I really feel like the card balancing is in a really tough position. You don't want the power creep to start coming in and make every new card a must need in each battle. But you also can't make the new cards really irrelevant where they are never used, thus they are making new abilities and new combat rules that let players have the ability to use all cards. Sure there are some cards never being used, but at the same time is it giving the players choices on how to use their cards instead of changing (buffing or nerfing) cards. I might just be in the realm of the old school card games where erratas and changes to how the cards wording/stats were printed had a very negative precedent in terms of gameplay and trust in the balance testing before the cards come out. There are exceptions in card games where the card actually gets banned in the format, but that might not be something healthy for such a new game like splinterlands.