Yeah, it's got to cost a lot or else it could be abused. IS' spell Strip Armor and Millenial Icequake, though a pricey combo, does global 30 damage. If you make a deck with champs that have abilities like Phase Shift or Turtle, you can circumvent the damage you take. It is expensive because it has to be.
The bigger the effect, the higher the cost. Icequake isn't playable at 100 nora, but it sure as hell wouldn't be balanced at 50. Symmetrical effects are never truly symmetrical, and the cheaper you make them, the easier it is to break them. See this card: http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=382853 . It's literally called "Balance," and it produces a symmetrical effect, but it's also broken as hell because it costs 2 mana. Same thing would happen with Icequake. If it dipped too much, I'd start crunching out some value deck asap.
It never been nerfed. It just massive global damage! So it should cost alot. It was often used with (old) Excorcist and Conduit (http://poxpulse.com/ability/id/1079) and strip armor for a massive dmg on your enemy.
just play 2 units with dark favor 3... thats like 18 dmg globally, its loss of life which is much more threatening, I mean sure, its way more costly. But you also get to keep the units and it doesnt hit yours lol. I HATE attrition bgs personally . Yet they get the job done.
Global damage in a board game is something that needs to be handled extremely carefully... something which Pox has failed at. Just because the army/deck building is TCG-like, it doesn't mean you can just do TCG things. It is my opinion that Icequake (among other things) simply should not exist in this game. It's not impossible to make global damage work out, just very difficult.
