Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Some New Card Designs!


Hey guys, I had an awesome 4-player playtest session last night, showed a few new people the game and everyone enjoyed it.  We played with completely randomized decks instead of drafting since everyone else was new, and ended up with some crazy decks.  I got owned by someone who was losing early on but caught up once they got an engine going where they drew a ton of cards, discarded them to get gold, used the gold to get prize cards, then used the prize cards and all the card drawing to draw their whole deck.  WHOA.  They even drew their whole deck, discarded it, then drew it again all in one turn!

Anyways I'm going to talk about a few cards I created recently to fill in some holes and the kind of strategies they lend themselves to.  The goal when designing these cards was to have interesting player interaction combined with interesting draft and deck building decisions.  I'll try to keep it a little light on the game terms so you can understand what the cards do, but you can check out the in-depth gameplay video if you want to know more about how the game works: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D00GcENem30

One new card is Bodysnatcher, which is a Defender that steals one of your opponent's basic cards out of their deck and puts it into yours.  It also gets bigger and more powerful the bigger your deck is, so if you steal a bunch of cards and buy a bunch of prizes he can get huge.  He also has great synergy with the "Ennoblement" promo card which can add another card to your deck every time it's played!

Another card is called Marble Highway, and it's a card that actually lets you react to and prevent attack cards from other players, for free.  In addition to that, it lets you make monsters on your monster board "angry" which means they are close to attacking you, and in return you deal damage and get gold.  You have to balance the risks and rewards of this card, or you can just save it to block an attack.

The third card is Burning Sensation.  This card promotes decks that have a lot of Permanents, Equipment, Defenders and card draw by damaging all players based on how large their deck is.  So if most of your cards are in your hand or in play, you get hurt less by it.  It's obviously a good counter to a Bodysnatcher strategy since their deck will be huge, but it's also good against people that are focusing on low-cost cards and empty their hand every turn, or against people that are going for a lot of prize cards.

The fourth card is tentatively named Treasure Jackal.  This is a really undercosted Defender that dies instantly when the opponent plays a Defender, Permanent, or Equipment card, and gives them a gold and a life to boot.  The trick with Treasure Jackal is trying to make sure your opponent doesn't get many of these types of cards in the draft, and/or making sure you play your Jackal after they've already played their cards that can counter it.

The last card is named Siren.  It's a very small Defender that's free to play, and it lets you look at the opponent's hand and the top four cards of their deck and play an Ability or Monster-Attack card from it if you pay the energy cost.  Siren is great at disrupting an opponent's strategy and helping against super powerful Ability or Attack cards by stopping the opponent from playing them and letting you play them.

Well those are some new cards that were added, I've been looking for cool ways to add even more player interaction and drafting strategy and all of these cards really go towards that goal.  The cards these are replacing were cool but just missing a little oomph that really made you think.  Even though the game has been essentially finished for a while now, I am constantly playtesting and tweaking the game to make sure it's the best game it can be.  Thanks for your support guys!

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