You see, in the deckbuilding games I've played, each player will start with a set of starting cards that they use to purchase more cards for their deck, which in turn allows them to purchase more cards and more cards until the end of game trigger is hit and then everyone counts up the points in their deck to see who wins. That system is a fun system to play, but not at all what I was trying to design because it's already been done. I wasn't trying to create another victory point deck building game. I wanted interaction and player vs. player conflict. I wanted to be able to battle head to head in a deckbuilding game.
Working within the limits of Magi Nation, I wasn't too sure what I was going to do for a starting deck. Going with what I knew of 10 cards in the starting deck, I initially created a set of 10 cards that included 5 creatures from 5 different regions, and 5 universal cards. I knew that this wasn't perfect from the start, but I wasn't too sure how to approach the problem. The issue here, is that creatures are the main focus of the game and you need them to battle with your opponent. In a normal deck of Magi Nation, you'll generally have over half of your deck as creatures, sometimes as much as 80% of your deck will be creatures. This is to ensure that you always have a steady supply. If you only start out with half of your deck as creatures, and draw half of your deck on the first turn, it's very possible (and probable) that you're only going to draw 1-2 of those creatures. If you only draw 1 creature and your opponent draws 4, then you're going to be quite far behind in tempo. The original game had tried to solve this with the use of "starting cards" which were cards that would start the game in your hand, although they were generally weak in comparison to cards you wanted to have in your deck. Because I knew that players were going to be adding cards from multiple regions into their deck due to the need to do so based on card availability, I hadn't planned on creating characters from different regions so this wasn't really a viable solution.
The second issue that I had to solve was how to actually get the cards from the center row that they were revealed in, to being placed into your deck. I had initially considered needing to purchase the cards with the energy that you get every turn, but quickly realized that this would devolve into "buy a few good cards, never buy anything else" because energy is what the entire system is based around. You use it to fight, and to survive, and running out of it loses you the game, so spending it on something that doesn't impact the current game state is going to turn out to be terrible. So then I thought about using 2 seperate energy pools, one that was used for adding cards to your deck, and one that was used for playing cards. This second design is what I had decided I was going to be using in my mind for quite some time because I couldn't think of anything else, but I had a feeling this would be much too "fiddly" for real practical use. You already move enough dice/tokens around in the normal game, adding more of that wasn't going to be a good thing.
As I said before, I initially began this project trying to fit the cards from a dead CCG into a deckbuilding game. The revelation for the current system didn't come until months after the initial concept. I had even shelved the project because I wasn't happy with the actual deckbuilding portion of it, I knew it wasn't going to be an elegant design. I'm not really sure what caused it, but something caused me to realize that the cards aren't going to be balanced based off of energy costs, so why use that resource as the scale in which to add cards to your deck? You can build a deck in a CCG with all 1 cost cards, or all 5 cost cards, but the single unifying thing within all CCGs is that each player has a limit (literal or realistic-imposed) of the number of cards that can be in your deck. You make decisions when building a deck to add one card over another based on the power level or effect of the card and what you're trying to add to your deck. Cards also have a restriction as to the number of copies you're allowed in your deck to prevent abuse and force variety. I should be developing a system around numbers of cards added, not the costs of those cards in the game. Adding 3 cards that cost 1 should be the same as adding 3 cards that cost 5 if those cards share the same relative power level. For anyone experienced with M:tG, Swords to Plowshares and Serra Angel were both powerful cards (when I played Magic), but both were powerful in completely different ways, and adding one to your deck had the same pre-game cost as adding the other. The pre-game cost is the equivilent of what I am trying to replicate while also playing the game.
This brought me around to creating what was initially known as "Syphon Stone". It was known as that, because that's the name of the card that I used to proxy it! The function of the card, in game, was to be a free card that you could play from your hand to choose a card in the center row and add it to your discard (the common way of adding cards to your deck in other deck building games is to add them to your discard.) It was too easy! I created a starting 10 card deck with 5 of these cards, 5 universal creatures that were all identical, and now I was really ready to playtest. I solved what was the bigger problem of the two issues, the balance issue of how many creatures were drawn in the initial hand I planned on solving at a later date, assuming that this system worked.
No comments:
Post a Comment