Designing Cards

I started with the base of 5 factions.  I figure if works for Magic and it's what Magi-Nation initially released with, it's probably not a bad starting point.  After that, I tried to apply different themes for each faction.  I'm quite the logical thinker, so my initial concepts are fairly uniform to keep things theoretically balanced, and this is what I first started out with:

• Air - Remove Energy from Magi
• Earth - Add Energy to creatures 
• Fire - Remove Energy from creatures
• Water - Add Energy to Magi
• Void - Prevent Energy Loss

It's boring, but I needed to start somewhere, so I ran with it.  I also decided to try and keep some of the air of a rarity system in the game, so it wasn't just 4 copies of every card, and instead have more copies of less powerful cards (commons), and fewer copies of more powerful cards (rares).  I wanted to keep the deck around 100-150 cards which I felt was a managable number to work with, but enough to give variety to the game every time you would play.  I knew there would be spells and creatures as the base of the game, and any other card types I could work on later if I wanted to add them.

With 5 factions, and armed with the above knowledge, I decided upon a breakdown within each region as follows:

• 6 - 2 Cost Common Creatures
• 4 - 4 cost Uncommon Creatures
• 2 - 6 cost Rare Creatures
• 4 - 1 cost Uncommon Spells
• 2 - 3 cost Rare Spells

This brought me to 18 cards per faction, and 90 cards in the deck.  This was perfect for another reason that hasn't been mentioned yet, and that reason was MONSTERS.

Something that I had in the back of my mind, which was a concept that is sort of a part of Ascension, but it doesn't really feel that way is Monsters.  Monsters in this context would be bad guys that are shuffled into the deck and would pop up randomly throughout the game that the players would need to fight back, while also fighting each other.  The concept sounds like a lot of fun, and with only 90 cards, this allowed me to add 30 monsters to the deck to try the concept out.  I made it easy on myself and just put 5 copies of 6 different monsters into the deck, and now I was ready to playtest!

Or was I?