In reality, when I initially began to design this game, I didn't have any intentions of creating something new from the ground up. At first all I was trying to do was to adapt a set of cards from Magi-Nation into a deckbuilding game to be able to play with my friends and possibly share the rules/card lists publically so other fans of Magi-Nation could also enjoy this variant of the game. When creating the lists of the cards that I was going to include in the game, I began to encounter a slew of issues.
You see, it's not necessarily the easiest thing to take the cards designed for one game design and port them into another similar, yet completely different game design. There are about 1200 cards that were created for Magi-Nation, and 12 different regions. Simple logic should let you see that if you wanted a game with a play style that had any coherence with one another that I couldn't have 12 regions in a fixed game, so I had decided just to use the inital 5 regions that Magi-Nation started with. This cut my available pool of cards down to around 500, which was a little easier to manage, but enough to give me some variety to work with.
My first job was to select the cards that would be in the game from within the 5 regions. Since I was using the purchase/selection model from Ascension, the idea was that I would have a pool of cards for each region, all shuffled together and then you'd have a limited number of the random cards face-up at any given time to be able to select from and add cards to your deck. This wasn't too difficult in and of itself, however it quickly became apparent that there were certain cards that would be purchased above all others, no matter what region(s) you had previously added to your deck.
Something about that concept really irked me. There was no real choice to be made. Each player would just purchase the most powerful available card, followed by the next and the next and the next until their deck would just be Pile_of_most_powerful_available_cards.deck. The conclusion I reached was that I wanted a reason to draft "Moderate Power card from Region A" for your deck full of Region A instead of "High Power card from Region B". This difference in card power is usually easy to differentiate when it comes to a standard CCG, because there are only so many cards that have a specific amount of raw power to have their inclusion into your deck be a no-brainer. Then you start picking cards that are less powerful, but go along with the theme of your deck to create synergy.
There it was... the THEME of the deck. That's what I needed to create. But how do you do that when you're looking at a random pile of 100+ cards over 5 different factions? I couldn't just make it so you pick a region and can only purchase cards of that region, that would be too limiting. Also, what happens when you choose a region and the random shuffle places the majority of that region in the bottom of the deck? I needed players to be able to play cards from any region, but give them a reason to purchase cards specifically to match the theme of what they've already drafted.
This entire thought process is what caused me to move away from the existing Magi-Nation cards that were already printed and instead create new cards that had matching themes and synergies that would allow them to be used much better within this system. Isn't it wonderful how any project can quickly grow to a size that you didn't expect it to?
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