The issue with Morphlings

So the starting cards that each player had, as I explained before were 5 copies of Syphon Stone, which allowed you to add more cards to your deck, and 5 copies of a universal creature.  At it's base, the Universal creature was just a 3 cost creature with no real energy-gaining or removal powers.  But in an attempt to have it be more than a weak card at the start of the game, and a useless card in the later game, I decided to give it a power to make it a creature of any faction you wanted until the beginning of your next turn.  We nick-named it "Morphling."

This probably wouldn't have been that bad, but since I was using Magi-Nation as a jumping off point, I hadn't really figured out what I was going to do about "Magi" or the characters that you're representing who are casting these spells and summoning these creatures and otherwise battling it out among one another.  My "awesome" idea, which I still think is a decent idea and I may try to implement something along these lines in the future, was to have a "Morphling" character as well.  That is, to have a character that you played whose powers would change based on the creatures that you have in play.  So if you have more creatures from faction A in play, you'd have Power A, if you have more creatures from faction B in play, you'd have Power B.  The concept is still neat in my opinion, but what we quickly found in playtesting was that I couldn't balance the powers on him when you had the ability to essentially choose any one of them that you wanted from the start of the game and generally the first 5 turns of the game when you had morphlings in your deck.  Both players would play Morphlings, choose the same region, and use the same powers.  It was quite dull.

This was largely disappointing to me, but it did allow me to progress to the point that I am currently at for Affinity.  Morphling creatures needed to be removed from the deck, they made the factions not really matter for anything.  They were generally the only ways that we were triggering faction-restricted spells in the deck and allowed you really splash anything into your deck without caring what faction it needed.  They also put the first two turns of the game into auto-pilot mode, where no player really gained or lost energy in access of what the other player could also gain or remove, so the game didn't really start until after you had added some unique cards to your deck and started to see those in your hand.

That's when I realized that I didn't need creatures in the starting deck, I could have a "pre-game" phase of the game where players both started with a hand full of 5 Syphon Stones and would alternate choosing cards for their deck by playing a Syphon Stone and then each player would start the game with a unique "starting deck."  This is currently the system that Affinity is using, and it has proven to add a unique experience to the game that other deck building games don't really create.  Then again this game is doing a lot of things that other deck building games don't, mainly because there isn't a victory point in sight.

So in the end, I'd like to say "Thank you!" to Morphling, for being an amazing failure that helped me find one path that Affinity really needed.