The issue of synergy

The (current and most likely permanent) name of Affinity wasn't what I had started with.  The name of the eventual game was completely unimportant within the design process.  At least to a point.  I do believe that placing constraints on your design at some point actually assists you in developing creative ways to introduce problems to your players and solutions to said problems. Regardless, that's not what I'm really here to talk about today.

Today I'd like to address the big problem that I had after my first playtest, and that was the problem where I didn't feel there was a decision to choose a less powerful card that worked better for your deck over the card with the most raw power available to you at the time.

My initial concept had been to have cards that assisted the other cards with restrictions on how they could be used.  So there were spells that could only target creatures of a certain faction for you to be able to benefit from that spell.  There were also less-powerful cards in raw power that didn't have restrictions like this.  So for an example, there would be a spell that cost 1 essence that added 2 essence to any creature in play, and there would also be a card that cost 1 essence that added 4 essence to a creature of a specific faction.  The second card was only good once you already had creatures of that faction in your deck, but if you didn't, it was a completely useless card to you.  This was exactly what I thought I wanted, but in practice it just didn't work out as well as I had planned.

If I had to pin-point the biggest problem with it, I suppose it would be the random nature of the shuffle.  If these cards were seen before their respective creatures could have been added to your deck, then you could either take the gamble of adding them to your deck and hope that those creatures show up in a timely manner for them to become useful.  In practice, this gamble just wasn't an exciting or strategic part of the overall game.  You were always better off taking the "safe" choice of something that you would guarantee the power level of, even if the overall effect was weaker.

It's not to say that none of these cards worked.  There were some that were much more effective than others and well sought-out in spite of their regional restrictions, but that wasn't really a result of the overall game, that was a result of the starting cards, which I'll address next.