How I’d Do It: Episode 6

Disclaimer: This is true of any article I write, but this week especially so: Nothing I make for these articles is tested. These are only initial ideas, the pack of test cards I’d bring to a full group discussion if I was actually making them for real. No “values” are final– if there’s a 3 on a card, it might be broken and need to be dropped to a 2. But that’s not what I concern myself with. I’m only spitting out ideas, I leave it to my nonexistant playtesting team to figure out if they’re any good.

With that said, let’s proceed with the article.

When the Coming of Galactus raid deck first came out, a thread popped up on the Realms where people started brainstorming new ideas for other comic threats that could be justified as a Giant Size. There were several valid suggestions– everything from Magneto to Imperiex. Basically, people were looking at the Galactus starter and thinking of characters who could fill the same role; they were looking to recreate the Galactus experience with new faces.

I found the excercise unsatisfying.

The entire reason Galactus was a fun format was that it was wholly different from the play formats we had up to that point. Simply rehashing the mechanics with a fresh cast of bad guys wouldn’t be all that much fun, since you’d still just be playing Galactus. If UDE is going to do another Giant-Size, and I certainly hope they do, I’d like to think they’d go right back to the well and craft an entirely different play experience. Every Giant-Size should feel new and fresh.

Out of that VSRealms thread, there were two suggestions that were made that actually sounded interesting to me. The first idea was to focus the “common threat” on a team of bad guys– it could be as big as the Sinestro Corps, or as small as the Arkham Inmates. Instead of focusing on one or two very large characters the way Galactus does, the “villain swarm” would get out several average- or slightly-above-average-sized characters who would use teamwork to take down the allied heroes.

I tried to work on a Giant Size Sinestro Corps for this article, but ultimately it was just too big. I didn’t want to go through a full design process and make all 40+ cards it would require, and the half-dozen I did feel like putting together just didn’t quite do enough to capture the feel I wanted. There wasn’t any way to really show my ideas without doing 20+ cards, and it was just too much work for one article. So, I went back to the well.

The second suggestion I liked from that thread, and in fact the one I liked the most, was Starro the Conqueror. For the uninitiated, Starro is a giant alien starfish who runs around the galaxy conquering planets. To do this, he follows a pretty simple process:

1. Clone self. This isn’t a technological thing– he simply breeds asexually, and produces offspring that are genetically identical to himself. Generally speaking, these clones start out very small– about the size of a basketball– when compared to the hundreds-of-feet-tall Starro.
2. Attach clone to a dude. Like the face-huggers in Alien, Starro’s clones leap onto victims’ faces and latch on.
3. Turn dude into slave. Unlike in Alien, Starro doesn’t use people as incubators– he uses us as cheap labor. Once you’ve got a star on your face (or your neck, depending on the creative team), you get all mind controlled and… stuff.
4. Have slaves kick other dudes. Dude 1, now a Starro slave, kicks Dude 2. Dude 2 falls down. Dude 1 holds him down, and then…
5. Put clone on other dudes. That’s right, Starro is the Amway of supervillains– he gets one slave, who makes more slaves, who in turn make more slaves… rinse and repeat until humanity is yours.

This concept really excited me from a gameplay point of view. Whereas Galactus is themed around a small number of obscenely powerful people, Starro’s army consists of a vast swarm of small, squishy starfish (Of Doom), supplemented by enthralled legions of captured opponents. Starro doesn’t fight with his own army, he fights with yours.

Grand Theft Brains

The main “extra” concept in the Galactus starter, outside of “characters a few turns early”, was the Planet system. Since Galactus was aiming to stall out until the late turns, the objectives and modifiers created by the Planets acted as a diversion– they effectively force a stall mechanism by constantly distracting the Alliance, forcing them to make short-term decisions rather than long-term ones.

With Starro, I don’t need that distraction because I’m not planning to create a stall strategy. In fact, every character in Starro’s can be recruited on the first turn of the game. That’s because the Starro deck only has one character, and it’s a very small one.

The Star Clone is going to be the backbone of the Starro deck. These are the only things Starro will be spending resources on; the rest of his army will be gradually appropriated from his opponents.

The basic idea with these guys is to put your opponent in a dilemma– 2 endurance isn’t that much to pay to not lose a guy, but if it happens too many times, you can end up burning yourself down to nothing. So, the Alliance players need to do some math– is losing this character going to cause me more than 2 endurance over the course of the game? And even worse– if Starro has six more of these things sitting around, is it really going to be worth paying 14 endurance just to keep a three-drop?

Of course, there’s always the option for the Alliance to simply ignore this power and never cede a character to the Conqueror. Starro loses a character every time he fires this power, so the Alliance can simply deny him any additional characters, painful though it may be, and swing in repeatedly for the win.

That is, of course, if the giant starfish himself wasn’t around.

Starro works like Galactus did in the Coming of Galactus set; he’s on the board, but he’s not a character. He’s essentially just a pillbox who sits there and fires off effects to help you and harm your opponents. Starro’s basic philosophy is that there’s no such thing as a problem that can’t be solved by throwing enough fish at it.

The biggest problem with Galactus was that, while he was very powerful, he was fairly easy to tech against. By searching out certain silver bullet characters, or using certain reusable control effects, Big G could effectively be stopped from doing anything at all– his plot twists become useless, and his characters have blank text boxes. Big G could simply be locked out of the game.

Starro doesn’t have this problem; certain characters, like the 3-drop Zzazzala, would utterly wreck Starro by massacring his life total every time he sacrificed a character. If a character like that hits the board, Starro simply takes it away. Every single turn of the game, the Alliance is going to have to do without the characters that would be most helpful to them.

The Starro player will need to strike a balance between using the Star Clones’ own ability and Starro’s KO effect. Starro’s is more expensive, but it’s guaranteed to work. However, the one on the Clones can be used in a pinch to cause some pretty hefty amounts of burn– in the later turns, it’s unlikely a player would give up their 5- or 6-drop simply to keep 2 endurance, so by keeping some Clones around into the combat phase, you can kamikaze them, one after another, to help whittle your opponent down.

The next item on the “don’t bother teching against Starro” theme is the Epic keyword. In the MCG set, this was given as a version to certain plot twists, and caused those plot twists to be un-negatable. Theoretically, a player playing a ton of Bat Got Your Tongue?s could stop Big G from doing anything productive, and the Epic keyversion made sure that the purple guy’s most important tricks couldn’t be shut down that easily. I’ve extended the keyword to come out of the version slot and into the text box, so that it now applies to Starro’s own payment powers. These powers, which are so vital to the operation of his deck, can’t be negated by something as simple as a player dropping an Ultimate Nullifier in his hidden area.

Starro’s last power is the final stopper being placed in the Alliance’s attempts to tech out. Starro can– simply by keeping some fish around– negate any plot twist effect the Alliance tries to play. With Galactus, very clever Alliance players could abuse the rules by playing Secret Files and Infestation to give everybody-gets-a-bonus effects to the whole alliance, and there was little Galactus could do to stop it. Starro, on the other hand, won’t have any of that crap. If an Alliance player wants to play EomE to search out a silver bullet, Starro shuts it down. If the Alliance tries to Flame Trap Starro’s horde, Starro shuts it down. Fighting Starro will never be an easy, formulaic process– any effect that the Alliance can use to shut him down, can be stolen or negated. The Alliance has to learn to fight WITHOUT its best characters and effects.

Even with all of this protection, there’s still one last option the Alliance has at its disposal to shut Starro down– Alliance players can play self-KO effects, so that when Starro tries to steal their characters, the Alliance simply nukes them to Devil’s Due or Baddest of the Bad, effectively negating the effect because there’s no longer a legal target. Well, unfortunately, this won’t work either.

One By One They Fall strips the Alliance of their one remaining sneaky trick. If an opponent’s character leaves play for any reason, Starro can immediately take it by nuking another Star Clone. So if I try to steal Ahmed, and his controller tries to Spire him to hand in response, One By One They Fall will trigger, and not only will the effect of Spire not fire (since its cost wasn’t fulfilled), but Ahmed now has fish on his face, to boot.

These three cards– Star Clone, Starro, and OBOTF– make up the core of the Starro character-theft strategy. They help create the overall “feel” I wanted from Starro: hopelessness. The Alliance is denied their mightiest champions, their strongest powers. They expend effort and resources trying to mount a defense, only to have the key elements of their force turn traitor and join their fishy foes.

Against Galactus, Earth musters is mightiest heroes. Against Starro, they settle for whomever they can get.

Breaking the Rules

As with the Galactus raid, Starro’s going to need some special rules to ensure he can keep up with his opponents. Let’s take a look at some of them before we move on to the rest of his cards.

• Starro is balanced to be played against three players. These three players are “the Alliance”, and follow the same rules as the Alliance in the Galactus format.
• Starro places two resources each resource step– these resources may come from his hand, or from the top of his deck. Starro can choose to do both from one source, or one from each.
• Starro doesn’t draw cards during the draw phase. Instead, at the start of his recruit step, he draws a card for each resource he controls.
• Characters Starro controls, as well as character cards in his deck, hand, and KO’d pile, have the affiliations of each character he controls.
• The Alliance cannot win the game by any means other than reducing Starro’s endurance to zero or less. Effects that would cause the Alliance to win, or to not lose, are disregarded. The Alliance can lose if an effect controlled by an Alliance player says so.

Most of Starro’s special rules are based around the fact that Starro is going to need to play a LOT of characters. In a perfect world, he’ll drop enough Clones each turn to steal the new recruits of two of the three Alliance players. That said, it’s unlikely to turn out that way– only half of Starro’s deck is characters, so he’ll have trouble filling his recruit points. He’ll have some help from his support cards, of course, but I’m assuming he’ll only have enough cards for one and a half thefts per turn. On his initiative, Starro can get away with stealing less guys, since he’ll control how the combats get arranged. And then any clones he saves will get used up next turn on the off-init to blunt the Alliance’s attacks.

But as I said, he’ll need a little more help to really make things run, so let’s take a look at some support cards that help get the engine online.

Multiplicity is the main way you have to make sure you hit your curve. Its primary effect lets it act as a one-time Reconstruction Program, while the ongoing part lets you get a Star Clone back once per turn for a reasonable endurance payment. I’m a little iffy on the first part– one of the main ways I’m throttling Starro’s theft is by limiting his access to Clones in hand, so Multiplicity may be a bit too “enably”, making it too easy to fill his recruit points, and thinning the Alliance’s forces too heavily. This would be one of many questions I’d send down to the playtesting team– if it turns out to work too well, I’d probably go the Soul World route and let the player gain back some of the spent life if the target of the payment power is a Star Clone, and cut the non-Ongoing part entirely.

Another way to help the board-filling along is the Spawning Pool. This non-unique location gives Starro about a 50% chance each turn of getting a free Star Clone. I’ve gone back and forth on the last sentence– making it mill the card if it’s not a Clone makes the card more powerful, since it lets you fire all copies you’ve rowed every turn, giving you several tries at finding a freebie character. If I cut that line, it’ll turn this into a pseudo-Beside Myself chain, where if the first fails, the “non-hit” card stays on top, which means any further activations will continue to miss. But, if you hit one, you can then take a shot with a second. And if that hits, you get a shot with a third. I left it without the chain for now, but again, testing might reveal that it’s a bit too easy to hit freebies with the current wording.

And The Rest

So, once the basic engine’s online and Starro’s begun acquiring enemy agents to fight for his cause, he needs to figure out how to leverage that into an actual victory of some kind. The rest of the cards are divided between ways he’ll win, and ways he’ll not lose. Let’s examine the former first.

A fight with Starro will always come down to endurance; not one to attempt fancy maneuvers, he’ll simply be taking your guys and smacking you in the head with them. Of course, this could present a problem; your opponents have pumps to help ensure combat goes their way, and since Starro’s characters don’t start out any bigger than the Alliance’s, he’ll need pumps of his own to make combat swing his way. This is where Mind For The Taking comes along. (Gday is entirely to blame for that awful pun. I take no responsibility for it.) This pump is quite large, especially considering that you can play it on either side of an attack. The function of the pump is quite simple– I can steal Gday’s 3-drop, then swing it into his 4-drop with a huge pump. Note that I cannot steal Gday’s 3-drop and play MFTT when I swing it into The Eponymous Pablo’s 4-drop– both the swinger and swingee need to be owned by the same person.

You’ll notice on this card (and most of the other plot twists) that Mind has both an Ongoing and a Non-Ongoing section, with separate effects. Like with the Galactus set, I wanted to create cards that would be balanced and playable in normal play. But whereas Galactus got an advantage playing these same plot twists because he could play them much sooner than normal, Starro’s advantage generally comes from having one of the effects stamped to his forces. So while the Alliance can play Mind, they can only get one use out of each, whereas you can get two. The Alliance can use Multiplicity as a ghetto Slaughter Swamp, but Starro also gets to return a handful of fish while he’s at it. And so on, and so forth.

The next card is one that I really strongly debated cutting entirely. I’m still waffling on it. To me at least, it seems “expensive enough to be balanced”, while at the same time remaining “HOLY CRAP BROKEN”. As with everything else, I’d need to see how it actually plays to decide. The Star Conqueror forces your opponents to completely discard their hands, but only works if you’ve got ten guys on the board. Before you say, “Whoa, that’s REALLY easy for Starro!”, note that this only works during Combat– and Starro’s “I Teef Joo!” power only works during build. So if you want to play Star Conqueror on any given turn, you’re going to need to forgo using your most powerful effect. So, I’d be really careful playing it. Letting the Alliance keep all of its fresh recruits is a really dangerous proposition, since it’ll mean you only have last turn’s guys and swarm of fish. It could very well work out for you– if one of the Alliance missed their turn-drop and you have a pump to get over another player’s, for example. But generally speaking, you’ll want to make absolutely sure Star Conqueror will gut the Alliance before you commit to it by passing the Build phase. Very, very sure.

The next cards are going to be Starro’s main tools to stymie the Alliance’s attempts to murder him. I’m not particularly proud of Fruitless Efforts– it’s two generic effects slapped together. That said, it’s still a very powerful card in Starro’s hands. It means he’ll usually be on the winning side of any dual stun, and if flipped off-initiative with a ton of fish on the board, it can ensure a relatively painless turn, with the Alliance barely making a dent with its attacks. They swing on you, you take 1, and then you KO to burn them for 2 or steal their guy. End result: a very frustrating initiative for the Alliance. As with the rest, of course, this may be too much in too small a package, and in “full” development I might end up splitting the effects into two different cards.

The last card I whipped up for today is another tool to make the Alliance cry on their initiative: Overwhelm. This was the first piece of art I thought of when I started brainstorming the set– a dude just getting swarmed with annoying fish monsters. The effect works out as a variant on a Golden Age card that I love dearly– Entangle. I exhaust five points of my guys to exhaust 4 points of yours. This is no more and no less than a 1-drop Army player’s Entangle. One thing that makes it especially well-suited to Starro is that it’s the ONLY effect that requires you to have ready Star Clones; so if you’ve got a copy of Overwhelm and you’re about to nuke 4 guys to steal a 4-drop, remember to exhaust them all first to tap an opposing 3. You might as well, right?

Live For The Swarm!

And that’s that. If this was a real set, it would be anywhere from 20 to 40 unique cards. And like I said over and over: every one of these effects would need to be thoroughly playtested to find out of it actually works or not. I’m pretty sure that the basic concept would be quite fun to play; every time you sit down to play, you’re going to be facing a completely different challenge. The difficulty of Starro’s army will depend entirely on what the Alliance decides to recruit, and Starro will be able to quite easily shut down complex combos, so unlike the Galactus format, which favored strong control effects, the best decks against Starro will be very resilient ones with so-so effects; you want characters that are good enough to be useful, but bad enough that you won’t instantly lose when Starro steals them.

This week was kind of a specialized topic, but if you’re going to take anything away from it, let it be this: don’t just try to rehash things. I know I’m guilty of this too, but when you sit down to design cards, don’t start off the concept with, “Well, it’ll be just like Inhumans, except…” Don’t just take something that worked and slap new faces on it; go the extra mile and try to come up with something entirely new. Now, that said– that doesn’t mean you can’t borrow old ideas. Sometimes, an old theme just works perfectly on a new team, like how the X-Statix theme is a perfect fit (in fact, an even better fit) on the new Hulk legend stuff. All I’m saying is, you should always make every effort to change things up and try something new. It might not work, and it might not turn out to be any fun– but a) you tried, and b) it’ll give you ideas and teach you lessons that you can then apply to something else. So you might still end up coming back to “It’s like Inhumans, except…”, but hopefully you’ll have come up with some ideas during the whole process that can still be applied.

Aaaaaaaand segue to art. Emjaybee’s girlfriend got sick and he didn’t have time to finish the Star Conqueror pic, but I loved the sketch I whipped up so much that I decided to just leave that instead of using canned art. For the rest, I was really happy with the stuff we put together this week– it was a fun theme, because we could basically draw any characters we wanted as long as we slapped some fish on their heads. We were actually supposed to be joined by a third artist this week– one of our new(ish) Hobby Leaguers is pretty good with a pencil, but there was a bit of a communication issue and I wasn’t able to get his piece. SO! Some hiccups, but I still like what we got. And hopefully we’ll have the rest of the kinks worked out for next week.

Alrighty, that’s me. Peace out!

-Spud