How I’d Do It: Episode 8

Take a look at these cards:

What do all of these card have in common? If you said “They’re all legacy cards!”, then congratulations, you proved that you’re capable of reading this episode’s banner.

But you’re only half-right.

What these card have in common is that they’re legacy cards that completely transformed their respective teams. Sentinel Mk. V was the lynchpin that allowed Curve Sentinels to exist; Henrietta gave X-Statix a playable high-defense character at the only drop where they were missing one; Kristoff is the only good 5-drop Doom has ever gotten, before or since, and finally freed Doom from his obligation to team up just to fill in his useless drops. Scarecrow, along with two Poison Ivies, a Joker, and a big Charaxes, turned Arkham from a scattered joke team to a powerful board control deck. Fatality gave the EE thin-resource build new life by forcing the opponent to be just as screwed as they are by negating search cards. Hulk finally gave the Crime Lords a solid finisher for either initiative, giving them a reason to play their pseudo-stall effects.

Legacy cards have an incredibly powerful effect on the game. Properly designed, they can fill a critical gap in a team’s performance. Improperly designed, they run the gamut from “Zorba uselessness” to “Quicksilver brokenness”.

Because Spud Can’t Write An Article Without Boring Theory:

Let’s start off by looking at what Legacy content is. In the simplest terms, Legacy content is “cards for old teams”. Few teams are entirely fleshed-out right out of the box; most need a bit of help after their debut to go from “playable” to “competitive”. Legacy contents often fills these gaps– the designers look at how the team they designed is working, and if it’s clear that a particular drop has no good options, or that the deck really needs a particular effect to protect itself against hate, they will often print legacy cards to keep the team from getting overwhelmed.

Now, that said, there are two dangers when designing Legacy content that you should be aware of right from the start:

1. “I would love” and “they should have” are two entirely different things. Designing legacy content for a team you love to play is a bit of a conflict of interest, because you’re inherently going to favor effects that you’ve pined over every time you played the deck. Today’s theme is Inhumans, and I’ve played them since they came out in MHG. But my build is a very non-standard one– Heralds/Inhumans stall. The cards that I want to see are probably not going to be tremendously helpful to the average player. And even if you play a standard build, your judgment of what should be will be biased toward effects that “Woulda saved me that one time!” This is especially important, given that:
2. Teams are supposed to have holes. I have complained– time and again– that Hellfire Club is desperately lacking a good 4-drop. They started out with two of them with good effects, but whose DEF values are only 6, which makes brickwalling on turn 4 very difficult. Their only option with 7DEF is a visible character, which means you need to nuke him if you want to use Shinobi next turn. The lack of a good concealed-optional 4-drop really stung, as I was never happy with my turn 4 recruit. But think about it– even with useless 4-drops, Hellfire is still really strong. They were still winning way over half of the matches where I brought them out, because their outstanding 5, 6, and 7– not to mention their ridiculous support cards– completely make up for it.

This “problem” is echoed all over the game– Future Foes have no good 4; mono-Doom has no great 5; Hellboy lacks a strong consistent stat boost; Avengers have almost no game off-init; X-Statix could really use a tutor; and so on, and so forth. These teams lack something that seems very obvious to the players– so obvious, that we wonder aloud how the developers couldn’t see it when the team was being developed. But that’s the thing– they probably did see it. They know full well that the hole is there, and exactly how to fill it in.

But usually, they won’t.

Legacy lets the developers employ a “release now, patch later” philosophy to their designs. Many of the team themes that they release have the potential to be game-breaking. Future Foes, foe example– discard effects can be crippling to many decks, so if the Foes were too strong, they could have a really degenerative influence on the meta. “So just balance them so they’re not!”, you say. Well, it’s not always that simple. The fanbase is notorious for breaking new cards in ways the developers never intended– for taking cards with an effect that was “just good enough to be worth playing”, adding in a left-field combo partner, and turning it into a metagame-defining juggernaut. So, the developers need to be cautious. When dealing with a team mechanic that has the potential to dominate the game in an unfair way– discard, KO, burn, etc– and the devs aren’t sure what its true impact will be, they’ll often err on the side of “a little too weak” and then see how it behaves in the wild. Often, the players will find a way to break it anyway, which vindicates UDE’s decision to hold back a bit. And if the team turns out to not be that much of a problem, and the card or two that they omitted for balance really is needed to make the team work properly, they’ll then release the card in a later set to restore the team’s design.

That’s the decision you need to make as a designer– don’t just start by asking, “Man, what would be the most ridiculous effect to give this team?!” Don’t start out with the intention of making power cards. Instead, start with this question: “Does the team actually need any help?”

If the team is struggling, give them legacy content that’s specifically intended to boost them up. Give them cards that directly combo with their existing cardset, that offer solutions to some of the team’s most critical problems, that fill in the weakest points on its curve.

If, on the other hand, the team is already doing quite well with the cards it already has, you’ll want to intentionally avoid giving it cards that combo well with the old style. Generally speaking, when a team is very strong right out of the box, its legacy content will often be to encourage alternate builds– to reinforce secondary themes that don’t see play, or to give a “new and different” alternative to an overplayed character. The cards don’t have to be weak, but their strengths should be calculated to avoid interacting too well with an already-excellent netdeck.

Alrighty, I think that’s enough theory for today. Let’s look at some application.

More Than Human

As I mentioned, this week’s character theme is the Inhumans. I picked them for two reasons: first of all, they have a rather complicated answer to that fundamental question above– they are certainly very powerful, but their power lies mostly in their ability to act as glue and lubricant for other teams, filling in with their powerful offenses and rampant search. Solo Inhumans, however, has seen almost no play. They just seem to have too many holes in their solo curve, with their effects spread out between too many themes, and too little payoff given to each of them. So they present a really interesting design challenge– how do you support their themes, without overpowering their already substantial “guest star” potential?

The second reason I chose them is because I bought the Marvel Knights “Inhumans” TPB from way back when, and it was freaking awesome.

There are three distinct “modes” for legacy content, which can be generalized in very loose terms by their rarity. Naturally the rarity’s not as big a deal for custom cards, since it’s very difficult for us to play with them in any kind of sealed format. But hey– even without that aspect, these three types of cards are still very different, each with their own unique challenges and opportunities.

Rare

Rare legacy cards are cards are deeply entrenched in their team’s themes. A rare card has little effect on a set’s sealed play, so you don’t need to pay a lot of attention to making it easy for anyone to use. In fact, you’ll often want to avoid it– since very few players will be pulling your card out of their packs, it would create a bit of an unfair advantage for those who do if it’s a format-dominating bomb. So, rare legacy tends to either have a fairly heavy team stamp (extending even up into Loyalty), or have an effect that’s narrow enough that it’s not tremendously useful outside of its own team.

Carthus is the head of the Inhuman Genetics Council, overseeing the Terrigenesis of all young Attilaneans. Those young inhumans, who in the miniseries we saw go from humanoid to transformed, were represented in MHG largely by the Cosmic - Surge keyword. They start with nothing, and then they bloom. So, I figured it made sense to have Carthus interact with that keyword.

However, I didn’t want him to outright give them counters. Even when a team is intrinsically based around a certain keyword, you’ll find that quite often, that team’s legacy content won’t refer directly to it unless it’s also featured on teams in the rest of the set it’s in. While tossing Cosmic onto a random character in a set isn’t a huge deal, having a card that grants cosmic counters in a set with no cosmic characters is generally not done.

So, I wanted him to assist Inhumans in “cosmicing up”, without directly referencing it that mechanic. The power I came up with helps with both kinds of Cosmic– for people with standard cosmic, returning to play will restore their lost counter. For people with Cosmic - Surge, Carthus’ ability will let them “sit out” part of the combat phase, to help ensure they make it to their Surge trigger unstunned. Note that I also referenced the all-face-up mechanic; while I couldn’t get away with a reference to the Inhumans’ main keyword, their enabling mechanic is open-ended enough to still function in other sets, which let me tie the card back in with the original card set.

Boosting the Inhumans’ Cosmic theme is a fairly easy task, because it was never tremendously abusable in the past. On the other hand, the Inhumans “Hidden Beatsticks of Death” theme was pretty badly abused (through the Skrulls team-up, mostly), so if we want to make a solid rare card for that theme, we need to tread lightly. Rather than giving the team more fuel to power an already bright fire, I’m going to need to make something that has a more ancillary function– giving them something helpful, without making their existing strengths unbalanced.

It occurred to me that, while the hidden build has tremendously powerful offenses, it has a problem on the defensive side. It has no off-initiative game to speak of (other than “wait for the opponent to swing direct, then smash back”), and can get outraced by equally fast decks taking advantage of the lack of defenders.

That’s where the new Attilan comes in. City Under Siege lets the Inhumans player take those straight-to-the-face hits with a bit more confidence– as long as the killing blow to his endurance is also a direct attack, the Inhumans player will gain back a fairly substantial amount of life.

One thing to notice about both of these rare cards– even though they’re fairly heavily stamped to the team, and will be unlikely to see any play at all in a sealed format, they do provide a small sliver of a chance of still firing. Carthus’ power will fire if you dedicate a team-up to his team, so he’s a fairly easy splash if your cup runneth over with team-ups. Attilan may seem like it’s impossible to play in sealed, but keep in mind– whenever a card like this pops up in a set, there is almost always at least one character in the set that can fulfill the team stamp. You could recruit 8-drop Captain Marvel in DLS by subbing in Mary Marvel; you could play Smiles, Everyone! in DSM because of Blockbuster. This is an important pattern that’s existed throughout the game’s life– there is always some way to fire any effect in a set, using only cards in that set. It may be unbelievably narrow– needing to pull two rares, for example– but the possibility is always there.

This creates another pattern– if you’re making legacy for a team that’s only one set old, you can make the stamping much harder, since it’s likely you’re making 3 or 4 cards for the team, so there will likely be a character somewhere in the set to satisfy whatever limitations you set. But as teams get older and their legacy count in each set decreases, the degree of team-stamping gets much lower. Hard-stamping anything would require adding a second card to make sure it can fire, so the restrictions must be slackened to leave some chance of them firing in limited.

Uncommon

Uncommons are an interesting challenge, design-wise. Since uncommons are very likely to turn up in a draft or sealed setting, you need to balance them so that they’re not a completely dead card if someone grabs one. Generally speaking, uncommon legacy cards lean heavily on their team’s theme, but with a small enough level of stamping to let anybody splash them and still get some use out of them.

Quite often, they’re uncomplicated beaters like Timberius here. More than enough mechanical elements to tie them effectively to their team theme– in this case concealed, cosmic, high attack– but in a package that anybody can use, as long as they don’t mind not being able to share team-stamped effects with him.

(This was my favorite moment from the MK miniseries– Timberius’ brother is killed by human mercenaries, but the ruling council won’t let him take a life in retaliation unless he can locate the exact soldier who killed him, a task they know is impossible. Timberius, fed up with their rules, takes matters into his own hands.

Great moment… very fun to re-draw. )

One thing you won’t often see is cards like the next one here: main characters very rarely show up as legacy. It does happen occasionally, true, but it’ll often be an “alternate version” of the character (Lady Lark from MXM) or a version from a particular moment in time (Carnage - Symbiote Surfer).

The majority of the time, legacy is a chance for second-stringers and guest stars to get some face time. It’s when we get “Who the hell is that?!” cards like Doctor Sun, Katrina Luisa Van Horne, and Mysterium; goofy fan-favorites like Matter-Eater Lad and Henrietta Hunter; and characters who have surged to new importance since their team was first featured, like Nyssa Raatko.

On the specific topic of these two cards, note that neither is outright better than their existing options at those drops. Both would need to replace a critical utility character if played on-curve, so instead of offering a pure power increase to the standard build, it encourages the player to either try a divergent build, or to simply use these as supplemental filler later on. Either way, they’re unlikely to upset the already tenuous grip the deck has on balance and fairness.

So anyway, uncommon legacy isn’t terribly hard to design– whereas Rare legacy needs to be pretty carefully designed to be undesirable in sealed play (due to heavy team-stamps and reliance on weird mechanics), Uncommons are usually just a character that makes use of its team’s effects so that it fits in well in constructed, but which operates fairly self-sufficiently, so that it doesn’t suffer when splashed. Uncommon plot twists and locations are similar– they usually do “something” for any player, and “something else” for their own team. So again– very useful when applied to their peeps, but still a small pump or general utility effect in sealed.

Not much more to say about these, really.

Common

With very few exceptions, the only Legacy you’ll ever see in a common slot is dual-affiliated characters. Dual-affils can go anywhere on the rarity curve, of course, but they do own the common slot, so… yeah.

Whereas uncommon legacy tends to be slanted very much toward their legacy team’s theme, dual affiliated cards tend to be much more solidly rooted in their “primary” team (ie, the one that’s being featured in this set), but with effects that have applications in their other team.

To see what I mean, look at Crystal here. I’m assuming that she’d be in a set mainly based around the Avengers– MUN, for example. Her main attributes tie her into Avengers themes: she’s a Reservist, and can target her own resources to provide pseudo-card draw in that build. And meanwhile, her effect is triggered off team attacking, so she has a place in the swarm build. At first glance, the Inhumans team affiliation is little more than a nod to the background fluff– giving that team its requisite legacy content without having to dedicate thought or set space to a standalone card.

But if an Inhumans player does decide to play her, she’s not a complete dud– Inhumans have a few effects that search cards out and put them on top of the deck, but rather than playing draw to put those cards in hand, they tend to have easy access to self-replacement to row their newly-found prizes. Crystal gives the Inhumans player a way to do that– search with Attilan to get a Blue Area, attack with Crystal to row it, flip it and activate it to protect her. The effect on these dual-affils usually require some thought to figure out what– if anything– they have to do with their legacy team, but there’s usually something there to be uncovered if you give it the necessary time.

Come to think of it, I have to wonder about the self-worth of a race that defines itself strictly by its difference from another.

Yikes… short article today. Still, though… I think that’s about all I can say on that topic. Legacy’s not that different from regular card design.

One question that I’m sure has popped up more in more than a few of your minds: “Spud, why does all this matter? That’s all about how to put legacy in a full set that has sealed play, and I’m just making fan cards!”

Well, on the one hand, you’re right– the majority of fan designers won’t be making full set, and it’s unlikely that any of us will ever make a set that’ll see any sealed play. But there’s definitely some applications to all this:

1. A lot of the lessons here are applicable to almost any kind of legacy– the focus on secondary characters, the principle that you shouldn’t try to solve all of your team’s problems or capitalize too strongly on things they already do well, and the degree of hard stamping.
2. Some fan crews are already in the process of putting together whole sets, and ensuring that the legacy content is well-made helps with the sense of cohesion. This item is especially important– I’m not saying we are going this way, but there’s a possibility that the game may, at some point in the next few years, discontinue official support, leaving fans as the only ones to keep the flame alive. If that ever happens, I feel it’ll be of vital importance for the fan designers to have a good handle on legacy, just like they’ll need to know every other element of design, to ensure that any fan sets continue in the feel and traditions that UDE’s set for us. If the fans produce terrible, broken sets, people won’t play them, and the fan efforts won’t keep the community alive. The only way to keep “us” going in that hypothetical game state is to have sets that are balanced and fun to play.

A bit depressing to think about, but hey, it’s just an insurance policy. Better to be prepared for a hurricane that never comes, than to be stuck in your basement after a flash storm and run out of beans on day 2. Though of course, your fellow shelter-dwellers may be glad that you’re out of that particular staple, but that’s another issue entirely.

Finally, this week’s art note. I had an absolute blast doing Carthus and Timberius, my two favorite-looking Inhumans from the series. I started doing one of my third-favorite, Neifi, but it didn’t get much further than initial linework, so I had to cut the card. Sadness. To counter that, though: I freaking love Emjaybee’s Attilan - City Under Siege art. He knew nothing about the comic source, but from nothing more than a handful of disjointed panels and a cocktail napkin sketch, he crafted a masterpiece. Go Em!

And also: go me. I think this Timberius is one of the best things I’ve ever done, so I’ll leave you today with some blown-up treeman goodness.

Peace out, Uninhumans!

-Spud