How I’d Do It: Episode 11

We interrupt your regularly-scheduled How I’d Do It to bring you something a little different!

When the fan previews were first announced, I had just started working on this article series, and I made a semi-joking request that when LH got its preview card, could it PRETTY PLEASE be on a Tuesday, so that I could form my article around it, designing cards to go along with it? I didn’t expect anyone to listen… and maybe they didn’t. Maybe this is just pure blind luck.

But hot damn, it happened that way, so I’m going to take advantage of it! Now, a fairly obvious caveat here: the stuff I show you today is almost guaranteed to be proven completely wrong. In fact, it’s likely that we’ll see cards before the end of this week that contradict one or more items in this article. And that’s fine; I’m just having fun here.

So, for those of you who haven’t read Gday’s preview today, our second preview card is the one, the only, the horse-faced, Beta Ray Bill. Not only is he a neat card in his own right, but he gives us a pretty solid look at what the Alpha Flight lineup in MUN is going to do.

When I first saw this, I had two thoughts about Alpha Flight’s themes– either they’re going to focus generally on card draw, or they’re going to focus specifically on massing plot twists. I wasn’t sure which it would be, so I found it difficult to whip up companion cards for him. Fortunately, though, today’s preview card cleared up all the confusion.

If the card left any ambiguity, TBS’ writeup spelled it out:

• “The main theme of Alpha Flight is to play as many plot twists as possible. Weapon Omega will turn your opponent’s plot twist against him or her, and as you’ll see tomorrow, they may even come to haunt your opponent even more than expected! Alpha Flight will manipulate the blue cards in interesting and challenging ways; however, they won’t be a full-sized team, so you’ll need to pair them up creatively to get their full effect.”

With that in mind, I set to work.

Pushers

As with any “condition-based” theme, our Alpha Flight cards will need to be comprised of two distinct elements: enablers, and abusers. The former class of cards sets up the condition we’re looking for– in our case, that means drawing, returning, searching, and reusing plot twists. Popular enablers in the past have included X-Statix HQ (which clears your board), Lex Luthor - Nefarious Philanthropist (which puts cards in the opponent’s hand and keeps them there), and Hellfire Club (which hides your unwanted guys). These cards don’t seem to do much on their own, but when combined with the right set of characters to take advantage of the conditions they create, they’re deadly.

Back to us: if our objective is to play a lot of twists all in one turn, we’ll need ways to accumulate them. Weapon Omega is a great help in that regard, but he doesn’t hit until turn six, and I’d like to get it going before then.

The second category, Abusers, is the characters who take advantage of your condition. Most conditions, on their own, aren’t a killing blow– many of them even seem to help the opponent, like when you nuke your board or give your opponent cards. Abusers are the reason you go to all that effort– because though it may be costly to turn them on, characters like Albert Gaines, Scarecrow - Psycho Psychologist, and Shinobi Shaw are VERY worth it. These characters would be broken if they were more easily applied, but if you add the prerequisite of having to work hard to set them up, then suddenly they become much more reasonable.

So, first let’s look at our enablers. We’ve already got a really solid one in Weapon Omega– our objective is probably going to be to play eight plot twists on turn 7 (to stun the opponent’s 7 with Bill), and we can assume that Guardian will probably get us two of those by “stealing” the opponent’s plots. We can also probably assume that we’ll get three or four of them simply by saving our plot twists for that turn wherever possible, which means we’re a mere two or three plot twists away from our objective before we even start brainstorming new cards. This gives us two important pieces of information:

1. Getting Bill’s effect to fire and stun an opponent’s 7 is not very difficult at all. Therefore, we need to be conservative when designing our enablers– if we go overboard, Bill’s power goes from “not too hard” to “pretty much guaranteed”, which probably tips the scales a bit too far.
2. That said, it’s only easy to fire Bill if we intentionally “save up” our plot twists for turn 7. Unfortunately, if we don’t play plot twists, we’re unlikely to MAKE IT to turn 7 in the first place, so we’ll need to add an enabler that turns on in the early- to mid-game that strikes a balance between preserving our “reservoir” and still letting us play some blue.

I’m going to stay away from plot twist search, simply due to my aversion to adding search in every team. Most teams simply don’t need it, folks! Instead, I’m going to focus the enablers on the concept of re-use. They need to get their plot twists in an “honest” fashion the first time, but once they’ve been drawn, they can get several uses out of them. As far as re-using, there are, off the top of my head, three basic mechanics that’ll let you do that.

First reuse mechanic: Returning plot twists from your KO’d pile to your hand.

Talisman here is pretty much a gimpier version of the classic Garth <> Tempest frame– she’s one drop lower, so we compensate by sticking her on a trigger and restricting what she can return. As you’ll recall from my Balance article, triggers are much more restrictive than at-will payment powers, since it’s much harder to combo with them– you can’t play a twist, return it, and replay it, all on one chain.

Another thing to keep in mind with Talisman is her restriction: she can only return a plot twist that was played THIS TURN, which means something that was played during build. This may seem like a huge pain, but I’d wager that in practice this would barely be noticeable. Upon what do I base this prediction? Well, just look at Bill above– his own power triggers on combat, which tells us that UDE’s planning to give Alpha Flight some plot twists that you can play before combat. Something like the JLA’s Battle Training and Stalwart Defense would be a perfect fit here.

Second reuse mechanic: Turning Ongoing Plot Twists Face-Down.

As you’ll recall, we’ve had a plot twist that could be turned down and re-flipped repeatedly, and this was powerful enough to warrant that it be banned. That card was A Day Unlike Any Other, which was a Team-Up with no other effects. Simply being able to re-play a plot twist at will is a huge benefit, even when, in ADUAO’s case, the plot twist is essentially blank. So, if we’re going to allow reuse of an ongoing, we’re either going to need to power it way down, or heavily restrict how it gets turned down.

Hastily Assembled does a few interesting things. First of all, it lets you play a minor mill engine, and then get your drops from the KO’d pile. The “return a character for free with a plot twist” satisfies the precedent test, since we’ve seen the same thing on Reconstruction Program and Return Of Donna Troy. Hastily Assembled has one higher cost, so to compensate I added a second effect that lets you draft ANYONE onto the team without worrying about team affiliations.

The pertinent item for this excercise, though is the Ongoing effect. I originally had it as only needing a single discard to fire, but I quickly realised that this would allow an infinite loop, discarding and returning the same card, over and over, as many times as you want. I had to ramp it up to two discards so that there would be an upper limit to the number of times you could play it in one turn; you can still fire this repeatedly, but only during recovery (after all the best Abuser effects have fired), and you’ll go down by one card in hand every time.

The Recovery restriction creates a good balance for our goal– it lets you play SOME plot twists all throughout the game, but

Third reuse mechanic: Boost.

I really like the new “Boost on plot twists” thing in MUN, and conveniently, it lends itself very nicely to our theme. This one’s actually pretty simple, and is almost identical to the Ongoing method above: make a plot twist with a one-shot effect, and then let the player Boost to get the plot twist right back.

In this particular case, I made a plot twist that can be played during the build phase to give your guys some pump to use later. You can fire it as much as you like, but it’ll almost never be a good use of endurance to simply cause breakthrough with it, as you’re always losing twice as much as the opponent.

You’d need to be very careful with this mechanic, because unlike the Ongoing model, cards phrased with this kind of Boost will be very difficult to restrict as far as repeated use in a single turn. With Ongoings, you can put the reuse on a trigger or stick it during an inconvenient phase, so that more than one use per turn isn’t helpful or even possible. Whereas any plot twist with Boost will be returnable and reusable infinitely (and “once per turn” won’t work since the game will forget it’s the same card as soon as it changes zones). So, any cards made with this model would need a heavy enough drawback to let players get lots of uses out of them, but severely punish them if they choose to do so.

And of course, there are other mechanisms that will let you get reuse. You can use the Agility model (at the start of X phase, you can do something to return a plot twist in the KO’d pile), which is similar to the Boost To Return mechanic, except that it’s delayed, and can’t be comboed infinitely. You can have cards that let you replay a plot twist from an unusual location (like Sorceror’s Treasure that lets you play a spent twist from the KO’d pile, or Siphon Energy that replays from the row).

And of course, you can simply use draw, search, and Rally to get fresh ones… but those have been done to death, haven’t they?

Users

Now, unlike Enablers, Abusers are kind of hard to predict. There are only so many directions they can go in as far as Alpha Flight’s enablers– they’re either filling your hand, or giving you reuse of what you’ve already got. And under each of those headings, there are only a handful of distinct mechanisms that’ll do it; so I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if the actual Alpha Flight enablers in MUN are close to, or almost exactly like, one of those cards above. And if that happened, it wouldn’t be any great sign of prescience on my part– the effects are just obvious, and they’re either going to use one of those three mechanisms, or one of five or six others. There’s not a lot of leeway with enablers, they just kinda have to be some way or other.

Abusers, on the other hand, are a total crap shoot. I’ve made three of them here (to complete a two-to-seven curve for the team), but I doubt that the ones we’ll see will look anything like this. Abusers can take any form the designer wishes– they all follow the form of, “IF the condition is satisfied, THEN: [some insane effect]“. The harder the condition is to satisfy, the crazier the effect. The effect you choose can literally be anything in the game, from pump to search to free stuns to exhaustion to “you win”. The next three cards show how I’d go about this, but it could really go any number of ways.

Arachne uses the same basic mechanic as Bill– using the number of plot twists played as a targeting restriction. Since Bill is a relatively late drop, I figured it would be helpful to give her a stall effect to help get to your win condition.

Oh, and I know her name is screwed up– MSE has a problem with long names. Nothing I can do about it.

USAgent uses the number of plot twists played as a straight pump, in the vein of All Too Easy or Strength From The Grave. Pump is a popular “abuse” effect, as even control decks need SOME way to defend themselves. Since I highly doubt Alpha Flight will turn out to be a control deck, easy access to pump is even more important.

Sasquatch, like Arachne, uses the condition as a threshold, but unlike her scaling threshold, Walter’s is binary. Arachne’s effect says, “Any number is fine, but more is better”, while Walter’s says, “This amount is required, and more is ignored”. It can be hard to decide which of those two effects to use when designing a card, and I don’t really have any pointers on which is the best method– just do what I do, and use your gut.

Those three cards are perfectly serviceable abusers, but as I said, don’t expect to see them. It would be one hell of a fluke if Billy and I magically fluked into the same arbitrary choice out of a field of thousands of options.

And stuff.

Aaaaaand that’s it for today. For those who were looking forward to seeing the finished Invincible Essential Collection this week, don’t feel that this unfairly pushed it out of the way– I was, in fact, not going to be done in time anyway, so this article is something to replace the nothing you would’ve ended up with.

I’ll have it done for next week (I think!), so tune in then for my final thoughts on it, the full card list, and a major announcement.

Toodles!

-Spud