by Spud

It’s my birthday today, and as my present to myself, I’m going to allow myself to change out of my cheerleader uniform and be blunt. Yes, more blunt than usual.

So, yeah. MEV previews are about to start, and we’ve gotten semi-official confirmation that X-Statix will be returning, as evidenced by the handful of X-Statix cards in the uncut proof sheet TBS leaked to us.

I think it’s fairly widely-known that I’m a pretty huge X-Statix fan, both in the comics and in our game. So, you’d think I’d be pretty excited right now– the team that defied all odds to be included in VS at all (in its first year, no less!) is making a comeback! I can finally stop proxying Hulk as my “Modern X-Statix” and just play ACTUAL Modern X-Statix!

You’d expect me to be excited, but oddly enough, I’m… not. It’s weird. I love me some X-Statix, but what excitement I’ve been able to conjure up seems to be overshadowed by something else: confusion. Having the team show up the first time was a major curve-ball– nobody expected it to happen, so it was almost like a prank UDE played on us. And hey, they got a cool-as-all-get-out theme to go along with their weirdness, being VS’ very first Loner team.

Their first feature was neat, but I’m having trouble figuring out why they’re being refeatured. Let’s look at some facts.

• X-Statix as a comic was more of a “cult classic” than a bestseller. Thus, it probably doesn’t have much marketing draw.

It’s no secret that VS isn’t doing well. Personally, I’m in the camp that says that continuing to sell out sets will save the game– I refuse to believe that our year of gangbuster sales haven’t helped us.

That said, I accept that the only way we have a future is if we CONTINUE our pattern, and keep selling out every set. It seems to me, then, that UDE should be focusing its efforts on printing new cards that are marketable. It’s already pretty bad that they’re using that incredibly lame shot of Cable Mama as the box art (seriously… what the hell were they thinking?), and featuring low-profile niche teams isn’t helping.

Basically, I worry for the game. I know we’re on a tenuous branch; I firmly believe that we can help our fate by acting with our wallets, but that strategy depends on UDE making a super-marketable product like they did with the last three sets. Making the diehard fans happy is great, but at this point I’m objective enough to say that it needs to take a back seat to making marketable sets. I’d happily give up my beloved X-Statix for YET ANOTHER GODDAMN X-MEN FEATURE if it helped the set sell.

• X-Statix as a team affiliation is probably one of the least popular teams the game’s ever seen, duking it out with the Manhunters for that bottom slot. People who didn’t read the comics don’t “get” the characters, and a lot of people just don’t enjoy their passive gameplay style.

The X-Statix are fun, but are they going to make anybody buy the set? I suppose it’s possible… I think most old-timers have warmed up to the X-Statix a bit over the years, so they’re now seen as kitschy and quaint. But have they warmed up enough to actually make anyone spend more on the set to track down the Statix cards?

Let’s face it, there are about three voices in the community who have requested this refeature. I really don’t think there are very many players left with strong nostalgia for the team.

Now, with that said… there’s a benefit to teams being printed, regardless of whether they get played or not. Basically, it adds color to the game’s landscape. Nobody’s ever going to take NextWave to a tournament, but the mere fact of their existence makes the game more entertaining and diverse. If one player a year shows up with NextWave at your hobby league, that’s enough for them to make a footprint in your mind and highlight a corner of the game world. Let’s face it– the game is usually dominated by three to five teams at a time, so the existence of these marginal teams can be a breath of fresh air after the dank cellar of tournament metas.

I’m not sure if that made sense… but, yeah. I think that even people who will never play the new X-Statix might still enjoy them simply existing and popping up every once in a while. It’s what adds spice to the game.

• There are a grand total of two characters who appeared in the X-Statix comics who didn’t get cards.

Kind of an odd complaint… just about everything that could be done with the X-Statix IP has been done. There are only two more characters who popped up in the comics who could be justified in getting the affiliation: spunky owner Spike Freeman, and a dual-affiliated Wolverine. That’s it. Other than those two, every single speaking-role member of BOTH incarnations of the team has gotten cards, so you kind of have to expect that they’re not going to cover any new ground IP-wise.

I know that sounds like a weird complaint–”GRRR! How dare they only feature my favourite characters instead of filling the team with nobodies!”– but it goes back to the last point. It’s important that the game feel new and fresh, so when a team gets refeatured, they generally get handed a few characters that have never gotten cards before. New faces help the team look new and exciting.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m looking forward to seeing my old friends come back… I just wish there was more room to expand them. I just feel like there’s only SO MUCH mor exciting they can get when the roster’s 100% refeatures… yaknow?

• I’m not sure how much further the loner theme can be taken.

Let’s face it… teams can be refeatured and have their old themes dropped entirely. We’ve seen it before (MXM brotherhood, for example), and we need to expect it every time a refeature is announced. But, there are some things you really can’t change. You can’t take away the Injustice Gang’s hand flood theme, because that was absolutely their signature theme. It’s two-sided: they did it better than anybody else, and they did it to the exclusion of everybody else, because it’s a theme nobody else would want to touch. It’s their theme, pure and simple.

Same thing with the X-Statix. The exact nature of their lonering will certainly follow a different track than before, but I just worry that we’re running out of things to do with that theme. Hellfire, X-Statix, and Hellboy all play essentially the same, and Hulk is just the same with ATK pumps instead of DEF ones. They all have the same “controlly feel”, and I don’t feel like there’s much of a change when I switch from one to another.

However.

Alright, so I’ve bitched for 1100 words. I’ve looked the gift horse straight in the mouth and called its teeth into question… but I’m done now. I actually feel better now. Writing all that down really has taken a weight off my shoulders; I’ve said my piece, and now I can move on to just being excited again.

All of what I’ve just written are my worries, but paradoxically, I’m not that worried by them. These are the things I think can go wrong if the developers are stupid, but I think we can be pretty sure after the awe-inspiring MUN set that they’re anything but stupid. I have faith in them after that masterpiece, and I’m positive they’ve foreseen and solved every one of these issues.

I’m positive that the set will leverage its higher-profile elements (like the Cyclops, Deadpool, and Gambit legends) to drive sales; I’m positive they’ve treated X-Statix like the quirky sideline it was always supposed to be; and I’m positive they’ll make the roster seem fresh even with little variation in the faces.

I have faith in the S and the Z. I won’t say they’ve never let us down, but I can at least say they haven’t let us down recently. They’ve done their best for us and given us the best sets in the game’s history, and I believe in them enough to know that MEV will rock hard and sell well.

And finally.

I was going to add this item to the list of concerns above, but unlike the other worries I had, the solution to this one popped into my head less than ten seconds after the problem did.

• Given the trend toward merging teams and the fact that the X-Statix team wasn’t mentioned on Ben’s preview draft roster, we can reasonably expect X-Statix to be rolled into the X-Force team.

This really bugged me at first. I thought to myself that I’d almost rather not have a refeature at all, than have then refeatured without the respect I feel they deserve. They NEED to be their own team, damnit!

But then it occurred to me… holy crap.

X-FORCE NUMBER ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTEEN.

Never read it? Here’s a synopsis: the “new” X-Force is having a press conference, and it gets crashed by the “Old” X-Force– Domino, Cannonball, Boom-Boom, and Warpath show up, and they’re pissed at having their name coopted by a bunch of rock stars. What ensues is a huge brawl between the two teams for the right to use the name.

Of course, it’s all staged. The managers of the “new” team just wanted the publicity that only a fierce rivalry can provide, and so this internecine squabbling was entirely to the team’s benefit, unbeknownst to its members.

So, yeah. Go ahead, UDE: Stick the new and old members on the same team. Make them fight it out over who’s the best choice at each drop.

And then print this.

And a few of these.

Go on, do it. Reward my faith in you. Show me you’re as brilliantly insane as I know you are.

Rock my world, UDE.

-Spud

I almost threw this article away because I couldn’t write the intro.

This article was inspired by a conversation I had with another card developer; he made a comment which boiled down to him not quite understanding a certain design concept, and then my brain snapped to attention and it occurred to me that perhaps that design concept wasn’t as fundamental and obvious as I’d assumed, and would actually make a great subject for a How I’d Do It article.

Problem is, I can’t figure out a way to relate this story without coming off as a complete and utter asshole. I mean, sure… people KNOW I’m a jerk, and I make no attempt to hide it. But my defense is always that my brusqueness is due to my preference for expediency and my disdain for tact, and never rooted in a desire to hurt or humiliate people. I think that’s true, but in this case, I couldn’t figure out how to tell the story without it looking like I’m mocking him.

It’s true that I was surprised he didn’t understand this concept, but then I’m still floored by the fact that people have difficulty with templating. I tried to write an article about templating at one point, but I found it completely impossible to do—the advice of the entire article came down to a single instruction in my mind: “Find an existing card that’s like the one you want to make and copy the function text.” I couldn’t write about it because it just seemed so basic to me… and yet, I don’t know a single other custom card developer who does it right. It seems simple if you can do it, but apparently it’s monstrously frustrating if you can’t… like magic eyes. I never got why those are hard either… you just blur your vision. Boom, sailboat.
…okay, so I’m drifting a bit.

All that was to say this: I’m not mocking this person. They said something that caught my attention and inspired me to write this article… and that’s all. If at any point it seems like I’m knocking this person or looking down on them, that’s really not my intention. This person is a very good card designer who just happens to not have understood one facet of the design process; I still love this person greatly, with mouth, and would gladly have their babies were I asked.

(It also occurs to me that writing five paragraphs of buildup and pre-apology for a possibly-not-that-inflammatory story means that this is going to be hugely anti-climactic when you actually read it.)
Alrighty… here goes.

The Inciting Incident

I’m loosely involved with the team that’s making the DC Universe set; my job is mostly editing, with my main contribution being a complete read-through of the entire “completed” set to identify templating problems, unintended interactions, broken cards, and the like. Overall, I’ve been quite impressed with the set—the developers have done a (mostly) awesome job of reining in the power level of the set while still making something that would be worth playing if it were made for real. The teams have a lot of flavor, and a lot of the individual cards have some really creative new mechanics and interactions that never would’ve occurred to me to try.

That said, the set reads a bit… unsmoothly. The developers of the set are all working remotely and can’t chat as they work, so their process amounted to doing a draft, getting comments, doing another draft, getting comments, doing another draft, etc etc etc. In the end, this means that each team is one designer’s baby, and their “handwriting” definitely shows through. You can kinda tell when you go from one author to another, as each one’s style and habits are still visible even after external review.

And again, this is fine; the easily-apparent “voices” help keep the different teams feeling different. One designer tends to use payments more than triggers, so that adds some unity to his team. Another favors one-shot “enters play” effects, so that again lends a common cycle to the team he works on. Each team has themes that, I think, both intended and not intended. They design the team around a gameplay concept, but they also add their personal idiosynchrosies, and it all comes together to create a really tight-feeling team. I must applaud the results.

*applauds*

Now, that said… there was an exception. There was one team that, when I first read it over, did not seem to have any theme at all. I dug through it a couple times, and other than a couple marginal attempts to tie two or three cards in the 40-card team block together, there really wasn’t anything “going on” that made them feel cohesive. Now, I’ve missed these things before– some “real” VS teams have themes that are pretty hard to pin down (most of the MVL teams, for example, and DCL’s JLA refeature), and it took someone else’s analysis and perspective for me to see what these teams’ real themes were. So, I asked.

(Continuing my effort to avoid details, I’m going to use a different team name)

“What, if anything,” I asked, “is the Zoo Crew’s theme? I’m looking over them, and I don’t see anything at all. They look like DOR Arkham, but worse– just a bunch of random characters with random effects.”

It was really confusing to me, because the individual cards for the team were really solid and well-done. The designer did an awesome job of capturing the feel of the individual characters, but there was nothing to bind them together as a team. I paused, and waited for him to explain his design; he answered the next day.

“Overall theme-wise, the Zoo Crew have two themes. One is the standard curve-beats. They have characters who are either well-sized for their drop, or who burn, etc…and they have some decent attack pumps. Standard, but solid and simple.”

And this is what caught my eye. I was shellshocked for a moment– “Since when is curve combat a team theme?”, I asked myself. I just didn’t get it. I thought everybody knew how themes work, how to define and apply them. Themes are something that we’ve seen in every team since the game began, and I figured the concept was pervasive enough that there shouldn’t be any confusion on, at the very least, the high-level concept. The nitty-gritty, sure, but surely people at least understand what does and doesn’t constitute a theme!

Well, not so much.

After I thought about it for a bit, it occurred to me that while it was one of the first things I think I got good at, my first efforts at theming actually were pretty pathetic. The first custom cards I ever made, back in the good ol’ MSM days, were an Avengers team that I shudder to think about today. The big theme I came up with for the team? “Well, they should be really consistent.” Yep, that’s it… they had search cards and sifters. That was the entire theme for the team. Anything that didn’t involve getting drops, plot twists, and other stuff, was just random cards that I felt suited micro concepts like a particular storyline or character. In practice, the team had absolutely no binding theme, with certain characters that actively worked against others. It was a real mess.

For those of you keeping track, I’ve just finished committing 1200 words to express the following concept: “There was a time I wasn’t as good at this as I am now.” Yeah, I know… I’m friggin deep. But it seemed really important to me that I relate the reason that I wrote this article– the concept I’m writing about is almost the “grade 1 arithmetic” of VS card design, so I almost felt stupid writing an article about it. I felt like I needed to justify this to anybody else who already understands it: yes, it’s a basic concept, but that’s no reason to assume people already “get” it. See, unlike math, there’s no lesson plan to teach a neophyte how to design VS cards. Other than myself, I’m not aware of anybody else who’s really made an attempt to break break any of this down into teachable chunks, so it really shouldn’t be that surprising that everybody who does this started in a completely different place, and will therefore have different areas they may never have had any exposure to. Personally, I started with full teams and only moved onto making individual cards good later on. On the other hand, I think most designers start from the other end, making individual cards that fit a small concept well, and then having to learn later on as they scale up their efforts how to make individual cards work as part of a whole.

All of us who do this are stumbling around in the dark; there’s nobody there to teach us, so we have to teach each other.

Wow, that got REALLY gay toward the end.

Alrighty, you’ve heard my justification for writing today’s lesson… I guess I should actually start talking about the matter at hand, huh?

Let’s start from the beginning. What is a theme? Some of you may remember the definition from grade 9 English class:

theme /θim/ Pronunciation Key – Show Spelled Pronunciation[theem] noun, adjective, verb, themed, them·ing. –noun

2.	a unifying or dominant idea, motif, etc., as in a work of art.

In VS, “theme” is generally understood to mean, “What does this team do?” The theme of X-Statix, for example, is having one guy on the board at a time. The theme of Marvel Knights is board control. Some people would say that Brotherhood have received many themes over the years– huge guys, pumped swarm, reservists, etc– but on another level, those are all just sub-themes of their larger theme: “I Smack You!”

It seems to me that we have a problem here: a lack of terminology. It seems like the word “theme” has been extended to apply to several different concepts over the years; and while it does appropriately describe each of these things in a vacuum, in practice it can be difficult to understand exactly which of these concepts someone is referring to when they talk about theme. So, let’s go ahead and solve that problem by coming up with some better, more helpful descriptors. These aren’t necessarily the “correct” terms for these things, they’re just what I’m going to use for clarity’s sake.

1. Team Theme: A concept, expressed in one phrase, that sums up what a team is “about”. The theme of the Spider-Friends is “Interfering with combat”.
2. Archetype: This is the standard “build type” for the deck, generally composed of two ideas: 1) what the team’s recruit pattern will look like, and 2) what the team’s action pattern will look like. For example, Doom has two archetypes: swarm rush, and curve control. Squadron Supreme’s two themes both use the same archetype: curve combat.
3. Recurring Source: This is a repeated use of similar costs, triggers, and general concepts to “fire” different effects across a team. This does not necessarily directly relate to the Team Theme. The recurring source for the JLA in their first appearance is “powering up”.
4. Recurring Effect: The flipside of a recurring source, a recurring effect is generally the tangible way that the team theme is applied in game terms. The team theme of the Spider-Friends, “interfering with combat”, is represented by two main recurring effects: 1) elimination of potential attackers (through exhaustion) and defenders (through evasion), and 2) large DEF pumps.
5. Cycle: An actual term used by UDE, a “cycle” is a sub-class of the Recurring concepts.  Whereas a recurring source or effect is a general description of the functions of a group of cards (“Cards that boost ATK”), a cycle is an even more nitty-gritty thing– it refers to cards that outright and intentionally have text copied and pasted from one to the next, and which function almost identically. Cycles can apply to both sources (ie, the 1-drops in Crisis that activate, search your deck for something, and then place themselves on top of your deck) and effects (the Fatal Five all have the same triggered effect and oversized stats)

Let’s take a closer look at each of these concepts by developing some cards for this week’s team affiliation, the Elders of the Universe. For those who don’t read a lot of awful 1970s Marvel space comics, the Elders are a loose collection of beings, each the last survivor of the first handful of races that existed when the universe was formed. Each attained immortality through one means or another, and they all share one common problem: extreme boredom. These people have lived for billions of years, and without something new to do all the time, they were at risk of going bonkers from boredom. To avoid that, they’ve taken an interesting direction in life: each has chosen a single pursuit, and they now work to become the absolute master of that activity. The Runner moves extremely fast, and has decided to explore everything in the entire Universe. The Grandmaster spends his times learning and mastering games, and often challenges other cosmic-level beings to games of skill and chance. He’s become quite good at it, having defeated Death herself in a gamble that made the Elders completely and utterly incapable of dying, eliminating any loopholes in their existing immortality.

My favorite Elder is the Collector, who strives to collect objects and entities of interest and importance. His ship holds a gallery of scientific and magical artifacts from every race dating back to the dawn of time, and his personal zoo holds thousands of strange and astounding beasts; he’s even tried adding a few superhumans to his menagerie from time to time, which is usually where he runs into problems with Earth’s champions.

So, yeah. The Elders are an interesting part of the Marvel universe, and I figured it would be fun to try to represent them in card form. Let’s see what we can do on that front.

Team Theme

Team theme is a high-level decision you make that serves to differentiate your team from others. Deciding your team theme can actually have a lot of overlap with some of the other concepts on the list– the Team Theme of the Avengers is “reservists”, but that’s also their main Recurring Source. Don’t worry too much about strictly defining all these concepts; they’re more there to guide your thinking.

So, what makes a good team theme? Well, there’s no single answer here, but a good start would be something that’s interesting and fresh. You want a team concept that gives the team its own distinct “feel”, letting it stand out even among other similar teams; for example, the Outsiders and Teen Titans are both off-curve team-attack teams, but while the Titans’ theme is generally “team attack”, the Outsiders are more specialized– “team attack as one cohesive whole”. It seems like a small difference on paper, but it’s enough to make them feel substantial enough on their own.

Theme is often used to capture the general “feel” of a team; Doom is a plotting supervillain, so he has an array of Control tools to limit his opponents’ actions. The Brotherhood are ruthless villains, so they’re always represented as very strong in combat. Superman and his peeps are heroic and very powerful, hence their themes of “huge guys and protecting people”.

So, how can we capture the feel of the Elders? The various Elders don’t take a huge amount of interest in mortal affairs, except where their personal obsessions happen to overlap with us. Generally speaking, when an Elder is in conflict with humans, it’s because they tried to do something on Earth (take an artifact, gamble with our lives, etc), and then our superheroes took notice and tried to stop them. An Elder would never outright attack a specific faction of humanity (ie, a certain super-team) because it’s really below them and not worth their time. However, when humans get upset and try to stop them, then at that point they’ll fight to defend themselves and eliminate this barrier to their objectives.

To represent this, I’m going to give them a simple theme: Not Attacking. They’ll have characters that fire a power that makes a major impact on the board, but it’ll generally be at the expense of their ability to engage in combat.

Archetype

Archetypes are a fairly loose and abstract decision you’ll need to make, and it’s important to remember that they’re not set in stone– you can start out building a team as Curve Combat, and then realize partway through that there’s some potential to add control elements, and then boom, they’re now Curve Combat/Control.

Still, though, this isn’t a decision you can just shrug off and hope will coalesce once the cards are made– you need SOME kind of archetype to start working with. It’s very difficult to build a team if you don’t know if it’ll be curve or off-curve, for example.

The recruit structure of the Elders seems pretty obvious– these are extraordinarily powerful beings, so a weenie swarm simply won’t do. They’ll definitely be curving. As for the action pattern, we’ve got two options once we rule out combat for them: we can either make them “combat-esque” through many “activate to stun target character” effects, or we can give them strong Control effects.

I think the latter is a better fit– out-of-combat stuns still seem like a targeted offensive to me, which doesn’t really fit most of the Elders’ personalities. Whereas a Control theme seems quite fitting– it’s not worth the effort to actively beat up the people in their way, so they’ll prefer to simply swat them aside and hope that keeps them down for a while. Kinda like how you don’t go out of your way to hunt down every fly buzzing around the room, simply batting at the ones that go near your head.

Recurring Source & Effect

I intentionally didn’t call these “cost” and “effect”, as I’m not strictly referring to precise game terms here.

A Recurring Source is what you need to do to get your effects. It could be as simple as having a lot of characters with “Activate -> [blah]“, or as complex as the Future Foes’ “Unless an opponent discards a card, [blah].” In either case, [blah] can be the exact same thing, and the difference is simply in how you get it. A Recurring Source will usually be worded almost exactly the same from card to card.

Other examples of recurring sources:

• “Replace a resource you control -> [blah]” (Avengers, Titans, Brotherhood)
• “Pay X ATK this turn -> [blah]” (Spider-Friends)
• “If [your dude] would cause breakthrough while attacking, instead, [blah]” (Squadron Supreme)
• “If you control four or more resources, [blah]” (Thunderbolts)
• “Target reinforced defender has [blah] this attack.” (Crime Lords)
• “While [your dude] has X or more +1/+1 counters, [blah]” (Thunderbolts again)

A Recurring Effect is what you get from your effects– it’s what your team is actually accomplishing. These aren’t always strictly the same effect– Doom has both direct exhausts (Mystical Paralysis) and indirect ones (Puppet Master). Spidey exhausts characters both based on their cost (Sensational, Amazing, Gift Wrapped), and their combat statistics (Stark’s Protégé). The Brotherhood’s various ATK pumps are all over the map, with a huge variety of costs and conditions attached; but the simple fact that it’s a huge ATK pump makes it fit right in with the Brotherhood.

Examples of recurring effects:

• “Recover target stunned character” (X-Men, Green Lantern)
• “KO target stunned character” (Marvel Knights)
• Opponent losing endurance (Injustice Gang– the stipulation that it’s based on hand size is a source)
• Stat pumps on both ATK and DEF for a generally huge character (Team Superman, X-Statix)

As you can see, a recurring Effect is actually a pretty simplistic thing– most of the real innovation when designing a team theme comes in applying a “standard” set of Effects through a creative new Source. A dozen or more “good guy” teams have been made with Reinforce and Recover as their recurring effects, but the fact that they’re filtered through completely different Sources gives each team its own unique feel. It IS possible to come up with new effects, but it’s difficult to do so for a whole team– new effects tend to be more complicated things like Frog of Thunder that take up a ton of card space, as I think we’re at the point where every “simple” thing that can be done with the VS engine has been done.

Now, something to keep in mind: when you’re designing a team, you’ll almost always have a Recurring Source, but the Recurring Effect is actually completely optional. Quite often when a new Source is invented for a team, the designers will implement that team’s effects as a mostly themeless toolbox of effects. For example, the Avengers Reservist characters got a huge variety of effects (pump, free stuns, board removal, board recovery, endurance gain, endurance burn, readying) that don’t necessarily have anything to do with each other, but the fact that they all trigger off having or replacing Reservists instantly makes them feel cohesive anyway. Similar “scattered toolbox” teams can be seen in MXM’s X-Men, DLS’ Future Foes, DJL’s JLI, and many more; you can get away with a really disparate pile of effects as long as you compensate with a cohesive source.

That said, effects still recur even when it’s not obvious. MXM’s brotherhood had a large variety of effects, but if you look at them closely, they all come down to two main categories: Smash Assistance (through pump and formation disruption), and Consistency. That’s how they differentiated themselves from the previous Reservist team, the Avengers; while the Avengers had effects that were all over the place, the Brotherhood’s effects all kept to a fairly narrow aggressive theme, so they were able to have some identity of their own.

I’ll work on the Recurring Source in the next section on Cycles, but we can at least look at Recurring Effects here. Do I want to use one at all? Well, yes and no. Each Elder is a very unique character with his or her own personal obsession, so giving them all a Recurring Effect wouldn’t really fit them. That said, their effects will still be linked in a way, because I’ll be setting each of them up with a unique effect that hasn’t been seen before in VS. It will serve to reinforce their oddity and how far removed they are from average mortals.

At least, I hope.

Cycle

A Cycle is a bit of text or other game function that’s cut and pasted directly from one character to another, essentially hammering the player over the head with the notion that “THESE CHARACTERS ARE SUPPOSED TO BE SIMILAR!” Cycles can exist within a team, as with the Fatal Five’s shared “recover stunned dudes” text; between different teams in a set, as with DCR’s “1-cost searchers who put themselves on your deck”; or across multiple sets, as with Scarecrow’s cornucopia of 5-cost versions.

Cycles can be a very helpful way of giving hints to the players about how to build decks. For example, in MXM there was a “pay 0 endurance during recovery” character at just about every drop on the X-Men curve, which basically serves as a breadcrumb trail for casual players to “happen upon” intended interactions. The player uses Xorn in his X-Men recovery deck and discovers how useful the “pay 0″ thing is, and then looks deeper and sees that many other characters have it too, so he retools his deck to include more of them.

And beyond being helpful, cycles are just “neat”. People like finding patterns, and I think developers like leaving them to be found. It’s an unspoken game we play; they lock puzzles away in the cards, and when we suddenly see them one day, we crack a wry smile and feel proud of ourselves for seeing it.

So as we discussed a moment ago, the Elders are going to have broad-ranging effects, and are therefore going to need a strong Recurring Source to unify them. I’m going to implement this in the form of a card Cycle: “At the start of the combat phase, you may [blah]. If you do, [dude] can’t attack this turn.” I could simply have put all the good powers on “Activate” costs to ensure that your characters have to exhaust to get them, and therefore “can’t attack anyway”, but I really wanted to spell out in plain words that these characters are NOT attacking. I also wanted to make some of the effects non-optional, so sticking them on a mandatory trigger was the only way to go.

Alrighty, I think that’s enough planning… let’s see what a couple of these guys would look like.

They each use the same general wording, instantly linking them together. But at the same time, they still manage to each have their own unique “feel” that sets them apart from each other and from past characters. I really like this mechanic.

I’ll post the rest of the Elders cards in a sec– first I want to talk about one last theme-related issue.

The Exception that Proves the Rule

One thing you’ll find about UDE’s application of themes is that there’s always one or two characters who don’t follow the rules. 6-drop Flash from DJL had an Ally-like power, but since it only fired based on his own powerups, he wasn’t Ally. The Future Foes’ discards were almost entirely of the “Discard or [X] happens” variety, leaving the choice in the opponent’s hands, but there were a couple of characters (Computo and Brainiac, for example) who made it mandatory instead, breaking the cycle used by almost the entire theme. One of the best cards printed in DWF for the Revenge Squad to take advantage of their Ongoing plot twists is Graveyard of Solitude– but of course, it is itself a Location and not a Plot Twist, so it breaks up your perfect row.

You’ll find these exceptions all over the place, and generally I think they come from a few different places:

1. The simple need to “mix it up” with a team’s effects
2. Balance issues (Flash would be too good if he triggered from anyone, and the Foes would be too awful if the opponent could NEVER be forced to discard)
3. The inability on the designer’s part to abandon a neat concept

2 and 3 are the really important ones. I ended up making two characters that break the mould I created for the Elders, and I think they’re good examples of one good reason to break theme, and one bad reason.

First up we have the Collector. This was actually the first card I made for this team, and the one I was most proud of.

The thing is, though, he pretty obviously doesn’t have anything in common with the team’s theme. He’s a nice control card, but instead of being someone who avoids combat, this is a card that wants to seek it out– he wants to hunt down rare characters and smash them to death, but even against non-rares he still presents a way to strike a blow against lowbies to cause at least SOME combat damage.

I identified about two weeks ago that his effect didn’t fit, but until tonight I kept trying to convince myself that while it didn’t fit the team, it DID fit the character, so I was going to leave it.

This is the “bad reason” I discussed above.

When you’re designing a full team, don’t let your id make decisions for you. The character may be neat, but if it doesn’t fit, then it doesn’t belong. “Odd duck” cards belong as generics; if you want them on a team, you really need to take the effort to shoehorn them in. Modify their effect a bit so that it retains the flavor of the neat thing that you liked, while still calling back to your team’s theme.

I finally slapped some sense into myself this morning, and I retooled the card. I think it fits much better now.

Most of the time, Collector will be joining his comrades in not attacking– off the top of my head, I can’t think of more than half a dozen rare cards that actually see play these days in the visible area. But if your opponent DOES play something Rare, Taneleer “switches on” and his Greed-O-Meter goes up to 11. It retains the same basic flavor of the first card (keying off card rarity), but it fits in much better with the team now.

The next card also breaks the team’s rules, but I fully intended it to do so, and have no intention of changing it. I give you the Champion:

As you’ll recall, the reason I gave for the team’s “don’t attack” theme is that most of the Elders don’t really concern themselves with the affairs of mortals. Well, Champion here is the reason I qualified that with “most”. Champion does nothing BUT concern himself with the affairs of mortals– he constantly seeks out powerful individuals and challenges them to fights. On a team of people who pursue only their hobby, we have one guy whose hobby really is “beating people up”.

Besides the flavor thing, Champion also fills a balance gap. You’ll notice with just about every control-oriented team in the game that there’s at least one or two characters on the team that are oriented for combat– often even being above-average at it. The reason for this is that control is rarely perfect; you’ll always be short one exhaust that you need, or one key character will have a Cloak of Nabu, or one of your key Control guys will get nuked off the board. At some point or another every control deck needs to engage in SOME combat, however limited, and if most of your guys are wussy controllers, the few you do intend to use as fighters have a lot more slack to pick up.

That’s why I made Champion do what he does: he can, quite simply, take anyone in combat. If he attacks a 1-drop, the 1-drop stuns and Champion does not. If he attacks an 11-drop, the 11-drop stuns and Champion does not. Champion is there to be a roadblock; he can handle ALL of your combat for you, but he still only gets to punch one guy each turn. And of course, he has a pretty major weakness: if the opponent has a single point of -DEF to put on him, ANY character in the game can stun him. If the opponent has a single point of -ATK to put on him, he can’t stun ANYTHING, regardless of how small it is.

But balance aside (and no, he probably still ISN’T balanced, and would still need some work if he were being made for real), Champion is a good example of the times when you want to intentionally break a team theme. Sometimes it’s just fitting to have a certain character buck the trend set by his team (Bizarro 4-drop is a great example) because they’re too stupid or rebellious to fit in; and mechanically, it makes the team more interesting if a certain (very small) segment of the team behaves in a way that counters the rest of the team.

That DOESN’T mean that you’re just free to abandon theme wherever you like, of course; you really should try to make characters fit, and the exceptions should seriously be like one card in twenty. To paraphrase The Incredibles: “When everyone’s an exception, nobody is.”

</education>

Aaaaaand that’s all the lessons for today. I have more cards to show you, but there’s nothing to learn here; they’re just “the rest of the Elders cards”. So, STOP LEARNING. Stop it. Cut it out right now.

…

…did you stop?

Good.

The next two cards are enablers. They ensure that while you can’t use combat to keep your opponents’ boards down, you can at least take SOME measures to keep the toe-nibblers at bay.

A key thing with Ego: he doesn’t KO “that cost or less”, he KOs EXACTLY that cost. If your opponent recruits a new 1-drop on 6, it survives. Ego is mostly here to make hitting the Runner more difficult, and to power the NEXT card.

…MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

So, yeah. Play one of these on the Runner, form him in front protecting Grandmaster (who we’ll get to in juuuuuuuust a moment), and choose your opponent’s largest character with Runner’s power. Your opponent can’t smash through Runner for break, as single attackers automatically KO when hitting a Primordial-affected dude. He can’t exactly ignore him either, as he might need to get Runner out of the way to hit Grandmaster. So the opponent’s only viable decision, then, is to team his 7-drop and a lowbie into Runner– which leaves that 7-drop unavailable to hit yours, and forces the opponent to team attack or pump to hit him.

As with a couple of the other effects, it’s probably a little too good, but it was just too juicy to cut out, and HOT DAMN if it doesn’t support the theme.

Alrighty, one last card:

Grandmaster is the deck’s win condition. You use the controlling Elders effects to stall out the game (using Runner and Champion as blockers, Caregiver to make them more annoying, and Collector to pull out his key pieces), and then on 7, you drop Grandmaster… and the wager is set. When you put Grandmaster on the board, you’re challenging your opponent to a bet. “I bet you,” you say with a satisfied grin, “that at the start of the recovery phase, I’ll still have ready characters. I bet that doing the best you possibly can, I will hit recovery and be able to fire this character’s effect. I am so confident, that I’m willing to put the result of the game on the line. If I can’t do it, I’ll just scoop. But if I can… if I CAN do it…” (and you pause here for dramatic effect) “…I’m going to burn the life right out of you.”

And then your opponent pees himself.

And that was, perhaps, the end of our beginning.

I will end today’s article with a small announcement: this is going to be my last article for a little while. There are a few reasons for my hiaitus, but I think two stand out the most for me:

1. I’ve taken up a couple projects (don’t worry, they’re still VS-related) and I haven’t been able to commit the time to them that I think they deserve. Working on this article takes a ridiculous amount of my time (two days to write and the rest of the week to do art), and I’ve had the same three “for fun” projects sitting unfinished on my desk since June. I just don’t have the time for both this article and my other projects, and I think I’ve given this one lone project a monopoly on my love for about as long as I can bear.
2. I’m more or less out of ideas for How I’d Do It articles (I covered all the topics that I intended to, and can’t think of anything else really important that needs to be done), and Radio Songs appears to be enormously unpopular, given that I’ve gotten exactly two comments between three articles, one of which was several weeks after publication. Basically, card designers weren’t reading my instructional articles (which was why I was writing them), and non-card-designers don’t seem to care about my comic reviews. Unless I can think of another topic to base an article around, there just doesn’t seem to be anything I’m capable of writing that people are actually interested in reading.

So, yeah. I’m going to continue to post random items on LH forever and ever (SoL matches, Hobby League reports, maybe a random musing here and there), but I’m officially putting my Tuesday custom cards thing on hiatus for at least a couple months, barring some massive creative epiphany.

I’d like to thank my few regular readers for supporting me as long as you have, and I’d like to curse the families of those who read and don’t leave comments. May your kin be stricken by The Pox (not large, small, or Chicken… just The Pox), and may your fingernails gain the hue of a seasick giraffe.

Peace out!

-Spud

Remember back in the day, on the last day of the elementary school year? Remember how useless it was to try to get the kids to do anything? Summer was a day away, report cards had already gone out, and it was impossible to grade you on anything. So generally speaking, we had parties. No lessons or tests, we just watched movies and brought in snacks.

Those were some good times.

Today I’ve got the same feeling. I’ve been working on this Invincible EC for eight weeks (on and off), and yaknow what? I’m done with it, and I just can’t bear to talk about it any more than I have already.

Print out, play with, and enjoy the fruits of my misery.

Moving Forward

And with that, Volume One of “How I’d Do It” comes to a close. Simply put, I’m done– I had a scribbled list of topics I wanted to cover to help ensure our community’s card designers have a good grounding, and I’ve reached the end of the list. There are a few random items I didn’t find time to talk about, but they’re minor and Billy covered most of them, so I don’t feel too bad.

Now, don’t panic– this doesn’t mean the article’s over. With MUN being released next week, I need to take this coming weekend off to sort my cards out, since I haven’t sorted a single card since World’s Finest. I’ve got piles and piles and piles of cards sitting on my desk that need to be sorted out and put away, and I really need to get it done before I crack my six boxes of the next set or I’ll simply never get it done. After that, I may or may not get something done for the following week– it’ll depend what I can squeeze in on the weekend, between cracking packs, sorting cards, building decks, managing trades, etc.

But the week after that– the 23rd, I think?– I’ll be back with a reformatted article. I’ve noticed that most of my regular readers (or at least, the ones who comment) don’t really give two farts about the how-to part of my articles, and are mostly ogling the cards. So, I’m going to change my focus a bit. I’m still hammering out the details, but the current plan is to review a TPB or story arc, and then crank out some cards inspired by it. That kind of article will be much faster to write than what I’ve been doing, which means I may actually get my life back. Yay! And it seems to me it’s something the bulk of you would rather read than all this dry theory I’ve been pushing. I spend a half-dozen paragraphs ogling over a great comic, then show you some spiffy cards, and then you’re free to wander off.

I’ve also got some other ideas for– let’s be honest– excuses to make some cards and present them in an article format, and I might even want to return to the How I’d Do It format from time to time if I think of a topic that needs to be covered, so I’m probably looking at a randomly rotating article format for the foreseeable future. If anybody has any suggestions for formats they’d like to see me try, or TPBs they think would be perfect for fan cards, or anything else, really, drop it in the comments (or PM me on the Realms) and let me know.

Alrighty, that’s me for this week. See you on the 23rd.

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

For those of you just tuning in: this is week 2 of a 3-week series, wherein I’m trying to cobble together an Invincible Essential Collection using all the combined strategies and techniques I’ve talked about in my previous articles. Last week, we covered the good guys; this week, we cover the bad ones.

I ran into a problem with these guys right off the bat: which bad guys do I even pick? There isn’t a single enemy group in the Invincible universe who can be justified as anything more than a six-character team. So, it seemed like the best solution would be to bring them all into one big “umbrella team” that would contain all the various bad guys from the IP, but still keep the groups distinct by unifying them with versions.

With that decided, I needed to then decide what the team would be “doing”. I wanted each sub-team to kind of do its own thing, but with an overarching theme that brings them all together. Looking through the comics, I found three teams/groups/organizations/whatever that all had one thing in common: a definite plot. And that’s “plot”, as in “nefarious”. These three groups had an objective to accomplish, spent some time planning it, and had a definite exit strategy for pulling it off.

1. The Viltrumites: A race of supermen, the Viltrumites are just about the most powerful beings in the world. They move and fly at incredible speed, are ridiculously strong and tough, and they all have badass mustaches.

As I explained last week, the evil plot of the Viltrumites is to:

1. Find a planet
2. Send a Viltrumite to infiltrate it
3. Remove any threats to their rule (such as superheroes)
4. Conquer it
5. Rule it for 500 years
6. The fleet arrives, kills the inhabitants, and stripmines the planet.

There were two main points I wanted to reflect with the Viltrumites: their sheer physical prowess, and their incredible patience. They live for tens of thousands of years, so they’re not in any rush to “win”.

2. The Lizard League: A very thinly-veiled tribute to the Serpent Society, the Lizard League are a generically evil villain group who are thwarted (rather embarassingly), over and over again. Invincible beats them, Shapesmith beats them… they’re the villainous whipping boys of the Invincible universe. However, after getting whupped so many times, they decide that they’ve taken enough crap, and need to step things up a bit. So, they take over a nuclear missile silo.

The Guardians’ heavy hitters are all off-world at the time, so they send everybody they have left– Rex Splode, Dupli-Kate, and Shrinking Ray. What follows is the biggest bloodbath since issue 7’s betrayal of the original Guardians.

(Click for a longer sequence)

The items I wanted to reflect with the Lizard League were their brutality, and their plot to take over the silo.

3. Angstrom Levy: Angstrom’s an interesting case– as far as we could tell, he wasn’t even trying to do anything evil. Angstrom is a brilliant man who somehow has developed the ability to open portals to other dimensions. The portal always opens to the exact same spot– so if he’s in Central Park and moves to Nazi Earth, he’ll appear in whatever Central Park has become on Nazi Earth. This ends up being a problem; he doesn’t know much about these other dimensions, so there’s always a chance he’ll pop up inside a solid object, or on a world that’s far too hazardous to risk going to. So, he comes up with an interesting plan: he goes to thousands of alternate Earths, locates himself, and brings his alternate self to this Earth. Then, with help from the Mauler Twins, he builds a machine that will integrate their minds with his own; thus, he’ll know everything Bizarro World Angstrom Levy knows about Bizarro World, and will be able to more easily move around it.

The plan (which, again, isn’t an evil plan at all– Angstrom’s a decent enough guy who’s just trying to solve a problem) mostly works– the machine is built, and the other Angstroms take their places on it. But just as they’re getting ready to fire it up, Invincible, who’s been tracking the Maulers since Angstrom broke them out of prison to help him, shows up, assumes the worst, and starts trying to turn the machine off. Angstrom can’t let that happen (the process has already been started and can’t be stopped), so he orders the Maulers (who are really beefy, but not as beefy as Invincible) to stop him until it’s all done. They try, but Invincible’s too strong, and starts kicking their asses. Angstrom, panicking about what Invincible’s going to do to his machine, opens more portals– and brings in dozens of other Maulers from alternate dimensions. These additional Maulers combine their efforts and decide to simply kill Invincible, who’s been a royal pain on their worlds. And… they start succeeding.

Angstrom won’t have this– he only wanted them to restrain him so he couldn’t interfere, he doesn’t want an innocent person’s blood on his hands. So, he starts manually shutting the machine down partway through the process, tearing the machinery off him. The Maulers warn him that this isn’t a good idea, but he doesn’t care, he won’t let them kill Invincible. So, he gets off the machine.

And it explodes.

When the dust clears, the machine, the maulers, and a half-mile area around them have been reduced to dust and rubble. Angstrom has survived, and the process worked– he’s got all of the other Angstroms’ minds integrated into his own. However, the explosion caused a major problem, and he’s been turned into a mutated freak.

His mind was screwed up by the blast, and he forgets that he didn’t want Invincible to die– he now thinks that Invincible showed up just to mess up the machine, and that it’s his fault that he looks like that now. He staggers off into a portal to find the most advanced doctors in the multiverse to heal his injuries.

Ten or so issues later, Invincible comes home from a mission… and finds a majorly beefed-out Angstrom Levy holding his mom and little brother hostage. He’s become obsessed with killing Invincible, and in between beating up Mark’s family to enrage him, he flings Mark between different dangerous worlds, making him fight horrific threats from throughout the multiverse. This goes on for a while, and Mark gets more and more tired– which was Angstrom’s plan all along. Eventually, they get into a brawl; during the fight, Angstrom opens a portal to a desolate world, and they both go through. Angstrom makes one final threat– that when he’s done here, he’s going to go back and kill Mark’s family– and Mark snaps. Angstrom told him he had been enhanced and was now super-strong, so Mark wails on him with his full strength in a blind rage. But Levy exaggerated his new prowess– Mark inadvertently beats him into a thick red puddle. He’s trapped on the alien world, but is eventually resucued by a fifteen-years-in-the-future version of the Guardians.

Holy crap, that was long. @_@

Angstrom’s sub-team is going to be interesting: it’ll reflect the non-violent nature of the build-up of the plan, where you gather Angstroms. Then, when you have them all, you’ll fuse them into Super Angstrom Levy, who will go insane and murder your opponents.

Or something.

The one thing these three groups have in common is that they all have a plan. An objective, a way to accomplish it, and if they do, then they win. So, I decided to base the team around instant wins. The Forces of Evil umbrella team will have three instant win cards (well, two and a half– one of them takes a bit more work to win once it’s fired), and the versioned sub-team members associated with it will help you achieve the goal. But since instant wins aren’t everybody’s cup of tea, two of the sub-teams can also use their “thing” to simply fight– so if it looks like your opponent is going to be able to stop the full implementation of their plot, they can simply default to smashing faces for the endurance win. And on top of that, there’ll be an interesting twist on the whole thing at the end.

So, let’s get started, shall we?

The Viltrumites

The Viltrumite sub-team is based around patience. They’re perfectly happy to sit there for a while, lulling their opponents into a false sense of security. Then eventually, when they’re ready and everything is prepared, they go on the offensive and crush all who oppose them.

The Viltrumites’ patience is reflected by drawing cards. They draw, and draw, and draw… and don’t play any plot twists while they wait. They simply wait it out, ensuring that they have adequate resources to utterly crush their foes. But once they have ten cards, all hell begins to break loose.

Viltrumite Justice shows the utter brutality of an unleashed Viltrumite offensive. Once you’re ready to strike, your Viltrumites will be able to jump two entire drop-points on the curve to take out whatever opposes them.

This card really shows the two facets of the Viltrumite strategy. You can try to continue to accumulate cards and go for the instant-win (which I’ll get to in a moment), or you can simply use the team theme to put these ridiculous effects online, and then revert to a simple beatdown strategy– your Viltrumite characters will start out huge, and they’ll just get huger. I left it up to the player to decide how heavily they want to invest in the theme.

Next up in the Viltrumite arsenal is Unopposed Threat, their negation card. When you have ten cards in hand, you’ll be able to use it during the combat phase. Once you build up a bit more and get up to 15 cards, you can play it any time– most notably, you can use it for a “free” negate of a search card. Your large characters will be hard enough to deal with on their own, but even more so if your opponent is forced to miss drops.

(Incidentaly: it occurs to me that if someone knew nothing about Invincible except for what they’re reading in my articles, they would be led to believe that the comic is an unrelenting gore-fest from beginning to end. This actually isn’t true– by and large, it’s a very light-hearted superhero comic, with a happy hero and a colourful world. It just happens that the parts of the story that end up being really important and memorable all involve a huge amount of savage beatings. Which, if you think about it, makes sense– given that the main villains of the story are strong enough to put a fist through your chest without even trying. These guys simply CAN’T fight without gore!)

The last card I’ll show you from the exploitation side of the Viltrumites is… um… Female Viltrumite. I know, I know– that is a REALLY stupid name. But, even though she’s an important character who we’ve been told will have an recurring role, we just don’t know her name yet! In fact, this was a huge problem when developing the Viltrumites; other than Omni-Man and Invincible, we only have names for two of them! I’m going to do some more research, and maybe send Robert Kirkman an e-mail, but if I can’t figure out her name by next week, I’ll just make up something that sounds right and toss that on her. It’s gotta be better than Female Viltrumite, right?

As for the card itself… ehh. It’s free stuns if you meet the requirements. There’s not really much to say about her, other than, “Hey, she’s pretty good!”. She gets free stuns on your attack as long as you keep your hand size beefy, which is even more brutal when you consider that the Viltrumites are no slouches in standard combat.

They’ve got two or three other “exploitation” cards, but I’ll let you see those next week. For now, I’ll just show you two more.

You may have noticed on Viltrumite Justice above that there’s a special clause at the end of the card: “If you control Viltrum, draw a card.” This sentence is repeated on a couple other Viltrumite cards– in addition to their own effect, you can also get some card draw out of them if you control the Viltrumite homeworld. So, let’s take a look at that.

Viltrum does two things. First of all, it increases your hand size by one every turn as long as you’ve got a character card to pitch. Secondly, it provides some burn– burn that increases with the size of your hand. At the Viltrumite threshold of ten cards, it doesn’t burn at all; but as you start to gather more and more, it turns into a great damage source. This once again reinforces the “If in doubt, switch to combat” philosophy of the Forces of Evil– this burn won’t really matter if you’re gunning for a free win, but it can be tremendously helpful if you’re trying to win on endurance.

Alrighty, so I’ve mentioned the instant win a few times, but I haven’t actually shown it to you. It’s not terribly complicated, of course- gather enough cards, and you win. But what, pray tell, is that magic number? How many cards do I need to win? Well, there wasn’t any huge planning or insight on that issue– I basically just picked a number at random that seemed high enough to be difficult, but easy enough to actually pull off consistently with Viltrumite support. I haven’t tested this stuff at all, so it may be too high or too low– but for the time being, it seems close enough.

The magic number– pulled mostly out of my ass, and subject to the testing that I probably won’t ever do– is twenty.

Twenty cards in hand at any point on turn 6 = instant win.

Think it’s too easy? Too hard? Let me know in the comments.

The Viltrumites

The Lizard League are brutal– they have an objective to accomplish, and they’re going to accomplish it with a bloodbath. Mmmmmm…. bloodbath.

Hey, wait a sec, this looks familiar!

Yep, that’s right: every sub-team gets a different version of The Cunning Plan, tailored to their needs. The one for the Lizard League demonstrates their two themes: their gradual takeover of the nuclear missile silo, and their propensity for extreme violence.

The mechanical theme for the Lizard League is Takeover counters. If you gather twenty of them, you win; and the main way to get them is simply to smash into people. That said, this isn’t the only thing they’re using them for– they’re also quite helpful for inflicting pain on your opponents.

So, what kind of fun things can you use them for? Well, Iguana here shows one of my favorite things about the Takeover counter system: gambling. With her and a few other cards, you can “bet” a certain number of your hard-earned counters and then see how that investment pays off. In this case, your opponent has a really crappy decision– either he loses his character, or you get two counters closer to your objective. It’s one of those wonderful “no correct answer” dilemmas that are so fun to inflict on your enemies; no matter what he chooses, you’re happy.

(On a random note: a lot of this art is temporary. I’ll be working over the next week to remove all the speech bubbles and sound effects on all the cards)

I don’t have the full Lizard League card list done yet– I completely gutted them and restarted them with a new theme yesterday, and I haven’t figured out exactly what kind of tools they need to work– but I’ll show you two more of their cards today.

Another way they can spend their counters is on pure pump. Since the League can’t get these counters without stunning people, I felt it was important to give them not only high natural ATK, but also additional sources of extra ATK to ansure that they can keep stunning people.

As has become a pattern with these cards, In Cold Blood isn’t complicated or terribly inspired– it’s a very straightforward card that plays to the League’s strengths. I’m still waffling over the cost; I’ve had it as two counters for most of the card’s life, but on the other hand, the fact that these counters are stored on characters, and this character needs to have survived a previous combat to even get this counter in the first place, tells me that one is probably enough. I’ll probably go with one by the time I’m done tweaking.

This fragility– the fact that your counters are all being stored on very small characters (the League caps out at 3)– means that you can really quickly have your plans foiled if your opponent stuns too many of your guys. It’s easy enough to rebuild your characters, but losing the counters they’ve earned is a major pain. So, I made a way to preserve them, by sticking them all on one big “counter silo”. Hail Supreme Lizard lets you be as cavalier with the lives of your men as you want– you can let your whole board get stunned as long as you keep one guy alive to hold everything.

And who better to hold these things than King Lizard himself? I really love King Lizard: during the fight with the Guardians, he ran away like an utter coward, and then reappeared to gloat when it was all over.

King Lizard really, REALLY wants to hog all the glory. He wants to be the one to hold all your Takeover counters, so that he can gain you the endurance you need to stay alive. The instant-win version of the deck will need the life to stall out to twenty counters; and the pure aggro version will need the life to counteract all the breakthrough you’ll be taking through all your lowbies.

As it stands, he’s probably gaining a bit too much– I’ll probably lower it to “half the number of counters”, or something like that. I’ll need to think about it a bit more.

I’ll have more on the Lizard League next week when I actually finish their card pool.

Angstrom Levy

Angstrom Levy has a very simple strategy, compared to the other two. It works in five simple steps:

1. Implement The Cunning Plan of Angstrom Levy, and remove a whole bunch of his alternate selves from the game.

2. Recruit a whole pile of copies of Angstrom Levy, Cast of Thousands from your removed-from-game zone.

3. Coerce your opponent into not attacking you by threatening that his characters will Take A Little Trip if they get too rough.

4. Once you’ve assembled enough of your Cast of Thousands (okay, less than two dozen… but still), integrate their psyches and form Angstrom Levy, Thousand In One.

5. Remove all threats that remain, and annihilate your opponent for the win.

Very simple… not necessarily easy, but definitely not complicated.

And The Rest

Of course, the three sub-teams above aren’t the only villains in the Invincible universe– not by a long shot. In addition to the main groups, the Forces of Evil team affiliation also has a number of free agents– random bad guys and yours-to-hire henchmen who are happy to help out their evil brethren. These random bad guys were a perfect opportunity to create “generic” support for the three alternate strategies– cards that are tremendously helpful for any Forces of Evil build, regardless of which strategy you pursue.

Doc Seismic is almost an automatic four-of in any FOE deck; he’s basically copies five through eight of your chosen The Cunning Plan. He also provides you with an extra body on the field to be exhausted for various effects– or to make your Subterranean Beasts more affordable.

I’m always very hesitant to add search to teams, because I feel that search is something a team needs to earn. Unless the team REALLY needs the extra help, I like to let them lean on generic search and other mechanisms– like draw and mill– to find their cards. That said, all of the Forces of Evil sub-teams are highly dependant on plot twists– most of them fall apart completely if they don’t have the tools they need to survive. So, I didn’t really have much choice in the matter; I gave them a plot twist search.

BUT… I made it expensive. Subterranean Beasts is a Loyalty 1-drop, which isn’t a huge deal, considering that two of the three main sub-teams are off-curve. As I said above, the search they provide is pretty expensive, costing you a resource point and two (or even three!) cards from your hand to work. Getting Doc Seismic out makes them much more reasonable, but I still wanted to avoid making them too easy to fire. Plot twist search needs to be restrictive.

The last two cards I’ll show you today have the distinction of being both the cards I like the most out of the whole team, and the cards that I think are least likely to actually see any play if anybody was actually going to play this team.

In the comics, Invincible never really gets a rest. He knocks down one threat, and another one pops up right away. He’s busy off-world preventing one alien invasion, and while he’s gone, a second, completely separate, alien invasion hits us anyway. There is a LOT of villainy happening in the Invincible universe, and it quite often knocks the heroes off-balance– they think they’ve taken care of the day’s big threat, and then they find out they’ve been ignoring an even bigger one.

I wanted to make a card to reflect this cornucopia of menaces. In the end, it was way too much text, and it needed to be two cards instead.

What these essentially allow you to do is to say, “Well, I can see that the Lizard League aren’t going to win this game. My opponent’s got a Total Anarchy out, and I’m never going to keep guys alive to hold counters. Ah well… time for a Viltrumite invasion.” And then poof, you throw away your counters, swap them for cards in hand, and turn all your Lizards into Mighty Mustaches. You only get half as much advancement in the new currency as before, and you can’t grab full-curve equivalents of the new characters, but you can turn a losing situation into a maybe-winning one. If your opponent’s deck completely mauls one of your strategies, you just shrug and change strategies. Granted, this would be a bit of a pain to fit into your deck (getting all three strategies into one deck would be one hell of an accomplishment), but the important thing is that the option is there.

Aaaaaaand we’re out.

I’m going to spend the next week fine-tuning the cards– if you have any suggestions for changes or new cards for either of the teams, drop them in the comments. Balancing a whole team can be a real nightmare, and it really helps to have input from other people.

In the end, I’m not silly enough to expect that what I make here is a finished, balanced product. My goal is to make a set of cards that’s polished enough to at least send off for testing; teams with the obvious broken interactions removed, and the confusing elements clarified. I’m positive that “twenty” as the goal for all three main strategies is a bit too simplistic, and some of them probably need to be raised or lowered to be fair. But it’s a decent starting point, and I don’t imagine it would take very long in testing to find the correct number for each one.

Alrighty, that’s me for this week. Next week I’ll talk about some of the mechanisms that went into making all of this, show you some of the “hidden” strategies I implanted in the card pool, and reveal the full card list.

See you then!

-Spud

Aaaaaaaand we’re back. Sorry about last week, but I’ve been doing this non-stop for three months and kinda needed a break.

The subject matter for this little excercise will be my favourite ongoing series: Robert Kirkman’s Invincible.

Here’s a quick synopsis of the series’s premise for the uninitiated:

• Mark Nolan is the son of Omni-Man, the world’s most powerful superhero
• Omni-Man is a Viltrumite, a race of ridiculously powerful, yet benevolent, beings who run around the galaxy, protecting planets from harm.
• At the age of… sixteen? I think?… Mark manifests powers. They’ll grow to full strength over time, but even at a very low level, he’s super-strong, bulletproof, super fast, and can fly. He calls himself Invincible
• Mark sorta-kinda joins the Teen Team, a group of teen heroes. He aspires to someday join the Guardians of the Globe, the mightiest hero team in the world (who his father works with, though he’s not a member).
• Everything’s groovy. They live happily ever after.

So what I wanted to represent with these characters was how young and exube–

Spud.

Yes, internal dialogue device I ripped off from DocX?

You forgot the last part.

What is that you saaaaaaaay?

You covered like four issues of a 50-issue series.

Ehh, the rest is more of the same.

Oh, really? So, I guess it’s irrelevant what happens at the end of issue 7?

Okay, fine, so Omni-Man’s a psychotic murderer. So what?

And I guess issue 12’s pretty forgettable, too.

FINE. I’ll discuss your lame “defining plot advancements”.

Soooooo… it turns out that Viltrumites aren’t actually philanthropists. What they do is, they send an agent over to a world that has resources they want, and they give him five hundred years to rule over it as he sees fit (they basically get paid in advance for their services to their race) (also: Viltrumites live tens of thousands of years. So, five hundred isn’t sucking up the prime of their life, or anything like that). After those five hundred years, the VIltrumite armada shows up, enslaves the planet, sucks it dry of resources, and exterminates all life on the planet. Omni-Man technically, by Viltrumite law, “owns” the Earth, but he realized that with the large number of super-people we have, he couldn’t just take it by force. Instead, he posed as our greatest hero so he could gain the trust of our heroes– all the while, eliminating monsters and supervillains, and other threats to his eventual reign. Then, when the time is right, he starts eliminating our other heroes, so that eventually, it’s just him.

It’s the greatest villain scheme ever.

Long story short: he tells Mark, who completely flips out, and decides to fight his dad to make him leave. This turns out not to be the greatest idea.

That said, after beating Mark to within an inch of his life, Omni-Man gets this sudden pang of guilt, and flies off. And then we don’t see him again for like… twenty issues. He ran off to rule some bug planet? Or something? It’s not important.

Well, not that important.

Aaaaaaanyway. With the Guardians of the Globe dead, the government (specifically, Global Defense Agency director Cecil Stedman) tries its best to repopulate the team. Most of the Teen Team get recruited, as well as some fairly disposable heroes. Oh, and The Immortal, who got his head punched off by Omni-Man, turns out to be actually immortal, and returns from that minor injury to rejoin the Guardians. So, Abe Lincoln is a member of the team.

…oh, I didn’t mention that? The Immortal was a knight of the round table, he came to North America on the first ship that sailed here, and he was the sixteenth president of the united states.

…ok, seriously, do you get now why this series is so freaking awesome?

I guess I should talk about the cards.

So, yeah. It actually took me close to two months of pondering, and four re-writes of the card list, to come up with anything remotely interesting for a Guardians of the Globe team. I had a few ideas for mechanics, but they were all rather controllish and better-suited to a villain team. Heroes are actually fairly hard to design around, which is why so many hero teams in the game have “arbitrary” themes. See: The Avengers, the JLA, the X-Men, the JLI, the Defenders, etc.

I had three ideas that seemed kind of promising for a hero team, they either didn’t strike me as particularly appropriate for this hero team, or I couldn’t think of a way to do them that wasn’t a retread.

1. Substitute. It made sense to me given that the bulk of the series has been about the teen heroes’ attempts to fit into the roles vacated by the dead Guardians. Unfortunately, I couldn’t think of a single way to use the keyword that hadn’t been done already. Let’s see: refreshing cosmic counters (Titans), “comes into play” effects (Darkseid), toolboxing effects (Defenders), no-tap payments (Spidey-Friends), “guys who are better on later turns” (TBolts)… anything I could think of to do with this keyword had already been done in one way or another. I really wanted to use this theme, but without a solid twist on the keyword, it wasn’t happening. Sigh.
2. “Bonus versus specific costs”. Anything from “character can’t be stunned while fighting something of its own cost” to “combat bonuses while fighting the highest-cost character in play”. I could definitely see building a hero team around this concept, but it just seemed a little too generic. I figured I’d use it if I couldn’t think of anything else, but I wasn’t thrilled with it.
3. “Your guys can’t attack. Ever.” The concept here was to build a team around activated powers– they get “easy” combat based mostly on cost comparison, but can never cause breakthrough, so they need to find other ways to cause damage. And they can never give in to the temptation to swing a 6-drop into an unreinforceable 1-drop, no matter how they might want to. I’ve actually got a full 35-card team built around this mechanic (for a different piece of IP), so if I wanted, I could just steal the entire thing and change the art, and poof, we’re done. But: 1) I didn’t want to steal the concept away from the original team I built it for, because it fits them much better. And 2) It still didn’t quite fit the Guardians. It would fit the OLD Guardians– my concept when I developed the list was a team of heroes who are so ridiculously powerful, that combat seems beneath them. They just look at you, and poof, you’re stunned. The original Guardians were that powerful, but the new ones really aren’t, so it doesn’t fit.

It was really frustrating… I had two workable ideas I didn’t like, and an idea I liked that I couldn’t use. I resigned myself to doing the cost-based theme, and hoped it wouldn’t be as boring as I thought it would. I finished the list and moved onto the villains.

…and then BAM. As I was groggily washing my hair last Monday morning, I was suddenly hit with an idea. It wasn’t groundbreaking, nor was it game-breaking. It was an effect you could find on any of dozens of cards… but the way it comes to happen intrigued me. The more I thought about it, the more overjoyed I became– not only was this a substantial mechanical twist on a theme I liked, but it was also flawlessly well-suited to the Guardians. In the time it took me to lather, rinse, and repeat, I came up with eleven characters and three support cards.

I was a happy, happy Spud.

But what was this card, you ask? What did I come up with that I loved so much?

Why, only this:

Schadenfreude!

As I said, it’s not groundbreaking, but HOT DAMN if it’s not fun and thematic: The Guardians of the Globe will key off of the death of a founding (ie, recruited) member, and subsequent replacement by a younger (ie, substituted) hero.

The whole theme coalesced into being without me even having to try– the effects were simply logical. These cards needed to be a certain way to work; it just made sense, and flowed freely from my fingertips.

We start off the curve at 1 with two good substitutable bodies. To start off with, Black Samson is freaking HUGE for a 1-drop, which is fitting, considering he’s one of the world’s strongest (remaining) heroes. He also offers a powerful boost to whoever tags him out– enough power to jump two slots on the curve and take down a 3-drop.

This was one of the really interesting things about this theme, to my eyes– I got to invert the power scale. Generally speaking, VS has a fairly rigid tempo– an effect of X type and Y size is “fair” when it comes into play on turn Z. The stronger the effect, the later you can play it, because a lot of effects are simply too good to pop up and make their mark during the crucial mid-game. For example, readying effects– you generally see these on characters at 2 and under (who can’t use the readying for much of a combat benefit), or at 5 or higher (because at that point you’ve “waited out” the rush decks and earned your end-game smashes). You see very few 3- and 4-cost readying characters, because then they would make a turn 4 board wipe WAY too easy, which would guarantee a victory far too often.

Pumps use the same kind of scale. They tend to be small one-shots in the early game, and then either get larger, or more reusable, as the game wears on. The reason being, once again, that you don’t want really strong pump to be too accessible on the crucial swing turns. If Samson’s effect was a “standard” substitute trigger– “when Samson enters play, target character you control gets +3ATK this turn”– it would be far too good for a 1-drop (especially one with Substitute), so he’d likely be a 3, 4, or 5. But the way these are set up creates a really interesting inherent balance– there’s only so much damage a Substitute 1-drop can do with 3ATK. It’s useful, but since it’s restricted to such a small wielder, it’s prevented from being abused.

Continuing this concept at the 2-drop slot is the Green Ghost, who hides his replacement. “Hide anyone” is another effect that is generally avoided on low drops, but which is substantially less abusable when the recipient needs to be a 2-drop with Substitute to get the effect. These characters tend to be support-based anyway, so they’re the kind of characters you generally want to keep around for a few turns.

(I can’t think of anything else to say about Green Ghost, but I need to fill in more text so the next image lines up, so… um… did you know that the Green Ghost derives his powers from a magical medallion? And it’s not enough to wear it– his powers activate when he swallows the mystic charm. To turn his powers of intangibility, flight, and who-knows-what-else off, he has to hork it back up, which leaves his mouth and chest covered in bright green vomit.

Robert Kirkman freaking rocks.)

The 3-drop keeps the theme going by giving his successor a one-drop-level stat boost for a turn, and letting them hunt evil in the shadows.

More importantly, he gives me a chance to talk about the other half of what these “Original Guardians” do for you. While you’re certainly free to recruit them and then immediately pop them out for bonuses on a Substituter, you’ll find that you often get more benefit from waiting a turn before you do that. Many of the Founders have a one-turn effect designed to tempt you into letting them fight it out for one turn; Darkwing, for example, lets you spend turn 3 murdering your opponent’s lowbies, ensuring a clear field when he leaves play. This will often be a wise choice, because many of your Substituters’ effects will be more useful on a turn higher than their own drop level, so they might benefit from Darkwing’s boost or War Woman’s counters at a later juncture.

Jumping ahead to 6 (you’ve seen 4, and 5’s kinda boring. ), we’ve got the lots-of-fun Red Rush. His power brings us back to the argument for Black Samson on 1– there’s only so much damage a Substitute 6-drop can do by readying. Substitute characters tend to be fairly bland (since they’re so easy to splash and toolbox), so letting one ready isn’t a huge deal.

Rush’s first power also serves as a nice segue to our next category of cards. The theme I’m pushing for is that you recruit an Original guardian on its turn drop, use it for a turn, and then sub it out the next turn. I’m asking the player to take a leap of faith– don’t just sub Rush out right away, hang onto him for a turn first, use his own (quite awesome) power, and then sub him out next turn. The problem with this theory is that you’re really taking a gamble. If you neglect to sub him out, you’re a Finishing Move away from turning that 6-drop Sub into a dead card.

With that in mind, I designed the Originals’ cards to be fairly good at staying alive, at least for one turn. Three of the eight can be concealed; four have above-average DEF values; most have Flight, letting them pick “easy” targets that don’t risk stun-backs; and Rush, specifically, can’t be stunned on the attack. The cards are all designed for above-average survivability.

That said, since the whole point of this team is a focus on the body that’s leaving, and not the body that’s coming in, I figured it was appropriate to go into this aspect a little deeper. I’ve got effects that key off being substituted over, and cards that are relatively easy to keep alive for one turn. What else can I do that puts the focus on the dearly departing?

The Second Theme… OF DOOM!

The most frustrating thing for me when I play my Titans substitute deck is when I have two Substitute 3-drops in my hand ready to come out next turn, but I lose all my 3-drop “shells” to this turn’s combat. It’s… frustrating.

Cecil basically acts as a temporary recovery effect. He won’t get you the character you lost (since they come back blank and immediately die again), but instead, he gives you the blank shell to substitute back over. He’s an essential part of playing the Substitute build– possibly even worth undropping for if you miss him.

I really liked that mechanic I gave him– “KO that character at the start of the combat phase”. Continuing the theme of focusing on the bodies that leave, I came up with a few more ways to key off of it.

The Immortal is a Substitute shell that just never goes away. You can’t just throw him into combat with no heed for his life– after all, he’s not going to make it into the next combat phase. But note something different about him compared to the other Founders– he has Substitute. I figured it was appropriate to tie him into both themes, since he was a member of both iterations.

The Immortal has a fun little combo with himself– as long as you have more copies of him, you can just keep popping him into play. Or, you can pop him out for one of the other 1-drops the Guardians have access to. Whatever suits your fancy.

Martian Man is the third interesting way I thought of to use this little mechanic. Essentially, he lets you swap him out for ANY Substitute you want. He can get you Card Draw Barbie, he can get you Hellcat, he can get you Ravager… or he can just get you Invincible. And he stops you from simply getting lowbies to swarm out with, because if you recruit what you fetched, you’re going to lose him at combat.

He actually used to have a separate power in addition to that one, which allowed him to “sub back in” from the RFG zone over any 3-drop at the start of recovery, essentially letting you re-toolbox him every turn. The power was cut mostly for space, but it also just seemed a little too abusive. I’m not sure exactly HOW it was abusive… it just felt that way. Or something.

Legion of Substitute Heroes

Hmm. It’s 10:30 on Thursday and I want to finish this thing before I go to bed, so I’ll only look briefly at the Substituters on the team. To be honest, they’re not that interesting, so it’s no big loss to gloss over them.

I only did one really “new” thing with the Subs on the team: I invented a new subcategory of Substitute. Substitute – Only is exactly what it sounds like– you can’t recruit the character, they can only enter play by Substitution. Another way to look at it is that those characters have an additional cost to recruit– discarding a card with the same cost as them.

The application of the keyword is pretty straightforward. Since they have a more stringent requirement to enter play, they get to be a little more powerful than similar cards. Monster Girl, for example, is almost exactly like Beast Boy – Party Animal, except she starts out two points bigger and slowly shrinks. You’ll need to sub her in repeatedly over herself if you want to keep her beefy.

I didn’t put a ton of “Substitute Only” guys on the team, because powerful subs + powerful sub-outs might end up with too much aggregate power. I just tossed in a few to keep the team interesting– and there’s always a regular Sub at the same drop if you don’t want to risk it. The alternative to Monster Girl is the first Invincible on the curve.

He was a card I liked a lot from the build I did with the “bonuses against certain costs” theme I mentioned at the beginning. Invincible is the Global Defense Agency’s trump card, the guy they call in to handle the toughest threats nobody else can handle. And he always manages to handle them (since he’s always getting closer and closer to being as strong as his dad), except when the plot demands otherwise. Soooooo… I figured it would be fun to make him the “go-to guy” for handling your opponent’s biggest guys.

Even beyond the obvious standalone benefit of that power, he also ties in quite nicely with the Original Guardians above. If you recruit Darkwing on 3, and then wait to sub Invincible until 4, Mark will be big enough (thanks to Darkwing’s leaving-play buff) to handle an average 4-drop with no additional pump, without taking a stun yourself. It’s a solid recipe for clearing your opponent’s board and creating a solid foundation for the rest of the game.

I’m tempted to end it here (so very tired…), but I’ll drop you one more card before I close this up. This card is two important things. First of all, it’s the Guardians’ exit strategy.

Second, he’s an incredibly unhelpful preview of next week’s cards.

Heh. I’m a jerk.

-Spud

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

This week, we’re going to cover some dry, boring theory.

Yaaaaaaay!

So, yeah. Our topic today is the delicate art of balancing effects. It’s not glamorous or tremendously exciting, but it’s something every card designer needs to know.

Now, of course, balance isn’t really a design job, it’s development. Designers come up with the concepts, and developers take those concepts and balance them. It’s not a huge deal if Design sends Development a busted card, because the oversight will likely be caught and sent back for tweaking. That said, if all balancing is left up to the development team, the set will take ten times longer to make. You can never be 100% sure at design-time whether an effect you make will be balanced, but you can usually be 70-80% sure. I mean, I don’t think anybody would have much difficulty deciding if a 1-drop with “Activate -> KO target character” is balanced or not. A large amount of balancing can be done right up front, and it’s only the final tweaks that really need to happen in the development stage.

There are a lot of factors to keep in mind when balancing an effect. I’ve broken them up into six main elements: Precedent, Cost, Restriction, Timing, Parity, and Context.

Precedent

The single most important balance element is precedent. Basically, Precedent assumes that whatever the developers have done in the past, regardless of your own opinions of it, should be considered “balanced”. Some pieces of it– Fartifacts, EomE, Beatdown– are better than the average, and some– Dr. Tzin-Tzin, Unus– are below. But taken as a whole, the historical body of card content is to be considered the average.

So, how do you use that? Well, it basically means that when you sit down to balance a card, the first thing you should do is to look at what’s gone before. For an easy example, let’s look at one of the most common card type in the game– +ATK to an attacker. Looking over the history of the game, you can see some common patterns:

• +3ATK is the “average”. In addition, a +3 pump can have an additional small effect, like adding Flight or moving the character.
• +2ATK is the most common pump. These pumps are usually stamped to a team, and most often serve to give Sealed decks a smaller taste of an effect that is generally going to show up on rares in constructed play. These effects tend to be more substantial and game-state-changing than the effects on a +3 pump.
• +4 pumps aren’t common. Where they do show up, they generally have either no additional effect, or an additional cost.

This kind of research is tremendously helpful when doing a first pass on a card– since we assume that all precedent is balanced, then to create a new balanced card, it should fit somewhere within the scale here. If you want to make a pump of a certain size, you can see what kind of additional effect you can get away with. If you have an extra effect in mind, you can see what size of pump would be appropriate for it.

And of course, this applies to every other kind of effect. If you want to make an exhaustion effect, a quick Precedent scan will let you know how big of a character to let the player exhaust, what kind of extra cost should be paid for it, and when to let it happen.

Of course, Precedent alone doesn’t tell you everything. If I want to make a +3 pump, but I want it to have a larger effect than that class of pump would usually be allowed, then I need to start adding detriments to it– some sort of downside to counterbalance the advantages I’m giving it.

For our first practical example today, let’s make a Green Lantern character. The GLs as a whole have many common effects, from reinforcement to pump, but today I’m going to pick one of them at random– Recovery. I’m also going to arbitrarily decide that this effect is on a character; so, the most generic starting phrasing of this becomes:

• Free -> Recover target character.

Alrighty, there’s a good start. But, it definitely needs some work. Precedent tells us that this effect, especially in the reusable form of a character’s payment power, should not be this open-ended and easy to use. Most character recovery effects are usable only during the recovery phase (requiring you to keep the recoverer alive through combat), or else they come with a hefty cost of some sort.

Let’s look at the latter first.

Cost

Cost is the most common and obvious downside that can be given to any effect. “Activate -> Stun target character” is really powerful, but “Activate, discard thirty cards -> Stun target character” is… less so.

The idea when setting up any cost is to see what the player is gaining, and then determine a fair compensation for that gain. For our first example, we’re getting a recovery effect. If we wanted to go with the easiest, most obvious equal transfer of cost for effect, we’d have:

• Stun a character you control -> Recover target character.

It’s simple, and it’s… mostly balanced. While you can use this effect to maintain a better quality of non-stunned characters, you’re still stuck with the same quantity. Now, that said, this is a fairly boring implementation of this effect. One of the most exciting things about VS is that most effects aren’t strictly symmetrical– forcing a discard doesn’t simply cost you your own discard, and forcing an exhaustion doesn’t simply cost you an exhaustion. VS has a truly remarkable system to determine egality– it’s almost like having a currency exchange of common costs. For example, the following things have been shown to be roughly equivalent; ie, if a card is balanced with one of these effects, it’s probably balanced with any of them.

• 1 exhausted character
• 1 discarded card
• 5 endurance paid
• 1/2 a character KO’d (ie, you’d expect roughly TWICE the effect for this)
• 2 locations replaced
• etc
  

This is where the real heart of cost-balancing comes in– balancing “Discard a card –> Target opponent discards a card” is easy, but figuring out if “exhaust a character -> Target opponent discards a card” is balanced is trickier. This is where game knowledge and finesse come in– you need to think about what that cost means within the context of a game. A discard cost isn’t a huge burden, since you can plan around it; but a forced discard is a big deal, because if you time it right, you can completely derail your opponent. So even though an exhausted character is roughly equal to a discard when they’re both costs, it doesn’t balance out quite the same way when they’re on different sides of the arrow.

Let’s go back to our GL character above. We determined that “Free -> Recover target character” was way too open, and that “Stun a character -> Recover target character” is a bit too bland. As my third arbitrary decision about this character, I’m going to make him a 4-drop. Alright, that gives us some useful information, because it lets us do a pretty focused Precedent check to see what kind of costs should be associated with our effect.

One drop below, we have 3-drops Xorn and Dr Sivana, who costs you absolutely nothing, but require the recoverer to survive combat, which gets to be fairly difficult as the turns wind on. One cost above our guy, we have Blink and Illyana Rasputin– one still recovers at Recovery, but doesn’t need to survive herself. The other doesn’t have any permanent cost, but needs to sit out the combat phase. Right at 4, we have Alan Scott, who activates to recover an on-team guy, and Chthon, who activates to recover, but only if he’s hidden.

So… 3-drops only work during Recovery. 4-drops recover anytime, but need to exhaust for it. 5-drops recover with almost no cost. So… what do we do for our recovery guy? It would seem the baseline is:

• Activate -> Recover target character.

But that’s too open. It would work on a 5, but at 4 it’s a bit too easy. Do we want to add an extra cost?

• Activate, discard a card -> Recover target character.
• Activate, pay X endurance -> Recover target character with a cost of X.
• Activate, exhaust another character you control -> Recover target character.

Hmm. I don’t know about you, but this isn’t really working for me.

Balancing with costs alone is tricky. It leads to a need to balance an effect for both single-use (good enough if the character dies right away) and long-term use (weak enough not to massacre the opponent over four turns of use). It also gets tricky because the higher up you get on the “effect size” scale, the less relevant pure costing is– costs can often be completely circumvented (KOing freebies, playing card draw to power discards, exhausting hidden 1-drops, etc), so if all you’re working with is cost, you’re in danger of having an effect that’s far too easy for a dedicated combo deck to abuse.

This is why costs are very frequently combined with a second kind of detriment:

Restriction

Restrictions come in all sorts of flavors:

• Use/play only during the [X] phase.
• Use only once per turn.
• Target character with a cost of [X].
• Target character with the [X] team affiliation.
• Use/play only if [X].
• While you control [X]
• If you have more [X]
• etc

A nice metaphor for thinking about cost and restriction is this: costs only work in full dollars. You can make a $2 cost, or a $3 cost. But they’re strictly integers– you can never perfectly balance a $2.50 effect purely with costs. It’ll either be too cheap, or too expensive. In that case, you use restrictions– not to change the cost, which is still going to be $2 or $3. But with the addition or removal of the right restrictions, you can adjust that $2.50 effect until it’s bad enough to cost $2, or good enough to cost $3.

That’s basically what restrictions do– they add a limit to when, whether, how, or how often you can use an effect. An effect that can be fired once per turn is dramatically different to one that can be fired repeatedly. A 4-drop character with “Activate -> Stun target 3-drop” is dramatically different than one with “Activate -> Stun target 5-drop”.

Restrictions and costs can be used interchangeably– if a cost feels too hefty, you can move the balancing burden into heavier restrictions instead. And since, as mentioned above, restrictions give you much finer control over balance than costs, making that exchange might ultimately grant a more correct balance.

I think we finally have enough tools to make our 4-drop Green Lantern. Costs alone didn’t quite “do it” for me, mostly because it’s difficult to do anything really interesting with them. But with a combination of cost and restriction, you get a lot more room to maneuver. Keeping our Precedent check in mind, here are some random ideas that I think would work:

• Activate -> Recover target stunned Green Lantern character.
• Activate -> Target opponent chooses a stunned character you control. Recover that character.
• Activate -> Whenever target non-defending character becomes stunned this turn, recover it.

And we don’t even need to stick with Activate. Precedent tells us that it’s the standard, but if we want to lighten the load a bit and not force an exhaustion on the recoverer, we can add a heftier restriction on the back end to balance it out.

• Pay X endurance -> Recover target stunned character with a cost of X. Use only during the recovery phase.
• Pay 1 endurance -> Recover target stunned character if it was the target of an opposing effect this turn.
• Discard a card -> Recover target stunned character at the start of the recovery phase this turn. Use only during the build phase and only once per turn.

Ooh… I like that last one. As with anything, it would need to be tested to ensure that it’s not too abusable, but that seems fairly good to me. Endurance payments aren’t very “Green Lantern-y”, but the team does have a few card draw options, which translate well into allowing discard costs.

I think we’ve got a winner.

It’s a close analogue to Illyana, our 5-drop exemplar, but it has a narrower effect, and forces you to call your shot in advance. That second part is a major thing– beyond the simple “cost/benefit” balance we’ve been using up until now, it adds another axis to the measurement: Time.

Timing

Fan card designers don’t think about timing as much as they should. Looking at most custom sets, you’ll likely see a heavy weighting toward payment effects– cards that can be used, if not at the owner’s leisure, than at least at his discretion. You know all those power effects that end up on real cards that have you cursing, “GRRR! Why is this triggered?! Why can’t I fire it NOW?!”? Those powers that would be perfect for the combo you’re building, if only they weren’t build phase-restricted?

I’ll tell you something about those cards– they were designed by someone who knows what the hell he’s doing. Fan designers don’t put painful timing restrictions on cards, because we hate playing those effects. You can tell a pro from a hack, because pros have the stomach– and the balls– to make cards that make you cringe… and yet make you want to play them anyway.

Putting effects on a trigger is an extraordinarily powerful restriction. It may not always seem that way; a character who triggers at the start of combat is always going to get his effect, more or less. But think about it: wouldn’t you prefer to hold 7-drop Ronan’s replacement effect until… “whenever”? So that the opponent can’t just wait until it’s safe to start flipping things? Or, look at 6-drop Holocaust– I’ve recruited him almost a dozen times in my Unaffiliated deck over the past few months, and I’ve gotten his game-breaking power to fire… once.

Putting effects on fixed triggers takes control away from the player. The effect is immediately a little worse– ie, a little less broken– because the timing of it is fixed. The effect might fire too early or late to be helpful, or a clever opponent may be able to ensure it never fires at all.

Let’s use timing to build our next card. Since timing is a fairly heavy restriction if set up correctly, let’s go for a much stronger effect this time: returning a plot twist to hand.

(And the crowd went: “Ooooooohhhhhhhhhhhhh…..”)

As usual, let’s drop the most open phrasing of the effect to get started:

• Free -> Return target plot twist card in a KO’d pile to its owner’s hand.

Now, let’s run a Precedent check to see how this has been handled before at various points on the curve. Rama Tut from MOR bounced a plot twist for 2 resource points, but you needed to control Doom to make it happen. Since the only way to do that on 2 was by also drawing a location, and the additional reality that there’s very little of worth to bounce on turn 2, it’s pretty restrictive. Also on 2 is Namorita, who is almost strictly better than poor Rama– invest 2 points, and you can return something whenever the heck you want. On turn 3, you’ve got Floronic Man– no restrictions, but 3 full resource points invested. He seems a little worse than Namorita, and mostly he is, but it’s slightly counterbalanced by the fact that he only goes the KO’d pile, not the Removed From Play zone, so you can theoretically reuse him later on. At 5, we have Garth/Manta, who get you a returned card once per turn for a trivial endurance payment. At 7, we have Aquaman, who can get you up to three for no cost, simply for having characters next to him.

What we can see from this Precedent check is that returning a plot twist, while a fairly rare effect, isn’t terribly expensive when it does show up. At 2 and 3 it costs you resources, but how often does your 2-drop survive into a critical turn anyway? By 5, it’s become a throwaway effect. By this analysis, I’d say our sweet spot for card return is turn 4, but we just did a 4-drop, so let’s try a 3 instead.

You can see an obvious balance of costs vs. timing in the low drops. Floronic Man and Namorita outright cost you resources to use their effects, but in exchange, you can decide when the effect goes off. This can be tremendously powerful– the longer an opponent can keep them alive, the better the odds that they return something game-breaking instead of a random 1-cost pump. Rama shows us the impact of timing– if we want to keep our resource investment, then we need to take the returned card right away on 2, or we need to underdrop later. Either way, the effect determines your tempo for you.

So if a 2-cost character with a timing impact only gets to fire once… let’s see if we can balance a 3-coster that triggers repeatedly.

• At the start of the combat phase, return target plot twist card in a KO’d pile to its owner’s hand.

Even though the timing is rigid, it seems too good– it’s a once-per-turn like the 5-drops, without the cost. Granted, the timing might screw you up (since you can’t use it to double-Beatdown an attack), but it still seems a bit too open. So, where else can we move the trigger?

• At the start of the recovery phase, return target plot twist card in a KO’d pile to its owner’s hand.

That’s a little better– it makes sure you need to invest something in the power, since you’ll need to protect the character to keep it around. I could probably live with that effect, but I’m going to keep looking– the first card we made is pretty heavily tied into the GLs’ stall mechanism, and I’d like to see if I can make this work for their other theme, the fast-paced rush.

• Whenever this character enters combat, return target plot twist card in a KO’d pile to its owner’s hand.

Ooh! I think we’re onto something here. By using a combat trigger, we’re obliquely borrowing another piece of Precedent: Emil Hamilton <> Ruin. Ruin has a devastatingly powerful effect, but it’s counterbalanced by two related items. First of all, it triggers on combat, so unlike the Ahmed Samsarras and Umars of the world, you can’t just let the owner of the power sit back in (relative) safety and fire the effect every turn. In order to function, Ruin needs to be exposed to danger. I think we’re getting really close to an effect I’d be happy with, but there are still some balance issues. First, it’s not quite a fair exchange– you’re almost guaranteed to get at least one use out of it, so a free return may not be entirely fair.

The second issue brings us to our fifth element of balance theory. Because, while the effect is good, and it’s balanceable, I’m worried that it’s too much power in the wrong hands.

Let’s fix that.

Context

Context is an important balance tool that asks questions, not about the effect you’re making, but about who you’re giving it to. The simplest example of this is to look at the “Activate” cost. We’re so used to seeing that keyword that we sometimes forget how complex it is. “Activate”, when given to a 1-drop, might as well read “Free ->”. Exhausting a 1-drop is not a huge deal. But the exact same keyword, printed on a 7-drop, had damn well better be nearly or more useful than simply swinging with that 7-drop’s 16ATK. When you Activate someone, that is, most of the time, the only thing that character will be doing for you that turn. They can’t reinforce, they can’t attack, and they can’t exhaust for other effects. This isn’t a huge deal with a 1-drop, but losing the opportunity to swing with your 5-drop on your initiative because you wanted their activated power… hurts.

The second reason that Ruin’s power is reined in, is because it’s situated on a 3-drop. Whenever Ruin uses his power, he’s going to be stunning. And great as he is, I’m rarely going to keep him over my 4-drop. So what this means is that Ruin is likely only going to fire twice, and then he’s going away. There are several implications of this. First of all, he’s small enough not to be worth keeping over the next drop. 3-drops average 3/3 lower than 4s, so keeping a 3 over a 4 is rarely helpful. You need a full-sized pump to close that gap in the next turn’s combat. Whereas, if Ruin was a 4-drop, he might actually be worth keeping. 4-drops only have an average drop of 2/2 under 5-drops, which is a much more reasonable gap. That’s a gap you can close with even a wussy +2 pump, or even just some smart powering-up. On a 4-drop, the bonuses of Ruin’s power would make him worth keeping over a 5. On a 3-drop body, he’s not.

But on the flipside, Ruin is still large enough. He’s large enough not to be able to stun while attacking down, which can frustrate you when you need his search. He’s large enough to constitute a large investment of points, especially considering that we know he won’t be around very long. The context of Ruin’s power is flawlessly balanced; one drop higher or lower, and he’d become an Ahmed-level threat. But where he is now, he’s the perfect balance of big and small to give you a proper bang for your buck without making him completely abusable.

Context can rear its head in ways other than cost. 5-drop Mr. Sinister from MVL has a bit of context balance that I guarantee you’ve cringed over if you’ve ever played him: he doesn’t have Range. His power is crippling to certain decks, but with his purely average stats, it’s not terribly difficult to shut down. Of course, the standard response to this is to hide him, to shove him in the back row behind your next-biggest guy, and hope that his bodyguard will keep him safe. While this is an excellent move, it presents a big problem– you’ve just paid 5 resource points for what amounts to an ongoing plot twist. You don’t get any offensive combat power for your 5 points, because Sinister can’t attack from the back. So if you choose to hide him off-init, you’re giving your opponent the option of simply ignoring him, since he’s not a threat that they need to take out.

Context is the issue that caught my eye above with our second card design. I like the “enters combat” trigger, but on a 3-drop, it seems a little too good. While Ruin’s power seems to be almost the same thing, it’s subtly different– first of all, our power doesn’t require us to stun. As we just mentioned, most 3-drops are big enough not to stun when fighting 1s and 2s, so if you’re fighting a swarm player, a 3-drop could become an endless supply of Savage Beatdowns. Also, while Ruin’s power makes saving him from damage with large DEF pumps a pretty stupid maneuver, ours is more open, and actually becomes a pretty viable object of your defensive attentions. And, let’s face it– it is a LOT easier to keep a 3-drop alive than a 2-drop or even a 1. What that then means is that it’s not very hard to keep this dude alive until your important swing turns– 5 and 6– where he can start recycling some very powerful plot twists to guarantee a win.

So, what does all of that mean for us? It means that he’s probably a bit too big. By the same token, I don’t want to drop him down to a 1-drop, because that makes him trivial to replace on a later turn if you’re forced to lose him. So, I think his sweet spot is 2. With the cost adjustment, and an additional cost to the return (since, you’ll recall, I decided that a guaranteed freebie return was just a little too good), I think he’ll be just about right. A discard would be fair– a card for a card– but I’m not going to use that, because I’ve got one last balance method that I haven’t brought up yet.

No, instead of a discard, his final power will go in a slightly different direction.

Parity

“Oh, Spud. You sly devil, you.”

Parity brings us full circle to the discussion that opened the article: equal exchange. The same way that 1 discard = 1 draw (more or less) for you, 1 draw for you will more or less be equal to one draw for the opponent. The theory goes: anything is fair as long as it affects everyone equally. I can draw a card as long as you can; I’ll KO a character if you do it too.

But be warned: assuming that Parity equals balance is a very dangerous trap to fall in, because equal treatment is NOT always fair. In fact, it almost never is. Criminal Mastermind lets both players draw cards, but the opponent doesn’t WANT any more. Madelyne Pryor KOs “all stunned characters”, but this “balanced treatment” inherently favors the player with the fewest stunned characters– which, lo and behold, is very easy to do with Underworld’s all-concealed curve. Dirty Tricks makes combat harder for all players, but while this would hurt a rush player, a stall player relishes it. And while Shriek and Carnage give +1 or +2 ATK evenly to the entire board, that bonus inherently favors the attacker, and the player playing a swarm build.

Parity is only an illusion of balance. It will always favor the player who knows it’s coming, and the player who determines when it happens. You can’t simply slap “each player” on a card and assume it’s fine. In order for Parity to truly create balance on its own, it needs to be presented in a form where both players can manipulate it.

Of course, with all of that said, sometimes you want false balance. Madelyne Pryor isn’t truly fair, but if she was, she wouldn’t be worth playing. This is the final kick in the pants to this entire treatise on balance: PEOPLE DON’T BOTHER PLAYING WITH COMPLETELY BALANCED EFFECTS. Oh, sure– they’ll play a balanced 4-drop if that team has no alternative. But they’re only playing that team because the 3 and 5 are the craziness. In the end, VS is a contest of balanced imbalance– my guy is imbalanced in Way X, your guy is imbalanced in Way Y. Over the long term, X and Y create an equal amount of advantage, so even though our guys are not balanced on a micro level (“This guy’s too good for a 3″), every deck is going to have something that’s just as good (“That’s okay, my 4’s just as broken.”), so it’s mostly a wash.

Don’t you love it when I invalidate an entire article with a single sentence?

Way back at the top, I pointed out that “Discard a card -> Target opponent discards a card.” is a boring effect. I said that pure equal exchange– just like pure parity– may end up balanced, but it’s still likely to be pretty boring.

But, that doesn’t have to be true.

Ultimately, the point of all of this “balance” crap is to make the game fun. Broken cards cause a degenerative game, which quickly ceases to be entertaining. Balance ensures that nobody is guaranteed to lose from the moment they sit down, which means that you’re rarely consigned to a depressing thrashing.

However, all the rules and guidelines and principles I can spit out will never trump your raw, gut feeling that This card freaking rocks. It may break every rule of common sense and fly in the face of precedent, but that doesn’t automatically mean it’s a bad card. “Pure exchange” ends up being boring because most costs in this game are paid using the same half-dozen currencies– if you fall into the pure exchange trap without putting in the extra work to do it interestingly, your cards probably will suck. The idea I value most highly when designing cards– and I think UDE has a very similar rule– is that every card should be at least a little bit interesting. It doesn’t have to rock your socks off, but it should be different enough to at least require one synapse to fire for it to be used. Enforcing a “soft” self-restriction against pure exchange and other lazy traps really helps to ensure this core value is upheld, because it means you’ll never be allowed to get quite lazy enough to make that “Discard -> opponent discards” character.

But that’s only my rule. I am very lazy, so I need to set up these blocks and guards for myself. I need to identify the areas where my designs are weak, and absolutely forbid myself from repeating my sins. But don’t let my rules completely restrain you, by any means. Because as with all things, no rule of card design is absolute. Equal exchange can be done, and done well. Coup d’Etat proved that– there’s always room for a “tired old mechanic” to be combined with something unprecedented. If you find that the Precedent rule adequately covers every card you make, you aren’t making cool enough cards.

I’ll finish today by quoting one of the finest human beings who never lived.

“Go ahead– Take Chances! Make Mistakes!”

“AND GET MESSY!“

Peace out.

-Spud

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

I don’t have a full article today, because I spent most of last week and the weekend working on something else for the blog. Instead of delving into a bunch of theory, this week I’m just going to share with you some random (well, not all that random…) cards I tossed together last week for fun. Considering my word-tastic episode from last week was universally reviled (or so I must assume, given the lack of comments), I don’t imagine you folks’ll mind a shorter installment this week.

Without further ado, let’s take get started!

(Sigh… that’s supposed to be Shadowcat. Yeah, I know. I hate it too. I was in a hurry.)

This was, without a doubt, the most difficult card I’ve ever made. Templating that power was an absolute nightmare. I went through almost a dozen different wordings, but they were all either too long to fit in the text box, or else they didn’t quite do what I wanted them to do. Here’s probably the worst of the lot, to give you an idea:

• Whenever equipped character becomes stunned by a character, move him to that character’s controller’s front row, and transfer Shadow King to that character. Then, move the new equipped character to your front row.

Ugh. If you ever catch me writing “the new equipped character” on another card, you have my permission to bludgeon me with audiovisual equipment.

Another difficult thing about this was the cost– I still have no idea how many resources this should cost. I’ve fluctuated from 1 to 4 throughout the development cycle (and by “development cycle” I of course mean “my period of wishy-washiness”), and I’m still not sure where the sweet spot is. On the one hand, you permanently get one of your opponent’s guys. But on the other hand, it’s not optional, and he can always play around it and hand you a 1-drop. So, yeah. I’m not sure where to go. I think 2 or 3 probably works, but this is one I’d really need to test to find out for sure.

Next!

I was inspired by our temporary sister site’s article on The Enforcers– three random goons who somehow manage to be a consistent, recurring threat to the superhuman community. These seem like easy inclusions in the Crime Lords roster, and since I’m going to need to make a contribution to Crime Lords Month at some point, it might as well be now.

Starting high and working down, first we get Ox, the group’s beater. 3 is about the highest I can justify making a “standard human”– sorry, Panther fans. Ox ties nicely into the Crime Lords’ “tricky reinforcement” theme by removing your opponent’s option to “cheat” a small attacker into your 3 for a standard crossover attack. If they try any of those shenanigans, you just reinforce Ox and stun them outright. In the end, your opponent’s only option on 3 is to make an “honest” attack of his own 3 into yours, which should generally work out much better for you.

Ox’ power isn’t really an off-init stun; generally speaking, you’ll almost never use it against a smart opponent. It stands there as a threat– it basically makes his text, “While Ox is ready, he can’t be attacked by characters with a cost of 2 or less.” He forces your opponent’s hand, which is one of the strongest tools in the Crime Lords’ arsenal. Every time you make a decision for your opponent, you’ve won at least a small victory.

Next up on the Enforcers roster is their leader, Montana. According to the BraveAndTheBlog article, Montana’s “thing” is using a lariat to capture his opponents, pinning them down to be beaten on by his associates. After reading that, it took me about six seconds to come up with the power I gave him– he drags people close to them, and then encourages his posse to beat them up. With Ox (and Dan, who you’ll see momentarily) wanting to defend on odds, I figured it was a good idea to put an offensive power on the 2-drop, to make your initiative choice a bit easier. That said, the ability can be used on 3 just as easily as on 2, so it doesn’t hurt that badly if you get screwed on the die roll.

Finally, we get to my favourite of the three– not only because he has the greatest name of any character in the history of comics, but also because I absolutely love the effect I came up with for him.

Fancy Dan, come on down.

I’ll say one thing before I move on: I’m not 100% sure this power works. I’m… I dunno… 95% sure. But there’s never been a trigger off of “becoming reinforced”, so I had to take a guess at how to word it. I also wasn’t sure if the game considers a “manual” reinforcement to originate from a character, or if it originates from the game itself, so that’s another possible way this falls apart.

But let’s ignore that and start thinking about abusing this. I’m not sure if I actually succeeded, but my intention was that you can reinforce him repeatedly during the same attack to pump him through the roof. Put him between your 3 and 4 and reinforce with both, and suddenly you’re defending with a 9/8 1-drop. Even if the attack goes through, your opponent’s dedicated an awful lot of attack power to someone who wasn’t much of a threat if left alone.

Huge pumps on defenders are generally a pretty rare commodity, but in this case it’s not really that bad. First of all, your opponent can see it coming. They’ll know before they ever declare an attack exactly how big you can make him, and they’re free to try to take down his potential reinforcers first to eliminate his source of pumps. Also, you can’t just apply this pump to any character you want (say, a crucial 4- or 5-drop). Instead, all his power is letting you do is to keep your 1-drop around. It’s just powerful enough to be useful to you (worst case, it determines the order of your opponent’s attacks, which is another case of your opponent’s decisions being made for him), without being too abusable and game-stopping.

And Finally, One For Gday

C’mon, I had to.

Like Ox above, Stilt-Man forces your opponent to make honest attacks. Your opponent can’t simply swing up with a pump, because you’ll just bail out and force him to swing again without it. Unless your opponent is packing turn-length pumps, you can force him to team attack with natural stats, or swing in with his 4.

And hey, you can always use him to bail out of your own attacks that don’t quite go according to plan.

Alrighty, that’s all I’ve got for you this week. I’ll be back again next week with a full-size article (though I’ll try to lay off the in-depth technical stuff, since you guys apparently hate that). In the meantime, go check out our thread on VSRealms to see if you won anything in our March Madness prize giveaway!

BUMP OUR THREAD, DAMMIT!

-Spud

First of all: sorry this is so late. The article just kept growing bigger and bigger, ending up a good 50% longer than usual. Plus, I wrecked my clutch yesterday, and had to deal with that instead of finishing this up.

So, yeah. Moving on.

This week, as promised, we’re looking at Keywords. This is going to be a more technical excercise than the last few; the last couple times, I talked about mechanics just so that I could show you some cards. This week, I made some cards just so I could talk about mechanics. This article is one of three I eventually plan on doing that were the original reason I decided to start this column; there were three major issues I saw with the vast majority of fantasy cards and that I really felt other designers could benefit from reading about, and “bad keywording” is the first (though, the least pressing, now that I think about it). I’ll try to limit these “nag rants” to one every couple months to avoid alienating my readership.

First, let’s look at what keywords are in general. Most people assume “keywords” refers only to bold-word mechanics, but that’s not entirely true. Here are a couple definitions to clear it up:

• Mechanic: This is any card action or interaction. Yep: this is basically anything cards do. More colloquially, we tend to use the word “mechanic” to describe things that are repeated across several characters– for example, the “Epic mechanic” from DCR, where a series of 7-drops had very strong triggered powers that only worked if you didn’t play plot twists that turn. Really though, “mechanic” is a very broad term that applies to almost everything the cards do in the game.
• Keyword: A keyword is a word that is granted extra “meaning” within the game– wherever you see that word, it is understood to “stand for” a larger block of text. For example, the word “replace” is a keyword that means “KO a resource, then put the top card of that resource’s owner’s deck in his resource row.” Basically, keywords save space– if the “Epic mechanic” above was going to be continued past the DCR set, the developers might find it useful to keyword it, so that instead of writing: “At the start of the combat phase, if you played no plot twists this turn, [BLAH]. If you do, you cannot play plot twists this turn,” you would simply write: “Epic: At the start of the combat phase, [BLAH].” The players would be expected to learn the mechanic, and understand that that triggered power only fires if no plot twists have been played, and then locks you out of them for the turn. (Note: I know this is a bad example, because the word “Epic” means something else in the game. But screw you, it didn’t exist when the community named this mechanic, and I’m sticking with the first one. :p)
• Bold Keyword: Basically the same as a regular keyword, these are what most people think of when you say “keywords”. Basically, these keywords have meaning as a standalone item. The word “replace” doesn’t really mean anything if you bold it and put it alone in a sentence, because it depends on context to work. On the other hand, things like Concealed, Invulnerability, Loyalty, and Unique can basically act as a self-contained sentence. There really isn’t any formal differentiation between Bold and Non-Bold keywords; it’s mostly a distinction made by the players to make things easier to remember. Actually, there is one thing that sets them apart– when a card contains a bold keyword, the rules let you refer to that card by the keyword. Example: “A cosmic character”. Whereas referring to “a Replace character” would, I think, cause a fair bit of confusion.

So, as I mentioned, the primary purpose of a keyword is to stand in for a larger block of text. By reducing these large blocks to a single word, the designers can use the card space they’ve regained to make the other effects on the card longer. Trust me– the most frustrating problem as a card designer is having a brilliant idea for a card, and not being able to fit it in the text box. For this reason, as far as I’m concerned, the best keyword UDE’s ever made is Crossover. The team-up text used to take up about 40% of a card’s available space, which meant team-ups had to be fairly one-dimensional and simplistic, since you just didn’t have the room to give them complex effects. Once Crossover appeared, Team-Ups suddenly got a lot more interesting.

Now, after reading that, you may be wondering to yourself why the design team doesn’t just keyword everything. Take every bit of text that appears on a dozen or more cards per set, and find a way to keyword it so that text boxes get freed up and we have lots of room for card effects. You could simplify “Use only during the build phase” to “Restrict: Build Phase.” You could simplify “Search your deck for a character, reveal it, and put it in your hand” to simply be “Search to hand: Character”. Really, you could sit there and make a few dozen of these– blocks of text that get repeated over and over and over again, and yes, you’d definitely open up a ton of space. If you went through and keyworded everything that could support it, I figure you’d probably get about 20%-40% more space on every card. That is not a trivial number– I can’t count the number of times I had to simplify a power because I couldn’t fit it all on the card. It’s intensely frustrating.

Unfortunately, going keyword-happy has two major downsides, which are really two sides to the same larger problem. First of all, the cards become an unintelligible mess. Writing powers out in full sentences guarantees, to a point, that people will understand exactly what they say. The player doesn’t need any more information than what’s printed on the card, and they don’t need to sit there scratching their head, wondering if that Insanity bold word means something important that they should know about. Having a certain number of keywords is a good thing, but every new one you introduce is something new that every player in the entire world, for as long as the game exists needs to learn. If you leave a mechanic as plain text, you leave yourself the back-door of simply being able to walk away from it a year later and never feature it again, without making new players wonder why this bold word they’ve never heard of before is in the comprehensive rules. (I’m looking at you, Transferable!)

The other side of it is a bit odd and unintuitive, but it’s still important. Basically, space crunch can be a good thing. If you look at the Legends sets, you’ll see that the bulk of the cards have relatively simple effects. Most characters have only one printed power, and even those are relatively brief. There’s a lot of empty space in Legends text boxes, despite the fact that the new text box, thanks to the larger default font size, actually has less space than before. The developers made a conscious effort to trim the effects down, which is a big part of the reason the sets have turned out to be so popular; there are very few Legends cards you need to pick up and read to understand– most of them have one or two sentences of text, which makes them easier and faster to play with. Contrast that with the last two “old style” sets– MTU and DWF– and you’ll see an abundance of cards with long, complex powers– and not just one per character. The text boxes in those two sets were crammed full of text, which made them comparatively slower and more difficult to play with.

What does this have to do with keywords? Well, basically, I don’t think fan developers could have made Legends. People who design fan cards tend to be rules nuts, and love making complex interactions. That’s what gets most of us inspired, I think– we think of a cool interaction, and then we get frustrated that no “real” cards let you do it, so we fill the void ourselves. It takes a lot of skill and discipline to pare your effects down, so most of us don’t bother. I’m one of the worst offenders– my cards are packed with text.

DUDE. Seriously. What does this have to do with keywords?!

Fan card developers– and even “pro” developers– like fancy effects. Card players prefer simple ones, with a dash of complexity here and there for flavor. Ultimately, card designers serve the players, and if we can’t be trusted to police ourselves and trim our cards down to only what they need, then an abundance of keywords becomes a bad thing. If you free up 20% of a card’s space, that doesn’t mean the cards are going to be 20% empty. We’re just going to fill 20% more space with card text. So not only do the effects become harder to read because of all the codewords and abbreviations, there’s also simply a larger number of effects to understand. It all leads into a pretty messy quagmire where a new player looks at your cards and has an aneurysm trying to figure out what they do.

And then, pretty soon, we’re making L5R cards.

Seriously… don’t ever ever let VS get that bad.

The Rules

So, let’s start looking at this from a designer’s perspective. You’ve got a mechanic that’s repeated on several of your cards, and you’re debating whether you should keyword it. Here are some considerations to help you decide:

1. Proliferation: How often are you going to use the keyword? Is it going to appear on lots of cards on at least one team? Is it broad and open enough to apply outside that team? Is it useful to future designers? Is it something that cards have been doing for ages that you’re only just now formalizing into a keyword? Basically: how much mileage are you going to get out of it?
2. Justification: Is the keyword good for the game? Does it add new gameplay options? Does it offer an opportunity to tie together a large number of cards?
3. Expediency: Does this mechanic need to be keyworded? How much text are you replacing by keywording it?
4. Complexity: Is it a mechanic that should be sprinkled around widely enough to justify keywording in the first place? How hard is it to learn and remember? Does the mechanic slow gameplay? Does it speed it up, by simplifying a normally-complex interaction?
5. Memorability: Do you have a snazzy name for it? Does the name evoke the mechanic? Is it intuitive– does it do exactly what it sounds like?

I’m sure I could come up with more, but four’s probably enough. The basic idea here is that adding a new keyword is a non-trivial issue, and before you decide to do so, you should run it by these items to see if you can justify it. They aren’t hard rules by any means– the idea here is more along the lines of “see if any major red flags go up” than “it must meet all of these rules”. If a red flag goes up in more than one, you should probably look at either changing your planned keyword, or dropping it entirely.

To see how it works, let’s look at some existing keywords.

• Press: Press passes the Justification test easily– it’s entirely new functionality.It passes Expediency and Complexity too, as it’s a ton of text that you’d need to print on each character. The biggest red flag is Proliferation, as it’s intended to be used only by one team; that said, it’s immediately counter-balanced by the reality that if it WASN’T relegated to the Kree, it would be horrifically broken.
• Crossover: It passes all the tests easily. It replaces a lot of text with one sentence; it’s simple and easy to remember; it enables an entire class of cards to become more complex; and it’s a great name. Just perfect on all counts.
• Army: Passes the all the tests except Expediency– you’re not saving much space since “Non-unique” is already a keyword, but even the minimal savings is justified given the sheer breadth of application of the keyword. You only save one sentence per card, but spread over the hundred-plus cards that use it, it’s a huge aggregate savings.

Oh, no. Spud’s gonna rant now. You can skip this part.

Now, there are two more classes of keywords I’ll bring up here, because they stand as an interesting contrast to each other. Reference keywords and Reminder keywords have one thing in common: they don’t do anything. Reference keywords (traits + Willpower) technically do something, but that thing is not very important. Ask yourself: would the Willpower theme have been that different if it was based on cost instead of Willopower count? Sure, some effects would need to be adjusted, but when they made the decision to tie Willpower down as “about one less than cost”, they made it redundant. Similarly, Mutant traits could’ve simply been a shared affiliation effect for Brotherhood and X-Men. Once again, you’d lose the unifying “mutant theme” across MXM, but I never understood why Mutants needed to be differentiated within this game from supers of any other origin– is a mutant psychic really that different in application from a magic or scientific one? Instead, they could’ve found some more interesting things to give the MXM teams.

On the other end, we have Reminder keywords. These are anything like Leader, Ally, or Vengeance– effects that do nothing on their own, but which instead give you some hints about what the character does without having to read the whole card. If you look across the table at a board full of Ally, you should be prepared for a powerup deck. If you see a guy with Leader, it tells you that you should consider hitting him first. That said, the best thing about these keywords is that they don’t matter. If a new player is confused by a card and says, “Well, what does the “Ally” bit do?”, you can honestly reply, “Nothing.” If you forget what these keywords are, that has absolutely no impact on the game. Players can forget what they mean, and a simple reading of the card will tell them everything they need to know.

This is the problem with Reference keywords– they don’t do little enough that you can completely ignore them, but they don’t do enough to justify keywording. “Willpower” and “mutant” are good concepts for keywords, but why couldn’t they be made to actually do something without being dependant on support cards? If Mutant and Willpower did something on their own, you could STILL refer to them with support cards, but they’d actually be able to do something outside the context of the one set they’re featured in. Why couldn’t a Mutant – Physical character be powered up or reinforced by discarding any other Physical card? Why couldn’t a Willpower 3 character tap to reinforce a character with a cost of 3, regardless of adjacency? Or take 3 less breakthrough? Or something? Anything?! Or “Willpower” could do something entirely non-numerically-related, and all the “Willpower X” costs could be refined to use recruit cost instead.

Ugh, I could go on. And on and on. I’ll just summarize:

• Reference mechanics spectacularly fail the Expediency and Justification tests. They don’t add anything mechanically to the game, other than a buzzword to refer to. Since EVERY keyword can be referred to in the same way, their failure to function beyond that is just lazy design.
• Reminder keywords are slightly less crappy. They’re still not ideal, because there’s still room for confusion (“What does this do again?”) if they don’t learn it, but at least the subsequent explanation is brief– “It does nothing. Go back to your game.” But on the other hand, they can reduce some confusion by at least giving you a high-level idea of what the character does (“Something will happen when that guy stuns.”), so overall it’s a wash. They fail justification, but they pass Complexity because they make the game run more smoothly.
• Have I mentioned that I hate reference keywords? Because I do.
• You know what? Just try not to invent new keywords unless you have to. It’s messy.
• Damn I hate Reference mechanics.

Play Time!

This week’s “example cards” aren’t as elaborate as usual– they’re here to give me something tangible to talk about, and not necessarily because I think these are good cards. So, take the rest of this with a grain of salt.

So, let’s invent some keywords to see how the audit process works. There are basically two ways to start work on a keyword:

1. You have an idea for a mechanical element that you want to base a team on, but it’s really long and doesn’t fit on the cards. You turn the mechanic into a keyword to save space and make room for individual card effects.
2. You have a team you want to make, and you need something to tie them together. You invent a keyword so that they all have something in common, instantly creating some sort of mechanical homogeny.

Both are valid approaches; I tend to lean on the first method most often, because I generally get an idea for a mechanic and then figure out what character I can attach it to. This approach is the easiest when dealing with small bunches of cards the way I do. But if you’re designing whole sets, you’ll often draw a bit of a blank for one team or another, and the “arbitrary keyword assignment” approach can be a decent way to get yourself out of a mental block. For giggles, I’m going to use Method 2 today, since I don’t go that route often

Our subject this week is going to be Iron Man. It’s often brought up that a good theme for Iron Man would be equipment abuse of some sort, so let’s work with that.

With the Legends push, we’ve seen a fair bit of equipment stamped to a single character. Juggernaut’s Helmet, Lasso of Truth, what have you– they all only work on one character, and generally speaking, this is both a good mechanical restriction (limiting the player’s ability to combo a powerful equipment with an abusive character) and a solid piece of flavor (Juggernaut’s helmet just doesn’t go at all with Lois Lane’s outfit). The text “Equip only to [blah]” works pretty well across the board for Legend stamping.

That said, it’s not perfect. Most legends are name-stamps, since they refer to a single being. Others– Flash, for example– apply to a number of different people using the same mantle, and Legend-stamp with Identity. This requires a modification– “Equip only to a character with the identity [blah]“. It’s longer, but it still works.

The problem here is Ghost Rider and his preferred mode of transportation. As I understand it, Ghost Rider is two different demons, intermixed with (two?) different humans. Flavor-wise, it’s not correct to have Zarathos in two bodies on the same board, but neither is it correct to have two different demon-possessed versions of the same guy on the board. Before Legends came out, this debate was all semantics– which character is “Ghost Rider” and which is “Dude <> Ghost Rider”? After Legends, though, it became important– Johnny Blaze rode some “wheels of vengeance” of his own, but can’t be equipped with the card of the same name, even though he’s “<> Ghost Rider”, because he has the wrong name. We’re going to run into a similar problem with my Iron Man stuff (admittedly, only because I choose to run into this problem), because “Iron Man” is just a suit, which can be worn by any number of characters. A good half-dozen people have worn the suit at various points, but none of them would be justified in having the name Iron Man.

The precedent here is set by Dr. Fate. That mantle can be owned by Fate himself, but also by any old schmoe wearing the stupid Fartifacts (grrr, I hate the Fartifacts too… SO MUCH HATE TODAY). By stamping to “name or identity”, you cover both possibilities– use by the real deal, and use by random jerks dressed up as him.

Looks good, but… RUH-ROH! It falls onto the second line! Clearly we can’t allow this– lines of text are at a premium in the new template! So, let’s try to keyword it to save space. Let’s see…

And then on the box-topper for the set, we’d write:

New Keyword: “Equip”

Some equipment in this set has the keyword Equip. This keyword has the following rules:

• A card with Equip: [name] can be equipped only to a character with the name or identity [name].

So, that’s our first keyword. It’s simple, it makes sense, and with the Legend push, it can be used all over the place. But is it a good keyword? Let’s run it through the grinder.

1. Proliferation: It can be used on all new Legend equipment… but would you want that? By opening it up to identities, you’re effectively removing its stamping– since any identity is a mere Living Legacy away. Thus, you wouldn’t want some equipment to be accessible this way– Juggernaut’s Helmet, or the Lasso. And once you start restricting it that way… where would you want it? Is it worth inventing a keyword for Iron Man and Ghost Rider alone?
2. Justification: It doesn’t add any new functionality.
3. Expediency: It eliminates nine words– usually saving a single line. Given that it might not be widespread, is one line of savings on, say, ten cards worth a new keyword?
4. Complexity: The only place I’d knock it here is in the simple fact that some people may not remember that it also works for Identity, since we never saw that before. But, it’s a small issue. Most people don’t remember that Loyalty-Reveal also works with a reveal from your row, but that’s no reason not to let that happen. It’s still a good interaction, and if there’s any confusion, there’s always the Comprehensive Rules. That said, there’s a definite possibility for confusion here– “Equip: Iron Man” looks almost exactly the same as “Equip only to Iron Man”, and there’s a good chance that people will have to repeatedly be reminded of the difference.
5. Memorability: It scores pretty well here– not only is it the same base word the full text is based on, but it’s also just a logical work in general.

So, yeah. It’s a simple, memorable keyword, but the simple fact that it won’t be widely applied makes me think it’s just not worth making thousands of people learn it. With it being so thinly applied, it’s likely that it would fall into disuse, and some players may simply forget its tinier details (like the Identity part). For the few cards where we want to let them equip to names and versions, we’re probably just better off writing it out in full.

Let’s try that again.

So, Equip was a bust. It didn’t replace enough text to justify its thin margin of applicability. Hmm… let’s go back to the well.

As mentioned, equipment does get brought up a lot in relation to Iron Man, but it doesn’t feel to me to be the perfect fit everybody assumes. Yes, Tony is a technology expert, and he’s always upgrading his armor with new gadgets. The problem for me is that even if we give Tony a large suite of equipment, it’s likely people will just say “Screw it” and fill him up with Artifacts (grrr…) and Girders– any of the “standard” good equipment. And that doesn’t fit Tony thematically at all. The Iron Man armor is sleek and high-tech– Tony buries his inventions seamlessly under the skin of his suit, he doesn’t run around toting machine guns and duct taping jetpacks to his back. His equipment is a part of him– it’s not a gun you can knock out of his hand. You can’t really hurt the “equipment” he runs without damaging Tony himself– any blow sufficient to knock out his palm repulsors is likely to crush his hand, too. So, it doesn’t make sense to me to give him an “open” equipment theme– most of the available equipment don’t make sense for him, and it doesn’t make sense for equipment hate to do anything to him. Plus, Tony’s suit isn’t just “steel shell, plus he’s got a laser”. It’s “steel shell, plus underplating, plus chest beam array, plus advanced targetting suite, plus boot jets, plus communication uplink, plus, plus, plus… AND he’s got a friggin laser.”

Hmm. That’s it, then.

New Keyword: Integrated

Some equipment in this set has the version Integrated. Any equipment with this version has the following additional rules:

• Integrated equipment does not count toward the maximum equipment capacity of a character if that character has no non-Integrated equipment equipped. A character equipped only with Integrated equipment is considered to be unequipped for purposes of recruiting further equipment.
  • Example: Iron Man, Captive Cobbler is equipped with “Targeting Sensors, Integrated” and “Uni-Beam, Integrated”. Iron Man can then be equipped with a Jetpack, a non-Integrated equipment. Once the Jetpack has been equipped to him, Iron Man is now considered to be equipped for purposes of further recruitment, so he can no longer be given additional equipment, Integrated or otherwise.
• Integrated equipment cannot be transferred to a different character once it is equipped.
• Integrated equipment cannot be removed from play by opposing effects.

Oooh… now this one I like. It’s flavorful, and quite powerful. In fact, it seems to be too powerful– any character can have a zillion equipment slapped on it! To balance that, we’ll need to add, beyond the hard rules for the keyword, some extra design policy– any equipment with the Integrated keyworded version will need to be relatively underpowered. Another reason to power it down is because of the immunity to hate– we need to make sure that any really powerful pieces, ones that your opponent would actually worry about, are still killable. Since we’re allowing a million equipment to be slapped on the same guy and removing the opponent’s ability to tear parts of it off, we need to ensure that the available effects don’t simply lend themselves to an “I equip Iron Man to the teeth with ATK pump gear, I swing into your lowbie, Blindsided, I win” gameplay style.

So, with that in mind, let’s see if it does better in the gauntlet than the last one.

• Proliferation: Ooh, right away we hit a bit of a snag. How much can we justify spreading this stuff around? From a flavor standpoint, only technology heroes should have this stuff, but there’s no way to stamp that. Which leaves us with name stamping, and how many characters both deserve Legend status and would make sense with Integrated equipment? This is definitely a sticking point– in order to justify this, we’re going to need to either expand the focus of it (giving magic tattoos to Tattooed Man, and claws to Wolverine, for two quick examples), or make sure we exploit the crap out of it on Iron Man. Either way, it doesn’t score well in this test.
• Justification: Well, this one’s a lot less bleak. Integrated adds a new mechanic, and one that puts an interesting twist on equipment. It fits very well for certain characters.
• Expediency: It cuts out a metric assload of text
• Complexity: There’s definitely a lot to remember here. And unlike some past keywords, which had a lot of rules text to explain one basic power, Integrated has three entirely separate “things” it needs to you to remember. There’s definitely some confusion potential there, but ultimately I’m going to lean on the Press precedent– Press is really complicated, both in theory and in application, but since it was the entire focus of a team and not just a randomly-splashed keyword, it popped up often enough in tourneys for everybody to see it work and understand a press chain, so the confusion eventually subsided. This is another iffy category, but it’s not a deal-breaker.
• Memorability: I think this one is fairly intuitive and sensible. At least, it is to me. That said, I’ll grant that it’s not a word you see used every day, so it may not be as intuitive to every player. Or… I dunno. Judge?

Hmm. High points in one major category and two minor ones, and low points (or at least, concerns) in two major ones. So, what’s the judgment? Do we keep this as a keyword? If I was designing this for real, I’d say it at least has enough potential to be sent for testing. If the development team thought it was too powerful, or too unintuitive, or just slowed games down too much, I’d either cut it, or heavily redesign it.

That said, given that I’m not designing it for real, and that I’m coming up on 5,000 words, AND that I’m already a day late with this article, I’m just gonna say “Sure” and run it to print.

Cards!

Note: I wanted these cards in easy-to-scan side-by-side blocks, but Gday’s theme is too narrow, and the cards only fit that way if I shrink them to the size of a postage stamp. So, I’m sorry you have to scroll so much. I’ll see about making him a new theme this weekend.

*cries*

It was going to be so pretty.

These are your “base cards”. You get an early-game Iron Man who can equip himself with whatever equipment he can scavenge. The Integrated equipment here are the “enablers”– these are the ones you’ll try to spam out onto your guy. Get him properly equipped, and he’ll turn into a nice little utility character– untargetable, hidden, as well as smashy AND unstunnable on the attack. Of course, those on their own won’t quite “do it” for you. You’ll probably also want one or both of these ones to take advantage of the rather sizeable deck investment you’ve made:

Uni-Beam rewards you for investing heavily in Integrated equipment. The fact that it can stun on-curve characters is balanced by the fact that you need to go off-curve yourself to play it– you’ll stun your opponent’s 4, but you never had one yourself to begin with. Wrist Laser lets you turn your equipped Iron Man into a pretty serious bruiser. One thing I was conscious of when I made these two was the possibility for a “too good to be true” turn plan of Wrist Lasered Tony on 3 with the initiative for a heavy smash, and then going off-curve on 4 with a Uni-Beam to stun your opponent’s 4 on his init. This is a bit too much utility out of a single character, which is half of the reason the Laser isn’t Integrated– if you want the laser for a turn 3 smash, you’ll lose your “only Integrated” considered-unequipped status, and won’t be able to buy the Uni-Beam next turn. If you want the beam, you’ll need to wait until turn 4 for the laser. It’s the Ahmed justification– being huge and having a solid power is fine, as long as you can’t take advantage of both in the same turn.

Next up we’ve got the 7-drop Iron Man, who becomes an unstunnable juggernaut if you kit him out. His low DEF still allows your opponents to pump through him for break, so that you can’t use him to utterly wall up on 7 without some additional support.

War Machine is your option if you’d rather play a different character early and suit up in the midgame instead. His ability is similar to Punisher – Guns Blazing, but a little stricter due to the greater ease of setting him up. And also due to the fact that Punisher is completely broken.

Finally, we’ve got the I’m-still-not-sure-how-much-to-make-it-cost Hulkbuster Armor. Essentially a super-beefed-up Wrist Laser, the HB armor lets you go the X-Statix route by beefing up last turn’s character instead of recruiting one this turn. Quantity goes down, but quality goes up. Of note: the HB armor isn’t concealed-optional, so if you use a Stealth Field to hide him, the armor falls off.

I know I kinda blitzed through the cards there, but it’s almost 10PM on the day AFTER this was due, and I figured I should just finish up and submit before my loyal fans get all crabby. I know I covered a lot of ground this week, but hopefully it still kinda held together… the point I’d really like people to take away from this is that making new keywords is a non-trivial issues (for us, and for UDE), and you should always approach it conservatively. Don’t make a keyword just because you can; always look for ways to use full text instead, and only resort to keywording if there’s no other choice, or if your keyword is just that brilliant.

Alrighty, I’m done. Next week’s article will be short, as I’ll be spending the weekend working on another project for Lost Hemisphere (which should be ready early next week). As always, I’d love to hear everybody’s comments. Actually, let’s try a structured discussion– if Integrated was a real keyword, what would you do with it? Who would you give it to? Is there some neat interaction other than “count the equips” that I’ve completely missed? Drop a comment and let me know.

-Spud

This isn’t the topic I originally planned to cover this week. My original plan was to write about the whys and wherefores of inventing new keywords, but partway through last week I had a great surge of inspiration on a different topic, and, ADD being what it is, I couldn’t let go of it. So, I’m going to postpone the keywords article until next week, and instead, I’m going to completely gut and rebuild from scratch the central theme of a team that’s always just felt wrong to me.

That team is, of course, the Sentinels.

The Sentinels were VS System’s first army-based team, and with the game state being what it was back then, I suppose they were the best the devs could do. The basic idea of the Sentinels back in MOR was that they acted as a swarm; you used a large number of low-cost Army guys to swarm the board and overwhelm the opponent’s quality with your quantity. The individual Sentinels were relatively puny, with stats that were at best average, and at worst, painfully small. This really, really bothered me. Sentinels are supposed to be huge! They’re supposed to be imposing! ALICIA MASTERS SHOULD NOT BE ABLE TO KILL ONE IN A FIGHT!

Once the Spider-Man set came out, the Sentinels got some new toys– the Mark III gave a board-wide ATK pump (to assist the swarm theme), but also the Mark V– an army character with standard stats for a 4-drop OR a 5, and an ability that made it quite difficult for your opponents to pump over your guys for break. With the latter in hand, Team Realmworx (I think?) came up with the Curve Sentinels build. Instead of the annoying swarm build, it used a curve of large characters to dominate the largely curve-based meta of the time by simply being a tiny bit bigger than all opponents. This was much more in line with how I felt Sentinels should operate, but I still wasn’t happy because it created a whole new thematic problem for me: the deck was far too diverse. It played a human being on 1, a mutant on 2, a named Sentinel on 5, a cyborg on 6, and razzer-frazzing Magneto on 7. MAGNETO! IN A SENTINEL DECK!

*shakes head*

While the playstyle was closer to what I wanted to see, the deck was barely bothering to play any giant robots! It was all named characters and behind-the-scenes manipulators, with hardly a chiseled face to be seen. It just didn’t feel right to me. I couldn’t do anything about it at the time, but hot damn, I’m gonna do something about it now! I’m going to finally do for the Sentinels what they’ve deserved all along– I’m going to make them feel like Sentinels.

So What Do Sentinels Feel Like?

To my mind, there are two main elements to a Sentinel attack. The first, and the one that we’ve never really seen done properly, is that these things are freaking enormous. A Sentinel is, depending on the source, anywhere from 18 to 60 feet tall. It’s strong enough to knock down a building, and much faster than you’d expect something so bulky to be. It’s covered in thick armor plate, and equipped with dozens of weapon systems to cover every possible tactical situation. It’s loaded with its own sensors to keep track of bogeys all around it, and supplemented by a direct connection to orbiting satellites to help track targets who drop out of sight. A Sentinel is just a massive walking weapons platform– death on legs. It finds you, tracks you, and takes you down. It is very important to me that whatever we do for these things, they should be an absolute nightmare in one-on-one combat. As in the comics, a careful application of teamwork and joint attacks can take one down fairly handily, but if you get cornered by one and have no friends to help you, then you are not going to be walking away from this fight.

The second important thing about capturing the thematics of a Sentinel is that they should be entirely devoid of character and personality. Sentinels are by and large not self-aware; they have enough intelligence to handle themselves in a fight, but the “feel” of a Sentinel attack should be cold and faceless– when a Sentinel brings in backup, it summons an exact duplicate of itself. This was another problem with the original character selection for the team– in trying to curve out, the developers gave us different versions of the Sentinels that we’ve seen over the years. So your 2-drop is a 1960s Sentinel, your 3-drop is a 1970s Sentinel, your 4-drop is a 1990s Sentinel, etc. But that’s not how Sentinels work in the comics; once a new version is created, we generally don’t see the old ones anymore. Old technology simply isn’t as effective as the new. The MOR selection was too diverse; our new build will exude uniformity. Once the proper attack starts, you are simply going to be swarmed by the more and more copies of the exact same hulking behemoth.

Now, I am not saying that there is no place for variety in the build. The Sentinels are agents of someone’s will, and they would not act without the go-ahead from a human being at some link in the chain of command. We will be including a few non-robots in the character set, but they will not be doing much of the fighting for you. They are there to supplement the robots, to drive them on, and to make them work better. And there will be multiple different robots; but instead of calling on different versions from throughout history, our robotic diversity will draw from different classes of Sentinel. Because while there would be no reason for anyone to dispatch a shiny new giant robot and a rusting one on the same mission, there would definitely be some justification in sending out, alongside the frontline fighters, some smaller units to perform specialized roles.

Alrighty, that’s enough theory. All of that is the “feel” that I think the Sentinel team has been missing; let’s take a look at how I’d solve the problem.

Colossal Menace

Methodical, precise, unsurprising, and huge.

So, yeah. It’s a 9/9 4-drop; very few 4s can stun it, and very few can dodge it. We’ve only ever seen two 9/9 4-drops before: one, Goldface, required a double-discard of affiliated characters before he’d come out to play. The other, Alan Scott, loses you the game, full stop, if he gets KO’d. Jumping a full point up the curve is a non-trivial thing, and it needs a hefty cost associated with it to prevent abuse.

Or, yaknow. Three costs.

The first cost is that you can’t target it, and that one is largely for flavor reasons. As I said earlier, one of the huge thematic elements I wanted to convey is uniformity. Sentinels should not be delivering flying kicks, or dodging acrobatically. They do not “pour on the juice” at one point more than another; Sentinels are nothing if not consistent. They behave the same way all the time; one Sentinel is going to attack you exactly the same as the next one. Of course, the restriction was necessary mechanically as well; with their stats starting out so huge, opponents are already guaranteed to need some sort of pump to get through them. People often start by declaring a “working” attack, and then hold their pumps in case an opponent tries to use their own pumps to get out of the attack. Since we’re forcing them to use that “reserve” pump up-front just to make the stun possible, it would be a little cruel to let the Sentinel player start out higher and then pump normally. It would just utterly shut down curve combat decks.

The second cost is that our Sentinels can’t cause breakthrough. While a 9/9 isn’t a huge breakthrough threat (no more so than any other 8- or 9-ATK 4-drop), as you’ll see in a moment, you’ll be able to fairly easily get your Sentinels– plural– to much bigger numbers, and with all of them having flight and range, they’re almost begging to be a “break up formation and SMASH SMASH SMASH” team. That wasn’t what I was after; I want my Sentinels to be precise, with their focus on defeating their opponents, full stop, and no consideration given to making it hurt. Our robots are all about the job. Don’t worry, though– the damage they lose from Breakthrough will be made up in other, more consistently applied ways.

The last restriction, if you’re playing the deck as I’m envisioning it, isn’t even a restriction at all. On turn 5, you’ll have one Sentinel from last turn, so after your resource “tribute” you’ll have 4 resources left to recruit a new Sentinel. On turn 6, you’ll have two leftovers, which once again leaves you… 4 resources. Unless your resources get nuked (and how many of those effects even exist in Silver anymore?), you can simply recruit one new Sentinel, every turn. Your survivors’ payments will always leave you at least 4 resources to recruit them a new friend. This is the main tool I’m using to enforce tempo and reinforce thematics– Sentinels don’t have a quick, surging swarm; they call in reinforcements which arrive at a consistent rate. Every turn they haven’t won yet, another identical drone arrives to provide more help.

Of course, 9/9 isn’t “huge” for very long. It’s overpowering on turn 4, but on turn 5 and onward, it’s anywhere from average to “laughably small”, especially since the Sentinels can’t pump directly. To ensure that your Sentinels remain large enough to represent a credible threat, I’ve given them a few tools to make sure they stay above the curve for at least a few more turns.

Colossal Menace is the main stat-booster for the team. Getting as many copies of this card face-up in your row as you can manage will be a primary focus for the Sentinels; its build phase restriction stops it from being pulled as a surprise, but surprise isn’t all it’s cracked up to be– seeing the train coming does you no good if you’re tied to the tracks. Colossal Menace is the main reason the Sentinels couldn’t be allowed to do breakthrough– having three 13/13 characters with flight and range is almost guaranteed to be a game-ender on 6 otherwise.

In addition to Colossal Menace, the Sentinels will have one other significant tool for remaining beefy as the turns stretch on. Target Sighted looks like it’s just a weaker version of Menace, and to a degree it is. Consider, though– if we assume you’ll get, on average, two copies of Colossal Menace in play, then you’re going to have a board of 11/11 dudes for your opponent to break through. These will be big enough to dominate the opponent’s 4 and 5, but will run into problems with their 6. So, that’s really the only character you need to be worried about pumping over. In that case, Target ends up being just as good as having Colossal face-up, and is even somewhat better– it doesn’t require a discard to play, and hey– if you want, it’s just copies 5 through 8 of Colossal.

The idea with these three cards– the core of your deck– is to always force your opponent to pump or team attack to take your Sentinels down. None of your effects are a surprise to your opponent since most of your important ones are Build-restricted, but it almost doesn’t matter; knowing in advance that your characters are completely outclassed isn’t particularly helpful toward changing that fact.

Support Group

So, the basic gameplan up to now is this:

• Turn 4, recruit Sentinel
• Turn 5, recruit Sentinel. Flip Colossal Menaces to retain size advantage.
• Turn 6, recruit Sentinel. Flip Target Sighted to retain size advantage against 6-drops.

So far, the theory’s pretty sound. That said, there are two gaps– what you do on 1-3 to ensure that this gameplan can be played consistently, and what you do on 6+ to ensure victory, since you’re not doing the breakthrough a normal combat deck would be to bring the opponent’s endurance down. Let’s take a look at the setup and support first.

I love throwing small sub-themes into my cards, so when I noticed that I’d assigned a cost of 1 to most of the Sentinels’ support cards, I figured I might as well run with it. I’ve given the Sentinel support suite a small theme of having all 1-cost resources, both in the enablers and the benefits. The Sentinel Gantry is the main card to take advantage of it– the more 1-cost resources you have, the deeper it digs each turn. I chose to let the Gantry create card advantage (by not requiring a discard) because it would feed into all of the Sentinels’ themes– swarm needs lots of bodies to play, Curve needs guys to pitch to Bastion, and our Towers build needs them to pitch to Colossal Menace. It’s non-unique, so the player can flip and use as many as he draws, though he’ll need to be careful– any old-school Revenge Squad player can tell you how difficult it is to be paying 3 or more endurance every turn just to hit your curve.

Next up in the 1-cost support suite is Command and Control. This location has two primary uses; firstly, and most obviously, it helps the Sentinels shine a searchlight on the hidden area, and smack into its denizens as ably as they do the braver visible characters. Our Sentinels are rather vulnerable to the common occurrence of receiving multiple stuns, and being able to take swipes at your opponent’s large hidden beaters on your own terms can go a long way toward making sure your towers stay upright. The second half of the Command and Control effect is essentially there to stop your opponent from using bounce and KO shenanigans to escape your bots. It puts a huge wrench in Kree press chains, and stops players from Substituting characters out of play in favor of more robot-smashy ones.

It’s always very tempting to give custom teams a plethora of search and sift effects to help them combo out, but I always try to avoid it if possible. In my first build of the Tower sentinels, they had a Demon’s Head-like card that let you exhaust a Sentinel to search and row anything with a cost of 1. It would definitely be fitting, but ultimately it just seemed like it made the combo too easy to pull off– it gave you another four copies of your main combo cards, and it just made the “nuts row” of four Colossals and a few Sighteds a little too easy to put together. That said, since I’ve made the Sentinels pretty damn dependant on their row contents, I do need to give them SOME help in setting it up. To that end, I’ve given them the Scout Unit. By investing some points in one or two of these early on, you’ll really help yourself out in the long run by keeping your row tidy and flush with global pumps and other helpful effects. I considered making them Concealed-Optional, but ultimately I decided that they should probably be kept available to your opponent, for two reasons. First of all, it’s a powerful ability, and hiding it makes it way too easy to keep firing. And second, there should be something for your opponents to hit if they’re staring down a board full of Sentinels they can’t stun, to stop them from having to completely waste their attack step.

One potential problem with the Sentinels’ picky row requirements is that you may simply run out of room. Like many resource-row-intensive teams before them, you may end up rowing the locations early on, or playing a Target Sighted on a character who’s since left the board, and then later on draw into a copy of Colossal Menace that you’d love to row, but can’t. Well, that’s what Larry Trask is for. With Larry available to you, you can row utility cards early without worrying that you’ll suffer for it later on.

The 1-cost resource theme is admittedly kind of a silly gimmick, but I like silly gimmicks. They let you keep a fun tone to the cards, and in cases like this one, they can really add to the overall feel of a team. By keeping our row as uniform as our board, we continue to reinforce the feel of a mindless bunch of robots. Actually, I was originally going to make the theme “resources with a cost of 1 or less”, to let you have a full-on Binary row of “0110001″, but it made the cards too cramped.

One thing you may have noticed about the Scout Unit above is that I let it grab 1-cost Army characters. Well, so far I haven’t actually shown you any of those, but surely you didn’t think I’d forget to toss a cookie to dear old Stu?

As you’ll often find with certain members of teams that have two very different builds, my Wild Sentinel is equally at home in two wildly divergent builds. Its main effect lets you build up a few Wilds in the early turns, and then nuke them on 4 or 5 to keep your Towers chunky. The other effect, on the other hand, lets them act quite easily as a swarm– which, before you rag on me for contradicting myself, is sort of appropriate for Wild Sentinels. My Wild sentinels let you dodge the hand-size issue that every swarm build has to deal with somehow, by letting you recruit them straight out of your KO’d pile. The removal of another Army card isn’t so much a cost as it is a tempo-reducer– you can only ever get half of the Wilds in your KO’d pile into play, so if you’re not making efforts to fill your pile (say, by also investing in some Scout Units), you’ll end up with a KO’d pile too thinly populated to fill all of your recruit points.

It actually surprised me how much of the “big guys” tech translates easily into the theoretical “New Vomit” build as well. Sentinel Gantry feeds your hand; Scout Unit lets you throw away Wilds to get even more Wilds, filling your pile and letting you swarm out more easily from there; Colossal Menace works just as well as a Faces of Evil analogue as it does a Shaw Industries, and Target Sighted lets you get even more swarmy pump against single targets. Larry Trask lets you row Wild Sentinels early on if your draws aren’t so hot, and then clear them into the KO’d pile to be recruited once you’ve got something more useful to put down. I never really intended these interactions, as the Wild was the last card I made for this. It just occurred to me as I was writing how well it synergizes with… well… everything.

It’s neat when that happens.

A Closer, and the Cutting Room Floor

So you’ve set up your row, and recruited a Sentinel on turn 4, 5, and 6. You’ve kept them alive, but even your colossi are going to be outstripped by what your opponent can muster on 7. You’re going to need a way to match the size of your opponent’s big beater, so that you can continue to dominate his lower drops without being disrupted by a one-sided smack, but your resource tribute stops you from bringing out your own big beater.

Well, worry not. Daddy’s here.

So, yeah. Once you hit turn 7, your big beaters aren’t all that big anymore. Bolivar keys on this in two ways. First of all, they’re no longer really worth a resource tribute every turn to keep around, as your opponent can likely beat over them with little effort. Bolivar acknowledges this by saying that you don’t need to worry about that anymore. Even if you don’t plan on making him your turn 7 recruit, you’re at least free to make SOME higher-cost investment with your resources than simply another Sentinel reinforcement.

If you do decide to bring him out, your Towers, which were being marginalized by your opponents’ increasing size while they themselves weren’t growing much anymore, get an instant boost– +4/+4 apiece. If you’ve managed to row all four copies of Colossal Menace and keep all your recruits (both are wishful thinking, admittedly…), you’ll have three 17/17 guys with flight and range to tear your opponent apart with.

There are a ton of other effects I wanted to do, but I’ve given myself a 10-card budget each week to stop myself from going too insane on any one idea, so I’ll just talk about some of the effects that I wanted to do, but couldn’t quite find the card room to squeeze in, or that I was unsure of for some other reason. First up, a card I really like, but I can’t quite shake the feeling that it’s too good. Nerve Gas is like a variant on the Steel Girder, except a little crappier since it only stops people from readying. That said, it’s also a little better, because it can be recruited for free onto someone who is absolutely freaking enormous and is almost guaranteed to stun everybody who enters combat with him. I just worry that letting the Sentinels lock down their opponents’ biggest guys will make them too MUCH of an overwhelming force, so I’d submit this one for testing with a sticky note of caution attached.

Another one I wasn’t sure about was a way for the Towers to cause something more than stun damage in combat. I definitely didn’t want them causing breakthrough, but it seems like they’d end up with a pretty awful endurance deficit as the game progresses. I tried to work some burn onto a couple cards, but kept cutting it for space– something like,

• “Whenever an Army Sentinel character you control stuns a character an opponent controls, that opponent loses 3 endurance.”

Or maybe tie it to some board clearing:

• “Whenever an opposing character becomes stunned by one or more Army Sentinel characters you control, KO it unless its controller pays 3 endurance.”

I couldn’t really decide how best to set it up, and I was already at my 10 card limit, so I figured I’d leave that decision for a year down the road when UDE hires me to finish the team for real.

End Of Line.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how I think the Sentinels should’ve been done all along. Coming up with Army was a great first step, but that was the only thing they did that really made them feel like Sentinels should. I’m not sure if we’ll ever see a refeature for the Sentinels, but if we do, I hope we see them with a bit of a tweaking, because their old themes just don’t quite fit.

Oh, and before we go, I’d like to welcome a new member of the formerly one-man How I’d Do It team. Getting all the art done for these things every week has been a real nightmare, so I’ve recruited my bestest buddy from another life, the incomparable MJB_1977, to pitch in on the art duties. His art’s got a much more exaggerated and colourful look to it than mine, so you’ll hopefully get a lighthearted break from my incessantly gloomy stuff from now on. He pinch-hit on the Nerve Gas card at the eleventh hour tonight when I realized I hadn’t found anything for it yet, so I’m already very grateful for his assistance.

Alrighty, that’s me for this week. See you again next time!

-Spud

By Captain Spud

After spending last week talking about a character I don’t give two farts about, I figured I’d give myself a break this week and do something fun. I was a huge fan of the X-Statix comics, and I was pretty shocked– and delighted, of course, but mostly shocked– to see them appear at all in VS, never mind being a fully featured team in the game’s first year. I can only conclude that someone on the design team was a big fan, and nagged them in, because let’s face it– no amount of rational argument would be enough to get them included.

What made me even happier was when it turned out that they had a really interesting mechanical concept for the team– they strive for, and benefit from, having exactly one guy on the board. Considering the extraordinarily curve-based meta that existed at the time, with most decks using some variation on “my 4 into your 5, my 5 into your 4″ with the goal of outnumbering your opponent, the X-Statix strategy seemed, to say the least, ill-advised. And yet, it worked.

Your loner is well-protected stat-wise by the brilliantly simple X-Statix Café, which does exactly one thing: it moves him exactly one spot up the curve. You get a 4-drop on 3, a 5-drop on 4, and so on. That, on its own, is huge; it essentially forces your opponent to team attack, which reduces the number of available attackers he has left over to swing into you directly. Of course, there’s always pump; a character can swing from one slot down with a Savage Beatdown and usually just barely stun the X-Statix character. That is, of course, if the X-Statix player doesn’t have a copy of Dead Weight, one of the largest defense pumps ever printed. If you DO become stunned, it’s a simple matter of playing Spin Doctoring, and you’re right back on your feet. If they try to negate it by KOing your character, Star of the Show makes your loner untargetable.

At its core, X-Statix is a control deck. Control comes in a lot of flavors, but ultimately, any good control deck aims to have the opponent, once they reach the end of the turn, sitting there with a slightly shocked look on his face, muttering that “That wasn’t how that was supposed to go at all.” The most traditional control deck is the Doom model; you use a variety of exhaustion and negation effects to effectively ensure that your opponent can’t make good use of his attack step. You repeat this turn after turn, usually stalling out to some game-ender Big Bad. IG Hand Flood and Spider-Friends are good examples of this model, using a variety of effects to leave your opponent with a board full of useless cardboard. Another popular control style is board control; you aim to use stun and KO effects to strip down the number of characters your opponent has to work with, so that you can eventually overwhelm your opponent with sheer numbers; Marvel Knights was probably the first dedicated board control deck that I can think of.

The final kind of control deck is combat control. Basically, this deck type wants to let opponents engage in combat as they normally would, and then use surprise effects to turn the combat around. The Marvel Knights set was just packed with combat control. Crime Lords is a great example– your opponent swings his 3 straight across into your 3-drop Kingpin looking for a mutual stun, and you then turn around with a reinforcement, a Face the Master for +3DEF, and a Fight to the Finish. End result: your character stuns, and KOs, and Kingpin didn’t even have to exhaust.

The X-Statix use all three control types to a degree, but they focus most heavily on combat control. With Acrobatic Dodge and Entangle legal at the time, X-Statix could pull off some incredible turnovers on an opponent’s initiative– I exhaust my 5-drop to exhaust your 4. You swing your 2 and 3 into my 5 with a pump; I brickwall with Dead Weight and stun your 3. Your 5 comes in with another pump; I take the stun, and stun your 5. I play Spin Doctoring to recover and smash your 4. It was your initiative, but I wiped your board.

Of course, it didn’t always work. X-Statix had no real search to speak of (only the minor sifting of X-Statix HQ), which made hitting drops a bit of a chore. They didn’t really mind underdropping, as the Café could generally get them big enough to at least make a showing; and they could always drop Phat as a filler. That said, it still hurt them. With everybody packing Beatdown, they really needed every point of DEF they could muster, and a bad hand could pretty easily land you in a situation where you’re taking an opponent’s entire board to the face. Also of note, the deck had a lot of trouble “closing the deal”. The only on-team game-ender was Doop, but as he’s hidden, he generally just lets too much damage come through on your opponent’s swings. Most X-Statix players resorted to high-drop generics like Imperiex to finish the game, but the meta was usually much too fast to allow this to work on a regular basis.

The deck was obscenely entertaining to play, but its inconsistency and its vulnerability to certain effects (Puppet Master, for example) meant it was never really taken seriously.

Rebuilding A Legend

Fast forward three years. X-Statix has long since rotated out of Silver Age, and The Ben Seck’s coy comments on the subject have more or less ruled out the possibility of a future refeature. I can’t exactly say I’m surprised; I was pretty shocked that they were made in the first place, never mind edging the Avengers out of a set. So while I’m sad that I’ll never be able to play them in a City Champs ever again, it’s also a bit reassuring; no matter what I decide to type up today about how I’d redo the team, I don’t need to worry about UDE showing us what real designers would do with the team, thereby making me feel a bit silly for the relatively poor quality of my own efforts. So, there’s always that.

Alrighty, let’s roll up our sleeves and get started. To begin with, let’s list off the basic traits of the old X-Statix concept.

• One person on the board
• One drop higher than the current resource count
• Ample supply of additional DEF pumps
• Recovery effect(s)
• Immunity to hostile effects– most notably, out-of-combat stuns
• Endurance gain (to counter the inevitable face-smacks)
• Control your own board: Must reduce self to one character during combat phase

By and large, we’re going to be keeping most of those effects the way they used to be. But let’s take a look at that last bullet point. The generally accepted method of controlling the X-Statix player’s board size is by using some sort of KO or bounce effect to nuke last turn’s drop, leaving you only this turn’s guy, who is then enlarged by the Café. Of course, this isn’t the only method the X-Statix used to stay lean; also heavily present in the affiliation are a number of characters who use Boost powers to come into play, fire an effect, and then leave. For example, the 2-drop Vivisector can boost for 1 additional point to cause 5 burn, and the 5-drop boosts up to 6 to exhaust anybody on the board. So if you’re worried that your 5-drop can’t handle combat with the opposing six, simply boost to exhaust him and take him out of the equation.

For this excercise, I’m going to make use of the same general concepts of the old X-Statix– single character who stands in the opponent’s way– but I’m going to go about it in a different way than the old “standard” method. Rather than curving out and nuking last turn’s drop, we’re going to set it up so that you pick one character, and make an investment in them; once your “anchor” hits the board on turn 3 or 4, you’ll keep him until the end of the game, and along the way he’ll grow to make sure he. On subsequent turns, we’ll be using a variation on the Bouncing Booster concept to ensure that you still spend your points on useful things.

First off, let’s set the groundwork. I’m going to be “reprinting” X-Statix Café. There’s just no reason to try to reinvent the wheel on that one; it’s an elegantly simple effect, and +2/+2 is the perfect size to put your characters one slot above the curve if they’re starting on-curve, ensuring that it requires some thought on your opponent’s part to take them down, without making them an impenetrable wall of brokenness. I’m also going to reprint Spin Doctoring, for much the same reason; while less simple, it’s still a very elegant effect, and I’d just end up having to ape it anyway, since a loner strategy with no recovery just doesn’t work that well (see: Pancakes, Absolute Power). I’ll also have one other reprint, on the character curve, which I’ll get to a bit later on.

Turn 4 seems to be the turn that most loner strategies “turn on”, so that’s where I’m going to put the ideal one-man-show for the team. I’ll also be throwing in very viable options at 3 and 5 so the player won’t feel roped into one strategy. Now, the X-Statix decks of the past generally had two big problems that were difficult to solve. First of all, they had difficulty creating board parity, and eventually opponents would simply have too many characters for the X-Statix player to effectively deal with, and the opponent would simply be able to smash in directly. The second problem, as mentioned above, was winning. X-Statix did a decent job of stopping the opponent from winning, but had very few realistic options for causing damage to the opponent, since your small board size more or less means you’re never causing breakthrough. Of course, if you can solve the first problem, the second one is less of an issue, so let’s work on that.

Total Anarchy

Orphan got most of the attention in the old build of the X-Statix, so I figured it was only fair to give Tike his turn in the spotlight this time around as the team’s main anchor. The Anarchist – Pernicious Perspiration isn’t exactly a subtle card; I shouldn’t need to sit here and explain why this is a useful power for an X-Statix anchor to have. But, I will anyway. The biggest problem you always had with X-Statix was that you had no real way of stunning multiple opposing characters without your opponent’s consent in one form or another. Sure, people could throw their entire board into your brick wall in a series of foiled attacks, but most opponents aren’t that stupid. A smart opponent will often simply team his entire board into your wall, which is just a roundabout way of exhausting your guy and stalling to next turn. Your opponent does something like this, turn after turn, never losing characters, until he has enough to simply rush over your wall and smack you in one fell swoop.

The Anarchist essentially removes this strategy from your opponent’s arsenal. If he team attacks you, you’re going to be stunning two guys. Two stuns = instant board advantage. I gave Tike low Defense for two reasons– first of all, he has Vengeance, so he WANTS to stun. Second, and mostly importantly, with the power that he has, and the fact that I gave the team access to a relatively painless recovery card in the reprinted Spin Doctoring, giving him a huge defense would just make him a little TOO good– since team attacking him is generally a pretty terrible idea, you need to at least leave the option open for your opponent to swing singly with a pump. Hell, his defense should probably be even lower than it is– I’m still waffling over whether or not he should have 5DEF printed. I’ll leave that decision to my nonexistent playtesting team.

The Anarchist on 4 is what I see as the “ideal” loner for the team, but like I said above, I still wanted to give the team options, in case they want to go a different route. The first option is to start lonering on 3 with The Orphan – Drama Queen. The Orphan uses a similar general strategy to The Anarchist– he essentially punishes your opponent for team attacking, because the more guys your opponent swings in with, the more he burns (since his power triggers for every attacker involved in stunning him). Orphan’s ability doesn’t clean up the board like Anarchist’s, but in a way, it almost prefers not to. The more guys you let your opponent have, the more he’ll have lying around to swing into you, and the more burn he’ll take. Like Anarchist, I gave Orphan a fairly low DEF value, but unlike Anarchist, Orphan probably wouldn’t be too broken if you were to increase it by a point. Since Orphan doesn’t decimate the opponent’s board all on his own, you’re not really borking the game that badly by forcing a few brick walls.

The choice between Anarchist and Orphan as your anchor will decide what the focus of your deck is– if you’re running Orphan, you’ll want to use a lot of Defense pumps, to goad your opponent into throwing lots of attackers into you to ensure stuns. Whereas if you’re running an Anarchist deck, you’ll want to go more heavily into the recovery effects, as his ability really does benefit you for letting him fall down.

The last “main” option for your deck’s anchor is the third reprint of this set: Orphan – Mr. Sensitive. The 5-drop Orphan was relatively overlooked in the original X-Statix legality run, because the theme of the time was more heavily focused on using your turn drop the turn you bring him out, and then nuking him the next turn. Having a huge guy who can’t attack on his premiere turn wasn’t overly helpful to the strategy. This time around, however, we’re chancing the focus of the team. This time, we WANT to use the “one guy sticks around, all subsequent turns we recruit bouncers” strategy. This Orphan can’t attack the turn he comes out, but he gives you a huge size advantage over your other options. The other two anchors are intended to speed the team up a bit by enabling a mono-team kill before turn 8, but this anchor would be leaning more toward the old-style stall strategy. He’s not burny, he’s not smashy, but hot damn, is he ever a wall!

The former X-Statix “engine” had four lynchpin cards: X-Statix Café beefed your guy up, and Spin Doctoring made your opponents run repeatedly into the same wall. The third lynchpin was X-Statix HQ, which allowed you to nuke last turn’s guy to make room for the new one. The card was hugely useful for the old strategy, but we don’t need it as much since we’ll be using mainly characters who handle the self-removal on their own. The last card that defined the team, and the one that was quite frequently the only thing keeping it running, was Star of the Show.

Star blocked a lot of effects, but the two most important things it did were to stop direct stuns (ie, Terra on 3-drop Orphan) which would invalidate your “pump out of combat” strategy; and it also stopped most of the game’s KO effects, since at the time, they were mostly targeted effects. It also handled important things like Mystical Paralysis that would stop you from attacking. Now, Star did its job quite well, but since we’re working with a slightly different strategy this time, I need it to do a little more work than it used to. And to compensate, I need to tighten it up a bit.

So, here’s Limelight. It has largely the same effect as Star of the Show, with a few important differences. First of all, whereas Star of the Show protected your loner every turn no matter who you switched in, Limelight “sticks” to a single person. This shouldn’t be a huge deal, as that’s our plan anyway. In exchange for this much more restrictive breadth of effect, Limelight does two new things. The subtler of the two effects is that Limelight makes your loner immune to triggered KO effects. These weren’t very prominent back in the day, with most being “Finishing Move”-style KO effects. But these day, things like Punisher – Guns Blazing and the “Killer Curve” of Fatality, Thanos, Parallax, and Superboy Prime cause KOs automatically, and none of the X-Statix effects offer any protection to them. Since losing your anchor is essentially game over, I needed to add some protection against these triggered effects which are a major staple of the gamestate today.

The more obvious of the effects is the one that will allow you to keep your guy around, turn after turn, without suffering from a relatively diminishing character size. For every Limelight you get face-up, your loner will get a +1/+1 counter at the start of combat. If you get two of these things flipped, your character will essentially grow with the surve, letting him keep up with the other characters in play. If you get three or even four flipped up, your loner will become a behemoth, quickly accumulating over a dozen counters and becoming a major board presence.

And that’s basically where the core of the deck ends; you’ll have X-Statix Café in your row alongside multiple Limelights, and your board will consist of a single beater with a power that limits the viability of team attacking for your opponent. Spin Doctoring will bring your guy back onto his feet when he gets knocked down. I’d probably avoid reprinting Glory Hound, as it packs just a bit too much punch given the Anarchist and Orphan’s powers, but I suppose testing would find that out for sure. I don’t have any huge issue with reprinting Dead Weight or something similar, as your characters actually become less effective when they don’t stun, so dodging combat in the old style isn’t as helpful as it once was.

Now, let’s move on to the other part of the team.

Just Visiting

The old incarnation of the X-Statix affiliation used the Boost mechanic to let characters come into play, fire an effect, and leave. That said, using Boost for this wasn’t necessarily the only way to do it. We’re going to use the same concept, but I’m setting it up in a different way, so that the effects are less of a “one-shot” and actually give you some benefit as the game wears on.

The X-Statix have had a wildly rotating membership over the years, but they’ve always made use of a teleporter when running missions. They run in, do the job, and run out. This is what I’m trying to reflect with the team’s new bounce characters; they drop in for a visit during the build phase, and then they take off before combat to let your loner work. In doing so, they fire off a useful effect so that their presence is still felt. So, essentially what all this does is let you invest your resource points in good effects that persist through multiple turns, without being saddled with extra bodies when you don’t want to be.

U-Go-Girl quite simply keeps your dude alive. By making aninvestment early in the game, you give your loner some much-needed Defense that will force your opponent to commit more effort to attacking him. Of course, this may not always be a good thing; if you’re using Tike and you’re sitting on two copies of Spin Doctoring, the +2DEF may actually hurt you. In that case, it might occasionally be worth it to give the Defense to an opponent, to ensure that he stuns your loner and fires the appropriate Vengeance effect.

My Vivisector is inspired by the old 5-drop Vivi; he comes in, exhausts someone, and then leaves. I’m debating whether his ability is too strong, and I’m currently leaning toward “probably”. It should probably become “target character with a cost less than the number of resources you control”, but since I was already running short on card space, I figured I’d pass that buck, too, on to my nonexistent playtest team. Vivi’s effect, like the other bouncers, is in two stages. Anybody, from any team, can invest resources in these characters and fire their effect once. They can pay 2 for some Defense, 5 for an exhaust, or 1 (with Phat, below) for a counter. But only a player who’s playing X-Statix, and has an ample supply of affiliated character cards to discard or reveal, will be able to get the character back afterward. Of course, this might quickly prove taxing on your hand; I’m not going to get into it with this article, but if I were fully fleshing out the team, I’d probably have to give them some substantial card draw to feed all the discard their effects are powered by.

Phat is the last bouncer I designed for this article, but of course in a full design I’d need to make between five and ten solid bounce characters– one or more at every drop– to properly fill in the theme. Phat is a familiar effect, following the precedent set by Mendel Stromm and the Force Field Belt that 1 resource = 1 card = 1 counter. Phat will probably be one of the most tempting effects to repeatedly fire, but doing so would wreak utter havoc on your hand, so you’ll need to be careful about how heavily you invest in him. The strategy of the team depends on a character growing with counters, but if you overextend yourself and throw away valuable cards one too many times, you could end up missing a vital drop later on.

For those who care about such things, you’ll probably notice that Phat is templated differently than the other two bouncers. In actuality, I’d probably stamp him the same as the other two, with a triggered effect at the start of combat. I decided to leave him as-is so I could briefly mention that these bounce-and-come-back powers were an absolute nightmare to template. Here’s Edie’s effect as I originally had it:

• “When U-Go-Girl comes into play, you may remove her from play and give target character +2DEF this turn. You may discard a card. If you do, return U-Go-Girl to your front row at the start of the next combat phase.”

That’s how I actually wanted the effects to fire, but it occurred to me that with that templating, you could have a full four U-Go-Girls in the cycle, turning your guy into an absolutely massive wall that nothing could ever get over. I needed to set it up in a way that would make people run into the uniqueness rules, and the only way to ensure that was to force her to sit through the build phase. I went through multiple templatings; the one Phat has was another one I liked, but the fact that you could control its timing (even if limited to the Combat phase) still lead to too many duplication problems. Ultimately, I decided I had to make it triggered, and tried this:

• “At the start of the combat phase, remove U-Go-Girl from the game, and target character gets +2DEF this turn. If you do, you may discard a card. If you do, you may return her to play at the start of the next build phase.”

Of course, that is utterly hideous– two “if you do” clauses in the same paragraph make it almost undreadable. In the end, even though it made things a bit broader than I liked, I needed to split it up into two powers, so that the first power handles the removal, and the second one triggers off of it and brings them back. That’s the version you can see above. In a way, it’s a bit clearer this way– by physically separating the two halves, it’s much clearer to the reader that “this part is for anybody, and this part is only for X-Statix.” I’m sure that with the full list, there would be a few effects– probably the ones on the 6 and 7 drop bouncers– that would be too strong to give “just anybody” access to them, so they’d go down to a single paragraph of text. But hey, I’m not designing those, so who cares.

So, yeah. That’s about it for today’s cards. I had a lot of fun with these ones, because I love both the comics and the cards they’re based on, and it was a real hoot to apply my hack skills to one of my favourite VS teams. I was a little disappointed that I couldn’t find time to do more of the art– I had designs planned for Vivi and Phat– but my weekend schedule didn’t turn out to be as open as I’d hoped.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this week’s article (I definitely liked this one more than last week), and I’ll see you again in the same place next Tuesday.

*waves*

Heya, folks. Welcome to the inaugural edition of How I’d Do It, a (hopefully) weekly look at the art of fan card design. Each week, I’ll pick a subject, and walk you through how I’d go about designing cards to fit that theme. (I’m also going to try to do as much of the art myself as I have time for). Along the way, I’ll try to explain some of the theory behind it all, to help other aspiring card designers improve their craft, and give those who have never given it a shot some guidelines to help them get started. Before we get into the meat of today’s article, I’m going to own up to my biases.

1. As far as I’m concerned, mono-team curve should be the baseline format of the game. Curve from 2.5 to 7, recruit one guy a turn, smash him into your opponent. Yes, team-up decks have an important place, because they encourage combo play. Yes, off-curve decks are important too, because they force you to run tech. Yes, stall is also vital, because it keeps combat honest. But all of these should be the exceptions. Any meta should be at least 40% mono curve combat, and 15% other categories. I know it’ll never happen in real life, but it’s the way I like to play, and it’s going to be the attitude behind most of my cards.
2. I hate reference mechanics, and I refuse to use them. Willpower and Mutant Traits are collectively the second-stupidest thing that’s ever happened to the game. They’re an arbitrary over-complication of the game rules, because they accomplish nothing you couldn’t do with the pre-existing rules. I may toss a mutant trait on someone for consistency if it’s ever reintroduced on the new card template, but I won’t be making any cards to take advantage of it unless they revamp things to actually make these mechanics do something.
3. I love goofy card mechanics and interactions. Again assuming that curve combat is the baseline, I love decks that deviate from the mould in a creative way. I play just about every “Disadvantage” deck under the sun, from IG hand flood to X-Statix.
4. Finally, I’m a very visual, tangible person. I like cards like Fastball Special that clearly represent “This guy does this thing.” I’m not a huge fan of “Here’s a name and some art to reflect something from the comics, and then the textbox is something random the team needed.” I definitely accept that these are necessary, and I do make them sometimes, but I’ll always try to make something tangibly thematic first.

Oh, and also: I tend to get really wordy. Don’t expect short articles. This week’s will be particularly long, as I’ll be taking you through the entire process without skipping any steps, to give you an idea upfront of how I go about this. In the future, I’ll skip the obvious parts and just present the interesting bits.

For my first article, I decided to dive in headfirst and give myself a hard task upfront– I’m going to look at how to go about designing difficult cards. I picked this subject because it’ll require me to think hard about every step of the process; the more I have to think, the better the step-by-step walkthrough will end up being. Now, what exactly do I mean by “difficult” cards? Basically, difficult cards are any card where, when I sit down to design it, I don’t immediately get an idea of what to do. Even after several minutes, hours, or even days of thinking about it, there’s still no obvious frontrunner—sometimes after all that I don’t even have a starting point.

Easy Cards

To help this make sense, let’s see what easy cards look like.

These cards are easy because the characters they represent have very straightforward powers. Gambit quite literally throws a card to hurt someone. Spidey webs someone up. Green Arrow shoots people. Thing is just huge. I like to call these “representative” cards. These characters’ various cards are mostly fairly similar in function because they generally do one or two things, and there’s a pretty clear precedent set within the game for how those one or two things should be represented. Shooting energy is generally burn or stuns; super-strength is high stats. When you sit down to design a character with one of these common power archetypes, you can pretty much just knock out the appropriate generic effect, give it a cost to reflect the team it’s on (replace a reservist if it’s for Avengers, discard a card if it’s X-Men, pay ATK if it’s Spidey, etc), and call it a day.

Keep in mind, I’m not saying that these are bad cards, nor am I attempting to diminish the work put into making them. Even an easy card can be screwed up if you approach it too ham-handedly, and it’s a testament to the skill of the UDE design team that we don’t have very many of these floating around. The card we end up with may actually be fairly complex (Thing, Rockhead for example); the only point I’m making is that the designers could have taken the easy route and still ended up with a good card.

There’s a second type of easy card that I’ll look at briefly; instead of having an obvious thematic route, some easy cards have an obvious mechanical route.

Let’s see, we need to make some Future Foes legacy (and yes, that’s what that is, even though it’s a generic). What can you do? Well, basically, you can take any generic effect—pump, resource hate, board control effect, what have you—and make it conditional on a discard. Ta-da, you’re done; the thematics can be tacked on later. And this doesn’t even need to happen only on filler cards—if you’re designing a team that aims to a)flood the opponent’s hand, and b)keep the cards there, it makes perfect sense to make the power that Lex has. There will simply be a point in the design of the team where you need to build an anchor for the theme, and you’ll pick an appropriate point on the curve, and a vaguely appropriate character, and ta-da, you’re done. This is actually a decent solution to difficult characters; set them aside, and then later you can try to marry them to important mechanical functions that don’t belong on any particular character.

So basically, there are two kinds of easy cards—you can start with a character that has an obvious translation into game text, or you can start with a vital mechanical process and then find a character to fit it. Easy cards are often what inspire me to work on a card set; I’ll come up with a really fun design for one card, and then I’ll start making other cards around it for support.

Of course, eventually you’re going to hit a brick wall.

Not So Easy Cards

Difficult cards come in a lot of flavors, but there are three types that pop up often for me:

1. Characters with powers that don’t have an obvious way to be translated into game text. Off the top of my head: I have no idea how I’d turn the X-Men’s Beak into a VS card. Sure, he has powers, but I have no idea how “ugly and feathered” would work in game text.
2. Characters with too many powers. If you told me to design a Martian Manhunter card, and this would be the only card he would ever get, I wouldn’t even know where to start. He’s got thirty-nine and a half powers, of which half a dozen all vie for “most significant”. Plus, even beyond his powers, he’s got a fun weakness to work with, and some background fluff you could design around (Leader powers, for example). These characters are difficult to work with because it’s really easy to get caught in the trap of making them do too much, cramming their text box with tiny-font rules text to fit in everything you want them to do.
3. Great ideas that take up too much space, or are difficult to express in clear sentences. As a general rule, I try to limit myself to three “paragraphs” of rules text on a card, with each paragraph having no more than one content sentence and one tag-along sentence (for example: “You may discard a card.” is a tag-along to “If you do, you may [blah]”.) Anything more and the card just gets too crowded, or too hard to understand. For a good example of a card like this that went to print, check out Spider-Man Robot at right. My roomie and I, both fourth-year university students at the time and very smart people, had to read that three or four times to figure out exactly what it meant.

On To The Matter At Hand

Alrighty, enough theory. My project this week is going to be thus: take a difficult character and make some cards around him. The difficult character I’ve chosen is Marvel’s Thor. I picked Thor because he fits all three of the problems I just mentioned… and more! In addition to having too many powers, and some hard-to-define powers, he’s also on a team that has no obvious mechanical gaps. And to top it all off, I’ve never read a Thor comic in my life, except when he’s appeared in other books. So this is pretty much one of the hardest tasks I could have given myself; hence why I’m getting it out of the way in the first week.

To begin, let’s take a look at Thor’s powers.

• Flight
• Super strength
• Extreme resilience
• Wears armor
• Controls weather
• In particular: Shoots lightning bolts
• Has a hammer for hitting things
• Has a hammer for throwing at things, which then comes back
• Can open portals

And I’ve probably missed some. A lot of Thor’s powers do have a fairly obvious translation—his physical abilities require big stats, his lightning bolts translate to free stuns. The hammer implies equipment. However, some of his other powers are more difficult—we’ve never had one clear template for weather control powers. We’ve seen everything from cancelling flight, to stat boosts, to can’t-ready effects. It’s all over the place. Plus, he’s got some weird powers like immortality and his portal-opening dealie that, while there, beg the question of whether you should even bother representing them.

We could go in circles for days about which powers to represent, how heavily to represent each, and how exactly to represent them; and then muddy up any progress we made on that front by trying to make him fit into his team’s themes. Fortunately, you have access to a vital weapon in the card designer’s arsenal: the ability to make completely arbitrary decisions. If it turns out to be a bad idea, you can always change your mind! Sometimes, the best way to get out of the hard card trap is just to pick one of the options out of the hat and run with it. In our case, I’m going to decide that in my rather limited experience with Thor, the facet of him I’ve seen used the most is his physical strength. Yes, he does have all that weather control stuff, but I don’t see him zapping people with lightning nearly as often as I see him punching people in the bridge of the nose. So, to save myself some pain and get things moving, I’m deciding that the main theme for my Thor is going to be “Thor is big, and he kicks people.”

Yes, sometimes it really is that simple.

So, let’s see where that puts us. I want to do Thor up as a full Legend, so I’m going to give him two or three character cards, and a number of support cards. I always start my design of a team or character with the character cards, so let’s figure out what our red cards are going to look like.

Characters

Generally speaking, deckbuilders prefer character versions to be at least three drops apart. If the first is a 4, the second should be a 7. If the first is a 2, the second could be 5, or even 6 or 7—as long as it’s not 3 or 4. You want to give people enough time to lose the first drop to regular combat, and generally speaking it takes two or three rounds of combat for that to reliably happen. Since Thor is one of the strongest Avengers, I want him to top out as an 8-drop. This puts the “sweet spot” for his next lower version at 4 or 5, and since we’ve already seen him at 4, I’m arbitrarily deciding to make him a 5. If I wanted I could also give him a 1 or 2, but Thor is probably too strong to make sense that low, so I’ll stick with just the two versions for now. Avoiding a low-drop has the advantage of letting us make his support cards stronger, as an effect that’s too abusable when exhausting a 2-drop might be just right when the smallest thing you can exhaust is a 5.

We’re going to work on the 5-drop to begin with, because it’s less likely that people will get an 8-drop out in play. We’re going to balance most of the support cards around this version of the character. To start out, let’s make some high-level decisions. I want him to reflect “big, beefy Thor”, so we’re giving him big stats. Whether or not we outright feature his weather control abilities on the card, we can give them some token representation by including Flight and Range. Range also covers the hammer-throw, so we’re actually making pretty good mileage here as far as covering all of his powers, before we even put a single word in his text box.

So, how big do we make his stats? The “standard” for big stats at 5 is to either go 11/8 or 8/11, depending on whether you want to showcase his strength or his toughness more. However, since Thor is a legend, and since I don’t really want to have to pick one of the polar extremes, I’m going to give him stats one full point above the curve: 10/10. This lets him stun 95% of 5-drops, and avoid stuns against over half of them. There are only a handful of people Thor won’t be able to handle in a fight. Combined with flight and range and a team affiliation, we could leave his text box blank and people would still play him.

Which actually brings up an important point—since he’s already huge, we have to be really careful about what text we give him. Even with an “average” ability, he could quickly become “the only 5-drop you’d ever want to play”. That said, that’s not necessarily a bad thing—if we’re designing Dr. Doom, it’s not a problem to make him the outright best choice at a drop, bar none; he’s friggin Dr. Doom, his name is on the bloody team affiliation. So, do we want Thor to be an anchor for the team? Do we want people to start every Avengers decklist with “4x 5-drop Thor”? Personally, I don’t have a huge problem with that. He’s one of the Avengers’ “Big Three” alongside Cap and Tony, so I’m okay with making him an above-average 5-drop overall. It just means we’ll need to keep a close eye on his power level, and add restrictions and costs to make sure that, while powerful, he doesn’t slip over into the dark lands of Abusable.

So what kind of power should he get? A couple options occur to me, and the choice depends on how we want him to behave in play.

1. We can give him a very strong activated power. Strong powers on big bodies are not at all unprecedented—just look at Ahmed Samsarra. Characters can generally only exhaust once each turn, and forcing players to choose between engaging in combat and using activated powers takes away the brokenness of combining the two. So for example, we could give him a power to represent using his lightning—“Activate  Stun target character”, with some combination of costs and targeting restrictions to make it right for that point on the curve. If you stamp it to the player’s attack step, the player needs to decide if it’s more useful to get a guaranteed stun with that power, or to smack into someone normally and get breakthrough.
2. If we give him a power that doesn’t require activation, it needs to be smaller in scale. With 10/10 stats, we can’t let him stun or KO people for free, since that lets him take out two of their biggest characters every turn. It’s just not balanced. If we’re giving him something passive, triggered, or paid, it’s going to need to be a small enough effect to avoid making him an unstoppable force.
3. We can give him a cost. I’m just mentioning this for completeness’ sake—we decided above that Thor was going to be a team anchor, but if we didn’t want to go that route, we could stamp him with Loyalty or a discard and he then becomes the team’s “best 5-drop beater, at a cost”.

Once again, this comes down to your ability to make an arbitrary decision. If we were designing an entire team affiliation, we could temper the decision by looking at the team’s ideal curve and how he fits into it, but since we’re building him in a vacuum, a lot of this is going to come down to your whim as the designer.

Of all of Thor’s powers, the only “biggie” that we haven’t represented yet is his storm control abilities. I like the mental image of him rushing into combat, throwing a gale-force wind at his foes as he charges, so I’m going to make that his effect. Looking at past wind-themed cards, I come upon an old favourite: Blow the Man Down. I like that effect on Thor, as it adds a pseudo-control element to him—he can shove rangeless opponents into the back row, who then won’t be able to retaliate on your opponent’s initiative.

Balancing powers is a tricky business; there’s no right and wrong way to do it. Generally speaking, you’ve got two options—you can give it a cost (discard cards, pay endurance, exhaust/KO characters), or you can give it a restriction (timing, number and type of targets). Even the strongest abilities can be balanced if you give them a high enough cost or restrict them tightly enough. Often, you’ll find the best solution is a combination of the two. With our 5-drop Thor, I’ve restricted the ability by chaining it to him attacking. This forces the player the plan out his attack step to get the best use out of the power– do I attack with Thor first to expose all the back-row people? Or do I attack last, to avoid making everybody easily reinforceable? The answer to that question will add some tactical complexity to the card, to avoid simply making him “Thor, Puncher of Faces”. That said, sticking it on an Attack trigger reinforces the fact that this is a combat-based representation of Thor, so even though we’re giving him a “magic” power, he still feels like a beater.

8-drops are generally intended to be game-enders, even if only because they have huge ATK and can smash things but good. In addition, though, the 8-drop level is where you can really start to go wild with borderline-broken powers, since so few games even get to that point. An 8-drop shouldn’t be a guaranteed victory (that’s what 9-drops are for), but it should definitely get you on your way there. I mentioned earlier that giving the 5-drop the ability to stun people for free would be a little broken, and that’s true. On the other hand, that’s a perfect ability for an 8-drop to have.

We’ll still need to balance it, of course. We haven’t designed it yet, but I’m pretty sure I want to make a card for Mjolnir, Thor’s weapon of choice. Unique equipment can be a little annoying because extra drawn copies of it end up being dead cards. So, let’s give the player an outlet– we’ll use the discarding of Mjolnir as the cost for the payment effect. It’s a nice flavorful move (representing him throwing the hammer at his foe), and we can balance the obvious power of a free stun by restricting it to your initiative. We’re also going to add another restriction– Thor can only chuck his hammer at front-row characters. This is mainly for balance reasons (to give the opponent SOME chance to protect his characters), but it’s also going to create an interesting interaction with one of Thor’s support cards. Speaking of which, let’s take a look at some of those.

Support Cards

I find that support cards are faster, easier, and more fun to make than character cards. Once you’ve got your characters, you’re already past a lot of the tough decisions– drop levels, overall thematics, what to include, and what not to– and can just start “rounding out” the character or team you’re working on. The first thing we’re going to do for Thor is give him a power we haven’t represented yet– he is, after all, the God of Thunder.

And hey, whaddaya know, that’s what the card’s called. One of the many arbitrary decisions I made for Thor was to introduce a minor running theme– “row matters”. His 5-drop shoves people to the back, and his 8-drop stuns people in front. I’m going to continue the theme for Thor’s “lightning powers” card. We’re again keeping the idea that Thor’s primary modus operandi is to smash people in the face, and generally speaking, I’ve only seen him throw lightning at people he couldn’t reach up close. Thus, we’re going to restrict the stun effect to support row characters. Now, granted, Thor can fly– so it’s not like he can’t smash those people. But sometimes, it’s just easier to skip combat and take the sure-fire stun you know you can do. Another important thing here is that I’ve intentionally created a non-interaction. 5-drop Thor needs to exhaust to use his everybody-to-the-back effect (by attacking), and he also needs to exhaust to use God of Thunder. This accomplishes two things– first of all, it helps keep Thor from simply becoming a “spellcaster” card, which isn’t the effect we want. Secondly, it stops you from dodging the row restriction on GoT by simply “blowing” before you zap. This kind of balancing decision is always tough to do in the design phase. We can make an estimate of how the cards we design will perform, but ultimately, the most important balancing decisions are made later, when the development team tests the cards. Most of the time, fan card creators don’t have a testing team, because our cards never get played. But if you expect someone to actually use your cards, I recommend erring on the side of caution and making things a little too restrictive, instead of too liberal.

( says the man who just made a flying 10/10 with no cost and an additional power)

But anyway. Let’s make a hammer.

The first idea I had for Mjolnir was this:

My primary driving force there was to make something that’s immune to some equipment hate. It just seemed really important to me that Thor’s hammer not be easy to nuke, which necessitated it having a cost. Thing is, though, people don’t really like costed equipment in curve decks. So, I tried to make it worth the player’s while and essentially make it a boost effect– you can play Thor on 5 as a 5-drop, or on 6 as a 6-drop. And if you do elect to wait, you get Invulnerability added as a nice little bonus. I could live with this design of the hammer, but it still kind of bugged me that I needed to wait until 6 to get the “full” Thor. Turn 6 is too long to wait to get a Legend character in play– even 5 is already pushing it, as anybody who’s tried Ra’s Al Ghul in Build A Legend can tell you.

I didn’t want to go completely back to the drawing board, as I do like the basic flavor of the 1-cost version. The old Mjolnir from MAV gave +2ATK and invulnerability on the attack, but it also had a “go fetch Thor” power that I don’t really want to mimic. (To be honest, if I was doing this in a real set, I’d probably just reprint the old one and be done with it. But that’s no fun in a design article) If we drop the extra power from it, I’d say we’re justified bumping the ATK bonus up to +3. And since I still want to make the hammer slightly resilient to hate effects, I’ll add another clause to the end, to represent Thor calling the hammer back.

Getting Weirder

And from there, you just kind of keep going. Even a boring character can inspire a wide range of support cards if you think about it hard enough. For a character like Thor, with a dozen powers and almost half a century of history (or thousands of years, depending how you look at it), I could sit here and pump out dozens of them. If we want to focus on Thor-equipped-with-hammer, we could print:

Some of my favourite cards to do are “pure thematics” cards– ones that represent a tangible event from the comics. If I was doing a Thor legend, I’d definitely want to represent one of my favourite things about the character:

You could even borrow the fun templating from the new Kid Flash from DCL and fill out the Thor curve a bit more:

The possibilities really are endless. Of course, that’s part of the reason, as discussed earlier, that Thor is a difficult character in the first place– he has a ton of options, and this could have been done any number of ways. Having too many options can really be a problem sometimes, as it means you spend too much time on one difficult problem rather than giving all of your cards the time they deserve. The trick, sometimes, is simply being able to say, “It’s good enough” and move on. I’m happy enough with the cards I made to call them done; they’re certainly not perfect, and I’m sure I could continue tweaking them for days and they’d be better for it. And of course, I’m sure that if I submitted these off for testing, there would be a bloodcurdling shriek, followed by the cards being sent back with dozens of horrified playtester comments, demanding I power it down.

But that’s a problem for real designers. Outside of a few casual games with your friends, these cards are never going to see play. The most important thing to remember when you’re making fan cards is for them to be fun; there’s no point trying to make game-winners, because your playgroup will just stop letting you use them. But if you can make some cards that fit in with the overall feel of the game, that are balanced enough not to overturn every game where they show up, and are interesting enough to really justify using them over “real” cards, then you’ve done your job.

Yikes… that was ridiculously long. Hopefully we can avoid that next time. As I said above, I wanted to cover the whole process with this first article, so that in the future I can skip the tedious bits and spend more time on the parts that are fun. As I was writing this, I started making a list of points I brought up that could be made into their own complete article; by the end here, I’ve got 9 items. And that’s after one day.

Yikes.

Alrighty, I’ll let you go now. Please toss me some comments on the article– I’d love to know how other people would do a Thor legend. Oh, and check out my main site if you want to see bigger versions of the card art I whipped up.

Take care, and thanks for reading.

-Captain Spud