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Recent updates to Conversation: (Generated at 2024-04-19 02:31:34)
| Conversation: Cardlist | Visual spoiler | Export | Booster | Comments | Search | Recent activity |
| Mechanics |
Recent updates to Conversation: (Generated at 2024-04-19 02:31:34)
Yeah, I'm REALLY hoping this has long-lasting ramifications and that it's not all somehow magically reversed somehow.
New Planechase!
Spoilers!
Planar boundaries are getting breached!
I like what I see so far. No set-specific keywords, though Phyrexian Mana and and TDFCs are in the set.
Battles yet to be revealed.
From a lore perspective, the amount of change to the invaded planes already looks too big to be satisfyingly reversed by a Deus ex Machina ending.
The latter is how Hearthstone feels a lot of the time
For me the paradox is I really love deck building, especially finding interesting uses of cards from a set, but I don't like chasing or buying to collect the cards you need.
In theory I like the idea from early magic of "I have these cards, you have those cards, a small proportion of the total pool, what's the most effective I can be with them". But it feels like in practice it comes down to "who has more cards" or "the designers basically built this deck and you do or don't find the key pieces"
If I'm actually enjoying a mobile game, I'm happy to pay something, even up to battle pass levels some of the time. But only for a reasonable "this much per this", its constant drip of pushing ridiculously pricy upgrades is awful.
Marvel Snap's monetization is annoying. You can only buy cosmetic upgrades, not new cards, so it should be fine ... except you need the cosmetic upgrades to unlock new cards
I needed something to pass time today and finally downloaded Marvel Snap. It's not bad, though it seems getting the cards is slow and I don't like spending money on mobile games.
I used to play Elder Scrolls: Legends from its release until about a year after we got the news that it was dead and the last monthlies had been rolled out. I liked Skyrim and was interested by the lore, but the mechanics weren't balanced and the meta got boring, which had already been at risk even before Jaws of Oblivion's release.
so we just list other CCGs we've ever played or liked?
Ultimate Combat! fast paced emulation of martial arts. Each turn you try to chain as many cards into a powerful strike against opponent.
Gridiron is American football. but with humor. ex. Dallas team is bunch of convicts. so they can get away with penalties. players take turns playing offense or defense. offense chooses pass or rush. cards have symbols, and defense tries to guess what play the offense chose, and what symbols are most abundant. offense gains X yards depending on play chosen and success or failure.
Shadowfist goal is to gain control of Sites. Some artists for Magic also illustrated for Shadowfist. Various factions ranging from Hong Kong triads, to aliens, to elemental gods, etc. Very solid and flavorful game for duels (multiplayer needs rules tweaks).
Pokemon only played on Gameboy. Pretty good adventure mode. Except late game AI cheats with coin flips. (I have designed a CCG inspired by their zone layouts. i.e. uses a main "battlefield" and reserves).
Guardians has amazing art, arguably still the best looking cards in any card game to date. Three factions in roughly rock-paper-scissor struggle. Form armies and vie over terrains between the players. Very strong humor. Solid strategy (although after expansions, some factions were overpowered.)
Also worth mentioning Arcomage, the card game within Might and Magic 7/8. Defend your tower while blowing up your opponent's.
Dragon Dice is collectible dice. Different sizes, shapes, and colors. Even had a computer game. Chucking physical dice is great feeling.
Played many other CCGs back in the day: Jyhad, Netrunner (original and rebrand), Rage, Battletech, Wyvern, Illuminati, Blood Wars (Planescape), Dark Ages: Feudal Lords, Ani-Mayhem, HEX. Some are these are good games, just didn't have the player base to keep them afloat.
I sometimes play Pokemon card game. (I also play Pokemon Card GB2, sometimes. The AI is not very good. For one thing they tend to like to draw a lot of cards, which means they will often run out of cards. Their defense is often not very good, either, in my experience, and they will often attack without regard for defense.)
Yu-Gi-Oh Crossduel is their new video game adaptation, which seems to be Commander-inspired. It's 4 players, with one lane attacking each opponent, and you can essentially choose an upgradeable monster to be your commander
There was an explosion of magic-inspired (to be kind) games back in the day.
Original netrunner really should be taught as a masterclass in asymmetric game design. And there are lots of tools you can choose to use to take the gueswork out; but they do of course have an opportunity cost vs just guessing and bluffing.
Garfields next games in the series (rage and battletech) are not nearly so good. But looking back one more we come to Jyhad. (Sorry, 'vampire the eternal struggle to have enough room on the back of the cards for the game's title') - which is... it's a pretty good game, with a few different strategies to meta around and lots of room tfor tactics and politics and bluff in between. The downsides are that it's only really playable multiplayer, and it is long. So evolving those strateggies likely takes longer than you're willing to stick with it.
The warhammer 40k card game is shocking well designed, given its provenance.
The illuminati card game is roughly the illuminati boardgame in card from; shared deck to draw from. Still fun, but a ery different fun.
If you can find it - wyvern is a deck-building version of stratego. It's fun; though it feels like it needs a couple of weeks more playtesting and balancing. Or maybe I just didn't have a particularly good selection of cards.
There's a print and play Alex had - I want to say 'inspiration'? No - Ascension. Something like that. Its about half dominion and half magic; you add a card from your collection to your deck each turn, but also manage a board of creatures.
There's a bunch of mostly terrible computer games with the mechanics - ranging from etherlords to faeria. (Etherlords 2 is moderately fun for a while; faeria is inexcusably bad).
Honourable mention to things tht really push the boundaries of deck building - "Megaman Battle Network" and "Stacklands" are both quite engaging and add a realtime component to your deck management.
And of course we can't leave off without mentioning the big ones: Yu-Gi-Oh, Pokemon and Hearthstone. They, uh, exist. Tha's the nicest thing I can say.
I've mostly drifted away from Magic. I still love magic, the varied settings, the intricate gameplay, the interesting match of flavour and mechanics. But I don't have much time, and keeping up with a constant stream of new cards is increasingly less interesting.
Other card games I've brushed up against:
The indie Android: Retrunner resurgence. It's really well designed. The game feels good in the same way as magic while working in quite a different way. Instead of creatures on a battlefield, the corp player plays cards representing servers, and the hacker player makes hacking runs on the servers or the corp's hand or deck or discards. The corp plays firewall cards which can be bypassed at varying costs depending on the hacker's equipment, like "is it worth attacking".
I love the socially diverse cyberpunk flavour. But we only played a few games, I found the tension of second-guessing the opponent almost all of the time actually too adversarial.
I got sucked into the Marvel Snap mobile game. Each deck is 12 cards from your collection, each turn you have 1, 2, 3... energy and play card(s) from your hand to one four slots in one of three locations. Each location is won by the side with more power, try to win more locations. It squeezes an awful lot of tactics and deckbuilding into really short, quick games.
And I've played some amount of Slay the Spire, and other roguelike deckbuilders like Inscryption. To me "build a deck as you go" without being able to CHOOSE the interesting synergies is quite different, but also works well.
I don't think there's any design space for a new permanent type. Anything that goes on the battlefield can be represented by an artifact or enchantment, with a new subtype if they want to hide some of the backend rules text
Nonpermanent spells are even worse. I thought there might be room for a multi-turn sorcery, like Hearthstone has messed around with a little bit, but that's better done as a Saga
I think the only option is for a new card that goes in the command zone. Battle as a new dungeon-like mechanic that starts in your deck could be interesting. It seems likely that battle evolved out of the cut skirmish mechanic from War of the Spark
Facts:
Reasonable assumptions:
Wild guessing:
Planeswalker-like interactivity: Opponents can attack/damage battles to prevent you from "winning" the battle.
Dungeon-like benefit: You can do the same to advance through "victories"/"acts" and are rewarded with spell-like effects or maybe static effects (King of the Hill-style). Invest resources to gain incremental benefits.
What I don't expect:
For example:
Battle for Supplies
Battle
(After you draw, if you have enough conquest counters, collect your reward and advance the battle marker. Sacrifice after final reward.)
[4] You gain 5 life.
[6] Draw a card.
[10] Return up to two target nonland permanent cards with mana value 3 or less from your graveyard to the battlefield.
[2]
RULES NOT WRITTEN ON THE CARD:
Notes:
Why this needs to be a new card type IMO:
Why this might be in ONE:
My .02/fan creation. I'm here all week.
From the recent big leak The Monumental Facade, Mirrex, The Mycosynth Gardens & The Seedcore are colorless/fivecolored rare lands in the set.
The other five Spheres are probably color-aligned and a lower rarity. It's a cool idea to actually have the nine spheres of New Phyrexia appear as lands in the set.
At least one card in the set makes use of the subtype Sphere and groups it with Locus... and basic lands similar to Open the Gates and Circuitous Route. I like the grouping with basic lands and am surprised to see it expand to include two nonbasic land types.
Toxic fixes any worries about damage on the stack that poison had, because I think that's the only mechanical difference between that and Poisonous.
I guess Luka can't catch a break. While Jace hasn't felt the like the face of Magic for a minute, I still expect him to be uncompleated somehow.
Huh. I'd guess that if you're only ever going to draft it once, then a set could actually be very small. After all, you only have 3 boosters per player; so you certainly don't need there to be many rares or any mythics in the set. (But you do want to avoid duplicates cropping up - so can't settle on just three rares each). Uncommons are indeed the sticking point; since you need each player to see a guiding one in their starting pack - and ideally a different one. And then you want a decent chance at seeing a duplicate among the three packs but it to not be too likely. You have, what, nine uncommon per player in the draft, so you probably need about 20 uncommons in the set, to meet those criteria.
Then fill it out with however many commons you need to fit out the deck archetypes you have made. Given the absolute need for basic functions (every set needs a bit of direct damage, creature removal, counterspell, combat tricks, etc.) it's actually going to be harder to crop down the commons to a sensible level. Still; you could probably get away with maybe 100 of them. (20 in each colour means you're going to see a lot of duplicates; but that's probably ok).
But if you want it to be draftable more than once, and not just be the same set of cards each time, then requirements are going to go up. Still; I reckon you could get away with sub-200 reasonably enough. 150 seems like a plausible lower limit, if my reasoning is valid.
Of course the smarmy answer would be that the absolute limit is three cards - a rare, an uncommon and a common. But it would be a very boring draft.
For what it's worth? My two small sets work ok-ish for a draft, at about 100 cards each. But a second draft of either of them gets very samey.
I have made up many cards. Often what I find is not making up the name of cards, maybe someone else has ideas about it. (Cost, subtypes, flavor text, and other changes, can also be considered.)
I also have ideas about possible challenges, some of which I had not made up any cards by myself.
What I think would be helpful is a NNTP server to discuss custom Magic: the Gathering cards. (I set up some newsgroups on my own NNTP server, which may be used, I suppose.)
Sup, I have a question and this felt like the best place to ask:
What's the smallest set I can make that's still draftable?
It's obviously doable with 249 cards (101/80/53/15), older sets had only 20 fewer uncommons so that might work too. Conspiracy had 210 (89/68/43/10+65) but it's not a regular draft environment, I don't know if it works as a regular draft.
Can you do it with the equivalent of a small set? Smaller? Larger?
I'm all for Bizarro Gatewatch, and they would likely be more popular than the Gatewatch. They would just have to work like the Praetors of New Phyrexia: Encounter them individually and work up to the team-up.
I feel the Gatewatch is turning into something similar e. g. Teferi is using Gatewatch resources to make BRO happen, but not everyone shows up in the set.
If the Gatewatch hadn't immediately followed their founding with another team up on Innistrad and then another team-up onKaladesh and then another team-up on Amonkhet... we'd have seen far less Gatewatch fatigue.
Ixalan e. g. got praise for being a break following only Jace - despite following Jace of all options! :)
This was the plot of War of the Spark
I feel like this idea is something that was being considered until it became clear people were annoyed with the Gatewatch getting so many cards over every other planeswalker.
I think having a group of villainous planeswalkers whose interests align to forming an alliance could be an interesting idea. They'd need to be at least characters that could still have some complexity and could still somewhat be rooted for to work I think.
I found another possible confusion in the rules:
"Visit -- [Effect]" means "Whenever you roll to visit your Attractions, if the result is equal to a number that is lit up on this Attraction, [effect]."
To roll to visit your Attractions, roll a six-sided die. Then if you control one or more Attractions with a number lit up that is equal to that result, each of those Attractions has been "visited" and its visit ability triggers.
It is unclear if visit abilities work if the permanent is not an Attraction. (There is also the question of if a non-Attraction permanent is considered to have lights (similar to rule 208.3; the text may define power/toughness but it does not effectively have any if it is a non-creature permanent). However, even if it does effectively have lights, it does not answer the original question.)
I think that a more clear distinction between normative and non-normative rules is needed (for example, rule 120.3f is normative while 702.15f is non-normative); many more things could also be improved (not only for Unfinity, although Unfinity is one that has many more problems than usual).
I forgot text box exchanging is now part of the rules. Well, this implicitly answers the question. If "exchanging text boxes" means "exchanging rules text", then everything in the text box must be considered rules text or have "no rules meaning" (e. g. reminder text, flavor text, ability words, flavor words,
watermarksdecorative icons) - since the "lights" are considered part of the text box, even if not explicitly called out as rules text.To be fair: Unfinity probably put a lot of stress on the rules team.
Yes. Furthermore, whether or not it is considered to be a part of the rules text is important, even if it is copiable. Some effects might care whether or not they are considered to be a part of the text box, e.g. if two Attractions are made into creatures and then Exchange of Words targets them.