Late Developments – Spiderling Egg

Hi there, HEX fans. My name is Matt Dunn, one of the designers here working on HEX, and the lead designer of Armies of Myth. One thing that we’ve seen players express interest in seeing is a look at the evolution of a mechanic between its conception and its eventual release into the world. After all, one of the keys to good design is iteration, and it’s not unusual for a mechanic to go through several rounds of tweaking and testing as we slowly refine it, honing in on the parts that are fun and cutting away at the parts that are not. Now that Armies of Myth has been out for a while, we thought it’d be nice to take a look at how one if its mechanics came to be. As such, it’s now my pleasure to bring you the story of the signature tool of the Vennen: Spiderling Egg.

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When I first sat down with Phil Cape, the Lead Developer of Armies of Myth, we knew we had an interesting challenge on our hands. The plan for AoM was to feature the four remaining races that had not been featured in HEX’s first two sets, namely the Coyotle, Elves, Necrotic, and Vennen. However, two of those races, the Elves and the Vennen, had at the time only been depicted in one shard each. Now, while it was entirely possible to craft the set in such a way as to make the two mono-shard races workable, even in limited play, that plan also clashed with something else we wanted to introduce in AoM: prismatic cards. If two of our featured races were sticking to one shard, they would be missing out on all of that multi-shard goodness. So, our first task was to see if it was possible to start expanding the Vennen and Elves into a second shard.

We went to our creative team to chat about this subject, and they cooked up some cool ideas as to how and why these two races may have started to dabble in gem magic. The Elves and their newfound ruby-wielding Ashwood brethren are probably a subject worthy of its own article, so for now we’ll stick with the Vennen, for which the team envisioned a secretive collective that had begun exploring the power of sapphire magic, which would eventually come to be named the Azure Fang. Thankfully, since the AoM planning stages were going on while Shattered Destiny was still in the works, we were able to work in a sneak peek at this new sapphire-Vennen development with Xartaxis, Bishop of the Azure Fang.

Interestingly enough, moving the Vennen into sapphire not only helped with the issues I mentioned above, but it also helped us to differentiate their feel a bit more from their arch-enemies, the Orcs. While the two races both use blood magic, the Orcs, with their leaning towards ruby, have a quick, brutal feel to their style of play. The Vennen, meanwhile, would now embrace the cunning, long-term-planning side of sapphire. Like a spider spinning its web, a Vennen player would aim slowly render the opponent helpless and defeated, relishing the anguish their opponent feels as they realize far too late that they’ve fallen into a carefully-woven and elaborate trap.

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Now that we knew the shards we were working with, we had to figure out how the Vennen were going to play. To find the answer, we had to get to the core of the Vennen identity. What is the most defining characteristic of the Vennen? The answer we arrived at was simple: Vennen are sadistic. Again, this creates a sharp contrast to the Orcs; whereas the Orcs aim to deliver (and receive) a quick and brutal death on the battlefield, the Vennen would consider such a thing a terrible waste. They would much rather take a prisoner alive, ensuring that said prisoner experiences a healthy dose of agony before death came to greet them. So, the trick would be to find mechanics that would play into that feel. We knew we wanted something that felt mean and a little invasive. Thankfully, we had an excellent candidate in mind for such a mechanic.

Inserting “bad cards,” (or banes, as they would come to be known) into an opponent’s deck was a mechanic we had already played around with in the past with such cards as Sabotage and Reginald Lancashire. We believed, though, that we could take that style of card and turn it into a full-blown mechanic for Vennen. It felt like a great fit for them for a number of reasons. One, it had the potential to play well with bury effects Chronic Madness, which is something we had already given Vennen some access to due to it being one of those mechanics that feels mean-spirited to many players. Two, having these banes forced into your deck can feel invasive and creepy, which was exactly the sort of feel we wanted for the Vennen. Third, and perhaps most important, was the profound impact these cards had on a player’s draw step.

That moment at the start of each turn when a player draws a new card is arguably the most important moment in the entire game. Each time a player draws a card from their deck, they are presented with new options, new possibilities, and even all new lines of play. More than anything, though, that card represents hope. No matter how dire a situation a player may be in, they will often find themselves thinking “I can still win this if I just draw [insert some sweet card in their deck].” We’ve all experienced that moment of tension, chanting “one time!” or “get there!” or even “c’mooooon big action!” And we’ve all experienced the supreme joy of drawing something awesome to dig you out of a rough spot.

It is because of this focal point of emotions that banes are so sinister. Suddenly, each time a player draws a card, there’s that worry in the back of their mind that they might hit a whammy. Banes take that moment of hope and anticipation, and twist it into one of despair and fear. The torment this can inflict on an opponent is exactly the sort of thing the sadistic Vennen would revel in. All-in-all, banes seemed like a perfect fit, so the trick was finding a solid execution.

Now, one of the simplest executions of banes was actually inspired by the deck-building game genre. Take Cryptozoic’s own DC Comics Deck-Building Game, for example. Some of the cards in that game hand out Weakness cards to the other players, which are essentially blank cards that serve to gum up their hand when drawn. Similarly, one potential bane execution would have been simple blank cards, essentially making for dead draws for the opponent.

Here’s the problem with that execution, though: it would often be hard for the player handing out the banes to see that their effects were doing anything. In a deck-building game, players often just put their entire hand on the table every turn, so it’s easy to see when your Weakness cards are affecting your opponents. Similarly, if HEX were a physical game, your opponent might be groaning or complaining about the banes eating up their draws, so you could at least see the fruits of your labor that way. In a digital game, though, it’s entirely possible your opponent might not be chatting at all, and so you, as the bane player, would have no indication that the banes were having any effect at all. So, to sum up, one player isn’t having fun because they’re being hit with these blank cards, but the other player is also not having fun because they can’t see the payoff the banes are giving them (note that the payoff could very well be powerful, it just doesn’t feel powerful). In short, neither player seems to be having fun which is not a great place to be.

The “blanko” version of banes also ran afoul of something Phil identified as a potential danger we’d want to avoid, namely the “hidden power” of Sabotage and Booby Trap. Specifically, a lot of the power when a Booby Trap goes off comes not from the damage, but from the fact that the player getting hit essentially skips their draw. As I alluded to before, though, the power there is often invisible to many players, so it doesn’t feel as awesome as it actually is. Phil posited that the right answer was to make it so that our banes would not eat up a champion’s draw step, but instead replace themselves when they “went off.” Not only would this allow us to avoid the problem of hidden power, it would also make things feel more fair for the player on the receiving end. No matter how many banes were in their deck, no matter how many they might hit when they went to draw a card, that player would still get to see a new card for their turn, perhaps even digging themselves out of whatever rough spot the banes may have left them in. Ensuring that the player on the receiving end of the banes never felt too hopeless was an important part of making sure the mechanic would still lead to fun games. All this led us to a simple, damage-focused bane, simply called Poison. It would deal 1 damage to a champion when it entered their hand or graveyard, and then replace itself.

The result of testing this incarnation of banes was incredible, to say the least. Because we could focus the power of the banes into the damage output (aka “the fun part”) and not have to worry about the skipped draws part, we could be much more generous with the number of banes being handed out, which in turn meant we got to see banes hitting more often in games. What was truly amazing, though, was just how much people seemed to be enjoying them. From our more casual players to our seasoned professionals, everyone seemed to be cackling with glee as the banes piled up. Chains of multiple banes going off were especially exciting. We may not have had the exact execution correct at the time, but we knew we were on the right track.

From there, we tried a few different tweaks. One big question to answer was what to do with the Poisons when they hit. The simple answer was to void them, much like Sabotage, but for a while, we had considered letting them stay in a champion’s hand when drawn. That way, if the player was forced to discard a Poison later, the graveyard trigger would deal a second damage to them. In a way, Poisons would either slowly deal more damage, or slowly shrink a player’s maximum hand size. Unfortunately, that turned out to be a little unintuitive, and didn’t seem worth the extra confusion versus simply voiding the Poisons when they hit.

Another variant that came up was abandoning the idea of inserting banes at all, and instead, simply marking individual cards as “poisoned.” A poisoned card would deal damage when it entered the player’s hand or graveyard, so it played very similarly to inserting banes. It did sidestep the need to create a new card, and also opened up the ability for other cards to reference poisoned cards in some way. It also played with a handful of other things, like “return to hand” effects and such. For a while, this seemed like a promising direction to take.

However, there were a couple of problems with this execution, although those problems weren’t obvious at first. While playing with this new version, there was a palpable feeling that somehow, it just didn’t quite feel as awesome. While modifying random cards in an opponent’s deck was mechanically very, very close to inserting banes, the two things felt very different. Putting new cards in the opponent’s deck just felt more invasive and violating.

Secondly, while it didn’t come up very often, the modifier version made it possible to technically poison every card in an opponent’s deck. This situation, interestingly enough, actually ruined the feel of the mechanic. You see, once the opponent knows all their cards are poisoned, they’re just resigned to their fate. With the banes, however, there was always a glimmer of hope that maybe this time, with this draw, the player would avoid hitting any banes at all. That hope, no matter how fleeting, was important to keep the player on the receiving end of the banes from feeling utterly broken. Also, the transition from hope to despair when the banes did hit was an important part of the Vennen feel.

One of the most profound changes to the Poisons, though, occurred due to the intersection of a couple of different problems we were having. First of all, while Poisons were cool, they were a little one dimensional. The damage output of Poisons, while simple, didn’t really offer all that many ways to interact with them, either when playing with them or against them. Meanwhile, a separate but equally tricky problem facing us was that we were having trouble finding room for one of the other big Vennen themes from the first two sets, namely the spider makers. Making swarms of little spiders was something players would probably be looking forward to doing, but finding room for that on top of everything going on with the Poisons was challenging. But then, someone pitched an idea that handily solved both problems: what if the “Poisons” were actually Spiderling Eggs? Instead of dealing damage, they would hatch into a little spider.

Suddenly, all those Poison cards were making troops instead, meaning they interacted with anything that cared about troops, which tends to be a pretty big swath of cards. They could be enhanced with all the various cards that buffed troops. They could be sacrificed to the many blood effects that used sacrifice as a cost. And best of all, they could be fought with removal, especially removal that was good at taking out swarms of 1 DEF troops. It proved to be a tremendous improvement, and that version is what you players now have in your virtual hands.

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The newfound spider eggs, over the course of their evolution, had become one of the mechanics we were most eager to debut into the new world, so much so that the team working on the Frost Ring Arena asked if we’d be alright with the mechanic being adopted into the iconic Vennen encounter there. With that, though, our story of the Spiderling Eggs comes to a close. It had some struggles along the way, but it was clear after the early playtests that we had something special. The mechanics of the other three races all have interesting tales of their own, though, and perhaps one day it’ll time for those tales to be told as well. For now, though, I hope you’ve enjoyed this little peek into the path this mechanic took.

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