Transformation Nation

We’ve smoothed out the transformation rules for cards

By Ben Stoll

Hey Hexomaniacs, Ben Stoll here, Director of Game Theory and Lead Designer of Shattered Destiny. Today, I wanted to explain some of the strange rules that accompany HEX’s transformation mechanic. I bring this up because Shattered Destiny went out in good shape, but there were a few corner case rules that we wanted to clean up that also weren’t worth moving the release date. With today’s patch, these corner case rules have been cleaned up. So, I want to be clear about what gameplay is intended and explain the way it will be working in a more permanent sense. It brings me great joy to see Shattered Destiny out in the wild–as the HEX universe expands with each set, we’ll be accessing new digital design space, and new rules interactions will potentially crop up (or old rules interactions will become more prominent). In fact, I believe each set that’s begun its development cycle thus far has come packaged with some brand new conundrum(s) for our oh-so-patient-and-accomodating engineering team to solve. One really strange thing that can happen in HEX is cards transforming into other cards with different card types. With Shattered Destiny on the scene, probably the most frequent source of such an interaction will be from the uncommon cycle of Mentors (troops that die and transform into an action card from Shards of Fate). I don’t recommend bringing up such high-level corner-case stuff to your friend who is just learning the game, but here are the rules for what happens when a card transforms into another card type in HEX:

When a troop card would transform into a non-troop card, it reverts prior to the transformation.

When an action or resource card would transform into a non-action, non-resource card, it reverts prior to the transformation.

When a non-action, non-resource card would transform into an action or resource card, it reverts prior to the transformation (this is simply the inverse of the second rule).

The fourth and implicit rule is simply that in all other cases, no reversion takes place prior to the transformation.

So, why the crazy and hyper-granular rules? Well, it can be really cool when a power intended for one card type somehow ends up on another card type, but it can also be very problematic. The above rule set, as clunky as it is, preserves as much of the cool stuff as possible, while killing all the problematic stuff. Ultimately, we decided to serve game play as much as we could here, and accept our game rules being a little more complex. But before I go into more details about why we went with that decision, I’d like to give you all a fair look at the choices we didn’t go with. There are two other obvious ways we could have gone with this. One way would have looked way better on paper, would have made it way easier for players to learn the rules comprehensively, but it also would have killed a lot more fun: we could have had one blanket rule that stated “whenever a card transforms into another card type, it reverts first.” Unfortunately, in this world, you do stuff like “Target artifact gets Invincible” you transform that artifact into a troop, and it loses Invincible. Sad face. There is a lot of fun stuff you can do that doesn’t really mess up gameplay that we would be sacrificing simply for a cleaner and simpler rule. The other end of the spectrum would have been having it such that nothing ever reverted when it changed card types.

This world allows for a few genuinely fun things that I am sad we will miss out on—this is the world where you can inspire your Mentor of the Flames to have lifedrain, transform it into a Burn, and your burn now gains you 2 health when you play it. Believe me, R&D did everything it could to try and convince itself that that was an interaction worth saving, but this world is ultimately worse for the game. This is also the world where your Burn can end up with Flight and “When this enters play, gain health equal to its DEF.” But much worse than that, your Burn can end up with Crush, which one forum poster pondered whether or not would mean your Burn would deal a point of spillover damage when it targeted a 1 DEF troop (it wouldn’t, because, as you would have to know in this world, Crush only works with combat damage). You would also have to know that Spellshield doesn’t protect your action from Countermagic, etc. etc. But it gets worse. We would essentially have to have super detailed and off-site “technical text” for every card that you would have to access in order to understand how it would work. Imagine you played a card that said “Target action gets “Draw 2 cards” (the same text that appears on Oracle Song) and then transformed that action into a troop. You now have a troop that says “Draw two cards.” But draw two cards…when? Such a text box on a troop is pure gibberish.

If you think about it, “Draw two cards” on Oracle Song technically means “When this card resolves, draw two cards.” But that’s something you would have to learn or reference. You would also have to understand the difference between “when this resolves draw two cards,” and “when this enters play, draw two cards.” But worse than that—so would your opponent. If you’re reading this article, you might be an experienced and high level player capable of handling all this, but you’d still be forcing your opponent to make heads or tails of a troop that read “draw two cards.” This is also scarier since we live in a world where there will be new mechanics indefinitely, which potentially exacerbate this stuff. It’s very important to us that the text on the cards make sense and be intuitive.

The truth is, you’d be surprised at how little we lose beyond “My Burn has lifedrain, lethal, or Cerulean Mentalist power!” even though your brain might want to insist that you’re missing out on jillions of possibilities. But we get to kill an immense amount of interactions that are nonsense, confusing, or in the worst case, deceive you into thinking something is going to happen that isn’t. So, I wanted to go into detail about the worlds we decided not to live in, just to be fully above board and comprehensive with you guys, but now I’d like to talk about the world we do live in. As you already know, when a troop transforms into another troop, it retains any modifications it has gained (unless otherwise specified). In majority of cases we believe this is better for both thematic and mechanical reasons—if you give your troop Dwarven Ballistics Training, teaching it how to deal 1 damage to something Dwarf-style, and then it transforms into an Angel with Angelic Ascension, it would be both sad and silly if your original troop didn’t retain this power.

It’s similarly painless (both for our rules engine to maintain and for the players to figure out) for artifacts and constants to transform into troops (or each other). One way to think of it, is that everything that a constant or artifact can do, a troop can also do—have powers that are dependent on entering or being in play, go from being in play to another zone, etc. This is the key to avoiding rules problems. However, no card type other than troop can attack or block or has ATK or DEF, making it possible for a ton of problems to crop up when troop cards lose that card type during a transformation without reverting first. Finally, Actions and Resources also play by all of the same “essential” rules. Their powers are always “do some number of things when this resolves,” they can’t exist in play, etc. So, I know that you’re sad that your damage actions can’t get fun damage related powers that also work on troops. But rest assured that there is plenty of room for potential craziness still. One of these days, you’ll still be able to play “Target action gets “when you play this, copy it three times”” targeting your Burn, then transform it into a Ruby Shard with Alchemical Dimensionalist, and then bypass the resource rule on turn 4 three times and that crazy tri-shard Wild Root Dancer combo deck that you’ve been having prophetic dreams about will finally come together!!! Anyhow, thanks for reading, HEXers! I hope you’re enjoying the new set and I can’t wait to see what crazy decks you all cook up!

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