Some chill background music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygH9VcV7IBg

After lifting up my face from playing Path of Exile I realise it’s already next Thursday. Instead of doing anything productive, I rewrote this.

So what is it about? Card design, as you can guess from the title. I’ve always felt the need to properly quantify concepts so that people actually know what the hell others are saying. It’s impossible to have a proper discussion if everyone thinks they’re speaking the same language, but isn’t. So here I am to analyze, and offer solutions, which thankfully exist.

Disclaimer: The most important points listed here are my own opinions, based on experience and game theories. There are no statistics this time around, except for simple numbers.

A card is designed with 3 principles in mind: power, novelty, and fairness. All of these factors are in relative to the base collection, and cannot be considered in a vacuum.

Power is how strong a card is mathematically, and is what determine whether or not a card has a place in top-tier decks. This is where one would determine whether or not a card is overpowered. Due to the fickle nature of the meta, and the fact that more cards are always going to be printed, a specific card’s power level is always subjected to change. This factor is almost always reliant on a card’s numbers, and can be adjusted.

Novelty is how different a card is. Since the base spells are removals and the base minions are just stats, the uniqueness of a card’s text determines its novelty, also dubbed its ‘fun’ value. A card like Satan for example is entirely unique in its design. Cards like this often requires deck to be build around them. This is what one would call the “soul” of a card. In order for certain cards to be novel, basic cards needs to be boring, this is fine.

A card’s fairness is based on its possible counter play, and how swingy its effect is. A card feels especially unfair when its effect is so powerful and so inconsistent that winning off of it is most of the time pure luck of the draw. Deepwood Anomaly is such a card. At the moment, and hopefully until the end of time, it is a terribly underpowered card. Forestcraft doesn’t have a way to support this card actively, but if it ever did, the game experience would then be warped around it. This is present day Aegis Haven, where a singleton win condition is so immensely unfair that the entire game revolves around an uninteractable card.

It’s important to grasp the fact that a card’s fairness, power, and novelty factor can be independent of one another. A card like Demonlord Eachtar is intensely overpowered, but also novel and fair. A card like Aegis is slightly on the weak side (for now), novel, and honestly super unfair. An unfair card is often novel, until the effect becomes mundane.

So what’s this about card design? Since everything is relative, the ideal card collection for a game like Shadowverse is a solid base set of bronze and silver that are mostly fair and consistent, with golds and legendaries filling in the novelty factor.

A card’s fairness, on the other hand, determine whether or not it’s healthy for the game. How good it is is completely irrelevant. Losing to an unfair card is incredibly frustrating, and god forbid it’s actually good too. Back when Daria was all the rage, games against her that didn’t involve a hard counter all boiled down to whether or not the player themselves drew poorly. The person on the receiving end, on the other hand, mostly just play out their cards and hope it’s their opponent who’s crashing into a brick wall. This problem is only exasperated with the release of the new set.

That said, overpowered cards certainly don’t help the state of the game. When they are so blatantly busted they carry entire classes, it is a problem. While win conditions certainly needs to be stronger than the overall power level of the game, did Shadow really need all of Eachtar, Soulsquasher, Catacomb, and Shadow Reaper? Did Dragon need all of Sybil, Ouroboros, Zell, and Rahab? Catacombs and Sybil probably could have made their respective classes relevant on their own, and overpowered cards like those should’ve been supplemented with more novel cards to round out and interesting archetypes, instead of even more overpowered cards.

This is, of course, not to touch on the very toxic element of overpowered neutral card. It’s no secret that Grimnir is very good. The fact that he’s neutral severely limits card diversity in a game that sorely lacked it in the first place, and only served to make decks more homogeneous. Every non-aggro non-Rune deck plays him, and he universally performs to a point that it’s saddening.

Now this is a topic I’m bringing up because Cygames has gone and stated that they want cards that end games when they are played, in order to hard-cap the length of matches. The win conditions they’ve been printing reflect this design philosophy. Hulking Giant, Heavenly Aegis, Bahamut etc. all contribute. The game then becomes a series of dice roll that puts intense focus on the luck of the draw, as well as the going first or second coin toss. Obviously these factors will always play a part in card games, but it wasn’t this bad before, but it has progressively gotten worse. This is a matter of design choice, and no amount of number fiddling will make it go away. Of course, it’s always possible to make these cards so underpowered that they’ll never see the light of day, but then it would render the point of printing them irrelevant. Again, the Deepwood Anomaly examples comes in handy.

I haven’t played Shadowverse for two weeks. It’s a shame because I am of the opinion that the game has one of the best core mechanics and base set of any modern digital card game out there, except for Faeria probably. The good news is all of these can be remedied. Cygames have shown willingness to change cards in the past, and there’s definitely a solution here. It’s a three steps one. Rebalance the overpowered cards first, they can still be strong, but not to this kind of level, and especially not so many for one archetype. Secondly, nerf the unfair nonsense back to meme territory where they belong. They can exist for those who like their novelty, but no one ever complained about Lord Atomy, and that’s where Aegis should be. Thirdly, if this game has to end by turn 10, make it the most interactive and decision-filled 10 turns possible. Storm Haven is an archetype representative of the best this game has to offer, and it ends the game fast all the same. Similarly, a card like Dark Jeanne is what this game needs, whose duality forces actual thought, and effect plenty unique to encourage experiments.

I can’t believe I went through an entire article without mentioning Forte.

I also remembered that I have a Twitter.