History of a HEX Card – Well it’s About Time

Corey Burkhart back again! Today, I’m going to give some insight into how we design and develop resources in HEX as well as share some stories about a new cycle of rare resources in Herofall, the Wells!

Resources are the card type least likely to get attention in a game. When you play a resource, in a flash you’ll gain some amount of charges, resources, and thresholds. But once that animation is done, you don’t have to worry about the card again. Unlike any other card type, these don’t go to your crypt or void when you’re done with them. They disappear completely. Resources are also unique in that you can play them at any point during the game. Because they have no cost, there’s no restriction beyond the “once per turn, on your own turn” rule that prevents you from getting them out of your hand. As such, their presence goes mostly unnoticed as they’re not actively fighting the battle like other card types.

Resources have three major components that they provide for a player:



Resources provide charges. Resources provide thresholds. Resources provide resources.

While these are not the only things a resource can do, they’re the simple building blocks of what makes up a resource. When we as designers make a resource card, these are the things that players expect from us. Our Standard resources all provide their namesake threshold, a charge, a resource point, and a permanent resource.

We want to make resources that are exciting, but we also want to make sure we don’t go overboard because resources are the foundation of everything else that goes on in a game of HEX. Over the past few years we’ve experimented with some crazy resources, but we found that the best resources are usually ones that have some tradeoff between these three major components. However, with these tradeoffs comes some boost in power when compared to the Standard resources.

For example, the Shattered Destiny shards provided a choice of thresholds, but in exchange you weren’t provided with a resource point. This trade-off prevents our dual shards from being strictly better than their basic resource counterparts, while at the same time providing flexibility for multi-shard decks. When testing Shattered Destiny, we tried out all sorts of things including a cycle of resources that didn’t provide a charge. We didn’t like these resources in the end because they played very poorly with champion charge powers and the deckbuilding that each champion brings with it. By removing the charges on resources, we made each of the champions less exciting and much less fun to play with. As a designer or developer, you need to be much more focused on not only the individual card and how it plays, but also how it plays within the entire context of the set. Draft, Sealed, and Constructed format(s) are each important pieces of how a card is experienced within HEX. A large amount of time that goes into each card is not just how does it play and feel on its own, but how does it play into the greater sum of the parts of the game. Each card, champion, gem, equipment, etc., is all a bigger piece of the grand puzzle that is HEX. If we leave one card or cycle in really poor shape, it can reflect poorly on the set that it’s in. If that set is received poorly, it can then reflect unfavorably upon HEX as a whole. Therefore, we strive to make sure each piece of the puzzle fits in perfectly.

When we got to playing constructed Herofall, we had all the resources from Shards of Fate, Shattered Destiny, Armies of Myth, and Primal Dawn at our disposal. We really liked the resources from Armies of Myth and Primal Dawn that required allegiance to a specific race. In deckbuilding, they did a fantastic job at providing players the tools to build both multi-shard racial decks and single-shard racial decks because of the special powers that some of them had.

With Herofall, we were no longer going to focus on the individual races of Entrath, but instead on the war between the Ardent and Underworld forces. As such, we wanted to make to make resources that would allow you to combine different races within your favorite shards. We had a number of attempts at the resources before we had the first cycle that stuck for a while:

These resources allowed you to play your Diamond and Ruby Humans more reliably with the Ruby Orcs that you love on the Ardent side, while Underworld fans could more reliably play their Sapphire Dwarves with their Vennen! The fact that you always receive one threshold made these resources exceptionally desirable in two shard decks and even three shard decks in some instances. We liked that some decks were branching to focus on being about two different races. For example, you could build decks including both Humans and Orcs by focusing on Ruby as the base shard and using the Root of Hatred to help play Blood Orcs and Root of Innovation to help play Sapphire Humans. However, when going down this road, it became more challenging to choose a champion players liked for the charge power because these resources didn’t always grant charges. This effectively dampened one of the interesting questions we want you to ask as part of the deckbuilding process – which champion do I choose?

Another thing we didn’t like about this cycle was that the only cards seeing play in these decks were those with lower threshold requirements. Cards with stricter or more expensive threshold requirements were comparatively more difficult to play. This encouraged players to replace high threshold cards with cards that were usually less powerful but had cheaper threshold requirements and were easier to play. Decks playing more than two shards were not only giving up the ability to play more difficult costed cards, but they were also giving up on playing champions with higher charge costs because of the restriction. Once we reached that point, we realized that these resources weren’t creating the gameplay we wanted.

Choosing to give up playing an awesome champion with a unique ability is not a fun choice. We want high health champions to be there because the entire recipe of high health and expensive champion power incentivizes you to play a longer game that is fun for your deck. We don’t want you choosing a high health champion because you felt like you had no other good option. Ironically, this cycle was taking us further way from the roots of what makes HEX fun. We were incentivizing players to avoid using the most fun cards and our really exciting champions.

Once we determined that the Roots weren’t providing the experience we were looking for, we dug them out of the set and searched for some new ideas to plant into Herofall. We knew we wanted the resources to gain you a charge because we didn’t want to invalidate the charge gaining cards from Shattered Destiny, but we also knew that we needed them to provide multiple thresholds beyond those within a race so players could build non-racial decks. We wanted players to play with the awesome cards in Herofall that encourage you to have multiple cards within the faction like Mistress of Bones or Ardent Officer.

That was when we came to the Wells!

These resources came together much more nicely for constructed play. They are the first resources to have a requirement of one threshold or the other, and in the end they’ve played significantly better for two-shard decks. It’s much easier to find one threshold than it is to find both. As a limiting requirement, this opened up a ton of interesting space which helps us print more cards down the road with significant threshold requirements like Mylaanth the Lifebinder or Rampaging Tarasque. In turn, making cards with more significant threshold requirements allows us to make the textboxes as exciting as these troops are.

Three-shard decks are more difficult to make with the Wells but they’re not completely lost by the wayside, which is a great plus with these resources. You can still build your Diamond-Sapphire-Wild Coyotle and Human decks or your Ruby-Sapphire-Blood Dwarf and Necrotic decks, it just takes some more fine-tuning to do so. The last thing these Wells really preserved was the designs that cared about gaining charges like Highlands Shinobi and Storm Cloud. These resources don’t punish you for building a deck that lacked the ability to get both thresholds early and often and therefore played much better in our eyes than the Roots.

That’s some insight into making resources in HEX and how we got to the Wells that you’ll be able to open up in your Herofall boosters! I’d love to hear your thoughts about the Wells and what decks you’re planning to build with them in the forums! Or, maybe you can show your fancy new deck ideas off if we meet on the Ladder!

Corey Burkhart~

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