Late Developments – Prophecy

Welcome back, HEX fans. Matt “HEXSquiddy” Dunn here, and with the solidly positive reaction garnered by our previous look at the evolution of Spiderling Eggs, it seems that a follow-up is in order. So, today we’ll be looking at a mechanic that took a while to find its way, but ultimately ended up as a key component of Armies of Myth: Prophecy.

When we first sat down to figure out what the coyotle would be up to, one thematic that jumped out to us was their unique perception of time. You see, to the coyotle, time is not necessarily a linear concept. Rather, they believe that all things that happen in the universe, past, present, and future, are happening in the same moment. With this philosophy in mind, we set about trying to find mechanics that played around with the concept of time.

One of the first and most obvious places to go to was quick troops. While the Sapphire of Mischief minor gem did give players a taste of how quick troops played, we knew even back during Shards of Fate that the coyotle would be a good fit for the debut of actual quick troops, playing not only into the aforementioned “time” theme, but also giving them that stealthy, ambush-springing feel that their hunting parties were known to employ. Cards like Starfire Totemist and Canyon Scout from Shattered Destiny also gave a small glimpse of what was around the corner.

However, while letting the coyotle own the quick troop space for Armies of Myth was a good start, we knew that wasn’t what we’d want to focus on for the core of their identity. For starters, we knew we’d eventually see non-coyotle quick troops down the road, so we didn’t want to make the association between quick troops and the coyotle too strong. A trickier issue, though (and admittedly, this is tip-toeing into the development side of things), is that quick troops can be dangerous if we’re not careful, especially at lower rarities. For example, great care was taken to ensure that it was not easy for the common quick troops in Armies of Myth to “eat” an attacker: that is, to jump out at quick speed, block a troop, and kill that troop in combat without being destroyed itself. This is related to the concept of hidden power I mentioned while talking about the vennen, which is probably a concept worthy of a development article in and of itself. The short version is that the above ability to “eat” an attacker is much more powerful than it appears, which often means the power level of such a card would have to be set at a level that feels unsatisfying. That’s just one of a handful of issues an abundance of quick troops would cause. Suffice to say that focusing an entire race around playing the game at quick speed would be a dangerous recipe.

So, we knew that quick troops would be a component of the coyotle, but we needed something else to focus on. We set our minds to brainstorming potential time-related mechanics, and came back with all sorts of ideas. One of my favorite proposed mechanics on paper was a power that had originally appeared on a card cut from Shards of Fate, one that Ben Stoll had even mentioned briefly in one of his interviews: a card that could be seen and played while it was the top card of your deck. It was like the card was in your hand before it was in your hand! However, this turned out to be less exciting in high quantities than we would have liked, and to make matters worse, the most powerful part about those cards was that they basically all had an invisible “draw a card” written on them when played from the top of the deck. “Draw a card” is one of the more powerful lines of invisible text a card can have, it turns out. Hidden power rears its ugly head again! Fortunately, this was much less worrisome in small doses, and as you all know, we were able to keep that mechanic on one rare in the set, with the Brown Fox Scout finally getting her chance in the sun after waiting in the wings since the beginning of the game.

We continued to put all sorts of mechanics through the wringer, but none of them felt particularly amazing. One that at least showed some promise was known as Omen during playtesting. It was a mechanic that cared about the top card of your deck, and granted a power while the correct type of card was on top. For example a troop with “Omen Action: Flight” would have flight while the top card of your deck was an action. While this did create a “caring about the future” feeling, there were many concerns about having the powers turn on and off constantly, even in a digital space where tracking the board state is less of an issue. Some tweaks were in order.

The easiest change to address the problem was to simply have Omen become a one-way off/on switch. So, we changed the definition: “Omen Action: Flight” would now mean “When an action enters your hand, this gets Flight.” This meant Omen cards would eventually get their power “turned on” at some point in the future, but the exact time it would happen would be a mystery. Of course, crafty players could accelerate the activation of their Omen powers by manipulating or increasing their draws, or finding other ways to get the required cards into their hand. This direction seemed more promising, but as we played more with Omen, we started to ask ourselves what Omen should actually be looking for.

Our plan originally was to divide Omen among the three shards of the coyotle: Sapphire Omen cards would look for actions, Diamond would look for resources, and Wild would look for troops (those last two may have switched back and forth a few times during playtesting as well). The problem with that layout, though, was that building an actual “Omen deck” was very hard to do. Omen Resource cards were essentially a given to turn on at some point for any deck, but Omen Troop and Omen Action actively fought against each other. You were basically discouraged from playing your Omen cards together, which was pretty unintuitive, and not at all what we wanted. So, we asked ourselves if there was something all Omen cards could look for instead. Resources jumped out as the easy answer, since we could reliably count on decks to have those. However, another potential answer popped up that sounded like it could be very exciting. Rather than looking for one of the three card types, Omen would look for all of them.

The reasoning here was very simple: we’d probably be happiest if most decks were a mix of resources, troops, and actions. What if Omen encouraged that? Thus, the definition of Omen changed once again. Now, if a troop had “Omen: Flight,” that meant the troop had Flight if an action, a resource, and a troop had entered your hand while it was in play. Of course, with this being a much harder quest to achieve, the Omen bonuses tended to be bigger, more exciting payoffs. That last part, I believe, was the key to steering us in the right direction when this version, too, ran into trouble.

The biggest concern we had with this Omen was that we were teaching players a bad lesson. It’s not hard to imagine a new player looking at this version and thinking “Oh, I see, a well-balanced deck should be one-third actions, one-third troops, and one-third resources.” However, as most of you probably already know, this is absolutely not the case. Decks need focus—control decks feature fewer troops while beat-down decks feature many troops. For a new player, figuring out the ins and outs of building a new deck for the first time is already an exercise fraught with peril, and having this mechanic be so misleading to such a player didn’t make much sense. However, as I mentioned earlier, it did give us the first big clue to what was working.

First, a quick side-note on playtesting for all you potential designers out there: when people are playtesting your product, it is extremely important that you listen to them. I don’t just mean listen to what they have to say, although that’s important too. I mean listen closely to everything they do as they play. Listen to every sound they make, every “hmm” or “oh!” or “ugh,” every groan, every sigh, and every laugh. Watch them. Did something make their shoulders slump? Did something cause them to crane their neck quizzically? Did something make them bolt upright in excitement? Study their face. Take note of every frown and every wince, every smirk and every smile. There is so much expressed in these tiny moments that can be missed if you aren’t paying attention. You’d be surprised how often your players won’t even notice that they’re doing it, but these reactions are your purest form of feedback if you can teach yourself to listen to them.

I mention this because while the reception to all our previous incarnations of Omen had been lukewarm at best, this version was the first time we started to see true excitement among the players. While this version wasn’t perfect, we had finally gotten something right that none of the other versions had before. What was it? As we watched game after game, it became clear: with the Omen abilities taking more work to enable, and the payoffs being bigger, a player would often find themselves at the start of their turn hoping, sometimes even chanting for that last piece of the puzzle to enable their Omen power. That moment was the key. That was what we had to focus on.

I had already discussed the importance of the start-of-turn draw when talking about the vennen last week. We already knew that, through the use of their banes, they could twist that moment of anticipation into one of fear. What if the coyotle instead amplified that anticipation? The key to what was working with Omen was that players had something exciting to look forward to. We needed to focus on that feeling of hope lying just around the corner, maybe even within the next draw. How could we make that happen?

The answer was Prophecy, although even here the first incarnation of Prophecy was not the one you are all familiar with. Perhaps because we were still on a path from Omen, the first version of Prophecy simply marked a card as “prophesied,” which had no meaning by itself. However, most cards that prophesied other cards also did something when a prophesied card was played. The good news was that with this version, you really, really wanted to play Prophecy cards together. It also allowed us to give different shards a slightly different feel with their Prophecy triggers (a Wild troop might get bigger when a prophesied card was played, while a Sapphire troop might exhaust an opposing troop, for example). However, there were two main problems with this version. The first was that the mechanic had become insular, meaning that it played with itself and not much else. Since this version of Prophecy needed prophesied cards to work, the number of cards that could interact with the mechanic in the future was somewhat limited.

The other problem was that this version of Prophecy didn’t really care about the prophesied card itself. Or rather, the smaller and easier to play your prophesied card was, the happier you were, since that would make it easier to get all your juicy Prophecy triggers. Not only did that feel a little lame, it also played especially poorly with what was at the time another mechanic in the set. Thankfully, the answer to these problems was simple enough: just flip it around. Rather than Prophecy giving a future card the ability to make your current card awesome, we would instead have the current card make your future card awesome.

Just like that, things all seemed to fall into place. An important trick we learned from the previous incarnation of Prophecy was to include some effects where you actively wanted the power to end up on something big and expensive. A lot of the Prophecy effects that grant a keyword to a troop serve this function, as did things like Thunderfield Elder. We also did get to keep some of the fun of caring about prophesied cards with Lanupaw, Prophet of Fate. Interestingly enough, there was also a card from Shattered Destiny that had functioned exactly like the final version of Prophecy, but it got cut at some point to make room for something else. Once we settled on this version of Prophecy, though, we thought long and hard about trying to fit it back in as a sort of sneak peek of the mechanic (a Prophecy prophecy, if you will), but we ultimately decided against it.

While it was a long and winding road to get there, we eventually arrived at a mechanic that felt downright perfect for Armies of Myth. Unlike the banes of the vennen, which found a solid direction relatively early on, Prophecy took quite a bit of refining before we found the secret that made it tick. And yet, the two mechanics, side by side, serve as a beautiful emotional contrast: excitement versus fear, anticipation versus dread, hope versus despair. It’s almost as if it was meant to be.

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