loyalty restricting
I believe we just used the word "restrict" differently: With restriction I meant that a card with the requirement of loyalty 3 will
never be playable (actually "available") to a hero that only generates >3 of that particular loyalty. Thus, the cards are restricted from even entering the same deck as that hero in the deck-creation phase of the game. "Prohibited" would be a better word to describe what's going on, as "restriction" maybe suggests that it still can happen to some degree.
abilities restricting
copono wrote:I do think that abilities of the hero restrict the selection. A deck that is consistent with the hero's abilities has a huge advantage (I think).
Yes, I also believe that. I see it as a strength though to be able to find the perfect deckbuild that is really fine-tuned to the heroes abilities
and also wins over 50% of the games in its matchups with any other human-built-deck out there. A deck that works very well with it's hero abilities should indeed increase it's chances of winning - why else would you care about selecting a hero in the first place?
Even though chances to win become higher to win, it doesn't necessarily translate into that you have a good or better deck than the opponent: Maybe some decks built totally around their heroes abilities would be a failure due to which those abilities are and given both the quantity and quality of the other non-hero cards in the cardpool that happen to work with the hero ability. This would be the result if we create the cards to stand "on their own" and not necessarily with the heros and their abilities as the origo. Most of the cards should
not be created to "complement" the available hero or "for"/with a specific named hero in mind - such an approach would be a disaster in our project due to what it does with card compatibility and what it means for our resources in terms of art/money.
So, if a hero has only certain kind of abilities in some faction, you are only going to use certain kind of cards with that faction. For, example, if only a certain faction's hero gives +2/+0 to all your attacking creatures, a deck with small and cheap creatures will most likely be in that faction.
Yes, all true. However, how does that in any way differ from what a player does with every single card in his/her deck? No matter if it's hero or not the player wants to maximize synergy. What you're writing is that certain cards, x, will lead to that certain other cards are included in deck, y z etc. That is always the case in a cardgame and is the heart of the deckbuilding.
The problem that arises in the case with heroes is if we only offer a) specialist heroes and b) very few heroes to choose from.
"Specialist heroes" would be a hero that has all of the abilities focused on a particular thing. Say for example a dwarf hero that focuses on attack, that has 2-3 abilities relating to all kinds of situations that are connected to attacks. If we release each faction with just 1-2 such heroes, then of course we'd see a majority of decks that played in one of two ways. This is a problem because it kills of deckbuilding, combos and variety in the game, especiall in the games early stages where it has a small cardpool and few heroes to choose from.
I agree with you that it really is a problem if we do it that way. Luckily we don't have to. I believe that no true specialist heroes should be created while the game has a small cardpool. Heroes can still be designed to be more versatile, giving each hero
more ways to be played. Compare our dwarf hero that only had attack abilities with a hero that has one attack ability, one defensive and one that relates to magic, or with another hero that has two event related abilities and one with defense. Clearly the latter ones have less obvious and more flexible deckbuilds around them compared with the dwarvish attack hero.
And if you take into account that heros will have 2 points in one faction and 1 in the other, playing cards of the second will already be very restrictive
Not really: The cards in the secondary faction aren't restricted. Whatever the text says on them still applies. What's restricted is
the cardpool from which that player can pick cards from to that specific hero, due to the heroes 1 loyalty in the secondary facion.
For the sake of argument let's pretend that we eventually will have an even ratio so a third of each factions cardpool requires loyalty 1, another third loyalty 2 and the final third loyalty 3. That translates into that specific player having the choice to include 66% of the cards from the primary factions pool and 33% from the secondary factions. In what way is that a problem? The level of loyalty required isn't related to
power of the card (gold cost handles that), the loyalty just indicates how characteristic the card is for the faction functions.
To give an example of that we can imagine two gaian cards:
Code: Select all
Elvish Healer
Creature
Goldcost: 1
Gaian Loyalty cost: 3
0/1
(T/2) [mark]: Target fighting creature that should have been placed in the grave after the combat has resolved remains in play instead.
Code: Select all
Healers touch
Event
Goldcost: 3
Gaian Loyalty cost: 1
Target fighting creature that should have been placed in the grave after the combat has resolved remains in play instead.
Compare the two. They both have pros and cons, but if you want to be a healing expert then you really should go with the Healer and not the Touch. Now, any faction/deck won't be able to do that. Why? Because due to loyalty 3 requirement the healing ability is still one that the gaian faction excels at. It's part of what they do best and their identity. Multi-factioned heroes that have a gaian loyalty of 1 can still benefit from the gaian healing by including the Touch, but to a lesser extent. That said, since they're multifactioned, they can also do stuff that the mono-factioned gaian deck can't ever pull off. It's a matter of choosing playstyle and you do that by choosing the faction.
You could do something like 50% for 1 point difference and 150% for two. Just think about it. Imagine in magic paying 5 mana for a counter or 10 mana for a 5/5 creature.
It's definitely a way to do it, the way you describe. It's one of the standard solutions to the problem at hand. Issue I have with the solution is:
1. Identity. Factions in MtG have much less meaning than I want them to have in WT or in any game. The more factions you can use and put in a deck, the less you actually play a certain faction or a certain style and the more you become the jack of all trades. This is true even if it costs you plenty. While it does indeed allow more combos it does so at a price for both the player in mana cost/mana development/timing and the overall feeling of what your deck represents. In real life most of the good and current MtG-decks tend to be 1-3 factions anyway, suggestiong that we are already on par with that anyhow in WT.
2. Balance I still see very strange combos coming around in the future that will cause all kinds of balancing problems even if we price "faction deviation" steeply. The larger the cardpool, the larger the problems. These problems
are already proven and inherent in MtG due to their huge cardpool but also very liberal deck building rules (and yes, there you do already pay steeply when you play multifactioned): Cards are banned altogether, some are made limited, blocks are created, rotated in, and rotated out, and new core sets are released every now and then. The banning, limitations and block rotation are really a disasterous failure from a development point of view, and also for all players that wasted money on the cards that "happened" to be rotated out or restricted. Banning and limitation is there because there are obvious problems with the cards implication on balance. In part that is also why rotation of blocks/sets is around. In our case we can't afford banning, limiting or rotating, and even if we could all those actions are symptoms of bad design and should never have to happen in the first place.
problem?
What I want to have more clearly identified is the actual problem(s) we'd be facing by using the loyalty and versatile heros as I have described in previous paragraphs. It's true that it would be
somewhat more limiting when it comes to deck building compared with a 100% open deck building system as MtG has, but in return we would also resolve some of the issues that I believe MtG has and the combos would still be very many and growing with time.
Would you mine showing me how to do the step-by-step calculations for how many possible deck combinations one would be able to build? Let's say we have 50 cards per faction in the cardpool, and that we in the core only have mono or duo-factioned heroes and that a card may exist up to 4 times in one and the same deck. How many "meaningful" deck variations would then be possible for a faction? (With "meaningful variation" I guess we should not count all deck versions where only 5 or less cards with unique names have been swapped out)