Tiers
Posted: Mon Jul 08, 2013 00:58
As promised to snowdrop, I'll write a bit on sets development, which is by my way quite obvious, but then having played exstensively MtG not everyone might get it.Yes, the cost is arguable. However I'd like it to keep to 3 until deck/playtest occurs, as anyway we don't have many powerful cards. I''ll open a topic soon on the matter.
Commercial CCGs have both weak and strong cards in the same set. Stronger cards become overpriced and their value pushes players to buy more cards, in the hope of getting them whilst they get the weak ones mostly. This effectively forces players to reduce the number of strong cards the play in favour of the weaker ones.
Here, we do not have such matter.
However these stronger cards also give flavour to the set and rule out which deck types are played and which ones are not. We need to give flavour to the sets too.
Going deeper, they limit the viable choices of competitive decks by pointing at their weak spots. If, for example, is quite easy for opponents to wipe out the grave, relying on it will become more rischious. Or if opponents can drop a 10/10 on the second turn, playing a slow deck will be more rischious.
What is to take into account, however is not the entire card pool, but the cards that are actually played, eg:
Taking it to the next level, there are also cards that stay in between: neither strong or weak, often with subtle abilities that are not always useful. This cards however constitute an important part of the game because they will be quite variable from deck to deck.An opponent could make a 10/10 on the second turn deck, and I would lose to it with a slow deck. That is highly unlikely because that deck loses to other deck types which can counter the 10/10. My slow deck is not that bad against these decks, so playing it is a viable choice.
We can name the stronger cards Tier 1, the middle ones Tier 2 and the weakest Tier 3. Not to be confused with rarity: the tiers can change quite drastically with a couple of newer cards.
Being mostly acknowledged from internet and having cards printable at will makes things quite different for us: t3 cards will be despised and t1 even more overrated.
It will take extra care to balance a set, and sets between them.