Moe to sexy girls 'color' wheel

[Mask_De_H]

Just because there's always a winner and a loser doesn't excuse bad options. It's a bad thing that 'dorf is dogshit most of the games he's in, even if people like GW can make him work. It's a bad thing that Clerics and Druids are better than you in D&D 3.5. People pick characters they click with in fighting games, and if you enter tournaments and the character you mesh with is ass, that's bad for the game. Every 3S Sean, BBCS1 Rachel or Xrd Potemkin is a huge blow to character diversity and the overall health of your game. It's even worse when you have six main archetypes (the moe colors) instead of 12-54 characters in a given fighting game.

If the selling point of your game is competition, options that can't compete make your game look worse. And competitive Smash is a hatchet job done to a party game; the moe murder TCG is being built from the ground up to fix stuff about Magic the Gathering.

People can dick around and do whatever in a casual game. People are going to choose options based on Timmy and Johnny desires. That's no excuse to not make a mechanically tight game so Spike doesn't rip it to pieces or worse, the game falls to pieces when Timmy and Johnny poke at it.

[GreatGreyShrike]

There's two different ways things can be imbalanced and they are important and distinctly different.

The first is that a thing can be too weak. It sucks, and it's a problem, if an option is presented as valid by the game but is actually so weak that it's not a real valid option in high competence play. It reduces the metagame by a single option, and narrowing the metagame is bad. But frankly - if you have 30 options or 29 options in terms of deckbuilding will not destroy the game. It's a way more forgiving error than, well...

The second way that a thing can be imbalance is that it can be too strong. This is a substantially worse problem, especially for competitive multiplayer games. If something is broken enough, it might reduce the metagame to a single option. Not by a single option, but to a single option. And that breaks the entire game and makes things pointless. If you're really amazingly lucky, and the game isn't online multiplayer but in person, you might be able to have the community ban the broken thing in question until it is removed or fixed or whatever - like Akuma is banned from Street Fighter 2 and the remaining game with him banned is pretty decent. But in a e.g. online multiplayer game with no ban enforcement mechanism it can completely destroy the metagame and wreck everything, and the game-maker will have to ban it somehow - which will (understandably) piss off anyone who may have spent real-world cash on it, if you're going for a TCG monetary model.

This happened in Shadowverse for a while, which was being a point of comparison upthread. The developers refused to fix broken options and I dropped the game during the Alice In Wonderland expansion because the metagame devolved to the point that there was ONE viable option, and it wasn't fun to play a boring and overpowered deck against itself infinitely. I don't know if they ever fixed things, because the terribleness of the experience and refusal to fix it in a timely manner was so bad I uninstalled and haven't looked at the game since then.

[Josh_Kablack]

This happened in Shadowverse for a while, which was being a point of comparison upthread. The developers refused to fix broken options and I dropped the game during the Alice In Wonderland expansion because the metagame devolved to the point that there was ONE viable option, and it wasn't fun to play a boring and overpowered deck against itself infinitely.

Not 100% precisely true. There were two *slightly different* varieties of Neutral Blood that were godawful broken tier in the Wonderland expansion. The one that used Spawn of the Abyss for its lategame win condition was weak against the one that used Phantom Cat for its lategame wincon, but Spawn was stronger against anyone who wasn't running Neutral Blood.

*************************************************************

*************************************************************

But the more useful point is that any TCG/LCG you release is absolutely going to need some means of post-release re balancing. Testing is not merely hard, it has a computational complexity measured in factorials of triple-digit numbers.

For example, let's say that we make a really really simple LCG. It has a pool of 60 cards. Decks have to be exactly 10 cards, and each card can only be used once in each deck, and this game only gets played 2 player. There are now 273,589,847,231,500,800 possible decks. And that number squared of possible matchups. Testing all of those against each other is not happening before release.

That means that an imperfectly balanced product is getting released to players, who will do their best to find exploits to win. That means that the development cycle has to include post-release patching. For a physical card game, that almost has to be just issuing Ban and Restrict lists, while online games can actually edit the abilities of individual cards.

[maglag]

That means that an imperfectly balanced product is getting released to players, who will do their best to find exploits to win. That means that the development cycle has to include post-release patching. For a physical card game, that almost has to be just issuing Ban and Restrict lists, while online games can actually edit the abilities of individual cards.

MTG already had card editing before it was cool.

People can dick around and do whatever in a casual game. People are going to choose options based on Timmy and Johnny desires. That's no excuse to not make a mechanically tight game so Spike doesn't rip it to pieces or worse, the game falls to pieces when Timmy and Johnny poke at it.

MTG doing pretty well after all those decades, still the king despite having seen plenty of borked stuff.

And as pointed out by Josh_Kablack, it is simply inevitable given any significant number of cards.

So some moe/sexy girls will end up stronger or weaker, the only alternative is spending the next million years playtesting and that's not really a viable option. If cards prove problematic after game release, they can always be banned/restricted/errata'd. Even Starcraft, the most balanced RTS ever, only became so thanks to years of Blizzard diligently patching stuff up. It's not a matter of never falling, just a matter of standing up every time you fall

Just don't do Artifact's mistake of promising never to do any errata then going back in your word a couple months after launch and there was a bubble building up over imba rares, doubly so when you're taking a direct cut of the secondary market.

[OgreBattle]

To keep with the theme various effects should involve damaging the girl's clothes, having them fall out of their clothes

Should the game also take on a more moe moe sexy girl angle? Like instead of MtG's "Beat up planeswalkers" it's like Maid RPG serving ojousama

A non violent (with options for violent hijinks that involve clothes falling off) theme would be nice

[maglag]

To keep with the theme various effects should involve damaging the girl's clothes, having them fall out of their clothes

That's kinda only possible in a computer game.

How many levels of "cloth damage"? Also what about mooks that only have
1 HP or being one-shot?

Fire Emblem Heroes has two stages with different portraits, "normal" and " clothes ripped" at below HP that also shows up for a moment if dropped straight to 0 HP. Characters also have a third combat portrait for when their special triggers.

Should the game also take on a more moe moe sexy girl angle? Like instead of MtG's "Beat up planeswalkers" it's like Maid RPG serving ojousama

Both as Touhou does it. Things are kept vague so depending on how you read things it may be saving the world or just some friendly competition for cake.

A non violent (with options for violent hijinks that involve clothes falling off) theme would be nice

Clothing is HP and instead of a graveyard there's the covered zone where naked girls go hide out of shame.

Instead of ressurection/healing magics, there's cards that repair clothing.

[OgreBattle]

Pokémon has Evolution cards perhaps stronger cards come into play layered like that

If it’s a deck building game perhaps the first phase is themed like a competitive harem manga where you spend resources to recruit girls

Or you yourself are a moe moe girl club leader recruiting for your club
Win conditions are based on having the best school festival or idol group performance

Zombie idol Chan vs VR idol squad

[Koumei]

I like where this is going.

[Thaluikhain]

Creatures start out in unremarkable clothes and upgrades take the form of gowns or tiaras or sparkles?

[maglag]

I like where this is going as well.

Pokémon has Evolution cards perhaps stronger cards come into play layered like that

The problem with that is that you could only play them already layered and if there's random draw mechanics the chances of getting all layers for a specific girl don't sound so good.

Although we could make "evolving" girls where the basic ones have simpler clothing then things get cuter/skimpier.

Like Poppy

"Evolves" to Poppy QT

"Evolves" to Poppy QTπ

If it’s a deck building game perhaps the first phase is themed like a competitive harem manga where you spend resources to recruit girls

Or you yourself are a moe moe girl club leader recruiting for your club
Win conditions are based on having the best school festival or idol group performance

Zombie idol Chan vs VR idol squad

In that case something that may spice things up is that each game there's something that's more popular like "maids", so all maid girls score more points, but there's only so much maids to go around so you could also decide to focus in non-maid stuff to face less compeition during the building-up phase.

[Foxwarrior]

Did somebody say deck building maid game?

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/65282/tanto-cuore

[Username17]

Did somebody say deck building maid game?

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/65282/tanto-cuore

Tanto Cuore is pretty much exactly Dominion with the additional mechanic that Victory Point Cards can be bought out of your deck into a separate pile where they stop clogging your hand but are still worth points. And then, once that mechanic has been introduced - obviously there are a bunch of cards that have special text for when you've bought them into the extra pile. It's a strict upgrade on Dominion, although a pretty minor one.

From a flavor standpoint, Tanto Cuore is about filling your life with sexy maids and getting them into your chambers. Individual cards are maids in various states of dress and undress. But structurally it's basically just Dominion with the extra method of interacting with your deck where you can buy cards into a pile that isn't shuffled back into your deck but is still worth points at the end of the game.

-Username17

[Username17]

So there was a big Magic tournament without sideboards. Here's what we learned:

• The vast majority of people want to play Magic without sideboards. Best of one is more flexible for casual play and competitive play alike, and sideboards are time consuming and stupid and people hate them.
• Without sideboarding, it is very difficult to make a midrange deck that can win. The entire Duo Standard event pretty much collapsed into Esper Control + White Weenies Aggro.
• Best-of-One Control Mirrors are boring as shit, because both decks come to play with large numbers of cards that are dead against each other. Making the game both low skill and also time consuming.

Making the basic hand management mechanic include the ability to put a card in your hand on the bottom of your deck and draw a replacement every turn would really mitigate the "dead cards" part of Best-of-One. That this mechanic can not only replace mulligans, it can replace sideboards. And allow players to pack cards like Lava Coil to protect against Aggro decks confident in the ability that they can bin them for another chance to draw threats against Control.

-Username17

[Axebird]

I bounced off of Duelyst when it came out a few years ago, but they've had a mechanic where you shuffle a card back into your deck and draw a different one as a replacement since launch. It's digital, so they can get away with shuffling your deck at least once every turn when that would be insane with physical cards, but it's shocking to me that no other games seem to have taken the hint and implemented a similar rule.

[DrPraetor]

I was fairly competitive at Duelyst a couple years ago when it came out (my little brother is very good and I think he was ranked at some point, but has gotten bored.)
https://duelyst.gamepedia.com/Game_Rules

During the late-stages of the Beta that I was playing, IIRC, they went from draw 2 - replace 1 to just draw 1 - replace 1, and I'll grant it was an improvement. Under the old rules, even in their guaranteed ramp, in long games you spent a lot of time playing a 5 and a 4 in the same turn and very little time playing 9s.

[Username17]

Draw One, Replace One seems like the place to be. Mulligans are terrible, and generally speaking being a card or two down at the start of the game is extremely punishing, even with the free scry. They are experimenting with a new mulligan rule that lets you choose which cards you are down - which is obviously a huge boon to combo decks. Frank Karsten has done some math on what London Mulligan decks [url=https://www.channelfireball.com/article ... in-modern/[/url] and it just looks horrible.

The Draw-and-Replace makes things more consistent as well, but does so over time. If we drop the maximum card copies down to 3, decks don't more consistently find individual cards than playing with no mulligans at all until about turn 6. And I'm totally OK with decks finding specific cards by turn 6. I don't think that's too early for a deck to "go off" since that's long enough for a linear aggro deck to just win the game.

-Username17

[Username17]

So Magic is going in hard on new templates for Planeswalkers, and (finally) exploring some new design space with the concept. Planeswalkers are still stupid, because Magic has a mechanic for "you can only use this once per turn" and it's called tapping. Planeswalkers are shit design because they don't work like cards in Magic work, they rely on a completely separate piece of accounting which is a fucking nightmare and marked by literally nothing on the table.

But let's consider for a moment Star Realms and the Space Station cards. As we see in Star Realms, a card your opponent may attack instead of your face has a disadvantage. Your opponent can make reasonable choices about whether they'd like to chip off some of your face or get rid of one of your resources. On the other hand, a card your opponent must attack has an advantage. Maybe it was good enough that your opponent was going to attack it anyway, but the fact that they don't have the choice is always no better for them and often much worse.

My intuition is that having fortresses on the battlefield keep track of damage from turn to turn is generally bad. Attackable targets can just work like creatures where if they don't die they reset to their normal hit points at the end of the turn.

-Username17

[DrPraetor]

Wall of Water:
http://img1.ak.crunchyroll.com/i/spire2 ... 4_full.png
is a very difficult card to balance.

It had better be better on defense than a minotaur; or, you'll never use it. On the other hand, if it's sufficiently better, then no-one will even try rush decks and everyone will go midrange instead.

There's an unstable equilibrium where midrange + walls loses to control loses to rush. Is that what you would target?

I suppose the comparison card-to-card becomes less direct if fortresses are cards with a special rule that your opponent must kill it, in order to win. But, you still can't have defensive cards too dominant over rush cards, 1:1.

[Username17]

The existence of walls is very similar to the existence of removal and sweepers.



These two cards are actually very similar. One essentially "removes" an attacker with a power less than 5, and the other removes a creature with a toughness less than 5.

Now Wall of Mist basically does not see play, and Lava Coil is a format staple. And part of that is that Wall of Mist can be defeated with Flying, Deathtouch, or Menace. And part of it is that Midrange isn't really interested in this kind of effect because it can't remove a blocker if you happen to be the beatdown. And part of it is that it can't be used to remove utility creatures like mana dorks. All of these things are real ways that the wall is worse than the coil.

But the real reason that Wall of Mist doesn't see any play in Blue Control is that the deck thrives by turning enemy removal into dead cards - that's its slick plan against Midrange. If Esper Control put a wall in play, the other player could get value off a Chupacabra or Cast Down that would otherwise be very close to being a blank piece of cardboard in their hand.

Let's turn our attention instead to a wall that does see play:



So that only removes an attacker with a Power of 3 or less. That's less than the Wall of Mist. But it has two things going for it. The first is that because it also does reach damage to your opponent's face it isn't blank cardboard when your opponent isn't attacking you. And the second is that because it lives in an aggressive deck that plays a lot of aggro creatures any removal cards in the opponent's hand were already "live cards" so playing it doesn't turn on anything that wasn't already on. Your opponent already killed your Steamkin with a Chupacabra, at least the field can block the thing.

The core truth of "draw and replace" as a mechanism is that players will be continuously sideboarding through the game. And that means that there isn't any "virtual card advantage" of turning your opponent's cards off by refusing to play targets for their removal. The best you can do is get a tempo advantage by having your opponent replace a useless topdeck at the end of their turn. But eventually that card in their hand is going to turn live.

-Username17

[DrPraetor]

That's true, but if anything replace might make walls too good; since, yes, your opponent can just dump removal onto the bottom of their deck if you play neither walls nor creatures, but then that also applies to your own walls, if they are a form of removal that is situationally-better.

The Fortress as you described - which is a Veteran Bodyguard and not a wall - is a whole other dimension of design space.

[*] Fortresses could eat a ramp (that is, a land) when they come into play, and you get the ramp back when your opponent pops them (which they have to do, in order to win.) This is my favored hack on the shadowfist victory condition.

[*] You could start with a fortress, which your opponent has to pop before they start doing you damage. The fortress does something for you (maybe the benefits-of-going-second are fortress specific as well?), but when the fortress pops, you get a bigger benefit. This is my favored hack on the L5R conceit of starting with a clanbox.

Either way, I don't want to delay a typical game of magic more than 1-2 turns beyond the current expected length, and you still want at-least the three broad strategies of rush, midrange and control to all be as-equally-viable-as-possible.

[DrPraetor]

How should the different factions play?

Hope wants to come from behind and win. This is very different from how white plays in the sets were white strong - coming from behind is not the same as having defense, it means you have big bombs that you drop if you survive the rush.

Law should be the defensive/lock/control suit. Law should also get (most of the) scry. Done properly, Law thus has natural synergy with game-lengtheners.

Blood gets stronger as trades happen. This means you want the game to run long and also to trade up.

Chaos should be unpredictable - you should spend time cycling cards to the bottom of your deck and then flipping the top of your deck over (designed to be anti-synergistic with Law's scry) to get random stuff. Chaos should also focus heavily on trading up rather than directly winning...

Gloom kills both players, shortening the game. This makes gloom intrinsically anti-synergistic with Blood (in addition to Hope and Law); is that odd?

Nature has a swifter ramp, which is nice if you either want to finish the game quickly (Gloom), or afford your bombs sooner (Hope).

... no, that's unsatisfying. You really want the wheel to run:
Hope
Law
Blood
Gloom
Chaos
Nature
======

Distinct issue, with Hope and Law.

In Three Hearts and Three Lions, Law means:

which is "Hope" on this moe wheel.

Only later, by way of Moorcock and gradually, does Law instead mean:

[Username17]

How should the different factions play?

The key insight is that every faction needs to have cards that contribute to the archetypes of Control, Midrange, and Aggro. And thus the question becomes "How should the different factions play in each archetype?"

Now Aggro is the simplest archetype, and most of the cards that get into competitive aggro archetypes are just some variant of a 1 or 2 cost creature with a decent and aggressive statline. You can I suppose profitably have a discussion about what "reach" looks like for different factions, since obviously "Red Deck Wins" has a bunch of burn and "White Weenies" has a bunch of ways to restock the board and "Gruul Stompy" has a bunch of big hasty boys it can topdeck. It seems to me that you could very plausibly create six different reach plans to round out aggro decks and with different sets different ones of those would be best suited to the environment and the "main aggro colors" would change.

Midrange and Control are more "interesting" archetypes because they have cards at many parts of the curve and tend to involve enough land drops that they can run 2 or more colors. That means that you could plausibly make a deck whose early interactions were from Blood, whose card advantage engine was from Chaos, and whose win conditions were from Hope.

Which means that the color pie has to carve out space all over the curve as well as all over the card types.

So my thought on Nature is that:

• Aggro Nature is about using recurrent threats. Your reach is that you bring the spirits back for round two and three and whatever.
• Control Nature is about bringing in big mana ramp to get to the endgame quickly. Card draw and big mana. You also get Vassal counterspells, which is a highly efficient form of removal that is only available at very specific times.
• Midrange Nature is about sticky threats interspersed with ramp.

-Username17

[Username17]

When you're dividing up the color pie, you have to ask yourself what a faction is good at providing and what it's bad at providing, which in turn will inform what a faction brings to your deck and what compromises your deck has to make by not including other colors.

Because of the fact that end-of-turn card-swap gives every player substantial flood protection,but only screw protection from about turn 3, I expect that most players will choose to run between 27 and 30 lands, with even the most hyper-focused aggro decks not dipping below 24. As such, the typical constructed deck will have 11 different non-land cards in it. Now the hand refining mechanic also encourages players to have 1-of silver bullet cards because the opportunity cost of drawing a dead card is so much lower, so tournament decks will probably have a lot more than 11 different cards in them, but the starting point would certainly be to have 27 lands and 11 different good cards at 3 copies each.

So what does that look like? For an Aggro deck, that's just a pile of 1-3 cost cards (and probably they pack a 12th card that's an extra 1-cost in lieu of the 25th-27th land). But for Midrange and Control that's a mixture of early pressure and interaction and late game battlecruisers.

What a Control deck is going to want is to have one or two win conditions, and all nine other cards to be answers and card advantage. And thus, barring "internal sideboard" cards (and disregarding multi-colored cards for the moment), a faction is probably contributing about 4 cards. So it would be possible to imagine a faction getting space in a Control deck despite not having any answers at all. They could just have some good inevitability and a few solid win conditions and rely upon two other colors for targeted removal and sweepers. But I don't think that's necessary. Every faction can have answers. Here are some that could be wholly or partially restricted in the color pie:

• Unconditional Counterspells
• Conditional Counterspells
• Conditional Vassal Removal
• Unconditional Vassal Removal
• Conditional Sweepers
• Sweepers
• Bounce
• Non-Vassal Removal

Now that's more than 6 things, which means that even if you decided to give each of those things to a single faction, that there'd be stuff left over. More realistically, I think your "conditional" answers can appear in several colors with different kinds of conditions attached.

Conditional Counterspells:

• Nature: Counter a Vassal Summoning.
• Law: Counter a non-Vassal, non-Land Card.
• Also Law: 1-cost extremely conditional "got 'ems" such as "Counter the second non-Land card an opponent has played this turn.
• Blood: Counter a non-land card unless your opponent pays life (or some such similar choice).
• Chaos: Counter a non-land card unless your opponent can spend more mana.

Gloom gets unconditional Counterspells, and Hope doesn't get Counterspells at all. And yes, there needs to be a generic term for a card that isn't a land. MtG uses "Spell," but I kind of thought "Spell" was going to be the catchall term for things that work like Instants and Sorceries in MtG, at which point there needs to be another term that covers Spells, Assets, Holdings, and Vassals.

In any case, there's a lot of room for multiple cards of different costs within these parameters. Nature could have a Vassal that has Ambush that counters a Vassal while played. Or it could have a slightly more expensive spell that counters a Vassal and also gives additional value like drawing a card or putting a land from your hand into play. The 1-cost Blood spell that counters a spell unless your opponent pays 3 life will probably see play in an Aggro-deck as a 1-mana spell to burn your opponent for 3, but the 4 mana Blood spell where you gain 4 life and then your opponent has to pay 5 life or have their spell countered probably won't see constructed play at all.

-Username17

[DrPraetor]

Fair enough.

However, while you're reforming MtG, you should probably set it up so that Aggro decks are more interesting?

If there are early defenses that need to be answered in order for an early win to be practical, then aggro decks want to be 2 colors and don't want to be solely a stack of stabs and zaps.

[Username17]

Fair enough.

However, while you're reforming MtG, you should probably set it up so that Aggro decks are more interesting?

If there are early defenses that need to be answered in order for an early win to be practical, then aggro decks want to be 2 colors and don't want to be solely a stack of stabs and zaps.

Two color aggro decks have existed in the past. There was Atarka Red during Tarkir, for example. It can happen, but it's a hard sell because Aggro by its nature is playing less powerful cards in exchange for consistency. Generally speaking, a two color Aggro deck exists as a single color deck that splashes for reach.


The then current version of Red Deck Wins was willing to splash Green for this.

The core issue is that you see two new cards each turn, one at the beginning and one at the end. Which means that on turn 2, you'll have seen 3 new cards, and on turn 6 you'll have seen 11 new cards. Which means that if you have 12 sources of your secondary color and you really need it by turn 2, you're failing to find about 8.6% of the time (11% if you don't get a draw step on turn 1!), while as if you're a midrange deck and you really need your secondary color by turn six - you're failing to find less than 1% of the time and tales of that kind of mana screw are camp fire stories. The two color aggro deck really can't depend on deploying its second color before turn 3 or 4, so you can't normally expect to be able to play two colors equally. And thus two color aggro exists as an archetype only when one color has radically better aggressive vassals and another color has radically better finishing moves.


The Red Deck Wins decks that play this card would be essentially identical if this card was Blue. They'd just have some blue/red lands to splash this thing and play it when they emptied their hand just like they do now.

The way I think you want to think about color identity is from the perspective of two-color Midrange decks. Those decks are pro-active and put threats on the board, and ideally they should feel meaningfully distinct based on what color combination they are. This was the "Guilds" concept of MtG, and it's really an important concept. It's such an important concept that while you'd definitely give them all names, you wouldn't give any of them unpronounceable names like "Selesnya."

Anyway, you gotta start somewhere so let's talk about the five flavors of Blood: Blood/Hope, Blood/Law, Blood/Nature, Blood/Gloom, and Blood/Chaos. Each of these can in fact have a signature two color character who is a Queen, because obviously.

• Blood/Hope: Queen of Heaven. You get Angel Knights, which are stupidly big and give you life when they hit things, and they are capable of winning most races on their own. So your early turns are there to stay alive until you can start making the table shake with giant angels.
• Blood/Law: Queen of the Waves. Soldiers and Knights and Officers and Aristocrats that make token troops and boost the troops you have.
• Blood/Nature: Queen of the Fairies. You get threats that are hard to remove and synergy effects that make them even more difficult to remove.
• Blood/Gloom: Queen of the Damned. It's a sacrifice deck where you put out spirits and minions and then you sacrifice them for credit and say "death trigger" a lot.
• Blood/Chaos: Queen of the Pirates. You have brutal effects of pillage and glory when your vassals get through to your opponent, and then you grant evasion and use removal in order to get your vassals through.

-Username17