We've entered the new year! Realistically, not much has actually changed, but I can't help but feel a sense of release at getting through... well, whatever that last year was. Here's to a happy and healthy 2021 for you all!
Conversation this week is another short one as we gear up for the end of the WCDC Season.
Fairest Of Them All
As always we start by congratulating the winner of the latest WCDC; BloodMefist and their Shattered Memory!
We look forward to their theme, which will be the last of the Season!
Gift Exchange
We have an unusual start to the year for the Fan Community Spotlight - Frostivus's "A Boy And His Yeti" is a small set of Runeterra cards, a first for the series! It's great to see our community here expanding out to other games. After all, each game provides a unique challenge for creating cards for them, as the balance and syntax vary wildly across all card games.
One of the things that might confuse non-Runeterra players, for example, is the way cards refer to themselves - not by name, but as though they are actually speaking to the player about themselves.
I must admit I only have a passing familiarity with Runeterra myself, so while I recognise the grammar here as likely being correct I couldn't critique it as I would a Hearthstone or Magic card. That's part of the joy of learning a new game for me, though - working out the intricacies of how cards are written and figuring out how strict you need to be with them when creating your own.
Hearthstone, for all the consistently inconsistent memes, does have a fairly well established style for how to write a lot of effects; Magic nowadays is rigid and uncompromising in its card text, as is required for a game as complex as it is, but I do enjoy looking back at older cards and seeing how the language of the game evolved over time, from minor updates related to rules changes or new shorthand being introduced (like mill was recently) all the way up to headache inducing cards like poor old Animate Dead or Oubliette.
I definitely want to take a deeper dive into the card text of various games and how they've evolved at some point - if only to show people some modern Yu-Gi-Oh! cards and send them running in terror at the size of the card text. Maybe it'll be part of a future CDC, maybe I'll make it its own thing - we'll see!
Make sure you check out the full interview at the link above - it's a small set, but a very flavourful one!
Come On Down!
We end with the WCDC for this week - better click the banner quick before the Cost changes again!
Comments
Somehow these card design competition winners always seem to be really spot on on art and theme, but completely clueless on balance - this card is unplayable at 5 mana, and no minion priest will never be a thing.
Time Rip is a perfectly fine card (not stellar, but far from unplayable), and when satisfying the condition Shattered Memory would be better in both quality and quantity of minion generated. So it seems quite reasonable to me.
The only reason Time Rip ever saw play was to empower Galakrond. Even so, it started being cut because removing one minion for 5 mana is bad tempo. Talk about no tempo for priest, it really needs heavy support in a no spell archetype, including ways to generate minions the first 4 turns. Even so, this card would see no play. Just compare it to the mage spell which summons you a 5 drop as well.
The comparison with Apexis Blast (AB) is not as simple as you make it sound. When used for removal, AB has a strictly worse primary effect, and whether a random 5-drop on board is better than 2 known minions in hand is debatable. It is better for tempo, sure, but priest doesn't usually need to play for tempo.
On the assumption a spell priest would play to priest's strengths and grind out long games (instead of just trying to mimic spell hunter and have every spell summon minions, which always feels like it undermines the whole concept of the deck), Shattered Memory would normally be more useful than AB since a lonely 5-drop on board isn't going to achieve much anyway.
There is a fundamental point here: bad tempo does not equate to a bad card. The only reason it has felt that way for a while is because aggro has been pushed really hard in the Year of the Phoenix, but that was not always the case and will not always be the case in the future either.
If I may, the entire purpose of the competition we did was to design "no minion" cards for classes without such archetype meaning that no Hunter or Mage cards were allowed. Most other classes, of course, can't accomplish this archetype quite as well as Hunter or Mage, so a little bit of lee-way is needed when analyzing these cards. Cards with custom watermarks can also be thought of as coming from a set where a no minion archetype for the class would be pushed by at least one other card, even if we don't know what that card would be.