Ive played card games, both online(Hearthstone, shadowverse) and physical(Yugioh, MTG, ext.), and one thing has always been true for each one. Alt win cons always pop up and, unless they are trash, ruin formats. So lets learn from YEARS of player feedback. Ban anything that says destroy opposing hero if X. Just good design.
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It’s what happened when your design team is terrible and out of ideas and you need to come up with stuff on a deadline.
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Make a legacy card. How do you think Reno came back? Fan service pack filler is easy to make.
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You could not do better design even if your life depended on it.
So just stop pretending.
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Better design then a card that says “Ignore your opponent for the whole game, win by not playing the game”. Hmmmmmmm.
Fun card idea
Class: Mage
Spell
Cost: 5
Effect: Draw 3 cards, reduce cost by 2
Well would you look at that. I made a better card then an alt win con nobody has ever wanted in a game.
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Ban anything that is fun and original. Just good design.
It’s astonishing to me how many people there are who are simultaneously physically incapable of thinking outside of the box, and believe that they’d do better than professionals in creative work.
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There has never been a good alt win con that was healthy for a card game of any kind. I don’t have to be a game designer to know this. I’ve lived it through plenty of card games that die 2 years in because of poor game design. This game wouldn’t make it past the 2 year mark if it was release now. But its the MTG of online card games, so it lives on through fan boys.
That’s something that only someone who hates fun would say
At the risk of playing Devil’s Advocate here, what is “good design”?
And why should the win condition cards the OP complains of be allowed
if it’s true that they are not good?
Stop blaming me for your poor communication.
Good design is emphatically not this embarrassing display of a “fun card”. Good design in a TCG is about doing things that are without precedent, things that have never been done before and thus don’t have any established power baseline. Things like alternate win conditions.
You have to be unbearably hipster to think this is anything but a compliment. MTG, by the way, has more than 30 alternate win conditions.
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I think We need to establish what good design is, and then determine if the cards the OP complains of fall outside of that definition, before we go off on each other.
I already said it. Good design is going outside of the box and creating cards that are difficult to evaluate because they do things that haven’t been done before. This is going to sometimes include new ways to win the game. This is going to sometimes include power creep, which if you ask me is like water: yes, too much can be a bad thing, but for the most part power creep is necessary and good actually.
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a great answer. Can you give examples of good design vs. bad,
as they apply to the OP’s complaint?
Wheel of Death is great design.
Odyn is great design. Yeah it deserved a nerf, but they only got the cost off by 1.
I’m including both of those specifically because my initial impression of the cards, before they were released, was significantly wrong. One mark of good design is that before people can actually play with it, you’ve got a lot of people saying it’s OP and another bunch saying it’s crap.
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What makes it good? It is inevitable after a point, right?
Can it be prevented?
Okay i’m bite it.
Alternative winconditions are in fact antclimatic but with that said.
I think while your general fundamentals are in the correct place we need to remember that we’re talking specifically about hearthstone.
And sincerely this specific game is only really healthy when it gets this “experimental design” aura that while can and will infuriate some players also makes everyone grow up a little in the process.
And to get to this specific place the devs allow themselves to mess up a little on those fundamentals so we can in fact see different worlds even if they’re not pleasant to everyone.
Basically hearthstone finds sucess not by being 100% healthy but by combining diseases so we can explore and experience different stuff.
And if they get really out of Control making MANY people stop playing then we do something about.
Well, I still want to know why WOD is great design, and if that card is the baseline for all great design?
Great design seems really vague to me, and I think we need some sort of ruling on what exactly that is.
Anything that moves your perception forward is good design by an artistic point of view.
Basically entertainment needs to Challenge what people know in a creative way.
Be It a game , movie or whatever.
And then we have minor adjusts like mana costs and other values that makes sure things work out the way the artistic side wants.
For Wheel of death i’m call it slighty above average.
While It in facts Challenges people to the point many did think it was unplayable garbage.
It also let the bitter taste that any alt wincondition does of your oponent cheating by winning the game in a non conventional way.
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Another great answer. So, is Wheel of death inevitable?
Can it be interrupted, or out-raced?
As long as there are caveats that keep it in check, then I see nothing wrong with it.
Well first off, I don’t really care about power level in this context. Design and power level are separate concepts. I edited the post above to also include Odyn, and yeah I think Odyn was probably undercosted by 1 until just recently. Power level isn’t really the point.
It’s about doing things that haven’t been done before and creating new archetypes and interesting options for those archetypes. In the “interesting options” category I think Doomkin is an example of good design, even if it isn’t the most powerful or defining card in Warlock.
I think if I had to pick a worst designed card in the new set… well first off it’s a multi way tie among all the cards that are obviously unplayable. But among the cards that see play, I’d say Safety Goggles. What does it do? Just gains armor. Odyn decks will still run it because Odyn but there’s absolutely nothing interesting tied to that. It’s a very boring card.
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