I also love drafting Izzet (a blue-red deck). I love drafting spell slinger decks in just about any game, but chaos draft in Magic the Gathering is a great format to play Izzet, since so many blue-red archetypes focus on sorceries and instants.

I also also love Time Spiral Remastered. The mechanics, retro frames, color shifted cards are all my jam.

It should come as no surprise then that I’ve drafted and played the common spell Riddle of Lightning many times.

Ride the Lightning!

Riddle of Lightning is an instant card that costs three generic mana and two red mana.

When you play Riddle of Lightning, you choose a target (a creature, planeswalker, or player would be most likely). Then, you look at the top three cards of your deck. You can choose to place them on the top or bottom of your deck in any order. Then, you reveal the top card of your deck. You take the cost of that card, and deal damage equal to the cost to your original target.

Is it expensive? Sure, five mana is a lot for a removal spell. But you do get the additional utility of sculpting the top three cards of your deck.

I love Riddle of Lightning because it takes a staple card, an instant speed red removal spell dealing damage, and turns it into a high stakes thrill to see if you can pull off the damage you need.

Let’s say there’s something that you need to deal three damage to. It could be a threatening flier, or an opponent’s face close to defeat. You play Riddle of Lightning, and it resolves. You pick up the top three cards of your deck.

Before we analyze your odds here, let’s set the stage for the cards you are going to see:

• Since you have at least five mana, and it’s probably turn five or later, your deck probably has about 25 cards in it (assuming this is a limited environment).
• You have at least five lands on the battlefield and not in your deck.
• And for argument’s sake, let’s say you drafted responsibly and have a nice mana curve, with 11 spells costing 1 or 2 mana, and 12 spells costing 3 or more mana.
• You’ve drawn an equal mix of lands (let’s say five this game) and spells (four 1 or 2 mana spells, and five three or more mana spells).
• Your remaining deck would then be 11 lands, 7 spells costing 1 or 2 mana, and 7 spells costing 3 or more mana.

At this point, when you cast Riddle of Lightning, and look at your top three cards, your chances of missing are (18/25) × (17/24) × (16/23), or about 35.5%. This means that you’ll hit about 64.5% from looking at the top three cards.

There’s a secret, too – if you really want to push your luck, and whiffed on the top three cards, you can choose to place all three cards on the bottom and take your chance on whatever the fourth card is. Having blasted a five toughness beater back to their maker this way, I can confirm that it feels awesome.

This means that in our hypothetical scenario, we have one more event – a 15/22 chance of missing (or a 7/22 chance of finding the card we need). This moves the odds of completely missing to 24.2%, or making it up to 75.8%.

Some players might decide that for five mana, they’d rather not have a 1/4 chance of missing dealing three damage. That’s a reasonable decision that a deckbuilder would make.

For this player, we can compare Riddle of Lightning with another red instant, Lightning Blast.

Lightning Blast is almost identical in inputs (mana and targeting), and in output (dealing damage). But it lacks the element of uncertainty and surprise that Riddle of Lightning has. Lightning Blast is, for lack of a better word, static.

To be clear, if I get passed a Lightning Blast, I’m probably going to feel okay taking it. There’s a version of Lightning Blast in every set. Cheap red removal spells like Shock and expensive red removal spells like Lightning Blast will be printed in every set. What makes Riddle of Lightning great is that it takes a staple card and makes it fun. You get two chances to make your play happen.

The escalation from high probability (Scry 3), to pushing your luck for the riskier play (Put the scried cards on the bottom and pray), heightens your thrill. These gameplay moments that Riddle of Lightning enables makes it an electric card.

Some Chance is Fun, but Pure Randomness can be Chaos

Let’s move to the other end of comparisons by comparing Riddle of Lightning with a red removal spell with an element of chance, Whammy Burn.

Whammy Burn is a test card only available in a Mystery Booster (and yes, I’ve seen this opened at a draft table during our store’s chaos draft). How Whammy Burn works is that you assemble a five card deck of each basic land (Plains, Island, Swamp, Mountain, Forest). You declare a target, then you shuffle your whammy deck, then reveal a card from the top of this deck. If it’s an Island, you bust and do 0 damage. If it’s any other land, you can either stop or push your luck. You deal damage to the target equal to the number of cards revealed.

Like Riddle of Lightning, Whammy Burn does not deal a deterministic amount of damage. Also like Riddle of Lightning, Whammy Burn may deal 0 damage. However, the odds of you dealing 0 with Whammy Burn are much higher than Riddle of Lightning.

• 1 Damage - 80% (4/5)
• 2 Damage - 60% (4/5 * 3/4)
• 3 Damage - 40% (4/5 * 3/4 * 2/3)
• 4 Damage - 20% (4/5 * 3/4 * 2/3 * 1/2)
• 5 Damage - 0% (4/5 * 3/4 * 2/3 * 1/2 * 0/1)

As you can see, there’s upside, but the downside is pretty shocking, especially compared to the staple cheap red removal, Shock.

For the exact same mana, you can do 2 damage 100% of the time. The risk to reward ratio here doesn’t seem to favor Whammy Burn. I don’t want to do nothing 40% of the time when I want to cast a Shock, and I definitely don’t want to do nothing 60% of the time when I want to cast a Bolt.

Some risk versus reward is fun, but here the risk is astronomically high compared to a Riddle of Lightning // Lightning Blast comparison. Riddle of Lightning may not do as much damage as you need it to, but it will almost never do 0 damage. You also get upside with the deck sculpting and scrying. Comparatively, Whammy Burn // Shock is a much less favorable comparison.

Conclusion

Riddle of Lightning is another great common card that shows us that with a little inspiration, we can take a staple card and make it shine.

Riddle of Lightning takes a common card type, the red damage spell, and adds two elements of chance. Is it a complete roll of the dice? No, your initial decision will most likely do an adequate, but not high, amount of damage. If you don’t like the cards you see, you can push your luck, ride the lightning, and flip over that fourth card.

At the same time, Riddle of Lightning doesn’t completely rely on chance or push your luck. Whammy Burn shows us that too much randomness can make a simply worse card that doesn’t make it out of testing.

Personally, I can’t wait for my store’s next chaos draft. Hopefully I can push my luck with another Izzet spellslinging deck and get another shot to draft and cast Riddle of Lightning.

He had a few different games with him, so I asked him how many game prototypes he had in the works.

“Oh, about thirty,” he said.

Internally, I had a meltdown in my frontal cortex. Thirty prototypes? Thirty?? Here I was, playtesting my second prototype, and feeling guilty for not testing my first.

I asked, “How do you keep track of all of those prototypes?”

He said, “That’s a very good question.”

That conversation got me thinking about the possibility of being able to talk to a publisher, reaching into a grab bag of ten different games, and being able to pitch whichever one was the best fit for what they’re looking for. (Thirty prototypes can come later.)

I’ve leveled up my prototyping, design, and printing processes. Why not level up my organization and create a framework that would allow me to support ten prototypes?

Why Do We Need Ten Prototypes?

Before we get into the requirements and game plan, let’s talk about why we want to be able to support and keep organized ten different game designs.

We’re not out here trying to roll the dice on getting a game published and increasing our number of rolls. It’s better to have one fully polished game that is fun and easy to understand over ten rough prototypes that are clunky and unwieldy. I’m not making this framework for supporting ten prototypes to do a buckshot approach, but rather to be able to make well-designed prototypes one by one and keep them organized.

One reason for this approach is that designing games starts off in a huge possibility space, then tapers off into tweaking and small adjustments. When you’re first designing a game, the world is your oyster. Your game can be anything! You start by defining a win condition and game play loop. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t. You refine, edit, put more rules in place, and before you know it, you have a fun game in front of you. Sure, all the rules aren’t fully written down, and maybe you can make some changes. But before you know it, your game has a definition and shape. Your time of throwing ideas against the wall and seeing what sticks is over. Now, you’re measuring, tweaking, and changing values to optimize the fun.

Congrats! You’ve designed a game. However, if you’re bringing this game to market, you still have a long road ahead of you. You either have to pitch the game to a publisher, who then will make changes, market, and produce the game, or you’ll self-publish and have to do all this yourself.

That’s all well and good, but your brain doesn’t stop thinking of new game ideas just because this game is done!

You can take that creative energy and make a new game prototype.

Another benefit of having multiple prototypes is that you get to explore new game areas, player motivations, and design space that you wouldn’t get to explore with just one prototype.

There’s the often cited story of two groups of students in a pottery class. One group was tasked with making just a single pot over the course of the semester. The other group made a different pot every single class. It turns out that the group that was focused on quantity actually made better pots than the group made on quality.

Being able to make multiple prototypes could be a logistical nightmare. However, over time, I’ve been able to level up my prototyping abilities and printing and cutting. I could go from having a game idea at 9am on a Saturday to having a fully playable prototype in my hands by 5pm (if you want to read more about how I make game prototypes, check out my post on Squib here). Since we’ve removed the physical barrier, let’s remove the mental barrier as well!

The Gameplan

Before we get into our game plan, let’s focus on what exactly we need for a game.

• A prototype. This is the most key part of the process. This will be generated using Squib.
• A rulebook. Helps people play the game when I’m not around (also very important). I use a free set of creative tools called Affinity.
• Marketing materials. We want a publisher to be able to understand, play, and hopefully sell this game on our behalf. To that end, we will want a Sellsheet and a Pitch video
• Versioning. When you make a game prototype, you don’t just make one – you’re going to make tweaks and edits and see new things and fix broken parts. To help organize all of the different iterations of the game, organizing prototypes by version keeps our head together.
• A README.md file. This helps us come back to a previous prototype that might have been in the backlog or not had our eyes on it.

What we don’t need

• Finished game pieces. We aren’t making game files to go to the printer for a 10,000 unit print run.
• Mass market marketing materials. We aren’t making kickstarters

For our requirements, we can store each game in its own directory in the file system.

We can also use the software Git to version our game, or at least have backups. We can also store this Git repository on Github as well. This gives us backups and the ability to work on our game across different computers.

The directory would look something like this:

game/
├── prototype/
│   └── YYYY-MM-DD-name/
├── rulebook/
│   └── YYYY-MM-DD-name/
├── marketing/
│   ├── sellsheet.pdf
│   └── pitch.mp4
└── README.md

In the prototype directory, we will initialize a new Squib project. This will be where we generate our prototypes.

Versioning our prototypes will be the most important, as this is where we iterate the most. I have written a command in my Squib projects to make new version files.

In the rulebook directory, this is where we’ll keep our rulebook files. Like in the Squib folder, we’ll want to organize materials by version.

Why don’t we use git branches as versions? Well, Git is mainly used to track versions of one project over time, and to organize the efforts of multiple people. I work alone, and also I want to be able to track progress over time and easily see past versions, and print them at a moment’s notice. With Git, I find it hard to go back in the past, as things may change.

By keeping versions explicit, I can easily jump between different prototypes of the same game and compare and contrast.

Our marketing folder has our materials to help publishers learn about our game. This will mainly consist of sell sheets, one page documents describing our game at a glance, and pitch videos that demonstrate the game in 2-3 minutes.

Lastly, we have our README.md file. This is a document that we can read to get ourselves up to speed quickly for a project that has been in the backlog.

What Is Most Likely To Change?

I’m not pushing this framework as a finished piece of work that will solve all my problems. I think it’s a step beyond an iterative step towards leveling up organization of game ideas and prototypes.

The area that I’m most interested in, and what is most likely to change, will be the versioning system. Right now, it’s manually tracked by directory names across different folders. It would be great to be able to create a new version from the game directory and have that propagate across the different folders.

We might also make a simple directory of scripts to help support versioning as well. It would most likely be in Ruby, since Squib is in Ruby and that’s what I have the most experience with, but it wouldn’t be a big deal for the language of choice here.

I might also make a shared assets folder for art and icons as well. This way, the prototype and the rulebook can have access to the same images without having to duplicate them.

I’ve taken the first steps towards using this new framework for a new game prototype. It’s possibly my spookiest yet. Keep an eye out if you want to playtest, or stay away if you’re scared by ghouls and goblins!

So I figured I’d dust off my light card strategy game and shut up and playtest.

Introducing Monster Kitchen!

The Game

Monster Kitchen is a two to four player card game where you’ll slay monsters and turn them into nutritious meals for adventurers. Games take about 10 to 20 minutes.

You’re slaying monsters from the dungeon to cook into recipes and feed to adventurers. Your goal is to be the first to get XX gold from adventurers.

You get gold by feeding adventurers. Each adventurer has a requirement for what they eat, and a base amount of gold they will pay. They’ll pay additional gold if you feed them food that matches their preferences. Some adventurers will do an action for you if you feed them. For example, the Knight will slay a monster for you if you feed him.

You get ingredients by slaying monsters. Every time you slay a monster, an event occurs. For example, if you slay a rat for ingredients, all your diners will flee, and you’ll deal new diners. Slaying a vampire will allow you to select an opponent to give you one of their resources.

And that’s it! On your turn, you’ll either slay a monster, or feed an adventurer. Slay monsters, cook meals, and get enough coins to win the game.

What I Liked

The theme hits hard. Feeding adventurers monster parts is fun.

There was a nice variety of diners and monsters. I didn’t feel like any card was too similar, or that there weren’t enough types of cards.

Combining ingredients was fun. When I served a monster sandwich, my mind thought about what a rat meat and skeleton bonemeal sandwich would be like.

Slaying the rat triggers an event where all the current diners go to the bottom of the deck and you deal three new diners. I think it’s really flavorful that a rat in a restaurant causes the diners to flee, but for a different reason.

Placing used ingredients behind the fed diner meant that they were out of circulation, and adjusted the pool of monsters. Not something I thought about, but a fun way to change the pool and keep the game fresh.

What I Noticed I want to change

The ingredient icon should be inline with the title. Right now, it’s under, and that takes up too much room.

There’s a pretty clear imbalanced strategy which is to use grain ingredients. Both grain monsters give extra resources when you slay them, and the recipe with grain is cheaper than others. Think we’ll have to at least add an ingredient to the grain recipe.

There’s a king diner who is a high payoff card, but just takes too many ingredients. Plus, with the Rat card, you can’t really plan for using the king.

The minotaur triggering to have everyone discard a card slowed the game down, since you’re making every player make a painful decision. Maybe it can be limited to target player discards a card.

Not sure that placing cards at bottom of the deck is elegant – it feels somewhat unwieldy to pick up the whole deck. I think we can add a discard pile, and start it off by milling one from the deck to start the game, we can have a better solution. And if the main deck runs out of cards, you can shuffle the discard pile back and make a new main deck.

In previous versions, different ingredients had different flavors. This version doesn’t have that, but I think it would be a nice touch to add back in. It can be surface area for diner preferences, and I think it provides a piece for players to imagine the monsters as ingredients with flavors.

Changes for the next Playtest

Probably the biggest change for this playtest is the on feed triggers for diners. The gameplay last time felt too linear, so I introduced a choice – do you feed someone the simplest recipe so they can do something for you when you feed them, or do you collect the best recipe for them to get the most points? Interested to see how this will play out.

I’ve updated the layout so that the ingredient is inline with the title. I also added a flavor up top. There’s no mechanical or gameplay reason for it now, but I hope it makes the experience richer. When you look at who you fed, you can also see what ingredients and what flavors you served in your dish. I hope this leads to fun moments where you realize what kind of meal you cooked up!

To balance out the grain strategy, I made it so that the sandwich recipe takes a grain, a meat, and a vegetable. What that means is that the sandwich takes three ingredients like all the other recipes. Grain is only used in the sandwich, so it went from being the best group to possibly the hardest ingredient to use. This is counterbalanced with grain’s ability to generate other ingredients.

No change for the king at the moment. Let’s see what happens! Plus it creates a fun moment when players realize that there’s a high risk, high reward diner.

I changed the Minotaur and Treant monster cards. Instead of having on slay ability triggers, now they are simply able to provide two ingredients in one recipe. This comes up in the entree and salad recipes.

I changed the bottom of the deck to a discard pile. Simple enough, and this should solve the problem of having to pick up the deck so many times.

Opening Up Design Space for Ingredient Preparation

Part of me wants to have the ingredient shortcut be on the bottom and upside down. The idea is that you slay the monster, but then to culinarily prepare it, you have to take a turn to rotate it 180 degrees, representing chopping or cooking, or some way of preparing it.

I think it could be a cool step since by turning the card upside down, you make it so that it’s less recognizable as a monster.

The downside is that turns now have an extra decision to make, and the game slows down. If you want to make a recipe that takes three ingredients, you now have 7 actions to take (three slays, three prepares, one serve) instead of 4 actions (three slays, one serve).

It’s something that can be explored in a future iteration. I think I might have to, since my mind is so split on it.

Preparing ingredients opens up a ton of space (do you chop them? cook them? do different ingredients have different preparation? can you prepare an ingredient incorrectly?), but also presents a lot of challenges. More player choices and individual card state are not trivial to solve. And I worry that solutions would be to either make cards more complicated, or introduce more game pieces. Ideally, this game would be completely playable with just a deck of cards. I would want to avoid tokens or dice if at all possible.

That being said, I’ve had versions in the past where you rolled dice to see if you cooked a recipe correctly, and there is a moment of suspense that rolling the dice creates. There’s also a component of using prepared ingredients having a high success rate, and improperly prepared or raw ingredients having a low chance.

Shutting up and playtesting

If you want to make games, “shut up and playtest” is the best advice to listen to. What this means is that you need to grab all the ideas floating around in your head, plop them down onto paper, and put them in front of someone else.

You’ll see if your ideas panned out, and you’ll also notice what doesn’t work. This is one hundred times more valuable to you and your game than any new idea you can have. A new idea for your game is place you can prospect for gold; an idea in a game that’s been playtested is gold.

I have my next iteration of my game printed and ready to play. I already know one or two things that I’ll be looking out for.

Can’t wait to share more about Monster Kitchen with you soon.

How does a designer achieve this? Let’s find out!

What We Mean When We Talk About Balance

What is balance? Simply put, balance means that any given strategy has a chance at succeeding.

Balance is important because it allows different gameplay and strategies. If one strategy is imbalanced and wins the most, then the game becomes about playing that strategy or playing against that strategy.

A game being balanced doesn’t mean that one strategy can’t beat the other. Take Rock Paper Scissors for example. From the perspective of Scissors, Rock is grossly overpowered. It has a 100% win rate against Scissors!

If Rock didn’t have Paper to balance it, then yes, the game would be imbalanced. But it does!

As a balance exercise, try playing a Rock Paper Scissors game, but instead of Paper beating Rock, Rock and Paper tie.

Spoiler alert: Rock then becomes the best play. Everyone eventually figures this out, and then everyone picks Rock. Then you tie forever!

Double or Half – Don’t Inch Your Way to Balance!

When you have a value you know is out of whack and you want to adjust it, you don’t want to make small tweaks. Instead, take your value, and double (or half) it. You’ll most likely overshoot your target and overcorrect, but then you have a bounds of what value is overpowered, and what value is underpowered.

If you have a card you know is unbalanced, take a value and double or half it. Then do your playtest. Each iteration is valuable, so we want to get to the correct value as quickly as possible. Most likely, you’ll find that you’ve overcorrected. That’s good! Note the value you tested with that time, and the value before. You know the correct answer is somewhere between there.

Levers to Pull

When balancing cards, you need to know which levers to pull. What is making the card so strong? And what surface area do we have?

If we’re balancing a Hearthstone card, we have four well defined levels.

Mana Cost, Attack, and Health are all numerical values that we can add or subtract to. And with our formula, we know that Mana is a bigger lever to pull than adjusting the attack and health.

Abilities can also be adjusted, although theirs is a bit fuzzier to measure. What we can do is map each ability to a value. This helps when comparing abilities to more concrete levers.

Pivot Point

One helpful technique is to have one card be your “pivot point.” This is a card that will always stay the same. Don’t touch it!

This gives you the ability to have a comparison point for any card you balance. By having one point of comparison, you can see how strong or weak a new design is.

This helps you more easily make balance decisions. Are you comparing a new design against every single other card you’ve made? Or do you only have to make one comparison to make that call?

Generally, your pivot point card should be simple and easy enough to understand. It should also have a constant power level. If you’re balancing against a card that’s bad in some situations, but can scale really well, than you can have a hard time.

Let’s consider balancing the first set of Hearthstone. I’ll take one of my favorite cards, and declare it to be our pivot point. Behold, the Chillwind Yeti!

Assigning Value Mathematically

Let’s take a look at our capstone creature. Mr. Yeti is a vanilla minion (vanilla meaning it has no special abilities) with 4 Attack and 5 Health, and it costs 4 Mana to cast.

Another technique is to take a card and assign it a value. What do we mean? Let’s look at Hearthstone’s first set.

Funnily enough, we can see that there is a formula for the value of a card.

Value = 2 * Mana + 1

Mana here is the mana cost of a card. A 2 mana card should have 5 value, a 3 mana card should have 7 value, a 4 mana card should have 9 value, and so on.

Value here requires more definition. How exactly are we defining value?

Value is equal to the Attack of a card plus the Health of the card, plus the Abilities of the card.

We could rewrite our value equation like so:

Attack + Health + Abilities = 2 * Mana + 1

Attack and Health are easy to see. They’re printed on the card.

How do we judge abilities? This one is a bit fuzzier, but we can make some assessment based on the cards we see. Divine Shield is worth about one value point, or about 1/2 a mana cost. Drawing a card when entering is worth about 3 value points, or 1.5 mana.

Chillwind Yeti follows this design, as it has 4 Attack, 5 health, and no abilities, and a mana cost of 4.

4 Attack + 5 Health + 0 Abilities = 2 * 4 Mana + 1

Now that we have a baseline level of power from our pivot point, we can look at other cards for balance. Let’s take a look at Ogre Magi, a card that I relate to closely.

Ogre Magi costs 4 mana and is a 4 Attack and 4 Health minion with an ability of Spell Damage +1. This means that if you cast a spell like Fireball for 6 damage, and you control an Ogre Magi, its Spell Damage ability will increase the damage from 6 to 7.

We can plug Ogre Magi’s information into our value formula and see that it’s balanced like the Chillwind Yeti.

4 Attack + 4 Health + 1 (Spell Damage +1) = 2 * 4 Mana + 1

Abilities aren’t all weighted equally. Let’s look at another 4 mana creature, Gnomish Inventor.

Gnomish Inventor costs 4 mana and is a 2 Attack and 4 Health minion with an ability of drawing a card when it enters play. If we weighted drawing a card the same as Spell Damage +1, then this card would be very weak in comparison. However, it turns out drawing a card is pretty good! So good in fact, that we can weight it three value points, as opposed to 1.

2 Attack + 4 Health + 3 (Draw a Card) = 2 * 4 Mana + 1

Let’s look at a card that combines my favorite mythological animal with my favorite color, Azure Drake.

Azure Drake costs 5 mana and is a 4 Attack and 4 Health minion with an ability of drawing a card when it enters play, and it has Spell Damage +1.

4 Attack + 4 Health + 3 (Draw on Enter) + 1 (+1 spell damage) > 2 * 5 Mana + 1

Wait a minute – this isn’t an equal value equation! Azure Drake has 12 value points, but it should only be allotted 11 due to its mana value of 5.

It’s Not Gonna Be Perfectly Balanced

It’s okay to have a game that’s not totally balanced. It’s also probably not possible to have a completely balanced game. Plus, balance can change over time as new strategies develop.

Let’s take a look at Sen’jin Shieldmasta against Booty Bay Brawler.

The Sen’jin Shieldmasta costs 4 mana, meaning that it can get 9 points of value. It has 3 Attack, 5 Health, and the ability Taunt. We can write its value expression at 2 * 4 + 1 = 8 + Taunt.

The Booty Bay Bodyguard costs 5 mana for 11 points of value. It has 5 Attack, 4 Health, and the ability Tault. We can write its value expression as 2 * 5 + 1 = 9 + Taunt.

But wait a minute – if we take a closer look, these cards are not equally balanced. Sen’jin Shieldmasta only uses 1 value point to get Taunt, while Booty Bay Bodyguard uses 2 value points to get Taunt. If Booty Bay Bodyguard were balanced like Sen’jin Shieldmasta, then it would have 5 Attack and 5 Health.

This isn’t an oversight. Some cards can simply be better than others. It’s okay! In fact, Hearthstone game director Ben Brode specifically said that a game can have bad cards.

The reason for this is that we want players to be rewarded for analyzing cards. If every card is perfectly balanced, then it might not matter what you play. But if you have some cards that are slightly more powerful than others, then players who spend their time thinking and analyzing your game can find better cards, and are rewarded.

To be clear, we don’t want to have cards or strategies that are so strong that they blow everything else out of the water. In our example above, Sen’jin Shieldmasta only has one extra value point above its comparison, Booty Bay Brawler. If Sen’jin Shieldmasta had 5 Attack, 4 Health, and Taunt for 4 mana, then there would never be any reason to play Booty Bay Brawler, and we’d say Sen’jin Shieldmasta is overpowered.

Your Job Is To Make A Fun Game

Remember, at the end of the day, your job as a game designer is to evoke an emotion or experience in your players. Your game is a tool for your players to interact with to feel that experience that you envisioned.

Balancing your game is a process where you make sure that a player doesn’t feel punished or frustrated for not picking the “right choice.” Generally, you’ll want all strategies to be viable and able to win. It’s possible that you do choose to make a faction imbalanced – maybe your game is heroes versus villains and you want players to experience that crime doesn’t pay by making the villain team weaker.

But I think we can all think of a game we’ve played where there was a clearly superior strategy that made the game not fun for everyone else.

Use the techniques above and avoid that in your games! Best of luck, and happy balancing.

One game studio, Erik’s Curiosa Limited, did just that and launched the trading card game Sorcery: Contested Realm with a Kickstarter campaign raising over $4 million.

Let’s take a look at the best example of a Magic: The Gathering inspired game designed for a contemporary audience.

The Art

Sorcery: Contested Realm works with a lot of amazing artists. They do all their art traditionally – no digital art. The result makes each card feel like a magical spell.

Each card is full art and jumps off the page. The artists showcase their talents and make dazzling pieces that make for great cards to play.

The Templating

The good news is that Sorcery: Contested Realm cards are easy to read. The bad news is that Sorcery: Contested Realm cards can often lead to ambiguity when interacting with each other. Sorcery uses keywords a great deal and you’ll want your rulebook nearby as you play your first game.

Erik’s Curiosa, the company that makes Sorcery, has a good online resource at curiosa.io where you can lookup cards that have references to their rulestext.

I will admit that the game does have a learning curve when it comes to learning all the keywords. But once you do, the brevity and clarity of each card makes playing a joy. Plus, it leaves more room for the art.

They Finally Fixed Lands

One of the biggest pain points of playing Magic: The Gathering is that due to the land system, you can not get the right cards to play the game.

Sorcery: Contested Realm has fixed this issue by separating lands and spells into separate decks. At the start of your turn, you can choose to draw a card from your spell deck, or your site deck.

Additionally, there are restrictions by types of lands, but luckily, it’s easier to meet the land requirements. Instead of tapping lands to generate colored mana, each land gives you one mana during your turn. Your lands do have an element, which works like a color. But you don’t need to tap for a color of mana – as long as you have enough lands with the same “threshold” of your card, you can play that card.

Sites often have cool abilities. They can silence minions, block passage, or ping minions for damage.

Playing your lands on a four by five grid also influences the flow of the game. Do you play a site forward to get closer to your enemy, or play on your backrow to try and bide time?

Sorcery takes one of the weakest parts of Magic and turns it into a new space for gameplay.

Your Avatar Puts You Into The Game

In Magic, you play as a Planeswalker (a fancy wizard) with 20 life who has a library of spells and lands that you use to battle your opponent.

In Sorcery, you play as an Avatar (a fancy wizard) with 20 life who has a spellbook and an atlas that you use to battle your opponent. However, instead of you being the wizard yourself, you have an avatar card that represents you on the battlefield.

All avatars have 20 life, some power, a tap ability to play or draw a site, and then one unique ability. The Avatar of Fire can turn fire sites into fireballs. The Geomancer can play and draw sites onto rubble that he produces. The Necromancer can make a skeleton buddy every turn.

Choosing an avatar gives you a chance to put yourself in the game. It’s no coincidence that one of Magic’s most popular formats is Commander, where you choose a legendary creature to captain your deck. Sorcery takes this design space to provide players a chance to tell everyone who they are with their avatar.

You Don’t Get Combo’d Out or Counterspelled

Sorcery limits mechanics from Magic that make the game feel one sided or not fun. Graveyard recursion does exist in some form but is not the end all be all of mechanics. There are no game winning combos that close the game out immediately. You don’t worry about losing out of nowhere. And you’ll never get a counter spell to stop you from playing your cool card.

Don’t get me wrong. There are some cards that do crazy things. Lilith can summon minions from your opponent’s decks, and Courtesan Thais can control your opponent’s next turn. Those cards are unique, though, and are meant to be awesome effects that you see once in a blue moon. Compare this to a reanimator deck in Magic that aims to get huge monsters from their deck into their graveyard, then reanimating them onto the battlefield to cheat them out.

Rarer Cards are more Limited

Sorcery: Contested Realm has a rarity system for its card. A card can be Ordinary, Exceptional, Elite, or Unique. However, this also limits how many copies of each card you can put into your deck. You can put four copies of an Ordinary card into your deck, three copies of an Exceptional, two copies of an Elite, or one copy of a Unique.

This change in the rarity system both allows for collectors to chase after their Unique cards without those powerful cards warping the game around them. Sure, you can add a powerful Unique card to your deck, but it’s one card out of sixty.

It Feels Magical

The art, avatar, templating, and rare cards all come together to make a game of Sorcery feel like you are having a magical battle against your opponent. That might seem obvious, but we live in a world where the last set of Magic the Gathering was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and the next one is a Marvel superheroes set.

I play games for many reasons. Getting an opportunity to escape from our current reality into a fantasy where I get to lead a magical army into battle is one of them. Sorcery takes this experience from classic Magic the Gathering and reshapes it using all the game design lessons we’ve collectively learned in the last thirty years to make an exciting card game that I’ll be happy to play for years to come.

It doesn’t have to be a trading card game. It could be a limited card game like Arkham Horror, or a tabletop game that uses cards, like King of Tokyo.

Today, I want to share how I designed and printed cards for a game design I made called Monster Kitchen.

Monster Kitchen is a 3-6 player game where players complete to collect ingredients and recipes to make dishes. And some of the ingredients are monster parts.

The game has gone through a few iterations. Any game design will over the course of its life. In some versions, players competed to feed dishes to diners. In others, the players had characters that they played as and that had special abilities. In versions where no mechanics were added or cut, different cards would be tested and tweaked.

If you want to make a game, it is critical that you are able to rapidly iterate. You need to be able to incorporate feedback and make adjustments to fix things that are broken with your game. And yes, no matter how good of a designer you are, the first version of your game will probably be broken in one way or another.

Technology

There’s no right or wrong answer for technology. I’ve heard of designers using layout tools like Adobe InDesign to lay out cards. As a software engineer by trade, I’ve elected to use a different tool.

For card layout and design, I use an open source software library called Squib. It’s built with the Ruby programming language to enable users to define their cards with data and generate prototype cards with layout and code.

Using Squib does mean writing code, at least a little bit. However, you don’t need to know much about programming to use Squib.

There are three main concepts to understand when using Squib – the cards (data), the layout (design configuration), and the deck (code).

Cards

In Squib, cards are defined using CSV (comma separated values) files. Think of these files as simple spreadsheets. Your first row defines what each column represents, then all the other rows are records with values for those columns.

Below, I have the CSV file for my cards shown above.

title,type,qty,flavor_1,flavor_2,description,illustration
Minotaur Haunch,Monster Meat,3,sweet,savory,,art/counter/meat.svg
Goblin Ears,Monster Meat,3,savory,sour,,art/counter/elf-ear.svg
Hydra Neck,Monster Meat,3,sour,bitter,,art/counter/hydra.svg
Dragon Egg,Monster Meat,3,salty,sweet,,art/counter/dinosaur-egg.svg
Giant Rat Flank,Monster Meat,3,salty,bitter,,art/counter/steak.svg
Wheat Flour,Flour,3,sweet,savory,,art/counter/wheat-flour.svg
Rye Flour,Flour,3,savory,sour,,art/counter/rye-flour.svg
Sourdough Yeast,Flour,3,sour,bitter,,art/counter/sourdough-yeast.svg
Cornmeal,Flour,3,salty,sweet,,art/counter/cornmeal.svg
Bonemeal,Flour,3,salty,bitter,,art/counter/bonemeal.svg
Onion,Vegetable,3,salty,savory,,art/counter/bulb.svg
Beet,Vegetable,3,savory,sour,,art/counter/beet.svg
Radish,Vegetable,3,sour,bitter,,art/counter/raddish.svg
Carrot,Vegetable,3,salty,sweet,,art/carrot-color.svg
Cabbage,Vegetable,3,salty,bitter,,art/counter/bok-choy.svg
Mana Potion,Curio,4,placeholder,placeholder,Restores 2 MP.,art/five_flavors/round-potion.svg
Scroll: Fireball,Curio,2,placeholder,placeholder,Choose a player. Discard their prepared ingredients.,art/five_flavors/fire-breath.svg
Scroll: Alchemy,Curio,2,placeholder,placeholder,Remove all MP. For each MP removed> gain 2 gold.,art/five_flavors/crystalize.svg
Respec,Curio,2,placeholder,placeholder,Replace your class with an unchosen class. Your MP resets to its starting total.,art/five_flavors/mirror-mirror.svg

The first row has the columns that define what the data is. The title is the name and header of the card, and the type is the subheader that tells us what category of ingredient this is. The qty column tells Squib how many times to render the card.

I also want to highlight illustration, which has a path to an SVG file. Here, I’ve added a file to my project, then pointed to the path of the file in the SVG. This lets Squib be able to reference that image and render it in the finished card.

Layout

Layouts are groups of design configurations that are able to be applied to elements.

For example, the image on the card is an SVG file. We want to give it a position and a size. We can define the position using an X and Y coordinates and width and height using a layout rule called illustration.

illustration:
  x: 100
  y: 200
  width: 600
  height: 600

For each element on the card, we want to give it all its styling rules with one grouping. Our illustration has a position (x, y) and a size (width/height).

Our text element have a position and size as well. However, this position and sizing is for determining the size of the text box, not the actual text the appears on the page. For that, we want to make sure that we align our text accordingly. The align styling here shifts the text to align with the left, center, or right of the textbox, and valign (vertical align – not used here but good to be aware of) can be used to align the text with the top, middle, or bottom of the textbox.

illustration:
  x: 100
  y: 200
  width: 600
  height: 600

title:
  x: 75
  y: 75
  width: 600
  height: 50
  align: left
  font_size: 16
  stroke_width: 1.5
  font: "Kentucky Fireplace"

type:
  x: 75
  y: 140
  width: 600
  height: 50
  align: left
  font_size: 11
  font: "Kentucky Fireplace"

preparation_icon:
  x: 500
  y: 920
  width: 130
  height: 130

time_text:
  x: 650
  y: 810
  width: 200
  height: 200
  font_size: 48
  stroke_width: 1.5
  font: "Trattatello"

flavor_1:
  x: 265
  y: 850
  width: 300
  height: 90
  align: center
  font_size: 16
  font: "Kentucky Fireplace"

flavor_1_box:
  extends: flavor_1
  radius: 16
  stroke_width: 2

flavor_2:
  x: 265
  y: 950
  width: 300
  height: 90
  align: center
  font_size: 16
  font: "Kentucky Fireplace"

flavor_2_box:
  extends: flavor_2
  radius: 16
  stroke_width: 4

description:
  x: 120
  y: 850
  width: 600
  height: 300
  align: left
  font_size: 12
  font: "Kentucky Fireplace"

Decks

Decks are applications of layout rules to card elements to output image files that will be your cards. Here, we load in the cards from the CSV and the stylings from the layout, and tell Squib how to combine them into cards.

Below, we have the code to tell Squib how to make the cards. I’ve annotated the code with comments that start with the hash symbol # to help explain the code.

require 'squib'

# Here, we load in the card data
data = Squib.csv file: 'cards/five_flavors/ingredients.csv'
cards = data['title'].size

# Now, we grab the layout files to get the style rules.
layouts = ['economy.yml', 'layouts/five_flavors/ingredients.yml']

# We create a new deck, loading in the cards and the layouts
Squib::Deck.new cards: cards, layout: layouts do
  # We start off by making a background and some cut marks
  background color: 'white'
  rect layout: 'cut'
  rect layout: 'safe'

  # Setting the title onto the card
  text str: data['title'], layout: 'title'
  text str: data['type'], layout: 'type'

  # Placing the image onto the card
  svg file: data['illustration'], layout: 'illustration'

  # This lays out the flavors onto the card. 
  # Note that I've done special configuration to map flavors to color
  rect layout: 'flavor_1_box', stroke_color: data['flavor_1'], fill_color: data['flavor_1']
  text str: data['flavor_1'], layout: 'flavor_1', color: "white"
  rect layout: 'flavor_2_box', stroke_color: data['flavor_2'], fill_color: data['flavor_2']
  text str: data['flavor_2'], layout: 'flavor_2', color: "white"

  # Placing the description on the card
  text str: data['description'], layout: 'description'

  # We save the cards to individual files...
  save_png prefix: 'ingredients_', dir: '_output/cards'
  # ...as well as to sheets of cards
  save_sheet columns: 10, rows: 6, prefix: 'ingredients_', dir: '_output/sheets'
end

Output

After you put together your cards, layouts, and decks, you can now make your cards.

I like to make individual card files to see how each card looks. I also like to make sheets of cards, either for printing and cutting, or for importing into Tabletop Simulator, a digital way to play board games.

Here is the code where we tell Squib to save our cards as PNG files, as well as in sheets. These sheets are for Tabletop Simulator and not meant to be printed out physically, hence why we have 60 cards in a sheet.

  # We save the cards to individual files...
  save_png prefix: 'ingredients_', dir: '_output/cards'
  # ...as well as to sheets of cards
  save_sheet columns: 10, rows: 6, prefix: 'ingredients_', dir: '_output/sheets'

I have the sheet command here from another project where I print the cards out on paper and cut them out. The cards are approximately 2.5inches x 3.5inches, and I find I can reliably fit eight cards per page (hence two columns and four rows).

  save_sheet columns: 2, rows: 4, rotate: true, prefix: "#{filename}_", dir: "_output/#{version}/sheets"

With that, we have a data driven way of designing and printing out cards. I can easily add a new monster ingredient.

As a fun exercise, let’s give it a try! I’ll add a piranha ingredient.

First, I’ll get a new icon for the fish. For prototyping icons (not used commercially), I like to use https://game-icons.net

Here’s a fun piranha icon from https://game-icons.net/1x1/darkzaitzev/fried-fish.html.

Now that I have my art, I’ll add a row to my CSV here for the game data.

title,type,qty,flavor_1,flavor_2,description,illustration
Cooked Piranha,Monster Meat,3,savory,salty,,art/counter/fried-fish.svg

And from here? Well, I already have my layout and deck files. All I have to do is run the command to generate the cards with rake deck in the command line, and now we have a new card to play with!

If you’re interested and want to try out using Squib to make cards for yourself, I highly recommend reading the official documentation. They do a great job of getting you set up and going with your own cards.

If you have any questions about how I use Squib in my projects, feel free to reach out at chasestevenspersonal+bricks@gmail.com. Happy prototyping!

Solemn Simulacrum is a 4 mana artifact creature with a power/toughness of 2/2. When you play Solemn Simulacrum, you can look through your deck for a basic land and play it tapped onto the battlefield. When Solemn Simulacrum dies, you can draw a card.

For four mana of any color, you can get more mana of a specific color, a body on the field, and a card draw when it dies. Solemn Simulacrum is flexible, adds value, and protects its player, leading to it being considered for any deck trying to gain value and power through to the mid or end game. Plus, it looks cool.

Backstory

Solemn Simulacrum’s origin is just as interesting as the card itself. Gavin Verhey, principal game designer of Magic the Gathering, tells the story of how Solemn Simulacrum came to be in his Good Morning Magic video.

The card design is submitted by Jens Thorén, a magic player who won a Magic event called The Magic Invitational back in 2002.

The winner got their own card design made as a real Magic the Gathering card.

Jens submitted their card design as follows.

Forestfolk
2{G}{U}
Creature - Elf Wizard
2/2
When Forestfolk comes into play, you may search your library for a basic land card and put that card into play tapped. Then shuffle your library.
When Forestfolk leaves play, draw a card.

The submitted design is remarkably close to the version that was printed. The only changes were making the mana generic, instead of requiring one green and one blue mana, making the creature an artifact, and changing the leaves play trigger to a trigger that happens on death.

Ever since then, Solemn Simulacrum has been a welcome addition to standard decks, limited pools, and commander brews.

Easy to Add Value Piece

When looking at cards with abilities that happen when the card is played, I like to think of them as a creature and a spell stapled together. Cards with abilities that happen when they die are similar, except the ability takes longer to happen, and the other player can take steps to prevent that creature from dying, and that ability from happening. When you have both abilities on a creature, you staple two spells to it.

From that perspective, we can think of Solemn Simulacrum as a Bear Cub with a Shared Roots and Obsessive Search stapled onto it – all with no color restriction.

This is one of the reasons for Solemn Simulacrum’s popularity. You get three cards in one that can go into any deck.

Asymmetrical Enters and Death Abilities

An interesting detail of Solemn Simulacrum is that its enter ability and death ability do different things. We can contrast that with creatures that have the same ability that is triggered on entering the battlefield and dying.

These cards with two ways of triggering their effects are easier to understand and have shorter text boxes. For cards that generate resources or help with payoffs in your deck, two triggers can be great.

However, these cards can be somewhat simple and flat compared to cards with two abilities. Not that simplicity isn’t valued – I enjoy simple design, and I think that complexity is a cost. If you add complexity to your design, you should be using it to make something interesting or fun.

With Solemn Simulacrum and asymmetrical enter and death abilities, we add a little complexity, and get a lot of design space back in return.

Asymmetrical entering abilities and death abilities help to tell a story about a card’s journey. You can tell a before and after story, much like transformation cards like Ecstatic Awakener. With entering triggers and death triggers, you can achieve this same setup and payoff with only one side of a card.

Hoarding Dragon above shows how the asymmetrical entering and death triggers can tell a story. Here we have a dragon who searches and snatches away a valuable artifact, as dragons often do. When the dragon is slain, the artifact is returned. You could even have a Hoarding Dragon snatch a Solemn Simulacrum!

Does Solemn Simulacrum’s abilities help tell a story? Does Solemn Simulacrum enter the battlefield looking for something, and brings in a land to represent its journey? Does it know that its owner will benefit from its death?

Solemn Simulacrum received its first flavor text 21 years after its initial printing. It reads

It has outlasted its creator, their kingdom, and even the castle walls, but still it stands watch.

Perhaps its sojourn is a search for meaning after being abandoned for so long, and its death brings sweet release.

Conclusion

When Jens Thorén submitted their design for Forestfolk, they probably had no idea that the end product would become as popular as Solemn Simulacrum. A flexible card that adds mana ramping and card draw, has a great origin story, and evokes a tragic tale has captured the hearts and minds of Magic players over decades.

Dinosaurs have a unique quality among other elements in our fantasy media in that they were real. Of course, no one has ever seen a living dinosaur, but fossils show that these terrible tyrant lizards walked and stomped on the same ground that we walk today.

Scientists have studied dinosaur fossils and records for hundreds of years. We have real world knowledge of dinosaurs we can take inspiration from. Let’s try and define some qualities of dinosaurs in games, and see what designs we can come up with.

Primal Dinosaurs

Dinosaurs existed in a prehistoric time. They inhabited the same world that we live in today, separated from us by millions of years.

They represent primal nature at its height, unmarred by human action or artifice. They operated on instinct, looking only to eat, procreate, and not die.

In terms of gameplay, dinosaurs in games tend to fall on the lower end of complexity. You won’t find a dinosaur counterspell or a dinosaur artifact with multiple effects. Dinosaurs are known for many things, but subtlety is not one of them.

Big Dinosaurs

Dinosaurs are, famously, big. They are the largest animals to ever walk the earth.

Dinosaurs as such are usually put onto big cards, both mechanically and by flavor.

Dinosaur Eggs

Dinosaurs laid eggs to procreate.

Eggs themselves have a few intrinsic properties. Eggs lie still and do nothing, but they carry the promise of future life. Eggs can also contain mystery – if you don’t know the parent, you may be surprised when the egg hatches.

Dinosaur Eggnappers

Dinosaurs are big, and so were their eggs. This created an opportunity for animals to take dinosaur eggs as a source of food.

We see depictions of eggnappers in card games, but their mechanics are usually bare and only tangentially related to the act of robbing a nest. Nest Robber has haste, to imply that it is quick and nimble. Eggnapper appears to be quite unsuccessful in its egg napping, summoning raptors when it falls.

Many dinosaur species suffered from the issue of having their eggs robbed, and it seems that in reality, eggnappers were quite successful. Personally, I think there’s some design space to depict a successful eggnapper (we’ll get to that in a bit.)

Scavenger Dinosaurs

Dinosaurs had many strategies for finding sources of food. Some were herbivores, eating different types of plants. Some were carnivores, hunting down prey. Other carnivores were scavengers, meaning that they ate dead animals that they found.

Contrary to popular belief, there were quite a few scavengers among our dinosaur friends. Tyrannosaurus Rex, king of dinosaurs, was an apex predator, but also scavenged and ate what it could when the opportunity arose.

Dinosaur Herds

Some dinosaurs traveled in herds together. Herbivores would live together in groups for protection, and predators would hunt together in packs to bring down prey larger than they were.

Fighting Dinosaurs

Dinosaurs had to fight to live. Either you were the hunter, and you were killing another dinosaur for your next meal, or you were the prey, and you were fighting to survive.

Different dinosaurs had different tools at their disposal. Pachycephalosaurus had a hard skull to headbutt with, Stegosaurus had a Thagomizer on its tail to swat away foes, and Tyrannosaurus Rex could chomp through anything.

Dinosaurs as Pandora’s Box

“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

It’s hard to talk about dinosaurs, and especially people’s perception of dinosaurs, without talking about elephant, or Tyrannosaurus Rex, in the room, Jurassic Park.

Ever since Jurassic Park, dinosaurs in media have been presented as a Pandora’s Box. We may have the ability to alter DNA and restore extinct species back to life, but should we?

This notion that our scientific advances in genetic mutations could have unintended consequences has permeated throughout dinosaurs’ media representation.

In card games, this fear of what could happen with genetic alterations and dinosaurs comes to be represented in the form of creating copies of creatures. The copying effect has a strong flavor of unleashing a terrible power.

Meteoric Extinction

No one knows for sure what led to the end of the dinosaurs, but the prevailing belief among scientists is that a meteor hit Earth, creating a devastating impact around it, and altering the atmosphere and the ecosystem of the planet such that dinosaurs could no longer thrive.

In card games, this meteoric event is represented through spells or actions that deal massive damage to multiple creatures, and potentially wiping the board.

Our Own Designs

After looking through hundreds of cards and seeing what dinosaurs existed, I wanted to make some of my own!

CARDNAME (Triceratops)
3{W}
Creature - Dinosaur
3/2
---
CARDNAME enters the battlefield with a shield counter on it.
CARDNAME has first stike as long as CARDNAME has a shield counter on it,

This card is a Triceratops that fights ferociously with its crest, but once that has broken, it’s much easier to defeat.

Mechanically, this would be a very tough creature to fight. The shield counter means it ignores the first instance of damage it gets, and first strke means that it deals damage before receiving it. I could see this card being quite strong. We could increase the mana cost by one, or alternatively remove the first strike ability and add two toughness, making it a 3/4.

CARDNAME (Pack Leader)
5{W}
Creature - Dinosaur
3/4
---
When this creature enters, create two 2/2 TOKEN NAME.

An army-in-a-can. You play it and get three bodies and 7/8 worth of stats. The art for the tokens can be smaller versions of the pack leader dinosaur, and you can have the art show the three dinosaurs together from different perspectives.

CARDNAME (Dinosaur Egg)
1{G}
Artifact
---
At the beginning of your upkeep, place a hatchling token on CARDNAME.
Remove three hatchling tokens from CARDNAME, sacrifice CARDNAME: Reveal cards from the top of your deck until you reveal a creature. You may place that card onto the battlefield.
Whenever one or more creatures an opponent controls attack you and aren’t blocked, destroy CARDNAME. Your opponent gains three life.

Here we have a dinosaur egg that takes some time to hatch. This can be played in a deck with many high mana value creatures to cheat out big monsters, or could also be played in a control deck to take advantage of a stalled board and get card advantage.

CARDNAME (Egg Stealer)
{B}{R}
Creature - Dinosaur
2/2
---
Haste
If this creature deals combat damage to a player, mill the top card of that player's library. If that card is a creature card, draw a card.

On the flip side, we have an egg stealing creature that lets you reap the rewards of stealing from your opponent’s nest. You can find an opening and sneak in this card to hit them and steal some card advantage.

CARDNAME (Parasaurolophus)
3{U}
Creature - Dinosaur
---
3/3
When this creature enters, tap and stun target creature.

This is one of the only dinosaurs that I would consider to be in blue, the color of knowledge and control. Parasaurolophus had a large horn on its head that was hollow and could have air blown through it. Paleontologists suspect that this horn could be used as an intimidation call.

On the card, we represent this horn call as a way of tapping down and stunning an opponent’s creatures, making them appear intimidated and backing down. The Parasaurolophus enters the battle with a mighty warcry, and an opponent’s creature becomes paralyzed with fear.

CARDNAME (Velociraptor Packmate)
2{R}
Creature - Dinosaur
2/2
---
This creature has flash if you control another dinosaur creature.
First Strike

Here we have a velociraptor that can use stealth and teamwork to defeat enemies. It ambushes enemies out of your hand to turn the tide of battle and hopefully eat up your opponent’s creatures.

It is enabled by having another dinosaur creature, rewarding you for playing more dinosaurs and tapping into the flavor of having a pack of dinosaurs working together.

CARDNAME (Scavenging Tyrannosaurus)
5{B}
Creature - Dinosaur
4/3
---
Menace
When this creature enters, you may exile up to three creature cards from a graveyard. Put a +1/+1 counter on it for each creature card exiled.

Here we have our ode to the scavenging Tyrannosaurus Rex.

I can see why T-Rexes don’t often have their scavenging nature depicted in media. Even as the king of dinosaurs, they only have so much screen time, and they have to play their role as the star. Their presence might be diminished if they are shown to be vultures looking for a free meal, instead of as an apex predator.

Regardless, here is our attempt to show T-Rex as both a fearsome monster and as a scavenger. You are rewarded for scavenging when it enters, and it can come in as a large threat with evasion.

CARDNAME (Baby T-Rex)
{G}
Creature - Dinosaur
1/1
---
Morbid - Whenever another creature dies, if that creature has greater power or toughness than this creature, put a +1/+1 counter on this creature.
This creature has trample as long as its power is 4 or greater.

The progeny of our scavenging Tyrannosaurus Rex. Here, we play with the Morbid and Evolve keywords in Magic. The Evolve keyword allows you to put a +1/+1 counter on a creature with said keyword if you play another creature that is larger. We twist that ability into one that triggers on death. The baby T-Rex eats when something else dies, and continues to grow.

CARDNAME (Gore)
3{G}
Sorcery
---
Target creature deals damage equal to its power to another target creature. Deal excess damage to another target creature.

This card is a powerful piece of removal in green that rewards playing creatures with high power. You can use it to remove another creature from the board, and if you play your cards right, you could potentially get two creatures for one card.

CARDNAME (Tyrannosaurus Rex)
4{G}{G}{G}
Creature - Dinosaur
10/10
---
Trample, Haste
This creature must attack if able.

A big dinosaur card for a big dinosaur. We want to bring the game to an end, and this card will have an effect the turn it hits the board. I tried to capture that it’s hungry and instinct driven by removing the decision of having it attack or not.

I almost didn’t add the trample ability as I wanted to have it be able to be blocked. Every turn, this giant creature would swing in, and your opponent would be forced to sacrifice a creature to it, or otherwise lose the game. However, I checked, and the many T-Rexes in Magic all have trample. I don’t want to break convention here so trample it is. Plus, closing out the game with a big creature is probably more fun than dwindling down resources and having one player lose all hope.

Conclusion

I hoped you liked some of the cards designed above. They take the inspiration from the base elements of dinosaurs and put them into new magic cards.

I do want to mention that the elements above, such as a primal nature, bigness, or scavenging, are elements that are inherent to dinosaurs in and of themselves. Great and original games will take these elements and put their own spin on them. What if the dinosaurs were domesticated by humans, and people rode dinosaurs into battle? What if dinosaurs continued and evolved their own intelligent species to match humanity?

Much like how Game of Thrones pulls heavy inspiration from the real history of the War of the Roses, so too can we pull heavy inspiration from real things like dinosaurs and cast them through our own lens to invent something new and give our players an experience they’ve never had before.

Slay the Spire 2 keeps the same system as the first Slay the Spire. You’ll pick a character with a unique set of cards, fighting enemies, adding cards to your deck, and trying to beat the boss at the end of each level.

What makes it work as a sequel is that every part of that system has new content – new enemies, elites, relics, cards from existing classes, new classes, new events, etc. Players of the original can hop right in and face new challenges and solve new puzzles.

Old Dog, New Tricks

There are a lot of graphical improvements. When you play a card, your character does an animation. You play a strike? The Ironclad swings their sword. This is a step up from the first game, where your character would simply slide towards the enemy.

There are three returning classes from the first Slay the Spire – The Ironclad, an armored warrior, The Silent, an assassin with poison and shivs, and The Defect, a robot who channels elemental orbs for effects on the battlefield.

Each one of these classes will be familiar from the get go. However, they’ve all gone through a few tweaks. For example, The Ironclad had a card in the first game called Heavy Blade that amplified strength buffs for more damage. That card is noticeably gone in Slay the Spire 2. However, for each old card gone, there are new cards for each class to experiment and play with. The Silent has had an upgrade to its discard playstyle – cards that are played when they are discarded now have the keyword Sly, both to help communicate this ability in shorter words and indicating that there are more cards that are played when discarded.

Returning players who pick up a familiar class will notice the improved graphics and animations immediately, and will be given new challenges and opportunities to prove themselves in combat with new cards and strategies to play with.

New Classes

Slay the Spire 2 introduces two new classes. The Regent is a regal lord from outer space, and The Necrobinder is an undead lich who has a helpful bone hand minion named Osty to help out on the battlefield. Both of these characters carve out new design space in Slay the Spire and have different playstyles and builds.

The Regent has an alternate cost system called Stars. You start each battle with three Stars, and can gain more through playing certain cards.

The Regent also has a mechanic called Forge. Each card with this mechanic will have Forge X, where X is a number like 6. The first time you forge in a battle, you add a card called Sovereign Blade. It costs 2 energy, deals an amount of damage equal to a base amount plus however much you’ve forged that battle, and has Retain, so it stays in your hand.

I enjoy playing as The Regent, but I think that the secondary resources of Stars could use some inspiration as well. In its current state, it feels like just another number to track. Secondary resources should have some weight. You should feel happy when you obtain them, and appreciate the reward when you spend them.

One of my favorite secondary resources in card games is Energy in Magic the Gathering. Energy works in a similar way where some cards generate Energy, and some cards spend Energy. One main difference is in themeing – in Magic cards with Energy, you can often feel how the Energy is amping up the card. Another difference is that Energy is not typically used as a requirement cost, but rather as a way to amplify the effects of a card. You can play a card without spending Energy, but it would be noticeably weaker. Cards with Energy usually have ways of enabling themselves as well, but if you have spare energy, you can spend more for a better effect. Conversely, if you don’t like the cards effect, you can use it as a way to bank up Energy for later.

If Stars were used as a way to amplify cards, as opposed to being a cost to play a card, it could have a mechanically different role and feel from the other main cost to cards.

The Necrobinder has some new mechanics as well. The Necrobinder has its own minion, Osty the bone hand. Osty starts each battle at 1/1 HP. At the start of your turn, you’ll add one to Osty’s max and current health. You can also add more health to Osty by playing cards with Summon. When you play a card thats says Summon X (where X is a number like 6), you add that much to Osty’s max and current health.

Osty acts as a shield of sorts – when damage comes through to the Necrobinder, first your armor will take damage, then Osty will take damage, and then finally, your character will take damage.

The Necrobinder also has access to one of my favorite new mechanics, Souls. You can add Soul cards to your deck through other card effects. A Soul card has 0 cost, draws two cards, and is then exhausted. There are cards that synergize with Souls, like Haunt, which triggers to deal damage whenever you play a soul, or Soul Storm, which is an attack that deals bonus damage for each soul you’ve used in that combat.

For me, The Necrobinder is a slam dunk. You have a new character that looks great and mechanics that match that flavor. You think about defense differently with your minion, and you have access to a bevy of strategies for combat.

Epoch System – Joining Unlocks and Narrative Together

One of my core beliefs is that card games struggle to deliver an ingame narrative experience. Cards can do a great job at depicting a world and give us a snapshot of characters in that world, but it can be hard to show these characters overcoming obstacles and going through change.

The cards in Slay the Spire have less space to work with when establishing flavor than, say, a card from Magic the Gathering. In Magic the Gathering, a card can be a creature, an action, an artifact, land – basically anything that could exist in the world that it wants to depict. Slay the Spire, on the other hand, are presented through a much more limited lens of actions that your character will take.

Slay the Spire 2 has attempted to crack the narrative and worldbuilding through a new gameplay system called Epochs. Epochs are a marriage of story moments and item unlocks. As you progress through the game, you’ll unlock Epochs. At the end of your run, you can go to the Epoch Timeline where you’ll see all these moments laid out in chronological order.

You can click to unlock the Epoch, where you’ll be presented with a short story and an illustration that reveals more about a character or the Spire itself. Then you’ll be presented with more relics, cards, or characters that you can meet on your run that will appear in later runs.

It’s a nice twist on the unlock system that gradually gives players more content, while also helping to reveal more about the world of Slay the Spire. There’s built in narrative pacing, and at any point, the player can experience each epoch in a linear fashion by going through each epoch from first to last.

Right now, some of the Epoch artwork has placeholder art (the game is technically in Early Access, even though it feels like a finished game), so it’s hard to judge the overall effect. However, the Epochs with finished art are evocative and allow you to connect to your character. I can’t wait to see the finished product.

Conclusion

Slay the Spire 2 shows that a good game system, along with many mechanics and good design, can keep players entertained for hours upon hours over multiple games. It doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but it does make every part of the wheel better. With new classes, cards, relics, enemies, and bosses, Slay the Spire 2 will keep players entertained and have them slaying to their heart’s content.

Before I do, I wanted to share my thoughts about what Slay the Spire 2 has to accomplish to live up to the reputation of its predecessor. Can the sequel live up to the hype of the original Slay the Spire?

Context

Slay the Spire was released in early access in November 2017. When it was first released, sales were slow until a streamer in China picked up the game. The game spread and sales exploded, jumping from 800 copies in the first few days to over 700,000 copies sold six months later.

Its rise in sales also helped the rise of the roguelike deckbuilder videogame genre. Slay the Spire used its digital nature in order to provide an experience that you can’t get in a paper card game where you’re staring your opponent down the table – an infinite power fantasy.

In a tabletop card game, once you’ve either proven that you will win, or have accumulated a significant advantage, your opponent will concede and the game is over. If you have shown a path to victory, it’s considered poor sportsmanship to continue playing, even if you have your awesome rare card in your hand that you’re itching to play. This makes sense as it feels bad to lose, and you have another human you’re playing against, and you (supposedly) want to have fun with them, instead of making them suffer while you play the game.

If you’re winning a game against a computer, though, they don’t have any feelings that you need to consider. You can play the meanest, nastiest cards you can think of and live out your wildest power fantasies. Your gameplay experience is solely about you.

For many players, Slay the Spire was their first experience with a roguelike deckbuilder game. That was almost a decade ago. Can Slay the Spire 2 deliver on the hopes and expectations of a groundbreaking game, even after much of the ground has been broken?

Sequel Stress

A successful sequel has to hold true to the original game while adding enough new material to make the purchase worth the consumer’s dollar. A sequel that’s too similar is boring and a cash grab, and a sequel that’s too different is alienating and messing with success.

Movies are another medium where studios make sequels, and they too have to make an entertainment product that feels true to the original, but provides fans something new.

This problem is ameliorated in narrative heavy entertainment products, like movies, or even story-driven games like The Last of Us, you can take the characters from the first movie, and put them in a new situation that’s similar, but not quite the same, as the original. Think about all of the James Bond or Mission Impossible movies where a new villain arises to endanger the world, only for the charismatic hero to save the day. These sequels work because they have a formula that works, and a likable protagonist that audiences want to root for.

Slay the Spire doesn’t have this. Yes, it has characters from the first games, but those characters never speak, and the only narrative is that you have to escape the spire… by slaying. This appears to be the same story of Slay the Spire 2, and that narrative alone won’t be enough to bring people back.

Historically, sequels in games can also adapt to new technology, using more powerful computers to provide more gameplay. Think about the jump from Warcraft 2, rendered in 2D and sporting two nearly identical factions, to Warcraft 3, which had 3D graphics, four unique factions and a new Hero system.

Can Slay the Spire 2 innovate with new technology? I don’t think so. From a technical perspective, the original Slay the Spire could probably be made with Adobe Flash in 2001. Card games do not require a lot of processing power, and Slay the Spire used 2D art assets for cards, characters, background, and effects. And before you dismiss this as hyperbole, the Game Boy Advanced game Yu-Gi-Oh! The Eternal Duelist Soul released in 2001 in Japan with over 900 cards and a complete Yu-Gi-Oh ruleset.

I’m not saying that a game can’t be fun without every bell and whistle. I still play the original Pokemon Trading Card Game for the Gameboy. What I am saying is that I don’t think Slay the Spire 2 will use raytracing to provide a new gameplay experience that was missing in the first Slay the Spire.

There is another entertainment property that is able to sell sequel upon sequel without narrative or technical innovations – trading card games.

What’s a new card set, but another Sequel?

For 2026, approximately every seven weeks, Magic the Gathering has or will release a new set of Magic cards to the public. Do they contain relatable characters in new settings and scenarios? Not really – four of the seven new sets this year are other intellectual properties and have no narrative cohesion. Do they have new technology? I’m sure printing has evolved over the last 30 years, but Magic the Gathering is still ink on cardboard, same as it ever was.

What drives sales of new cards? How can Magic keep making new sets without the game going stale? New cards, of course!

Trading card games like Magic the Gathering, Pokemon, and YuGiOh rely on their players to invest time and money into their collections, with the hope that their cards will be playable for years to come.

New sets bring new mechanics, and new cards can be matched up with old cards to form new strategies and tactics.

Card games have another element that helps keep gameplay fresh over time – randomness. In every card game, players have decks of cards that are randomized in order through shuffling.

Trading card games must keep their rules fairly consistent so as to not make older cards invalid, but video games that are self contained can introduce new mechanics and systems.

Warcraft 3 had better graphics and used new technology, but many of its innovations come from gameplay mechanics and design rather than tech. The move from two symmetrical factions to four asymmetrical factions could have been done in the 90s, as Blizzard did with Starcraft (albeit with three factions rather than four). The hero system in Warcraft 3 did not require four times as much RAM – from a data perspective, you probably have to store a few kilobytes more data for a hero unit than for a regular run of the mill grunt. However, the hero system proved to be one of the best mechanics of Warcraft 3, and influenced many popular games to come, like World of Warcraft and League of Legends.

Conclusion

Perhaps the question we should be asking isn’t whether Slay the Spire 2 can achieve as much as Slay the Spire did. We can instead ask whether or not Slay the Spire 2 would be worth consumers’ time and money.

If Slay the Spire 2 can bring the same dynamic gameplay from Slay the Spire, but with some new cards, classes, and systems, that could be enough to make sure that it succeeds as a sequel.

Slay the Spire was born from two friends in Seattle, one of which managed a local game store, stocked with card games and board games. They took inspiration from those games and brought them into the digital space, providing video game players with fresh new gameplay they hadn’t seen before.

Perhaps we can trust the makers of the original Slay the Spire to have continued playing games and seeing what has worked in the marketplace. Just as video games continue to evolve, so too have board games and card games. With nearly a decade since the release of the original game, I’m sure there are some new mechanics that they have been wanting to share in their own game.

Can the sequel live up to the hype of the original Slay the Spire? Is that even the right question? Do game designers exist to revolutionize the industry with every game they release, or is it the job of a game designer to make a game that people enjoy playing?

Be sure to tune in next Saturday – I’ll be spending this week trying to slay the spire again and will give my thoughts on Slay the Spire 2.