Blog

Patrick Sullivan

In games of Sealed Pack, abilities and equipment, especially the good striking weapons, can be dominating.  Because not every class has access to direct removal for these classes of cards, this adds to the level of frustration these cards can create.  A lot of players draw a similar conclusion from this experience—that there should be a variety of generic (Burn Away) or semi-generic (Chipper Ironbane, Acid Hands, etc.) to answer these sorts of threats.  While we need to give tools to the classes that don’t destroy these card types outright, a sea of generic destruction available to every class isn’t the type of world we should be creating.

To start with, the attrition rate in World of Warcraft TCG is already too high, if anything.  It’s very hard for our allies to have any permanence because of direct attacking, and questing ensures that people rarely run out of things to do.  Because of this, it’s already a challenge to have cards stay in play for more than a turn or two.  We don’t want our boards to be constantly empty besides the ally you just played; most of the cool interactions in TCGs come from having a bunch of different cards in play.  So we don’t want our abilities and equipment to be just another speed bump as you’re curving out with your allies.  Having cards actually stick for a little while is an important part of having fun games.

Another thing that’s fun is for our classes to have distinction; it’s a way of translating MMO flavor and makes for good mechanical gameplay.  When we bleed parts of our trait map to the generic part of the card pool, the classes that specialize in those mechanics feel less special.  It’s hard to get excited about Dispel Magic when Cromarius Blackfist exists.  Now, some amount of this is unavoidable.  Allies with Mend can detract from our healing classes, for example.  We can’t avoid this entirely because almost any power we give to any ally is somehow overlapping with the mechanics of at least one class, but ability and equipment destruction are too significant to the definition of our classes to be handing it out for free to our allies.

Most importantly, we’re much better off seeding a variety of “sideways” answers to cards that don’t destroy cards outright, but instead give the player a different way of handling the card in question.  Rogue can’t destroy abilities, but it can Poach it out of the opponent’s hand before it creates any trouble.  Priest can’t blow up a weapon, but it can give a health boost to its allies, heal them, or bubble them from the damage.  These kinds of answers are the best, in my opinion.  They give a ton of distinction to the classes, allow the other player to keep his card (remember, we’re under some obligation to make sure the guy with the weapon is having fun, too), and just generally create more variety in the gameplay. 

This is not to say we won’t make allies with some play against opposing abilities and allies; in fact there are plenty of allies that either destroy them conditionally or interact with them in some way that isn’t outright removal.  But the era of unconditional, no additional cost destruction is a thing of the past, at least at the rate that Munkin and friends provided.  While it can be frustrating to lose to the occasional weapon or ongoing ability, we feel it’s far worse for a bunch of generics to homogenize the deckbuilding and game experience, which is what they do.