Blog

Patrick Sullivan

A lot of people, especially serious, tournament players, have some misconceptions about development.  Specifically, those only the products geared toward competitive play go through anything resembling “development”.  This is not the case.   The raid decks, even our other stand-alone hobby games, go through a rigorous development process.    Now, the development process is different for each product, balancing for power level between the individual classes in the Class Starters is less important than in a regular expansion, for example.  Still, this most recent version of the Class Starters went through a fairly lengthy development phase for a variety of reasons.

The primary use of the Class Starters is as an entry vehicle to our game.  When someone walks into a store and wants to get started with the World of Warcraft Trading Card Game, this is the first thing that should be in his or her hands.  Were that the only factor, we would want to make these as simple as possible.  However, there are other things to consider.  For one, we want them to have a reasonable degree of replayability.  If all the allies had no text boxes and all the abilities were Energizes and Wraths, it would be pretty simple to teach someone how to play.  But how much fun would it be to play that deck the fourth or fifth time?  In addition, we want to use these in certain OP events for newer players, but experienced players play in those events as well.  While experienced players aren’t our primary target, it’s nice if these provide a little bit of depth even for our experienced players.

A significant change was giving each deck a theme.  The first round of Class Starters was full of “stuff”.  Some allies, some named abilities, maybe a striking weapon or two.  Whatever definition we could highlight in the classes basically came incidentally.  Yes, Gouge was a card, but very little cared about stuff being exhausted.  This isn’t a disaster, the decks still played out fine, but they didn’t provide the depth and replayability we were going for.  By adding some “damage type matters” or “punish exhausted allies” themes, we’re able to show off a little bit of the game’s design space without overwhelming new players.  All it takes is one or two cards that actually reward you for doing the theme to feel like your deck is different from your opponents, the rest of the stuff is “hidden” and adds no complexity (for example, having “exhausted allies matters” doesn’t make Gouge any more complicated, allies have the Nature Damage type in the appropriate decks doesn’t make those allies more complicated, etc.).  Placing a Talent in each Starter is something along the same lines.  All of them are either some of the glue for the theme or the most exciting card in the deck, and sometimes both.  Plus, showing off that we reference talents, and we give definition to each spec, is cool information to communicate without adding to complexity overload.

The other major change was including a booster pack.  Now, this doesn’t change the product at every level, since the booster basically gets ignored for the purposes of OP.  Still, adding a pack does a ton of stuff, besides being a sweet value-add.  First of all, for players not intimately familiar with TCGs, a set starter deck can imply that you aren’t supposed to change the cards around, which is the opposite of the message we want.  Also, once players get more comfortable with playing the games and get used to the various classes, improving their deck with cards out of their booster pack can provide a lot of fun and replayability.  The most important thing, though, is the implication—that the game is infinitely customizable and dynamic, and that each player is in control of playing with the cards they want to play with.  After all, that’s the essence of playing TCGs.

There is some opportunity cost to all of this.  These decks are, after all, some amount more complicated than the previous round of Starter Decks.  This is especially noteworthy when complexity is at a premium in new-player products.  In the end, we felt the complexity uptick was fairly minor, and in exchange we got substantially more depth and were able to show off what makes TCGs cool in the first place.  In a product intended to draw in a new audience, those have to be priorities as well.