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sendhelpidfk3 years ago

I play a lot of MTG, so this game is right up my alley. Especially later in the game, there's a lot of strategies you can use to win games, whether that be slow and grindy clocks or fast combo descks that stack devotion miles high. I've got a lot of respect for you designing an entire card game over a weekend. I do have some constructive criticism for the game, though:

  • Generally, with card design you don't want 'strictly better' cards; usually in card games rarity is used to distinguish how interesting a card is from a design perspective, so that way decks aren't mile-high stacks of rares, plus it forces you to make tradeoffs when constructing decks (however, I do understand what you're going for here)
  • Playing into the first point, some more diverse strategies or cards that make strategies available would be fun - spells that have a weak initial effect but let you play another spell that turn (trading your own card advantage and value for speed)? Spells that steal enemy bonuses and such for a turn before giving them back twofold or something (risk vs reward)? Draw spells? Discard spells (both forms of card advantage)? There's a lot of ways you can take the card designs while still keeping the base gameplay of slapping together bonuses and multipliers to power out huge effects
  • The ability to choose from a handful of 'starter decks' with these new strategies in mind as well as the pre-existing ones - maybe keep the current starting deck as the de-facto aggro/combo deck, another deck that uses Wraths and Prayer Bells with Assualts to be the control deck, some decks using the card ideas I mentioned above - that way, people can get a glimpse of the actual depth of what you have going on here and can start trading into more interesting sub-strategies or more powerful iterations of their current strategy
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Spydercrawler3 years ago(+1)

Thank you for writing such an in-depth review of my game! I have also played a lot of card games, so I certainly understand where many of these points are coming from.

If I was going for a normal, scalable, card game, I probably wouldn't use 'strictly better' cards, like you said. In this case, though, I had to use them both to simplify the design process to meet time constraints, as well as to ensure that enemy decks are better than the player deck. If the enemies did not have better decks than the player, then the player would never die and see the deck editing screen, which I didn't really want. So, I had to make some cards that were, frankly, overpowered to ensure the player died at least once.

I also wish I could have had more diverse cards and strategies. Once again, this came down to time. It is much easier to balance the strategies in a short period of time when the strategies are fairly simple. If I had more time, though, I would probably add card draw, and less powerful cards that don't end the turn. I think your recommendations are all really solid. I might make a post game jam version that adds this stuff, honestly.

I should have added starter decks. I considered it, but decided against it at the time. Once again, I think this is something that I should add in a post jam version of the game. The wrath/bell/assault deck honestly sounds really neat! 

Once again, thanks for the review. It's given me a lot to think about.

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