Community Designs 1

     So today, I’m going to do something a little different today. I’m going to have a look some community designed heroes from the Custom Card creation thread on the Altered Discord. I’m going to evaluate them for a) theme – does the card belong in the Altered world and the faction it’s been put into b) power – is the card costed correctly, too powerful or too weak and c) novelty – is it something interesting and new. Note that I reckon a hero ability should be worth around 1 mana a turn or 7-8 mana over the entire game. Now note I am not a game designer but just an amateur archchair designer so my opinions may be wrong. I'm sure that the Equinox folk will have their own views. 

     We’ll start up first with a couple of Axiom cards. This first one by [CVN] Komah, the picture definitely looks like an Axiom character, but the abilities do not. Getting mana orbs in play early is a Bravos ability, and this is actually a very strong version of this. Cost reduction is fine in most factions, but Axiom is more than likely to be for permanents.

     Not being able to play more than three cards is essentially trinket text as you very rarely ever have the mana to do that, though the first ability might impact that. In terms of power level this is broken. Being able to use any character with fleeting as an extra mana orb is an ability that can essentially ensure you get double your opponent’s mana early. Then getting a discount of 1 on a card play is gravy on top of that. The second ability would be strong on its own, but this card is just way too strong and out of faction. As to novelty the first ability is novel but pitched at way the wrong level and having a restriction on the number of cards you can play a turn is interesting as a balancing feature, but this should be 1 or 2 instead.

     The second Axiom hero by Exalts Ilad has an anime picture but other than that is reasonably in scope of Axiom with a giant robot dragon. I guess the flavour on this is the giant mechanical dragon scares off all your other non-robot creatures. Interacting with robots is a very Axiom thing so this one passes the flavour test. As to power level, we are spending 1 mana to essentially give 2 boosts to all our robots. I mean you’re going to use this ability before you play any non-robot characters. Since most of our robots are tokens, getting fleeting is irrelevant. The only non-token robot we’ve seen wants to be played from reserve, so it won’t affect Sleeping Botty either.

     My view is that two boost for all your robots is a bit too strong and that one might be reasonable if a little strong for 1 mana. Charge affects everything and costs 2 from hand, so it might be just about reasonable here for 1 boost to all robots for one mana. I don’t think the card is especially novel here. I mean its just a double charge for robots after all.

     Jora by [CVN] Komah is a big powerful warrior on a lion. He has a few more Ordis vibes that Bravos, but I could give it a pass with a change to the armour style, I guess. The abilities to create a token and get boosts are both things that Bravos does, so the flavour is just about there.

     The ability to spend 1 mana to create a 1/1/1 is about neutral, though possibly should cost a little because it’s a guaranteed card play on one expedition. The ability to gain a boost for every other boost you have is bonkers good though. If you have another character that you’ve played physical training on here, you can pop out Kermo with three boosts on it. So, you’re now getting 4 mana’s worth for 1 mana investment. This is way too strong and not balanced in the slightest.  Oh, and all your characters without abilities played from hand gain 1 boost (not just the first one like on Teiga). Err talk about too much!

     I’d say that this isn’t a particularly novel design as it just reuses Bravos things in an overpowered way.

     We now move onto Lyra and our first hero which is by [CVN] Komah and it has a very tricky ability which is very flavourful for Lyra. The big operatic conductor Folato is also very Lyra in nature, so I’ll give this one maximum marks for flavour.

     As to power level I think this is too strong. Its harder to evaluate in terms of mana as its new, but the first ability is already worth one mana before we even get to the second ability, which I feel is way stronger. If I were rebalancing the card, I’d get rid of the first ability and have the second one switch two characters you control between expeditions. This might be more balanced, but it would need playtesting.

    Its definitely a novel ability and some interesting design space.

     Yugi is another Japanese anime card this time by Maverick that alas doesn’t look particularly Lyra. The ability is not random related either, so I’d say that it also fails the thematic test.

     Power wise we have another hero off the power scale. If you have a great combo in your deck now all you need to do is play a first turn setup turn to let your opponent win both expeditions, go fetch your combo to catch up. With the nature of Altered you’ll get to use those cards twice (from hand and reserve). Every other turn you are not only drawing two cards, but getting the exact ones you want. Drawing a card is worth two mana, drawing the one you want would at a guess be worth at least 3 mana making two a net gain of at least 6 mana. You’d only need to activate this twice to make the hero be way overpowered. Repeatable gameplay like this is not great design.

     In terms of uniqueness of ability, it is unique I guess, but my feeling is that the ability is not one that we’d want to have reliably in the game.

     Next time I’ll look at the other three factions’ designs (warning there’s lots of Ymzir designs out there).