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hi everyone,

Jimplay here, today i'll give you some insight information about artist recruitment .
Many of you have sent drawing, and expressed the interest in working with us.

First of all, we wish to express our bigger thanks about this self-willed and support attitude !
We're glad to see that our DoXa's community, is strongly supportive and self-willed by helping us greatly when it is possible.
As i could read here: keep up the good work. As you are greatly supporting us, this is possible !
Thank you very much for continuing to send your artwork, we are still looking for artist.

So, since the last news that i've provided, we recruited 1 artist : Ivan.
He's actually working on some artworks, and thanks to him, our forecasting production time is reducing by one third !
The more artist working in our game there was, the less waiting time before a playable game there would be.

Keep up the good support !

//Jimplay, Art lead for "Duels of Xen'Arun"

Hey guys,
it's Milky again for another Game Concept update. Last time i mentioned how there was an imbalance in the dynamic of Spells vs Fortunes in MMDoC and promised that i touch on that in greater detail this time. Today i will do exactly that.
Lets begin by taking a closer look at the problem:
Let's all follow this link:
http://www.mmdoctools.com/cards…
This filters out all fortunes excluding the neutral ones.
In general Fortunes might not seem to have been extreamly inferior compared to spells, but there is one important thing: What made Fortune decks strong were usually the same neutral fortunes over and over again. Only very few neutral fortunes were actually usefull and playable in a competetive environment.
Especially the common and uncommone ones. Sure with rares or especially epics it was kind of ok since with fortunes you could be very creative, so it was possible to create strong ones there. But was it possible to great a good amount of strong commons and uncommons? My answear is no. And i mean it was not possible by the nature of fortunes and not the devs simply failed to do so. So what is actually the concept of fortunes and how does it compare to spells?
Well i would define it as more strategical, long term aimed. And it's not like the themes of fortunes were totally new to ccgs. DoC's factions often had familar themes for any CCG player. And thus the fortunes were based around that, too. Haven heal, regain creatures from graveyard to hand; Necro revive; etc.
Other fortunes would interact with the keywords of the factions creatures or the tribes. Granting buffs like giving creatures attack anyways (stronghold) or interacting with spies (sanctuary) for example.
On the other hand spells were much more direct and in your face. Way more damage and removal. While there is also utility, you can always combine these cards with some damage or removal when going magic instead of destiny. And damage/removal is very strong. It is much more consistent in its usefullness, because you basically always want to have some way of getting rid of enemy creatures. And it has more tempo, which is key esepcially in MMDoC, because you always use it to directly affekt the board situation rather than doing things that only later give you an advantage (eg. put a creature from you graveyard to the top of your deck).
These are the two key points here (no order):
1. Less situational
2. More direct impact

And these are problem for fortunes not for a specific card design, but of the concept for the concept of fortunes vs magic. Because you can theoretically always make every card strong by buffing it, but it's hard to balance fortunes vs spells. I'll try to illustrate that in an example.
Note that its often either the slow impact or the situationalness that is the problem of a single fortune.
Lets take:
3 (0/0/3): Choose: Target creature has sweep attack or target creature has attack anywhere until end of turn.
Its a typical example of a card thats simply too situational even though it lets you already choose between two effects. While it
does have a direct impact on the board, it does require a number of things to be effective: You always need a creature. To be effective the creature best has a high atk/ the board needs the opponent to have some creatures adjacent (sweap atk)/ you need to be able to make a good trade (melee still receive retaliation/ and even more. Compare that to a 3 resource spell that lets you deal 4 damage to target creature. The spell is much more likely to be useful. (You could play it without a creature, much more likely to do a good trade with 4 dmg + atk on target creature in front of your creature/ trick retaliation).
How could you make this balanced?
You could make
1) Lower the cost
2) Make the effect permanently

[Lower the requirements is not valid, because well if you do that the card might get balanced - but only because if its 1 fortune it can also be played in creature/magic decks, which doesn't count since we are fundamently talking about the concept here, the card only serves as example]

1) Well its almost impossible to balance. Either it will remain too situational or become really really strong (this largely has to do with the cards around it). Even if the card costed 1 or 0 it probaly wouldn't be balanced. Depending on the other fortunes it would still either be unplayable as it does nothing to really help enabling fortune decks, but in the right decks it would be OP since its so cheap, while having an impact on the board. Here the fact that it is a fortune is a kind of drawback and the card itself is even faster than spells. This is certainly not a desirable state. Also if we would design too many cards like this, where is even the difference between spells and fortunes? Flavor whise, gameplay whise..

2) Here it is again a question of tempo. Either the card is playable resource whise, then its almost an auto include in every deck or its too slow and not playable. Trust me its a fine line really! (assuming even that we let you choose a creature at the beginning of your turn; attached to one creature only its almost like an enchantment which has even other problems but i wont touch on that now)
If the card is cheap enough so that you can play it either so early (like turn 1-2) that you dont receive too much damage or squeeze it in in like turn 4-6 with another creature, its so strong that you always want to play it, because in the long run it will win you the game. If not and it costs like 3,4,5 resources it's simply too slow and you will die before.

So what could we do? How can we balance fortunes, while giving them an individual flavor and let them be operators on more long-term strategies.

Well if they are too weak for a single turn, but too strong to last permanently let them last for several turns. Now that is a concept fairly uncommon for CCGs. It has some problems i will touch upon later on, but let me quickly show you why it is great in the DoC environment and help with the balance.

2 (0/0/3): Lasts 3 turns. At the beginning of your turn you may choose a friendly creature and give it either attack anywhere or sweap attack until EOT (wording is slumpy but its only an example).

Now im not saying this is perfectly balanced, i just made the example up and spent much too less time thinking about it, but i think its very clear that these kind of effects are much easier to balance over several turns.
This is the concept we have for Fortunes or Tactics as the card type is called in DoXa. This doesn't mean every tactic will de desinged around it, but a good amount especially those that have faction specific effects and are very normal (again rares and epics can have very unique effects that can also be balanced with permanent or instant; and we also want to keep the possiblitly to do neutral fortunes for specific purposes take the great card revised tacitcs as an example).
Btw with turn it is meant your turn. So if it says 3 turns it will last 3 of your turns and not your + opponents + your only.
The advantages:
- Better balance
- Clear thematic and gameplay related differenciation between tactics and spells
- Lots of fun interactions to experiment with:
Think about the dynamic of doing something at the end of your turn vs at the start of your oppoenents in such cards.
Eg: 1 (0/0/2): Lasts 2 turns. At the beginnning of your turn look at your opponents hand. Choose target card (with cost 2 or less or sth, just making this up ONLY EXAMPLE NO BALANCE INTENDED) So as you can see the opponent always can react here, making it an interesting dynamic.
Or interactions with when the tactic leaves the play after a couple of turns.
EG: 2 "summon of the titan": Lasts 5 turns. When summon of the titan leaves play, summon a 5/5/10 Titan to the field. (again certainly no balance intended, just a very intuitive example i hope)
OR the other way around.
2 "Lasts 3 turns. summon of the bloody evil OP demon" When (this) comes into play summon a 3/3/5 demon to the field. When (this) leaves the field deal 3 damage to each friendly creature

Additionally think about cards that can make tactics last turn less or 1 turn more. Also interesting dynamic. I think there is a lot that can be explored with this concept. Again we dont want all tactics to have this, but it is a main concept. (there will be 2 sub types - one lasts several turns the other is instants [or permanent])

Lastly let me quickly talk about what i meant with problems above:
The reason why this is not in many ccgs is because ccgs are originally board games. And there its hard to keep track, because you have to do it for each card individually, normally with counters. This can be a very complicated thing to do. Even in online ccgs where the ai can calculate it, its hard for beginners or casual players to remember all the cards on the board and keep track of how long everything is going on etc.
This is why its very important for us to make the mechanic as intuitive as possible. We need to make it visible within the games graphics how long each of the tactics will still last. And we need to make this mechanic understandable to players that didnt play DoC before and that didn't read a long blog post by Milky about fortunes vs spells
Смайлик «grin»
In the tutorial.

Overall this is the biggest challenge in this regard in my opinion. Making this mechanic intuitive. But im am confident we will find ways and do this just fine! And then im looking foward what kind of decks you guys will be able to create with the tactics we design!!

I hope you enjoyed the read. Until next time.
Your,
Kai Krüger, Game Concept Director