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Been doing a lot of reminiscing about TESL design while reading this whole MaRo pile on.
A quick story about Alfiq Conjurer I don’t think has been told yet to illustrate the “nowhere near as big a delta” concept Mark is referring to here: https://twitter.com/maro254/status/1259239195089887233">https://twitter.com/maro254/s...
A quick story about Alfiq Conjurer I don’t think has been told yet to illustrate the “nowhere near as big a delta” concept Mark is referring to here: https://twitter.com/maro254/status/1259239195089887233">https://twitter.com/maro254/s...
For those unfamiliar, this was a card that we printed in Moons of Elsweyr, on the left. It turned out that it was too powerful, and we (having the ability due to it being a digital game) changed the health from 4 to 3 after a month or two of it being recognizably the best card.
We got *killed* for printing it at all, despite 1) many complaints about Alliance War, the previous set, being underpowered and 2) it giving Mid Battlemage, an extremely popular midrange deck, a leg up after a stale control-heavy meta. People said it was obviously broken...
...and that we must have pushed it so hard to sell the new set. There was no possible way to miss how broken it was.
Well, once we changed it’s health from 4 to 3, it suddenly wasn’t a problem anymore. Sure it was powerful, but it was a healthy and generally acceptable card.
Well, once we changed it’s health from 4 to 3, it suddenly wasn’t a problem anymore. Sure it was powerful, but it was a healthy and generally acceptable card.
That one health?
We AGONIZED over it.
We literally had a Slack thread that was dozens if not hundreds of posts long talking about whether it should survive Ice Storm (a popular 3-damage-to-all spell) or not.
We knew it was risky, but after testing we thought it’d be OK...
We AGONIZED over it.
We literally had a Slack thread that was dozens if not hundreds of posts long talking about whether it should survive Ice Storm (a popular 3-damage-to-all spell) or not.
We knew it was risky, but after testing we thought it’d be OK...
...especially given the above two points, that went in its favor.
We were wrong! For sure. We admitted it by fixing it later, which is all we could do at the time.
But getting told we were idiots and careless and greedy HURT. We made what I genuinely believe to be as close to..
We were wrong! For sure. We admitted it by fixing it later, which is all we could do at the time.
But getting told we were idiots and careless and greedy HURT. We made what I genuinely believe to be as close to..
...a perfect expansion as possible and got savaged over one point of health that we were 50/50 on and barely made the wrong call on.
That’s what I think about a lot when I see Oko (does -1 instead of +1 make it just straight balanced? Probably) or Veil (fine at 1G or GG? Yup).
That’s what I think about a lot when I see Oko (does -1 instead of +1 make it just straight balanced? Probably) or Veil (fine at 1G or GG? Yup).
It’s such a fine line. We had some of the best TESL players in the world in Josh and Paulo and Jason (I don’t think I’m a slouch either) and specifically focused on one card and it’s health for posts and posts and got it wrong. It’s hard af and I don’t envy anyone making...
...similar calls in Magic, where you can’t hotfix that one number a month later.
(For kicks, I went back in time in Slack and looked. 70 posts!!! In that one thread!!!)
