MoG's Game Dev Journal

[Man_Over_Game]

Back to what I was saying, you don't start with many cards in your deck, and your opponents know exactly what cards you put in there (as you pick 3 cards at a time from a neutral stack of 5 revealed cards that refill when a slot is emptied, until everyone has 9). If you need more cards, or if you just need to reshuffle your discarded pile into your deck, you can take a Hit and draw your 3 cards from the neutral stack.

Combined with that, we made it so that any time an opponent's card is put in the discard pile, you can remove a number of dice from any of your Magic cards and attempt to roll higher than that player's Power (the current number of dice in their reserve pool). If they succeed, the opponent's card goes in YOUR discard pile instead.

This works to both negate your opponent's current strategy while also forcing them to burn themselves to negate your "milling" playstyle, which also makes them more predictable (due to the fact that the cards they have to use are revealed). Of course, this also muddies up your normal strategy a bit, as you'll start to draw your opponent's old cards instead of the ones you want, so it does have a bit of a Catch-22 about it.

One interesting aspect of this is the fact that the Magic strategy is stronger the less your opponent has been Hit, as he'll have fewer dice in his Reserve Pool to counter your card-stealing. This also means that the Magic playstyle is naturally countered against the Equipment playstyle, as the Equipment playstyle has a naturally low card-loss rate, and wants to have a ton of dice in their Reserve Pool.

In essence, we have:

Units > Equipment > Magic > Units...

Or, alternatively:
Board Control > Burst Damage > Card Advantage > Board Control

In a system where your universal currency is a d6.

So you can make a deck entirely around using Equipment to take out key targets and defend yourself as you use Magic cards to wall off a major weakness of yours, forcing your opponent into burning through his own health to keep up his card advantage.
Or you can make a Magic + Units deck that just throws out as many units as you can to put pressure on your opponent while relying on Magic cards to protect them or to steal cards to fuel your rapid draw rate.
Or maybe you make an Equipment + Unit deck, where you put up a wall of units to absorb hits for you while their dice return to your pool to later be recycled for your big-hitting Equipment at the end of the round.



Right now, we're looking at finding the means of making custom cards into .XML files to use on Cockatrice (a program that allows you to play MtG with people over the internet with made-up decks). Cockatrice does a lot of the things we're looking for, like turning cards upside-down, stealing cards from your opponent, or putting various counters on cards.

I know it's possible, but most resources that did this died like 5 years ago, so we've ran into a lot of dead ends. If we get this to work, though, we can look into getting playtesters from the internet, which means we can be a lot pickier about what help we can get, rather than whoever just happens to be in the only open game shop in town.