Novelty's MND Custom Expansions... the design philosophy behind the cards

It's coming up to the 2nd anniversary of the day when I decided "Hey, let's make a custom card expansion for MND". Well, custom cards were nothing new for the game, people have been making them since the beginning of the game... but an entire expansion... complete with art... now that was definately something new... at least for MND.

After all, I had known and even worked with some of the following people who have made custom cards for other games. Some of these include

• Bruce Mason, one of the designers for Precedence's Babylon 5 prior to the demise of Precedence. After Precedence went under, Bruce continued to create custom expansions based on the ideas in progress from his work for Precedence. He has since then made the fan made sets Anla'shok and The Vorlons with some help from the online community and a third expansion - The Dying Races - being in the works.
• Jsson Roosevelt, together with his childhood friend Shane Saunders, created a whole universe of cards for Wildstorms. A few of my card ideas was transformed into custom cards for that game.
• Tomi Nieminen, part of Doomtrooper Finland, who have created and are still creating custom expansions for Doomtrooper. Some of their custom cards are hosted on the official site of the creator of the game.
• HC O'Neill, one of the troika of people who rules on Rage. They are currently working on their fourth custom expansion.
  

I remember those perilous days in the beginning with the flame wars over at Insiider and half of almost everyone claiming their right to free speech by denouncing the expansion, while the other half was zealously backing the concept of custom cards, if not the expansion then in progress. Those days are long gone of course. The game is dead... well, almost dead... there are still pockets of survivors who play regularly offline (and I've got to give a shout to Dave and his Springfield players) and online (especially those European players who could never find anyone to play except online).

Before I ramble on about multitudes of unconnected things, I best get to the point of this article/post/blog/whatever - what are the major guidelines and design philosophy behind the custom expansions. To make it easy on the memory, I've decided to keep it to three items and that they'll all start with the letter P (so pardon me for the horrible shoehorning).

1. Power Escalation Potential
Power Escalation is always a problem in a CCG where cards do not rotate out, or otherwise retired. Cards in an expansion has to be incrementally more powerful (read attractive) so that players will use them. Over time, the increment in power levels with each new expansion adds up until such a time when the first few expansions become underused because they are too weak. This issue was one faced by Mike Liesik, the last designer at Interactive Imaginations for the game, and was already evident after the release of Voice of the Storms.

Hence the custom cards that I with the help of the gEngine faithful are making are governed by the rule that the power escalation cannot be too much more than what already is available in the game, although there are some exceptions¹. I have been disparaged for making cards less powerful during playtesting of each expansion, and that's because of the wish to not increase the power levels too much. Also, a power card can make the design of future cards even more difficult. The existance of the creature cards Mist Hyren and Cawh, for example forced the text of Wawek's card to ensure that those creatures cannot be abused with Scyalla. The Core spell Entomb, as another example, forces each custom spell created to be checked that it is not broken when used with a Core magi.

What are the alternatives to power escalation? How can we make new cards, keep the power level about constant, yet make the cards attractive to the players to want to use them? The solution has been to move "sideways" instead of "up and up".

There are many themes, concepts and gameplay mechanics that have not been explored and instead of making existing themes and decktypes more powerful, the custom expansions that we have been working on tries to explore those other concepts. How can we increase the usefulness of Perpetual Motion... or Jungle Stalkers... or Shifty... or Arctic? Design of useful cards for these little used mechanics is one of the ways of going "sideways".

The other way of going "sideways" for MND in particular is to focus on the creature themes. For example, the Forest theme was introduced to Naroom with the first custom expansion, and in the design of the latest expansion, I had to remind the card designer to design the card for that decktype. Likewise, creature types such as Korrits, Kintors and Stuff has been expanded and reinfoced. Every custom expansion also has a Xyx creature, following the precedence set by the official expansions.

2. Player Interest

I work on the principle that if at least one card in an expansion catches the eye of a player such that they go "That is a great card!" than I would call the expansion a success. There are many different types of players out there and there is no way an expansion can please every player with every custom card created. Each player would have their individual likes and dislikes and each expansion seeks to have at least one card designed for that (type of) player in the expansion.

Someone recently posted (and I paraphrase) "I like cards 1, 3, 4 and 6, don't like 2 and 7, neutral about 5" to which another person replied (and again I paraphrase) "but cards 2 and 7 would be so useful in my deck". This only illustrates that what is one person's pleasure may be another's poison and special care is taken when designing the custom cards to ensure that there is, hopefully, something for everyone.

A large CCG manufacturing company likes to think that there are three basic types of players (although each type is not unique, i.e. some players have 2 of the 3 types, and some of the rarer players are a combination of all 3 types).

The first type is termed "Timmy". These are the player who like power cards - big creatures, big spells, big numbers. These are the players who would look at All High King Korg with his 26 starting energy and love the card just for that one stat alone. To them, each game is about playing (or to be able to play) those large cards.

The second type of player is termed "Johnny". The Johnny-types are the types who love to win by exotic ways. Combos are the mainstay of their game, the harder it is to pull off the combo the better. They get the satisfaction of winning with a combo. Sometimes, even if they don't win, as long as they are able to pull off that elusive combo, they are happy with the game.

The third type of player is the "Spike" type, probably named after a skinny Vampire on TV. These are the types who will win whatever the cost. They may copy decks off the internet, or abuse power cards or broken combos. It doesn't matter how they win, as long as they win every game they play, casual or otherwise.

3. Playing Experience

The final guideline behind the creation of the custom cards is to enhance the playing experience and renew interest in the game. There are a number of things that decreases playing experience - not being able to drow or play a card during your turn every turn... infinite energy combos... instakills. These are termed Negative Play Experience (shorted to NPE) by most CCG players and is to be avoided at all costs.

Although the custom cards toys with denial mechanics - for example: restricting energize, discarding cards, restricting draw - each of these cards are designed such that there are answers to the card in question, be it built into the card itself as a weakness, or in the form of another card.²

One little looked way of increasing the playing experience is to enhance the uniqueness of each region. It is well known, that Orothe is the Relic region and KT has the big creatures. Some of these have been expanded, and new ones have been created. Weave is gradually getting the ability to manipulate the discard pile, Arderial has its Telepathy elements enforced and Paradwyn is beginning to get more adept at manipulating creature's starting energy. To ensure that each ability is unique, some form of regional enforcement is hardwired into the card such that it gets pretty much useless outside of its intended region, and thus creating the uniqueness for the desired region.

Conclusion

One further thing that doesn't fit in the 3 categories above is the fact that each custom card created must have some sort of art, preferable in the same style as the existing cards. This is often the most difficult part of the card design - to draw/get the correct artwork (and permission to use the artwork) for any custom card. Often times, whenever someone demands that I should make this or that card, I retort with the reply "Get me the art first". Creating the text might be easy... creating the artwork is often beyond the ability of most people.

This is a sneaky way of making sure that the guest custom card designers have a better picture of what needs to go into the custom cards that they are responsible for. Hopefully they will now understand the reasons why I vetoed some of their card designs. This is also meant to be an invaluable resource not only to those who are currently helping with the design of the custom cards, but also to the wannabes.

Most everyone would think that making custom cards is and easy thing, and I would have to agree. However, the creation of custom cards as part of an expansion is a completely different story, and I have to say that even after a few hundred cards, I still find the process difficult, but as someone said when I first started " go write a million cards first". In other words practice makes perfect.

Footnotes:
¹ Power escalation (for the custom expansions) is slightly more in weaker regions and weaker decktypes to ensure that they catch up to the power-regions and to level the playing field.
² Hence the increase in spell and relic discards with each custom expansion, not just a mechanic in and of itself, but to ensure that there are "answers" available.

Links:
This is the blog version of the article, most of the links are on the right.

Custom Expansions:
The following lists the custom expansions which have at least some work carried out on them.

Expansion Name	Expansion Type & Number of cards	Design Status
Elder's Legacy	Custom Expansion 50 cards	Custom Tournament Legal
Shadowsfall Promo	Custom Promo Expansion 12 cards	Custom Tournament Legal
Tainted Glimpses	Custom Expansion 100 cards + 3 Promos	Playtesting
Keeper's Quest Promo	Custom Promo Expansion 4 cards	Playtesting
Twilight War	Custom Expansion 100 cards + 4? Promos	Under Design
Double Jeopardy	Custom Promo Expansion 8 cards	Under Design
Exodus Flight	Custom Expansion 150 cards	Collecting Images
Cure	Custom Promo Expansion at least 4 cards	Collecting Images
Ancient Enemy	Custom Expansion 100 cards	Collecting Images
Fallen Hour	Custom Expansion 150? cards	Collecting Images