M13 Back on Task

I'm not going to lie, I couldn't find a way to make this post interesting or educational. It's more for the collaborators to discuss logistics than anything truly exciting. The upshot is that we've done some footwork and are ready to get knees-deep into the card file again. You're more than welcome to read on, but I promise it will be boring. Fair warning.

We put together a basic skeleton back in September as a first draft and to get something we could playtest early. Since then, we've examined some of the choices we've made about our featured mechanic[1] and designed a couple neat cycles and a dozen or so solid top-down cards to help add new resonance to the set. It's time to start our second draft. Let's incorporate those cycles and as many of the top-down cards discussed over the last couple days as we can, pitch what no longer works and revise the keepers.

It's not going to be fun or easy removing cards we like from the file, but we have to remember that a card doesn't make a set. A lot of these will never been seen again, but many will be saved for future sets (in our case, those sets will be theoretical, or real amateur sets or even actual sets, thanks to convergent design). The point is, being a fun, interesting or elegant card isn't enough: it must serve the needs of the set (Resonance, Accessibilty, Play Value, Innovation, Nostalgia) better than any other card or combination of cards that we can muster.

Let's review the five-card cycles we've got right now: the common Chasm Drake cycle (Elephant Rider, Ethereal Stalker, Dogs of War & Army of Munchkins), two common lair cycles, the common cantrip cycle (Withstand, Exclude, Afflict, Zap & Wildsize), the uncommon Sunblessed Tactician cycle (Streamtide Philosopher, Bogcurse Schemer, Taunting Minotaur & War Oak General), and the mythic planeswalkers cycle. Hmm. Maybe we should fit in a rare cycle just for completeness.

Also, since we're entering a stage where we'll be doing a lot more playtesting, I'd like to work primarily in MSE, updating card files as we work. To that end, I've created a DropBox folder where we can share our files. I've given access to most of the known collaborators. If I missed you or you want to join in, I'll need your email address. DM me on Twitter if you don't want it public. Nothing (that I know of) prevents us from working on the same file at one time and overwriting each other's changes, so any time you would open a file, make a copy with a new name and edit that. We'll be able to make notes within individual cards pretty easily and i've added meta-cards so that we can leave color-specific notes or general notes as well, though we really need to keep a central repository of notes as well. Probably, we'll create a new google doc with one tab where we add our latest update at the top. We'll figure that out.

For now, I've got the latest version of all the commons and I've added the cycles and the new top-down cards. I went through the Google Doc and added the white uncommons, rares and mythics. I'd like the team to do the same with the rest of the set as we currently see it. Yes, it'll change drastically between now and the time we're finished, but we're going to need the full set to playtest much further than we've already done. If you remove a card, don't delete it until you've copied it to the 99 file since we may need it again later or will at least want a record of it for reference.

[1] Check out the section under Rules of Lair on the wiki, where a few of us have explored alternatives to our initial set of design rules. In particular, Nich has done a lot of work on the possibilities of asymmetrical use of lair and lair on auras. I hope to have a more in-depth discussion about which rules to stick with and which to change soon.