General Alternative Combat Systems

[Jason Waddell]

This is exactly cube related, but I am interested in discussing the fundamental combat systems in Magic-like games. For example.

Hearthstone
Restriction: Players only act on their own turn
Attacking: One creature at a time, creatures or enemy can be targetted
Defending: Taunt (passive ability)
Damage: Permanent
Overall playstyle: This system is very "offense" favored. 30 starting life is therefore needed.

Magic:
Restriction: Made forever ago
Attacking: All creatures at the same time, evasion abilities (flying, unblockable)
Defending: All creatures can block, defender chooses
Damage: Wiped away at end of turn
Overall playstyle: Defensive favored. Board stalls are very possible. (20 life).


What are the pros and cons? And more importantly, are there others with interesting properties we can create?

 

[Onderzeeboot]

I can't remember the game, but it had the following combat system:

???
Restriction: ???
Attacking: One or more creatures at a time, always attack the enemy player, attacking exhausts attacking creature, attacker can take as many attack steps as they want as long as each one is completely resolved before the next one is started
Defending: All creatures can block, defender choses, blocking exhausts blocking creature
Damage: ???
Overal playstyle: Kind of a middle ground to Hearthstone and Magic.

It's more complex than Magic, but I quite liked the implications. I can give an easy example where this rules set plays subtly different from Magic. Imagine the following board.

versus

Under this system, you can attack with the Grizzly Bears. Your opponent can kill it with a Hill Giant, but that would exhaust the Hill Giant for the turn, leaving your Rumbling Baloth free to attack your opponent's face without impunity. If your opponent is losing the damage race, they might decline to block the Bears because they need to kill that Baloth. At this point though, you can just pass the turn, having poked for 2 and leaving up a defense that actually blocks their Hill Giants profitably. Now imagine you have this in hand.



Under Magic you can try to bait a block by just attacking with the Bears, but that means you have to wait a turn with the Baloth. If you attack with both though, your opponent will snap double block the Baloth with both Giants, which is bad for you as well. This system though, lets you attack and possibly trade with the Bears, and if they took the bait and blocked allows you to directly capitalize on the board by attacking with the Baloth.

 

[Aston]

There's some games which have a "lane" system as well - the only one I've played is the Heroes of Might and Magic TCG but I think the Elder Scrolls TCG has it as well. When you play a creature, you assign it to a particular lane, and it can either attack opposing creatures in that lane or the opponent if the lane is clear.

Another digital TCG I've played is Faeria, which includes a board which is built as you play and has restrictions about where on the board you can summon creatures, and you have to be within range of the enemy player or their unit to attack. It was kind of cool but I didn't spend a whole lot of time on it.

 

[Jason Waddell]

There's some games which have a "lane" system as well - the only one I've played is the Heroes of Might and Magic TCG but I think the Elder Scrolls TCG has it as well. When you play a creature, you assign it to a particular lane, and it can either attack opposing creatures in that lane or the opponent if the lane is clear.

Another digital TCG I've played is Faeria, which includes a board which is built as you play and has restrictions about where on the board you can summon creatures, and you have to be within range of the enemy player or their unit to attack. It was kind of cool but I didn't spend a whole lot of time on it.

Yeah, I started playing Faeria a couple weeks ago. It's made here in Belgium, which is pretty cool. It more or less has Hearthstone's combat system, with spatial limitations (most creatures can only attack creatures they are adjacent to, damage is permanent, Taunt is a passive ability).

 

[Onderzeeboot]

I played so many ccg's, I lost count. Would have to reinstall some to see which ones I liked. I rembemer one that had a really cool lane mechanic, where cards had a turn cost instead of a mana cost. It was an incredibly cool card game, but it had an incredibly annoying PvP aspect where you basically had a floating island with different land types, which would dictate income and crafting and, I think, teambuilding. Problem was, other players could invade your island, and you would lose land when they were succesful in their invasion, meaning you would be randomly thrown back to the stone age. I quit when I wasn't able to play for a week and came back to an island with just the protected inner circle left.

Edit: Found it! Berserk: The Cataclysm. Hahaha, massive negative reviews on Steam, but I remember liking it. Problem is mainly that you had no agency in playing your cards, but the concept of using time as a cost is pretty cool!

 

[Jason Waddell]

Thoughts: I really don't like how Magic's combat system leads to board clogs. When running cube nights, the most miserable I saw players was when two high-value, low removal decks ran into each other. Both players staring, pained, at the board trying to figure out if there were any profitable attacks to make. I really think that if Rosewater et. al. were to remake Magic, this is one thing they would change.

That said, one of the things that really bothered me when I started Hearthstone is how hard it is to keep anything on the board. They've pinned cool lasting effects on things like Quest rewards, Death Knight hero powers, Legendary weapons, etc.

But you can't really have something like a Birds of Paradise in a system where you can just attack everything in front of you.

I wonder if a keyword like Swordproof (cannot be attacked) would be useful. You could still "bolt the bird", but it allows you to have some utility creatures that do something while in play, rather than just having a battlecry or deathrattle.

I guess, due to the interface though, the only thing Hearthstone creatures can do is attack. They can perform no other actions on the board.

 

[Onderzeeboot]

You could try how multiple combat steps play out like I described a few posts above. It's actually really easy to use with Magic the Gathering. You only need some small rules tweaks.

1. The active player can enter any number of combat phases during their turn. Each combat phase is followed by a main phase.
2. During an attack phase, the active player can declare any number of their creatures as attackers as normal (creatures without haste that were played this turn can't attack as usual).
3. At the end of each combat phase, tap all creatures that blocked during this combat phase (technically this would trigger right at the start of the "end of combat step").

The order of turn phases will look like this:

• Beginning phase (untap, upkeep, draw)
• Pre-combat main phase
• Combat phase 1
• Post-combat main phase 1
• Combat phase 2
• Post-combat main phase 2
• ...
• Combat phase n
• Post-combat main phase n
• Ending phase

My guess would be that this would lead to slightly less board stalls.

 

[Gozmit97]

I think something along the lines of Duel Mastes/Kaijudo is pretty good. Will admit it's been a long time since I played Duel Masters, and I've never played kaijudo.
Duel Mastes/Kaijudo:
Restriction: Does not see too much play (as far as i know)
Attacking: One creature at a time, exhausted (tapped) creatures or enemy can be targeted
Defending: Blocker (passive ability)
Damage: Wiped away at end of turn
Overall playstyle: Defense favored, I think. Instead of life, you have 5 shields. You lose when you have no shields an suffer a direct attack. Shields are normal cards, that go to your hand when destroyed.

Other things that might be worth looking into are resource systems. Kaijudo has a mana system sort of like MTG, but all cards can be played as lands of that type, and you only require 1 "red" card to play all red cards.
Eternal, a game similar to Magic, also has a different way of going about mana costs. Instead of requiring you to pay for Each Aether Adept you play, it just requires ou to have Influence of and sufficient power (mana), which i think is a much more elegant solution.

 

[Jason Waddell]

I think something along the lines of Duel Mastes/Kaijudo is pretty good. Will admit it's been a long time since I played Duel Masters, and I've never played kaijudo.
Duel Mastes/Kaijudo:
Restriction: Does not see too much play (as far as i know)
Attacking: One creature at a time, exhausted (tapped) creatures or enemy can be targeted
Defending: Blocker (passive ability)
Damage: Wiped away at end of turn
Overall playstyle: Defense favored, I think. Instead of life, you have 5 shields. You lose when you have no shields an suffer a direct attack. Shields are normal cards, that go to your hand when destroyed.

Other things that might be worth looking into are resource systems. Kaijudo has a mana system sort of like MTG, but all cards can be played as lands of that type, and you only require 1 "red" card to play all red cards.
Eternal, a game similar to Magic, also has a different way of going about mana costs. Instead of requiring you to pay for Each Aether Adept you play, it just requires ou to have Influence of and sufficient power (mana), which i think is a much more elegant solution.

Interesting. This seems pretty close to the style I had in mind, with a few changes. I was already working with a "blocking" ability word, but was looking for some way to avoid or reduce the "lambs to the slaughter" system Hearthstone has when you play creatures into your opponent's board.

Proposed:
Attacking: One creature at a time, tapped creatures or enemy can be targetted.
Damage: Permanent

Relevant keywords:
Blocking - Can tap to block.
Backstabbing (another name? Initiative? Assassin?) - Can attack untapped creatures
Swordproof - Cannot be attacked

Will playtest it this week and see how it works.

 

[Jason Waddell]

I printed some cards out and playtested against myself. Which isn't ideal, and I'm tired from work, but....

I don't know that it really added a lot, maybe lightweight combat allows you to dedicate mental resources elsewhere. Maybe combat is supposed to be easy and sequencing difficult. I'll try it against someone else and see if I feel any different.

 

[Jason Waddell]

Played that system with my girlfriend last night. She said she had fun with the basic cards, but was worried about complexity. I think I agree. The way I have envisioned the game is a Best of 5 with quick deck iterations between games. Anything that slows things down (e.g. turn by turn combat) could turn things into a bit of a slog. Have to decide where to spend my complexity.

 

[Taamas]

EDIT: I actually shouldn't be posting this, so I will remove it now that you have seen it.

 

[Jason Waddell]

Is 101 their life total? *shivers*

 

[Onderzeeboot]

Is 101 their life total? *shivers*

Huatli, Warrior Poet can gain you a lot of life when you have large creatures around. To be fair, opponent should probably just start making dinos at this point. At some point they should draw their own Thundering Spineback, at which point they'll create more dinos than our hero. Also, none of hero's dinos have reach, so those flyers on the other side should be able to slowly chip in for the win.

 

[Taamas]

Yes, 101 and 49 are our life totals, more because of Verdant Sun's Avatar than of Huatli. Sadly, our hero terribly lost that match. He could have had a chance if he had stolen a flyier to kill the planeswalker instead of a token, but he wanted to check if Entrancing melody worked for tokens.

Anyway, I don't want to steal this thread. The discussion on alternative combat systems is very interesting, and I'm eager to see the results of Jason's experiments.

 

[anotak]

a few games like eternal ccg and maybe(?) hearthstone use a system where there's a limit on how many permanents can be out and when you play a new one you have to choose to destroy an old one

this keeps cognitive overload from the bad / annoying types of board complexity down and also is a hard limit to some degree on these clogged states

 

[Taamas]

Oh, another thing why I think Magic is defense based: the attacker has much less info about the outcome. They send their creatures and the defender is who choses what fights what, and is also able to group defenders in order to have an advantage even with smaller/worse creatures. So, the defender has an advantage both in information and in available choices.

 

[Mad Prophet]

#BringBackBanding

Nobody has the information advantage when you can't understand the boardstate.

 

[Kirblinx]

So I have been enjoying the Final Fantasy TCG and seems to be a well structured game here is how it works with your analysis.

FFTCG
Restriction: Fairly functional to Magic
Attacking: Can only attack players, can attack in groups, attacking done in stages
Defending: Can block with one character during each attack
Damage: Wiped away at end of turn
Damage to Player: Removes the top card of the library. Get hit 7 times you lose, so big and small creatures do the same damage to the player (similar to kaijudo)
Overall playstyle: This system is moderately "offense" favored.

When I first played it, I didn't understand why you couldn't block with multiple creatures but there are multiple abilities and cards you can use at instant speed (they use the magic stack in their game as well) that can help swing combat in your favour, so that a big forward (creature) can actually get killed in combat. The main difference it has with magic is the resource system, as I feel it is better than magic, as it makes mana flood and mana screw almost non-existant, but we aren't discussing that. The party attack system is there to help break through board stalls and seems to do a decent job.

Willing to discuss it in more detail if anyone cares.

 

[Aston]

There's also the way Netrunner approaches "combat" with its run system. It's asymmetric so one player is always the attacker and one the defender, with the defender (the Corp) having various servers in which it can hide objectives the attacker (the Runner) needs to steal, which it does by running on the server and looking at one or more cards in it, stealing any objectives it sees. The Runner's attack set up, their rig, is visible to the Corp, but the Corp's defensive measures are face down until the Runner interacts with them the first time, when the Corp has the opportunity to turn them face up if they can spare the resources to do so.

This makes a really cool bluffing and counter-bluffing game - if you're the Runner, do you attack a server where you've already revealed the defences and know you can break them, but spend your resources to find you've accessed something useless? Do you go for the heavily guarded server protected by facedown cards you might not be able to break? Does the Corp have enough resources to employ all of its defences? As the Corp, do you put your objectives in your most heavily guarded server where the Runner will likely think they are, or drop them behind a defence you can't hold but would be expensive to break through?

Unfortunately having played a tiny bit of competitive Netrunner it seems that the goal of many decks is to bypass this bluffing game as much as possible, which is unfortunate, so careful balance is required where runs are risky but not suicidal.

 

[Jason Waddell]

Netrunner with the starter decks is pretty cool though.

 

[Aston]

That last sentence was rather negative but I do like the game a lot, just not the tournament decks. Playing with just the starter pack or with just a few extra cards was really fun.

 

[FlowerSunRain]

This mirrors my experiences on Netrunner. Great design, frustrating development.

My card game of choice these days is Doomtown, but its too far removed from Magic to be use.

 

[Suicufnoc]

How about hearthstone, but a creature can only be attacked once per turn, and damage doesn't persist?
or
Magic, damage persists
or
What if your opponent attacks you on your turn? So you untap, decide if you want to block, if you don't block, you can attack. No idea what effect that would have.