General New Deckbuilding Mechanic (Hearthstone Death Knight)

[Jason Waddell]

There's a pretty juicy deckbuilding mechanic announced for the next HS class:





This converts pretty easily to Magic.

If your deck were:


You could include:


But not:


Obviously you could generalize it in other ways (e.g. make it 4 pips. "My deck is ").

This is such a cool design and I love these kinds of interesting parameter spaces as a deckbuilder. From a design perspective, if I were to design a cube with this in mind, I would cut all the fixing lands. All mana is generic, any land can tap for any color. If you were using customs, maybe you would adjust the costs of cards to be more or less color intensive to get the drafting / deckbuilding dynamics that you want (e.g. "I want players to have to commit harder to a color to get its best cards, so Snapcaster has been moved to ").

 

[Onderzeeboot]

Agree, it's super interesting design space. Note that this system is much better suited to keep certain combo pieces apart (by virtue of being incompatible) than Magic's current . E.g. it's impossible to run Channel and Rolling Thunder in the same deck, because you can either go or if you want to run a deck.

 

[Mown]

This is actually the deckbuilding rule for my homebrew card game.
It's also like half of the rules because I never figured out how I wanted the game to actually play.

 

[safra]

isn't this how Keyforge works

 

[Jason Waddell]

isn't this how Keyforge works

keyforge has literally no deckbuilding

 

[Onderzeeboot]

The entire conceit of KeyForge is that all decks are semi-randomly generated and immutable entities. No two decks should be the same (though I seem to remember there was a hiccup in their deck-generating code), and you can't construct new decks using cards from different decks.

 

[Karshtakavaar]

I used something like this for an early draft version of a MTG RPG that used a 20 card deck. While it was in a totally different context (Decks had no lands, those were part of the "battlemap" for combat, it was a cooperative game, there were other reasons to commit to one colour or split your focus due to how the skill system "worked"), it kinda wasn't relevant in the end? The players were incentivized to stick with one or two colours for consistency reasons anyway, and having the restriction so tied to mana cost was, well... restrictive. 1-drops could never force you to really commit to their colour, two drops barely required commitment, etc. I did use 3 pips as the benchmark initially, which also just prevents 4 and 5 colour decks which I wasn't super happy about as well.
In a second draft that was barely tested I ended up having a second set of 'colour commitment' pips opposite where P/T would go and really pushed it - cards usually had 2 or 3 pips, and a player character had 5 total pips they could split between the 5 colours. I wouldn't mind going back and testing that version a little more.

 

[Velrun]

At the beginning of the end thread, choose one -

• Give me a link to the article where this was announced and I can read about the new mechanic.
• Explain to me with a few more words exactly how this mechanic functions.