Customised Special Play Card Decks?

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Brot
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Customised Special Play Card Decks?

Post by Brot »

Greetings all,

I'm currently working on getting a 7's League going, the Ruleset is for now very minimalistic, I only want to include big rule-changes if people think they are necessary.

Basically the only thing I picked out now to rework is the Special Play Cards. To me they are awesome, but somewhat chaotic, with a few bad/boring cards among them. They are also not really consistent in theme. I plan to only allow Special Play Cards as Inducements and grant every team free 50k in cards every game (so even the higher ranked team always has a card).

The rethemed Decks I'm working on are:
50k Dirty Tricks - cheap and disgusting tricks, fouls and the groundkeeper
50k Fanatical Fans - fans, cheerleaders, lots of sideline effects
50k Team Support - staff support and help the team, protection and healing/recovering
50k Special Plays - potentially spectacular plays, passing/catching or unique blocking/movement tricks
50k Wyrd Events - absolutely weird and mysterious events (e.g. eclipse, squig ball or weather change)

200k Wizard - powerful spells
400k Desperate Measures - extreme effects, potentially crippling on the enemy team

Each one is supposed to be at 10 cards (maybe less for Desperate Measures). I don't think a 100k category is necessary, this way it is possible to theme them better.

But the question I also had was: did anyone ever experiment with allowing teams to 'build' their own 50k card deck? The decks have a lot of character and having a preferred deck is fun - but selected your own (e.g. around 16 cards) deck could potentially give a team even more character.
Or you could personally choose to split the personal deck into piles to allow for some planning for certain situations.

Nevertheless, It's just a random Idea I thought *might* be good, but *might* be horrible too.

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Re: Customised Special Play Card Decks?

Post by GalakStarscraper »

I spent soooooooo much time working on those 104 cards for balance ... good luck with your project good sir! I honestly do not know how balanced or unbalanced what you are suggesting would be.

Tom

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Re: Customised Special Play Card Decks?

Post by Brot »

I can imagine that, and have massive respect for your work. There are barely a handful of cards I think about slightly changing/introducing, basically all I desire to do at the moment is to re-theme the cards and do some slight reordering to create a bit more 'theme-consistent' 50k card decks. It's also my at the moment preferred way to create a 'fluffy' league environment, as I want to keep house rules at a minimum at the start.

Either I just create a few slightly more different decks (as before mentioned), which would be the more conservative approach. My other idea of today, allowing the teams to create a 'playbook' of cards for themselves for a season, seems to me to be an interesting experiment in balance and game design.

In the best of cases it could help teams to compensate for their weaknesses, play to their strengths and create a unique fluff around the team. In the worst case people consistently try to hardcounter each other and break the game.

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Re: Customised Special Play Card Decks?

Post by celticgriffon »

I really do like your idea but I think to get things balanced it could possibly take a huge amount of work.

The current iteration of the special play cards is quite wonderful. Definitely an improvement from Dead Zone 3rd Edition. In case you didn't play in those early years both teams would get 1 - 3 cards before a match... and the mix was as random, chaotic, and full of luck varied power level as possible.

Perhaps another alternative would be to have one or two "stadium" deck(s) for the home and/or away teams? Or you could have one card with two different effects pending if the home or away team drew it.

Cheers,
Michael

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Re: Customised Special Play Card Decks?

Post by Brot »

Sry to necro this old thread - but due me working a lot on the Special Play Cards in the past few weeks i could not help but think a bit about the customised Special Play Card decks again.

As I see it, there would be the following problems to solve:

1) Choice (affecting a single match) - Depending on the opposing team you can choose different inducements to combat them. If you have a single card deck, this does not apply.

2) Probability of 'farming' specific cards - a few specific cards can potentially wreck a play for an opposing player. The cards are not designed to be chosen, so if the decks are too small or you can pump inducement cash into a specific deck, you've got a problem.

Resulting from those 2:

3)Size - if you have a single large deck, you have no choice. If you have multiple small decks, you can farm for cards.

I still think this idea could be fun though. Maybe it would also be fun to have a special 'Card Draft' at the start of a season (drafting single cards for your SPC deck, instead of players).

Well, maybe i'll think a little bit about it.

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