Board Game Design Day: Balancing Mechanics for Your Card Game's Unique Power Curve

[Music] all right lords ladies gentlemen bees welcome to what is hopefully the most you're gonna think about power curves and collectible object games all year my name is Dylan exabyte meio twitter handle is up there on the screen I'll show it at the end you can always get in talked with me on there I tend to reply to a lot of questions and retreat stupid funny stuff give you a quick history on me I've been playing TCG since they've been around with magics launched and been making fan efforts including chaos magic which you see some insight in that that went into like the plane chase product that came out and I've been playing professionally making trading card games since about 2000 first trading card game that I professionally worked on was magi-nation there's a Game Boy Color RPG and trading card game that came out for that night was one of the designers on that I also started my own trading card game company tenacious games where I created the Spoils which has just terminated its run giving it may be the fifth longest run in TCG history which is kind of neat after that I went and worked on Magic kinda on the bench I was working on a digital push for wizards but I was in the pit so I was there for graphs and what have you did whole filling I was not a major designer on magic but was there in the periphery and since then I've been working at Pokemon as the main person in charge of the pokemon card game outside of Japan and Korea I take the game that comes out of Japan and localize it and distribute it make the products for all the markets around the world for just over nine years now so of course given the background on these games today we will mainly be talking about hearts known our Stone has probably the simplest mana system of any major trading card game which makes it really easy to be the basis for this talk when you're talking about a mana system what you're really talking about is these numbers up here that tell you how much it cost cards to be put into play in hearthstone if you are unfamiliar with hearthstone at the beginning of each turn you will gain one mana and then you can spend that mana to play your cards each turn at the beginning turn two you will have two mana at the beginning of turn three you will have three mana and so on in that fashion so to play those cards costs you can play the one that costs two on turn two or any turn after that and you'll have some left over mana when you are talking about the ratio between how much a card costs and how powerful it is there are two things to consider the cost which we've got highlighted up here and everything else in the card is generally the power and that's this bottom part down here so as you can see these are all what are known as vanilla creatures they just have power and Life Points and as you pay more cost you get more power for that but how that's related is a little interesting to start looking at so we can align these on a chart pretty easily we can put them we can label an axis for costs along the bottom one through nine I've got down there however aligning the axis for power is really hard to do it is tough to look at a card in most card games even simple cards as this and give it a number it's tough to say that that card has 17 power and this card has 15 power but we can gauge relatively the power levels of these cards and around them on the chart like this and we get a nice little line that goes through there but that is for these very simple cards and don't encompass the entirety of the cards within the game there so at 7 in hearthstone you can get more Gollum which is a 7 7 with no card text on it at all you can also get profit Velan which is a 7 7 4 7 that has a lot of text on it that is very powerful so obviously profit villain is a much more powerful card than war golem in fact it would be hard pressed to make a seven seven four seven mana with text on it that would be even more powerful than profit villain without making a card that would go in every deck for a couple years so we can arrange these cards on power wise on the same cost slot we've got war golem here we are gonna throw the line back up there there's profit belén and here's our good friend dr. boom so these are all cost seven but clearly do not all have the same amount of power so even as we zoom in on seven there is going to be a range of powers at that seven cost so what that gets into is talking about how much you get four seven is even better than what you get four five plus two and that becomes pretty obvious when you start looking at some of the best cards at various mana costs dr. boom probably one of the best seven cost cards ever made in hearthstone however that card is better than Louis of which is probably one of the five best five cost cards that are made in hearthstone and annoy-o-tron which has been just ubiquitous while it was legal in the standard format in her stone and one of the easiest ways to look at that is if dr. boom were to block Louis Abe it would still be threatening seven damage so even what even though it has taken out that five cost card it doesn't go down in its value plus it's got the boombots going on so you actually get more at seven than just five plus two and that comes into a lot of reasons and ends up giving us what looks more like a curve as you increase the cost you get more power but it isn't a linear amount of power increase the amount of power you get at each cost point goes up a bit more Kirby the reason that they're more than power lines is expensive cards have to be a better than cards adapt to their cost for example the game could end before you even get to seven so you might never even be able to play dr. boom so that means that if you make it to that depth of point in a game as you get that many resources you have to have sufficient payoff for waiting that long to play that card the more expensive card is the less flexible it is you can't play dr. boom before it turns seven in an hour game however to cost card like the golem you can play at any time that you have at least two mana and if you come to a turn later on in the game where you have perhaps five or six mana you can play that with other cards and that's also one of the great reasons that our stone has the hero power is it helps smooth out your mana curve at any time if you have played if you're on turn six you play a four Acosta turn you've got two left over you can hit your hero power button and that will help you smooth out and use all of your resources every turn the similar thing with the annoy-o-tron there you can play that extra two at any point that you have left over that much leftover mana so what the cheaper card is the easier just to play at any point of the game and y-you don't need as much payoff for that card and y-you have two linearly not linearly curve up your power as you go up in cost and this gets into the point of additional power at each cost here are two pretty standard cards war golem and River croc and River croc has an an equivalent card that is clearly just a bit better than River croc flame jugglers the exact same stats for the exact same mana cost however you also get to deal one damage to a random enemy you could make flame juggle and were golem and make exactly war golem stats and give it that same same ability however that war golem with the special ability is not as much better than flame juggler is and this is where we start getting into weird terminology things and why you can't just say a card is more powerful than another card and what I'm trying to get across here starts to get a little complicated and we're gonna try to show it on this cool chart here how good a card is depends on the ratio of how far the Kirt off the curve it is so these two cards can be put up these are the base cards with no stats can be put up on the curve here and when we add flame juggler it is just that little red mark up off the curve whereas the flame juggling or golem is also that same little red mark off the curve but the flame juggling word if flame juggler is way better than flame juggler wool goal because moving that much off the curve at two is worth way more than moving that much off the curve at seven to make a card that is that much better than more gollum you have to do something like profit velan or dr. boom to be that more more impressive at the same cost and that ratio is kind of the thing that we really need to look at at all times when you're talking about how good a card is and why power isn't just to get enough word because war golem is a more powerful card than flame juggler but it's probably a much worse card than flame juggler and so we've been always trying to come up with good terminology for that for that ratio me and a friend of mine used to call it in Jedi that's probably a little too trade murky to get around extra credits did an episode where they had talked to us about that and said something about that being like an official term that we had used it Wizards it was just something that we had kind of kicked around at one point I've been thinking of trying to come up with a name maybe Marx or something for it anyway moving on we can see our flame juggling or golem just does not really stack up with those other cards there and so that that's why the ratio is so much more important than the actual like scaler of how much extra power you're getting when you're balancing a card so when we're gonna look at other games you get to get into different cost structures and those cost structures have a circular informing of both the cost and the balancing of those individual objects within the game in a hearthstone Gate card the only thing that you can really do to make the constantine different is put it in a class versus have it be a neutral card that second card druid of the claw can only be played in a golem deck but otherwise they just both cost five but when you get into Magic the Gathering they have a far more complex mana system if you're not familiar with it up in that upper right corner is the cost for those two cards tidings and sliver Queen both of them have a converted mana cost or total cost of five just like Lois evan druid of the claw but Tydings requires three of any mana and then to specifically blue mana to play whereas lunar Queen requires one of five different to play and that is far more difficult to do so sliver Queen in terms of raw power is just more bang for your buck than tidings because it's five is a much harder five than tidings is that actually gives magic way more granularity and their cost whereas it her stone everything that costs five costs five magic can actually do a there lots of like essentially decimals in the cost that they're able to do for balancing cards and that gives them an extra knob to turn tidings you can make slightly better and then just make the mana cost have more blue in it or they could have it do an additional effect and put a different color of man in it that makes the card harder to play but it gives you more knobs to turn when you're balancing things like that and that also starts to get into how the power curves are different for these cart for these games because in hearthstone you generate a mana every turn and there's no resource that you have to play out of your hand to do that whereas in magic you do not get a mana every turn you can get a maximum of one mana every turn but you have to play a card from your hand and it relies on you drawing that that means that in hearthstone harsh dough needs to bribe you with more power to play low-cost cards a one cost card in hearthstone relatively is more powerful than a one cost card in magic these up here are maybe a year or two old at this point but some very popular one cost cards and the associated games tunnel Trog was a beast when it came out and was at the cornerstone of many powerful shaman decks Northshire cleric to this day is played in a ton of clerics it is a ton of power at one cost cards where as you look at expedition envoi and anoint or of Champions these are pretty basic cards that do little to nothing and just have stats on them but they were considered solid cards in the magic decks they were played in because they only cost one and you need that flexibility more in magic than you do in hearthstone if you wait a turn or two in hearthstone you will always be able to play your more expensive card whereas in magic your curve does not go up automatically so you need to make sure that you have cards that you can always play when you haven't drawn up to your specific mana point conversely because of that magics cards at higher cost give way more power than her stones cost cards at those similar costs piloted sky golem and / you're thirsty and both really powerful six cost cards in hearthstone but the Associated white cards from that same era the subjugator angel and lend of all of the preserver subjugator angels can just end games when you play it and Lindvall is one of the biggest comeback cards that's been printed in magic that's been that's viable these cards just have tremendous amounts of power because by time you hit 6 in magic that is usually a much later point in the game compared to her stone you're probably talking turn eight at the minimum if not like turned ten or something so as you get up there you need more and more power so you get more and more power payoff from magic because they have to bribe you to bring you along to convince you to play higher cost cards because it is hard for the game to go that long in magic so that gives us two different looking power curves and it's this isn't super great here these are not official or anything these are basic estimates here but har stones power curve is higher at the low end but magics outpaces it pretty sharply as you go along so on magic your 6th turn is not likely to give you a 6 cos card higher mana costs require more Matt a commitment in your deck and magic needs to bribe players more to play their expensive cars and they get more granularity with their mana system her stone one man at every turn your deck doesn't need any mana support in it and it needs to bribe you to play low cards because if you just wait around you're always gonna get to play your mo expensive card more expensive card excuse me and then some games have some really weird curves like Pokemon the cost in a pokemon card is the stage these are all basic Pokemon these are the Pokemon that you can put directly into play Lapras Pikachu and froakie however as we all know you can evolve Pokemon and you can involve that Pikachu into a right shoe and that froakie into a frogadier and that frogadier can evolve even further into a greninja so these three points of of cost in Pokemon that you can get but then there are even more powerful caller more powerful cards in Pokemon called a X and GX cards and these cards are basic but as you can see if you just look at the hit points on those cards in the top right corner Darkrai and Groudon have significantly more than even the stage two card greninja and the damage that they do if you can see next to like mountain rent is much higher than what miss slash is doing on greninja and that is because they have cost that you pay on the back end Pokemon if you have not played it is a game usually won by defeating six of your opponent's Pokemon and when you each time you defeated an opponent's Pokemon you get a prize card when you defeat an e ex pokémon you get two prize cards however you don't pay that cost until you have lost that resource so you do not pay it going in you pay it on the way out and only as you're losing ground and so some mega Pokemon can even evolve but that gives Pokemon a really different power curve compared to a lot of games that you get this chunky curve there are very few points of granularity in the Pokemon power curve and it varies up and down wildly because if you don't pay all the costs upfront you pay some of the costs on the back end so the Pokemon stage determines time you have to wait a turn for each stage of evolution that you do in Pokemon and your deck commitment to play a stage to Pokemon you need more cards committed to that Pokemon if I'm going to play 40 X Pokemon I put those in my deck if I want to play greninja I need 4 froakie's and 4 frogadier x' and 4 greninja x' so that eats up more of your deck space giving you less flexibility and then the e^x Pokemon give up that extra prize on the way back so Pokemon compared to magic in hearthstone each Pokemon has to start from basic no matter where it turn it is and the time is per Pokemon and it gets reset every turn there's no plateauing of power like you would get in magic in Pokemon you don't reach a magic in hearthstone you don't reach a point where just huge cards can be played every turn like in magic and hearthstone you're always starting out at the beginning with the same lowest card so it has a very different flow to it and that causes the card designed very different than those two games very briefly I'm gonna talk about clash Royale it's a real-time strategy game but it still has a collectible object element to it real time strategy games are hard to discuss in these terms because usually it's combos baiting and reacting that tell you more about the card's power level in general in StarCraft banelings are not something you're just gonna build if you're playing xored but if they've got a lot of Marines maybe you should make a baneling or two to start going in that direction in clash Royale skeletons for one cost are not a great card they don't it's not going to be a central part of your strategy but you use it to distract other cards that your opponent has played and this gives a whole other different mana system compared to magic heartstone or Pokemon that really doing a power curve almost makes less sense because it is in a constant rise and fall of power you are constantly building up a power reserve that you expend when you play those cards thus reducing how much you have at that time but it is constantly building give you a rise and fall and that happens within that and that is briefly and very quickly a general discussion of power curves if you have want the questions or the slides they will be in the vault at some point again this is my contact information if there are any questions we do have a microphone here I think we've got about two ish minutes left if i'm not mistaken maybe 10 ish 10 10 - we got about 10 ish minutes left so i didn't blow through that pretty quickly yeah so if we have some questions there's microphone right there and then when we are done I will go to the overflow zone over there make sure that you fill out your evaluations that you'll be getting for this talk will ask you your favorite number your favorite numbers 5 hi so a question is about Bar Creek when we were developing a game if it's a new game that won't come up very often but an older game like magic hearthstone or a Pokemon eventually you print cards that are just better strictly better than previous cards when as a designer when when is it okay to do that why does it come out so often and why well a lot of that depends on the game and the philosophy that they have behind the game for example in magic some of the most powerful cards ever were printed in the first set and their cards that will never equal the power level of those cards but there are cards that get printed in magic that are just better sometimes even within the same set what what happens there a lot of the time and that that comes into doing rotation within your collectible object game hearthstone doesn't Pokemon does it magic does it but not every game does do that and with rotation you are always able to take chunks out of the game and always have this newer section of elements that are in the game by doing that you're going to be able to hit different points like I forget it right now in hearthstone when the mech set came out there was the vanilla three four four three that came out and that card just didn't exist and now that card has left and now there is no three four four three so it allows you to have different holes to make players make interesting decisions a magma rager was of course like the the five one four three I think and they it's it was always kind of a joke card like even in fiction they made jokes about how bad magma rager was and eventually they printed the five to at that same exact cost so sometimes by looking at your curves and seeing what cards are in aren't being played yeah you're gonna occasionally print some cards that are strictly better than that and sometimes you'll learn over time that your granularity has been off small numbers are incredibly dangerous in card games and Pokemon did kind of a rebalancing I'm gonna say eight years ago with the black and white set where the smallest number in the game was often one and that is very dangerous number because the next number you can go to is two which is twice as big and so it's very hard to make a small adjustment to the number one because you can either completely get rid of it are moving to that so they boosted the base HP of a lot of things and up the base damage of a lot of things and now there's kind of this new normal in Pokemon but I don't but yeah if you look over like the Sun Moon series it's not significantly higher compared to the XY series so it's just a lot of a lot of things came there but some games actually just just do it as a sales mechanism where they just constantly creep it up and up and up because it's a lot sometimes it's because the design space isn't that big like magic pokemon hearthstone there's a lot of design space in those games but some games just don't have that design space so to keep people interested in buying the new boosters or whatever they do have to do that but usually rotation means that it's never it's just well shirt I mean like dr. boom right dr. boom was the card in hearthstone for a very long time but now it's just not legal in standard play so it allows them to do those resets and take chances right if they never print something as good as that if they you're never printing cards that they have to pull back they're probably not pushing hard enough and so you there's always a balance there of how to how powerful do we make this card so yeah it's it can be complicated thank you so you touched a little bit about in that answer about kind of granularity and the fact that it's a 1 or 2 or 3 you can't go in between those too much but in miniatures games like Warhammer or war machine stuff like that the costs are much more granular a Warhammer there'll be 132 points for this vehicle and 130 points for this other vehicle does that granularity would that help or to to bouncing card games like this or is it just sort of a false sense of confidence it's a it's a different resource that you're balancing at that point right because usually in a miniatures game like Warhammer if I have a hundred and thirty two point orc tank I don't have to wait til I get to the hundred and thirty two points in the game to be able to put my orc tank out that's just in my army and it's a summation so that your total army has an equivalent power to this total army that you're that you're likely to be facing but you're gonna start with all of that and play at one time so some games do some collectible object games do do something like that they'll like put stars on cards and say you can have seven stars in your deck and those will similar usually be like more powerful cards in the game and they try to balance it off that but it it is a different system that you're looking at with miniatures but those do give a lot of granularity and since the numbers usually are much higher on that that is a that is a deck construction versus a object playing scheme that you're talking about there and yeah that that turns it that does turn it on its head a little bit but that granularity is very nice because those numbers are usually so high and give you enough granularity that you can always just like make a unit however you think it needs to be if it's something in fiction this is the origin role he needs to be able to do this you could always just tweak that number plus or minus one a lot until you find the place that it it finds out and a lot of time those costs are set to your encouraged or discouraged combos from existing within those games as well thank you so you spoke about a hearthstone and you spoke about magic and in one you have a constant resource generation that's going up every turn and the other you're looking for specific resource generators I don't know if you're familiar with the original Warcraft card game that was the precursor basically to hearthstone in that there was a mechanic where you could take any card from your hand and actually play that as a resource where do you think that falls among those power curves do you think that's kind of in between the two or what is your opinion on that the question is about the original hearthstone card game in its similarity and differences or the original Warcraft card game and it's similar in differences to both magic and harsh stones mana system you could take any card from your hand and play that as a resource and in a way it is closer to magic because you have to give up a card resource from your turn and and to be able to play that as a mana card I think is what they were called I forget at this point so it is a little similar to that but again there is no typing and that is where magic gets a lot of its actual its actual granularity comes from the different colors of magic and that also gives them ability to make very powerful cards that just is for you to meet in the same deck so that that's where a lot of that comes from but yeah it is probably closer to to hearthstone still because if you ever really wanted to you could play a card from your hand to become that but you would eventually run out of hand resources if you did that every turn but yeah it's it's probably still closer to hearthstone but not but it is still off from it's still probably in between her stone and magic but it's probably closer to hearthstone thank you so I've played hearthstone Pokemon and magic for years now and seeing them through many different iterations do you think that it's healthy to have cards that are so far off the power curve that they create a metaphor the game designing it preemptively of course and looking specifically at Shaima new Pokemon example dr. Carson as well like dr. boom Shaymin ex0 arc GX yeah Pokemon tends to have a lot because Pokemon is a very similar to her stone there's another IP going on at the time and where magic gets to kind of said to send its own IP within itself like they want to make a good Jace they make a good Jace because it makes sense whereas Pokemon will have kind of pressures coming from different angles right and the top uh Guardians were very important in the video games and so that is something that we wanted to push with in the Pokemon card game so you'll get something like that and usually with Pokemon you will see that those cards are more of engine cards than combat cards with like Shaymin although Kapolei lay is a decent attacker as well so it's it's interesting that a lot of games that are have a more varied IP ty will tend to do that for brand reasons almost more than like gameplay reasons but the game also is like played around that you know even when top alele first came out very few decks were focused around it it's still a utility card in a lot of games so yeah having specific cards that skew them skew themselves around the meta I think is going to happen in various games it's happened in every aim right and cards have to either get controlled or towners come up or counter strategies come around it if something becomes very dominant do you think it's also because of the chunky balance curves it pokemon first the chunky balance curve in Pokemon does have a great deal to do with it because there's so little granularity it is tough to make like a GI basic GX that is in one direction or the other without like the HP is maybe your biggest dial that you can really do with that thank you mm-hmm this is where last one I think go ahead oh so when you're developing the cards and you're you have your cost and you're trying to plot it on the curve can you accurately before you've at least a game II through play testing determine where that actually falls into a show or is that something that evolves in a better game the question is can you accurately predict where on a power curve an individual card is going to fall and the answer is usually a lot of a lot of times I mean as game designers that's our job and we usually you know you'll I think Gavin very just posted an article today about some very famous cards and magic with that has the developer comments from them and it's interesting to see someone saying like I'm going to push this card I'm going to try to make this be an important card for this next format or I don't think this is very good let's see if we can bring it up where this card is not supposed to be as important let's bring it down a little bit so the idea is you're always gonna know where it is but like even with I mean even with like wizards is R&D department or pokemons R&D department which are probably and hearthstone right those are probably some of the most focused R&D cost balance houses on the planet but that's not as good as a hundred thousand people playing ten million games right they're never gonna hit every single every single combination in there and just stuff is gonna slip through and it's just not everything is gonna be there because the power of collectible object games why they're so fun is because there literally are 200,000 decks you could go build right now and so yeah we think we know where it's gonna be sometimes wrong so thank you yeah and that's the talk thanks for coming everybody [Applause]

Channel: GDC

Views: 50,335

Keywords: gdc, talk, panel, game, games, gaming, development, hd, design

Id: ul1MSQ8aW00

Length: 30min 48sec (1848 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 17 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/Yoonzee]

PCD or power curve deviations for a term to measure power of cards in comparison.