What Makes a Great Deckbuilder?

in 2014 a game called dreamquest was released it was kind of ugly and the balance was awful but unbeknownst to everyone at the time it was a complete revolution dreamquest was one of many roguelike inspired games coming out of the time but it had a unique twist it included elements of deck building tabletop games like magic the gathering dominion and star realms for those who don't know deck builders are games that give you a basic set of cards and task you with collecting new ones until you've constructed an entire deck that you could use to do normal gamey things like fight monsters complete quests or defend a magic demon train from a horde of celestial super beings you know regular stuff in these six years since dreamquest came out deck builders that built on its legacy like slay the spire dicey dungeons and grifflands have seen a meteoric rise from relatively humble beginnings and it seems like every day there's a new take on the genre coming out to the point that the roguelike ancestry of deck builders is becoming less and less of a factor as these games begin to find their own voice ratropolis is a deckbuilding tower defense game steamworld quest is a deck building traditional rpg and signs of the sojourner is a deck building visual novel but what is it that catapulted this new breed of deck builders to glory so quickly and despite the fact that many of these games are quite similar why can i just not stop playing them well i think the answer to that is because deck builders are fantastic at stimulating our creativity and rewarding us for making dumb things work in monster train for example which is that train game i mentioned earlier i got my hands on this big boy called the demon fiend he's strong he's tough and he's usually balanced down by his pretty hefty cast it's an okay card however i managed to reduce its cost with the relic duplicate a bunch of times and then buff them to kingdom come to get an entire deck full of the damn things that cost off as much and beat the tar out of basically every single enemy it was completely game breaking and that's sort of the point while there was a pretty hefty amount of luck involved this amazing wombo combo was down almost entirely to be making clever use of random ingredients to create an awesome synergy and as a reward i got to feel pretty smart which doesn't happen very often but how can deck builders create these sorts of opportunities through the design of their cards after all no matter how good a deck builder is in every other area if it's got boring or poorly balanced cards it's basically dead in the water after playing deck builders for quite frankly way too long i think i've managed to come up with a set of three criteria that i think all well-designed deckbuilder card pools fall into the cards need to enable synergies they need to create interesting decisions as part of longer term strategies and they all need to have distinct identities let's uh start with that last one because i picked its name purely on the basis of the rhyme and it probably needs a bit of additional explanation so what do i mean when i say that cards need to have an identity well when each card in a deck builder has its own unique flair and function it brings with it unique upsides and downsides that a player has to work around through smart play and clever deckboarding which is both fun and feels very satisfying to do this can be seen really clearly in the design of steam world quest a deck building rpg where your players call robots for an example let's take a look at some of the basic attack options available to copernica who is the mage character we've got book bash electrolyze and flame lash all of these cards fulfill the same basic function more or less to deal a small amount of damage for free but they go about it in different ways leading to different tactical options bugbash does low damage but lowers the magic power of the target meaning that it fits well into a defensive play style electrolyze lets you draw cards next turn which means it can be great for helping to set up a combo and flame lash can do a lot of damage but it's reliant on you looking out and setting the enemy on fire to reach its maximum potential because these cards all have their own unique quirks you've got to build around they create much more tactically stimulating gameplay than a generic do some damage i guess spell they also create more interesting deck boarding opportunities for instance teaming up flame lash with armoly the knight smolder spell which reduces enemy fire resistance but more on synergies later we can see the consequences of generic card design in slay the spire the game is normally really good at giving each card besides the crappy starter ones you want to get rid of interesting effects but that means that when a car comes along that doesn't really have its own identity it struggles to stick out or feel like it would meaningfully contribute to your deck even if it's actually quite useful leap is a card for the defect class another robot i've got a type that's essentially a straight upgrade on your basic block card however it has no interesting effect beyond this boosted efficiency as far as i'm aware no other card is just a strictly better version of a basic one and the design is weaker for it this card is boring and has no features that make it stand out so i end up glossing over every time in spite of the fact that for a common card it's actually quite powerful even if it does make you play in a boring way in addition to giving each card their own mechanical theme a great way to get cars to stick in a player's mind as well as get them thinking about potential uses is through what's called flavor which is to say the aesthetic and thematic design of the cards magic the gathering is great to this and it's part of the reason why it's drafting mode where you make a deck from random card packs it's arguably one of the oldest and most popular developers around take this card for example the alpine houndmaster this is a card with a whopping eight lines of rules text and two completely distinct effects it's a lot for a new player to remember without even considering the card's actual tactical applications luckily the magic designers have made this card much easier to get your head around by turning it into a little bit of a story see this guy is a houndmaster that means he likes dogs so when you play him he searches your deck for a dog to accompany him on his adventures and he gets stronger whenever they are tagged together the two specific cards he searches for are even pictured in the card up look there they are two dogs rather than having to remember a bunch of complicated rules all new players really have to do is be on the lookout for those specific doggos in their draft packs as well as dogs in general because they nearly all contribute to aggressive playstyles where you attack with a lot of creatures at once which is exactly what the alpine hound master wants you to do that's an entire strategy right there informed by a single card brilliant giving players mental shorthands for cars through their mechanical or thematic design massively reduces the amount of brain power players need to devote to remembering what cards they have and what they do this frees up a bunch of mental resources for the actually fun bit of the game combining different cards together to create cool effects in other words synergies as far as tank builders are concerned i think synergies come in three flavors hard soft and flex the first type of synergy would be what i call hard synergies these are synergistic effects which have plainly stated benefits to being matched with specific keywords or types of cards and no other potential date building scope outside of that a good example of some hard synergy can be found in tribes this is the card game term for a group of cards that are all unified by a single super type in hearthstone for example murlocs are pretty crappy on their own but they make other murders stronger so the more murlocs you have the more luckier they get encouraging you to focus entirely on this single type of card hard synergy cards can be great for giving players a foundation to build their deck around or as a fun gimmick but if a game has too many cards with hard synergies deck building can quickly become something of a formality in griff lands nearly all of the deck archetypes rely on hard synergies for example bleed discard and combo in the regular battles or influence and dominance stacking in the debate battles if you're going for a combo-based strategy for example you pretty much have to ignore every single card that doesn't either consume or generate combo points because the more combo cards you have the better your combo cards become instantly rendering about two-thirds of the cardboard completely useless because they don't engage with or affect this strategy at all another type of synergy will be what i call soft synergy where cards have implied relationships with other cards but the player is left to figure out the best use for them a fun example of a soft synergy is in dicey dungeons which doesn't technically have you holding a deck but it may as well do the engineer class has an ability which sets all of your die to six it's very powerful but it's rendered even more so with the addition of the flamethrower weapon which deals fire damage equal to the sum of all dice put into it and when all those dire sixes you can deal a whopping 24 damage plus the damage from setting the enemy dice on fire in a single hit whoa soft synergies encourage players to evaluate the interplay between their cards and rewards them for finding interesting connections personally i find it best when soft synergies make up the majority of the carpool because these cars encourage players to think on their feet to create synergies but aren't quite as restrictive as heart trilogies and are much less demanding on deck building than the third type of synergy speaking of which the third and final type of synergy is a flex synergy rather than gaining increased effects when paired with other cards flex synergies are all about having versatile effects that either make it easier to execute an existing synergy or support one indirectly these might be cards that filter through your deck to draw specific cards put back things on top of your draw pile or have other weird effects careful use of these cards will let advanced players improve the consistency of their strategies even if the flex synergy cards don't directly contribute often flax synergy cars can be bad or outright useless on their own but it's when paired with other synergies that they really shine in one step from eden the spell pinch just deals one damage to you that's it pretty terrible right but it counts as essentially an instant free spellcast for decks that care about casting lots of spells and activates on hit effects like the flak jacket relic allowing you to do revenge damage without needing to actually get hit yourself the thing that distinguishes flex energies is that they synergize with synergies themselves and have no real payoff on their own a great way to control synergies is to control the rate at which various cards appear by ensuring that a player gets lots of soft synergies and only a few flex enhanced energies developers open up a lot of possibilities to the player while still giving them cards to build around and support their strategy with just not so many that deck burning becomes boring or impossible in monster train cards have three rarities common uncommon and rare and these three tiers roughly correspond to the three different kinds of synergies common cards have simple straightforward effects that are easy to understand and are used as the foundation for your strategy in other words they have soft synergies razor sharp edge is an example of a soft synergy card it gives a big boost to a heart attack and a small penalty to their health and is basically nice to have but it really shines when used on a creature that attacks multiple times like the animus of will uncommon cards offer flex synergies like this one the wickless baron who's a bit rubbish on his own but supports a variety of sacrifice or resurrection focused decks because he gets stronger whenever something dies finally rare cards are powerful but narrow so you need to build around them as such they often use hard synergies a personal favorite is this bad boy the shadow siege who is obscenely powerful but the main challenge to him is building a deck that's actually capable of playing the damn thing longer term more strategic challenges are also key to making dev builders work if all you are doing is matching up synergistic cards whenever you saw them not only would your deck probably suck but it also wouldn't feel like you were making tangible meaningful choices or progressing towards some sort of end goal this is why it's important to give players things to think about beyond a single encounter or a single card's interactions they need to consider their whole deck and their whole playstyle in a holistic sense rather than just as a means to an end in other words their cards need to work as part of a strategy a very simple way to add some longer term decision making to a deck builder is to require players to manage not just their cards but also their deck the bigger your deck is insert penis joke here the less likely you are to draw into your important combo pieces or flex synergy cards when you need them it's a common new player mistake to pick up every single card that's vaguely synergistic wherever possible and end up with a bloated useless deck am i right ladies oh oh you're too kind i'm here all week anyway by giving players the option to spend resources to delete cars from their deck thereby making it more consistent players are asked to juggle reliable access to their best cards with the versatility of a larger deck learning how powerful card deletion effects are is an important learning experience and can massively increase the depth of a game particularly when paired with upgrade systems by letting players upgrade their cars to be more powerful or gain a variety of extra effects you can let them invest into their star players and better orient their strategy around particular cards that perform well deck building games can also give players extra stuff to think about by giving them some resources to manage like money or health health systems are really interesting in particular because they force players into a cool risk reward dynamic in slave the spire response have two functions by default you could have a nap and heal some health or you can upgrade a card just like i mentioned earlier upgrading a card allows you to focus your deck and make it stronger in the long run but you might die if you don't have enough health this allows new players to recover from mistakes and play it safe while also letting expert players mim-max everything to ride the razor's edge for an extra challenge it's also sometimes a good idea to add money or health related cards to your pool in order to link a player's strategic decisions with their synergistic ones cars that heal you or gain you money can be weak but offer security or flexibility for the future on the flip side cards that spend money or cost health can be much more powerful than normal but need to be balanced against the fact that they hurt you in the long run by requiring a player to analyze not just every card in a vacuum but also its potential impact on their decks reliability their wallet and their margin for error developers can give their games a much stronger long-term element beyond simple synergies the clearest example of this can actually be traced back to the original deck builder dominion which is a tabletop game in dominion you play as a medieval merchant landowner and the aim of the game is to get more points than the other players by buying these victory cards to do that you have to build up a money-making engine by using cards from this central market which usually aren't worth any points but enable you to afford the provinces and dutchies the thing is though is that those victory cards don't actually do anything so the more of them you buy the worse your deck gets as it gets clogged up choosing when to go for the win and start buying victory cards is a massive part of the game's strategy because if you commit too soon you won't be able to buy enough and will just have an even worse deck and if you wait too long the other players will buy them before you and you'll lose let's recap deck builders are very complicated i've given a pretty basic overview of deck and cod mechanics here but i've barely even touched on progression systems enemy design multiplayer or anything like that but a good rule of thumb for trying to understand why we enjoy a particular deck border more than the others can be found in that trifecta of identity synergy and strategy you need to ask yourself how distinct of the cards how fun are they to put together and how interesting are they to manage through these lenses we can better articulate our feelings on some games and understand why they make us feel the way they do i didn't love signs of the sojourner because although it's got a great story and a very good dog my deck capped out in power and complexity very quickly so the latter two thirds of the game were spent feeling like i wasn't really doing anything that mattered on the flip side in spite of its wonky difficulty in ui problems the way nowhere profit has your cards actually get hurt and die is an awesome management challenge that more games should really try to steal but best of all knowing more about how these games work will give us the perspective we need to look past the game's flaws and see why it was so revolutionary in the first place if you haven't go and play dream quest it's on the steam sale right now and it's actually really good it has a really smart system of character upgrades the different play styles all feel very unique and despite the simplicity the cards have a lot of very fun interplay i know i slacked it off at the start of the video but dream quest is a fascinating look and a primordial genre just beginning to form and hopefully you'll see the same raw potential in it the blizzard did when they hired peter whalen to work on hearthstone seriously give it a play you will not regret it that is until you meet the [ __ ] kraken boss and you rage quit the game seriously i'm out [ __ ] this i take it all back hi and thanks for watching the video this one was a load of work to put together but luckily there are a load of great depth orders out there so please do me a favor and step outside the hearthstone bubble once in a while and give some of them a go if only to justify the effort i spent playing all of them as for a youtuber i'm gonna promote might i recommend the fantastic channel of angori tom who's a part of the oxcast and one of the few people still making solo style let's play content who's actually watchable he's got a few more subscribers than me but yeah [ __ ] it tommy's super funny he's chill and i've had his fantastic playthrough orbs of nautica on in the background while editing this video and now i will never stop referring to the repo leviathans as lord choppy bits he's great please give him a watch but even greater than him are my super cool patrons who continue to support the channel and in exchange they get a bunch of super cool bonus bits like my thoughts on hero battle auto chess games which are sort of take builders but not quite and my super top tier mysterious benefactors also get their names right out at the end of every video like what i'm gonna do right now they are alex the launch assaran baxter heal big chess bodhi brianna tariani daniel medjes david sester dirk jan karen beld doodle hog evie george sears epithon janos fekete jordan joshua binswanger kai gillespie lee berman lucas slack lunar eagle 1996 mace window 54 max philippov mr t with some tea knox patrick romberg philby the bilby prospero rey's dad samuel vanderplatz sheldon hearn steve reilly strategy in ultima and ciao so let's get along with every single video i swear to god thanks for supporting thanks for watching and i will see you around bye

Channel: Adam Millard - The Architect of Games

Views: 122,994

Rating: 4.9731789 out of 5

Keywords: Games, Video Games, Gaming, PC Gaming, Adam, Adam Millard, Architect, AoG, Architect of Games, Review, Analysis, Game Design, Deckbuilder, Slay The Spire, Monster Train, Cards, Magic The Gathering, MtG, Rougelike, Decks, Signs of the Sojourner, Dream Quest, Hearthstone

Id: d_gBRNAgBKQ

Length: 18min 28sec (1108 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 03 2020