mythmirageandmagic

[mythmirageandmagic]

Problems and Solutions: Designing Cards

The very first things I ever designed were custom Yu-Gi-Oh cards. They were crazy and absolute crap, but it started my love for game design early. As I’ve gotten older I’ve jumped from Yu-Gi-Oh to Magic the Gathering and then Magic the Gathering to Hearthstone, creating custom cards along the way. Its hard not to be taken in by the simple allure of designing a card: Just add a mana cost, stats and a cool effect and bam you’re done. Put it in the game! Of course because its so easy you often get less than stellar results and I always fall prey to thinking too deeply about bad design I see on places like r/customhearthstone. Today I wanted to offer some help to card designers based on mistake I see a lot in custom cards: A card that is a solution to its own problem. Of course if you’re interested in designing cards for more serious titles and not just for fun this advice will help you too so lets jump into it!

This is the card that sparked this discussion. Its got a very simple effect: every turn it spawns one of these Goblin Bomb minions which explodes upon death to deal damage. When the Bomb Maker himself dies he destroys all the bombs. Its important to note too that the idea of summoning Goblin Bombs is a mechanic introduced in the official Hearthstone expansion The Boomsday Project. 

All of these cards are official cards designed and implemented by Heathstone’s developers. So what sets Bomb Maker apart as bad design compared to these cards? Well I think it has to do with the idea of Problems and Solutions. Bomb Maker is a solution to its own problem. 

To explain more in detail, the Goblin Bombs are the “Problem”. They have to die in order to produce the effect of dealing damage, however they have 0 attack meaning you cannot command them to attack and suicide into your opponent’s minions. This is a conundrum also seen in Hearthstone’s set of “Egg” cards which have positive effects upon death but can’t be easily suicided off. So the Problem is a Problem of deck building and synergy. How can I build a deck that allows my Goblin Bombs to die? 

If that’s the Problem then a card is a Solution if it allows the Goblin Bombs to die. In its simplest form a card like this might a card which increase the attack of your minions. Once the Goblin Bomb has >0 attack it can suicide into enemy minions and trigger its effect. There are also cards which specifically trigger the “Deathrattle” effects of cards. Finally, you could use a card that deals damage and target your own Goblin Bomb to kill it. That’s a lot of different Solutions to one Problem! That’s an extremely good thing! the more Solutions you have to a single Problem, the more fun deckbuilding and playing the game becomes because it presents a lot of choice to the player. It allows for moments of creativity and ingenuity. The Solution is the fun part because that is the part the player controls. The Problem is just there to create Solutions.

So this leads me to Bomb Maker. His ability to create a Goblin Bomb every turn is a Problem. You are creating all these Goblin Bombs which are totally useless unless you can make them die. But wait, Bomb Maker is also a Solution because when he dies he destroys all Goblin Bombs! This is bad design because it robs the player of the fun they had shifting through interesting possible Solutions. Its Solution is also extremely boring. Text that reads “Destroy your Goblin Bombs” takes a very literal approach to killing your Goblin Bombs. Part of the fun of Solutions is that they aren’t apparent at first glance. Its a puzzle to think about different ways to solve a Problem. This takes all that fun away by literally and unceremoniously destroying them. 

But here we in Myth, Mirage and Magic we NEVER present evidence of bad game design without providing some kind of solution. Every mistake is made to be learned from and this is no exception. The good news is, redesigning this card is made easier by the nature of Solutions and Problems: simply pick a side. 

These are 3 version of the original card that fit the theme. The 2.0 and 3.0 versions still have the problem that they are both Problem and Solution, but they are slightly better than the original. That’s because they present a more interesting Solution to the Goblin Bomb problem. Increasing their Attack instead of just destroying them lets you suicide them into enemy minions. However, 3.0 improves on this by giving the Attack bonus to all your minions. This is better because it makes it less obvious the card is meant to synergize with Goblin Bombs and it also means this card can become the solution to multiple problems not just the Goblin Bomb one. Its important to note here that I’m not worrying about balancing these cards at all right now. Balance is a completely separate discussion and you can achieve balance with nearly any effect by just changing the numbers. 

Finally, Bomb Maker 4.0 strips away all elements of a Solution and becomes exclusively a Problem. In this way we can see that reductive design is often the most effective way to achieving interesting cards. 

But what if we wanted to make Bomb Maker exclusively a Solution card? Well one solution is to just retain the “Deathrattle” from the 3.0 card, but there is already a card in Hearthstone with that exact card text so instead I went a bit creative:

Self-Destruct Button uses an effect very similar to the first iteration of the Bomb Maker. However, there is a huge difference this time that makes the design more interesting to play with: this card has 0 attack instead of Bomb Maker which has 3. This means this card cannot attack enemy minions to suicide like Bomb Maker could have. But wait, aren’t we a Problem and a Solution again? Well yes we are, but the key is that we aren’t the Solution to our own Problem. Being a Problem and a Solution is actually interesting design if the Solution doesn’t directly solve the Problem. 

In Hearthstone there are too many examples of these cards to list but you can take a look at the Quest cards introduced to get a better feel for how to do this. These Quest cards are very literal with their Problems because they ask you to do a specific thing. However, once you solve the Problem you’re given a Reward card which can offer a variety of effects. Some Rewards deal with your opponent directly but Rewards like Crystal Core offer secondary problems. Decks that use Crystal Core have to think about ways to solve the Problem of the Quest and then the Problem of how to best utilize the Reward. In a way, reducing your opponent’s life points to 0 is the Ultimate Problem you face in any card game. You could then argue Goblin Bombs are a Solution to that Problem. The key is to offer a Solution to a different Problem not the Problem of your card. This ensures that players always have interesting decisions to make when deck building.

And that concludes the first post of Myth, Mirage and Magic. Content on this Tumblr will not be regular as I am a student dealing with both college work and independent game development projects, but I encourage you to follow me if you’re interested in Game Design content. On here you may call me the Game Design Genie (or Genie for short) or if that sounds incredibly lame (because it is) then you may call me Kanra.