Storm of Souls Preview: Mechanaon Friday, 14 October 2011. Posted in News ArchiveThe Mechana are a strange folk. Devoted to the research and creation of their machines to the point of obsession, they are constantly searching for new ways to implement the teachings of the Grand Design. In the face of the turmoil facing Vigil, the people of Hedron are doing what they do best – building things. But their typical methods of containment have proven insufficient as the Storm of Souls washes over the land. In the struggle for power amidst the chaos, they have had to search for new ways to utilize their expertise.
One of our goals with Storm of Souls was to create an experience that was familiar enough to long time players that it still felt like Ascension, but still different enough that it stood on its own as a new way to play. The Mechana was the faction with which we did the most tinkering, if you’ll pardon the choice of words. In Chronicle of the Godslayer and Return of the Fallen, Mechana had a very distinct play pattern which characterized the faction well – build the great machine. Every Mechana Construct fed into buying more Mechana Constructs, and when the machine got rolling, it was hard to stop. We liked that feel, and felt like it did a great job of representing what the Mechana were all about.
For Storm of Souls, though, we wanted to do something different. We still wanted Mechana to care about Constructs – that’s their whole shtick, after all – but wanted to move away from the idea of Mechana Constructs as things that you just continue to collect. While it’s certainly a lot of fun to amass a giant pile of Constructs in front of you, we felt like we needed to do something new or else the gameplay of the Mechana would just feel the same as it was before.
http://www.ascensiongame.com/images/stories/card_images/SoS/Synchronizer_L.png[/img]You’re probably wondering – wait, what’s so different about this? Couldn’t this have just been CotG or RotF? The answer is yes – Synchronizer is a Construct that could have easily been at home in one of the previous Ascension sets, because it does something fundamental to the Constructs strategy. It provides you with value from your Constructs when you play them, kind of like the Burrrower from Chronicle of the Godslayer or Socket Alter from Return of the Fallen, which lets your deck still operate efficiently on those turns when you draw your Constructs for the first time.
The difference is that while Burrower and Socket Alter were one-of-a-kind effects in their respective sets, Synchronizer represents the most common type of Mechana Construct ability in Storm of Souls. While Constructs like The Grand Design and Watchmaker’s Alter made it easier to acquire more Mechana Constructs, cards like Synchronizer make it less painful – or even profitable – to actually play them. Why would we go down that road instead?
http://www.ascensiongame.com/images/stories/card_images/SoS/Scrap_Flinger_L.png[/img]Because in Storm of Souls, the Mechana love to break their own toys! Rather than build up an enormous machine that you just sit back and watch grow, nowadays way Mechana works involves actually putting the individual pieces of that machine to work and churning them back through your deck. Scrap Flinger is one of many Mechana effects that gives you a bonus for destroying your own Constructs – and a substantial one, at that, giving you as much power as the original Emri on a single four cost Hero.
As an aside, you’ll note that Scrap Flinger uses the term “destroy”, which is also new in Storm of Souls. In the original Ascension, we decided to avoid the use of game terms that couldn’t be explained directly on the card itself to make the game easier for new players to pick up, so on cards like Corrosive Widow we spelled out that they caused opponents to put a Construct into the discard pile from play. As we’ve moved forward with more sets, writing out that exact action every time has become cumbersome and lead to extremely wordy cards, so we decided to compress “put into the discard pile from play” into a single game term – destroy. It means the same thing, and previous cards with the old wording are considered to destroy Constructs for any sort of effect that might care about that.
An effect like – this!
http://www.ascensiongame.com/images/stories/card_images/SoS/Hedron_Rising_L.png[/img]Hedron Rising’s ongoing effect probably looks familiar to any of you long time players, since it’s the same effect on Hedron Link Device, except that it effects all players at once. The particularly cool new thing on here is the Event Trophy effect. Ever finally got your cool new Construct into play only to see it get destroyed by an opponent killing a Corrosive Widow or something of that sort? While Hedron Rising is in play and you have a Fanatic Trophy, any time a Construct you control would be destroyed, you can banish the Trophy to keep it around! When the Mechana are in power, no one’s going to be destroying their Constructs except themselves….
原文链接：http://www.ascensiongame.com/news-archive/item/storm-of-souls-preview-mechana
英文很难所以只能发原版。。。
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