By Brian Kibler
Sometimes mechanics come about because of a singular idea. I like to describe our job as sitting around thinking up ideas and saying “Wouldn’t it be sweet if….?” Like – “Wouldn’t it be sweet if there were cards that did something as soon as they showed up in the center row?” Ta da – Fate! But sometimes mechanics come about as a result of looking for an answer to something else entirely.
One of the elements of the original Ascension experience that we thought could be better was the balance of power and rune strategies. It was often the best strategy, especially in three or four player games, to simply buy Heavy Infantries early and often and just kill every monster as they came up and, failing that, kill the Cultist repeatedly. It was a simple strategy, but a very effective one. We initially addressed this in Return of the Fallen by increasing the honor totals in games with more than two players, but that simply reduced the likelihood of the power deck winning. It didn’t do much to change the experience of playing them, which was less interesting than we wanted it to be.
The biggest difference between power and rune strategies and the relative fun in playing them comes in the number of decisions a player has. Sure, for some players winning alone is fun in itself, but for most players feeling like you won because you made the right choices is that much more satisfying. A rune-heavy strategy generally has interesting decisions every turn. Do I spend my five runes on Voidthirster or Watchmaker’s Altar? Do I want to buy a Shade of the Black Watch, or is it too late in the game for banishing and do I need to focus on getting honor?
While power certainly has some decisions to make due to the varying rewards on different monsters, those choices come up far less since often there is only a single monster on the board that you reasonably want to defeat. Sure, there are times you want to kill a Mephit and a Cultist instead of a five cost monster because you really want to banish something, but those times are few and far between. Monsters like Wind Tyrant, Fire Tyrant, and Doom Weeper give power decks exciting moments by spiking their resources to buy more expensive heroes and constructs than they normally could, but these basically just serve to give the power deck the occasional level of decision akin to that which rune strategies face each turn.
Perhaps more to the point, Ascension is at its core a deckbuilding game, operating under the principle that the gameplay is about building a different deck each game as you go. The linearity of the pure power strategy undermined that – too often a successful deck would just be a huge stack of Heavy Infantry and a small number of center row cards the player happened to pick up. We wanted to shake things up and make the experience of building and playing a power heavy deck more variable and more fun.
We knew that the solution had to lie primarily in monster rewards. We could make center row cards that changed the play experience for power decks (and we did – which you’ll see in the Void faction preview soon!), but the games in which those cards didn’t show up would remain very similar to the old all Heavy Infantry all the time play pattern. The baseline efficiency of Heavy Infantry is also very hard to compete with. Power strategies have a hard time buying high rune cost heroes and constructs, so there’s only a fairly narrow band of costs that appeal to them. While there is some room for cards like Deathseeker, we wanted to do to change things than just make a few better power cards.
We felt like power decks are the most fun when they get the chance to buy cards that they normally wouldn’t be able to afford. The rewards from monsters like Wind Tyrant or Doom Weeper, as mentioned earlier, often let the power decks buy higher rune cost cards, but even these are only particularly fun when there’s actually something you want to buy on the board right then, and we can only make so many monsters with runes as a reward before they all start to run together.
Enter Trophy.
The way Trophy works is simple. Whenever you kill a Trophy monster, you gain the honor part of its reward immediately, and then place the card itself face up in front of you. The Trophy monster itself tells you how it works while it’s under your control. In the case of Hoarding Tyrant, you can banish it to gain two runes.
As it turns out, a great way to give power decks more decisions was to let them choose when to get their rewards. Hoarding Tyrant draws obvious comparisons to Wind Tyrant. While Wind Tyrant provides more runes as part of the reward, the fact that you have to spend them immediately means that you can’t always buy something you really want. With Hoarding Tyrant, you can wait for a rune heavy hand to buy something big, or save up multiple Trophies for something even bigger!
By Brian Kibler
Sometimes mechanics come about because of a singular idea. I like to describe our job as sitting around thinking up ideas and saying “Wouldn’t it be sweet if….?” Like – “Wouldn’t it be sweet if there were cards that did something as soon as they showed up in the center row?” Ta da – Fate! But sometimes mechanics come about as a result of looking for an answer to something else entirely.
One of the elements of the original Ascension experience that we thought could be better was the balance of power and rune strategies. It was often the best strategy, especially in three or four player games, to simply buy Heavy Infantries early and often and just kill every monster as they came up and, failing that, kill the Cultist repeatedly. It was a simple strategy, but a very effective one. We initially addressed this in Return of the Fallen by increasing the honor totals in games with more than two players, but that simply reduced the likelihood of the power deck winning. It didn’t do much to change the experience of playing them, which was less interesting than we wanted it to be.
The biggest difference between power and rune strategies and the relative fun in playing them comes in the number of decisions a player has. Sure, for some players winning alone is fun in itself, but for most players feeling like you won because you made the right choices is that much more satisfying. A rune-heavy strategy generally has interesting decisions every turn. Do I spend my five runes on Voidthirster or Watchmaker’s Altar? Do I want to buy a Shade of the Black Watch, or is it too late in the game for banishing and do I need to focus on getting honor?
While power certainly has some decisions to make due to the varying rewards on different monsters, those choices come up far less since often there is only a single monster on the board that you reasonably want to defeat. Sure, there are times you want to kill a Mephit and a Cultist instead of a five cost monster because you really want to banish something, but those times are few and far between. Monsters like Wind Tyrant, Fire Tyrant, and Doom Weeper give power decks exciting moments by spiking their resources to buy more expensive heroes and constructs than they normally could, but these basically just serve to give the power deck the occasional level of decision akin to that which rune strategies face each turn.
Perhaps more to the point, Ascension is at its core a deckbuilding game, operating under the principle that the gameplay is about building a different deck each game as you go. The linearity of the pure power strategy undermined that – too often a successful deck would just be a huge stack of Heavy Infantry and a small number of center row cards the player happened to pick up. We wanted to shake things up and make the experience of building and playing a power heavy deck more variable and more fun.
We knew that the solution had to lie primarily in monster rewards. We could make center row cards that changed the play experience for power decks (and we did – which you’ll see in the Void faction preview soon!), but the games in which those cards didn’t show up would remain very similar to the old all Heavy Infantry all the time play pattern. The baseline efficiency of Heavy Infantry is also very hard to compete with. Power strategies have a hard time buying high rune cost heroes and constructs, so there’s only a fairly narrow band of costs that appeal to them. While there is some room for cards like Deathseeker, we wanted to do to change things than just make a few better power cards.
We felt like power decks are the most fun when they get the chance to buy cards that they normally wouldn’t be able to afford. The rewards from monsters like Wind Tyrant or Doom Weeper, as mentioned earlier, often let the power decks buy higher rune cost cards, but even these are only particularly fun when there’s actually something you want to buy on the board right then, and we can only make so many monsters with runes as a reward before they all start to run together.
Enter Trophy.
The way Trophy works is simple. Whenever you kill a Trophy monster, you gain the honor part of its reward immediately, and then place the card itself face up in front of you. The Trophy monster itself tells you how it works while it’s under your control. In the case of Hoarding Tyrant, you can banish it to gain two runes.
As it turns out, a great way to give power decks more decisions was to let them choose when to get their rewards. Hoarding Tyrant draws obvious comparisons to Wind Tyrant. While Wind Tyrant provides more runes as part of the reward, the fact that you have to spend them immediately means that you can’t always buy something you really want. With Hoarding Tyrant, you can wait for a rune heavy hand to buy something big, or save up multiple Trophies for something even bigger!
Those of you who have been paying attention to our announcements have already seen this one, since it was on our sell sheet. Hoarding Whelp is the sort of effect that is only really interesting on a Trophy monster, since refunding a point of power when killing a monster doesn’t do all that much. Hoarding Whelp can help you save up to kill the big bad monsters in Storm of Souls…like this one.
Much like Hoarding Tyrant and Wind Tyrant, Unchained Fates draws immediate comparisons to Earth Tyrant. But unlike with their tyrranical predecessor, the ability to choose when to use the reward from Unchained Fates ensures you’ll have a huge turn. With Earth Tyrant, you’d often spend most of your resources killing the monster itself, and then draw a Militia and an Apprentice and have nothing to do with them. With Unchained Fates, you can set yourself up to generate a huge number of runes and power in a single turn, and you have complete control over when you want to use it, whether to buy a huge construct or to kill an even bigger monster.
Check back next week when we introduce you to the other big mechanic of the set, Events!
原文：http://www.ascensiongame.com/news-archive/item/taking-trophies
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