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Add affinities to every card


SCUD13

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So this idea is very basic and straightforward but it could make it possible for the devs to easily create many "new(ish)" cards by adding affinities to every card (or even add all the 4 affinity types to every card).

I could imagine a poll every once in a while with a few cards to choose from and that card would get a new version with an affinity. The community could even come up with ideas about the different special attributes a card could get. Let's say we vote for Contruct (because that's my fav unit) and a frost affinity. After that we could discuss what could be the special to that unit. For example it could have it's siege mode turned off but does extra dmg to frozen units. This way we would have the "normal" contsruct and a brand new with frost affinity.

The possibilities are endless and I think it is so much easier to do than creating brand new cards from scratch.

Pros:

+ Easier to create this than a brand new card - artwork, sound and everything is already done, only a copy/paste needed and some stat/attribute changing (I guess)

+ Varied deck building

+ Communitiy interaction

Cons:

- Balancing issues

 

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3 minutes ago, SCUD13 said:

The possibilities are endless and I think it is so much easier to do than creating brand new cards from scratch.

This has come up a couple of times, but we currently do not have plans to add affinities for Twilight Edition cards. In fact, we are even considering not adding affinities to some of the new cards. 

Affinities were introduced as a way to increase set size in the old EA days. And it makes sense, a 120 card expansion sounds better than a 60 card one, even if a lot of it is bulk. Affinities do have some charms, but in some designs, the difference in the affinity does not matter at all, or one of the two is clearly superior. By forcing yourself to have two affinities ready for each card, you automatically create some restrictions to your designs. Increasing that to 4 is close to impossible. I dont see a world where a card can have 4 different enough affinities, where all get played and its not in the way of an actual new card in design. 

Adding affinities to the cards from the Twilight Edition creates new problems too. Take Eruption. Adding an extra affinity to it is already tricky. I guess you could say a purple affinity with 200 damage that ignores debuffs or something. But the current Affinity System also requires you to change the basic Eruption. Changing it to a Fire affinity to deal 200 + 100 damage is just lazy design IMO. 

Then there are cards like Shadow Mage. How would you even go about introducing two different affinities for this card? Affinies are also confusing to new players, so personally (im not on the design team) I would really hate for us to mess with the cleanness of the basic first edition.

One other thing: adding affinities would take time off actual new cards, which are way easier to market to the larger playerbase than adding affinities. In a way, some of our patches have dramatically changes units to allow for completely new playstyles, but still people ask ''are the new cards ready yet?'' because they do not think this counts as new units. I expect the same would happen with adding (more) affinities to current cards. 

We do think there is design space for affinities, and some of our new cards will have them. But our designers feel that if we cant come up with an affinity that actually adds something to the card, we will stick to only one version of the card. 

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 9/21/2021 at 5:10 PM, Majora said:

Adding an extra affinity to it is already tricky. I guess you could say a purple affinity with 200 damage that ignores debuffs or something. But the current Affinity System also requires you to change the basic Eruption. Changing it to a Fire affinity to deal 200 + 100 damage is just lazy design IMO. 

Is this really neccessary tho? Cant just the current effect be marked as "red affinity version" without any change (other than giving the card the affinity?) 

I do like consistency and the current Affinity-System isn´t consistent throughout all cards. What bothers me is that some cards like Lost Spirit Ship can be used twice in a deck, even tho these two affinitys only differ in the active spell (which is very minor because it´s almost never used).  

So in my opinion there should either be 2 affinitys for all relevant cards (especially T3 and T4 units) or it should not be possible to use the same card twice in a deck.
I´d prefer adding new affinitys for certain cards (which are not problematic for PvP) because that would also enable more possible strategies - more so if the crystals ever get a meaningful rework.

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3 hours ago, Xamos said:

Is this really neccessary tho? Cant just the current effect be marked as "red affinity version" without any change (other than giving the card the affinity?) 

I do like consistency and the current Affinity-System isn´t consistent throughout all cards. What bothers me is that some cards like Lost Spirit Ship can be used twice in a deck, even tho these two affinitys only differ in the active spell (which is very minor because it´s almost never used).  

So in my opinion there should either be 2 affinitys for all relevant cards (especially T3 and T4 units) or it should not be possible to use the same card twice in a deck.
I´d prefer adding new affinitys for certain cards (which are not problematic for PvP) because that would also enable more possible strategies - more so if the crystals ever get a meaningful rework.

If your issue is that a card like Lost Spirit Ship can be played twice, I dont see how that problem will get solved by adding affinities to the base cards. 

I feel the biggest reason people want affinities for the base cards is consistency and to check a checkbox. But adding another eruption affinity while keeping the current one the same, also results in a break of consistency, cause that is not what affinities are. 

Im not sure if its technically possible to disallow affinity X of people have affinity Y on the field. It also would be weird with spells. On top of that, if you finally have a unit where the affinities are actually very unique, it would be a shame if you cant play both versions because of a rule. 

Long story short however; 
- Removing affinities is not an option, the system is in place (this one should be obvious, but i wanted to mention it just in case)
- We do think there is interesting design space for affinities, but we dont want to staple them on a card just because we have to. This is the reason why not all of the new cards will have an affinity, and its also the reason why we are not planning to force afinities for Twilight Edition cards. 
- Adding affinities to Twilight Edition cards is currently not planned, and I think people really underestimate how much work and issues this would cause. Keep in mind that adding affinities would directly take away work from other areas, including balancing and new card design. 
- We have seen that people really want actual new cards. Marketingwise, its not exciting to sell ''a new affinity for eruption'' instead of ''new spell! lava stream!''. We saw this with the pretty drastic overhaul of some units. Even though some cards were edited to be basically new units, people still ask ''when new cardz?!''. 

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[I am sorry for repeating Majora's point, didn't read it before posting]

I hate affinities, particularly for rare / ultrarare cards. When you get a card from booster, you have 50% chance that you get the "inferior useless" one, what for me breaks a lot of fun from boosters opening.

I'd opt in getting rid of most affinities from the game (Grinder, Lost Spirit Ship, Firesworn), and leaving only those that have actual huge impact on card's playstyle/purpose  (Core Dredge, Spirit Hunters). I dislike affinities for artificatly increasing cards pool without affecting playability/ possibilities.
It is nice when you have to think over in depth what affinity to choose, not when it doesn't matter.

Edited by Dallarian
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I like some of the affinity card such as Root Nexus, Equilibrium, Unity and more. But truly, many of the affinity cards have a useless affiliation where one is remarkably better than the other or similar. So if new affinity cards were to be made, it should be done with forethought. It's not fun when you get from a booster pack an inferior or similar version of an affinity card. It will also be more exciting if new cards come into play.

Edited by Yah-Kob
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