Author Topic: Mage specific cards in future expansions? (Read 15603 times)

Hedge · « **Reply #15 on:** March 04, 2013, 04:23:37 AM »

You do know that title Prietess does not always mean Do Gooder, But even in your world of Priestesses are rightious and good it Should not prevent the Other Four Mages from Casting it.Clerics can learn wizard spells if they choose to be multi class, True, mono Black has no Oblivion Ring, but I can choose not to play Mono Black, It could even be the only white card in the deck. In Most Skirmish Games You know exactly what Pieces you get and I have the Choice in that.

I have played almost every mass market Card Game and This one has the highest number of cards by far that are restricted based on one other card.

Hedge

Sausageman · « **Reply #16 on:** March 04, 2013, 06:29:30 AM »

I have to agree with you that Mage specific cards aren't good, and are extremely limiting. One of the major plus points that Mage Wars brought to the table was that ANY mage could use ANY spell - if a dark mage wanted to use a holy, angel spell, then they could. They'd pay dearly for it, but they still could. In this way, it guaranteed everyone's spell books would be unique.

By bringing out so many mage specific cards, we end up essentially playing the spell books the designers had in mind, which is a massive shame. Also, it's SO annoying when you get into games like this and cards become redundant from the get go. If I have no interest in ever playing a Wizard, I may as well throw away all the 'Wizard Only' cards.

For me, I vastly prefer the idea of it being cheaper for the intended mage (or more expensive for those it wasn't intended for), or more powerful. For example, the Suppression Cloak might be a lv3 spell to anyone but the Wizard. A lot less restrictive, and no longer redundant. Perfect.

DarthDadaD20 · « **Reply #17 on:** March 04, 2013, 09:03:22 AM »

Quote from: "Hedge" post=8583

You do know that title Prietess does not always mean Do Gooder, But even in your world of Priestesses are rightious and good it Should not prevent the Other Four Mages from Casting it.Clerics can learn wizard spells if they choose to be multi class, True, mono Black has no Oblivion Ring, but I can choose not to play Mono Black, It could even be the only white card in the deck. In Most Skirmish Games You know exactly what Pieces you get and I have the Choice in that. Hedge

I have played almost every mass market Card Game and This one has the highest number of cards by far that are restricted based on one other card.

Good points! Still, think of it like the skirmish games, chose your mages you play, and you get a choice in that. Plus, no one is pointing out the fact that most of the cards are school restrictive, not just mage only. Sure alot of the cards in the new set are "restrictive", but some say "Mind training only" and why would a beastmaster know specialized magic from a school he has never learned from? Thats part of the whole game, that one mages' magic is being shown as Superior in the arena, why would everyone be all the same? That, and right now, there has been two sets. they have "muticlass" mages, (trained in two schools)
so its not like a beastmastr will never use a mind only card, just not the one thats out yet. Sure priestess dont have to be goody goody, but this one is, I bet they will make a priestess trained in both holy and dark and then hey, a priestess can use drain life. I'm in noway diminishing anyones opinion, I'm just offering my thoughts and a counter point, I dont think that anyone is wrong in how they feel, but mage only/school only only makes perfect sense in my mind.

sIKE · « **Reply #18 on:** March 04, 2013, 09:34:17 AM »

I think of more in the Martial Arts format, only those with the highest levels of training are taught the top end spells (like the good old Quivering Palm) of the school. Sure anyone can learn "the easy" stuff but it takes many years of driving your hands in the bucket of rocks to harden them "enough" to even be able to be taught "The Quivering Palm".

As Dada was saying ….hope I am making sense here....

Koz · « **Reply #19 on:** March 04, 2013, 10:32:57 AM »

While you can argue the story reasons behind having mage specific cards, I think Hedge is more worried about the game play behind these descisions. I do agree with some of Hedge's and Sausageman's points. I was surprised at the large number of mage/school specific cards in the expansion as well. It really limits how useful these expansions are to other mages and, as Hedge pointed out, if someone only plays one or two mages regularly they may not buy the expansions because they are useless to them. It would be a lot like Magic releasing a set where most of the cards were Red and Black with only a few cards of the other colors. That would be a real drawback to people who didn't play Red and Black and may hinder sales.

I also agree a bit with Sausageman's point that we seem to be pigeonholed a bit to building spellbooks that the designers envisioned which limits creativity. While there is obviously room to play around with some versatility, there is no question that when it comes to the Forcemaster particularly, there will be few surprises. You know she will be packing the Force Blade, Charms, Mind Control's and Forcefields. That makes her very predictable and I wish she had more variety in her playstyle. At least the Warlord can go in different directions (swarm, big creature, ranged or melee, beat down, Earth focused, etc), but the Forcemaster seems like she will be very predictable and "samey", although she will grow as her spell options increase.

For myself, I plan on having builds for all mages, so I'm not as hurt by the mage/school only spells as some others might be, but I see their point. In the future I think Arcane Wonders may want to consider unbundling the spellbooks and selling those seperately so they can include more cards in their expansions. That way they can include more variety of spells and expand all of the schools a bit more evenly. I think they will sell more product this way and appeal to more of their players.

Tacullu64 · « **Reply #20 on:** March 04, 2013, 10:36:11 AM »

I like the mage only and school only system used in mage wars. In my opinion it is essential to giving each mage a unique feel and emphasizes their strengths and weaknesses. There is nothing wrong with encouraging mages along a certain path and there are still many options for customizing mages and we only have a core set and one expansion.

Let us pretend that The Lord of Fire is the best creature in the game and Charm is the best way to deal with him. Why shouldn't every spellbook have the LoF and whenever he is cast the opposing mage Charms him. Yes, there are other ways to deal with him by why would I use anything other than a charm (I'm not saying charm is the best or LoF for that matter, not trying to start that debate, just using them for an example). Charm being exclusive to the Forcemaster (at the moment) emphasizes her strength against large creatures but does nothing for her weakness against swarms of smaller creatures. I know that nobody has suggested this but why not just have generic mage cards with no limitations on spell book construction. If that was MW then I probably wouldn't play. No matter how hard designers try to balance cards some will always be more efficient and thus more used than others.

If you only play one or two different mages I can certainly understand how this system would be frustrating. I mentioned in another thread that I thought all the extra copies of cards cut down on the number of different new cards we received in the FM vs WL expansion. If you are not interested the two new mages and only wanted new cards for the existing mages I could see how this might make the expansion seem like less of a value for you. Maybe the answer is to publish expansions with only one mage that way you could include more spells for the schools that aren't featured.

Koy · « **Reply #21 on:** March 04, 2013, 12:22:21 PM »

It took me a a second read through of Koz's initial post, coupled with some shock that Nihil was back before my brain caught up with the thread necromancy going on here. Good old Monday morning...

I am in the same camp as Tacullu, where I play all six mages and want each to be significantly different from the others. This expansion is fantastic! However, I absolutely see the point of view of the one or two mage "specialists" being disappointed in this expansion. It isn't a view shared by me or my gaming circle and to be honest, we consider the "watering down" of any given mage with cherry picking the "best" spells to be a game flaw to a certain extent.

That being said, I believe you have two ways an expansion can grow, vertically or horizontally. By which I mean: vertically adding depth to the current spell lists (ie, adding more spells for existing mages to use) or by horizontally adding breadth to the available mages themselves. Forcemaster v Warlord skewed heavily towards the horizontal option.

I love that there are now 6 distinctly different mages and I look forward to more mages in the future, complete with mage specific cards. I am also very interested in a vertical expansion where the current base of mages are expanded.

The only things I'm not looking forward to are the strange multiplayer Archmage type expansions which change the entire concept of the game. But that, as they say, is a horse of another color for a different thread.

Hey_Daralon · « **Reply #22 on:** March 04, 2013, 04:40:25 PM »

Tacullu64 hit the nail on the head. We really do need to find our balance or rate of Mage-specific, school-specific, and cards for anyone. I absolutely love this game and I plan to stick with it for a long time. So, I'm looking forward to how this game will evolve in the future. That being, there will be many more mages (hopefully) and a lot of them will share the same schools in some way, perhaps a couple that straight-up have the exact same schools, but function a different way. I really like how the Forcemaster gets exclusive access to a few spells, and therefore, a particular strategy. And, I also like how the Wizard can cross paths with the Warlord and Warlock in some ways. With this system, both you and your opponent know a little bit more about what to (or rather what not to) expect.

Another way to put this, I like to see it as the exclusive cards should serve as the basis for your mage, what gives them their identity and basic strategy. Without them, the only thing that really would set everyone apart in the future would be the special abilities on their cards and that some mages will have more of one element than another. Now I'm not saying we need even a lot of the cards to be exclusive, your mage's true power comes from all of the non-exclusive cards he/she has. I'm pretty optimistic about the future of Mage Wars, so I really think a few expansions from now, there will be so many cards and options that this whole deal with exclusivity will become sort of an afterthought. It'll still be there, but I'll just play with the preconstructed deck one time to get a feel for the mage and then my next deck will be entirely different if that makes sense.

Anyway, I thought the first expansion was awesome, way better than what I was expecting.

Thessial · « **Reply #23 on:** March 04, 2013, 06:54:50 PM »

So this has become a somewhat heated debate at times. Hopefully I can shed some design perspective on this.

The uniqueness of the mages has currently been developed as dual process.

On one side we have the mage cards. In the beginning (duh Duh DUUUUH!)... there were tons of mage ideas and each mage idea had tons of ability ideas. All in all it was brutal process to work through and contributed heavily to our initial 5 year playtest cycle. We experienced a great deal of difficulty pairing ourselves down to the primary mage abilities that you now see in the game. But keep in mind we still want to create other versions of the existing mages. To give some clarification, there may be Wizard trained in the White Spires who currently has the abilities you know and love. Our concept is what if instead of being trained in that lofty institution you were trained in the private college of Aldamar. You would still be a Wizard of Sortilege, but you have a different set of abilities.

On the other side of the equation we want to add to the unique feel of the mages and help them share in their family of mages. We achieved this through the "Mage Only" and "School only" cards. Far from being a random decision and attempt to short cut card design, we want each mage to have iconic spells that when you see them cast in an Arena, you know immediately that mage is "blank" from "blank" or that mage is trained in the "blank" school.

Functionally this method provides us with two additional things as producers. Mechanically it adds an extra layer of consideration for every variation of every mage. To help them have similar feel of initial training and yet maintain variety enough that every players mage can unique. In terms of story, which is a major function of the design, it gives nearly unlimited storyline options and now mages from the same country, but different schools can weave into numerous threads.

A good point was made earlier that the new Forcemaster Vs Warlord expansion seems to be a 'horizontal' expansion. That is both a good observation and accurate. The Forcemaster Vs. Warlord expansion introduces three schools of magic that aren't well represented. War, Mind, and Earth. We really wanted these to get off to a good start.

Another point was made that the number of 'only' cards was significant in this set. That too is accurate. During the playtest period it was discovered these two mages favored additional cards that helped with their feel. Again there a lot of sacrifice in getting the mages to this stage. Once we get to alternate versions of Forcemaster and Warlord, this will make more sense. Going forward you will see 'only' cards getting increased playability as we increase the numbers of alternate version mages and also increase the number of mages.

Keep in mind that each class of mage is specific to a set of magic schools. It is possible to say that we have had mage suggestions for nearly every possible combination of schools. For example, there is an idea for mage trained in dark and holy. There's your dark priest, although that won't be the name of that mage.

Lastly, we very much want to bring deep experiences into Mage Wars. Now that all the schools (except Water) are represented you can expect a lot more depth in the coming developments. In particular the upcoming Druid Vs Necromancer Expansion will bring more use out of the Nature only and Dark only cards.

I hope this helps to give you some insight on what goes on behind the scenes. Know that our entire design team has seen the comments in this post and on this forum and we are taking notes. Please feel free to ask me any questions and I will do my best to get you an answer.

Now if you have read all the way through this post...here's your treat. Alternate art cards for Wizard and Beastmaster.

[attachment=147]Beastmaster-v2.jpg[/attachment]

[attachment=148]Wizard_v2.jpg[/attachment]

Enjoy and keep gaming!

DarthDadaD20 · « **Reply #24 on:** March 04, 2013, 07:04:37 PM »

They were colored beautifully!

Skytale · « **Reply #25 on:** March 04, 2013, 07:08:28 PM »

Woo! Great artwork! I love it! Especially the wizard.

(But you know we're going to want an owl familiar now, right?)

Thessial · « **Reply #26 on:** March 04, 2013, 10:40:48 PM »

Let's just say that we try to make sure nothing in our artwork is superfluous.

Also, just to clarify...when these mages are released, you will see alternate mage ability cards as well.

Tacullu64 · « **Reply #27 on:** March 04, 2013, 10:56:32 PM »

Quote from: "Thessial" post=8661

Let's just say that we try to make sure nothing in our artwork is superfluous.

Also, just to clarify...when these mages are released, you will see alternate mage ability cards as well.

Can you give us a hint on the format they will be released?

I'm hoping for a set of alternates for the first 4 mages with new cards for each school.

Thessial · « **Reply #28 on:** March 05, 2013, 07:33:27 AM »

We will be producing a Spell Tome soon (with all new cards) and some of them will appear in that. The number that appears will be determined by how much playtesting we get done. I would say two of them at minimum.

Sausageman · « **Reply #29 on:** March 05, 2013, 07:36:06 AM »