Target of Opportunity
Select one of the following: KO a character with Flying in the Front Row OR KO a character with Range in the Middle Row.

I was digging through some of the old Marvel files, and I came across this beauty. It was a pretty popular KO card early in development (back when characters were getting KO’d like, uh, flies), and though the game’s engine kept evolving, an updated version of Target of Opportunity almost snuck into Origins.

So what kept it out? I’ll give you a hint: it has to do with what the rest of this article is about.

In the past few weeks I’ve taken a look at the basics of design and development as well as some mistakes of the past. Today I thought I’d go over an often-overlooked aspect of development: the wonderful world of templating.


A Card’s Body is its Templ-ating

Templating is, in general terms, the basic grammatical layout of a card’s game text. In some ways it’s like math or logic, full of variables and if-then statements. In other ways it’s like art, its job being to explain a card’s function as clearly, concisely, and consistently as possible. (Okay maybe calling it art is a stretch, but I’m supposed to trick you into being interested, right?)

Let’s go over the three C's I just mentioned, and then I’ll get to the fun stuff.

Clear: A card’s templating should be as clear as possible. This means that a new player should be able to understand what the card does simply by reading it (ideally without having to consult the rulebook). However, there’s a slippery slope between being clear and over-explaining. If you try too hard to be clear, a card’s text box can grow too full. If a card’s text box grows too full, it tends to scare off players. What I mean to say is that over-explaining is dangerous. It can often lead to there being too much text in the card’s text box, which can be dangerous because it can scare of players who don’t want to read that much text in one place. What really I mean is that it’s bad to say too much at one time in one place. Over-explaining = Bad. Which brings us to the next point.

Concise: A card’s templating should be as concise as possible.

Consistent: A card’s templating should be consistent with other cards that have a similar function. This gives the cards a unified feeling makes it easy for players to recognize like mechanics.

Here’s an example of consistency. In the Vs System, some triggered powers start with the word “when,” while some start with the word “whenever.” You might be wondering what the difference between “when” and “whenever” is, and, just in case you are, I’ll tell you.

“When” is used if the trigger will/can/is likely to only happen once in the lifespan of the card’s being in play. For example, “When Professor X comes into play . . .”

“Whenever” is used if the trigger will/can/is likely to happen several times in the lifespan of the card’s being in play. For example, “Whenever Bishop attacks . . .”


Target of Opportunity Jones and the Templating of Doom

All right, that’s enough templating for today. Let’s get back to Target of Opportunity. I mentioned that the above version existed in a time period early in Marvel’s design when characters were much more fragile than they are now. In fact, there was no stunning back then—when a character lost a fight, it was KO’d. Just like than. Boom.

ToO was a fine card back then. Sometimes it was just okay, sometimes it was nuts. But let’s be honest—back then, everything was out of whack. Many cards were really just placeholders we used to work on the game engine. Even still, there was something that bothered me about ToO.

“KO a character with Flying in the Front Row OR KO a character with Range in the Middle Row.”

This card punished a flier in the front row or a ranged character in the middle (now called the support row). But fliers were usually in the front row and ranged characters were usually in the support row. So basically, this card punished characters for being where they were supposed to be. That certainly didn’t feel like a target of opportunity to me.
I voiced my concerns about this (or somebody else did—I can’t remember, but it’s my article, so I guess I’ll take the credit) and the next iteration reversed things to something like this:

Target of Opportunity
Select one of the following: KO a character with Range in the Front Row OR KO a character with Flight in the Middle Row

Now that was more like it. The idea being that if you’ve got flight and you’re “grounded” in the support row, you’re vulnerable, and likewise if you’re a ranged striker but you’re lurking around the front.

This version of ToO made it pretty far into development, although its templating changed to keep up with the game engine. Here’s what a more recent version of ToO looked like. This version existed when the engine was very close to what it is now.

Target of Opportunity
Plot Twist
Threshold 3
Stun target front row character with range or stun target support row character with flight.

Even though it was situational (your opponent might not be playing with characters with flight or range, and if he or she knew you were playing ToO, he or she could try to play around it by positioning characters carefully), ToO was an extremely powerful card. Take a moment and think about how this card might fit into the current metagame.

Pretty good, huh? But did you notice something? A character with both flight and range could not “hide” from ToO. It would either be a flier in the support row or a ranged character in the front row. There was no escape.

We tried to fix ToO in the following way:

Target of Opportunity
Plot Twist
Threshold 3
Stun target front row character with range unless it also has flight or stun target support row character with flight unless it also has range.

Yeesh. Talk about ugly templating. Even now it hurts my eyes to look at it. Plus, rather than characters with flight and range always being vulnerable to ToO, now they were always immune. We tried one more time.

Target of Opportunity
Plot Twist
Threshold 3
Play only during the combat phase.
Exhaust target front row character with range and a cost of 5 or less.

What? That’s right, at the eleventh hour this card got a serious overhaul. Its previous templating was deemed unacceptable and the above wording was a pinch-hitting replacement. The problem was that now the card was silly as well as ugly. It only punished ranged characters in the front now, and only if they weren’t too big. (The cost restriction was a pure mechanical balance issue—there was no flavor attached to it. Although I suppose one could argue that the larger characters were harder to catch off guard . . .)

A card that had once been charming and flavorful was now slapdash and clunky. Fortunately, each set is designed with more cards than it can fit so that toward the end we can pare off the excess. Target of Opportunity was all but going into the set with the above text, but at the last minute we came to our senses and grabbed one of the cards that had been set aside for the Spider-Man set. It was a very basic card that simply returned one of your characters to your hand. So when you win a tournament with Swift Escape, remember that it was given a special opportunity to make it into Marvel Origins.

That’s all for today. A quick look at templating and a card that almost was. Please send any questions or comments to dmandel@metagame.com and come back next week for a look at how the metagame affects design and development.