I delved into the development of the hidden area a few weeks ago. Today, I’ll run through what I remember about the evolution of teams as I received them from the designers. I’ll also give you a better glimpse into the process, at least in the hands of this set’s designers (Brian Hacker and Dave Smith).
I don’t appear to possess the earliest files from Marvel Knights, which dated back to a time when there were mechanics in the set (such as “hunter”) that didn’t make it all the way through the process. (See this article for more on that). I know we did many eight-man drafts with these mechanics before the file began to take on its current form. I believe that Brian and Dave were testing their ideas with 110-card common pools, at least at first. We’d frequently run a draft and play a couple of matches, and then they’d sneak off to Brian’s office to develop some new cards in secrecy. Then we’d run through their next iteration in a new draft. At other times, Brian or Dave would ask me about the balance point on a card . . . or at least that’s how I seem to remember it. It’s possible that their files were on some shared drive that I was too busy to look at while I helped Mike Hummel and Danny Mandel wrap up the Man of Steel set.
The earliest file that seems to have found its way onto my computer was dated September 9, 2004. To put that in perspective, at about that time, you might have been reading a preview of Hammerhead or Spider-Man, Alien Symbiote. At that point, the designers had worked out all of the commons and uncommons, but only 18 of the 55 rares. The legacy cards had not made their way into the file yet, either. This reflects the high priority these guys placed on getting the draft for this set up and running as smoothly as possible.
X-Statix
I don’t think I understood what was going on with the X-Statix until Dave tore me apart in a draft with X-Statix HQ and Vivisector, Myles Alfred. It was an awkward experience to be seemingly in control of things on the board, yet unable to overcome the endurance total swings generated by these two cards. In the end, X-Statix HQ was moved from a common to a rare, and a discard was tacked onto its effect.
From that point on, most of the X-Statix development revolved around making sense of how best to build a loner strategy in Constructed. Before I knew anything of the X-Statix theme, I remember Brain asking me if it was “fair” to make a 6-cost character that read, “Activate >>> Stun target character. Use this power only if you control no other characters.” I believe I responded something like, “Well if that is all the character does, it’s probably okay.” And so Zeitgeist was born! At the time, he simply read, “Activate >>> Stun target character. Use this power only during the combat phase and only if you control no other characters.” He had 12 ATK and 10 DEF. I’m still curious about how reasonable this character would be on just any old team, but on a team that was designed to get down to just one character in the first place, he soon emerged as a very tricky card to balance. I believe that the first time we tried out Spin Doctoring was when we knew that Zeitgeist couldn’t exist in such a simple form. You could wipe out your opponent’s entire board before we decided to make his power a one shot power, at least most of the time, by giving him cosmic and forcing him to lose his cosmic counter upon activation. Much of the rest of the team that fit into this build remained largely unchanged. Right from the outset, the designers had cards like Battering Ram and Plazm that fit in nicely with the theme, either by KO’ing themselves or by returning to hand.
The swarm style X-Statix deck presented several challenges of its own, although these weren’t too different from those of past teams. Still, aside from balance issues, we had to be careful that combat math didn’t require a supercomputer, especially given the likes of Saint Anna; Orphan, Good Guy; and their ilk.
Marvel Knights
At some point in the process, I believe there was an in-house debate about a card like Midnight Sons. I think there was some interest in making such a card generic. I was strongly opposed to giving players the tools to get around loyalty. Whether you are a big fan of the loyalty mechanic or not, you can hopefully appreciate how effectively it lets us team-stamp a card. While it is a slight constraint on deck building to play a character that reads, “As an additional cost to play (card name), reveal an additional (team affiliation) character card from your hand,” a character with loyalty is a much more severe constraint. If any team had access to a card that could circumvent loyalty, you would probably see a lot of decks running Garth ◊ Tempest or some other very powerful character that we originally wanted to be limited to a single team or highly focused team-up deck. Loyalty is just about the strongest team stamp we can put on a character. You can’t normally splash one character from a team if that character has loyalty. With some other team stamps, you might with luck actually make use of a splashed character. For example, you might draw two copies of your Silver Surfer or Wolverine, Logan. Because of these different degrees of team stamping at our disposal, I was opposed to a card resembling Midnight Sons in generic form. I was, however, all for it as a cool thing for one team to do.
As it turned out, you can reliably use Midnight Sons with about as much regularity as you’d like, given that you have access to it via Dagger, Child of Light, and access to her via Wild Ride. So, Marvel Knights has plenty of options for making use of characters with team stamping, and I’m sure that there are people out there trying cards like Fizzle or Bamf! in their latest Marvel Knights decks. Frankly, the possibilities here are staggering, and not something that we could fully explore by ourselves.
Along with this teaming-up specialization, I also thought it was fun that the team had a couple of cards like Stick and Iron Fist, Living Weapon. Well, at least I enjoyed my deck with these guys and cards like It’s Clobberin’ Time! and Spider Senses. Plus, with each new set, you’re sure to find other goodies.
Beyond testing and giving some thought to all of the possible team-ups, the next trickiest things to balance for Marvel Knights were the KO effects, the slew of ATK-pumping combat modifiers, and the equipment theme. The consistency afforded to the team by Wild Ride was always a consideration, as well. Finishing Move set the initial standard for KO effects in the Marvel Origins set. Later, A Death in the Family set a standard for that effect without needing to exhaust a character. Assessing the power level on this type of card is tricky. Quick Kill represents an interesting example. Frequently, when you’re capable of stunning one character in a turn, you’ll be stunning two characters or more, especially if you have the initiative. If you stun a 4-cost character and a 3-cost character, Quick Kill leaves your opponent with his or her 3-cost character instead of the 4-drop. It’s hard to put an exact value on having accomplished this, given that the card doesn’t have the versatility of some other cards you could have included in your deck for use later in the game. Nevertheless, the substantial swing generated by the above scenario probably will cause Quick Kill to see quite a bit of competitive play. Also, if you can manage to take down an opponent’s 4-cost character when he or she has the initiative, you have really accomplished something.
As for the ATK modifiers, simply put, we needed to test what could be done with an entirely aggressive deck full of positive ATK modifiers within a metagame that might or might not be packing Overload and similar countermeasures. The prevalence of Crime Lords’ reinforcement also seemed likely to keep this in check. As for the equipment theme, we were mainly making sure that we were okay with Punisher, Jury and Quentin Carnival, both of which could get equipment out at times that it otherwise wouldn’t enter play.
Crime Lords
The primary challenges with the Crime Lords were with cards that switched defenders and with just how far we could push defensive cards and cards that gave reinforcement. The possibilities that Armed Escort, Jaime Ortiz ◊ Damage, and Mr. Fear afforded for switching defenders were many. We kept stumbling upon new ideas within this theme as we made new decks. I know I severely underestimated Jaime Ortiz until very recently. Even in writing my preview of Mr. Fear, I was still coming up with new ideas that I hadn’t considered before.
Once it was established that the Crime Lords would be the best team to date at reinforcing, the question was just how far you could go in this regard. Geraci Family Estate and The Family are about as far as you can hope to push things in terms of giving a single character or all of your characters reinforcement. Geraci Family Estate can single-handedly give fits to several decks that are focused on putting you away with one huge knockout blow. While the same could be said of Overload, the fact that Geraci Family Estate is a reusable location that can’t be stopped by cards such as Not So Fast gives the Crime Lords a very powerful tool. The Estate also makes many of the characters on the team very scary. You have characters that can give defenders with reinforcement +2 ATK (Saracen) or +2 DEF (Kingpin, Wilson Fisk). The team also has very powerful and versatile defensive cards, such as Face the Master and Shakedown.
The challenge to the Crime Lords player remains in deciding what to do once you’ve stalled out into the later turns of the game. You likely need to team up with other teams to gain the late game power of cards like Jean Grey, Phoenix Force, though there may be enough power in generic cards like Apocalypse. Then again, the reversals on your opponent’s initiative that can be gained by this team may be enough to put a careless opponent away very early in the game.
Underworld
The Underworld was an interesting challenge in that they made use of a new resource in our game. Specifically, their KO’d pile was the fuel to play their game. Cards making open-ended use of these resources, like Strength of the Grave, were, and still are scary. It was tricky to balance cards and design decks that used up your KO’d pile. We had to figure out how many cards you could have in a deck competing for the same resource. We had to reach an understanding of how many cards in a deck needed to be devoted to building up your KO’d pile. All said, many of the challenges with the Underworld were similar to those for X-Statix. We had to learn a new play pattern.
Besides trying to balance out a new type of resource with the Underworld, we also had to balance some of the most tricky plot twists in the set—Dark Embrace and Witching Hour. Dark Embrace was scary mainly because of cards like Latveria, and to a lesser extent Beast. At one point, there was no upper boundary to the number of cards you could discard. This was changed in part because some decks I’d made that put out two Dr. Doom, Lord of Latveria were getting a little scary, and because we figured we needed an upper limit anyway, should we make for example an 11-cost character. Even now that we’ve limited the amount of cards you can discard, I think you’ll still find there’s some action to be had by getting out two Varnae at once. As for Witching Hour, the templating on the card used to ignore whether or not you had a character with the same name in play. At that point in time, there were decks floating around in the R&D room with multiple copies of Cyclops, Slim and Beast entering play at once. Violating uniqueness seemed to get out of control, although again, I think there are still many interesting things to be done with this card.
Hopefully, you’ve gotten some insight into our developmental process and formulated your own deck ideas from this quick summary of the development of the Marvel Knights teams.
Comments are welcome at Dhumpherys@metagame.com.