Danny Mandel recently gave you a very thorough rundown of the evolution of the hidden area. He hinted at a few of the developmental issues with the mechanic. I’d like to run through some of these issues in more detail and give you some ways to start thinking about the hidden area.
Everybody into the hidden area! But not too quickly . . .
We knew we had to have control over who had access to the hidden area. Obviously, we didn’t want someone like Alicia Masters popping over to the hidden area immediately. There are many characters we’ve printed that would cause an opponent some serious headaches if they found their way into the hidden area too early in the game.
By literally putting a high cost on cards that would allow any character to enter the hidden area, we thought we could exercise sufficient control over when someone went there. As it turns out, Dr. Strange is the only card you’ve seen thus far that allows just any ol’ fellow into the hidden area. That means you don’t have to worry about most of the characters you’re familiar with getting into the hidden area before turn 7. On turn 7, there are a lot of scary cards that might make it there, but at least none “break” the rules (like Blob might have if we hadn’t errata’d him—see the next section for details on that). Besides, by that point in the game, there are a lot of other powerful options available to the players anyway, so do your worst.
Amongst the top candidates to move into the hidden area are characters with the cosmic keyword. After all, the drawback of cosmic is that the bonus goes away after the character is stunned. If that character is hidden, it will be much harder to stun, right? Part of the challenge of taking advantage of this will be that it won’t take place until very near the end of an ordinary game.
Serifan would be very annoying in the hidden area. If your opponent doesn’t have a way to directly stun him or to return him to your hand, you can say goodbye to stun endurance loss. He’s a prime example of why we wouldn’t want just any character getting into the hidden area too early or too easily. It may become a little easier to get Serifan into the hidden area in the future, but at present, it’s quite an endeavor that likely isn’t worth the trouble.
The hidden area: By invite only!
Besides specifying when characters can go to the hidden area, we can also dictate who may go there. Having mentioned a few irritating characters, I’ll now bring up Dr. Doom. You’ve probably noticed Diplomatic Immunity, which allowed us to give a subset of characters access to the hidden area. Specifically, all present and future characters named Dr. Doom would be able to hang out in the hidden area. Before designing the card, we had to deem it fair for him to get there, and we will have to design and balance all future Dr. Dooms with that knowledge that Diplomatic Immunity is available for them. With Diplomatic Immunity’s low threshold, you can start moving Dr. Doom(s) into the hidden area as soon as you have one out. Both Dr. Doom, Diabolic Genius and Dr. Doom, Victor Von Doom can really shut out an opponent’s plot twists, but then again, you have to maintain an unstunned Doom character. To make that easier to achieve, you may want to team up Doom with a team that has some hidden characters that won’t stun so easily.
Scarlet Spider ◊ Spider-Man is a similar example where characters with a specific name— Spider-Man, in this case—have the opportunity to move to the hidden area early in the game. (Note that Scarlet Spider, Spider-Man has been errata’d to: “Whenever a character named Spider-Man comes into play under your control, you may move it to your hidden area.”)
In addition to characters who come into play in the hidden area, there are many characters that can move to the hidden area by themselves. Fortunately, we control the design of these characters to know exactly what they do. Or do we?
Blob and My Hero
Our attempts to keep characters with certain effects from getting into the hidden area can always be circumvented with plot twists that endow hidden characters with obnoxious powers. Generally speaking, as far as plot twists are concerned, only ongoing ones endow characters with powers over numerous consecutive turns. There was only one such plot twist we deemed too problematic, and was closely tied to the only high cost character I’d found that had caused extreme problems with concealed.
You see, I’d already checked preexisting cards for the ever-dangerous word “cannot.” This brought me to Blob. “While Blob is in your front row, support row Brotherhood characters you control cannot be attacked.” But what if Blob somehow made it to the front row in your hidden area? You could put all of your visible characters in the support row, and your opponent would not be able to attack them. Our rules state that a player may be directly attacked if that player controls no non-stunned visible characters. So by these rules, you opponent could not attack Blob if it managed to become hidden, nor would your opponent be able to attack you, because you would still have non-stunned visible characters.
With the cards we created, we could have seen to it that Blob would never make it into the hidden area. I mean . . . Blob hidden? C’mon! In terms of keeping hidden as interesting as possible, however, we knew we would like to give players the opportunity to put any character into the hidden area at least sometimes. As such, we decided to errata Blob, as well as the problematic ongoing plot twist, My Hero, to work as we’d intended. Only Blob and My Hero caused unintended problems within our rules, and they have received errata so that they only provide their benefits while Blob or the target of My Hero is visible.
Check your weapons at the door.
We found that what equipment could do for characters was, in general, much more frightening than what ongoing plot twists were capable of. Equipment could endow characters with very strong powers that we didn’t want on characters in the hidden area. This was especially problematic for a couple of equipment cards we’d already made, namely Flamethrower and The Blackbird. Both of these are powerful equipment, each with a big drawback pertaining to the equipped character becoming stunned. Normally, this is a reasonable check, since prior to the introduction of the hidden area, characters had no way to “hide” from attacks. (It was a nice benefit of evasion that stunning was part of the mechanic’s cost, meaning that these cards were not a problem with it.) While cards like Advanced Hardware on an early visible character might be a little too powerful on a 1-cost hidden character, it was mainly Flamethrower, Blackbird, and any future powerful equipment that compelled us to keep equipment out of the hidden area. There certain rare exceptions to this rule, like Medallion of Power. As such, we made the following rules so that normal equipment wouldn’t find its way into the hidden area: 1) All equipment comes into play attached to a character in a visible area. 2) If an equipped character moves from a hidden area to a visible area, or vice versa, that character’s equipment is put into the equipment owner’s KO’d pile as part of moving that character. 3) Equipment may not be transferred from a character in the visible area to a character in the hidden area or vice versa.
Concealed on a character—a plus or a minus?
Is a concealed on a 6-cost character a benefit or a drawback? What about on a 2-drop? There isn’t really a hard and fast answer to those questions. In general, however, it is fair to say that having concealed on small characters is a big advantage. The first time your opponent stuns two of your characters, you are going to have to KO one if you don’t have a recovery effect. If you have one of your early characters in the hidden area, you should be able to avoid that unfortunate scenario longer. Furthermore, these characters aren’t soaking up much endurance loss during attacks, anyway. For each point of DEF a character has in excess of its cost, it saves you endurance during an attack. Small characters don’t save you much endurance in this manner. Then again, if you are able to reinforce a character, especially a small one, you can save yourself a ton of endurance that you might otherwise take. If your small characters are off in the hidden area, you’ll be losing out on many chances to have them reinforce or be reinforced. So, even on small characters, having concealed isn’t strictly positive. It will depend on the other cards in your deck and what your game plan is.
As for higher costed characters, they can potentially save you plenty of breakthrough. Yet you will often find that on any given turn, given the choice, you might prefer to play a character that could swing back on your opponent’s initiative. And the more you’ve incorporated cards into your deck that help swing back, the more appealing being concealed seems on larger characters. I’ll mention a few of the cards you should reconsider in a moment.
How many characters in your deck do you want to have concealed?
The answer to this really varies from deck to deck. In a Crime Lords deck focusing on reinforcement, you might not want to have any hidden characters. In a loner X-Statix deck, you probably want each of your characters to be visible every turn. Consequently, those decks are not likely to have any concealed characters at all. With other decks, you’ll likely want some number of hidden characters. Some viable decks even want all (or nearly all) concealed characters. In this case, make sure you evaluate which cards belong in such a deck. You might pass up on old staples like Acrobatic Dodge to give From the Shadows a try.
What cards do I play with and against hidden characters?
If you’re running a lot of concealed characters, any card that affects or counts all of your characters is especially exciting. If the hidden area does one thing very well, it’s making sure that sure your forces don’t suffer attrition at an alarming rate. If you have five characters out on turn 5, cards like Blade, Daywalker start looking spectacular. Make sure you give him a try in a largely concealed deck.
The concealed mechanic gives you many more options on your opponent’s initiative than you’d usually have. Furthermore, you will have the chance to swing back at exhausted characters. Cards like Crushing Blow and Sucker Punch are gems. It might also be worth revisiting the Arkham Inmates in team-up decks, since punishing exhausted characters is an area in which the Inmates excel.
Almost any card that requires an exhaust as part of its cost becomes more interesting. In general, you will have more characters in play as the game progresses and more opportunities throughout a turn to use those characters. Cards like Finishing Move and Home Surgery become easier to fuel with characters you have hanging out in the hidden area, especially on turns where you might already have a stunned character and don’t want to risk an attack with them. This is particularly relevant with cards that you can only use in the recovery phase. Such cards, like Medical Attention and Museum Heist, are no longer nearly as challenging to use on turns when you don’t have the initiative.
In terms of combating your opponent’s characters in the hidden area, look at cards that affect characters during your attack step. You won’t always be able to get to that guy you want to get to, anymore. Cards like Pleasant Distraction, Dr. Octopus, Otto Octavius, and Magneto, Eric Lehnsherr are even more impressive now.
Comments are welcome at DHumpherys@metagame.com.