Last week, I gave you a glimpse of some of the X-Men cards that never escaped R&D. Having discussed some of the rationale for why we added what we added to that old team, I’ll now jump into the development of some cards for a new team—the Spider-Friends. Well, that’s only a half-truth, since the cards in the Spider-Man vs. Doc Ock Starter Deck had been out for some time. This made them feel like an old team as we went through the development process. There were a number of goals with the team, but discussing them all would fill up an article by itself, so I’m just going to describe some of the original cards and show you what happened to them along the way.

Aunt May: Recruit cost 1. 0 ATK/0 DEF. At the start of the recovery phase, gain 1 endurance for each Spider-Friends character you control. When Aunt May comes into play, if you control another Spider-Friends character, gain a resource point.

In the above form, Aunt May lets you resource jump if she enters via a come-into-play effect. That would be simple enough to fix with templating, but we didn’t like how easily she might be able to add to the number of characters you could play in a turn. You could play Aunt May, play another Aunt May, and very easily feed into any number of cards that keyed off the number of characters you had recruited that turn. Her finished version can still help in that way, but it’s a little more costly to recruit multiple copies of her. We were also finding that the endurance gain she promoted was a little nutty, so she was nerfed to gain endurance for non-stunned characters only.

Cardiac: Recruit Cost 3. 3 ATK/2 DEF. Activate >>> Stun target character with a cost of 2 or less. Activate >>> Recover target character with a cost of 2 or less.

The changes to this card were very subtle—so subtle that you might not even realize that the card changed. The modifications were made because of concerns with Daily Bugle. At the time, Daily Bugle’s errata that makes it trigger only when a character an opponent controls is stunned had not yet been issued. Thus, we didn’t want Cardiac stunning a character you control, because that would set the groundwork for a recursive loop. In the end, it was a little too problematic to contain, so Daily Bugle was fixed to work the way we had originally intended it.

But this only addresses one half of Cardiac’s change. If he were able to recover an opposing character, you could also end up in some serious loops. For example, let’s say you had Firestar, Cardiac, and Daily Bugle in play. If you were teamed up with the Fantastic Four and had a Cosmic Radiation in your resource row, you now have the fixings for some infinite torture. Firestar stuns an opposing Wild Sentinel, which triggers Daily Bugle, which lets you turn Cosmic Radiation face down. You use Cardiac to recover the opposing Wild Sentinel, then play Cosmic Radiation, readying both Cardiac and Firestar so you can repeat. Poor little Wild Sentinel. By team-stamping the recovering effect, we could get around part of this problem, but it would still exist when you were playing against another Spider-Friends deck. That is why you can only recover Spider-Friends you control.