I sat here for about half an hour trying to figure out how to start this article (and you thought it was easy writing these things) before it occurred to me to just go straight to the horse’s mouth. Today, the horse is a man name Kevin Tewart. You see, my theme for this article is Man of Steel design stories, and what better place to start than at the set’s core mechanic—cosmic. But rather than tell you the story myself, let me hand the mic over to today’s special guest horse . . . er . . . writer, Kevin.

{Danny’s Note #1: Some of you might not recognize Kevin’s name from amongst the Vs. designers and developers and trained monkeys* I usually talk about. That’s because Kevin spends most of his time working on that game about the kids with the spiky hair. Fortunately, Kevin often acts as an in-house comic book consultant (this means he’s a geek, just like everyone else in R&D), and he occasionally hooks us up with a cool mechanic.}

{Danny’s Note #2: I asked Kevin to give me a quick summary of the thought process behind cosmic, and here’s what he emailed me.}

The great problem with superhero games is how to have characters of wildly disparate power levels involved in the same story. In the comics, they can manage this because the writer has total control over everything that happens. In a game, including TCGs, this control doesn't exist, so we have to create mechanical elements to simulate the same stories and elements without a “deus ex machine” running the show.

Since the Superman set included Apokolips and the New Gods, this became a particularly glaring problem. Over the years, many stories featuring Darkseid have included Batman making a significant contribution to Darkseid's defeat. But in a game that's basically straight-up firepower, Batman duking it out with Darkseid is patently ridiculous.

Generally, in these stories, the bad guys come in and are obscenely powerful. But after they've been thwarted in some clever fashion, they're easier to take down afterwards. So, the question was how to mimic this storytelling in a mechanical TCG element.

My solution was to have “cosmic tokens” and the “cosmic” attribute. When a cosmic character came into play, it would get a cosmic token for free. As long as it has the cosmic token, it gets a certain ability: higher stats, some special power, or an ability that requires removing the cosmic token as a cost. I also suggested certain cards (like Batman) that would have the ability to strip characters of their cosmic tokens. Also, if a character was flipped face-down, it would lose its cosmic token.

The mechanics would flow like this: First, the character comes into play with a cosmic token, and is stronger than his drop point would normally indicate. Second, through struggle and good tactics (meaning good card play and plot twist use), the cosmic token is eliminated. The enemy character is now brought down to size and is more manageable.

Another benefit of this was that it would allow multiple drop points for extremely powerful characters without sacrificing game balance. For example, Darkseid is supremely powerful, so how can you justify even a 4- or 5- drop point Darkseid? My solution was to make a 4-drop Darkseid with a cosmic token to give him bumped up stats. That makes him appropriately menacing for the character, even at a low drop point, but it doesn't screw up the game balance, because he is weaker than he should be after losing his cosmic token. This creates an appropriate payoff.

So, there you have it . . . straight from the horse’s mouth. While Kevin didn’t spell it out in the above, we decided to connect a character’s becoming stunned with losing its cosmic counter. While there’s some thematic value to this (perhaps Steel got thrown through a wall, damaging his armor), it’s actually heavily tied into the bottom-up aspect of the mechanic. As I’ve mentioned many times before, one of the great (and by “great,” I mean both “large” and “fun”) challenges we face working on a superhero game is blending flavor (or top-down design) with function (or bottom-up design.) While the cosmic mechanic started out as a purely thematic suggestion from Kevin, it wasn’t locked in until we explored its game play value. Fortunately, it passed with flying colors.

Vs. is an extremely tactical game. By that, I mean that in addition to the game’s strategy (planning ahead from turn to turn), there is a heavy emphasis on in-turn decisions such as setting up your formation, ordering your attacks, and making the optimal play with your locations and plot twists. One of our development goals was (and is) to make the tactical decisions facing a player as interesting as possible. Cosmic accomplishes just that.

Usually, an attacking player’s goal is to stun two or more characters (causing all but one to be KO’d) and/or to cause lots of breakthrough. However, a few annoying cosmic counters can change all that. Is it more important to stun my 3-drop, or to get rid of that invulnerability-giving counter on Serifan?

That’s not all cosmic does. It also gives us a way to create one-shot effects like Superman, Blue’s power. Both the word “cosmic” and the cosmic counters act as markers that other cards, such as Entropy Aegis Armor or Cir-El, can reference. All in all, the cosmic mechanic proved to be a sturdy skeleton for the set. Now, let’s take a look at the stories behind some specific cards.

Krypto

The Short Lifespan of Negative Cosmic Counters

Krypto was the first card I previewed way back when, and he still holds a special place in my heart. You see, I’m a dog lover. I spend a good portion of my workday trying to convince my co-workers to look at photographs of my dogs (and the rest of it writing anti-cat propaganda). There’s a very good reason for this: Dogs are awesome! Especially when they can fly and shoot heat beams out of their eyes.

I don’t remember who came up with the “Krypto cannot attack unless he team attacks” idea, but it was probably Matt Hyra. He’s pretty smart when he’s not wearing short shorts and a fake mustache. At one point, Krypto’s drawback was cosmic—once he became stunned, he no longer needed his master to lead him into battle. Similarly, Parasite used to be a 10 ATK/10 DEF character that came into play with a cosmic counter that gave him -4 ATK and -4 DEF, so you had to remove the cosmic counter to charge him up. We later decided against having cosmic drawbacks, since it’s far more difficult to put a cosmic counter back onto one of your characters than it is to purposely remove one (either by suiciding the character in combat or by using a card effect to remove the counter).

Cir-El

When Is a Boost Not a (Stat) Boost?

You may have noticed that a character’s boost often includes some stat-pumping so that the boosted character’s ATK and DEF will be roughly on par with a normal character at that cost. Other times, especially on smaller characters which hit play when the combats aren’t so deadly, we like to hand out interesting non stat–based boosts. With Cir-El, we got to do both. For one resource point, you get to reset all of your cosmic counters. Unfortunately, your 6-drop is a measly 9 ATK/9 DEF (her power counts herself). Fortunately, there’s great synergy between her boost power and her cosmic power, so if you’ve been playing tons of cosmic guys, her boost ends up boosting her ATK high enough to put her on par with 6-drops, and all your other cosmic guys get back online.

Jimmy Olsen

Cosmic Jimmy

Jimmy’s original incarnation looked something like this Jimmy Olsen:

Cost 1

1 ATK/1 DEF

Cosmic: While a Team Superman character is protecting Jimmy Olsen, that character gets +2 ATK and +2 DEF.

So on the one hand, he used to give twice as much of a stat pump, but on the other hand, his power was cosmic and therefore pretty fragile. If your opponent had a 1-drop, Jimmy was getting smacked.

Development led to Jimmy changing into what he is now, but that’s not really why I wanted to talk about him. You see, Jimmy was at the center of a debate about what to call the cosmic mechanic. Our first placeholder for the cosmic mechanic was, in fact, the word “cosmic.” However, while “cosmic” was apropos for characters like Superman or Darkseid, was it a thematic faux pas to put it on “normal powered” characters like Merlyn, or Batman, or even Jimmy Olsen? We looked at tons of other words, but nothing really captured the flavor, so we decided to run cosmic as cosmic under the assumption that it usually made sense, and the few times where it didn’t would get lost in the overall thematic feel of the set. What do you think?

Rose ◊ Thorn

A Perfect Marriage of Form and Function

I love it when a plan comes together. For those of you out of the DC Comics loop (shame on you), Rose and Thorn are different personalities of the same person. Rose is shy and sometimes paralyzed by fear, while Thorn is aggressive and dangerous. There were several design submissions showcasing her duality, (one interesting one had her as a 1 ATK/1 DEF character that got +6 ATK and +6 DEF, suggesting that the character’s default personality was Rose), but the simple plus or minus to her stats proved elegant and interesting for game play.

Mark Moonrider

Everything Old is New Again

One of the great things about set-wide mechanics is that they allow us to revisit older concepts in a new way. Mark is very similar to Quicksilver, Pietro Maximoff from the Marvel Origins set. They’re both 3 ATK and 4 DEF, and they both smack for 5 endurance. Of course, the way they do so is a little different. Pietro needs to run around and flank your troops, whereas Mark can fire away as long as his megaton touch (also known as his cosmic counter) is ready to go.

The Prophecy Fulfilled

Mike’s Secret Stash

I don’t know how he does it, but every once in a while, Mike Hummel walks in with this innocent look on his face and is like, “Hey, would something like this card work?” Most of the time, it’s pure gold. (Other times, we try to set him on fire.) The Prophecy Fulfilled was pretty much done from the moment Mike threw it at us. Sure, we added the play-only-during-build restriction, both to play up the “Prophecy” feeling and to give your opponents a heads-up as to what was going down, but for the most part, Mike just rolled this one out. I can’t help but feel like he’s got a bunch of these gems hidden somewhere as some sort of collateral in case we do decide to set him on fire.

Dominus

The One That Got Away

Don’t get me wrong, Dominus is still pretty cool, especially in the right metagame. But you should have played with him in one of his original incarnations:

Dominus

Cost 4

6 ATK/7 DEF

Cosmic: While Dominus is ready, characters your opponents control cannot ready.

So on the one hand, Dominus has to be ready for his power to work (this usually means he won’t be able to attack), but on the other hand, he stops all of your opponent’s characters from readying. It’s funny because Dominus skated through development with that wording, and even though he was my baby (or at least I’d come up with the card), I ended up being the one to convince people that he needed more testing. That testing ultimately led to his nerfing.

Mr. Mxyzptlk

Choose Your Own Annoyance

No card in the Man of Steel set (with the possible exception of the next entry) caused me more sleepless nights. Superman’s impish enemy needed to cause just the right amount of annoyance without being a real threat. We tried all sorts of wacky things (remind me sometime to tell you about the three man-hours we spent trying to figure out if the person going second in a game of tic tac toe could willfully concede the game to the person going first, even if the person going first wanted to force a draw. No, seriously.), but nothing clicked.

In the end, it occurred to us that it wasn’t important to come up with the specific way in which Mr. Mxyzptlk was annoying, as long as we gave the players a tool that could be annoying in lots of different ways. We liked the idea that he kept bouncing back to your hand (the fifth dimension if you please) but then returned (often for free) to plague your opponents for another turn.

Bizarro World

You Never Know What to Expect

We were tossing ideas around for Bizarro World when Mike got that silly look on his face and dropped the bomb on us—the card text would be fluid, changing whenever we wanted (this was later amended to whenever a new set became legal). It turns out that this was an idea Mike and Kevin had had a million years ago, and it just screamed to be on Bizarro World. No card so sharply divided R&D opinion (at least that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it). One side was like, “It’s just like you’re banning one card and printing another one with the same name. Boo!” and the other side was like, “It’s the coolest thing ever. Yay!” Strangely, I found myself in the middle. I was happy to do the card, but I wanted to make sure it was going to be cool enough. In the end, Mike gave me $5. No, that’s not true. In the end, I decided there were enough potential giggles that it was worth it. And remember, the new Bizarro text becomes legal when the Marvel Knights set becomes legal. This means that if you’re playing a game at midnight, your Bizarro World might change right before your eyes.

Gole

Gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooole!

For those of you who are fans of soccer, ’nuff said. For those of you who aren’t, move along.

Anti-Life Equation

Math for Fun and Profit

Anti-Life Equation is another Matt Hyra special. Matt’s a big fan of cards that either mess with the rules or mess with your head. (Wait until the Justice League set . . . he’s lead designer.) I gotta tell ya, I’m still not sure what this card does. I will say that when Justin Gary joined the team, this was the card I saw him get most excited about. I remember one game had three of these in play . . . and I’m glad I was merely a bystander. As Justin put it, “It’s the single best card for highlighting the relative value of endurance vs. board position.” Then again, nobody likes Justin.

Play Time

When Art Influences Life

Since one of the themes of Team Superman involves protecting/protected characters, we wanted to give players an efficient but fair way to mess with an opponent’s formation. Play Time is definitely a finesse card, often able to act as a Blind Sided for a front row character by forcing the support row character behind it to move. My favorite thing about Play Time, however, is that its art caused the discussion I mentioned earlier about tic tac toe. Sometimes inspiration comes from the strangest places.

Okay, that’s all I got. Tune in next week for a Marvel Knights preview and a discussion of the color black.

Send questions or comments to dmandel@metagame.com.

*Yes, I mean you, Andrew Yip**.

**For those of you who haven’t heard, Andrew Yip has joined our team as a full time designer/developer. We’re grooming him to be the next Humpherys which, as you know, means I’ll have to make fun of him at least once each article.