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“What do you want, Yip? I’m a very important person doing very important things!”

That’s how it all began. Actually, it began about three or four months before that with Andrew pestering me about quitting Vs. System, but that’s a story for another time. Right now, I’d like to focus on what would become the most influential team in the set, both thematically and mechanically—the Heralds of Galactus!

Early on, we toyed with the idea of making the Heralds of Galactus a smaller fifth team, like Sentinels and Kang. But the more design conversations we had, the more it became obvious that Galactus and his heralds demanded top billing. The design team had a clear vision; they wanted to bring back curve decks, especially stall decks. So far, we were on the same page.

Andrew also made a big deal about making Galactus matter. I may be straying into design here, but I guess that’s your reason he’s not a 10-drop. As stated in last week’s intro, Andrew wanted the character of Galactus to influence not only the Heralds characters’ play pattern, but also how the entire set played, the art’s content and appearance, and what kind of flavor text we wrote. Pretty much every aspect of the set was influenced in some way by the “Big G-Nizzle.”** I’ll let Andrew drone on and on about how awesome he is in a little bit, but first let me take you back in time and shed a little light on how we threw this set together from a thematic perspective.

The initial set skeleton called for around forty cards per team: twenty-five or so characters and fifteen or so non-characters. So, what the furry squirrel were we going to put on these cards? Brace yourself, gentle Metagame.com reader, for a mental breakdown of that process.

The character curve proved troubling. How many Heralds are there? A quick mental count left me with around sixteen unique characters that we could use, and that was counting Galactus and Galan as two different guys. What about that kooky spaceknight, ROM? Did we even have the rights to this guy? Dazzler and Golden Oldie . . . too campy? Wikipedia suggested that Gladiator was a Herald at one point, although I could never confirm this. Knowing that the responsibility for any IP (intellectual property) mistakes would be laid at my feet, I opted out of messing around with back-stories I couldn’t verify (feel free to email me about Gladiator if you can indeed confirm his Herald status). Oh yeah, and then there was the “Kryptonian.” Not likely, although Superman Blue could have some synergy in a Heralds deck.

Sixteen unique characters? That’s it? We could fudge it by throwing in a couple of made-up robot enforcers to hang out with The Punishers. Or, we could do it Marvel Origins style and create multiple versions for the most important Heralds. This would not be the last time we would look back to Marvel Origins for inspiration.

If I thought filling out the curve was hard, filling out the non-character cards proved to be even more difficult. Really, after you do the obligatory ones like Ultimate Nullifier, Elemental Converters, I Hunger, and Worldship, what else can you do? This is where having a garage full of comic book longboxes comes in handy. I started digging. I pulled the relevant Silver Surfers, early Fantastic Fours, Infinity Gauntlets and Wars, pretty much any comic in which the Big G made an appearance. Truth be told, there weren’t that many. Galactus hasn’t made that many appearances in comics. In fact, Galactus was kind of obscure. He is known throughout the Marvel universe mostly by reputation only. If you meet Galactus, you usually don’t live to tell the tale.

When I started research back in September of 2005, the Annihilation Saga was still a rumored speck on the horizon. All I could do in regard to that was pay close attention to the spoilers and try to get as many relevant characters in the set as possible. In the end, Fantastic Four Vol. 1 #48-50; The Herald Ordeal: Silver Surfer Vol. 3 #70-75; and Galactus: The Devourer #1-6 were the main storylines I mined for Heralds flavor.

Just like the set in general, we wanted the Heralds of Galactus team to be influenced by the Devourer of Worlds himself. The Heralds’ non-character card set needed to represent thematically Galactus’s desire to eat really succulent planets and create unstoppable cosmic bad boys (and girls).

So, the non-character cards fell into three categories:

These three basic themes would carry over into the art descriptions, and not just for the non-character cards.

Andrew and I live about an hour apart, so most of our design conversations took place through Instant Messenger or MSN. One of our early conversations was about trying to tie each team to a specific color palette, a color focus. Looking at the art now, you can probably determine which colors we chose for the Heralds (the rather obvious purple and red). In some pieces, the color focus is more subtle than in others. In fact, on some of the cards, it’s so subtle that you can’t even see it. Just wait ’til I get warmed up.

Back to the problem and solution of multiple versions: Silver Surfer got three versions. So did Morg and Nova. How were we going to get these space baddies to look different in every picture? The Heralds don’t change costumes, so we couldn’t cheat and use that. Maybe we could change the setting? How many times can you write, “Silver Surfer soars through the cosmos”? Well, I guess you could have him doing that on every card. What else does that guy really do? Maybe I should have written one with him sitting on the end of his board crying about all the “innocents” he’s killed. That guy is so emo.

Looking back at our established themes for the non-character cards, we decided that the character cards would break down into two basic camps: “Pacification” and “Soaring.” Every Herald would get his or her “soaring” card, and the Heralds with multiple versions would receive an additional “pacification” card. And what about the third Morg and Silver Surfer? Easy, we made them stackers! We have them fighting each other, trading witty banter and brutal blows. What about that last Nova? I don’t think anyone would mind getting another “soaring” shot of Nova. She’s hot! Get it? C’MON!

So, how does all this over-thinking come together for your enjoyment/ridicule? Oddly enough, soaring shots write themselves:

The Fallen One, The Forgotten
Setting: Starfield, Deep Space
Action: The Fallen One rockets through space. Speed lines imply a high velocity. His body appears as shiny and seamless as the Silver Surfer’s, reflecting the light from distant stars. He follows a dark purple energy trail, a trail that will lead to his former master Galactus and revenge.
Focus: Fallen One
Keywords: Revenge
References: Thanos #11-12

Silver Surfer, Skyrider of the Spaceways
Setting: Earth, Space
Action: Silver Surfer flies toward the viewer, standing in his classic Moebius pose—one foot in front of the other, riding a wave into shore. A solemn expression is on his face. We see subtle hints of purple reflecting off the front of his chrome body from an off-camera Galactus. The Surfer is returning to his master, dooming another planet to annihilation.
Focus: Silver Surfer
Keywords: Duty
References: Silver Surfer: Parable

What about the “pacification” cards? Galactus doesn’t discriminate, so neither should we. Let’s have these guys each visit a different alien world. We’ll spread some of this fear and panic around. One step further, we’ll have low drops represent the Heralds in transit and the high drops represent their unwelcome arrivals. Looking at the art, we have Firelord visiting the Skrulls, Nova saying hi to some Kree, Air-Walker getting blasted by Ovoids (you can see them on the EA, I swear!), and Terrax waging a bitter battle with a squadron of Shi’ar fighter jets! I should ask Andrew if we can do a special poster-sized EA for that one. And then you have my favorite Herald card, Silver Surfer, Harbinger of Oblivion, bringing the doom and gloom to our home planet Earth.

Silver Surfer, Harbinger of Oblivion
Setting: New York City
Action: Upshot: Silver Surfer, hovering at street level. He is statuesque on his board, one arm outstretched, announcing the coming of Galactus to the panicked crowd in the streets. Behind Surfer, through the clouds, we can barely make out Galactus. The distinctive shape of his helmet and purple armor give him away.
Focus: Silver Surfer
Keywords: Emotionless Duty
References: Fantastic Four Vol. 1 Issues #48-50

Firelord, Harbinger of Havoc
Setting: Major City, Skrull Planet
Action: Firelord is fighting in the streets, engaged in hand-to-hand combat with Skrull Commandos. It is his favorite pastime. He bludgeons one Skrull with his staff and kicks another away. The Skrulls are completely outmatched.
Focus: Firelord
Keywords: Entertaining Diversion

Ah, Firelord; one of many cards in the set poking fun at those lovable Skrulls. FYI, that is the planet Skrullos in the Worldship art. For all you Skrull loyalists, blame Andrew. That guy hates Skrulls. If you see him at a Pro Circuit, be sure to fling 2-drop Skrull Soldiers at him. Seriously, whenever I’d mention doing a full-blown Skrull team, Yip would squeal his little girly laugh and then sock me in the face. Speaking of tiny tyrants, let me throw it over to Mr. Lead Design himself, Andrew Yip, for some honest reporting.

At the beginning of each design year, roles and responsibilities are given to each R&D member. About a year ago, fresh off lead design of the Fantastic Four starters, I was assigned my first full lead: “Andrew Yip, Heralds of Galactus.” I would be lying if I said it wasn’t at once the most exciting and terrifying moment in recent memory. My knowledge of Galactus at the time was vague at best; I knew he ate planets, I knew he was purple, and I knew he hung out with that Silver Surfer dude. Armed with that knowledge alone, I jumped right into the set design.

Illuminating doesn’t begin to describe it, I know. And yet from this humble start sprang nearly all of the final mechanics and themes not only for the Heralds team, but also for the entire set. Staring at these four lines, three weeks of thinking yielded this masterpiece:

At this point in my mental process, I’d begun to think in nearly full sentences. Fortunately for my R&D team, this ignited what would be an extremely long series of conversations about Galactus and his team. Pretty much nothing had been designed yet; what the Heralds did, how we could represent Galactus visually, and what his power was going to be were completely up in the air.

Some of the earliest design questions involved how many cards should be used to represent Galactus. This question had several possible answers, including:

Some designers were in the Voltron camp, while others were in the single card camp, and still others wanted an oversized Galactus card that would literally destroy all other cards when it was played (Ben Seck’s first lead design, Legion of Superheroes, will be released this holiday season). Thematically, the first two options always made the most sense to me because no matter how weak he is, Galactus is always a whole being; a Voltron-type design seemed to lend itself better to a cool alien race or some sort of builder/construction mechanic. The big point that led us to choose the first option was its subtlety, and therefore its effect on Sealed formats. Were we to design multiple versions of Galactus that marched up the cost curve and “grew” from turn to turn, it would be extremely difficult to have those cards do anything individually, and that would tax Sealed formats. Multiple versions of Galactus would also make him difficult to describe, and one of the biggest goals of the design was that he be simple. The first option allowed Galactus’s name alone to be important. This was particularly thematic because it represented the raw power of Galactus’s being—he could influence the game even when he wasn’t in play. A single Galactus also gave players a single card to look for when they opened packs; everything’s better when you have Galactus.

Unfortunately, the choice of a single Galactus didn’t lend as much insight to his design as it did to the design of his team. This brought us back to the beginning, and the top-down design* that followed yielded this little number:

Whenever a resource is KO’d, each player who controls no resources loses the game.

Awkward. Not only did the first version of Galactus not do anything to your opponent unless you had other cards, he could also make you lose a game you normally wouldn’t. Against any sort of poly–endurance loss character like Fire, or the even more innocent Hornet, Galactus would happily Dark Phoenix, Cosmic Entity your side of the table. But the seed idea was there: Galactus, as the devourer of worlds, needed to eat resources. Obviously.

The idea of Galactus eating resources carried itself deep into the design cycle entirely off its thematic strength. One of the earliest locations was designed specifically with resources in mind:

At the start of the combat phase, each player KOs all plot twists and locations in his resource row with cost less than the number of counters on <cardname> if you recruited Galactus this turn.

Combining these thoughts together yielded another Galactus, a.k.a. Super-Apocalypse:

At the start of the combat phase, KO up to three target resources. Whenever a resource is KO’d, each player who controls no resources loses the game.

At the start of the combat phase, KO all your opponent’s resources.

Cycling through the many iterations of a high-cost, resource-eating Galactus yielded a lot of information. First, most of the versions required a lot of work for them to win the game. In some cases, it couldn’t even win the game on the turn that Galactus came into play. This was a big consideration both for organized play and for the raw power level of Galactus. Galactus wanted to end the game when he came into play, and fiddling around with resources was not the most efficient way to do that. Considering the desire to keep Galactus himself simple, other cards would likely need to shoulder the burden of eating resources, and that implied a lot of dead cards until Galactus entered play, much like the eating machine above.

It took quite a big push to jump off the resource train of thought, but the complexity and other issues with the “resource Galactus” were pushing the idea out of the realm of possibility. This led to thinking about more efficient paths to victory. Since the Heralds team was going to be a stall team, it made sense mechanically for him to work with endurance:

A quick glance at the latest DC set will tell you why this version of his wasn’t chosen. But the power threaded a new train of thought in which Galactus’s hunger wasn’t represented literally by eating resources, but instead by using a more ambiguous quantity like endurance.

It took a minor epiphany to realize that one of the features of a stall deck was that it cared nearly exclusively about its own endurance, not its opponents. This begged the question, “Why does Galactus care about your endurance?” The final version of Galactus answered this question:

When Galactus comes into play, gain endurance equal to the endurance of target opponent. That opponent’s endurance becomes 0.

Simply put, Galactus doesn’t care about your endurance; he cares about your opponent’s, and the higher the better. The final version of Galactus was an extremely natural fit thematically, for the goals of a stall team, and as a game-ending power.

Once it was determined that there was a single Galactus, we knew that the team had to concentrate on getting the game to a point where Galactus could enter play. Since a single Galactus implied a high-cost Galactus, it meant that the team was going to be a stall team. But even more importantly, the team needed to have a way to display the power of Galactus without having him in play. This motivated a mechanic nicknamed channel:

Activate, reveal a Heralds card from your hand >>> Gain endurance equal to that card’s cost.

While obviously too powerful, the idea of revealing cards from hand and gaining a benefit based off of their cost made it through the entire design cycle. It ultimately became two groups of cards: one that required you to have a threshold of cards with cost 4 or greater, and one that required you to have cards of higher cost than your opponent. The latter subtly motivated the team in other ways as well, including enforcing them as a curve team. If you peek back at the original Eating Machine 1, cost referencing was already being used as a way to differentiate the team, except back then it distinguished what got eaten and what didn’t.

Once design got down to specific characters, one of the biggest hurdles was deciding how to represent the characters in a single way despite differences in individual philosophies. While all of the Heralds served Galactus, each did so with a different perspective. Some looked exclusively for empty planets, while others wreaked havoc on planets long before their master arrived. Since the team also needed a way to eliminate opposing characters consistently, returning characters to hand became one of the team’s themes. The more evil Heralds like Morg returned opposing characters to hand, while more benevolent characters like the Silver Surfer could also protect your own characters by returning them to hand.

Once Galactus himself was locked in and the “cost matters” and “bounce” themes were chosen, the characters pretty much designed themselves. Some additional themes like card drawing and endurance gain were added to round out the team, but much of the initial design was maintained throughout development. But what seems like a brief conversation now happened extremely slowly in reality. The jump between various mechanics and ideas, no matter how logical they appear now, seemed like giant breakthroughs when they occurred. Each one ignited a tiny celebration in the room as another idea was ushered in. And just like that, the design for the first team of the Heralds of Galactus set was complete. But the work wasn’t done yet; the flavor process for Heralds still remained, as well as the design of the rest of the teams.

Writing flavor text caps the long, arduous process of creating a Vs. System set. Most of the art is done, the card text has been locked, and all that’s left to do is template the cards and add those silly little quotes at the bottom before they get sent over to editing (editors rock!). It’s a perfect opportunity to add those final bits of tone, pop culture references, inside jokes, and sometimes a couple of Easter eggs.

And then they get printed, cut, wrapped, and shipped. Join us next week for an in-depth review of the Inhumans. ’Til then, this is BZ signing off for AY.