From a development standpoint, Sinister Syndicate presented some special challenges. We wanted the team to offer some of the best available weenie swarm strategies. We also wanted both the Sinister Syndicate and the Spider-Friends to be rewarded for playing multiple characters in a turn.
While there are several possible avenues a weenie team can take towards victory, the most straightforward is probably to establish a quick board presence and push that advantage before an opponent can establish control. These strategies can be further subdivided into how to maintain that early advantage and how to throw the opponent off his or her later game.
For example, The New Brotherhood can set an opponent on a quick clock. That team has access to some of the better direct endurance loss cards available, like Pyro and The Mutant Menace once an opponent begins to slow his or her combat assault. Still, most variants on this deck focus heavily on the higher end of the curve, at least up to a cost of 5. Still, decks like these don’t ever want to see turn 7.
In contrast, there are weenie strategies like those seen in decks featuring multiple GCPD Officers. Such decks seek to prolong the game and take advantage of effects that key off a large number of characters. For example, the winning deck in the Sydney $10K event teamed Gotham Knights up with the Fearsome Five to utilize cards like Shimmer and Dr. Light.
The weenie portion of the Syndicate was shaping up to be a quick, swarming, combat-oriented team. Thus, Sinister Syndicate set the bar for just how fast a team could be. Though it lacked the strength of the army options available to Sentinels, Syndicate was otherwise similar to the purple folk. We didn’t want games to consistently end too quickly or without any interaction between the players. If we were too lenient with the speed and raw power of this team, it would be hard to make them good for the game. In particular, we didn’t want this team to raise the weenie-swarm bar so high that we’d have to print countermeasures.
With one exception, every single new non-character card that entered the development process was changed in a significant way. That one exception was Rejuvenation. Lion’s Den was decreased from +5 ATK to +4 ATK. Goblin Glider used to return to hand when the equipped character was put into the KO’d pile. Spider Slayers used to give its bonus both when your characters were attacking and defending. Get Him My Petsss, besides being swapped with Power Nexus, used to let you, rather than your opponent, choose which character to KO. Hired Goons gave an additional +2 ATK to all of your Sinister Syndicate characters until just before we went to print. We made a large number of tweaks until we felt safe with speed of the team, especially given the knowledge that the outside world would improve upon all of our decks.
As the time nears to start previewing the Superman set, I’ll wrap up the major development changes in Web of Spider-Man by taking you through the modifications of the Syndicate cards. I’ll start by showing the initial version of the cards again, as it seems that the readers enjoy that, and it has the added benefit of annoying Danny. He always whines, “But we might want to use that card idea later.” How dare I spoil a few card ideas? Fortunately for you, I’ve already learned to ignore Danny. I suggest you do the same.
Green Goblin, Altered Ego: Recruit Cost 7. 17 ATK/11 DEF. Pay 13 endurance >>> Each other player loses 13 endurance. Use this power once per turn.
That’s right! Green Goblin really used to end games in a hurry. He didn’t need to activate to use his effect. In games where you had the initiative on turn 7, your opponent scarcely had a prayer of seeing another turn.
Sandman: Recruit Cost 6. 9 ATK/9 DEF. When Sandman comes into play, put four +1 ATK/+1 DEF counters on Sandman. When Sandman is stunned, remove all counters from Sandman.
In his infancy, Sandman’s 13 ATK/13 DEF when first hitting play only slightly overshadowed his peers. This didn’t seem like quite enough, so he was moved to 10 ATK/10 DEF (still with four counters). At that point, it took enough work to stun him that it seemed like he should be severely penalized for being stunned, which led to the current version with smaller base stats.
Speed Demon: Recruit Cost 1. 2 ATK/1 DEF. Evasion. Pay 2 endurance >>> Ready Speed Demon. Use this power only once per turn.
As you can see, this guy really had the shackles thrown on. First, we reduced his ATK to 1. Then he started carrying around a Flamethrower, Goblin Glider, or whatever was at hand. When Vulture started looking like a mediocre character, we knew something was wrong. At first, we tried frisking Speed Demon whenever he came into play. After enough visits to the Lion’s Den with Flying Kicks and Mega-Blasts tossed in, we decided he was still doing too much for a 1-cost character.
Venom, Alien Symbiote: Recruit Cost 4. 9 ATK/9 DEF. When Venom comes into play, return a Sinister Syndicate character you control to its owner’s hand or KO Venom.
The initial version was just too far above the norm for my tastes, given that you might only have to KO a 1-cost character. His final version is more satisfying, as it takes into account the cost of the character you KO. Our initial adjustment was a little too harsh, as it brought him down to 6 ATK/6 DEF with the current wording.
Dangerous Experiment: Choose a plot twist name. Reveal the top card of your deck until you reveal the named plot twist. Put the named plot twist into your hand, shuffle the other revealed cards into your deck, and lose 1 endurance for each card you revealed.
This is actually very close to the final version, as in the end it was just made a little more difficult by requiring a character exhaustion as part of the cost. More importantly, it was made a team-specific card. Dangerous Experiment is one of those amusing examples of a card we made obviously better in playtesting, and then made clearly weaker than even its original version. You see, at first we changed the end of its text t “ . . . lose 1 endurance for each character card you revealed.” After a little testing, it was felt that this was getting too close to enabling many combo decks.
Fisk Towers: At the start of the combat phase, target a location. Fisk Towers gains all payment powers of that location this turn. Replace all instances of that location’s name with “Fisk Towers” and replace all instances of a team affiliation with “Sinister Syndicate.”
There weren’t that many locations in our card pool that made me worry about this card, especially since it would only be able to capitalize on locations with payment powers. We probably would have wanted to let it copy only opposing locations, so that you couldn’t just double up your own. Ultimately, the card would have limited future designs when considering, for example, locations with an additional cost to flip.
The next version looked closer to the final take. “At the start of your recruit step, you may discard a Sinister Syndicate character card from your hand. If you do, gain 1 resource point. Spend this resource point only to recruit a character with a cost less than the number of resources you control.” This accomplished pretty much exactly what we were looking for. We wanted players to play additional small characters over the course of the game. Part of the problem with the card was that its discard cost was particularly harsh on this type of deck. However, that wasn’t the biggest problem we had to contend with—we realized this could be used to circumvent boosts costs in some ugly ways. Any character with a boost cost greater than 1 could jump into the game a turn earlier than we wanted, since Fisk Towers only checked that the character’s cost was lower than your number of resources. It did not check for cost plus boost cost. This was exactly not what we wanted to give this team. The final version got around this loophole and provided a fitting way to get out some more small characters.
Next week, I’ll take a look at a card in the Superman set that lets you combine all your favorite weenies from different factions into a tight-knit crew.
Comments welcome at DHumpherys@metagame.com.