There comes a time in every man’s life when he just needs to talk about a League of Assassins power rare. For me, that time is now.

Let me get something clear right from the beginning: this is a development article. I know, I know, I’m always saying things like, “Designers are awesome and cool, and developers are crappy and mean,” but I have to admit, I’ve done my share of developing. (What can I say—I was young and needed the money.) So without further ado, I give you:


Me Talking About Tower of Babel

For those of you out of the loop, Tower of Babel was a storyline starring the Justice League wherein Ra’s Al Ghul created global instability by messing with the language processors in people’s brains. People, including the Justice League, temporarily lost their ability to communicate with each other and work as a team (thus the loss of team affiliations from the Vs. cards). It’s a good read and features a pretty keen sequence where members of the League are cleverly incapacitated by methods devised by one of their own.

Anyway, when I was first looking over the list of card names we had planned for the DC set (while some card names are created late in the process, some, such as staples of comic book lore or popular storylines, are set in stone from the get-go), I came across Tower of Babel. I assumed it was a location and asked Mike what its deal was. He gave me the 411 on the storyline (see the above paragraph) and told me he’d bring it in for me to read. (Several months later, he actually brought it in . . . grumble, grumble . . .) I went back to my desk (which was about a foot away—remind me sometime to tell you the story about how for the first five months I was working at UDE, there were sixteen of us all sharing one big room about the size of the trash compactor from Star Wars) and thought about the Tower.

My early notes on Tower of Babel looked like this:

Tower of Babel
Location—not a location, a plot twist

As an additional cost to flip Tower of Babel, discard a Demon’s Head character card from your hand.

Characters your opponents control cannot team attack.
Any player may (do something) to turn Tower of Babel face down.


See, I told you I’d thought it was a location. Note: Early in design, the League of Assassins was called the Demon’s Head, Ra’s Al Ghul’s nickname/translation.

As you can see, the sole function of the card was to stop opponents from team attacking. Keep in mind that the card’s power is templated for a location—that’s why there’s no duration mentioned, and the note implies that turning the card face down would end its modifier. We toyed around with various ways to turn off the Tower, such as forcing its controller to pay endurance or discard to sustain it as well as giving the other players built-in ways to turn it off.

Here’s a later version of the card:

Ongoing: Characters opponents control cannot team attack. (Players have to be able to do something to temporarily get around this.)
Maybe like this.
PT
Characters opponents control cannot team attack this turn. Ongoing: At the start of the whatever, you may pay 3 END, if you do, turn this face down.

My favorite thing about this incarnation of Tower of Babel is that the time you have to pay the 3 endurance is at the start of the whatever. One of the changes between this version and the last is that rather than give the other player(s) a mechanism with which to shut off the Tower (as the note mentions in parentheses near the top) we made it a one-shot modifier that a player can reset by paying endurance (similar to Political Pressure or Salvage). The problem is that in addition to this being less interactive (your opponent has less control over the Tower than if, let’s say, he or she could force you to “Jean Grey” it from your resource row by causing a certain amount of breakthrough) in most match-ups and/or game situations, 3 endurance just isn’t enough disincentive for a player to keep the Tower going. Too often, a player would just take the 6 or 9 endurance loss if his or her opponent was playing a deck that really needed to team attack.

Looking at the card from another angle, I find it kind of amusing how concerned we were with players being unable to team attack. I mean, sure, if this were a generic effect that any and all decks had access to, maybe we should have been worried (since we want to encourage team attacks), but this was a team-specific card. Big deal if one team happens to be especially good against decks that want to team attack.

Here’s a later incarnation of the Tower:

Play only during the Build Phase.
As an additional cost to play this plot twist, pay 5 endurance.
Ongoing: Characters who do not have the Demon's Head team affiliation are considered to have no team affiliation.
At the start of each combat phase, pay 5 endurance or turn this card face down.

A couple things changed between this version and the last. First and foremost, we expanded the card’s scope of influence to shut down not only team attacks, but also team-stamped powers and plot twists (anything that gives a specific team a bonus, like It’s Clobberin’ Time! or The New Brotherhood) as well as reinforcement. This was especially nice in that it made the card useful in almost all matchups, not just ones where a player intended to team attack.

To match the card’s increased power level, we cranked up the endurance cost to 10 the first turn (5 to play it and 5 to keep it around during the combat phase) then 5 to keep it around for each additional turn. Also, it’s worth noting that we went back to making the basic function of the card ongoing rather than a one-shot that could be reset.

While everyone felt that removing team affiliations was more thematic than just stopping team attacks, there were several problems with this incarnation. Again, while the endurance investment for repeat use was substantially higher, all too often a player could suck up the pain for a few pivotal turns. A second problem was that the card was plenty strong just messing with powers and team attacks, but the whole “denying opponents the ability to reinforce” thing was just heinous. It was like a super–Blind Sided. Yeesh.

A more insidious problem (I say insidious because we didn’t notice it right away) was that by forcing the Tower player to play the card during the build phase (theoretically to give his or her opponent a heads up as to what was going to be going on during the combat phase), we also inadvertently made it so that those opponents would be unable to recruit characters with loyalty.

Yet another version:

Play during draw phase + only if you control Ra's Al Ghul.
Ongoing: During the combat phase, characters who do not have the LOA team affiliation have no team affiliation. At the start of the recovery phase, pay 7 endurance to turn this card face down.

This version addressed the loyalty problem by having Tower only affect the combat phase. We also team-stamped the card by forcing you to control Ra’s, since in the earlier version any deck could run the card at the very least as the aforementioned super-Blind Sided. (Early on, there were more “must control Ra’s” restrictions, a la Dr. Doom, but we felt the League was too much of, well, a league to have everything center on Ra’s.)It’s also worth noting that the window to play and reset Tower changed again—I told you I liked triggers that go off at the start of the whatever.

Unfortunately, this version still hadn’t solved the reinforcement problem, and it still had the kind of clunky reset mechanism. I say “clunky” here because the Tower’s effect on the game is so powerful that we kept having to ratchet up the reset’s cost so high it was getting ridiculous.

Here’s the final version of the card you all know and love.


Tower of Babel
Plot Twist, Threshold 1
Play Tower of Babel only if you control a League of Assassins character.
During each player's attack step this turn, that player's characters that do not have the League of Assassins team affiliation have no team affiliation.

The end result solved the reinforcement problem by only taking away team affiliations during a player’s attack step. It also nerfed the card a bit by allowing a player under the Tower to use defensive team-stamped plot twists and powers. Also, we decreased the play restriction, just requiring you to control a League character to make the card easier to run in a team-up deck. And finally, we just axed the reset feature entirely, deciding that the card was still fantastic even if you only got one use out of it.

So that’s it. The story of one brave League of Assassins power rare’s journey from conception to reality. One of my favorite things about Tower of Babel is that while the League is so heavily focused on locations, their strongest non-character might be a plot twist.


A Note From the “I Hope My Coworkers Don’t Kill Me” Department

Last week, I talked about the rest of the R&D guys and mentioned a few other co-workers. I would like to clarify that Kevin Tewart (our resident comics expert and speller) has the most industry experience in R&D, predating Mike (The Hummel) Hummel by about six months. Also, Kevin was on the original, original Vs. team way back in the process—remind me to tell you about that story, too.

I’d also like to mention a few more of my coworkers who help playtest Vs. and offer lots of helpful development feedback. Rather than write a full paragraph full of half-truths about each one, I’ll just give each of them a semi-appropriate nickname.

Alex (The Man) Weitz
John-Paul (Also The Man) Roggenkamp
Patrick (The Stud) Swift
Tara (Could take me in a fight but probably won’t . . . Probably) Martinez
Michelle (Welcome Back) Aspeytia
Gavin (Secret Panda) Pattanumotana
Will (Hump Day) Estela
Eric (Allergic to Everything) Tice
Robert (No, not that Robert) Smith
Eric (The Best) Bess
Alex (The Chark) Charsky
Jake (The Chark’s Roommate) Bales
Scott (Punch in da Mouth!) Elliott
Andy (He’s from New Zealand) Fletcher
Leighton (Latent Mutant Powers) Kurashima
Ian (He’s tall, but not as tall as Humpherys) Estrin
Jason (Prime) Brenner
Cory (Lord of Grief) Jones
Jason (Doesn't actually play Vs, but really wants to learn how, really) Chai
Dan (The New Guy) Scheidegger


Send questions or comments to dmandel@metagame.com.

And tune in next week for some more detective stories.