Welcome to Part 2 of the Heralds of Galactus Design Diary with your hosts Andrew Yip and Billy Zonos. I, Billy Zonos, will of course be narrating the bulk of these articles because Andrew is lazy and I have attention issues. This week, we shine a spotlight on those black-bordered isolationists, the Inhumans.
So Maybe it Happened More Like This. . .
One Year Ago:
Billy: So you’re telling me I can put any cosmic-themed team in this set?
Andrew: Basically, except . . .
B: So we can do the Kree or the Skrulls? Even the Shi’ar? What are your thoughts on the Defenders?
A: Wait a sec, bro. We have to re-feature the Fantastic Four and Doom.
B: What? No. Why?
A: Take a knee and I’ll tell you about this new thing we’ve been kicking around called Silver Age.
B: . . .
When that conversation began, Heralds of Galactus was a whole new world with endless possibilities. All that was known was that Galactus had to be in the set. That’s like what, two to three cards? That still leaves me with a 217-card canvas to paint on!
(This is the part where I thank Mike Hummel, Danny Mandel, and Matt Hyra for being too “busy” on “cooler” projects to be bothered with lowly IP research.)
. . . And then Andrew explains the concept of Silver Age to me. The first thoughts through my head were, “Restrictions? Doom? The players are going to be so annoyed!” With two of the four main teams locked in, a number of problems presented themselves:
1) Since Doom and the FF are set, do we have to do the Heralds as an actual team?
2) The Heralds only have 16 unique characters! (Okay, this problem was easily solved. I’m just being bitter.)
3) Doom? We are so getting bashed for this.
4) What will the fourth team be? Is Skrulls the only team that makes sense in this equation?
5) Do we really want a set where three of the main teams are re-features? (Not that that’s a bad thing.)
6) Can Skrulls be anything but a joke team?
7) Will Metagame.com pay by the word? (No really, this was a question.)
Of course, as useless as a 2-year-old watching Blue’s Clues, Andrew had no answers. His response to all of this was, “I don’t know. That’s your job. Figure it out.” A few days later, Andrew hits me up on MSN with an idea R&D devised to solve problem number five. He drops some dual affiliation knowledge on me, and the gears in my head sputter to life. Keep in mind, these conversations took place well before Justice League was released. At that time, I had no clue about dual affiliations. Otherwise, I probably would have come up with the following ideas myself. That’s how awesome I am.
A: What if,—check it yo’—what if we do the Inhumans instead of the FF and then just dual-affiliate in the core four?
B: Brilliant! Wait . . . that won’t be enough new FF content to be considered a re-feature. What if we also throw some dual-affiliated FF dudes on Doom?
A: You’re the smartest man I know.
Dual-affiliating the FF not only took care of problem #5, it also reopened the set to more original ideas. The Skrulls, once a shoo-in, were now losing their grip. Why? For the answer to that question, tune in next week. Stop derailing my thought trains. I’m supposed to be writing about the Inhumans.
The Inhumans Really Are Cool
To be honest, setting the character list for this team was simple. Giving Black Bolt three versions was a design choice as opposed to a restriction (as it was with the Heralds). While the Inhumans have a ton of characters to choose from, most of those characters are C-level and below. Did anyone miss seeing the Genetics Council in Heralds of Galactus? Exactly. In the end, the first draft was the final draft.
When it came to the non-character cards, we really only had about 30 issues of modern Inhumans comics to mine: the Paul Jenkins/Jae Lee maxi, the Carlos Pacheco/Jose Ladronn mini, and the aborted Tsunami Reboot from a couple of years ago. I chose to stay away from the pre-nineties stories since most of the great character development didn’t happen till Paul Jenkins made the Inhumans cool in 1998.
Using those three runs as the basis for everything Inhumans, I came up with an initial non-character skeleton which heavily featured their locations: Attilan, Blue Area of the Moon, Himalayan Enclave, The Great Refuge, The Outside World, and The Substructure. The Inhumans are all about location; from the Himalayas to the Moon, they’ve moved their home about ten times. Obviously, six locations for one team is pushing it. But instead of giving us a push back, R&D used the heavy location theme of the Inhumans to come up with the really cool terraform mechanic and an interesting new way to play a location-based team. The location theme of the Inhumans rippled through the rest of the set as well, with the “Coming of Galactus” plot twist transforming into the location Worldeater Apparatus. Although I stressed over it, R&D doesn’t let trivial things like similar art mess with its design flow.
From the Jenkins/Lee run we gave you Terragenesis and The Royal Guard. Terragenesis was a card that Andrew asked for specifically by name. From a design perspective, R&D needed a card depicting the transformation from human to Inhuman.
The Pacheco/Ladronn run had a much larger impact on the overall thematic design of the set than we first thought. That run provided the modern thematic basis for including the Kree in Heralds of Galactus. Non-character cards like Waking the Ancestors, Power Struggle, Final Decree, and to a lesser extent It’s Slobberin’ Time! were based on that four-issue miniseries.
We rounded out the Inhumans non-character cards with the Extended Family Team-Up and Exploiting the Flaw. I knew Extended Family was in from the beginning. Thematically, it symbolized the link between the Fantastic Four and the Inhumans. Also, it would be the yin to the Common Enemy yang. As with Marvel Origins, Team-Up cards with inherent thematic meaning were an important aspect in linking the four main teams in this set. (There’ll be more on this in a future article.)
On the other hand, Exploiting the Flaw was a last-minute addition. It’s arguably the most broken card the Inhumans have if not the most difficult to understand. Right before the art descriptions were due, Andrew expressed to me that he felt there weren’t enough combat pump art descriptions for the Inhumans:
A: Dude, I need a picture of some random Inhuman guy kicking the crap out of something. In most of these the characters are standing around hugging it out.
B: Stop trying to limit my vision!
Vs. is a combat-oriented game. I guess he was right in the end. I guess.
Art Descriptions
Most of the Inhumans art descriptions broke down into four main categories:
1) Art depicting the Jenkins/Lee maxi.
2) Art depicting the Pacheco/Ladronn mini.
3) Art depicting the Tsunami series.
4) Locations.
Here are a couple of examples from Jenkins/Lee run:
Maximus the Mad, Mental Manipulator
Setting: Prison Cell, Attilan
Action: Maximus sits relaxed on his bed, one leg tucked under the other, which dangles off the side of the bed. Dressed in black, he leans back against the cold, concrete wall. The bed is plain, a classic prison bed attached to the wall by two steel chains. Maximus is of course insane; his expression betrays the schemer inside. A wry smile creeps across his face. A single window in the ceiling hits Maximus directly in the face with a religious light. The rest of the cell is bathed in deep shadow.
Focus: Maximus
Keywords: Insanity, Trickster
References: Inhumans TPB
This is a version of the character from the opening pages of the first Inhumans trade. In the story, he would go on to nearly overthrow his brother Black Bolt with the help of this man:
Dewoz, Dark Reflection
Setting: The Royal Palace, Attilan
Action: A large mirror hangs in a dark hallway. Dewoz steps out of the mirror, half his body still inside the mirror, the other half in the hallway. He is stepping out at a ¾ angle so we can see his body reflecting in the mirror. The glass surface of the mirror has a liquid consistency, like that scene from the 1st Matrix where Neo gets sucked into the real world.
Focus: Dewoz
Keywords: Silent, Creepy
References: Inhumans TPB
You can probably tell by now what the Inhumans’ color focus was, and we instructed the artists to play with shadows and light to create some very moody pieces. Here’s a couple more from the Pacheco/Ladronn run where the artists used heavier inks to get that dark vibe:
Black Bolt, Devastating Decree
Setting: Streets of an Alien City
Action: Black Bolt is encased in a translucent energy sphere. In front of him, the Shi’ar Majestrix Lilandra. Black Bolt unleashes a tremendous scream which shatters the energy sphere. A white light washes over Lilandra. One of Lilandra’s arms is up trying to cover her face, but the energy is too much and she will eventually succumb.
Focus: Black Bolt
Keywords: Unchained Power
References: Inhumans Vol. 3 #4
Gorgon, Thundering Hooves
Setting: Streets of an Alien City
Action: Gorgon is in the center, surrounded by Shi’ar soldiers. He stomps his hoof violently. The ground cracks at the point of impact, unleashing a force so great that the Shi’ar soldiers are thrown back. A tremendous wave of energy washes over them.
Focus: Gorgon
Keywords: Animal Rage, Thunderous Power
References: Inhumans Vol. 3 #4
Karnak, The Shatterer
Setting: Streets of an Alien City
Action: Karnak is in the center facing the viewer while fighting an off-camera Shi’ar soldier. Behind him, the Imperial Guardsman Warstar is ready to strike. Karnak notices Warstar, but appears too busy pummeling the Shi’ar soldier to care.
Focus: Karnak
Keywords: Graceful, Efficient
References: Inhumans Vol. 3 #4
All three of these images were pulled from a story in which Ronan had forced the royal family to make an assassination attempt on the Majestrix of the Shi’ar. Something doesn’t go according to plan, and they end up duking it out with the Imperial Guard. All three artists do a fantastic job bringing these pieces to life with the use of shadow and light.
Some of the more interesting character images, I think, come from the Tsunami series:
Alaris, The Outgoing One
Setting: A Dark Bar, University of Wisconsin
Action: Alaris in the center. He stands over a table covered with empty beer glasses. He has a fresh one hoisted up and ready to down. Seated at the table, we have three human college students in various stages of intoxication: one slouched back in his chair; one head down on the table; and another holding his mouth, apparently ready to vomit. Alaris has a huge grin on his face as if he had just said, “Another round?”
Focus: Alaris
Keywords: Strength, Innocence
References: Inhumans: Culture Shock TPB
Despite his uncommon looks, Alaris made the most of his trip to an American university. We see him on another card, The Outside World (yes, The Inhumans in the picture are supposed to be humans), with his little buddy San, The Less-Than-Outgoing One.
San, The Alienated One
Setting: The University of Wisconsin
Action: San has just created a marvelous sculpture of sand and glass in the student quad. The sculpture has attracted a few onlookers who are either dazzled by its beauty or looking around to see its creator. San is standing nearby, head down and shy, facing the viewer. San should be inked darker than the rest of the figures in the shot to express the alienation he is feeling inside.
Focus: San
Keywords: Creation, Sadness
References: Inhumans: Culture Shock TPB
Yeah, mix-ups happen. Those are supposed to be humans as well, but in the end, it still works. If anything, I’ve learned to send in better references.
Jolen, The Treacherous One
Setting: Arboretum, University of Wisconsin
Action: Jolen stands silently in a lush garden with all manner of vegetation. But this isn’t the Garden of Eden, so it should be cast in shadow and appear menacing. A couple of college students have wandered in and had the misfortune of being sucked into the ground. The beautiful vegetation is consuming them. One student in buried up to his waist, his arms swinging wildly in the air, a look of pure terror on his face. Scattered around him there are arms and legs sticking out of the ground. Jolen stands rigid like an oak, his cloak obscuring his body. Green tendrils and roots are sliding out from underneath his cloak. Some tendrils connect to the earth while others push students into the ground. A slight smirk is seen on Jolen’s face.
Focus: Jolen
Keywords: Beautiful Vegetation, Horror
References: Inhumans: Culture Shock TPB
In the end, whatever I scribble down is made better by our wonderful artists. It really is a collaborative process that begins with these simple mental sketches we give them to work with, and ends with sweet images that capture the tone and flavor of Marvel’s great characters.
We could go over the locations too, but that’s boring, and I think I’ve bored you enough. Let’s switch gears instead. I’ll throw it over to Andrew now, but I’ll be back to toss out some flavor nuggets at the end.
I Barely Remember this Part
Regardless of Billy’s imagined conversations and wild rantings, some of what he says has truth to it. The Inhumans were chosen as a novel team that thematically had ties to other teams in the set. As a race that had its home uprooted, destroyed, and relocated over and over again, they seemed particularly suited to have their home created and crushed in the set where Galactus would reign. As the set evolved, the Inhumans did indeed prove to be suited; the mechanical opportunities created by their flavor were a perfect fit for the themes and gameplay of the set.
Finding a Home
The Inhumans were philosophically very different from the other teams in the set. While the Kree were very military in nature, and Doom cared only about himself, the Inhumans were home-bound and more focused on the betterment of their society. The Inhumans rarely interact with other races or peoples, and the few they do interact with usually share or understand their life perspective. The solitary nature of the Inhumans and their emphasis on their society as family were themes that heavily influenced the team’s design, even more so than their unique powers.
The development and protection of the Inhumans’ home was the impetus for many of the mechanics in the set. When Galactus’s powers were more resource-centric—like the Eating Machine card I talked about last week—the Inhumans were the main victims-to-be. Since they cared more about their home than any other team, it made sense for them mechanically to develop their resource row with locations and care about their resources. These very locations would be likely targets for any sort of resource-row-devouring Galactus we would design. To represent the Inhumans’ concentration on self-development and seclusion from the outside world, one of their first mechanics concentrated on rewarding players for developing their resource rows as early as possible:
Domain X (You can flip this card only if you control X or more other face-up resources.)
Attilan - Location, Threshold 5
Domain 4: Activate >>>Search your deck for a card, put it into your hand, and shuffle your deck.
Clearly, the final direction of the Inhumans did not stray far from this mechanic. The big positive about domain as opposed to the binary “all face-up” theme that the team ultimately used was the variety of values we could introduce. Instead of being able to flip any locations up in the same turn regardless of order, domain allowed for more linear, storytelling elements in the card design:
Substructure – Location, Threshold 3
Domain 2: Activate, replace a face-down resource you control.
On the Surface – Location, Threshold 4
Domain 3: Activate, draw a card.
Attilan – Location, Threshold 5
Domain 4: Activate >>> Search your deck for a card, shuffle your deck, and put it on the top of your deck.
Domain allowed the designers to dictate a general order in which locations would be flipped or used, and that order helped capture the flavor of Inhumans’ society developing. In addition, domain acted as an additional knob that the development team could use to tweak the power level of locations up or down. In the end, domain had some upsides, but it was generally considered too difficult to pull off in limited. Locations have the same problem as plot twists in their sensitivity to when you draw them, but domain negatively impacted this sensitivity even more. It became necessary to draw them not only by a certain turn for maximum effectiveness, but also in a certain order as well. One of the big design issues that Justin Gary discussed in his design series was play-more mechanics and the merits and drawbacks of designing them. While play-more mechanics can sometimes be too obvious for deckbuilding and reduce the interesting interactions that normally arise in sets, play-less mechanics can be a worse evil. Domain was such a mechanic—rather than playing a bunch of domain locations and capturing the theme of resource development, players would tend to choose the best one and try to find other locations and plot twists that could be used at any time. Play-less mechanics tend to be the ones that involve a cost: The more cards you play with a play-less mechanic, the more expensive each cost is to pay. To address this problem with domain, the mechanic changed to:
Domain X (This power is active only if you control X or more other face-up resources.)
This way, domain locations could be played together, but some of their powers wouldn’t be active until later turns when you had enough resources in play to achieve domain. But even with this change, domain proved too clunky and made the possibilities of cheating too great. As the set adopted its other mechanics, domain was one of the first mechanics cut. To replace it, the domain mechanic was changed to, “If you control no face-down resources,” and this clause was implemented using plain text.
The Birth of Terraform
As you may have guessed already, there was a time when Heralds of Galactus was going to introduce not only the first location mechanic, but the first two. Terraform was designed in conjunction with domain to ease draw sensitivity and smooth out players’ resource rows and character curves in a way similar to reservist. (But unlike reservist, terraform made resources tend to be face-up.) The functional similarities of terraform to reservist include the interactions with replace effects and top-deck manipulation. Replacing resources was always the same as drawing a card if you had a terraform location in hand, whereas replacing into reservists was only useful for future recruits. Because of these interactions and the difficulty in writing terraform out as plain text, it was kept over domain as the first location mechanic for Vs. As the Inhumans moved toward the “all face-up resources” theme, terraform remained as a positive way to ensure a perfect resource row.
Defining Terrigenesis
As I said, one of the features of the Inhumans that differentiated them from other teams in the game was their solitary nature. Much of their time in the comics was spent resisting the outside world and attempting to remove external influences from their lives. The idea of seclusion and the self-improvement of their race immediately birthed many mechanics and themes for the team, the simplest of which was the use of concealed. Using concealed on the Inhumans would stick with the team throughout the entire design process. However, concealed didn’t always represent seclusion.
Another big feature of the Inhumans is the Terrigen Mists: each Inhuman is exposed to this mutagenic gas—which endows them with their powers—as he or she enters adulthood. Despite this shared origin, each Inhuman was unique in his power set. The idea of a tightly-knit family of unique beings resonated strongly with the themes of concealed and cosmic. If you recall Mike Hummel’s first design article on the second X-men set, he discussed at length the various ways he tried to represent mutants. The Inhumans were a very similar design problem on a smaller scale. The main thing I wanted to highlight was the transformation of each Inhuman from pre-mutant form to his or her final, fully-powered self. The first representation of the Terrigen Mists was the terrigenesis mechanic:
Terrigenesis – Move all of your concealed Inhumans to the visible area.
Tonaja – Cost 3 character.
Concealed <p> Tonaja has +3 ATK and flight while visible.
As you can see, concealed was initially a means of representing the Inhumans in their pre-adult stage; each one started concealed and could only be moved via a card that had the terrigenesis power. Obviously, many of the Inhuman cards had the terrigenesis keyword. The first incarnation of terrigenesis had many of the interesting interactions that the Anti-Matter team had in its first appearance. However, the presence of terrigenesis as the exclusive way to move the Inhumans from the hidden to the visible area made the team very half and half—you only ever got the full value of the Inhuman characters if you also had their terrigenesis cards, and vice versa. This created a heavy-handed deckbuilding pattern that wasn’t conducive to exploring team-up possibilities. Movement between the hidden and visible area was preserved and expanded on in the final design, but instead of representing terrigenesis, it represented the inside and outside world.
Once the hidden area was scrapped as a way to represent terrigenesis, the cosmic keyword leapt to the forefront. Since it represented powers of shared origin and was already earmarked for use in the set, cosmic seemed like a natural fit for the Inhumans. But cosmic alone seemed insufficient to represent the terrigenesis transformation. In fact, entering play with a cosmic counter and then losing it seemed like the exact opposite of terrigenesis—and that is where Parasite made his (conceptual) return. If cosmic characters entered play without a counter and then gained one at some point like Parasite, the mechanic would much more strongly represent the Inhuman transformation. And thus, cosmic—surge was born:
Cosmic—Surge (This character does not come into play with a cosmic counter. When this character recovers, put a cosmic counter on it.)
The initial version of cosmic—surge used the character recovery to trigger the terrigenesis mutation. This version was scrapped because its play pattern was too different from cosmic; instead of trying to prevent your characters from becoming stunned, it rewarded you for becoming stunned and then recovering. This prompted the next (and final) version of cosmic—surge that appears on cards today:
Cosmic—Surge (This character does not come into play with a cosmic counter. At the start of the recovery phase, put a cosmic counter on this character.)
For a nod toward the original cosmic-surge mechanic, one need only look at the Terragenesis card.
The Back End
And I’m back! Was that illuminating? R&D guys should write more articles, right? They should probably put that somewhere in their contracts.
As promised, I give you a couple more dashes of flavor:
Andrew and I are taking a break next week due to his complaints about overexertion, but that doesn’t mean the Design Diary goes on hiatus. Tune in next week for something special. I’ll wave goodbye alone this time since Andrew has long since left the building.
Heralds of Galactus Wallpaper: Black Bolt, Illuminati