Blindfire, the Most Difficult Card to Balance

I’ve been toiling away on Cyberpunk Legends Scenario 05 and an interesting problem came up. I created a card that was the hardest thing to cost that I’ve ever built.

That card is Blindfire.

Rat Tat

But to talk about Blindfire, first we have to talk about Rat Tat.

Rat Tat is one of the most interesting cards in the game, because on its own, it’s a bad card. It’s basically a one rank, one suit, and one damage. That’s substantially below average for a Legends card.

But have one in the yard and it becomes a solid run of the mill card. Have two or more there? Now we’re talking! You’re getting damage numbers that usually come with either a drawback or substantial setup costs on a card you can just play into the Plan.

Where it gets really interesting, though, is when we think about getting more than one in the same Plan…

See, if you have two in one Plan, all of a sudden you’re doing 4 damage with them. So, if you’re running Rat Tats, the total damage potential of your deck secretly scales with how many Rat Tats you can find a way to ninja into a single Plan.

After all, if you have three in your deck and you’re playing them the one at a time, you’re getting 6 damage out of them (1+2 [1 in the Plan, 1 in the yard]+3 [1 in the Plan, 2 in the yard]) but if you play three in the same Plan you get 9 (3+3+3). 50% MOAR DAMAGEZ!!!

Now with the basic Solo deck (which has 3 Rat Tats) it’s almost never worth trying to hold onto them to engineer this. You’re usually actually better off trying to discard the first one or even two. After all, to even get two into the Plan, at a minimum you’re going to have to engineer it so you play twice in the same round!

BUUUUUUUUT…there’s two interesting points that come up here. First (world’s smallest spoiler coming) you can get additional cards that “count as Rat Tat”. And second, if you’re playing Gauntlet and really trying to optimize, you can:

1. Make absurdly large Plans.
2. Die if you don’t make every point of damage count...

And once you have 5 of these in your deck, well, putting them out 1 at a time nets you 15 damage but if you could, somehow, engineer the miracle Plan where you slammed them all down at once, you’d get a whopping 10 extra points of damage.

So getting a bunch out at once would be pretty sweet. Which brings us back to…

Blindfire

The problem with costing this card is the variance — id est the difference between the floor and ceiling on the card. In the best imaginable case it basically one shots any boss in the game, but the worst case is absolute disaster: you’ve just played a 5 of Muscle…and that’s it.

That is literally worse than every basic, zero cost card in the starting decks. Whiff and your crew is probably taking an extra hit from the Obstacles you’re facing. And by the time you can even pick up Blindfire your margin of error on each run isn’t going to be huge.

So the first thing that you have to do to balance something like this is just to crank the cost all the way up and ask yourself “How many Rat Tats would I have to hit to think this was worth it.”

Right now the maximum cost in our game is 3 eddies. At 3 eddies, if I pulled one Rat Tat would I be happy? In that case I’d either be getting a pair at the cost of a single card and at least one point of damage or — if I pulled one of the upgrades that counts as a copy of Rat Tat — a bunch of numbers on the board and 1 damage. That’s not bad but not exceptional. I don’t think I’d want to pay 3 for that.

(For those of you who clocked the Extra Muscle card from the base game I showed off months and months ago, that’s a single card that’s a pair and does no damage costed at three: it’s costed for where you can get it in the game, but I think, objectively, it would be a 2 cost card if it just existed in the aether.)

So would I be happy to pay 3 for two Rat Tats? That’s 4 damage and a 3 of kind (or something roughly as good) off 1 card. That’s a phenomenal rate. Sign me up to spend 3 eddies on that all day.

So next we have to look at the probabilities. Let’s assume you’ve been going hard down the Rat Tat path and have 6 Rat Tats in your deck. Drawing 5 cards from a 30 card deck with 6 Rat Tats in it means you’re about 25% to get at least two Rat Tats - what we consider to be absolutely worth 3 cost. You’d also be around 45% to end up drawing at one, which we said was alright but probably closer to a 2 cost than a 3 cost. Seems pretty good…

“But wait” I hear you say, “James, if I’m 45% to draw one and 25% to draw two or more…doesn’t that also mean I’m 30% to DRAW ZERO (which you yourself said would be a catastrophe)!?” Yes, yes it does.

Great, so this is a bit gamble-y. It’s got huge upside, distinctly bad — but not devastating — downside and a fairly reasonable average case at 2 cost (with the assumption of 6 Rat Tats).

But there’s more we have to consider. Imagine you draw it after you’ve drawn all of your Rat Tats. It’s just a dead card until you reshuffle your deck.

On the other hand If you draw it late in your deck you might know exactly how many Rat Tats you have left and remove the gambling element entirely.

And you also have to factor in the fact that the more Rat Tats that are in your discard when you play Blindfire, the better drawing even one Rat Tat off this card is. Because, while we said that getting to make a pair off a single card and do one damage was decent, making a pair and doing say four damage (because 3 Rat Tats are already in your discard) would totally be worth 3 cost.

Next we have to look at the rest of the card. Because drawing and playing Rat Tats isn’t all it does. It also discards cards.

In Cyberpunk Legends, when you empty your deck, you shuffle your discard, flip it over and it becomes your new deck. So there can be advantages to cycling your deck. If you’ve burnt through most of your good cards already you can toss this down and basically get rid of an extra hand’s worth of card, bringing you that much closer to shuffling your good cards back in your deck.

So with all that we’re probably on the borderline between 2 and 3 cost for this card, but there’s one more thing…

The Future!

We’re always working under the assumption that this game will continue for years and years… which means we have to be wary of any card that might limit our design space or, you know, break the game in years to come.

This isn’t to say they won’t happen, it isn’t even to say we 100% want to avoid them. Right now is like you’re getting in on year 1 Magic: you get to play with some broken stuff, that’s part of the fun.

But we have to be aware when we’re doing this and while I’m not planning to make too many more Rat Tats — after all I’m running out of onomatopoeic words for the sound of shooting things — if we ever made it so you could end up with 10 Rat Tats in a deck this card would be pretty beyond the pale.

So With That...

The cost probably has to be 3. It has too many upsides to be anything else. But it’s a gambler’s 3. Unlike a normal 3 cost card which is always “Very Good”, Blindfire has the chance to be “Broken-in-half-busto-absurd” but also comes with the possibility of occasionally being “hot garbage”.

Which is something you want in some of your special cards.

It's going to be an exciting moment every time your Solo flips this. Sometimes it’s going to be the only thing that could save your crew; you’re dead this turn, you need to do a ton of damage to clear enough Obstacles to live, your Solo tosses this down and flips 4 Rat Tats and suddenly everyone’s out of their seat and shouting. I want that in the game…

And sometimes it’s going to leave you stone cold without a pulse. Which makes for a story in its own right.

Blindfire also hints at the direction we’re going for the Rat Tat build. Now that we’ve printed a fair number of Rat Tats, we’re going to explore a different vector to let that deck improve…we’re going to give you ways to search for them, whether that’s directly tutoring for them or digging for them with things like Blindfire. This gives the Rat Tat player cool build options and progression without the existential threat that comes with printing too many cards that read ‘counts as a copy of Rat Tat.’

And with that, fair reader, I leave you! I hope you’ve enjoyed this exploration of what it takes to balance the cost of a card. Thank you for reading all the way through my rambling and, if you have thoughts (or want me to write more stuff like this), send us a note.

—JP