No Netdecks

When I first started playing card games one of the aspects I loved was the creativity. At every tournament, at every game store, you’d see people cracking out these weird and wonderful decks. There wasn’t a meta to play against, there weren’t a small list of decks you had to play or you’d lose.

But I also like to optimize. I like to try to tweak my deck to make it better. I like to find the edge where I can…and in the age of the internet, these things are at odds.

One of the design goals with Cyberpunk Legends was to create a core system where optimization was clearly possible, but “optimal” was really hard to define. Where you could be creative in how you build without feeling like you were missing out.

Which leads us to the “cooperative poker” system. 

The cooperative poker system utilizes what I call Orthogonal Design.

These two cards:

 

 

Which of these is better?

It’s actually impossible to say. It depends a lot on the composition of your deck…and, importantly, the composition of the decks of the people you’re playing with. This is because, unlike in Magic the Gathering, the numbers and symbols on the card aren’t directly interrelated. This is the heart of Orthogonal Design

In Magic, the numbers on a card move in parallel, if you change the power or toughness of a card, you have to change its mana cost. If you change its mana cost you have to tweak some other part of the card.

But let’s say I changed the numbers on one of those cards to 2,3? Would it be better or worse? Hard to say, it might be slightly better because it’s a bit easier to make a straight off a 2,3 than a 7,5…but look at how these two cards play together, if your crew can lay down both you’re almost to a straight in just two cards.

Now what about this one?

 

 

Is that better or worse than the other two? It’s got two numbers, one interval apart. It’s got one symbol. The only difference is the text. It does double the damage but that damage is conditional.

Now in most CCGs you could tell what whether the design team thought this was better, worse, or roughly equivalent by looking at the cost. But since the only cost to play something in Cyberpunk Legends is your turn (and, to a lesser extent, that it’s not going to be available for a while) there’s no external voice saying “use this one!”

And truth, we’ve actually debated these three cards internally a fair bit. Some teams are just really good at making straights. They see them, they find ways to communicate about them and they build their decks toward them, and for them, Good Plan is just plain better. But we’ve encountered teams where they struggle to ever get damage out of Good Plan. It really depends on what you want to create, and how creative you can get in the directions you build.

So what about this one?

 

Better or worse than the others?

I’ll let you all debate that on the Discord server, because I’m sure I’m going to write a whole article on Local Reinforcements soon…

Til then…

JP