Preem Cards!
Night Crew
Deckbuilding. It seems like a solved problem.
Magic, Arkham, Flesh and Blood &c. solved it years ago.
But what happens when you take away the curve? What happens when every card has inherent synergies (because of the suits and ranks on them)? What should the rules be for deckbuilding then?
How do you allow people to deckbuild in a game where they’re trying to create poker hands?
That’s a question we’ve been wrestling with for a while…
Making the Impossible Possible
At first this seems like an impossible task. “What if I just buy 10 copies of the game and make a deck filled entirely with 7s?”
Well, luckily we have a few vectors to work on.
First, if you’re playing a multiplayer game, you don’t actually get to put that many cards into the plan yourself, so everyone you’re playing with better have filled their deck to the gills with sevens as well or that whole “fill the deck with 7s” plan is going to come up real short.
Second, to overcome obstacles you not only need to make their To Hit requirements, you also need to do enough damage to overcome them. This is really tough if you’re trying to make a deck entirely of one rank. With some pretty standard deck building rules (in our case a limit of 3 of the same card per deck) this makes breaking the game much harder. You can make the game dull - after all, if you try to stack your deck this way every play you make is basically going to be the same thing - but you can’t actually just dominate.
And, of course, there’s the suits. By making suits part of the To Hit requirements, by asking for flushes and having rules text on obstacles that references suits, we can make it reasonably disadvantageous to just try to cram all of one number in your deck.
It might seem OP for the first Scenario or two, but it’s going to fall off pretty quick…
Deckbuilding While Upgrading
Some of the Upgrades are pretty busto though. How do we keep them from breaking the game?
This one’s actually easy. Since you get these as you play, you’re already limited in what you can choose from. And, since we control what order you see them in and how many copies are available for your crew, we can build the balance into the order these show up in. These also cost eddies, so even the number you can actually acquire is entirely in the designer’s control.
That said, if people start to get really into doing versions of the gauntlet with preconstructed decks and the consensus is that your constructed decks get to be built using some number of eddies from the get go we’ll probably limit these to one of each card per deck.
The Spotlight Problem
But then there’s cards like Spotlight’s On. It’s awesome, it’s a blast to play, it creates some of the most exciting moments early in the game. We want you to have that. We want you to have cards that create that heroic, pulled it out by the skin of your teeth, feeling; that let you come in clutch and your whole team cheers..
But…uh…yeah we can’t let you just stack a ton of copies of Spotlight’s On or your starting deck might actually be too broken. So we created the Preem symbol.
Preem Cards
We’re not a collectable card game…I don’t actually want you to have FOMO. What collecting there is in Cyberpunk Legends I want you to do for the joy of it, not because you feel like you have to for power. Which means we can do something awesome: we can pre-restrict cards.
Every collectable card game out there knows at least some of the cards they’re going to have to restrict in each set before their sets ever land in your friendly local game store. But, even though it would be better for the game, they can’t just say ‘hey you’re only going to need one of these’ because the very cards they’re going to restrict are going to be some of the biggest chase cards. The economic of pre-restricting cards just doesn’t make sense for them.
But for us? Well, that’s not our business model. On a purely mercenary side: we want you to have such an awesome time that you’re excited for the next scenario to come out. Which means I can put the preem stamp on cards and say “this means you can only have one of these in your deck.”
And while this may not seem that cool…as a designer it’s kind of amazing. It means I can make cards which are off the curve, cards which are a little broken, cards which it’s a blast to windmill slam down on the table, and not actually break our game. It literally lets me push how cool I can make our cards.
PREEM!
-JP