Quote (Katelyn @ Apr 11 2017 04:41pm)
They are hiring for hs team u do a good job u are guru of card balancing z
I would absolutely love to help provide balance change ideas. Not as a job, but as a hobby. My ideas aren't all great, but I think I have a good grasp of what makes different card games excellent. What I could bring to the table is "at least it's not shit", which is better than plain shit. I can only pull from a few card games though: MTG, Hearthstone, Yu-Gi-Oh, a few different board games, Dominion (board game but worthy of its own category of mentioning aside from other board games), a couple online card games that I can't remember any longer (one was on iPad), and Pokemon.
Hearthstone feels a lot like a mix of Dominion and Yu-Gi-Oh. The primary difference: Yu-Gi-Oh leans as hard as possible to the OP-broken cards, and Dominion doesn't have a rush strat (closest thing to it in Dominion is ending the game 2-4 turns sooner than expected, disallowing enough late-game turns to pan out).
Dominion: All players start with the same hand. You can use gold cards in your hand to buy cards. When you buy a card, it goes into your discard pile, and when you end your turn you discard your hand and redraw 5 cards. Your deck recycles when you run out and reshuffle discard pile as deck. The idea is you build up your deck with cards you need (bigger gold pieces, good action cards, etc). You are limited to 1 buy and 1 action per turn, unless if cards modify that condition. You always draw 5 cards by default, but other effects can alter that. Hearthstone has begun to integrate ideas of shuffling cards into the deck, but Blizz hasn't done it in a very interesting way yet. What HS needs more of is cards like the 2/3 "draw a secret" creature, which brings consistency into decks that need it. Currently, 2-card combos are as far as you go in HS, otherwise the deck is (typically) frail and inconsistent. Getting more control over what you pick from your deck, and encouraging shuffling of cards into the deck, would allow for build-ups of consistent combos, but in a fair and fun way.
Yu-Gi-Oh: If you look at Yu-Gi-Oh versions that don't use broken cards, the game is actually really interesting. It's like MTG-lite. Yu-Gi-Oh has a "soft stack": You can choose to activate traps, or choose to activate creature effects you are holding in your hand, based on conditions that occur on your opponent's turn. You cannot cast counter spells or burns from your hand, however. These are mechanics HS should really look to borrow: End-of-turn optional response cards from hand or field.
Taking MTG as an example, there's lots of "OP" cards. But they print them anyways. Why? Because Wizards of the Coast knows that OP is in the meta, not in the card. MTG has better deck flow (even though you have to draw land cards) because the cards are designed for the meta. HS doesn't design cards for meta; they design cards to build hype, to revolve around themes, and they focus on the individual cards or small clusters of cards (ex. elementals). If HS were smart, their 5/5 elemental that gets +5 health for each elemental played in the previous turn would cost 8 instead of 9. Their quests would all be viable. The 5-cost buzzard 3/2 would be a 4/4. Their 5/4 taunt guy would have the type "Goblin" from the Goblins vs. Gnomes expansion, and that typing would have an applicable use. Their 5/4 adapt 5-cost beast would be a 5/5 5-cost even though stranglethorn exists. And adapt, it would have more thematic impact than just "choose an effect that already exists". And so on and so forth.
This post was edited by Canadian_Man on Apr 11 2017 09:33pm