I want to be your canary...

So here's the next card I can show.
Yeah yeah, I can hear you saying "Another thief!?"
Well friends, Zidane is the embodiment of thief. He's a roguish, womanizing, con-artist hero at heart with a monkey tail! And like any good thief, he's damn annoying to come across in-game.

A good player will know how to play him to really mess you up. Every time he leaves play, he discards a card at random, and draws you a card. You can use your leader card offensively to put him back to your hand, and play him again, or phoenix down him a few times, or what have you.

He balances out though, because he's not much of an offensive force, he's the weakest character in the game without spells or ranged, but I wanted to design him to be like a fly on the wall. You can't really waste your resources dealing with him, but he's a thorn in the side nonetheless.

I really like the piece as well. One really cool part about Captain-Sunshine's art, is that it's completely traditional, she doesn't use photoshop or anything, so it's got this cool watercolorey style all her own.
Check it out at http://www.captain-sunshine.deviantart.com, she's got a lot of fanart, even some Xenogears stuff O_o, way to be old school.

Third Playtest at Kublacon

So I had a short little playtest at Kublacon with Alex, an old AGOT buddy of mine.

I put into practice the new rule "when the winner of a battle brings their cards back to their hand, they have to discard down to 3 before redrawing up to 7. " It really helped curb some of the momentum of the game when someone would carry over 4 or 5 characters a battle. (As a contrast, you don't have to do this when you retreat)

After our playtest we came up with a simple elegant rule, that rebalances the game pretty well.

"After a battle finishes, all cards in the discard pile are moved from the discard to the remove from game pile."

There are a number of reasons this becomes helpful:

Phoenix Down/Raise abuse
-Raise and Phoenix Down are two very powerful cards. In a way it creates a bridge between your hand and your discard pile for playing characters. Is playing with a 30 card hand ever fair? Probably not. By moving your discard pile to the remove from game pile each turn, the revival cards actually become... revival cards. Not teleport-Wakka-in-from-3-battles-ago cards. It also lets me revert Auron back to discard, which creates less rules confusion. One other thing it does that is kickass, is that it adds more balance and thematic value to Quistis.

Quistis' ability reads:
Blue Magic: Tap Quistis to choose a black or white spell in your discard pile and play it at no cost, then shuffle it into your deck.

On paper, it sounds good.
Blue Magic is being able to mimic monster magic right, if a spell has been discarded, most of the time it's been played, and thus, you are able to mimic it. (Of course I took some liberty in letting any spell be used, just to make it not worthless, but you get the idea.)

In the playtest, before the rule was in place this made Quistis an offensive monster. During the game, I played 6 thunders against alex (only 3 are allowed in the deck)

So really, this let me hit a character for 1600 damage with no counterattack and "no recovery" 6 times (no recovery means that the attack cannot be cancelled with potion, cure, or Aeris [so far])

Basically, this made Quistis an invisible long ranged Sabin that could wear equipment ... broken

Now that the discard pile resets every battle, Quistis is in a way forced to "see" each of the spells, which makes more sense regarding her ability. She still has the potential to be powerful, but now there aren't a whirlwind of broken possibilities regarding her. (Now I don't feel bad about giving her 1200 attack instead of 1000 either!)

Leaders pt.2

Yeah, so, let me break you out of that last rules snoozefest with another card. This is a design I just did really quick of the leader cards. That little map you see is Ivalice from FFTactics (which needs to be represented in this game somehow. I'm sure I'll get to work on Tactics characters soon, I just want to get the basic game down.) I thought it would be neat to add the heraldry of the white and black lions from the story. I know text-wise this looks pretty complicated, but I'll roll with it, it doesn't seem complicated enough to be convoluted.

And along with this new card, I have a redone version of an old friend...


See how beefy he got? Due to the team-up rule given to the leader card, I don't feel as bad about giving him mega-defense, because if anyone deserves that, Cecil does.

Also notice the orange aura around his ability title. This tells you that the ability is a leader-only ability, and is only usable when Cecil is the leader. A modest price to pay for his defense increase.

(Another reason Cecil was updated is because he was broken beyond belief, his prior ability read "While Cecil is in play, characters in your back row may not be attacked"
... get it? Just stick him in the back row, and your opponent can't do shit to you without completely obliterating your front line. Now he reads a much more sensible "While Cecil is in your front row...")

Leaders?

Just had an interesting brainstorm today that I think I might implement.

So far by themselves, all leaders do is give you the higher party numbers.
(I.e. if Cecil is your leader and he's in a leader friendly area, he gets 5 guys as opposed to the regular 3)

I'm thinking of expanding on this. I had it planned to where you had an actual leader card you attached to the leader, it's not equipment or anything, but it lets you and your opponent identify your leader. I'm thinking of giving it an actual purpose besides a placeholder, which will probably benefit the game in the long run.

The leader card, besides identifying the leader will have 3 unique abilities (think of them as leadership orders) that you tap the card to use. (It will ready in the next round like the characters as well.)

Return a character to your hand-
Multiple uses for this one... you can offensively use it to pop characters like Kain back to your hand, or defensively to protect a character.(or more specifically a relic that character is holding)
I wanted to make this a universal ability, but it seems too powerful to just make a regular action.

Dual attack by two characters-
Will be a godsend for high defense characters, it still makes Auron a pain in the ass, but not a wall you struggle to get past for the entire game. Like the latter ability, it's way too good to just make it usable whenever.

Prevent the leader from being discarded-
Lots of uses for this one too, in the second playtest, leaders were getting assassinated left and right, without much of a chance to hang around. Especially with fighter leaders, who were getting killed first turn on the front lines. Lots of great annoying characters to put this on... Cecil, Aeris, and Cyan come to mind.

I'd like to be your guardian...

As much as I like the anime style of most FF fanart, I'm a huge fan of this piece. I thought it was kind of weird seeing Auron in Kingdom Hearts along with Mickey and Sora, he's so out of place. I really like the traditional look, it makes him look like that much more of a badass.

This is the guy that has been keeping me up at night. So far, he is the only character in the game with base stats that break 1600. (Until a certain sasquatch pal is made)

The problem is the defense, high attack is great, but high defense can be pretty frustrating to come across. (Originally, I had items that would add to defense as well as attack, the defense ones ended up getting cut out because they would create near impenetrable characters. Can you imagine this guy with 2000 def -_-)The only character that can defeat him head on is Setzer, but that's at a high cost.

I think the negative ability does a good job of balancing him, if he's losing he can still be abusive, but if he helps you win, he goes away for good. (well almost...)
Still, I doubt there will be a deck that wont run 3 of him, so I'm implementing a helpful, yet potentially annoying rule with the game.

Back when I was playing the UFS card game, they had a tournament rule called "diversity" where only the top player of each character could advance in the tourney. It was a good rule to have, because some of the characters in that game were just stupid... (it wasn't uncommon to see like 6 Nakorurus a tourney.)

I've adapted that in a way for this game... In fftcg, only one copy of a single character can be in play at the same time on either side. I'm not sure if I want this to extend to alternate versions of characters as well, but we'll see.

Check out more of Abishai's work at http://abishai.deviantart.com/

That's TREASURE HUNTER!

So here's the first non-official-art card I'll reveal.



Pretty sick huh? The art kicks ass for sure. Locke is easily my favorite Final Fantasy character, was the first card I worked on, and now, the first card I'll reveal.

One unique thing you may see, is that Locke has the "Thief" trait.

When thief characters defeat other characters, the defeated character's controller must choose and discard a card from their hand. It's a good way to promote control as a strategy. As of current there are 3 thief characters in the game (Locke, Edge, Zidane) , and running all three in tandem (in x3's) would make a nice little control backing.

I decided to make general thievery a trait, because of characters like Locke. He's generally not a petty thief, but he certainly has the ability to do so (stole his clothes too!)

As he would probably agree, I see Locke as more of a treasure hunter than thief, since the whole point of the game is to collect relics, none should do it better than him, this is why he always gets the higher of the two leadership scores. (which means you get the bigger party.)

While the ability looks good on paper, it gets better when you realize that some of the location cards give you more characters for playing the preferred class, but will also reward you for picking a less effective class and handicapping yourself a little. In this case Locke gets the best of both worlds.

He just strikes me as a good character, he is the poster boy for versatility, I don't see why you wouldn't see him in every deck.

If you like the art, check out the rest of Nekki's gallery on deviantart, there's a lot of cool fanart in there for you FF heads.
http://nekki.deviantart.com/

Whew, finally.

After 1 and a half playtests, here is the flowchart for the game. (at least for now)

Setup Phase: (You only do this phase once, at the beginning of the game)
-Draw 7 cards. (duh)

-Mulligan (You can discard the entire hand and refill it once; this is optional)

Battlefield Phase: (The # of characters you can play is determined by the leader and location)
-First player plays a location (relic is on the back of these)

-First player plays a leader
--Second player surrenders and gives up the relic, then starts over at the battlefield phase as the first player. (of course, this is optional)
--Second player plays a leader

-First player plays the rest of the party (also attaching equipment or relics to them)
--Second player plays the rest of the party (also with equipment or relics)

Battle Phase: (These aren't fixed steps, they are individual actions the players alternate doing. When one side wins, the battle phase ends (Usually by wiping out the other side))

-Attack (One of your characters to a single opposing character, this taps the character)

-Rest (Draw 1 card)

-Attach a card to a character in play (Equipment, Relic, what have you)

-Use ability (Whether it be a character ability, spell, item, relic or what have you)

-Retreat (Player surrenders, returns their non-spell cards in play to their hand, then draws up to 7 cards)

Victory Phase: (These are fixed steps again...)
-The winning player returns their non-spell cards in play to their hand (no drawing to 7)

-The winning player takes the location card (now able to use the relic on the opposite side as they see fit, in a sideboard. The relic never actually goes to your hand, so it doesn't count towards your handsize)

-Check for victory (if any player has 6 relics, they win the game!!)

-Discard any amount of cards, and draw up to 7 (Players with more than 7 cards must discard down to 7)

-Start over at the Battlefield phase, now with player 2 becoming player 1!

~~~~~~~~~~~

So that's that! I don't think it's all that complicated, it may take 1 game to get it down though.

ALSO! I added a way to organize abilities a little, to prevent confusion.

Character abilities with no special characters are passive, meaning they're always on.
(I.e. "Acrobatics: Tidus may not be attacked by characters with the Ranged trait.)

Character abilities with a hand cursor in front of them mean the ability must be manually triggered, or in short, you have to use it.

(I.e. ">Beat Rush: Discard a card from your hand, ready Tifa") --Of course ">" is not an actual hand cursor, but the cards in game will include them.

Abilities that start with "..." are reactionary. This means they are only used when a certain criteria is met, and then, are done immediately after the triggering action has ended.
(I.e. ...Healing Wind: When a character would be discarded from play, tap Aeris, then cancel the discard. This ability is considered a Recovery ability.

Yeah, that's it. Hopefully you guys will see some cards soon.