Reference Card

Just a short update today.

I made a reference card for the demo so players dont have to keep glancing back at the rulebook to play the game, just figured I'd share it with you guys.

Moving everything from the old format to the new is turning out to be pretty easy, I've got to do the art for the white magics cards and the relics, and the demo will be ready.

Demo Deck: Part 2 - Theives

So here's the second page of the deck.
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=RRZ403K8

"Thieves" is kind of misleading... all of the characters aren't thieves. Their icon is a thief just to show that they're the middle ground of the army. They don't have the high attack and defense totals of fighters, or the spells of mages. Typically, they're ranged attackers, ninjas, or thieves, with a stat total right in the middle.

I don't really know what to call them that groups them all together...
"Support units" are a decent designation, but that could be taken as 'healers', and that's hardly what they are. I'll have to think on it...

Anyway, here are the characters I chose, and why I chose them.

Yuffie x3
Irvine x3
Edward x2
Locke x1

Yuffie: Yuffie is in a main slot for versatility purposes. Being a new player with something like a hand full of spells and no mages is discouraging, so Yuffie helps fill this gap. Also, there's one summon and one real summoner in the deck, so Yuffie can help with this also.

Irvine: Irvine is in a main slot because he is the poster boy of ranged attackers. No other reason really. Maybe to show people the drawback of fighter characters like Kain with 1400 Defense.

Edward: Edward is a trial. Being a control card I think it would be interesting to see how he plays out. His stats are pretty low, and his ability requires a bit of board setup, so I thought the 2x slot was good for him.

Locke: Locke always gets to use leader abilities regardless of the stage, so he will give the new players more chances to play around with the leader stuff.

If any of you are reading out there, let me know what you think, and if these files are coming out correctly.

Demo Deck: Part 1 - Fighters

Well, you guys have waited long enough. It's true, the demo isn't completely done, but I will release the deck one piece at a time as I finish up.

The demo itself is made up of card sheets, each file will have 9 cards and you cut them out to play with them. You can just use the cutouts themselves as cards, though I would recommend sticking them in a card sleeve with another card backing them for easy shuffling.

(If you don't have card game cards lying around your house, go to any hobby store, and ask if they have cards from a dead game you can have or buy cheaply. Card sleeves aren't too expensive either, the best card sleeves are Dragon Shields, which are 10 bucks for 100 sleeves (enough for 2 demo decks) any sleeves will work though, no matter how shitty.)

Well anyway, here's the file:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=B873ONBJ

You'll notice it's huge, nearly 50 megabytes. This is the complete uncompressed card sheet of 9 fighters, so if you print it out as is, it will be photo quality. (Honestly, it may rape your printer though, so if you're worried about ink, temporarily set your printer to draft or quick print, or whatever the option for lower quality prints is.

As far as the contents of the sheet, I'll tell you who I chose, and why I chose them for the deck.

Fighter's page

Cloud x3
I chose Cloud as one of the backbone fighters because of his straightforward nature. There are 4 different sword cards in the deck also, the deck seems like it's almost made for him to stack up on swords.

Auron x3
Auron is the premier fighter. I chose Auron in a main slot to break new players in to the idea of characters with higher defense than 1600. Magic and team-up attacks will have to be used to bring him down. Though you can't carry him over to the next battle, which wont make him a constant irritation.

Kain x2
Kain is the newbie's get out of jail free card. But there are only 2 because he's not very threatening once he's out.

Cecil x1
Cecil will be good to have around for the ranged and mage characters. Though, I don't think there are enough tools in the deck to deal with Cecil x3, so x1 is fine.

Of course, after releasing the deck in it's entirety, I will upload a playset of every card for download, even one's already included in the demo deck. So if you want to run x3 Cecil... damn you... but it can be done.

Then, as I release new cards, I will release them in the playset format (which is a file with 3 copies of a single card, the max you can have in the deck)

Also, if you download the file, and the cards are PURPLE, let me know, I'm having some issues with the color calibration of my monitor, so it's possible they'll come out this way.

I'll release the "Thief" type characters next.

Oh GAWD! It's back!

Did you miss me?
Bet you thought the game was done for.

In a way it is, all of the old files are lost, but I'm just going to re-do them. I've got a new template now though, so all it is is a matter of plugging in the art, text, and values.

Dry your tears, the demo is ON! Expect it soon. I never did get the OK to do the last card, so I'll have to sub it out.

In the meantime, let me show you a new card (with the new template)



Yuffie at her best. I love how Xaphania's piece transfers perfectly to card form. Great colors, and dear god... Yuffie being Yuffie. If I hadn't played the game, judging by a lot of the art I see, Yuffie would be as emo as Squall.

Check out Xaphania's site at xXaphaniax.deviantart.com. Definitely worth the look, she has a very distinct style, and doesn't limit herself to one type of art. Lots of fan-art, original characters, chibi art, also lots of line-art, which I thought was pretty cool. It's nice to see the in-between phase of art, being an aspiring artist myself.

(Though you probably wont see my art in the game, I don't think the world is ready for that yet :P )
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Cardwise, I'd like to think Yuffie is interesting. Thanks to her near-infinite materia collection, at the cost of 1 card, Yuffie can temporarily fulfill any role you need: Black mage, white mage, counter attacks, even...summon. For her versatility alone, I think Yuffie will be seen in a lot of decks, especially as new traits come out for her to create combos off of. She is somewhat weak though, being in the lower tier of strength as far as ranged characters go. She can't take out the average ranged character without help from equipment. However, her ability helps protect her from spells, which may offset this penalty.

So what do you think of Yuffie? The template? Let me know, yo.

Yeeaaowch! Seafood Soup.

So, I know updates have been few and far between, life is good though, I actually got a new computer!

The sad part is, that I have a new computer because the old one melted and got the blue screen of death.

Yeah, so all of the FFTCG files are sitting patiently on my non-booting harddrive.

Unfortunately, this means the game is on hiatus, because until I restore them, I can't work on the game anymore.

I could always replicate it, but I'd much rather design then replicate, so I'm working on a new project in the meantime. For any who are curious, it is at boticcg.wordpress.com.

Thanks for the support everyone! The game isn't dead, but it might be a little while before you see more updates.

BACK UP YOUR DATA, KIDS!

Toolbox your deck with Tools!

I've got to make an extra note on this one. Even though the card only focuses on the chainsaw portion of Aribuwana's Edgar fanart, you've got to check out the whole piece on Aribuwana's site at aribuwana.deviantart.com it's epic. As much as I wanted to use this piece for Edgar, EVERY old-school Final Fantasy fan is going to know the chainsaw, and how badass it was tearing through behemoths with a Jason mask on. I felt the piece was better served as the chainsaw relic, since it IS a really cool rendition of the chainsaw.

Overall, this is the best Edgar fanart I've seen on the internet; It even has a full shot of Castle Figaro. With the quiver for the autocrossbow on his belt and the forlorn Sabin in the background, you can tell the work was done by a real fan of the game. It was the background of my computer for awhile, definitely worth checking out. Aribuwana has also done a really good Terra, and has more FFVI on the way. Considering FFVI is my favorite Final Fantasy, I've got his art page bookmarked, you should too.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Chainsaw is a card you'll probably be seeing for some time. Throughout the life of this game, you'll not find a more efficient way to deal with attached equipement and relics.

The only requirement to discard the equipped item is to tap the chainsaw. The character doesn't need to participate, and you still get the +200 regardless of what you do.
The best part about it, is that it will discourage other players from playing their own relics, because if they let Chainsaw stick around, they'll lose their relic the very next turn without any real effort from you.

Not really much else I can write about it, it's a toolbox card. A well-rounded deck will have an answer for any other type of deck and chainsaw is a good choice for attachment removal, which is useful vs. decks that have a lot of equipment and relic synergy.

If any of you were curious on the status of the demo, all I need are the rest of the relics and one more character. That's 7 cards total, but the relics should go quickly. At the very least, I CAN use official stuff, but I'd like to try to find some artists first.

Thanks again for reading all! Hopefully we'll be able to start talking card balance and gameplay soon :)

Cowboy Up!

Yes ladies, he's still single!
You don't want to know what I went through to get this fanart... Irvine is one of the quintessential ranged characters of Final Fantasy, so I HAD to find art for him. After pages upon pages of Irvine Yaoi I find this gem. (I swear, I just can't look at Zell in the same way again.)

Seifer-sama really makes Irvine shine in this piece. I've always had extra respect for artists who are especially good at drawing folds of clothing around a figure. I think this piece is a great example of that, the lighting seems spot on too.

One other thing Seifer-Sama said that I thought was interesting was that the piece was done in Crayola colored pencils. I'm such a snob about my prismacolors, it's nice to see something this talented come out of what I would assume are pretty ordinary colored pencils. Shows me that I should pay more attention to actually drawing then how much I pay for my art supplies...

Check out her page for some more awesome fanart. She has A Song of Ice and Fire fanart too!! Lots of stuff actually, I guarantee you'll find something you like. Check it out at http://seifer-sama.deviantart.com
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
In the game, Irvine is the worst nightmare of Mages for sure. I see it being pretty common for the ranged characters to make it to the front row and get taken out before they can hit the mages in the back. Irvine just bypasses the middleman and takes the guesswork out of stopping a bothersome mage. Remember all the Bahamut stuff I talked about last blog? Barring any sort of recovery ability, Irvine ends the problem for you right there with his grenade rounds.

Another less noticeable thing is that Irvine becomes a real threat when you attach weapons to him. He's already at 1400 attack, and it's not difficult to get him a bit higher. When he hits 1600, he can take out most melee characters with ease, not to mention a lot of characters with the "counter" ability are monk type characters who's defense happens to fall into the 1400 range.

Anti-Mage, Anti-Monk, what's not to love?

The 1000 defense really hurts... but he can also run to the rear, and get a parting blow at the same time.

I guess there really isn't much synergy with him as far as card combos go, but he's definitely a solid character and worth a place in the ranged portion of your deck.

Here thar be Dragons!

He's here!
I'm sure some of you were waiting for summons, and Bahamut doesn't disappoint. This is a great Bahamut piece from a very talented artist. Genzoman talks about how his Bahamut design was inspired by different incarnations of Bahamut in the games. I'm lucky to get such a great, and original design to use in the game. Check out Genzoman's page at genzoman.deviantart.com.
He's done work for professional card games too! Pretty sick. I highly recommend the mythos section of his page, I spent like 45 minutes looking through it!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Instead of looking at this entry solely from a Final Fantasy fan's perspective, I'm going to take a look at it from a competitive gamer's perspective.

I feel every game needs at least a card that makes the other player freak out when it hits the table. The trick, is getting that card to mesh with the rest of the cards without creating a balance issue.

I don't think a meticulous game balance is the end-all-be-all of competitive gaming. If it was, we'd all be playing Virtua Fighter instead of Street Fighter or Tekken. Guess which game is in the $10 bargain bin...

Not that Virtua Fighter is bad... it's a masterpiece, balanced to perfection... but it's TOO balanced, like no matter which character or style I'm using, it feels like Potato vs. Potato. Instead I'm playing Tekken where I can juggle 80% of a character's health away, or Street Fighter where I can Spinning Pile Driver someone out of a jab.

I wanted the game's Summoner mechanic to mirror this. Even though Summoned creatures power varies Final Fantasy to Final Fantasy, you're fighting dragons, and gods, and other majestic things.

I want people to freak out when Bahamut hits the table, and scramble to take out the Summoner before it finishes. (sometimes in vain!)

I feel Bahamut accomplishes this, that's certainly a powerful ability, considering it can't be dispelled, if the opponent doesn't have a Summoner, it's pretty much an auto-win for you.

So where the heck does the balance come in? Well, lucky for me, true summoners in Final Fantasy are usually the damsel type, small children, or anemically weak. I try to give all summoners a base ATT/DEF of 600/600. (which is 200 points above the Mysidia twins by the way, ouch) This means, it's really not all that hard to kill a Summoner, any class can do it. Even if they have other magicks, if they're already kneeling, they're prone to any magic spells you may have anyway. Not to mention you can only have 1 copy of each Summon in your deck, you don't want to recklessly waste that power card.

In a summoner's defense though, you don't have to start your battle with a summoning. Pop in your summoner after most of the field is knelt out, and you'll have a better chance of survival.
Also, don't forget, the only requirement to trigger a summon is for the summoner to re-stand, and while most of the time, this will occur through 2 consecutive passes, and the round ending, anything else to prematurely stand the character also works. Haste works well for this, there is definitely some other synergy for this also, just gotta be an optimist. ...

Magic 101: Part 2

So, compared to the flaming rain of ultimate destruction black mages often deal out to their opponents, being a white mage is a pretty thankless job. But nobody will deny that it's one of the most important roles in all of Final Fantasy (anyone who has played Final Fantasy XI especially is probably nodding in agreement right now.)

This is no exception in the card game. As you can see from these cards, White Magic typically has less options to offer you per each spell. But each spell has it's place amongst your party.
I would've showed you guys the mainstay of white magic: Cure and Raise, but honestly, they're just more efficient versions of Potion and Phoenix Down, so I figured I'd just show some slightly more exotic white magic spells today.

First one I'll show you guys is Protect. Protect is definitely a nice spell; in the card game, it's basically an extra life. True, you may or may not have to use it immediately in a battle, but it's always nice to be prepared. One other thing you may notice, is there is no "Recovery" trait anywhere on the card. This means that because it's technically not a recovery card, it can save you from no recovery attacks! This is huge, and possibly crippling if you've got a high defense guy guarding your back row. Of course, no strategy is foolproof. Magic has no problem taking out your protected characters, because protect only grants the extra life to characters defeated in physical combat. Of course, that's what Shell is for...

Oh, and note that the "Status" trait in the ability text is green, this lets you know the status effect is beneficial, and items like Remedy or spells like Esuna will not effect them. (They only effect the red Status cards like Bio, Fire, etc...

The second one is Haste. The applications for this one aren't too hard to figure out. Stand Auron... duh. Stand any character you want to take a second swing really. It can also be used to stand mages to give them back their resistances. Haste is also special because you can also trigger Hastega and stand your whole row. Should be annoying at the very least.

The third one is going to make people hate you over and over again. Dispel!
Every card game has a card like this, restrict your opponents moves and actions, without sacrificing any advantage yourself (except card advantage, really.)
The applications are great, and all are irritating. Imagine a player getting ready to Thundaga your Cecil with fire on him, and you just tap him and play this to cancel the spell. Now your opponent is out 3 cards and probably quitting the game. Also, keep in mind you can cancel White Magic with this. Cancel your opponents' Cure, to make sure the character dies, or even cancel your opponents DISPEL!

Once again, gotta say thanks for reading and keeping up on the game! With every post, the game gets closer to demo status, almost done! Just a little longer!

Magic 101

So it goes without saying that magic is the most powerful force in this game. However, magic does more than just rain death upon your opponent. Some weaken, some mess with strategies, being a mage is more than just being a cannon. (Though there's nothing wrong with being a cannon.)

Each spell has a base effect, and this effect can sometimes be amplified by discarding extra cards along with your spell. So Fire, +1 discarded card becomes Fira, +1 more discarded card becomes Firaga. You get the idea. It will tell you what the extra effects are on the cards, so don't worry too much about it.

The one thing you need to remember though, is that the effects stack, so discarding 2 cards with your Fire spell gets you the base ability, lv2 ability, and lv3 ability.

I'll introduce a few of the spells and their applications.

Fire, Blizzard, and Thunder. Probably the most basic spells in final fantasy, have 3 very different applications in the card game.

-Fire is a pretty versatile card, the base effect of fire (where you just cast it and discard it with no extra cards) has you attach the card to an opponent and drops their defense by 400 points. It's a quick and easy way to weaken a fighter with really high defense, or get a regular fighter a low enough defense to get picked off by the ranged characters.
-Fira ( discard 1 card) also weakens the character further by discarding all equipment and relics from the attached character. Definitely more situational than the base ability, but definitely has its use, if not just for the chance to snipe some relics off your opponent. (Afraid of a little fire Cloud!?)
-Firaga (discard 2 cards) just says "screw it" and discards the character completely. This is by no means an efficient discard, but it has it's place. It is definitely the most powerful since there is no criteria to do it other than "be a character"

-Blizzard is primarily a defensive card, good for slowing down aggressive characters by tapping them prematurely. Or just speeding up the next round by decreasing your opponents options.
-Blizzara is probably the most tactical spell. It has all the power of Blizzard, but when used on a character that is already tapped, it discards it. This is great if you can hang on to it and a caster by the time your opponent has exhausted his options, because it gives you free reign of who to discard.
-Blizzaga is the spell that is going to make people scream "CHEAP" and cry like Edward. With all the effects of blizzard, and blizzara, blizzaga extends this by attacking an entire row instead of a single character. This has the potential to cause some serious damage as a round ender by wiping out the fighter row when they're already tapped, or even a good opener, tapping the row early.

-Thunder is your surgical removal card. As long as a character is a legal target and has 1600 DEF or less, it discards it from play. Simple application, and a definite staple to the mage's spellbook.
-Thundara is your guaranteed surgical removal card. By adding the 'no recovery' criteria, you can be sure your opponent isn't going to just cure or potion the pain away. Dispel should be your only worry, but there are only so many white mages...
-Thundaga is the ultimate I never want to see you again card. It just dooms the character, no chance of recovery or revival. Keep in mind though, that all of the thunder series spells can only target characters with 1600 or less, so it's not the only answer you'd want to have.

So there's a taste! Of course there will be more magic to stock your decks with, but you should be able to get by on just these.

Showdown

I know some of you were wondering when we would see these two. Check out that art! Probably the most famous rivalry in Final Fantasy history is represented perfectly by Daniel Chou. The two pieces are meant to go together, and I really like them because they're more of a mature art style, and these cards represent the most developed part of the rivalry. I really like the faint smile Cloud has, because it shows his growth through the series. He seems to have grown out of the stoic loner mindset a little. Anyway, check out Daniel's page at http://www.zureul.deviantart.com. He has a quite the variety of pieces, definitely worth checking out if you like these two.

So first, let's talk about Cloud. Get to know him, because he's going to be your fighter backbone for the demo deck. He starts out at a solid 1600/1600, and his ability, though moderately useful, is a definite combo card. In FFTCG, characters can only have 1 relic, or 1 equipment card attached to them at a time. Cloud gets that 1 equipment or relic, and ANY number of swords you can stack on him. An aggressive player might have a mythril sword, gunblade, and masamune on him at once! That would even make T.G. Cid run screaming. Similar to Mog, he's only going to get better, the more swords we get, the more people will fear him.

Sephiroth is an interesting card as well. The first thing you notice, is that he has the Villain trait. (outlined in evil red so you don't miss it)
Villain is actually a negative trait. Anytime you win a battle, and you only have Villains in play, the relic goes back to the pile and nobody gets the relic. (Villains do what they want)
Of course, when you see his stats, you might not care too much. Sephiroth has the printed max for attack, and above average defense, as well as black and summon magic himself. This guarantees he will always be a threat. Don't forget that when he stands, he's immune to black magic, because of his black magic trait. You'll have to use brute strength to get him usually, unless he's already attacked this turn.

His character ability is also negative. Due to needing host bodies of remnants to manifest himself in the physical world, Sephiroth discards another character you control as a cost to be in play. This could be a liability, considering the penalty for winning with villains alone, and the fact that he has to do it again if you raise him. Seems balanced on paper to me, though we'll see as he shows up in decks. At any rate, he'll be tricky to use, but I'm sure a clever or experienced player will make good use of him.

Oh, and don't fret if you're one of the Sephiroth fanclub, and you don't want to juggle so many variables around in order to use him. Sephiroth is unique in my mind, as he has FOUR well-defined forms to make cards from: SOLDIER Sephiroth, Crazy "I am a clone" Sephiroth, One-Winged Angel Sephiroth, and this Advent Children version. The SOLDIER version isn't even a villain, how cool would that be to play?

Relics

How's this for a first relic? Thanks to Mog, we've got a totally redone version of the gunblade in case piece. Computer graphics seems to work really well for weapons, and IMO Mog's gunblade is the best of them all. He has a nice collection of art on his site: http://www.mogcaiz.deviantart.com check out his Sora especially, it's great.

So, as far as the game goes, can you expect to ruin people's shit with the gunblade? Absolutely. Generally if anything is a relic, it's going to be overpowered because the the extra strength offsets the fact that you're essentially gambling with your points to use them. The gunblade gives you a pretty weak damage increase, but in turn, dooms characters instead of discarding them when they are defeated, this does 2 things for you:

Firstly, it technically eliminates recovery. The definition of recovery is "prevent a character from being discarded" and when you switch out the discard for doomed, the abilities cannot function. That means no potions or cures. (Also note that the wording on the Gunblade is different from the wording on Zozo, which is "when a character would be discarded, they are doomed instead" which means that characters in Zozo can still be recovered. This makes the Gunblade significantly more powerful.)

Secondly, it kicks problem characters out of the battle, (so I guess that means no phoenix downs or raise either) This can be great for characters like Cecil or Zidane, that you want to STAY dead when they leave play.

It's definitely a strong ability, well worthy of the gunblade, but there's one more offset. Your character is considered to have no traits. No... you're not going to be able to turn your ranged character into artillery with this, or stick it on Cyan to make your opponent cry blood dealing with your counters. It definitely seems strong as is.

What do you think? Would you play relics? I do want hoarding to be a valid tactic, but not to be the only sensible option.

Kupo-po!

So before you say it, I know. The pictured moogle is not technically Mog (Mog is actually the badass moogle that tells you how high your attack is.)

The thing is that there is no Mog fanart or official art that translates well to card form that I could find. But I thought he was so tied in to the last post, I had to wing it. This moogle is actually from Final Fantasy XI, starring in one of the mini-expansions.

Anyway, Mog's ability is inspired from an old Game of Thrones card called Wheels within Wheels. WWW gave you the ability to switch plot cards around at will. Plots are similar to FFTCG's location cards, and I have a feeling Mog will be just as good in this game as WWW was in Thrones.

Being able to switch out locations can be useful. On the losing side, and don't want your opponent to take a certain relic? Switch it with something not currently useful. Overrun by your opponent? Bring in Bevelle really quick to reset the round. Or, how about starting with Auction House if you're behind, switching to Mako Reactor, and next turn retreating. Ouch.

(One important thing to note, is that since the leader check is made at the beginning of the round, swapping your locations around doesn't affect the amount of characters you can play.)

The more locations are released, the better Mog will get. I'm looking forward to seeing what kind of evil my playtesters and myself can dish out.

The World is your Battlefield!

Ha! Bet you thought I abandoned this! I was actually on vacation, so I apologize for the delay in posts, and updates.

So, the demo deck will take a little while yet, I've got to do cards for the items, relics, locations, equipment... you get the idea. For the final product, I'll probably commission an artist to do a lot of the small stuff, but for now, I'll just use official art when I find it.

So anyway, I got some of the locations done. For those that don't remember, they are dual-sided cards. You fight at a location, and when you win, you get the relic on the back to add to your point total/arsenal.

Anyway, here's some without further ado:










For all who forgot, you play these before you fight, and it changes the face of the fight in some way. It should help to keep the game from feeling stagnant. See the class on the card as well? This is how you identify if the location matches up with your leader's class.

Expect a new post soon! I'll show you a character who thrives on these cards.

A demo deck in the works?! Kupo!

Well, I figure I've made you guys listen to my ramblings long enough without actually playing the game for yourselves.

I'm starting work on a demo deck, it will include every non-Cid card revealed so far.
(Cid is a little niche, so he wont do any good in a non-specialized deck.)

As you've been noticing lately, there is a lot of official art on the cards, when I mentioned the initial idea of fanartists doing the art.

Well, the official art is just a placeholder. I'm interested in seeing how the game plays, and grows, and sometimes I just want to stick a card out there without committing art theft. You wont see a non-official card up here that I haven't already asked for permission to use.

Anyway, lets talk about Kain and Cecil.

Dark Knight Cecil seems like a popular choice for most people, so I wanted to make him as accessible of a card as possible. He's a powerhouse for sure, he breaks the rule I said I would never break... a ranged character with an attack of over 1400, which means he can take out most front ranged fighters with his attack.
Giving him ranged represents the old Dark Wave attack he had that hits all enemies with his HP as a cost.

The thing I wanted to capture with Dark Knight Cecil was the futility of using the powers of evil to fight evil, the whole reason he became a Paladin in the first place. Sure, he breaks the game rules, but at great cost.

With every attack, Cecil dooms the top 4 cards of your character deck, which brings you a step closer to a TKO every time he attacks. Four cards is a pretty large amount, and if you aren't prepared for it, he could even be a liability. The ability to destroy full blown fighters from the back row is nothing to laugh at though, we'll see how it plays out.
~~~~~
Kain is very similar in application as Cecil is, but less solid all around, he's your exterminator, a one-shot to take care of the problem character in those hard to reach spots. Sure, once he's out, he's sub-par, but with ways to return him to your reserves, Kain becomes a serious threat. His ability used to be triggered when he came into play, but that ended up breaking him, when he could phoenix down back into play and kill any character on the board. His new wording seems to balance him out some.

I also revealed these two cards to illustrate a new way to word character abilities. They are now structured like this: "Name: Cost: Effect"

Name is purely descriptive, Cost tells you when the ability can be used, and effect describes the ability.

Triggered abilities effects are pre-empted with "he may" or "she may" to show that you can choose not to trigger the ability, Kain is an example of this. Cecil is not, you have to discard the cards every time with him.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Well, besides that, any other characters you guys are dying to see in the demo decks? I'll see what I can do for everyone that reads this blog.

Finally, pile name problem solved.

God damn mountain dew, I have work in 5 hours and here I am...

Anyway, here's the newest idea I had for the discard piles.

There are 3 piles, the character discard, item discard, and doom piles.

Doom pile is the new erase pile, same mechanics but with a more fitting name. If all of your characters end up in it, you lose right? Sounds like people will have less trouble with it. Doom is also a Final Fantasy spell, so it's slighty thematic. So you can discard a character, and you can doom a character, easy.

Other then that, there are the 2 discard piles. The new difference is that instead of having the doom equivilent of an item discard pile, at the end of every battle, the discarded item cards will go to the bottom of the item deck.

Thoughts on party limit

Though the last playtests we've done have been good, the current state of the game, where every battle starts with 6 characters on both sides, seems a bit stale to me, like you're just wading through bodies to win each battle. I also feel like initiative should be decided by something more tactical than just the amount of relics a player has.

Though I want the player with less relics to have some sort of "catch up" advantage, I think initiative should be determined by the following:

At the end of the party phase, the player with less characters goes first.

As I thought about this, initially I was put off by it, but really, it solves an important problem.

The game ends when all characters hit your erase/rfg/whatever pile (still not happy with the name), and in all the playtests I've had since I implemented this rule, this has been an issue. I think decks should be able to be built around the concept of running through your opponents character deck, but I don't think it should come into play every game.

The way I see it, is that if people play with less characters, to try for initiative at least a few times a game, always decking out of characters wont be an issue.

Also, for every character short of your maximum, I figured drawing an extra 2 cards would be a fitting added bonus. (This also makes Shadow 10 times as good as he was before.)

Clear Skies Ahead

So after todays playtest, I really like the current state of the game. It feels stable, each of the character types seem to balance each other, and the deck and discard/removal mechanics seem to work pretty well. The game also feels unique, and not complicated at the core. Now I feel like I can focus more on the cards than the core rules of the game itself, which is a great feeling.

In the meantime, I'll present to you guys a character that promises to shake things up a bit.

Edward always seems to get a bad rap, but how else could a character that automatically hid after being dealt a mighty blow be taken? Well, due to favoring the underdog, and maybe a bit of sadistic humor, the spoony bard will be the definitive control character of this game. While he can lock down a character pretty well, he can't do it completely, which will hopefully make you think. Fear a cure? Lock down Yuna's casting, Worried about runaway Irvine? Lock down his move ability. Not to mention have Auron or Esper Terra sit and twiddle their thumbs.

Whether it was Edward or not, some control cards are definitely needed. Man, can you imagine a deck template of Edward x3 and a bunch of thieves as your dedicated thief class... probably pretty miserable to deal with, but that's the way control players like it I'm sure...

(Random note: While perusing the interweb, I came across this interesting bit of info. In case you aren't aware, Edward's name in the japanese version is Gilbart, which is actually his family name. What I didn't know, is that according to the site, the game's primary currency, Gil, is derived from the Gilbart family. Bet you didn't think Edward was THAT important, did you? I can't verify the authenticity of the source info, but I refuse to believe it is false, because that's way too cool.)

CID!

So, I'd been toying around with the idea of a Cid mechanic, and I had some breakthroughs and thought I would share them with you guys.

The Cids will be the first subtheme of the game, a super-synergistic set of characters, they will all react off of each other, (kind of like Porom and Palom, but to a more extreme level) being decent by themselves, but pretty fearsome in tandem.

To give you an idea, here's the in-progress text for the Cid's I've worked on so far.

FFIV Cid "Scruffy Pilot Cid"

1500/1500 Fighter

Brawler: Cid gets +100 ATT and +100 DEF for each Cid character in play.

-He's a pretty hard hitter, so it seemed fitting to make him the tank of this group.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
FFVI Cid "Banana Suit Magitek Grandad Cid"

800/800 Mage

Black. White.

Magitek Fusion: All Cid characters in play gain the Black and White traits.

-As this Cid is our resident Magitek scientist, it seemed fitting for him to give his brethren magical abilities though magitek fusion. If you ever made a Cid deck, this would be the key card, though, he would need to be protected, or the others would lose their magic skills (and immunity)
~~~~~~~~~~~~
FFVII Cid "Sit your ass down and drink your goddamn tea Cid"

1600/1600

Highwind: Tap Cid, if you have X or less characters in reserve, draw a character and put it in your reserve. X is equal to the number of Cid characters in play.

-Probably the fan favorite, this Cid differs from the above listed, in that he's pretty decent by himself. This touches on the previous post, in that it helps you keep playing characters to the battle. I think he'll be a pretty common card to see with or without other Cids.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
FFVIII Cid "Headmaster Robin Williams Cid"

800/800

Balamb's Assistance: Tap Cid, draw a card for each Cid character in play.

-Another card good by himself. Drawing cards without passing is nice, because it denies your opponent the chance to ready their characters if you have the jump on them. Anyway, this Cid is more of a minor character than most, but you should still see him on the board a lot.
~~~~~~~~~~~~

and well... so far that's it... Oh wait... I forgot.


Remember when I said that IMO, Auron was the most powerful canon Final Fantasy character? Well, I lied...



Yeah, immediately after making him, he's on the watch list. I'm telling you, without tweaking the entire balance of the game, you will not see a statistically more powerful character than T.G. Cid.

I feel like he will balance out though... it's almost impossilble to make him the leader, because 3 Cid's must be present first. There ARE ways (cough... General Leo) to do this, but nothing worth building around.

I like him though, you can use him as a silver bullet card to deal with Cid decks, or run him in your own Cid deck for all sorts of mayhem. If you'll remember, in Final Fantasy Tactics, Cid is framed by the Church, and in the card game, it's only worth his time to come out when there are some imposters trying to sully his good name. There can be only one of course...

Don't worry though, you'll get a less specialized Orlandu at some point to use in your non-Cid decks. He'll still kick a ton of ass, I promise.

Be all that you can be!

So, in the last couple of playtests, we had a pretty annoying problem.

Some battles would last up to 30 minutes or so, and in a game of 6 battles, that makes the game way too long. Also, due to this, you would go through a third of your deck per battle, and if you happened to use all of your magic in one battle... oops, enjoy worthless mages.

Usually with card games, this is the nature of the beast, but because the game is based around battles, and the exchanges between melee, magic, and ranged, it needs to always be available.

The easiest fix is that the non-character deck will reshuffle when it is depleted, however to prevent constantly running through your deck, draw cards like Ether will be moved to the remove from game/erase/whatever pile.

The bigger change, and the reason for this post, is the addition of reserves.

Normally when you begin a round, depending on your leader, you'll either start with 4 or 6 characters in play. In addition to those characters, you'll also draw 3 "reserve characters" face down on the board. (the player that owns the characters is free to look at them)

You would play these reserves as an action, the way you play characters from your hand...
And that's it, after your reserves are gone, you can't add more characters to your battle, however you CAN add to your reserves via character abilities, or the new universal action: "Discard 3 cards, draw a character and add it to your reserves."

Of course, on the flip side, some more devious or politically-minded (redundant?) characters will be able to reduce your reserves as well.

Of course, this is all on paper, and only playtesting will tell...

Thanks for reading my blog BTW, you guys rock.

Some fundamental game changes.

Through some playtests with friends, and general rethinking of the rules, the current state of the game will have the following changes.

-No more counter-attack

As a core game mechanic, counter-attack will no longer be a universal ability. Instead, "counterattack" will be a trait, and only certain characters will get it. (I.e. Tifa, Sabin, Cyan, and similar types of characters) to offset the significant bonus that the first player recieves for this, at the beginning of each battle, the player with the least amount of relics will go first.

-Two separate decks

The game deck will be divided into two, with one character deck, and one deck with everything else. This is to ultimately trump the problem of getting character screwed, and for a game so dependant on characters, this needs to not be an issue. Though, there will no longer be a mulligan in the setup phase.

Instead a system of rationing characters will be implemented. I don't like the idea of income, because this creates fodder characters, and for a game powered on fanservice, I wouldn't want anyone's favorite character to end up as the meat shield.

-Universal relic deck

Having one common deck for relic cards will add an extra layer of strategy to the game without adding a new layer of complexity. Being able to see the general flow of the game a few turns before will interest a tactical player, and also allow you to counter-pick cards other players may pick. Whether this means the same cards will always be used, or each player will bring 4 to the table or something will be seen.

Ultimately, this is all I want to change for the time being, so we'll do some more playtests and see how it goes.

Another random brainstorm

I've been having a pretty annoying formatting problem with the cards lately. "Remove from game" isn't going to cut it anymore, it takes almost an entire line on the ability text to write that out, in an attempt to condense it, characters previously considered to be "removed from the game" will be considered to be "erased". (Hey, it's the best I could come up with, I spent like 15 minutes in front of thesarus.com looking for an easy term.)

Anyway, this is in reference to the first Final Fantasy for NES, that had an insta-death spell called "Rub", (and for obvious reasons, we're using what would most likely be the actual translation, not the actual name of the spell.)

This means the remove from game pile will now be the erase pile. (not the erasure pile, as to avoid 80's pop jokes, ugh.)

I don't think it's too bad, but if any of you have some better ideas, post them here.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Oh, and also, I plan to streamline another part of the game.
The locations originally had individual troop limits, (ie. smaller areas like the auction house can hold fewer characters then say Narshe Battlefield.)
I feel this mechanic didn't add too much to the game, and now all locations will have a default 6 characters for the location's correct class, and 4 characters max for the other 2.

Beware the Twincast!

I thought it only right to show these two in the same post. Enter the Mysidia twins!

These two aren't terribly popular as far as Final Fantasy characters go, but they're easily two of the most heroic.

By themselves, they really aren't that great. Granted, nobody picks a mage for their stats, but even a summoner can beat these two in hand to hand combat (which is damn sad) , though considering they're probably not even in the double digits age-wise, it makes sense.

When they get together is when heads start to roll. Together, they get rid of all magic immunity, and Palom can hit an entire row with single target spells. This is pretty big, Thundaga for example, removes a 1600 def or lower character from the game... imagine taking out a whole front row like that, or better yet, the back row, where the mages who normally have protection get a taste of their own medicine.

Also, take a look at that art. I seriously couldn't imagine finding a piece this good for the twins. Luckily for us, Niko seems a pretty hardcore RPG fan, and has some awesome niche RPG art in his gallery. As you can probably see, the two cards are actually a larger mural type piece, you should do yourself a favor and check it out at http://www.chibiniko.deviantart.com you don't really get the full effect just looking at the cards.

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.

Playtest ahoy!

So the game had its first playtest, and I must say, it was better than I thought it would be.
(Granted, my expectations were pretty low)

The game seems fundamentally balanced, as long as I don't break a few concrete laws I set for the characters... (no base ranged characters with 1600 attack or higher probably being the biggest.)

I think my biggest fear initially was the fighter type characters overrunning the other characters. But when I ended up playing, they had their just had their role like the others, as opposed to steamrolling through everyone. Spells didn't seems underpowered to the point of being obsolete, either.

One thing, that we did notice, is that Phoenix Down and Raise are two VERY powerful, and abusable cards.

Phoenix Down:
Tap user, search your discard pile for a character and put it into play tapped.
Raise:
Target caster, search your discard pile for a character and put it into play tapped.
(More efficient version of potion for white mages...)

The thing about this is, we saw Auron 5 or 6 times that game due to discard pile recursion, which doesn't seem to be very healthy for the game.

Sorry I can't show the cards yet, I've been too lazy to email the artists about the use of their art, but I'll give you some text.

-Auron-
1800 Attack/ 1800 Defense
Sworn Duty: At the end of the battle, discard Auron from play.

Really, he's all stats, and in my opinion, he's the strongest hero in Final Fantasy (lore speaking), so he deserves it, but we can't have him popping in every 2 seconds for tea...

So due to that, I've decided to create a separate remove from game pile, and Auron's ability will now move him to that instead. He can still come back when he is killed, but if you win with him, that should be it, he's done his duty, he's gone. This mechanic will also be implemented for Bahamut, and the Gunblade. The only plans I have for cards being returned from the Remove from game pile is Phoenix, but I haven't even brainstormed that yet.

-Bahamut-
Summon.
Tap caster and put Bahamut into play, when caster readies, remove all non-Summon characters from the game.
(This is probably going to be the nastiest summon you will ever see)

-Gunblade-
Relic. Sword. Weapon.
+100 Att
Specialized Training: If attached character has no traits, (that's stuff like "white" "ranged" etc) characters they defeat are removed from the game instead of discarded.

We also dodged a bullet with Bangle, the generic armor card of the playtest deck. All it really did was increase defense by 100, but we ran into a problem when giving these to 1600 defense characters. They were near untouchable, and there were a few cards that could deal with them, but I think such an integral gameplay mechanic shouldn't have to be dealt with by silver bullet type cards.

In the end, we decided that Bangle will be:

Bangle
When attached character would be discarded, instead discard bangle from play.

It's like a pre-emptive potion or cure spell, (same vein as phoenix down:raise) except with one difference. Potion and cure are considered to be "Recovery" abilities, and there are cards and characters that bar Recovery cards or abilities from being used. Bangle doesn't carry this keyword, and is immune to those effects, on the flip side though, there are no plans to have armor be recursive, so I don't think it will end up being abused.

So anyway, I played with my friend Mitch, who doesn't play ccgs on a regular basis, but nonetheless has a good mind for this type of game. I asked him for his top 5 characters, and here's who he chose. Along with some of my commentary.

1. Cecil
-He's a wall, I was really having trouble dealing with him, Aeris, and Cyan in tandem. (Aeris is kind of like a portable cure) Cyan has 1400/1600 and gets +400 att while counterattacking.

2. Auron
-The stats purely, Mitch kept bringing this bastard back into play like every match.

3. Edge

1400 att/1000 def
Ranged.
Vendetta: When Edge is the only character in play, he gains +400 attack and +600 defense.
-Mitch liked him for the clutch value, and he IS an interesting card, he and Amarant are the only two cards that come dangerously close to breaking that concrete rule I spoke of earlier.

4. Cloud
1600 att/1600 def
Swordsmaster: Sword cards do not count towards Cloud's equipment total.
(Each character may only attach one card at a time, Cloud can attach one, and all the swords he wants)
-This was surprising to me, because the initial playtest has no relics, but Mitch made him work with a Mythril Sword (+200 att) and a Bangle in tandem. It really made him a force to reckon with. He'll get better later though. With the relics in play, there will acutally be 4 in game swords (Mythgraven Blade, Gunblade, Masamune, Mythril Sword)

5. Kain
1400 att/1400 def
Jump: When Kain comes into play in the battle phase, he may immediately make an attack on any character at +400 att.
(This is a one shot, and only available when Kain is played mid-battle)
-This was brought on by Mitch playing his characters conservatively, and while he only had 1 out, Kain came out and won me the match. It was then we both saw he had real ninja potential (for not actually being a ninja at least)

When I asked if there were any characters he thought were underpowered, he mentioned Setzer...

Setzer
800att/1200def
Ranged
Ante Up:When Setzer attacks, you may discard any amount of cards from your hand, this attack gains +300 att for each card discarded.
-Mitch thought he was underpowered, because he felt he only had one shot, and then was pretty much fodder. I do see the merit in that, but at times on my side Setzer was the only one who could really deal with Auron's 1800 defense.

It's on the watch list for sure, but we'll see how it goes.

Location/Relic proxies are printed up, I'll let you know how they go, soon.

Ugh.

Yeah... that point based balancing thing I mentioned... not gonna happen.

Cecil kills them all... according to my templates there is no reason in the world why someone with a magic keyword should have 1600 defense, but I feel like he isn't going to be broken in the actual game. Oh well, I guess that's what play testing is for, right?

In other news, all of the characters are done. Whew!

For anyone that wants to know what the playtest decks will contain, here's what I've decided.

30x characters
3x Cure
3x Raise
3x Protect
3x Fire
3x Blizzard
3x Thunder
4x Potion (you can use any # of the item cards, the 3 card limit does not apply)
4x Phoenix Down
4x Ether
1x Ifrit
1x Shiva
1x Bahamut
1x Ramuh

Then the location/relic deck, these are still being worked out, but trust they will be done soon.

I might post a couple cards up soon, and explain my thoughts about them...

The horrors of balance

I don't know if anyone knows this, but once upon a time I used to be a pretty hardcore A Game of Thrones player. (Unfortunately, hardcore does not necessarily equate GOOD, I certainly did well within my own meta, but I'd always crumble under other meta's control decks, and things of the sort)

Anyway, because we were so wrapped into this game, I got to know the designer pretty well. His name is Eric Lang, and he was this sarcastic skinny guy from Canada who had never eaten hot wings in his life. I remember him saying one time "Man, I've got the idea for hundreds of cards in my head, I just have to worry about balancing them, that's the bitch" He's right, and this is the part I hate.

Most card games have some sort of income system, something like "Batman costs 6 to play, because he's the bane of every criminal in Gotham, but Robin only costs 2, because he's a college kid that wears tights."

A Game of Thrones, even, had cards that cost up to 10 gold. Final Fantasy is weird in the sense, that there is no income mechanic, which means instead of 11 (0 also counts) balance points for characters (Where 0 is the worst character and 10 is godlike) there is only one.

On paper, this makes the game a lot less complicated, but it will also make cards harder to make, because they will all have to meet the exact same standard, or it will end up like Marvel Vs Capcom 2 with everyone picking the same 8 characters in a 56 character game.

I think that based on my prior card game experience I can do this free-hand pretty well. But I really wont know until it's played, so I'm thinking of trying to do it mathmatically. Something like giving each character a required point total, and giving every aspect of the card a point value. That way it will be easier to find overpowered and underpowered characters. I can imagine it getting awfully complicated, but it's something I'll be trying to figure out.

Rock Paper Scissors? General battle design.

This is something that I thought would be appropriate for the system of this game.

Instead of having units with arbitrarily numbered attack and defense totals, I tried to loosely have each type of character repel one of the others. By doing that, it gave me kind of a template to use for each character that I could modify to fit them without having to start from scratch. (And at the same time, keep units with high totals in both from dominating the battlefield.) What I didn't expect, is that almost every character in final fantasy (at least the amount that I did) almost evenly fits into the 3 classes, with only a few hybrids.

Anyway, here's the example I was getting at...

Melee Characters:Rock - Average stats: 1600/1600
Melee characters are the basic building block of your army. It's a good idea to have a few of these in your front line to protect the characters in the back, (because don't forget, when your front line falls, the back line moves up) They also can freely kill most other types in melee combat without falling themselves. Their big weakness is magic, because magic in the card game is very strong, and to a lesser-extent, other melee fighters, but you can usually get in a parting blow vs. them. Some characters, I felt were good fighters but a little lacking in constitution, so their defense can drop lower than 1600, but only in the rarest circumstance will it drop below 1400, for reasons mentioned later.

Mages:Paper -Average stats: 800/800
Yeah, if fighters are the baseball bats, these guys are the baseballs. It's no question that a fighter is going to defeat these guys without breaking a sweat. So naturally, any mage that values their head will be in the back row. The thing about mages is... well duh, they can cast magic. Magic will on average cleanly take out a fighter, the trade off is that magic cards come from your hand, they aren't printed on the character, so in other words you can't use them repeatedly. The other good thing about mages is that being able to cast magic also brings you resistance.
For example, Vivi has the "Black" trait, which grants Vivi the ability to cast black magic. But as an added bonus, as long as Vivi is standing, he can not be targetted by black magic cards. (I think I mentioned this earlier, but whatever)

Ranged Characters:Scissors -Average stats 1200/1200
Unfortunately for Vivi, there are only two rows, and that's where these guys come in. Characters with the ranged keyword ever so rarely break 1400 in their attack, which means at the base value, fighters are almost always immune to their attacks, but ranged grants the character the ability to shoot into the row behind them, giving them extra effectiveness vs mages, and so-so effectiveness vs other ranged characters. (again, that parting blow) One thing I've noticed on paper though, is that the ranged characters have to work a little hard to get to the front line to hit the mages in the back. For example, Wakka could go up to the front for a shot, and Cloud who was already in the opposing front row will ream him next turn. The extra effort seems to be a way to balance out the limited nature of spells, but when I actually start to playtest, we shall see.

Wow, a card!

Look! Something other than text!

Ultimately, I plan to use fanart for all of the cards. There are some badass fan artists out there, and I'd rather display their talent than official stuff.

I wanted a lot of nostalgia in these cards, and that's why they have the old school blue menu screen for a template. I like the 3 classes for traits too, but it reminds me of 8-bit theater.

I've currently done 12 of these cards, but I need to get the OK from the artists to publicly post them. This one's ok because this is official Square-Enix art. (If I got a cease and desist from Square-Enix I'd probably hang it on my wall.)

Here is an example of the general look for character cards. I have the character's name, with a title included (So I can also make cards like Cecil: Dark Knight... This is probably my favorite thing about the VS card game.)

The upper right hand corner is where the character's class goes, in this case, Cecil is a fighter. (True, he's got magic, but since his main job is being a human shield, I thought he fit a little better into the fighter category.)

Then we get the trait bar. Cecil has the "White" trait, which doesn't mean he's an Aryan warrior, it means he can use White Magic. The "Black" and "White" magic keywords also grant resistance. (I.e. as long as a character with the "Black" keyword is standing, he is immune to all "Black" magic cards. This doesn't work on Summons though, they'll ruin your shit regardless of who you are.)

Also note that Cecil's ability will eventually be "leader only" I'm working on a uniform way to display effects that are passive, (i.e. always on) triggered, and whether or not those abilities are only useable when one is the leader, like Cecil's ability will be in the final product.

I consider Cecil to be the Captain America of Final Fantasy, there's no greater leader than one that fights on the front lines and would give his life for you.

Anyway, on paper, that's a devestating ability, coupled with Cecil's good defense (most fighters have 1600 attack) you might not be able to do anything while you're getting ranged attacked every turn.

This is a great opportunity to point out my #1 pet peeve with card games. Emulating the source material. There is a VS card of Two-Face which is something like "Flip a coin, heads destroy target character." Wow, some serious design thought there. I think good design involves structuring a character around the game, not the other way around. You want to give them an ability useful to the game, but have it also capture their essense. In this incarnation, Cecil is a tank, you can't get around him, but he doesn't literally cover certain characters and take damage for them.

And them of course, we have the attack icon (Moogle with the Sword) defense (Moogle Shield) and flavor text (One again, not literally.)

And I'd like to take the time to thank all that have read so far. Comments are most definitely welcome. This is only the 2nd card game I've worked on, and the 1st one was horrendous, so your feedback is definitely welcome.

Sorry, that was probably confusing. Now: RULES

I guess I should lay down a basic framework of the rules. I never really set these in stone, but here's an idea of what you can expect.

Relic Phase-
This is the first phase of every round. In this phase, player 1 chooses a relic/location card from his pre-chosen relics, and lays it on the field in front of him location side up. (Player 2 is free to turn over the card and see what the relic is of course, just to see if he wants to commit forces to it)

The location cards will have a title, picture, favored class (as i mentioned before), two leadership totals, and a global ability that activates. That probably makes as much sense as Metal Gear, so let me give you an example.

Mount Ordeals
(This is the mountain where Dark Knight Cecil goes in FFIV to become a Paladin... spoiler alert ;P)
Favored Class: Mage (Leadership 2/4)
The favored class mechanic tells you which class is most prepared to deal with the area, and in this case, most prepared to be the leader.

After the card is placed, Player 1 plays a character in his hand that he wants to be the leader of the party, followed by player 2. (If player 2 chooses, he may decline to play a leader, and give the relic to player 1) If that character is a member of the preferred class, you would use the higher unit number (4), otherwise use the lower (2). (This is something I blatently stole from the Starcraft Board Game, I think it's a cool concept, and I hadn't seen it anywhere else)
-This number tells you how many extra characters can join the battle besides the leader. Since you're fighting for the area's relic, it's good to have more forces on your side. So in FFTCG, it will be to your benefit to have a variety of character types.
I've split every character in Final Fantasy into 3 different types, each represented on the card by their sprite in Final Fantasy 1. The 3 classes are just vague representations of the characters. Not all of the thieves are actually thieves, and such, it just is an easy way to group the light armored guys together. The classes don't grant any abilities by themselves, they're there for flavor (not literally) and to set up the aforementioned leader/unit mechanic.

Fighter- This includes all the warmongers, knights, martial artists, abominable snowmen, angry black men etc. (Cloud, Auron, Umaro, and Barret are examples of fighters)

Thief- This includes... well... Thieves, and those considered fighters, but would be more of the archer, ninja or other lightly armored characters.
(Locke, Quistis, Setzer, and Edge are examples of "thieves")

Mage (Specifically Black Mage as far as the sprite goes)-
These are all of the mages, black, white, red, summoner, they will generally have horrible defense, but will let you use magic cards. Magic cards are generally pretty powerful, because they're exhastable, and make you give up some card advantage to use them.

After both players have placed their leaders, player 1 will play out his forces, followed by player 2. (Player 2 gets a serious advantage in this phase, but player 1 played the location/relic, so he has the advantage in that respect.)

Battle Phase-
The battle phase is the meat and potatoes of the game, it is here where you pit each character against each other. Player 1 and 2 simply alternate actions until one side retreats or is destroyed. Every two actions, each player gets to draw a card as well.

The battle is set up like traditional final fantasy, with a front and back row. The difference is that in the card game, you can't attack the back row at all without a card effect, or the ranged keyword. Yes, this means Umaro can't kill Yuna if she's hiding behind Auron. (Unless he gets a blitzball, oh.... that would not be pretty.) And of course, you can't have a back row without a front row, so when the last character in the front row is defeated, all back row characters will move to the front. (If Umaro defeats Auron, he gets access to the creamy center!)

The actions are as follows

Attack- Pretty simple, you tap the character you want to attack (I'll use MTG terminology for you guys, but the actual cards just use symbols to describe cards tapping, and readying) and then choose an opposing character to get beat on. The defending character gets a free counterattack as well if it's a legal target. (Umaro cant be counter-attacked by Yuna because she has no Ranged keyword, pretty clever Umaro) You just match each attackers attack to each characters defense, if they equal or surpass the number, the character is discarded. (Gotta love that Starcraft board game!) Of course, there will be items, and white magic you can use to keep your characters from being discarded. (If Yuna casts Cure on herself, or Auron uses a potion, she'll be ok and Umaro will be upset. Good thing he wasn't a legal target for a counterattack. Though I doubt she could hurt him with her stick anyway...)

Move-Move one character from a row to the other, could be nice to get a front row shot at a mage, or retreat a thief to the back when a fighter pops up.

Spells/Items- If these can be used, they will say so on the card. Various effects unnecessary to get into now.

Add Character- If you are under your max character limit for the battle determined by the leader, add a character from your hand to battle. (Note: If the leader dies, you lose the higher troop # and are stuck with the low one)

Draw a card- duh. Don't confuse this with the 1 card you get to draw after both players have an action though. This is separate.

Retreat- Return all of your characters to your hand, and forfeit the Relic.

Once only one side remains, the phase ends.

Cleanup Phase- (It will probably be called something else later, but I'll roll with it now.)

All that really happens in this phase, is that the winner returns all living characters to his hand, and takes the relic for himself... and then player 2 starts over and plays his relic...

So here's your basic rule framework. Don't worry, you get a picture next update, as a reward for wading through all of this text.

The basic idea.

So what I've got going on, is a war game. The victory condition as of now, is to acquire and hold 10 relics from the Final Fantasy series. The relics will be items that have popped up in final fantasy that are integral to the story, or symbolic of the game. (i.e. Blitzball, Magicite, Materia, stuff of that nature)

I guess you could just call them points, but I wanted to make points more than just scorekeeping.

What's the fun of getting relics instead of points if you can't use them? After you win a battle, and the battle's relic, you are free to use the relic on your characters.

-For example, you fight in the Blitzball Stadium, win, and get the Blitzball relic. (The relic cards will be double-sided, one side with the location, the other with the relic that you recieve after you win) The locations will have traits as well: special effects that only apply to that location, and a preferred class for entering the location. (i.e. Midgar slums are more homely to Thieves than Mages)

The relics themselves are superpowered versions of regular cards you attach to your characters. (think weapons or armor) They're a little broken so far, but I think that adds to the fun. (Wanna cheat a little bit? Give an attack powerhouse like Auron the Blitzball, he'll gain Ranged and be able to shoot directly in the back row, but if he is defeated, you also lose the relic...which means you'll be out 1 point.) I think it will add a little bit of risk/reward to the game, which will be fun.

Hello World!

Well hello there!
The purpose of this blog is to document my design of a card game based on Final Fantasy. As of this post, I've already devoted a significant amount of time to it, so you should be seeing updates pretty quickly.

Seeing as I wasted my childhood playing video games, and 6 years playing collectible card games, I figured I would create this giant bastardizing casserole of both. It's always been a dream of mine to create games, I've got a pretty decent amount of unfinished projects sitting around my house, but I gotta say, creating card games are the most fun of all.

There's no programming to worry about, so I can just focus on the game itself, this is probably the greatest draw for me. Well, that's enough introduction... Tally Ho!