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.