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.)