User:Ilaro/Dev Diary

The Elder Scrolls Legends – Campaign Intro Cinematic

Anne Lewis

Senior Content Manager

JUNE 12, 2016

The Elder Scrolls reveal the past, present and future of Tamriel. Told through the eyes of a moth priest named Kellen, The Elder Scrolls: Legends will allow you to change the course of Elder Scrolls history through its rich story-driven campaign and strategic card-based gameplay. Learn more about the story in the intro cinematic for the campaign mode, revealed during the BE3 2016 Showcase.

The Elder Scrolls reveal the past, present and future of Tamriel. Told through the eyes of a moth priest named Kellen, The Elder Scrolls: Legends will allow you to change the course of Elder Scrolls history through its rich story-driven campaign and strategic card-based gameplay. Learn more about the story in the intro cinematic for the campaign mode, revealed during the BE3 2016 Showcase.

[video]

Before leaving the stage, Pete Hines, Bethesda’s Global VP of Marketing and PR, announced that in addition to PC and iPad, The Elder Scrolls: Legends will be coming to Mac, iPhone, and Android tablets and Android phones, so you can bring it with you wherever you go. Thousands of players have joined us for the closed beta, and have been experiencing the fast-paced, intense strategy gameplay for themselves. If you haven’t already, create an account at Bethesda.net for a chance to be part of the action.

Reference: [1]

Moons of Elsweyr Developer Diary – Contemplating Two Moons

Parker Wilhelm August 13, 2019

When we sat down to design Moons of Elsweyr - before it was even called that, in fact - we knew we wanted our newest expansion to include a special connection to the moons of Nirn. Ultimately, we found that connection in our new Wax and Wane mechanic.

From a theme perspective, we set course for the Khajiiti homeland. One of the most distinguishing aspects of their history and culture is their relationship to the Lunar Lattice, which manifests in more than just how they practice religion.

Two-Moons Contemplation

Back to the set design, our team discussed several ways we could capture a lunar feeling in our game. Should we be literal and represent a moon on the playing surface somehow? Should we give each lane its own moon? Should we perhaps turn a lane into the surface of a moon? We tried each of these things at one point.

Here are three examples of moon mechanics that made it to the playtesting phase but ultimately fell short of what we wanted:

• Lunar was a mechanic found on creatures. When you summoned one, a moon became visible in their lane. That moon then progressed through four phases, one by one. When a specific phase met your Lunar creature’s requirements, you’d get a pretty good output like drawing a card. It also meant that some abilities could align together at interesting times. However, finding a good way for the phases to progress from one to the next got complicated. This led to frustration and lacked player agency.

• Mooncall was like Lunar, but simpler. The lanes got a moon, but you didn’t control the phases. They ticked down by themselves like a timer. Creatures with Mooncall would come into play, then that lane would get a moon for this turn and your next turn. During those turns those variable Mooncall abilities would be active. The idea was that those abilities would remain active for about the average life cycle of most creatures (~1.5 turns). For example, one card we had would shackle an enemy creature while the moon was visible in the shackler’s lane. The interesting part was if the player summoned another Mooncall card on the turn the countdown would have expired, the moon timer got extended by a turn. The bad part was it created a lot of situations where you would avoid contesting Mooncall lanes entirely, hoping to just wait it out or scared it would suddenly turn back on. It created a lot of racing scenarios, the design space wasn’t as wide as we wanted, and it didn’t feel interactive enough.

• Moonphase was a mechanic based on cheap creatures that needed to be played three times. The first two times you played a Moonphase creature would advance one notch on the moon’s phases return the creature to your hand; the third time you played a Moonphase creature in that lane, it stayed in play. The more expensive ones had neat Summon abilities that would justify playing them even if they didn’t stick. The trick was you could mix and match different Moonphase cards since it only cared about the third Moonphase trigger in the lane, not the third instance of those creatures. You could play a 1-cost Moonphase card only two times, bouncing it back to your hand each time, and then play your 3-cost and have it stay in play. The gameplay was cool, but it was pretty redundant and a bit fiddly. You ended up making a lot of clicks for an otherwise simple return. We converted that concept and feel into the Moons of Elsweyr card, Lunar Sway.

Lunar Sway

Lastly, we found the set’s new Khajiit Mechanic:

• Wax and Wane: When cards with Wax and Wane are played, a bonus effect is triggered. At the end of your turn, which bonus effect switches between Wax and Wane.

From a flavor standpoint it showed the passing of time associated with moon phases changing. The dual nature of the mechanic also highlighted the two moons and the variable relationship they have with the Khajiit. From a gameplay perspective, it played well from the start. Once we had the visual reminders in place to make it clear which ability would be active on which turn, things started to shape up.

Moon Gate

One of the final pieces we ironed out were the theories we’d apply for why some abilities went off on Wane and some on Wax. We tended to place effects that affect your opponent’s stuff on the Wane turns to give opponents a safe window where their cards wouldn’t be messed with.

Lastly, the mechanic paired well with Consume. Consume let you get a more powerful version of a card when you leverage your other resources. Wax and Wane focus on flexibility, letting you find more uses internally with planning and patience.

We think it hit all the right notes for us, and we hope you love it!

- Jason Hager

Moons of Elsweyr Developer Diary – Creating Consume

Sparkypants Studios August 07, 2019

When designing Moons of Elsweyr, we wanted to portray the battle between the Khajiit and the forces invading their land. We spread the Khajiit (and consequently Pilfer) out among all attributes and we wanted a mechanic that would represent Euraxia Tharn's conquering army to contrast with that. One of the identifying features of this army was its use of necromancy, so we figured that was a potential avenue for us to explore.

We already had some necromancer and resurrection-based cards but they were all in Endurance. Our biggest challenge was to find a way to portray these characters and spells in other attributes without making Endurance give away part of its identity.

Seeker of the Black Arts

Our first attempt at a necromancy mechanic was called Soulbound - a keyword that resurrected the creature as a 1/1 upon dying (for example, a 3/3 Lethal creature with Soulbound would die and come back as a 1/1 Lethal). Necromancy was being portrayed as creatures being resurrected rather than the necromancers themselves, meaning any attribute could have a necromancy-flavored card.

After playing with those, we decided they created game states that were more repetitive than we wanted. Soulbound got the point across, but having to kill creatures multiple times was exhausting, especially since they often relied on Summon and Last Gasp effects for the ability to make sense. We still thought the mechanic had potential but wasn't quite there yet, so we decided to explore other alternatives. One of the original Soulbound cards survived this process, however, and ended up being released in Moons of Elsweyr with the name of Wandering Skeleton.

Wandering Skeleton

Our next attempt was inspired by ESO's necromancer skills that consume corpses. Eventually, this mechanic evolved into the Consume ability we have today, which was different enough from resurrection that we felt safe putting it in all attributes without taking anything away from Endurance's attribute identity:

Consume: Remove a card in your discard pile from the game to get an effect.

Since the condition of having a creature in the discard pile (all Consume cards in Moons of Elsweyr consume creatures) happened naturally in most games, we felt that Consume cards could see play in many different builds. However, we also wanted to make sure players could play a Consume-focused deck if they wanted to. For that, we created the Imbued creatures, or as we called them, "Consumables" - creatures with fair stats that gave you bonuses if they're Consumed.

Imbued Minotaur

Each attribute has one with a characteristic keyword and we included two Neutral ones as well to make sure every attribute combination could have enough cards for a Consume shell. On top of that, cards like Seeker of the Black Arts and Discerning Thief were also included to give the mechanic some new angles.

From a gameplay standpoint, we were happy with how Consume turned out - the mechanic itself encouraged trading and playing to the board, which is a style that we generally want to incentivize. We hope you liked playing with Consume as much as we did!

- Paulo Vitor

Alliance War Developer Diary – The Expertise of Empower

Sparkypants Studios May 30, 2019

With each expansion to The Elder Scrolls: Legends comes also stories of trials and triumph that the team went through during its creation. In this Developer Diary series, we take a behind-the-scenes look at some of the learnings from our latest release, Alliance War, with commentary from card designer Jason Hager.

"Empower: When your opponent takes damage, effect increases for the turn."

Sometimes the search for the right mechanic begins with the needs of another one. The story of the Aldmeri Dominion's Empower mechanic starts with the context created by the Alliance War's first designed mechanic, the Guildsworn's Expertise:

"Expertise: Bonus effect at the end of your turn if you played an action, item or support."

One of the first jumping off points was to look at the card types that fueled Expertise and see how the set would handle them. We thought, ideally the triads in the set that shared classes with the Guildsworn (Strength/Intelligence/Willpower) should also be triggering Expertise on a regular basis. Wouldn't it be nice if the mechanics themselves played well together?

The Daggerfall Covenant (Strength/Intelligence/Endurance) which shares Battlemage (Strength/Intelligence) with the Guildsworn felt like a natural place to try an Item mechanic (which became Mobilize). The Aldmeri Dominion (Intelligence/Willpower/Agility) which shares the Mage class (Intellgence/Willpower) with the Guildsworn began with a general exploration of actions and ultimately became Empower.

"Actions" as a design goal was a pretty wide net. Certainly we were going to include actions anyway, so how would this help our search for the Dominion mechanic? The next step was to make some constraints and examine how actions are already used in the game.

One Mage triad already existed from Houses of Morrowind. The "good stuff" version Tribunal has a reputation for providing reactive and removal-heavy gameplay. We had already played enough general games with the new triads to see what a "good stuff" version of the Dominion might be regardless of our new mechanic. How could this new Mage triad engage with actions without feeding into more of the same? Could we provide incentives for more proactive play patterns?

We shifted within the triad to emphasize Assassin (Intelligence/Agility) and Monk (Agility/Willpower) more than Mage. We examined the more aggressive elements; dealing damage - often with creatures, sometimes directly. We also looked at the groups that make up the Aldmeri Dominion for inspiration, especially the High Elves and Khajiit (less so the Wood Elves, which seem to be a bit more reactive).

Swindler's Market, Descendant of Alkosh, Lillandril Hexmage

Some early concepts lived in the 0-cost action space, using trinkety spells like Completed Contracts and Curses. Unfortunately, nothing we designed there really struck our fancy. Next, we looked at the typically-Khajiit mechanic Pilfer. In what space does Pilfer play with actions?

A promising early prototype for the action mechanic included actions that could attach to creatures (at a higher alternative cost) like a custom Pilfer ability. With each instance of future damage from that creature, that action could be played again and again. It had potential, but once the designs went from paper to our test games we immediately found a big problem (other than Lillandril Hexmage infinite loops).

The new mechanic created a constant stream of undesirable snowball effects and mini-games where removing and protecting the build-a-Pilfer creature became the only thing that mattered. This was especially true of sticky creatures, of creatures in lanes that were abandoned and of weak creatures that now needed premium removal to stop them. It was difficult to find reasonable and appealing recurring effects that didn't completely warp the game. We wanted the mechanic to affect the game, certainly, but we didn't want it to define every game. Back to the drawing board.

A breakthrough came when we transferred the spirit of Pilfer from the creature to the action itself. What if instead of making the creature better with the action, we made the action better with the creature? Another important breakthrough came when we stripped the necessity of creatures from the equation entirely. The mechanic expanding to any damage brought a lot more cards into the discussion. This felt like a great place to explore! Off to the races!

The next challenge was: if we wanted the actions to be variable, what should those variables be?

Some early card pitches for Empower proved to be perfect matches. Spoils of War and Channeled Storm, using fairly common knobs as variables, were pitched in the first few hours of the discussion and remained unchanged throughout testing.

Spoils of War, Channeled Storm

Beyond cost and damage, other effects didn't play as well with our new mechanic. Here are some examples of the problem cases we ran into:

• Attack sequencing: Imagine a simple action that gives all of your existing creatures +1/+1 with Empower: +1/+1. With this action, it becomes very difficult to sequence, since it tells you to attack with lots of your creatures to increase the Empower total, but not all of them. You'd want to hold back a few attackers to have them use the benefit this turn. This led to very complicated situations, especially when boards got wide. When we narrowed the stat increase to one creature, the card ended up being too burst-y, almost like one large direct damage action. Result: not great.
• Natural limitations on variables: Imagine another action that summons a 1/1 creature with Empower: +1 additional creature. This action would immediately be limited by the space available in your lanes. This could be really frustrating if you were triggering Empower with lots of small creatures; if you lived the dream for a really high Empower number, you often got less output, not more. That's not living the dream at all. We also tried putting the output creatures in your hand instead, but then we ran into the hand limit! Results: again, not great.

One of the most appealing things we found about Empower was living that dream. You want to see that number growing. You want to make it get as high as possible and scream from the top of Chalman Keep, "ta-da, I did it!" In game design circles, that is sometimes referred to as a Fiero moment. Anything that fought against that feeling was kind of a bummer.

We ultimately found several variables that we thought turned out great! And even though Empower proved to be one of the more difficult mechanics to design around in the set, we think it gave us both the rewarding play pattern and the link to the other Alliance War mechanics that we were after.

The real test will be how it plays in the real world. I'm excited to hear from the players as to which Empower cards you like best. How big of a creature were you able to Wish for? How many swings did you get with Volendrung because of Alchemy? Also, what types of Empower variables would you like to see in the future? We value your Expertise.

Alliance War Developer Diary – Better in 50

Sparkypants Studios May 23, 2019

With each expansion to The Elder Scrolls: Legends comes also stories of trials and triumph that the team went through during its creation. In this Developer Diary series, we take a behind-the-scenes look at some of the learnings from our latest release, Alliance War, with commentary from card designer Paulo Vitor Damo da Rosa.

As we designed The Alliance War and introduced the other five three-attribute combinations to the game, we were constantly on the lookout for ways to also make the 50 card decks more enticing in ways that didn't disrupt what people were already doing.

We felt we could accomplish this organically by printing more synergy-based cards, (since these are naturally stronger with fewer cards in your deck) but we also liked the idea of having more cards like Galyn the Shelterer and Ungolim the Listener, which directly benefit smaller decks by themselves. So, the cycle of what we internally dubbed as "50 Cards Matters" came to be. The idea with these cards is that, much like Galyn and Ungolim, they can be played in 75 card decks but they are clearly stronger in 50.

With this cycle, our biggest challenge was finding something that would play in a similar space to these Uniques while not just being copies of them. We also didn't want them to be Unique Legendary cards, so their power level had to be different. In the end, this is what we came up with:

Baandari Opportunist

Salvage

Gray Viper Brigand

Spiny Haj Mota

Nereid Sister

The first three are pretty straightforward - they get better if you draw multiple of them (though there are certainly ways to artificially draw more copies of them). Salvage is similar, except it wants you to draw multiples of a different card rather than multiples of itself - in this case, an Item.

Baandari Opportunist is the most different of them all, but still plays on the "better in 50 card decks" angle in the same capacity that Ungolim and Galyn do, by adding powerful cards to your deck. I thought it might take some time for players to figure out that Baandari Opportunist was the Green card of the cycle, since it's a little different than the others, but as soon as it was previewed people immediately connected it to the other cards; ironically enough, as I'm writing this, Salvage is the one that slipped people's attentions - I guess they were expecting a creature!

Alliance War Developer Diary – Making Mobilize

Sparkypants Studios May 16, 2019

With each expansion to The Elder Scrolls: Legends comes also stories of trials and triumph that the team went through during its creation. In this Developer Diary series, we take a behind-the-scenes look at some of the learnings from our latest release, Alliance War, with commentary from card designer Paulo Vitor Damo da Rosa.

Of the five alliances in the Alliance War set, Daggerfall was the easiest to slot - the fact that the coalition was made of Orcs (which are represented in Warrior), Bretons (which are Sorcerer) and Redguard (Battlemage) meant it was clearly the choice for the Intelligence/Strength/Endurance triad. In fact, if the Intelligence/Strength/Endurance triad had already existed, we might not have been able to do the Alliance War as a theme, since Daggerfall is so strongly associated with this combination.

From very early on, we also knew we wanted its mechanic to have to do with Items. Strength, Intelligence and Endurance are individually the attributes with the most Items and the attribute pairs have strong associations to them already - the Redguard theme, for example, is Items and Item Sorcerer is a popular deck. That, plus the fact that there had never been an Item-exclusive keyword before, made it particularly appealing. So, we set to work on exactly what Item mechanic we would want.

One of the biggest issues with Item-heavy decks is that you might not draw any creatures, or your opponent might kill all of them and then you end up with a lot of cards you can't play - there's nothing worse than having two Items in hand just waiting for a creature and then drawing a third Item. If we wanted to make a mechanic that incentivized Items, we would have to find a way to solve that as to not punish the player for drawing too many of them. The simplest way we found was to make items that could just be played as creatures if you wanted, which in turn would let you equip your other Items if that was all you had in hand.

Ornamented Sword, Covenant Masterpiece, Staff of Ice

The first iteration of this mechanic had the "Animated Weapon" flavor - think a sentient sword that does the fighting on its own, or Dr. Strange's cape. We thought that was pretty cool but it had one main problem - the Item version was just dominating the creature version. Items are naturally better than creatures since they effectively have Charge and can be used to set up good trades. Steel Scimitar is a very strong card and Solitude Stalwart sees little play, even though they have the exact same stats - if we ever printed a "Solitude Stalwart/Steel Scimitar" card, then it would be played as Steel Scimitar the vast majority of the time, and the creature option would just be a last resort if you had a ton of Items and nothing to equip them with - which was fine, but not ideal.

We left that idea dormant and experimented with a couple of different Daggerfall mechanics. One of them was Forge, which let creatures spend their turn to create an Item that they could equip somewhere else. Another was Refine, which let you upgrade all or some of your Items, (one version, for example, upgraded all your Steel weapons). We even played with the idea of Dual Wielding. Ultimately, we didn't feel like any of these mechanics were doing what we wanted for Daggerfall from a game-play perspective, even if they were good flavor fits.

The breakthrough for Mobilize happened when someone suggested that, if the issue with the original mechanic was that the Item version was just better, we could simply create a 1/1 token to equip it. Suddenly you weren't choosing between +2/+2 or a 2/2, but between +2/+2 and a 3/3, which was a much closer choice. The flavor also captured the Alliance War feeling much better than an "Animated Weapon" did - the Weapon here wasn't sentient, but merely inspired someone to take part in the war. We felt that this flavor really conveyed the idea that the war was happening and it was happening for everyone - even elderly and young people were being dragged into the fight.

Originally, one of my favorite Mobilize cards was this:

• Orc Mail
• Cost: 3
• Mobilize
• +2/+3
• The wielder is an Orc.

I thought it was pretty cool because it would either turn a creature you already have into an Orc to receive Orc synergies or, more importantly, you would be able to play it in your Orc deck knowing that, if you Mobilized it, the Recruit would be an Orc. On the other hand, this drew our attention to an issue, because, if the Recruit wasn't originally an Orc, what was it? It had to be something, it couldn't just be a Recruit with no race.

Ultimately, we settled for just assigning a Recruit type to each Mobilize card, which unfortunately meant Orc Mail's reason to exist was sort of gone. Instead, if you want to Mobilize some Orcs you can, for example, use Covenant Mail.

In the end, I think the coolest part of Mobilize for me is that it enables a completely new style of deck, as it allows you to play a critical mass of items that wasn't possible before (because you would also need a critical mass of creatures). This might not seem like much, but some of the Item synergies currently in the game are very strong, so I look forward to seeing what players can do when they have the option of playing basically as many Items as they want.

Alliance War Developer Diary – Infinite Combos and Swapped Attributes

Sparkypants Studios May 10, 2019

With each expansion to The Elder Scrolls: Legends comes also stories of trials and triumph that the team went through during its creation. In this Developer Diary series, we take a behind-the-scenes look at some of the learnings from our latest release, Alliance War, with commentary from card designer Ryan Siegel-Stechler.

Dominion Battlereeve and Ayrenn, Dominion Queen

Dominion Battlereeve started life as a proposal for Ayrenn, Dominion Queen, (we'll get back to her in a second). We really wanted the leader of the Dominion to be able to trigger Empower easily, potentially multiple times in a turn. Well, what better way to trigger Empower than to have multiple pinging triggers? The original design, however, had one minor difference:

"Summon, Slay, Pilfer, and Last Gasp: Deal 1 damage to your opponent."

It took exactly one playtest to realize what we'd accidentally done. When you summoned Dominion Battlereeve, she'd deal one damage to the opponent...which would trigger Pilfer...which would deal one damage to the opponent. Over and over until they died. Oops!

Dominion Battlereeve, Ayrenn, Dominion Queen

However, that experience ended up being incredibly valuable later on when we continued with the design of Ayrenn, Dominion Queen. We still wanted her to be able to trigger Empower multiple times per turn. Another proposal for that ability that we all liked and were close to locking in was:

"Whenever you draw a card on your turn, deal 1 damage to your opponent."

Because of the accidental infinite combo we'd created with Dominion Battlereeve, however, we were able to identify the major problem with this line of text. Can you spot it?

Bandit Ringleader

Another infinite pinging combo! After trying it in decks, we quickly found that between Dark Rebirth, Altar of Despair and Bandit Ringleader just being good on its own in the Empower shell that the combo was a major problem and amended Ayrenn, Dominion Queen to her "draw an action" version. It's important to learn from your mistakes!

Abnur Tharn and Sai Sahan:

Sai Sahan is a master swordsman. Abnur Tharn is a consummate politician. But would you believe that they once had each other's ability?

We had slotted Abnur Tharn into Agility as the Empire was already increasing the number of Imperials in Agility, while Intelligence was a natural place for Sai Sahan as a Redguard. Originally, we conceived of "Summon: Sai Sahan uses the summon ability of a creature" to play into the trope of a master martial artist using their opponent's greatest strength against them, and "Immune to enemy Wounded creatures. Summon: Give all enemy creatures -1/-1." as representing Abnur Tharn's political machinations.

We met in Baltimore (where the Sparkypants studios are) for a design conference, both to talk about Alliance War and the next set in the future. On a walk to dinner, almost as a joke, it was brought up that maybe we should just swap Abnur Tharn and Sai Sahan. The more we thought about it, though, the less it felt like a joke. Convincing an opponent’s creature to use their ability against them was totally a political move. Sai Sahan is renowned for defeating two armies of assassins and emerging unscathed.

What better way to represent that than an ability that allows him to single-handedly take down an army and not receive a scratch in return? Gentleman Jim Stacey and Speaker Terenus meant these wouldn’t even be the first Redguard and Imperial in their swapped attributes! Sometimes keeping an open mind in design allows you to find a very different perspective. In this case, we were all very happy with the result.

Dev Diary – Tuning Tutors & Manic Monsters

Sparkypants Studios February 18, 2019

Welcome back to another Dev Diary! Last time, we looked back on the design of double cards and how to design a lane condition. Next, we thought it'd be interesting to take a look at specific examples of some of Isle of Madness' recognizable cards and delve deeper into their creation!

Crucible Blacksmith and Wake the Dead

An important design goal is to make every game unique - we want each game to feel different and present players with new game states and decisions. Cards that let you draw a card of choice from your deck, commonly referred to as "tutors" by the card game community, are inherently problematic because they potentially allow decks to consistently do the same thing each game.

Crucible Blacksmith, Wake the Dead

However, tutors also have the potential to lead decks in the opposite direction. They can cause players to run single copies of cards they wouldn't normally play, expanding their options to search for with the tutor. This can greatly increase the diversity of cards you play with and against. For Isle of Madness, we set out to find tutors with restrictions that would keep players sticking to the latter strategy over the former, with the goal of including a tutor in each attribute.

Sadly, we failed in that goal. We tried a wide range of different restrictions, including magicka cost, power, health, keywords, creature types and even rarity. However, most suffered either from being too broad and exploitable, or too restricted to be interesting. Two tutor designs managed to hit the sweet spot between those extremes, Crucible Blacksmith and Wake the Dead, and I'm optimistic that ideas for even more tutors will become viable as the card pool for Legends continues to expand.

Giant Chicken and Tiny Dragon

Giant Chicken and Tiny Dragon had a troubled upbringing. They started life not as collectible cards at all, but as cards created by an early version of the Intelligence attribute's double card, then known as Manic Jack & Demented Jack.

Giant Chicken, Tiny Dragon

Manic Jack was a creature with "Summon: Transform a card in your hand into a Giant Chicken", and Demented Jack did the same for a Tiny Dragon. At this point, Giant Chicken and Tiny Dragon were "vanilla" creatures (they didn't have any abilities) but we fell in love with them nonetheless. Manic Jack and Demented Jack were problematic, though. While either would have been fine designs on their own (and you can find a similar card in the set in Fortress Guard, included because of how well it played with doubles), they didn't work well as a double card.

It was incredibly unclear what you were supposed to do with Manic Jack & Demented Jack - how to evaluate it, what decks you might want to play it in and how to best use it when playing with it. The sheer number of choices the cards presented was overwhelming, doubly so because the value of each half was dependent on the value of the other half since they could transform each other. Because double cards inherently give you extra options, we found that they were a bad place to do designs that provide further flexibility.

Thus, we transformed Manic Jack & Demented Jack into Manic Jack & Manic Mutation, killing our beloved children Giant Chicken and Tiny Dragon. We couldn't live with the guilt, or in a world devoid of the cards, so we struck a deal with Sheogora-I mean, set out to design cards to do these delightful concepts justice.

That's all we have for now – we look forward to shedding more light on what it means to work on Legends at a later date and in the meantime, we hope you enjoy playing Isle of Madness!

Dev Diary – Double Cards & The Art of Lane Conditions

Sparkypants Studios February 11, 2019

Greetings, Outlander! I'm so excited to finally have players joining me here in Isle of Madness. You might be wondering how you got here, so I invite you to journey with me through tales behind the design of Madness.

The craziest part of the story is the beginning…or was it the end? While the team at Sparkypants Studios brought the vision to life, the initial design and creative groundwork for Isle of Madness was completed over eight months ago by Direwolf Digital.

TESL SparkyTeam in-body

The Isle of Madness design team, from left to right: Sam Pardee, Andrew Baeckstrom, Josh Utter-Leyton (that's me!), Yuri Tolpin, Kevin Spak, Matthew Nass. Not pictured: Chuck Kallenbach. It appears that one of us has succumbed to the madness.

Double Cards

For our visit to the Shivering Isles, a theme we knew we wanted to capture was the duality of Mania and Dementia. How could we show that two cards were two sides of the same coin? Our answer was to show them both in one card and double cards were born. The story doesn't just end there though. While we thought the concept of two cards in one was really cool, double cards did have some gameplay concerns we tried to address.

The first is a problem we call "hand glut" - double cards contribute to filling your hand with too many cards. Having close to ten cards in hand is an overwhelming number of options to process every turn, plus running into the maximum hand size and having newly drawn cards destroyed is not fun. To combat this, we made sure that at least one half of each double card (with the exception of the Unique Legendary Rayvat & Tavyar) was cheap.

Drawing multiple double cards greatly exacerbates the hand glut problem; we didn't want players jamming decks full of double cards and having overflowing hands as a result, so we made the decision to do just one double card per attribute. That said, double cards are a mechanic we can do plenty more with and are likely to return to again before too long if they are received well.

Speaking of, double cards being well received was our second concern. Because they have built in card advantage, each component card - when fairly costed - should be significantly weaker than a regular card at the same cost. We worried that the comparison to similarly costed single cards would make these look weak and that they'd be unappreciated as a result.

It's also way more exciting to play with cards that feel powerful, so even if the double card as a whole is playable, it can be unsatisfying actually playing the weaker component cards. Our solution here was, honestly, just to make them powerful. They aren't all tournament-winning caliber, but I do expect several of the double cards to become staples in their attributes. While the individual components of a double may still seem underwhelming at first glance - they all fail the direct comparison to single cards of the same cost - the hope is that the power does shine through when you play with them.

Syl, Duchess of Dementia and Thadon, Duke of Mania

We're always on the lookout for novelty in new game mechanics, and Legends is a rich vein to tap into for that. The two lanes are a unique feature of the game, and it's surprising it's taken us this long to consider adding special lane rules to versus gameplay. It's something that has been experimented with and considered since the game's conception - we were just waiting for the right time to introduce it.

As it turns out, it's rather difficult to find lanes that have good versus gameplay. A good lane design has to:

• Be meaningful. It should make the lane feel noticeably different.
• Not encourage single lane play. (This kills most ideas.)
• Feel different from a support. This mostly boils down to the opponent needing to be able to take advantage of the lane with any normal deck.
• Since the effect is for both players, you need to be able to break the symmetry in some way to actually want to play with the card. Which means you want to be able to build around the lane in some way, which can conflict with the previous bullet point.

Despite it all, we think that the Mania and Dementia lane conditions check off those boxes while still being fun. We'll be back with another dev diary very soon to talk about some specific cards from Legends' latest expansion – we hope to see you there!

Dev Diary - Behind the Houses of Morrowind

Dire Wolf Digital May 1, 2018

Greetings, Outlander! By now, you've gotten to see all the cards in our Houses of Morrowind expansion, so we thought it might be fun to go through some of the cards and tell some of the stories behind their designs. Here goes!

The Oathmen

Once we decided Morrowind was going to be a three-attribute set, it didn't take us long to add something like this cycle to the file.

We like putting cards at common rarity that make you care about the attribute ratio of your Arena deck. Drafting is a lot more fun when you're drawn towards certain cards for reasons other than their raw power level and since every card has an attribute, it's an easy thing to key off of. The "Ally" cycle in the core set, for example, was created so that you might lean towards one of your two attributes as you drafted.

In Houses of Morrowind we wanted to make a cycle that could work in a two-attribute deck, but really sang in three-attribute decks – particularly in Arena. Originally, they were called "Allies" and checked the top two cards in your deck much like the original Allies. We soon decided that we preferred gameplay similar to the cycle cards like "Priest of the Eight" hail from in Heroes of Skyrim. Checking for cards in play gave players a lot more agency and proved a lot more satisfying.

From there, we went through a lot of iteration on the abilities themselves to make sure each was generically useful, but also made sense for the appropriate House’s theme. We think we landed in a place where these push you in the right direction in Arena while acting as almost a fourth three-attribute card for their respective houses in constructed.

Camonna Tong Heavy

When making a set with as many themes as Houses of Morrowind, it's important to create overlap between them. Cards that have different contexts in different Houses make deckbuilding a lot more interesting.

Take Camonna Tong Heavy. He has House Hlaalu's "Plot" mechanic but he definitely appreciates a little help from House Redoran's "Rally" mechanic.

As an aside, we normally would be a bit reluctant to make cards with Summon abilities that reference their own power or health unless the card modifies itself in some way because it's usually a lot shorter and simpler to just say the actual number.

In another set, Camonna Tong Heavy might simply say "Unsummon a creature with less than 4 power." But having Rally in the set made text boxes like this one worthwhile. You can see the same logic at work on Odirniran Necromancer and Grand Inquisitor, which also appear in Rally attributes.

Seyda Neen Courier

This little guy may look unassuming, but he's one of our favorite cards in the set. We're always hunting for elegant designs – that is, cards that are simple but nevertheless have a lot of gameplay to them. And that's what Seyda Neen Courier does.

This is a simple enough card that could appear in any set and could go in any Arena deck. At worst it's a 2-cost 3/1, which isn't embarrassing. But in this set it does so much more.

For House Dagoth, that +3/+0 sword goes a long way towards creating an early 5-power monster, which can turn on cards like Ash Piercer and Ascended Sleeper.

House Telvanni loves that the Courier can give away its sword and leave behind a 0/1 body that's ripe for Betrayal.

And should you find yourself in, say, an aggressive Battlemage deck, (hey, not every deck has to be tri-color) you'll probably appreciate the way that sword can provide a little bit of burst or enable a Rally creature to trade with a burly Guard.

Temple Patriarch

Exalt is a great mechanic because it can help players have things to do throughout the whole game. A card like, say, Vivec City Pilgrim can act as either a 2-cost card OR a 5-cost card, making it more likely you have something to do on turns 2 and 5.

There's just one problem – while playing Exalt creatures early is often correct, it's also not very fun. In general, players vastly prefer to use the text on their cards. So it can be painful throwing your Pilgrim out on turn 2, knowing you'll never get that sweet +2/+2 bonus.

That's where Temple Patriarch comes in. With Patriarch in your deck, playing an Exalt creature early doesn't necessarily mean giving up on its game text. If you can keep it alive and land a Patriarch, you can have your early game cake and your late-game frosting too. It may not always work out, but we found the possibility of doing so made Exalt much more fun to build around.

Writ of Execution & Morag Tong Nightblade

When Morag Tong Nightblade was spoiled, many players did a double-take. What was a slaying assassin doing in Willpower?

The answer is that we were trying to make a statement about the Morag Tong. What makes them different from the Dark Brotherhood? Well, whereas the Brotherhood is a death cult that kills to honor Sithis, the Morag Tong is a respectable organization that upholds the law and kills deserving targets.

Both organizations have cards in Agility – after all, they're sneaky assassins. But whereas the Dark Brotherhood lurks in Endurance, an attribute that has a certain appreciation for death, the Morag Tong's secondary attribute is Willpower, the attribute that seeks to impose its sense of order on the world.

Writ of Execution also deserves a little digital ink. We normally don't like cards to create cards of other attributes, but if the flavor is good enough we can make exceptions. Here the Completed Contract really sold the story and helped solidify the Morag Tong as Willpower-Agility. The clause also gave your opponent an incentive to kill the creature before you could complete your contract – perhaps by Betraying it? – creating a little more gameplay tension.

Cliff Hunter, Cliff Strider, and Cliff Racer Onslaught

When we realized we were making a Morrowind set, we knew we were going to need some Cliff Racers. There was just one problem. In our Core set, we'd defined Cliff Racer as a big dumb Charge guy. Original Cliff Racer has exactly one thing going on, and that thing is Charge.

But we didn't want to add a bunch of big Charge guys with Morrowind. One thing we've been keeping an eye on is the amount of burst damage in the game. Some amount of burst damage is healthy – it gives aggressive and midrange decks hope against control opponents who have otherwise stabilized, making the ends of games more exciting. But too much makes the game feel less interactive, because you don't have a chance to deal with creatures before they hit you. As we add more sets, the risk of the latter situation increases, so we were very careful with those kinds of cards in HoM.

And that's how we arrived at these cards. Cliff Strider gives you more stat points than we typically put on a Charge creature, but can only attack creatures. Cliff Hunter uses "Summon: Battle a creature" as a different take on a Charge creature that can't attack your opponent, (a formula you're likely to see us do more of going forward.)

And finally, Cliff Racer Onslaught follows through on the meme that Morrowind is full of Cliff Racers. But what are these Cliff Racers doing? Descending on unwary travelers, of course! There are ways to allow your new Cliff Racers to hit your opponent, but you usually have to use your existing board to do it, so the damage didn't entirely come out of nowhere.

Fun side note: Early on in testing, Onslaught cost a bit more but made two Racers and targets in each lane to really drive the story home. Trust us: That was too many Cliff Racers – especially when copied with Mushroom Tower.

Caius Cosades

Back in early Heroes of Skyrim design, we came up with a mechanic for the Thieves Guild that we called "Spy." Spy would let you look at two of your opponent's cards, and try to guess which they had in their hand for a benefit.

The mechanic was divisive. Some playtesters loved trying to dissect their opponent's plays and try to determine what they might or might not have; others thought the mechanic was purely random. In the end, the flavor wasn't quite right anyway – yeah, maybe the thieves scouted their targets a bit, but it wasn't the main thing they did. We decided to cut the mechanic, but leave in our favorite card with it – the wily cat you know as Thief of Dreams.

Flash forward to early Houses of Morrowind design. Surely here was the place for Spy – after all, all of the early main quest missions in TES III are about gathering intelligence for Mr. Cosades here. Once again we designed a bunch of Spy cards and once again they were loved by some and hated by some.

So what happened? At the time, the set still lacked a strong identity. Then we hit on the three-attribute set theme. As we contemplated which factions to focus on, we realized that we should be shining a spotlight on the denizens of Morrowind, not their nosy guests from Cyrodiil. Out went the Imperials, and with them went Spy.

Of course, we couldn't do a Morrowind set without capturing the Spymaster himself, so once again Spy got to survive on a single card.

Sun-in-Shadow

We've seen a few people ask: Why Sun-in-Shadow? Of all the great Telvanni characters, why her? The main reason is that we thought she told a cool story as a three-attribute card. In the launch set, we established Argonians in Agility and Endurance.

Sun-in-Shadow is a cunning mage, the quintessential Telvanni schemer, so of course she's an Intelligence card. But she's also carrying her Argonian heritage with her. Being a tri-attribute card told a story about Sun-in-Shadow in a way it wouldn't have for, say, Master Aryon (who you can see on Tel Vos Magister).

That's all we've got time for today. Hopefully this gave you a little insight into our process. Until next time, good luck to your house!