You ever plan something out and think 'oh, this won't take too much time, I'll be fine to continue with these other things as well' and then it turns out you've grossly misread the situation? Yeah, turns out getting entirely new windows installed in your house is both a multi-day job and a fairly disruptive one, who knew!
This week we'll be talking about the importance of planning ahead.
More Core
First, the winner of the latest WCDC! Congratulations to Sinth and their Fresh Apple.
We'll look forward to their theme next week, too!
Proper Planning Prevents Pmistakes
This might be a bit shorter than my usual sections - more of a rumble than a ramble - but talking last week about design space got me thinking about one of my own mistakes in that area, from back when I still regularly updated new hero ideas.
This one comes in the form of my Experimenter hero. A former student of Professor Putricide, Xel Grimwarden decided she'd had enough of experimenting on herself and went out into the wide world to find some more interesting test subjects. The Experimenter class focused on buffs, 0-Attack synergy, and swapping (usually Attack/Health swapping).
That keyword on the Grim Sludge - React - is what I'll be talking about. It was something I fell in love with when they first introduced it to Hearthstone (unkeyworded, obviously) and I was so sure that I could make a bunch of awesome designs with it... without actually coming up with more than a couple of designs, first. That turned out to be a little bit of a mistake.
Now, I said that they'd already made a card with this keyword, so what does it do? Well, during your opponent's turn, a minion with React gains a bonus. The Hearthstone cards with this mechanic are the Tar series of minions - Tar Creeper, Tar Lurker and Tar Lord - which you can see I based the token on. Additionally, you could argue that Shimmering Courser works in a functionally identical way; after all, you can only cast spells on your turn, so it might as well say "React: Can't be targeted by spells or Hero Powers".
I had my base, and the first design I came up with was pretty cool, I thought - a minion with "React: Your opponent's hand is visible.", which encouraged the opponent to either kill it or play quickly, to prevent you from having too long to view their cards (though in practice you could take a screenshot or even just write everything down, obviously). I made something Poisonous on the opponent's turn, so that it was hard to attack into but not threatening to attack with. And then... I made a variation on Shimmering Courser. I made some that raised Attack. I started making less and less of them in general, focusing more on the other areas of the class which were so much easier to make interesting.
Eventually, it got to the point that I considered just reworking the class to remove it altogether. This idea that had so captured me turned out to be hard to work with, a drain on my creativity and excitement for the class. I ended up putting the class down "for a few weeks" and just... never picking it back up.
I was sold on an idea, and I didn't do the requisite research to make sure that it would actually pan out. Like scheduling window installation, foolishly not realising that it would be fairly noisy and disruptive; or window shopping in general, buying into the allure of the product in the window and only realising as you're putting it on later that yellow is really not my colour.
Whenever you're doing something big, be it a fan creations project or something in your real life, always remember to plan ahead. You can't predict everything, but you can prevent a lot of silly mistakes with just the most cursory of glances into an idea.
The Monster Mash
Finally, our competition this week! We've gathered a group of deserving species together, and asking you to come up with some more new representatives for them in Hearthstone. Now, I'm not saying that a Tortollan would probably get a bit more attention from me... but I'm not not saying that either, y'feel? Please, I've just been nerfed.
Comments
If Blizzard gave me a coin for every time I was in the same situation, I'd have 2 coins. Which isn't enough for a pack, but it's weird that it happened twice.
Once was with probably my first entry into the Class Design Competition back on Hearthpwn. I decided to make a 'Weaponsmith'. Turns out, there isn't much you can accomplish with weapons, especially when your keyword revolved around having your weapon active during your opponent's turn.
The second was with an expansion centred around an elemental war. The (then) 9 classes were split into 3 sub-factions, a la Gagetzan, and the idea was that each faction would have a keyword that was strong against another faction and weak vs the third. Turns out, something like that is almost impossible to balance.
Man I saw that apple design years ago.
That's what I first thought too. Also it looks cool but it would probably never see constructed play.