I am now on the verge of the homemade cube being as complete as I am ever getting with the project. I have finished my reviews on the cards and will be posting those starting now and over the course of the next month or so. A big haul of corrections and improvements arose from that effort and I will doing a 4th print run imminently containing those improvements and a handful of new cards akin to those I snuck out in the 3rd print run. The arrival of those cards will mark the "complete" point for me and what a fantastic little journey it has been. Magic has taken me on many a wonderful little journey in my time from travel to friends to achievements to understandings, and this creative one is vying for that top spot.
The homemade cube is already as good as finished in terms of playing well and having enough of the right sorts of thing available to it and the fourth print run will add a little polish and a chunk of depth to that really underscoring the completion. I will then continue to tinker, designing new cards that I think are interesting or fun and seeing where that leads. This will be a pretty slow process and should do little more than keep it fresh and interesting, as new releases do for real cubes. It will certainly mean a whole lot less in the way of content about it so I might actually get back to writing about real cards after this final big dump of card reviews.
Much as I mostly did the reviews for myself and the benefits they bestow on the project they are useful notes and a better set of complete and together spoilers than I have previously managed to offer for the homemade cube. These reviews have been done in much the same style as I used to review real cards for their potential in cube but with a lot more focus on the design elements and what I can do to improve them. Rather than rate power and playability as I normally do I rated the power and design out of ten for each card. Playability I rolled back into the power stat as I did way back in the day when I just gave a single mark out of ten for any given card. It is meaningful enough just having a single power rating and one is well able to presume that fair cards with high power numbers are getting the play while those that have lower numbers despite seeming good are perhaps a little narrower. The power rating simply translates to how well it performs in cube on a purely winning perspective. The design rating has nothing to do with that at all and relates to much more abstract things like how fun the card is. Game logistics, ease of understanding, aesthetic, all these things that I largely ignore in all my other reviews become relevant when I have control over the card design!
On top of the ratings I gave each card I have earmarked those that are not in current use with one of a selection of terms so you might have an idea of why the card is not in use;
cut - a card I have simply cut from the drafting cube because it is not suitable nor easily fixed. This is common for poorly designed cards, some experimental cards, narrower cards, and cards I made too much redundancy for. These cards, while not suitable for limited cube are cards I would like to include for some constructed events or things moving that way like a rotisserie draft.
banned - the equivalent of annulment. These are cards I wish to no longer exist at all for use in any format relating to the homemade cube. These are such egregious design fails that they should only be used as things to demonstrate what not to do.
side lined - a card that isn't right now but doesn't merit changing and so gets to sit on the bench until the meta calls for it. Perhaps a card that is so similar to an existing real card that we are broadly familiar with how it plays and what it does and it has been benched to allow other newer more interesting cards to see more of the action.
reworking - a card that I like but isn't quite designed right and needs some changes to get where I want it. Those cards that are warping the format too much in their incorrect state while awaiting a print run need to be benched.
retuning - as above but it is minor stuff without any fundamental change to the card. Usually a power/toughness change, perhaps a minor keyword or the cost on an activation. These are typically more balance issues than design issues.
No comments:
Post a Comment