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2 years ago ::
Sep 08, 2011 - 5:15PM
#331
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MaRo's article explains that they found out that their original DFC implementation wouldn't work. It has the appearance that by this time it was too late in the production process to come up with a proper alternative, and they made the mistake to salvage the mechanic with a sub-par implementation instead of shelving it.
Of course we would never hear such a story from any official Wizards employee (until at least several years after the fact, when we can all look back and laugh about it), but things like this aren't exactly unheard of in the corporate world. There are deadlines to be met, and sometimes stuff gets pushed out the door in a less-than-optimal configuration. On budget, on time, on target, pick two, etcetera.
In my ever so humble purist design standpoint, if a mechanic cannot be implemented gracefully, then it should not be implemented at all. Feel free to argue that hassle with checklists and sleeves still constitutes "gracefully".
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2 years ago ::
Sep 08, 2011 - 6:45PM
#332
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Date Joined:
Aug 20, 2008
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It has the appearance that by this time it was too late in the production process to come up with a proper alternative, and they made the mistake to salvage the mechanic with a sub-par implementation instead of shelving it.
I would not interpret things quite that way.
What we have - double-faced cards that can be played with sleeves, and the checklist card to also allow playing without sleeves - is pretty much the correct, best, and only way one can do it if one insists on having double-faced cards.
So I can't say that they must have done this in a rush, and they implemented DFCs badly. Except for one relatively minor thing - a place to put the name of the card on a checklist card, so it's as readily identifiable as a normal card - there isn't an obvious way they could have done this better.
Doing it instead of flip cards - or instead of simply not bothering?
Cards like Civilized Scholar/Homicidal Brute do capture the horror flavor of Innistrad well.
Full-sized cards are more attractive in appearance than flip cards.
Double-sided foil cards are exciting, and will sell packs.
Coming up with weird ideas to make everyone happy since 2008! I have now started a blog as an appropriate place to put my crazy ideas.
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2 years ago ::
Sep 09, 2011 - 12:41AM
#333
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What we have - double-faced cards that can be played with sleeves, and the checklist card to also allow playing without sleeves - is pretty much the correct, best, and only way one can do it if one insists on having double-faced cards.
Sorcery and token together in eveyr pack is a better way. They should have shelved it until printing technology made that possible.
That they chose the best method within the constraints they had does not make it adequate or acceptable.
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2 years ago ::
Sep 09, 2011 - 6:13AM
#334
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The champion mechanic would also have worked fine. Not knowing the exact who, what, where and when of transformations is an important element of the horror genre. Better flavor than "oh, there's the mayor, he's a werewolf". How many mayors does Avabruk have anyway?
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2 years ago ::
Sep 09, 2011 - 7:35AM
#335
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The champion mechanic would also have worked fine. Not knowing the exact who, what, where and when of transformations is an important element of the horror genre. Better flavor than "oh, there's the mayor, he's a werewolf". How many mayors does Avabruk have anyway?
They keep holding elections everytime they discover the last one was a werewolf.
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2 years ago ::
Sep 15, 2011 - 9:20PM
#336
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The champion mechanic would also have worked fine. Not knowing the exact who, what, where and when of transformations is an important element of the horror genre. Better flavor than "oh, there's the mayor, he's a werewolf". How many mayors does Avabruk have anyway?
I do like the champion mechanic, and I have previously advocated it, but I feel like I have to say that there is a signficant drawback: it makes building a werewolf deck weird. The werewolves would say "champion a human," so you need human targets. This means that at least half of your creatures should be human, and probably more like 2/3rds. So it would feel weird having a werewolf deck have a minority of actual werewolves.
Still I think it would be just a different experience once people got used to it. And it would be fun to turn certain famous cards (or legends) into werewolves.
I do hope they tried this implementation out before throwing in the double faced cards, and found some other fatal flaws in that implementation.
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