Had the first go of the battle cube over the weekend. Reporting back with my initial findings.
- Concept was very fun.
- Battles always felt worth going for.
- Was interesting to have another axis to win on outside of combat damage.
Some observations and improvements I'm looking to make ahead of next time.
- Originally worked on the idea that winning 5 battles out of 9 was a victory. Quickly realised that was easy to make mathematically impossible so dropped it down to 4.
- Originally started the 9 battles on their normal starting counters. Next time will start them a little higher (probably base +2) and make it more difficult to add counters on (especially across multiple battles at a time) to help
balance cards like
Render Inert. One player played
Render Inert on turn three and immediately claimed one "victory point" (the colloquial name we gave to winning a battle, 4 "victory points" = a win) and had a
Serra Angel ready to go on turn 4. Partly this is because winning 4 battles is roughly the equivalent to doing 20 damage (as most start around 5) but unlike attacking life points directly, you get a tremendous amount of advantage for winning a battle compared to doing 5 or so damage to an opponent. This was somewhat negated by the nature of multiplayer, but starting the battles a little higher should help too. Which leads me on to:
- Needs more incentive to attack life totals too. Winning a battle or doing 5 to an opponent are basically the same for the attacker (short of the potential for more blockers), but the outcome is hugely different to the game state. Going to add in the cycle of curses that promote attacking opponents for upside (
Curse of Disturbance et al) and add in some more effects that
drain life totals when things happen. My life total was the only one that got into single figures (thanks to Prickle
Faeries) and only then did people
consider attacking me rather than battles. More incidental life loss could put in work.
- Burn was VERY strong. Need to limit this to less efficient burn spells. Probably just the ones that reference battles specifically.
- Proliferate was good. Repeatable proliferate on a stick where the only cost was mana was too good. Very easy to put battles out of reach. Will be limiting proliferate to one shot effects from spells or things where the cost is steep such as
Plaguemaw Beast.
- Less gimmick creatures. I had originally included 4 copies of things like
Medicine Runner and
Quarry Hauler. These are fine, especially when I sure up whites
Blink theme, but actually some decent utility creatures or just big dumb idiots with trample would probably be preferable.
Colossal Dreadmaw can attack a battle pretty effectively and over the course of a game, is going to be more impactful than the one counter
Quarry Hauler manipulated. I got too cute. Need to get less cute.
- More synergy with the back sides of the battles. One of the battles that was randomly selected cared about Transformed permanents. One card about creatures sharing creature types. These two got no interest what so ever. One that wasn't selected but could have been cares about number of artifacts, of which there weren't that many. Going back to the previous point, it's far more important to create synergies rather than cuteness. Deeper themes across the colours to ensure all battles have the potential to be good.
All of these take aways are fairly minor (and things I probably would have smoothed out better had I had more time before we had chance to try it the first time). The draft and gameplay was still super fun. It was really interesting to have a different axis to play the game on. Might even add in a few more axis like Mill and Poison if I can work them in without compromising the above points.
Once I've made the tweaks I want to make, I'll put together a proper list and share it here for those who are interested to take a look at and maybe suggest some ideas. If you like cubes / drafting, I'd recommend this "Battle cube" format. It was a lot of fun.