Design Log: Stardate 04.08.2003

The Changing Face of "The Text of the Kosst Amojan"

One of the most popular features of DecipherCons past has been the "Design-a-Card" seminars, where attendees get a taste of what it's like to design a card. The designers will lead the group through the hands-on process, pitfalls and all, of designing what could potentially be a real card some day. I say "potentially" because there are no guarantees that anything close to the design the participants come up with will ever see the light of day.

For example, at DecipherCon 2000, seminar attendees put together a card called "Original Humanoid" (with an image from the TNG episode "The Chase") that was unworkable, according to designer Evan Lorentz. "There was a lot wrong with it. It was too specific, you'd only ever need one copy of it, and fixing it would have thwarted the intent of The Big Picture. It was more concerned with 'storytelling' [about the image] than with decent gameplay." So, with apologies to the seminar participants, "Original Humanoid" was never seriously considered for production as a real card.

Not so with the product of DecipherCon 2002's design seminar. The participants selected an image of the book of the Kosst Amojan (from the DS9 episode "The Changing Face of Evil") from our available-image database and spent over an hour designing a card to go with it. You can check out the details of that design process in the two articles linked below, but in a nutshell, the first draft was an event card called "The Text of the Kosst Amojan," with a quote from the episode for lore: "There's an old saying... 'He who studies evil, is studied by evil.'" It had a cost of 1 to play, and its game text was (approximately – unfortunately, I didn't record it exactly) "To play this event, you must command a Kai or a [Baj] Treachery personnel. Plays in your core. Order – Select three cards from your discard pile. An opponent chooses one to place in your hand, one to shuffle into your deck, and one to be removed from the game. You may do this only once each turn."

That was only a start, and subsequent brainstorming eventually transformed it into an interrupt named "Studied by Evil", with a different quote for its lore, requiring command of a Kai or a Prylar, selecting only two cards instead of three, none of which was removed from the game. As my DecipherCon article pointed out, "the final card was quite different from the first draft" and cautioned that "We have no assurance that "Studied By Evil" will ever actually make it into a Star Trek CCG set in any form." But everyone had fun and enjoyed the insights into the design process – a successful design-a-card session by any measure.

Fast forward to April 8, 2003, and the revelation of card number 67 in the new Energize expansion set (drumroll, please...):

Well, how about that? It turns out that the first draft was pretty darned close after all!

Card type, title, lore, cost, and the "once each turn" restriction are all dead on. (The addition of the "unique" dot was actually one of the first changes that was made to the initial draft during the design seminar, but that disappeared as unnecessary when the card became an interrupt, and then was restored in the final real event card.)
The requirement that you command a Kai or [Baj] Treachery personnel to play the event has become part of the implied cost of using the event's game text – not only do you have to command one of those personnel (Prylar disappeared from the text again), but you have to stop that personnel too.
The two-card selection from the interrupt version is what made it into the final version, with two of the three effects from the event version, but overall the function is essentially the same.

Of all the potential Star Trek CCG cards that have been generated at DecipherCon design seminars (this is the third), this one was by far the closest to being a viable real card right out of the gate. "Original Humanoid," as mentioned above, just didn't make it at all; the 1999 "Too Many Cooks" eventually surfaced as "Oops!" – sort of. Says Evan, "There was not a a lot of similarity. Too Many Cooks was an elaborate attempt to counter both red-shirting and mega-teaming," and, like Original Humanoid, tried too hard to adhere to storyline (because there were six Ferengi in the image, there was a penalty for having more than five personnel in the Away Team, which was too restricitve). Not only the card title but also the gameplay was altered considerably, taking the published "Oops!" rather far from its "Too Many Cooks" roots. In comparison, "The Text of the Kosst Amojan" came through the transformation from dream card to the real thing remarkably intact – even though ironically the first draft was closer than the "final" seminar product.

An aside on keywords: not only does this card have one of the three new keywords in Energize – Pah-wraith – but it also references another of the new keywords – Prophet – in a backhanded way; it works only on cards that don't have the Prophet keyword.

Kathy McCracken
Major Rakal
Star Trek Intelligence Officer

April 8, 2003

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