Star Trek CCG Design-a-card Seminar: Part 2

Last time, we had gotten as far as an event card with a cost of 1 called The Text of the Kosst Amojen, with this game text:: "To play this event, you must command a Kai or a [Baj] Treachery personnel. Plays in your core. 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 before the participants started picking it apart. First a practical matter – there was now so much game text that there wasn't quite enough room for the lore. But Evan tracked and kerned the type enough to pull the "widowed" last word up to the first lore line. Someone pointed out that you could play several copies and use each once each turn, so perhaps it should be unique. Since that also fits storyline (there's only one Book of the Kosst amojan), it gets a "unique" dot in the title.

Another practical matter, this one gameplay-related: shuffling takes extra time, so placing it under the deck would be better; you still may have trouble getting it back. A sidelight of this discussion concerned whether it should say "beneath your deck" or "on the bottom of your deck." (Yes, wording discussions do get into such fine points, and with good reason: to eliminate all possible ambiguities.) The latter won out.

Brian points out that you'll actually get only the third best card from your discard pile (your opponent will remove the best one from the game and bury the next best one under your deck), but it's still powerful because even the third best will probably be a good card. He said as it was, he would build a whole deck around it. That was a red flag to the designers that it probably needed a greater cost to play. Yet others said it was already too difficult to get into play, as there are only two Kais and one other Bajoran Treachery available. What to do?

Well, maybe it would work better as an interrupt, so you get only one use out of it before it goes away, rather than staying in play to use each turn. So Evan copied it into an interrupt template. That seemed to call for a more "active" title, so we pulled from the lore to rename it Studied By Evil and found another quote for the lore. It no longer needs a unique dot, and we could remove "Plays in your core." But since it's an interrupt we have to specify the timing; we could either say when it plays or just keep the Order label, which we did. By the time we were done with it, there was no longer any room for lore, so that disappeared.

So how does this look? Well, it isn't broken (good), but now no one would bother to play it because you can only do it three times per game (bad) due to the deck-buliding limits. In addition, Tim pointed out that with the new title and no lore, you can't even tell this is the Kosst Amojan – lore does often play an important function in identifying the storyline. Besides that, it's too wordy, so no one will want to bother to deal with all that text.

This led to another flurry of changes: remove the once per turn restriction (you've only got three copies anyway), select only two cards, and remove the interrupt from the game. Remove the Treachery business and make it command of a Kai or a Prylar that lets you play it (there are lots of prylars including a universal). Now it's much easier to get into play. Finally, it was decided that even the "remove from game" text was not really necessary. So the final card was quite different from the first draft.

The seminar wound up with some discussion of alternatives available if the image turned out to be too low quality to use (find a subsitute image, have the art department rework the image, do another image pull), the approval process (a complicated tangle of which actors have approval rights under what circumstances), and reasons why a card might be rejected by Paramount (a fairly rare occurrence, and usually rectified by modifying some feature like the title or lore). We have no assurance that "Studied By Evil" will ever actually make it into a Star Trek CCG set in any form, but everyone enjoyed the insights into the design process – and the occasional spoilers of upcoming cards – so much that the seminar ran well over the allotted hour.

Thanks to Evan and Brad, and to the other members of the TCG Design Studio present, for shedding some light on the often-mysterious process of designing our favorite card game!

Kathy McCracken
(Major Rakal)
Webmaster and Intelligence Officer

November 3, 2002