My Rebellion Review (2/2): My take on the set design

Now that the entirety of Rebellion has been shown, I'm posting some thoughts about it. Earlier, I posted my picks for the strongest cards.

In this post, I want to focus a little more on game design and the Rebellion set: what do I think works, what do I like less, and what do I think this set says about the future of the game?

The Great - The "please use weapons training on me" cycle

In Magic the Gathering (and probably other TCGs, but I'm less familiar with them) a cycle is a set of cards across the colors (or splinters, or factions, etc.) that share features. This can sometimes be names, artwork, or rules.

Splinterlands is no different, and summoners are probably the best and simplest example. As early as Alpha, there were cycles of summoners across splinters that cost the same mana and had similar abilities.

So that cycles exist in Rebellion is nothing new. BUT this is the first time I've been wowed by the design that goes past "here are some cards that all cost 0" (the fiends in CL).

In Rebellion, we get a cycle of 5 2 mana cards with no attack and 3 abilities. So far so boring. BUT, each of these cards, at level 10, gets an ability that triggers off of attacks (e.g., Blast). So how do you activate them? Weapons Training!

And this is where I really want to give kudos to the design team. This is a hugely synergistic set of cards that allow them to be undercosted relative to their skills and stats because they need a second card with weapons trainer to be fully effective. I can't wait to see how these play out and how powerful they are.

The existence of this cycle gives me hope for the future of Splinterlands as the devs are able to come up with interesting abilities AND crucially cards that maximally leverage those abilities, and that design really shows through in this cycle.

The bad - The Dual Element summoners

But my praise is not universal - there are some missteps I think in this set that will make designing cards harder in the future.

My vote for biggest misstep this set is dual element summoners - 5 summoners (possibly 10 when we include designed summoners later) who allow to use cards from 2 specific splinters.

This ability is incredibly powerful, as it allows you to choose the rockstars from 2 splinters. Over the history of splinterlands, the dragon splinter has reigned supreme because of exactly this ability.

While this ability is cool and fun and I applaud the devs for being able to code this, I think it's going to hamper card design in the long run. Now, instead of comparing each card to those in its splinter and the neutrals, it now needs to be directly tested with every other card in the game. This adds a huge amount of additional work in balancing cards, and I think it's going to mean overpowered combos will slip through with greater frequency.

What's more, I think these summoners are undercosted (fortunately this is an easy fix). Right now, in Modern with the "summoners give no abilities" ruleset, these summoners will be objectively the best - both cheaper in mana and more versatile than any other summoner currently in the game. Even without that ruleset, the mana discount + cherrypicking 2 splinters' best cards will likely more-than overcome the stat/ability boosts of other summoners.

As a comparison, the soulbound summoners are 6 mana for an ability usually seen on a 3-mana summoner + the ability to bring a single card from another splinter (gladiators). This ability is (generally) less powerful than the ability to bring in the best cards from another splinter, yet these cost 3 more mana than the dual element summoners.

And on top of that, it makes designing future dual-element cards hard, because they can effectively be comboed with any splinter at any time. Even with only 5 dual summoners, you can always force a dual-element card in any lineup if you want. This makes designing such cards hugely problematic from a balance perspective. The price of Zyriel has shot up as a result of this (and from weapons training getting a buff). I really liked the design of Zyriel initially, but now I am hesitant for future dual splinter cards because of the difficulty of balancing them that is brought on by the existence of dual element summoners.

The weird - Chonky bois with low attack that aren't tanks

There is a set of cards in this set that I can't tell what I think. The above 8 cards are all really high health/shield cards with relatively low attack power for their mana cost. Multiple of them have abilities designed to put them in the front line (flank, shield bash) but have attack types not generally seen in the front (magic and range) and often missing many of the damage mitigation skills needed for good tanks.

I can't tell if these cards are good. These cards can eat a lot of attacks, but not as well as dedicated tanks, and I think the lack of damage will hurt your team overall. So I think they're not great, but I'm sure I'm missing some ways of really making them strong or certain rulesets that will really highlight their power.

The ugly - card frame design

I hate being negative, but I hate the card design of the frames (the art for each monster is pretty solid!). The icography has taken a step down from before. Now, the rarity and splinter and weirdly small icons on the top of the card and they're both duplicated in non-intuitive ways elsewhere. The rarity can be figured out from the level bar on the bottom, which looks like a low-effort progress bar and detracts from the card. The splinter can (if you're not colorblind) be sussed out from the background, but the backgrounds all look like lazy word art patterns. The dual summoners, which use half of each background, really spotlight how hard it can be to tell these apart (check out the earth/life summoner especially). Doing the backgrounds this way made it harder for each card to stand out with its own bespoke background, and really makes each card feel cheap, because they are literally copied and pasted across the entire splinter. The patterns for the most part don't really even signify the splinter (except maybe waves for water), so again, good luck if you're colorblind.

Sorry for the rant, but this is the one case where I feel this set is simply a downgrade over previous work.

Conclusions

Anyway, that is three of my current takeaways from card design. I think there's some great stuff in there, some bad stuff (most of which I think can be ameliorated with a simple mana cost increase on dual summoners), and some weird designs which may take a while to play out.

Overall, I think the team did a good job avoiding powercreep, and it makes me not too worried about it in future sets. \

Referral

Interested in getting in on the game with the release of a new set? Want to start off with some cards? Use my referral link below and I'll send you some cards to get you started!

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