HERO CARDS by Scaredgirl

[Evil Hamster]

I do like the quests idea. I just hope there's one that will let us win a pulverizer

Still it would seem easy (from a non-programmer!) for him to just put out a few new cards once a week while he's working on the quest system! Just a little something to keep the interest up. Plus more new cards will help to reduce the so-called seeming "overpowereness" of rainbow. (hehe I made up a word!)

[Cisco]

actually been wanting to email zan about  card creation. It be nice if he let the community create cards from design etc . thene he would just having to accept or not and add it to the game, or put it in a test phase. He already has his hands full with all the other stuff and goes to work like everybody else so I see no reason for him to be against it. Same can be done with quests. Only thing is havn´t really seen him accept any idea that wasn´t his so....

[Evil Hamster]

It would be awesome if he would do that- even if he just put them in a beta or the trainer. Then we could playtest them before he added them to the real game.

[Kumlekar]

Can't blame him for wanting to keep his code underwraps.  The more community access it has, the more vunerable his server is.  As for 3-5 cards a week, thats alot of work if the cards have abilities.  Every card needs significant amounts of bug testing unless it recycles abilities.  I'm assuming hes not making this a full time job and has maybe 10-15 hours a week working on his code.  A single card with a new ability I would assume takes at least two hours minimum.  Add in all the bugs and glitches, that time is very quickly taken up.  He probably is spending time on server maintence too, but I really don't know what that would involve.  With cards and new features of the size being suggested on this thread, it will be awhile before we see it released.

As for a card creation system, somethign like that would be exceedingly hard to create without releasing the source code, or at least having the problem read a scripting language, which wouldn't do most people any good any ways.

[Terroking]

The wyrm queen (while not having a new ability like all the others) would make dive/PU decks much, much better and i love most of the ideas and all of these would be epic and most would effectively counter my rainbow deck, only problem i have is with joker, and how he mutates his own creatures, making it all luck to see who gets the better abilities, or phase drags or graboids with freeze

i agree that mass mutation would be fun, and you could get some weird mutants really fast, but it would just cause utter chaos (which is rather the point of entropy i think) to both you and your enemy, maybe a quanta scramble like with scrambler would be better? only on a larger scale of about 10-15 quanta or maybe 5-10 if that is too much

[jmizzle7]

The wyrm queen (while not having a new ability like all the others) would make dive/PU decks much, much better and i love most of the ideas and all of these would be epic and most would effectively counter my rainbow deck, only problem i have is with joker, and how he mutates his own creatures, making it all luck to see who gets the better abilities, or phase drags or graboids with freeze

i agree that mass mutation would be fun, and you could get some weird mutants really fast, but it would just cause utter chaos (which is rather the point of entropy i think) to both you and your enemy, maybe a quanta scramble like with scrambler would be better? only on a larger scale of about 10-15 quanta or maybe 5-10 if that is too much

All you would have to do with Joker card is blow up his guys and use this ability, and voila! Army of mutants.

[Cisco]

Didn´t think goin that far. Simply have a group of people design cards . Scaredgirl already has a thread for that. the ideas of what kind of cards gets submitted daily in this forum. just a lot more structured and thought thrue maybe adding a voting system etc. Something to send zan, he will have to do the work obviously in adding it unless he gives certain people accsess wich won´t happen. be stupid to let other people get there hands on the code as this site is beeing targeted  quite a bit as is. as for 3-5 cards a week.... that is way off the charts . even ten a month is quite a bit. This is just some brainstorming I´m doin here anyways havn´t sent anything yet. will do it tommorow though just to see what he thinks about it. the hero cards wouldn´t be harder to add as any other cards so we will see.

[Evil Hamster]

The abilities are already programmed. I would assume that any creature with "dive" calls the "dive" subroutine whenever the ability is used. Otherwise he'd have to program for every possible mutation result 

Adding new cards with existing abilities wouldn't be too hard. Adding new abilities to the game would be another matter.

My guess is the artwork probably takes as much time as coding a new card. But for testing/balancing/debugging in the trainer or a "beta" version of the game he could just use some kind of placeholder art.

[Kumlekar]

Just curious, Is flash object oriented?
Yes what you say about function calls is true, but how many cards with the same design and just different numbers do you want?  Theres only a few elements that would benefit from more basic creatures, even ones with recycled abilities.  Every sorcery and permanent would have to be dones from scratch, meaning that all we would really have left is weapons, shields and creatures to be easily made.  Thats a pretty small selection.

My issue isn't that its a bad idea, its that the energy would be better used elsewhere.  As for art, I'm a programmer, not an artist, I really don't know how long that would take.

[Evil Hamster]

I think you just agreed with me?

An increase in the number of cards will increase the number of viable decks and reduce the dominance of "rainbow" decks, even if they are just variations on existing cards.

New abilities will require more coding time than variations on existing cards.

The card pool is still small enough it can benefit from more variety even if there aren't any new mechanics introduced.

The last two cards added- sundial and scarab- use devour and hasten, already existing abilities. Of course sundial introduced a "pause" feature- that required some specific programming. Scarab added a "X=number of scarabs" feature- I haven't written any programs in a decade but that doesn't seem TOO difficult 

[Kumlekar]

Its funny, I never intended not to    I guess we'll have to make sure that never happens again! 

I guess when you were last coding structured code was standard?  I have no idea how complex the elements code is, but the sundial code could have been either simple as hell or extremely complex.  It really depends on how attacking and permanents interact usually.  Scarab is well... yeah, really simple.

Even so, depending on the structure of the program, something as simple as sundial could be a nightmare.  I'm assuming Zan had enough foresight to prevent most of those issues though.

[Scaredgirl]

The wyrm queen (while not having a new ability like all the others) would make dive/PU decks much, much better and i love most of the ideas and all of these would be epic and most would effectively counter my rainbow deck, only problem i have is with joker, and how he mutates his own creatures, making it all luck to see who gets the better abilities, or phase drags or graboids with freeze

i agree that mass mutation would be fun, and you could get some weird mutants really fast, but it would just cause utter chaos (which is rather the point of entropy i think) to both you and your enemy, maybe a quanta scramble like with scrambler would be better? only on a larger scale of about 10-15 quanta or maybe 5-10 if that is too much

I agree that mass mutation is all about luck and could be in some situations very OP. But then again everyone likes mutants so I don't see a big problem with that. Sure you might get some insane super mutant but so can your opponent.

I would do a rainbow deck with multiple Graveyards, Rain of Fire's and the Joker. Then just kill everyone with Rain of Fire and transform all those Skeletons to Mutants.

Quantum scramble would be quite meh, because if the opponent is rainbow also, it would do nothing.