We know that you need to balance a card based on card cost, but we also know that we need to balance a card based on metagame.
These are some ways to tweak cards to find a good spot for the metagame.
Say you make a creature with the Lightning ability on a stick. (5 Damage).
This is your base concept that you want to work with.
Now you need to consider some things.
What element should it go in first of all. Each element has it's own unique synergies and strengths and weaknesses. You want to find something that it fits in thematically, has synergy, and is not redundant.
Next you need to consider the cost of the ability.
Having a low cost ability (say, 1
) increases the value of the card. Having a higher cost ability (4
) decreases the value of the card.
This gives you the option of either A) making the creature easy to play but difficult to use it's ability regularly, or B) making the creature much more difficult to play but making it easier for it to use the ability.
You want to tweak these levels until you get a metagame position that is neither too powerful or not strong enough.
The next thing to consider is HP. This represents an interesting balance point. Basically, it decides how vulnerable you want the ability to be.
Anything with 1-4 Hp can be considered relatively low. These are creatures that die easily in one or 2 hits. This means that you increase the chances that the ability will be countered in some way.
Anything with 5-13ish HP is hardy. It can survive a reasonable amount of hits. This means that you want the creature to be more difficult to get rid of, but harder to play.
Anything with about 14+ HP has extra benefits from high HP advantage cards such as Acceleration, Catapult, and Gravity Pull. It also takes the point of becoming so difficult to kill that it will be ignored in most cases. This increases the cost of the card greatly.
A creature with 0 HP is the most interesting one. It does 2 things:
A) it requires a second card for it's ability to be of use, and
B) it sets synergy with only a few specific elements.
Both of these terms reduce the card's quanta cost by a large margin and affect it's metagame position greatly.
The last thing you should consider is the creature's attack.
Basically you use what you have from the last points and you add attack from 0 until you reach a cost that reflects how difficult you want the creature to be played. If you want a card to be very difficult to play, then simply raise it's attack to a high amount. If you want the creature to be slightly easier to play, give it lower attack.
Once you establish these key points, your card takes up a certain metagame position. There are limits to this, however.
You don't want a card to be too strong. in the metagame. If your balanced quanta cost ends up being 10
or more, then depending on the card, you may consider nerfing some parameters to get a more balanced metagame position.
At the same time, if your card is so weak that it's balanced cost is less than 2
, you may want to consider buffing some parameters to get a playable card.
Personally, I think the cards that offer the most balanced position in the metagame cost around 3-6
. Too little or too much and it either becomes either not worth a card slot, or potentially game breaking.
That's all I really have to say for this rant, I hope this helps or at least sparks up some discussion.
