Post by: ZephyrPhantom on June 26, 2015, 08:07:19 pm
(http://i1074.photobucket.com/albums/w403/ZephyrPhantom/CIandA/CIAProject1FinalMedium_zpsnhjwofkr.png)
"Instakill" by Knight-Curator Zblader, ft. two guys I don't know and art by andretimpa (genre sci-fi)
"Instakill" by Knight-Curator Zblader, ft. two guys I don't know and art by andretimpa (genre sci-fi)
Over the years that EtG has existed, the concept of 'forbidden' mechanics has been hotly debated, though often without clear boundaries. One of these mechanics is the condition of Instakill, i.e. the ability for a something to immediately kill a creature without caring about its HP.
In spite of that, EtG does indeed have a way to instantly kill creatures by combining
and 
. Beyond that, cards like Antimatter and combos like SoW Reflect can arguably do better than killing a creature - instead, they turn the creature into a healing/self-damage outlet.So here's question to all designers out there: under what conditions do you think an instant-kill card in EtG is acceptable?
Post by: iDaire on June 26, 2015, 08:15:29 pm
For example, Holy Flash is a largely damaging card, but because it's only instakill towards darkness creatures, because :light is an element designed to be both pacifistic and the bane of darkness. So, Holy Flash doesn't count as CC if the creature it targeted isn't :darkness.
Post by: Espithel on June 26, 2015, 08:18:55 pm
Lighting basically reads "Kill target creature if it has 5 or less HP. If not, reduce its HP by 5."
Gravity pull, when used offensively, reads "Kill target creature. Some of your creatures will not attack this turn."
RT reads "Temporarily kill target creature until your opponent pays quanta equal to its cost. Your opponent skips their next draw."
And flash reads "Kill target :darkness or :death creature."
Post by: ZephyrPhantom on June 26, 2015, 08:23:05 pm
Instakill cards need to have a drawback in order to become acceptable, and the drawback should be thematic to the card itself.
For example, Holy Flash is a largely damaging card, but because it's only instakill towards darkness creatures, because :light is an element designed to be both pacifistic and the bane of darkness. So, Holy Flash doesn't count as CC if the creature it targeted isn't :darkness.
And flash reads "Kill target :darkness or :death creature."Flash doesn't kill every Darkness/Death creature, though, and as far as I can tell, conditions are only deemed 'acceptable' because the community has agreed they should be that way. For example, what's the problem with a card like this?
Quote
Sadness Spear | Sorrowful Spear
12 :darkness | 10 :darkness
Spell
Kill target creature.
It's more expensive than Antimatter but has virtually the same function of making a single creature on the field "worthless", just slightly more extreme.
Additionally, what's the difference between a card like that and
Quote
Unlimited Fire Works | Unlimited Blaze Works
12 :fire | 10 :fire
Target enemy creature takes 50 damage.
No regular creature in EtG will survive a card like this without Immaterial, so what stops it from being made? Like Holy Light, it doesn't truly "kill", but instead deals damage.
Furthermore, compare games like MtG, which are very willing to put instant kills, both conditional and unconditional, in their meta, and rarely if ever have a problem with the existence of such cards. Do instant kill cards really have a different meta effect here?
Post by: Higurashi on June 26, 2015, 09:05:05 pm
Elements has tempo, but it's not as noticeable due to no trading creatures and due to Fractal being broken. The best way to make the presence of tempo much more obvious is to play combo decks. You do nothing or very little until you draw your combo. For an Immo deck, doing nothing is disastrous. For a Fractal deck, it's absolutely fine. If you do draw a potent combo, it gives you a tempo swing and suddenly you're ahead.
Freeze+Shockwave effectively puts you behind by requiring two cards for one. The game gives us one option that is much better in terms of card value, and that's Squid+Shockwaves. Single-target instakill remains weak in Elements because it lets you play a lot of creatures -and- it lets you play as many untargetable creatures as you could ever need.
Other acceptable options for instakill would involve losing card or tempo advantage, such as discarding the top card in your deck. A lot of options can be manipulated into being pointless, such as discarding from hand (discarding a superfluous pillar) or absorbing all quanta (playing it early won't affect you negatively at all in a mono). Discarding one card from the entire deck wouldn't work either because it doesn't affect the current state. There are some weird ways to make some options work, but they seem really arbitrary and can probably be circumvented (such as requiring several quanta types for absorbing).
Edit: For an example from a different game, instakill cards in Hearthstone are usually just really expensive, which puts you behind on tempo because of its limited resource system (mana) and low amount of creatures in a game where they can trade, though Execute is an exception in that it's well used and too easy to enable. Tempo is everything in Hearthstone.
Post by: AD TienzuStorm on June 26, 2015, 09:09:20 pm
Actually, every instakill is conditional. That's what's acceptable about them: their conditions are balanced enough so that they're not OP.
- Maxwell's Demon requires the creature to have a higher attack, which is difficult to raise on its own (with SoW and Rage Pot being the only for sure attack boosts that don't also raise HP the same amount)
- Otyugh requires the creature have less HP than it and has a somewhat not really effective deterrent in Poisonous
- Freeze+Shockwave requires at least a duo and is restricted to only six instakills at max
And I think there's another, but I'm too lazy to go searching. But I believe I've made my point.
Post by: Espithel on June 26, 2015, 09:21:18 pm
Magic gets it cheaper, perhaps, because you need more of it. Elements does not.
Post by: Ginyu on June 26, 2015, 09:34:01 pm
In Yu-Gi-Oh!, a high-defense monster could block you for several turns, as you couldn't attack your opponent directly before you killed it (except some monsters with special abilities). Insta-kill cards were usually restricted or banned in tournaments. In Elements, you don't have to kill any monster. Just ask yourself: How often do you see creatures like Stone or Colossal Dragon (AI3 doesn't count)? Using more insta-kill mechanics would nerf HP even more. That's why I don't think we need it.
Post by: OldTrees on June 26, 2015, 10:51:16 pm
Consider MtG:
The cheapest example of Instant Kill is Terror/Doom Blade/etc/etc which is a 2CMC spell that destroys 1 creature that it can target.
However there are many ways to avoid targeting (Protection being the strongest quality since it also prevents damage, enchantment, equipment, and blocking).
The next example is Wrath of God which is a 4CMC spell that destroys all creatures without targeting.
However that does nothing to Indestructible creatures.
Ah, but non targeting, non "damaging", non "destroy" lethal effects still exist like an AoE of -X|-X or an AoE of "exile".
Notice what happened. MtG added an ultimate attack and regretted it. So they added a defense. But then they needed a way around that ultimate defense. And then a way around that offense. Etc Etc. While this does create a nice layered complexity it also hints to "Nothing can be OP if it dies to Doomblade" since any attempt merely reads "Opponent taps 2 swamps and discards Doom Blade"*. So we need to realize that the moment we add instant kill, creatures will be capped in value by the cost to the opponent for them to use the instant kill.
*Note: This has impacted the MtG metagame in a quite significant way. It has made it so that WotC feels fine printing cards that are vastly OP compared to their peers but still die to Doom Blade. So 2 cards an order of magnitude apart in value might be given the same cost merely because Doom Blade exists.
Post by: eljoemo on June 26, 2015, 11:09:58 pm
That said, Freeze + Shockwave can't be prevented and I think that's okay. So I guess with enough restrictions or a combo, it can be good, just not too many restrictions to make it redundant.
Post by: iDaire on June 26, 2015, 11:14:09 pm
All cards in any card game like this should have a counter to them. If the instakill card itself has no drawback, then another card outside of that instakill card should have a balance. For example, lets say I made a card:
7 :darkness- Wrath (Kill any non-darkness, non-death creature). Then there should be a card like this:
5 :light- Enlightenment (Protect all creatures on the field from receiving damage equal to or more than their current health).
Something like that anyways. All cards need some way for the enemy to protect themselves against it. Otherwise, the card is unfair if it has a large impact on the game. Instakill cards have the ability to shut down strategies and prevent the opponent from winning, so without a valid counter, it's considered overpowered.
Post by: ZephyrPhantom on June 26, 2015, 11:56:12 pm
Any ultimate kill(a kill that has no defense) puts a ceiling on creature durability for any and all creatures subject to that ultimate kill. It is always ok BUT it has an irrevocable impact on existing and future creature design. So it should not be added without careful thought about the consequence.If I remember correctly, Wizards plans to increase the base costs of those kinds of cards by 1 (DB-style cards costing 3, Wrath-style cards costing 5), as well as using more -X/-X and other control-style effects at lower CMCs. Is instant kill designing controllable if developers do not hold onto the belief it is absolutely necessary for the game?
Consider MtG:
The cheapest example of Instant Kill is Terror/Doom Blade/etc/etc which is a 2CMC spell that destroys 1 creature that it can target.
However there are many ways to avoid targeting (Protection being the strongest quality since it also prevents damage, enchantment, equipment, and blocking).
The next example is Wrath of God which is a 4CMC spell that destroys all creatures without targeting.
However that does nothing to Indestructible creatures.
Ah, but non targeting, non "damaging", non "destroy" lethal effects still exist like an AoE of -X|-X or an AoE of "exile".
Notice what happened. MtG added an ultimate attack and regretted it. So they added a defense. But then they needed a way around that ultimate defense. And then a way around that offense. Etc Etc. While this does create a nice layered complexity it also hints to "Nothing can be OP if it dies to Doomblade" since any attempt merely reads "Opponent taps 2 swamps and discards Doom Blade"*. So we need to realize that the moment we add instant kill, creatures will be capped in value by the cost to the opponent for them to use the instant kill.
*Note: This has impacted the MtG metagame in a quite significant way. It has made it so that WotC feels fine printing cards that are vastly OP compared to their peers but still die to Doom Blade. So 2 cards an order of magnitude apart in value might be given the same cost merely because Doom Blade exists.
Post by: OldTrees on June 27, 2015, 12:13:39 am
If I remember correctly, Wizards plans to increase the base costs of those kinds of cards by 1 (DB-style cards costing 3, Wrath-style cards costing 5), as well as using more -X/-X and other control-style effects at lower CMCs. Is instant kill designing controllable if developers do not hold onto the belief it is absolutely necessary for the game?
Believing the game needs ultimate attacks has negligible impact on the ability to balance an ultimate attack("an attack without a defense" to differentiate it from things like Otyugh). And, like all design, designing such effects is inherently controllable.
It is the far reaching impact of the design that controls design of other things(Fractal's impact on creature design is a similar example albeit a weaker control). These are design choices that must be made while taking the entirety of the game into account including all of the future.
EtG can handle these kind of cards, however doing so correctly would take much more time than we took designing that Air Bird(I forget the name) with the Swift "Ren"(aka bounce) skill and that spent a long time in development before we released it for peer review.
Post by: ZephyrPhantom on June 27, 2015, 12:29:00 am
Noted. Fenghuang's development did indeed take an unbelievably long time (several months, I believe) even if the resulting card was very high quality. It'd be difficult to imagine the timespan a group would have to take to balance killspells, especially seeing that MtG is now only beginning to work on making it more reasonable after years of Terror/Doom Blade/similar cards.If I remember correctly, Wizards plans to increase the base costs of those kinds of cards by 1 (DB-style cards costing 3, Wrath-style cards costing 5), as well as using more -X/-X and other control-style effects at lower CMCs. Is instant kill designing controllable if developers do not hold onto the belief it is absolutely necessary for the game?
Believing the game needs ultimate attacks has negligible impact on the ability to balance an ultimate attack("an attack without a defense" to differentiate it from things like Otyugh). And, like all design, designing such effects is inherently controllable.
It is the far reaching impact of the design that controls design of other things(Fractal's impact on creature design is a similar example albeit a weaker control). These are design choices that must be made while taking the entirety of the game into account including all of the future.
EtG can handle these kind of cards, however doing so correctly would take much more time than we took designing that Air Bird(I forget the name) with the Swift "Ren"(aka bounce) skill and that spent a long time in development before we released it for peer review.
(That being said, I still would be interested in seeing the steps individual designers would take to attempt to balance killspell designs.)
Post by: OldTrees on June 27, 2015, 01:47:04 am
(That being said, I still would be interested in seeing the steps individual designers would take to attempt to balance killspell designs.)
I would start by noting that killspell design puts a hard cap on creature value. So the first thing to do would be to ensure that hard cap was high enough. I would start that by identifying the planned sweet spots of creatures(for instance we chose Fenghuang to be focused on skill use and have a cheapish body 4-6|3-5 because that allowed for early play, medium value per turn, and long lifespan). These sweet spots would be the things we would want to protect from too low a hard cap. Then I would use mass playtesting to determine if the predicted sweet spots existed and if there were any other such spots. Then I would spend time imagining how the game would change over the years and how those changes would impact these sweet spots(Ex: Fractal). This last step of this first part is the hardest, longest, and tied for the least accurate step.
Remembering that the cost to the opponent of using the killspell determines the hard cap and now knowing what I want to protect, I would start working on the cost of the killspell. Since EtG is a deckbuilder game I would need to estimate the frequency of the killspell so that I can balance its cost in a way that creates a RPS (cheap creatures > killspell > expensive creatures > cheaper CC > cheap creatures). This would put the cost to the opponent of using the killspell at some amount(determined above) below the cost to use the most expensive creature sweetspot. This metagame prediction is the other least accurate step.
Then I would add the card, take a month vacation, and return to see the adjusted metagame. Using that adjusted metagame I would use mass playtesting to see how the card needed to be adjusted(as well as start finding out which unforeseen restrictions it will put on me as the designer).
Post by: serprex on June 27, 2015, 02:28:19 am
Post by: Sera on June 27, 2015, 07:39:27 am
I believe that kill spells balance out at some point before it becomes a 1-for-1 trade against a target, taking quanta cost into account. The main use of single-use control spells in the game is an advantageous quanta tradeoff (2 :aether for a 10-cost dragon, etc), though with the added value of potential removal of a combo. The downside is that there's a chance that you might not be able to get a good tradeoff, like if targets are cheap, or if there are no targets at all. A vanilla instakill card would also meet the same problems, so the only question now is when that 1-for-1 trade balances out with the problem of not being able to do advantageous tradeoff. For sure that's below 10 in a mono setup, and I'm leaning to agree on serprex's 5, or maybe 6 if we're being conservative. And we have to face that Elements is not as combo-intensive as Yu-Gi-Oh: stopping a world lock with minor control will definitely win you the game, but destroying a momentum-adren staff does not exactly have the same impact as there may be 4 or 5 more in the deck.
Only problem I see now is that it depreciates HP, like what Ginyu had said. But as of now, "soft CC", as most people call it, also stops creatures with any amount of HP. That's pretty much hard CC, in my opinion. It's something worth comparing with instakill.
A Bigger Bottle of Basilisk's Blood:
6 :earth Spell
Target creature is disabled for 15 turns.
It's not instakill, but it might as well be.
6 :earth Spell
Target creature is disabled for 15 turns.
It's not instakill, but it might as well be.
Post by: Higurashi on June 27, 2015, 11:47:41 am
A Bigger Bottle of Basilisk's Blood:Strange as it may seem, this is a long way from instakill. For rushes and 30-card domination decks it is, but rushes won't pack expensive single-target spells unless they can also target HP and do decent damage. In a long game, soft CC like this can essentially become negative card value as you will have ended up paying 1 card for 0 cards. The reason stalls would still pack this is because there is already more CC and healing in the game, and a way to make it repeatable (BB into Auburn Nymph or healing+Diamond nullifying damage completely).
6 :earth Spell
Target creature is disabled for 15 turns.
It's not instakill, but it might as well be.
Either way it's not an equivalent to instakill in the majority of games for 50% of decks that would use it and thus doesn't fit into a balance discussion on instakill effects (it will be different in some domination deck matches too), but it IS a viable alternative.
Post by: ZephyrPhantom on June 27, 2015, 02:54:56 pm
Does the same hold true for a spell that doesn't kill, but inflicts so much damage that it technically will kill any creature in the game without outside interference? (See example below.) Unlike Puff's example, Unlimited Blaze Works essentially guarantees a creature will be permanently removed from the board.A Bigger Bottle of Basilisk's Blood:Strange as it may seem, this is a long way from instakill. For rushes and 30-card domination decks it is, but rushes won't pack expensive single-target spells unless they can also target HP and do decent damage. In a long game, soft CC like this can essentially become negative card value as you will have ended up paying 1 card for 0 cards. The reason stalls would still pack this is because there is already more CC and healing in the game, and a way to make it repeatable (BB into Auburn Nymph or healing+Diamond nullifying damage completely).
6 :earth Spell
Target creature is disabled for 15 turns.
It's not instakill, but it might as well be.
Either way it's not an equivalent to instakill in the majority of games for 50% of decks that would use it and thus doesn't fit into a balance discussion on instakill effects (it will be different in some domination deck matches too), but it IS a viable alternative.
QuoteUnlimited Fire Works | Unlimited Blaze Works
12 :fire | 10 :fire
Target enemy creature takes 50 damage.
No regular creature in EtG will survive a card like this withoutImmaterialoutside support, so what stops it from being made? Like Holy Light, it doesn't truly "kill", but instead deals damage.
Post by: serprex on June 27, 2015, 06:25:31 pm
[snip] I would start by noting that killspell design puts a hard cap on creature value. [snip]Parallel Universe limits design space enough all on its lonesome
Post by: Higurashi on June 27, 2015, 06:41:39 pm
Does the same hold true for a spell that doesn't kill, but inflicts so much damage that it technically will kill any creature in the game without outside interference? (See example below.) Unlike Puff's example, Unlimited Blaze Works essentially guarantees a creature will be permanently removed from the board.While it's possible to buff a flying Titan or Colossal Dragon to withstand 50 damage, you'd then be paying two cards to resist one and it all turns into technicalities. For all practical purposes, 50 damage is certainly instakill.
There seems to be a threshold where soft CC/instakill becomes preferable, and the best way to measure it should be to use Fire Lances since it's the most powerful CC. If a monofire gets to 20 :fire before using a Lance as CC, it'll still succeed in stopping most of the damage an early creature would do. That's a 9 HP threshold, but that requires a monofire. The best killing CC card any deck can splash is Lightning, and we all know what an effect that has on the unupped meta. That's a 5 HP threshold.
Then there's repeatable damaging CC in OE and Dexterity in Arena making cards like upped Steamie invaluable, but that's a different issue. We also have to separate the unupped and upped meta, as Thunderbolt sees a lot less use than Lightning. Not even Rage Elixir is used as much as Lightning, proportionally speaking, although perhaps it should be.
Post by: OldTrees on June 27, 2015, 07:39:56 pm
Yes, PU likewise installs a hard cap.[snip] I would start by noting that killspell design puts a hard cap on creature value. [snip]Parallel Universe limits design space enough all on its lonesome
And our quanta system and max hp install soft caps.
And then there are a bunch of lesser but notable impacts.
The existence of these caps is not bad in itself. Well placed caps still allow more than enough design space to create an ever expanding game. However it is the placement of these caps that makes designing this effects take more development time to do correctly. So to add them, one should spend the extra time needed.
Does the same hold true for a spell that doesn't kill, but inflicts so much damage that it technically will kill any creature in the game without outside interference? (See example below.) Unlike Puff's example, Unlimited Blaze Works essentially guarantees a creature will be permanently removed from the board.While it's possible to buff a flying Titan or Colossal Dragon to withstand 50 damage, you'd then be paying two cards to resist one and it all turns into technicalities. For all practical purposes, 50 damage is certainly instakill.
Yet a creature with 51hp would be fine. This marks a significant difference between an "attack that overwhelms all existing defenses" and an "attack for which there can be no defense". Having a card that deals 50 damage does not prevent me from making a creature that is worth 20 :underworld(although our quanta system does a good job of discouraging that). It merely requires that such a creature has a defense against 50 damage(say by having 51hp).
However this distinction only matters in the future, in the present there is no significant difference between the two.
Post by: Tiko on June 27, 2015, 09:08:33 pm
But then again, Flooding is even more of a rare encounter than Freeze+Shock..
As a sidenote, the "last updates" brought the pace of the game even to a higher level, and various powerful creatures have been added to the bestiary, like Seraph (the Fire equivalent of the Graboid/Shrieker), Psion, or Focus - which all are dangerous and hard to deal with. I'm sure that more forms of direct damage cards, combos or even instakill spells/abilities would be an overall welcome addition to the game.
Post by: Espithel on June 27, 2015, 10:59:22 pm
It stops you from playing multiple creatures more than it kills multiple creatures.
Post by: ZephyrPhantom on June 27, 2015, 11:02:04 pm
Post by: Espithel on June 27, 2015, 11:04:12 pm
It's worth noting though that Flooding doesn't simply restrict creatures but instead punishes them through instakill. It admittedly makes me wonder what Flooding would've looked like if it had obstructed the first 2-3 creature slots instead of obstructing all but the first 5.
The instant kill is how it imposes its will.
Once you know you're playing against flooding, no sane person would play over five... Being able to kill people faster aside.
Post by: ZephyrPhantom on June 27, 2015, 11:07:04 pm
Post by: Espithel on June 27, 2015, 11:15:22 pm
Best way to find out is by making cards, I guess.
Another point is how people seem to be fine with deflagging a weapon (which is, for most intents and purposes, the same as instantly killing a creature.)
Post by: AD TienzuStorm on June 27, 2015, 11:22:42 pm
Another point is how people seem to be fine with deflagging a weapon (which is, for most intents and purposes, the same as instantly killing a creature.)
Same with how creature stealing is a no-no but weapon stealing is fine.
But, you can't target weapons with CC, which is definitely more common than PC. So, for the few cards that can possibly get rid of them, they would be stronger than average CC.
Post by: ZephyrPhantom on June 27, 2015, 11:36:15 pm
Best way to find out is by making cards, I guess.Hm. How does this card look? It's technically more of a mill card, but:
Another point is how people seem to be fine with deflagging a weapon (which is, for most intents and purposes, the same as instantly killing a creature.)
Kill and Replace 4 :darkness | 3 :darkness
Spell
Destroy target creature. Its owner plays a creature with equal or lower ATK from their deck.