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⬅️ Previous capture (2023-01-29)
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Spellweaver is a CCG that, while not at all a game I recommend, I'll always remember, because of what it taught me about game design, and about myself. (Disclaimer: I last played several years ago, so this may not be entirely accurate.)
The game is inspired by Magic: The Gathering (and the lead creator is an MtG expert), so the rules are based on MtG with a few changes, most of which are massive improvements:
Still, the game is killed by the same thing as MtG: no concept of a power curve. Many cards are so efficient and lacking in drawbacks that every deck with the right colors wants four copies of them period, and many more are just completely useless. In fact, if you divided the range of strength that the cards span into three equal sections, I think less than half of them would be in the middle! And the devs know that. They don't care (I argued with them about it).
Funnily enough, toward the end of my era, almost everyone I argued with on the forums agreed that the game had a huge balance problem, but nobody could agree on which cards were the overpowered ones. The forums were also a ridiculous cesspool of toxicity.
Before I go on to the moral lesson I learned, I want to mention a few more gameplay problems. The next one is the problem of creature size: most of the removal (cards that destroy enemy creatures) is geared toward dealing with a few big creatures rather than a swarm of little ones. This meant big creatures often had to be obscenely overstatted to see play, which they were, and some aspects (Nature/green and Wisdom/blue) were almost completely lacking in removal, so they had other broken auto-includes to compensate.
There were also a few cards seemingly designed without any thought of how they would affect gameplay, like Guardian of the Faithful and Voidtouched Subordinate, both of which made it very difficult for your opponent to profitably attack you, leading to a lot of miserable stalemates. Electrostatic Storm was a persistent spell that killed your own creatures as much as the enemy's, so it's *only* use was in "One Turn Heal" decks which played no creatures, but packed obscene amounts of removal and used healing spells to win by life. Almost everyone hated OTH.
We also have to talk about Cataclysm... the card that destroys all creatures. This card taught me what a horrible mechanic that is in a CCG. And I will never forget the days of "Vamp-Lamp", a deck that used Cataclysm and a creature called Lamp of Zapphir that was immune to it.
And almost every card art depicting a female being was sexualized. Just shameful.
I guess that's enough ranting about how bad the game was. I still have to give the developers some credit for coming up with a massive improvement over MtG.
A story I want to tell is my attempt to create my own CCG inspired by Spellweaver, by reducing RNG, increasing skill and greatly improving card balance. My CCG died in the playtesting phase. The reason was that although I came up with some cool mechanics and succeeded in reducing the draw RNG, I think I inadvertently took almost all of the skill out of the game by making hands public information. I didn't realize how much of the skill in Spellweaver was in weighing risk and deciding whether it was worth playing around a card that your opponent *might* have. Without that, there were almost no non-obvious decisions in-match.
But also, the dissatisfaction of playing my own CCG taught me something else: the problem with RNG is not that Spellweaver had too much of it. The problem is that Spellweaver had it. No competitive game should have it. I might have been able to make my CCG better than Spellweaver, but I could never make it anything more than a joke compared to Prismata or Go. So I scrapped it.
No, a little bit of randomness is not okay
What did it teach me about myself? It taught me about self-deception. I was so critical of the game and all its cards on the forums, but I convinced myself I was having fun anyway. One day I had a streak of some twenty games in a row against a deck that was essentially the descendant of Vamp-Lamp after Lamp and other supporting cards got nerfed and new ones were introduced to take their place. Finally, I examined my recent memory and came to terms with that I was not enjoying Spellweaver, and I quit.
I kept telling myself it would get better with the next balance patch, and I think I really did believe that. Maybe I was also afraid of what I would feel if I left Spellweaver? What's for sure is that from that day on, I learned to be more skeptical of my feelings, and realize that self-deception is a very real thing that even rational people do.