Hey everyone, Cups here to share some thoughts from fellow developers on the My Little Pony CCG! Absolute Discord has made a huge splash in the game, in both fun factor and changing up the meta, and as usual some cards have had more impact than others.
Check out below the break for insight into some of the development team members' favorite cards, some chosen for how they change the game and some because of just how cool they are!
Let's start with our overall team lead designer, Darrell. He's a big fan of frightening, so you can attribute a lot of the improved frighten cards to him. His favorite is the Changeling Drone! He says,
Sometimes, to make a certain type of deck work, you need a complicated "capstone" card that binds all the other elements into an elaborate combination that helps you win games. Changeling Drone is something of a capstone for the deck that likes to frighten Friends, but there's nothing complicated about it. It just gets huge when you start frightening things--and with 2 power for 2 cost, it's a still pretty solid even if there isn't a whole lot of frightening going on.
Next up we have Adam, who works directly in card development. He immediately narrowed his choices down to the Epiphany cards, and picked Pinkie's as his fave! His reasoning is,
I love the flexibility of modal cards, both as a player and as a developer. The Epiphany cycle is great because each card fits into a different space depending on the modes chosen - I'm a particular fan of the blue and pink Epiphanies. In the case of Pinkie's Epiphany, you can use it as a discounted Downright Dangerous (as long as you're planning on playing another card this turn - great for aggressive decks), or you can use it to grab a Friend from your discard pile and play it for only one action more than playing the Friend from your hand (great for decks that run Friends with useful enters-play abilities, especially those that also run retire effects), or you can use it to net some card advantage by dismissing an opposing Friend and recurring one of your own from the discard pile (great for slower control decks). You can even use it to dismiss your own Friends and then get them back again - particularly useful with cards like DJ Pon-3, Loose Cannon. Modal cards create a lot of cool strategy space, and ones which let you choose multiple modes have a fun build-your-own-card feel to them every time you play them.
Trevor is also in card development, as well as a big part of our organized play program. He decided that he couldn't decide, and picked THREE cards. That scoundrel. He says,
I think Discord, Spirit of Chaos is a perfect example of the theme and mechanics of Absolute Discord. It just captures everything we were going for with the design and development of AD.
I'm personally always looking for ways to play around with 'enter play' effects. Minuette, Fast Forward is a great way to build decks around taking advantage of 'enter play' and even leaving play effects. I look forward to being able to build decks around her in the future.
Speaking of taking advantage of Minuette, Rainbow Dash, Sonic Rainboom is a real fun card. It's incredibly powerful on it's but to truly take advantage of it's power she needs help from something like Minuette. Plus the art and flavor team did such a wonderful job with a card highlighting my favorite pony.
And it's my turn! I do help out with card development, but my biggest impact is ponifying the game. Sometimes that means designing a card from scratch, and other times it means taking game text and turning it into a fully fleshed out card. For example, I'm given "Friend, 3 pink, When this card enters play draw two cards," and it's my job to decide that it's Princess Cadance out on vacation looking for interesting things to see and do, then choose a subtitle, flavor text, and image.
My favorite example of that is Applejack, Liar. With everyone worried that any Troublemaker might be a Villain, I love the concept of a Troublemaker that disappears, faking out your opponent and refunding you the cost. Making it Liarjack only made it better!
Another one of my faves in Absolute Discord is that nameless one on the right. I think it speaks for itself. Or, doesn't speak, as the case may be. Spooky.
Anyway, that's it from us for now! What about you? What are your favorite cards in Absolute Discord, for gameplay or coolness reasons? You can find a full list over on the MLP: CCG Wikia, and use that to link us to the ones that really wowed you!
