Deck Building, Points & Lackey

It’s time for a bit of an update here, and not just a posting of cards.  I’ve been having a play with Lackey as a means of play testing my game and trying to get a handle on how easy or hard it is to build a deck.  That process has led me down the path of having to give point values to some cards as a means of enforcing some deck building rules.  My initial plan with this game was to make deck building as open and free as possible, to not put in too many restrictions so a player could decide what ki

nd of deck best suited them.  But the reality of that is that a deck can be built using mainly rare and powerful cards and therefore becomes too cheesy and at the same time a lot of cards start to become redundant.  I’ve seen that happen in other card games.  I wanted to give each card a valid shot at being included in a deck.

In the end I have given a point value to every type of card, with the exception of Model and Location cards.  Location cards are pretty minor in the grand scheme of things and all fairly evenly powered, so I  didn’t thing they warranted a point value.  All the Model cards should also be equal in value.  I didn’t want to show bias towards one particular model over another.  If you look closely at the Model cards you’ll see that all of them total the same value.  Add their attributes, their trait values and a couple of bonus points for any special ability and they should all be the same.  I suspect that when play tested some of these models will end up seeming over or under powered, at that point I will change their ability or stats accordingly.

So, my plan with building a deck now is to set a maximum number of points a deck can contain.  There will be some other rules in there too.  Like, you will not be able to have

 more than 3 of any one particular card and you will not be able to have more tha

n 1 of any particular Model.  Another restriction is your deck must contain at least 1 Model and 1 Target card.  By not giving Model cards a point value, I’m hoping that will let players create a deck with either a ‘support a small group of models’ or ‘large number of model swarm’ type decks.  Not sure how either of those strategies will work out.  Only play testing will tell!

This post also contains a couple of updated card designs.  Showing the new point value in the bottom right corner along with some other more subtle changes.  I’ve posted my first cut of the card back too.

Lackey can be found at http://www.lackeyccg.com/.  When I get to point of satisfaction with the plugin I am writing for it, I will release it along with a card list here on my blog.

Thanks to all who read this blog, I hope this is something a bit different from th

e usual stuff out there.  Please feel free to leave a comment, even if it’s just to say hi!  Seems like I started to get a few more hits after I posted a link on the forums at http://baaste1.ba.funpic.de/.  Cheers to Baaste!