Designing Wide: Viewing Card Viability across the Long Term

A few weeks ago, Simon Engmalm was kind enough to invite me to commentate on several matches in the Swedish Open. At past events I’d attended, I’d found myself with other tasks that kept me from doing commentary on stream (and honestly, I’d always been a bit nervous to try), so this was an novel experience for me. Fortunately, when the event actually happened, the matches were excellent viewing on their own (a round six game on Saturday, and the finals on Sunday), and Simon was an excellent host who kept the commentary moving, so I don’t think I bungle things up too much despite being new to the actual commentary game.

The finals took place between Niklas God and Johan Bisenius, with 5 Inquisitors with Foresight flying against Zam Wesell, General Grevious, and Berwer Kret, each with a number of upgrades including Treacherous on each ship. As a viewer, I was struck by the very skilled technical flying by both competitors that lead to a nail-biting match (well worth a watch, when it goes up on Targetlock TV’s youtube channel). As a designer, what struck me most were the inclusion of two cards: Foresight and Treacherous. Both were critical at various junctures during the match. Foresight provided the Inquisitors not only with extra attacks (and a serious area threat the Separatists had to work to avoid), but also with a way to negate defensive range bonuses against enemies in their bullseye. And Treacherous was at the heart of several key plays that kept the match in contention by negating several hits and even a crit that could well have put Berwer Kret out of commission, in a beautiful play that saw an Inquisitor left holding the strain.

Why is this interesting enough to write an article about? Because at various points in development and even after release, the most common feedback I saw about these cards was that they “wouldn’t see play.” Foresight was frequently reported as too weak compared to Snap Shot due to its more limited angle of attack and cost of a Force charge, and consensus was that it wouldn’t be chosen as a result. Treacherous was seen as too much work to set up on enemies, and not rewarding enough when used to sacrifice allies to save one’s skin. And, what’s more, at the time I received or observed this feedback, I thought the people who made these analyses were very likely correct.

So today, we’ll be exploring two questions. First, what happened - why are these cards seeing use now despite a lukewarm reception? This is a question veteran X-Wing players probably can quickly guess the answer to, but I think it’s worth going over for those readers who are less familiar with this particular game.

And second, and more interesting: Why did I let these cards go out the door knowing there was a distinct chance they’d be written off as “binder fodder” (cards people leave in their collection binders rather than playing) in the first place?

Format Determines Function

What’s in this image? Only what you take with you.

First, a little context about how X-Wing events work for those who aren’t already deeply immersed in the game. X-Wing sharks, I’ll ask your patience here.

There’s more than one way to play X-Wing, with two major formats (Extended and Hyperspace) supported for tournaments and a third for more narrative, large-scale play (Epic Battles). It’s important to remember that the 2021 Swedish Open was a Hyperspace event. Hyperspace is a curated format, where only select cards are allowed and most cards are unavailable. Additionally, the list of cards in Hyperspace changes over time to keep the format fresh. The most powerful lists in the game generally don’t appear in Hyperspace.

Further, keep in mind that X-Wing has an official currency for cards in your list (points). But cards aren’t really judged on their points alone, they’re also judged on their perceived value, which is distinct from points. Value is instead a communally held reflection of how good something is for its points cost - in other words, how much bang you get for your point.

But even though the card lists in Extended and Hyperspace are different, the points costs are the same. This means that the relative values of each card are somewhat different in each format (because the pool of options is different), a card that is not “worth its points” in one format may fairly priced, or even undercosted in another.

This is very much something Frank intended in X-Wing 2nd Edition, and is the main reason I’ve generally been against the occasionally lobbied suggestion to price cards differently in Extended and Hyperspace (even if I thought it was feasible to implement correctly). The fact that a card’s single points cost doesn’t reflect the same value in both formats can actually be a good thing for the game, giving different cards different niches in which to thrive. If every card was carefully calibrated to provide exactly identical utility for its cost across all formats, then there would be far less incentive for players to seek out context-dependent value and find uses for cards they had written off before.

So, the answer to the first question, of “why are these cards seeing play” is pretty straightforward. These cards were a poor value proposition in most formats at the time of their release. Due to the addition of new cards to the game overall, changes in points costs, and changes in Hyperspace lists of cards available in Hyperspace, they became contextually efficient. Value is a product of context, and when the context changed, the values changed. This is pretty open-and-shut; X-Wing’s modular points and rotating formats worked as intended to give cards that were once “weak” a place to shine (eventually).

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s get into the interesting stuff!

Building for Uncertainty

A pombaline cage model, of the design used in the rebuilding of Lisbon after the 1755 earthquake. Courtesy wikipedia.

But going beyond this, let’s imagine X-Wing didn’t have points changes and Hyperspace rotations. Could there still be an argument that it’s good for the competitive scene to occasionally create content that isn’t competitively viable on release? To answer that, we need to get into a big question: philosophically, what is the value of a new piece of content in a game?

Fundamentally, I believe that a new piece of content should make players excited to continue playing the game, and there are a couple of common ways it can do this:

• Intrinsic: It is exciting to the players in and of itself.

• Emergent: It creates exciting interactions with other pieces of content (usually those that already exist, but sometimes it can foreshadow future interactions and build excitement that way).

• Breath of Experience: It widens the pool of content that exists in the game, adding new tools or ways of approaching the game.

It’s also worth noting that a piece of content can provide excitement on a wide variety of axes: artistic expression, theme, mechanics, competitive viability, just to name a few. For the purposes of this article (and to prevent it from expanding into a treatise any more than it already has), I’m going to focus purely on excitement generated by competitive use, which is almost always a product of a card’s perceived viability. I don’t think it’s necessarily the most important axis (I don’t think any one is most important), but that conversation is definitely out of scope for this article.

When it comes to competitive viability, even during the design process but especially once it is released, a lot of weight is put on intrinsic excitement (“is this card good?”) and emergent excitement (“can I make an awesome combo with this card, or does it counter that card my friend always beats me with?”). Very little weight is put on whether a piece of content gives you new options or not, because new options generally don’t contribute to existing strategies that win you the game. If something is novel and immensely efficient, it is generally seen as “breaking the game,” and tends not to go over well because it disrupts existing, well-liked strategies. Thus, a lot of content that widens options available (rather than doing something established in a more efficient manner than existing options) tends to settle at a lower tier of efficiency.

To go to specific examples, Foresight gives you reactive attacks (something “new,” or rather, returned from First Edition), but only within a limited arc, and at cost. Treacherous rewards you for putting other ships into the line of fire, but to get the full benefit, you need to draw an enemy ship into the position you want, which is extremely hard to pull off in many contexts. Each one widens the breadth of experiences within the pool of content by rewarding new strategies, but both carry enough inherent challenges that make execution of these strategies difficult. For a player who is engaged primarily by the way the mechanics express theme or narrative play, these cards have obvious appeal, but to a player who is looking at each release to find the cards more efficient than the ones they already have, the costs and provisos are unlikely to make these an obvious choice.

But I don’t think this means that cards like Foresight and Treacherous are only for less competitively oriented players (even if this might justify their existence). In fact, I think cards that expand breadth of play serve a couple of important roles for the competitive ecosystem:

• Experimental: Even if a novel concept isn’t a hit on release, if the player base responds to it positively, that can be a sign that the design space it represents is worth exploring further. In especially long-running games, this sort of experimental content is sometimes even picked up by later designers exploring the more marginal concepts create by their predecessors.

• Setting Up Emergent Interactions: Creating a broad base of concepts not only sets up future interactions, but also gives players who like to experiment with combinations a wide range of options with which to experiment.

• Unexpected Tech: Giving the game tools that the players (and even designers) don’t know it needs yet can also be a benefit when dealing with particular dominant strategies. A wide base of content with different ways to interact in the game space gives a game a healthier “immune system” with which to combat problems that arise.

Ultimately, all three of these reasons stem from a more fundamental rationale: as long as it is being played, a game will continue to change. Even in games with no new content and no rotations (chess, etc), strategies evolve and tactics go in and out of fashion within the community who plays and defines the game. When trying to determine something’s value, it’s impossible to separate that value from the context. If a game will run for even a few years, it becomes too large to see the entire game in any single moment. A particular piece of content’s value across the life of the game can’t be fully expressed in any single moment.

Value and Value

Don’t get me started on games with speculation…

So, what’s the take-away here? “Max Brooke says go ahead and make tons of bad cards as long as they might someday be interesting?” Not exactly - or, at least, not without some caveats.

For starters, when making a commercial game, it’s important to keep your eye on where the value proposition to the consumer in your product predominantly lies. In an X-Wing ship expansion, that’s really the ship itself - the physical miniature, the ship cards, the dial, etc. If the ship is a dud competitively, consumers will be unhappy, and rightly so. So while the upgrade cards are still important, they’re not the core value proposition of the product. If one or two out of eight included in the product (or one out of thirty, in Treacherous’ case) gets ignored on release, that’s probably fine for the overall health of the game. To turn to the example of opening a pack of (15) Magic: The Gathering cards: if one of the Common cards in the pack has a really thematic effect that you couldn’t really see wanting to use, nobody will bat an eye. If the Rare card isn’t at least narrowly competitively applicable, people will feel they wasted their money. I suspect it’s no accident that Magic moved away from the relatively frequent “bad Rares” that used to be a staple of its design, and added the Mythic Rare tier to further emphasize the correlation between rarity and value: both of these decisions improve the value proposition of the unopened pack to the player.

So while not every product has to be competitively oriented, if a product does cater to the competitive crowd, it’s important that it be perceived good value on release. In the case of the products containing Treacherous (Servants of Strife) and Foresight (BTL-B Y-wing), I wasn’t worried about that one card tipping the scale.

The type of game you’re designing also matters. If you’re designing a game with 16 discrete pieces of content that players must choose between, you probably can’t afford to have too many of them be rejected by your competitive player base, because as a percentage of the game that exists, each card is much more substantial.

So I’d say the takeaway of this journey through the lives (so far) of Foresight and Treacherous is this: Initial assessments of value are relevant to a designer, but even an accurate initial assessment of something’s value is often deeply incomplete, and that’s worth keeping in mind, too. Put another way, nobody’s Foresight is perfect, so relying upon initial assessments can be Treacherous over time.

I’ll see myself out.