What Makes a Great Deckbuilder?

Why don't you add me to the randomly drawn selection of pointless twitter posts you can't seem to pull yourself away from in spite of how obviously toxic and shitty it is?: twitter.com/Thefearalcarrot You Know what I synergise with? Money. makes finger rubbing together motion whilst raising my eyebrows : www.patreon.com/ArchitectofGames

Pinch is the first card players ask about! Thanks for featuring One Step From Eden in your vids now and then, we love to see it!

"Reward is for making dumb things work." You just described all of my favorite decks I made back when I played ccgs, and the deck I'm planning to make for Dr Strange in Marvel Champions when I get him.

One of my favourite things about deckbuilder games is the replayability, I'll always end each run having seen new cards that didn't work with my deck but draw me in to make a new deck featuring them.

"No other card is just a strictly better version of the starter" Have you seen Good Instincts and Swift Strike?

Eventually we'll reach a point where thanking the Patreon supporters is going to take up more time than the actual video and I'm all for it.

One Step From Eden is a fantastic game. For those that have not played, or even heard of it, I highly recommend looking into it!

I was really hoping "flex synergy" would just mean some extremely ineffectual joke synergy to use when you're simply too much better than your opponent

I'm so happy you mentioned Dominion. It's simply amazing, we've played it so often with friends and family and it stays fun every time.

That "Discard" caught me off guard. Awesome.

The struggle with Hard Synergies in a lot of cases is that the design space in those synergies tend to be very narrow. If you have a Merloc deck, chances are it's going to be a lot like every other Merloc deck. (Maybe this has changed, I haven't played hearthstone since Un'Goro). With something like Magic: The Gathering's Goblins, however, the tribe has been around for so long and has had so many strategies that you can cludge together all kinds of edge-case strategies (like Red-Black-Blue goblin control) and actually be pretty effective and fun. If you're going to have hard synergies, it pays to put in extra work to add in different cards that can work with the core of the strategy in different ways. Often it only takes one card to create a strategy like this: Back when I played Hearthstone I had a pirate rogue deck that synergized heavily around Ship's Cannon and the rogue's ability to cheaply return creatures to their hand and cut costs of creatures, meaning that I could build up to a point where I can dump my hand out on the table for massive damage and carnage all in a single turn... but once the cannon was cycled out I completely lost interest in the tribe because it just wasn't "my idea" anymore, it was just another pirate deck like all the others. Not fun.

I love Monster Train for the twist it gives on usual boards and deckbuilding, I am glad that it is gaining some TRACK-tion. I wanted to put in some train puns, but I can't think of any more, sorry.

I do love the deckbuilding genre! I played Dream Quest on mobile wayyyyy back in the day, and was super hyped when I saw Slay the Spire start demo-ing itself because of how cool Dream Quest was. Incidentally, did you know that all the art of monsters and characters was done by the developer's kid? I could forgive the art pretty easily after hearing that adorable fact. :3 My personal fave so far is Monster Train, since it basically does a lot of what StS does well at its core, but also iterates with new stuff in ways that make it more complex and decks more ridiculously powerful, while still feeling earned when your deck does become OP. Deffo one to check out if you find the genre even a little bit interesting at all!

One Step from Eden's mix between bullet hell and deck builder is amazing, especially with how different each character plays just because of their basic ability. You can use any card with any character, but the Gunner's spamming gun that recharges mana has a vastly different playstyle from Shizo's executioner revolver that has its damage based on your money and locks you in place to fire. Just one single ability makes the characters so distinct in their decks because they're built around the central ability in order to reach their full potential.

I'm on my forth run of Griftlands and I've been obsessed with the game this past week. Maybe its reliance on hard synergies are the reason my decks seem to be very powerful come endgame. That might be bad as a deck builder. But that's ok with me, because Griftlands has blown me away with everything else surrounding its deckbuilding. I was surprised how the small contextualization between events made me even more engaged in deckbuilding games. In slay the spire you go through several rooms with enemies. In griftlands, each 'room' is a quest with motives, goals and characters. The other area that it excels is in the amount of tactical choices it offers. Do I want to spend my health or my resolve 'life bar'? Do I want to buy 'life', cards, 'bonus itens' or social 'bonus itens' to make the next encounter easier? That avaiability of options for how I want to tackle each challenge has been very engaging and rewarding. Its a different direction of polish from the rest of card games

Taking a break from playing Sts and monster train to watch videos about Sts and monster train 😅

These “Soft Synergies” remind me of D&D, I remember one session where I used the spell Heat Metal, to do most of the damage on the big bad evil guy, by cooking him with his own armor. The thing about Heat Metal is it has a really high damage potential but using it will make you a massive target, since if you take damage you might lose concentration and be forced to stop casting the spell. So what I did is cast Heat Metal, then transform into an ant (druids can do that) and hide. There was nothing in the rulebook saying these two things have these effects with each other, and in fact if it did it wouldn’t be nearly as fun, I spent most of that game hiding between two flagstones cackling to myself and reaffirming that yes indeed I did want to keep roasting this guy alive, but it didn’t matter because the fun was discovering and using the strategy.

It's particularly enjoyable to me when types of synergies in games are at odds with each other, and you have to make a decision between two things which you really can't compare. For an example, in a few of my favourite RPGs, classes don't completely restrict what abilities you can adopt but give discounts on abilities within the class' domain. So it comes down to the hard synergy of using your class-remit abilities and being far more efficient in your xp spending, or exploring the abilities of other classes for soft synergies, but at a premium.

Tom is one of my favorite Youtubers. Definitely didn't expect him to be mentioned here of all places! I really love his sexy, sexy Warhammer streams with Ben.

This is the sort of high-quality design discussion that you see in a GDC talk. I hope you keep making videos for a long time.