Hello, Heroes!
Yesterday I posted a design diary on the changes the Shapeshifter that we made as part of the 0.3 update. To round out my series of posts on the biggest patch for Fable Fortune so far, I wanted to go into more detail about the changes we made to some of our neutral cards.
We ended up making changes to over 70 different neutral cards during this update, as well as introducing over two dozen brand new cards. We were targetting a few specific groups of units with these design changes, so I wanted to give you guys some insight into what our overall goal was.
One of the problems we were noticing during the Closed Beta was the overall diversity of neutral cards that were making it into people’s decks. Cards that were just big ol’ piles of stats with no abilities were extremely popular as they were good on pretty much any possibly board state. Cards like:
We definitely want cards like this to be a viable option, especially for new players that are just joining the game and need some strong units to fill out their decks with. However the power level of these cards compared to other, more complex and synergy focused cards meant that these more exciting cards were getting pushed out of the meta. Through heavy playtesting, we found that this was either because the synergies on these cards were either too obscure or not powerful enough to warrant playing. So we set about leveraging the awesome, characterful creatures that the Fable universe has in spades to try and solve some of these problems.
While we had almost all of the critters from the world of Albion represented in our Closed Beta card pool, there were a few types of creature that we had more of than others. Of all the various races, Hobbes and Hollow Men were by far the most numerous, particularly with a few new Hobbes being thrown into the mix with the 0.3 update. Because of this, we saw Hobbes and Hollow Men as prime candidates for transforming into fun new synergy-based units that could in turn power some more combo focused decks.
Hobbes are easily some of the most recognisable characters from Albion. They’re strange, mischievous and a little psychotic. They come in all shapes and sizes, wielding all sorts of weapons and spells, and often gang up on you in these strange motley crews. A trio of staff-wielding magic users flanking a hulking Hobbe in armour and a pair of Hobbes on stilts? Yup, sounds like a classic Hobbe encounter.
We wanted to really inject this feeling of having a bunch of weird and wonderful Hobbes working together to take you down, so we created a new Hobbe-based mechanic: after you summon a Hobbe.
These effects really pay you off for playing Hobbes. Lots of Hobbes. Each Hobbe that you play from your hand (or summon from your deck with effects like Pressgang, or return to life with effects like Wake the Dead) causes these Hobbes to generate additional value and help put pressure on your opponent.
These types of effects combine really well with any Hobbes that have a Big Entrance ability or Rush, because they allow you to get value out of those units right nowwhile triggering your other Hobbes' abilities, we made sure to include those effects in our redesigns:
To help really empower the ‘play all the Hobbes all the time’ theme, we also introduced some return to hand and cost reduction effects, allowing you to replay some of the more powerful Hobbes over and over again for cheap to trigger the other Hobbes’ abilities:
All in all, this makes Hobbes a really fun and whacky deck to play as you seek to play and then replay lots of Hobbes with different abilities while raining fire down on your opponent with the explosive Bombers and Firebreathers.
Hollow Men, on the other hand, needed to have a very different kind of feeling to Hobbes when you were playing them together in a deck. Hollow Men are aggressive but hard to kill and heedless of their own (un)life. They attack in swarms and can seem like an endless horde. We tried to capture some of that feeling with the following mechanic: after a friendly Hollow Man dies.
These units all get more powerful when a fellow Hollow Man bites the dust. This allows you to trade off other Hollow Men to destroy or deal damage to your opponent’s units while also generating value using these abilities. These effects naturally play well with Last Laughs, which already give you an advantage when your units die, so we made sure that at least a few Hollow Men had some potent Last Laugh abilities for you to build around:
We also included a few stand-out cards that can really help you to outpace your opponent by generating additional Hollow Men or getting use out of using multiple Last Laugh and ‘after a friendly Hollow Man dies’ triggers:
While we wanted to make Hollow Men a viable option for any Hero, it’s worth remembering that the Gravedigger also makes heavy use of Hollow Men with her Hero Power, spells and units. Be sure to think about some of the following cards when considering how to construct your Hollow Man deck:
That pretty much covers two of the largest scale reworks of neutral cards that we carried out as part of the 0.3 update. We think that Hobbes and Hollow Men are now an interesting and potentially super powerful pair of races that can help fuel a wider range of different decks. I’m really excited to see how these decks will shape up in the Hero League over the coming weeks.
Happy chicken chasing!
Tom “Wimbles” Wimbush - Lead Designer of Fable Fortune (Mediatonic)