november 14.

Richard Garfield Goes Shopping

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-ep1QnXLQ8
I enjoyed helping design the shop in Artifact and I think it provides a lot to the game. We knew we wanted the heroes to get more powerful over the course of play – and in fact we experimented with some experience and leveling systems to accomplish that. We quickly came to the conclusion we could get a lot of the feeling of improvement from a shop which sold items that upgraded the heroes. Rather than collect experience, players would collect gold. The gold could be spent to flexibly upgrade your heroes in different ways during the course of the game.



The shop is composed of three panels, the rightmost selling a random consumable item. These items are effects that we wanted players to always have access to, we didn’t want them to be forced to put, for example, healing potions in their deck.

The middle panel is dedicated to equipment the player chooses to bring into the game. It is a minimum of 9 cards, and unlike the other two panels, when you purchase something from the center panel a new option is immediately revealed. This means that when you have multiple purchases buying from the center first is correct so you can see the new revealed option before committing to further purchases.

The leftmost panel is the most exciting panel – the Secret Shop, which has who-knows-what for sale. While I wanted to see players build their shop deck with equipment that made sense for their strategy – we wanted to have the possibility that anything might be available in the shop, that it was bigger than just your deck list. This is the sort of mechanic that is easy to do digitally, but hard to do with a physical product.

The additional choices had to occasionally be better than what a player has in their deck, or they will rarely find themselves buying from the secret shop – and its’ cool appeal would be at best a surface appeal. This might happen, for example that a player has much more gold than they usually do, and so their equipment deck list might not have some bigger pieces they could afford. Also, it gives an extra chance to get what a player needs in a pinch – you might really need a weapon and you don’t get the opportunity from your deck list – you might have one that can work from the secret shop.

Because of the secret shop, one type of equipment whose design I began really valuing was equipment that would be conditionally valuable – perhaps conditional enough that it wasn’t correct to put it in my equipment deck, but when the conditions arise it makes the offer at the secret shop an unexpected boon. An example of such a piece of equipment is the Demagicking Maul, which can destroy an opponent’s lane improvement. This is the sort of equipment I might not make room for in my deck – but can be really happy to see when playing particular decks, or when one of my opponent’s improvements is really just begging to be destroyed.



One of my favorite cards from the shop is the Shop Deed. It reduces all costs from the secret shop by the cost of the item, in other words – you can get whatever the secret shop is offering for free. The wording on that is a bit peculiar though, why doesn’t it just say the items are free? That stems from our desire to make as much as we could modular and unbounded. If a Shop Deed merely made items free – then what would a second Shop Deed do? The way we made it, a second shop deed actually reduces the cost to negative numbers, and just as we respect negative numbers for armor – we respect negative numbers for item costs. You can start making a lot of money from your second shop deed!

- Richard Garfield

október 31.

Richard Garfield on Losing a Hero

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvCr3w6CJGc Losing a hero might not be as bad as you think.

Many players immediately gravitate to red because the heroes are often huge and robust, and the feeling of losing a hero on the flop is so bad. Red is solid – but it doesn’t dominate – and that in itself indicates the penalty of hero death is probably overrated. The loss of a hero can hurt a lot; the temporary loss of the attack and block the hero provides, and the reduced flexibility in card play make it generally something to avoid. And then on top of that your opponent scores some gold for the kill.

To really understand the cost of a hero dying you have to understand how good it is to be able to redeploy your heroes. When your hero is destroyed they sit out a turn, and then they can be put into any lane. It is hard to overstate how important and powerful this ability is. In general you only have to win 2 lanes, and so focusing your power correctly is vital to success in Artifact – it could involve sending backup to a key lane, or dropping into a lane in which you want to slow your opponent. If you are playing a multicolor deck you generally can’t play all your cards in every lane – this will allow you to play cards of the appropriate color into the perfect lane. If your hero works well with allies you can guarantee they have some – either choosing a lane that you have population in, or deploying it with some creeps that are heading into a lane.

An example of the power of redeployment – the hero Necrophos with his Heartstopper Aura. This makes the hero deal 2 piercing damage to its enemy neighbors at the start of a turn in a lane. If you have this aura is active within a lane, dealing with it is sometimes not too bad, I just make sure my neighboring heroes have over 2 health so they don’t die on the outset of the next turn. When I destroy a hero with this aura, and it is ready to redeploy – I might find myself panicked because I have to make sure every one of my heroes and important creeps have over 2 health – you are threatening them all!



This example actually points to another reason players often overestimate how bad hero death is – because of most other card games at some level they equate death with reset. In Magic an enchanted creature loses its enchantments. In Hearthstone unless it specifically indicates otherwise a creature leaving play to the hand or the deck becomes reset – to a generic copy of itself. This is profoundly untrue in Artifact. In Artifact equipment and permanent modifications – of which there are many – survive death. Is Necrophos about to die? In Magic or Hearthstone upgrading him with Heartstopper Aura would typically be a waste. In Artifact it is priming a bomb.

While it is sometimes difficult to appreciate the upside of a hero dying early in the game – it often becomes clear late in the game. A good player will find themselves intentionally not killing an enemy hero so he or she can’t redeploy to a more useful location. With great force of will I can restrain myself from killing an enemy hero in these circumstances. A good player may even find themselves pulling the trigger on their own heroes so they don’t have to rely on the shop providing a town portal. I confess, I can’t bring myself to do that.

- Richard Garfield