Power cards

So on my birthday Sunday, I decided to surf around Phil's site for awhile, looking for more information for the next projects I'm working on. I re-read the Luke interview, and this quote caught my eye (paraphrased):

"Anyone can make one-shot power cards. We deliberately avoided that in Guardians - we didn't want to restrict any cards."

Wow. Here's the co-creator of Guardians talking about his vision about how the cards should be designed. And here's myself, designing one-shot power cards in Champion's Odyssey (like Doom & Tomes of Transference).

Now, to be fair, some of these cards were designed to take advantage of Balor's ability, rather than restricting them for having the potential to be abusive. However, I much prefer to restrict a card, instead of having to errata cards because of an environment with no restrictions (Champs, anyone?).

Add to that the challenge of creating new cards. There are 675 cards in Guardians. Seven Seas adds almost 200 cards. That's 875 cards. Now I show up and try to design another 100. And here's the thing about those 100 - you want to make them compelling. You want people to use them. You don't want them to say, "that card stinks" or "I would never use that card". Guardians has many different game mechanics, but you can only make so many cards before they start sounding like other cards.

Adding one-shot power cards keeps things fresh, keeps things different. I've kept them to a minimum, and they aren't too powerful. And though they place restrictions on the cards that Luke never intended, I think at some point the designers would have to go down that road to keep the game from stagnating. Still, I'm considering changing the cards, to maintain the spirit of the original game...

UPDATE: After more consideration I've decided the two cards I listed above (Doom and Tomes of Transference) are the only two that need to be changed because they contain the phrase "you may only have 1 copy of this card in your deck." It seems to me that this is the restriction to which Luke refers - in Guardians, there are no limits to how many copies of a card you can have in a deck. There are other restrictions in the game they seem to have no problem with (accessories that only allow only 1 copy in play, for instance). I'll be posting updates to these two cards soon - I have already fixed Tomes and am working on a solution to Doom.