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Variants and Fan Cards / Fan Card Mechanics Week 78: He Who Remains
« on: November 22, 2023, 02:25:32 pm »
For Week 78, I'm using a mechanic that I came up with a while ago, but have gone back and forth about, not sure if it is worthy of being its own thing: Remain cards. Remain cards are similar to Duration cards (they even share the same orange color), but they operate differently enough (I think) to justify being their own mechanic.
Here are the rules for Remain cards:
Design a Remain card.
The Remain type is not by itself playable, so your Remain card will need at least one other type (presumably a playable type such as Action / Treasure / Night / Dawn / etc.). Your Remain card can have any other type as well (I don't think Remain - Duration would work, but I'm not banning it in case someone comes up with something creative I'm not anticipating). You are also free to include any other official or fan mechanics in the design and to use any additional cards/landscapes you want to support your card's design--and if you use a split pile or non-Supply card, you are allowed (but not required) to use multiple Remain cards.
My main judging criteria is whether I would be excited to see the design in a Kingdom. Important factors for me are:
Here are the rules for Remain cards:
- Remain cards are orange and may stay in play beyond the turn they are played.
- As part of their ability, Remain cards will put Remain tokens on themselves. They do this using a +Remain direction, with +X Remain putting X Remain tokens on a card. So, for example, if a card says "+2 Remain" it will put 2 Remain tokens on itself.
- Players do not discard Remain cards in Clean-up if they have any Remain tokens left on them. Instead, players remove one Remain token from each Remain card each Clean-up.
- Remain cards are not discarded the turn their final Remain token is removed; instead they will be discarded the following turn (unless additional Remain tokens are added).
- There may be other ways to add or remove Remain tokens from a Remain card.
- Unlike with Duration cards, everything a Remain card does on-play happens the turn it is played.
- Thus, if a card such as Throne Room plays a Remain card multiple times, that card does not stay in play until the player discards the Remain card, as there is no need to track the fact that the Remain card was played multiple times.
- Remain cards may have an effect on future turns using a below-the-line ability, but playing a Remain card multiple times will not multiply that ability (although doing so will put more Remain tokens on the card, which could strengthen the ability or extend the time it's working).
- I have made a few examples of Remain cards for the follow-up post.
Design a Remain card.
The Remain type is not by itself playable, so your Remain card will need at least one other type (presumably a playable type such as Action / Treasure / Night / Dawn / etc.). Your Remain card can have any other type as well (I don't think Remain - Duration would work, but I'm not banning it in case someone comes up with something creative I'm not anticipating). You are also free to include any other official or fan mechanics in the design and to use any additional cards/landscapes you want to support your card's design--and if you use a split pile or non-Supply card, you are allowed (but not required) to use multiple Remain cards.
My main judging criteria is whether I would be excited to see the design in a Kingdom. Important factors for me are:
- balance -- the card useful, but not overpowering (both in general and in a variety of Kingdoms);
- playability -- the card is fun to play and works in more than one type of deck;
- simplicity -- this doesn't always mean fewer words; a card with lots of text that, once you understand it, can be easily and intuitively be played is better than one with four lines of text that is hard to understand;
- topicality -- the card uses the mechanic in an interesting way;