All it did was give you the chance to have meaningful conversations with us =P besides im sure your awesome "Speculation"(Trademark SurgeonFish Inc.) ability will come in handy as we try to determine the "Backfire Cards"(Trademark SurgeonFish Inc.)
The card in question, in context: Alright. It's not just that the star is there at all; it's that the star is in it's own row entirely. A row that doesn't so much as exist in the Teleport Other card. One could simply put all these boxes on both cards, but the creators didn't; this means that the presence of boxes themselves is supposed to tell you about card function. The ones on Teleport Other are, logically, damage (left) and range (right). Compare to Arcing Zap: Teleport Other does no damage. It has a blank box (left) in mini-form to remind you of this. Now compare to Escaping Run: It is not a card that deals damage. Instead, it has a movement value on the left. One can assume that this is the start of another pair of statistics, and therefore that lower row on the Maze of Mind card. But, ah ha! It has usurped the space where a damage/range pair would be! So, when viewed in mini-form, there would be no damage/range row. This implies that the star on the left in Maze of Mind is actually some form of movement; perhaps staggering about. If so, I wonder what the box on the right is. What would be logical to pair with movement? Is this where dodging (or other defense reduction) goes?
I was wondering if anyone would notice that star. It will all be explained in the future. Actually, I was planning to explain that stuff last week but polling indicated that people wanted to hear more about adventuring and deck-building rather than more about the combat mechanics. We will get back to it eventually though. There's some good detective work in your post Sir Knight - but you aren't quite right. Admittedly, it would be pretty hard (impossible?) for you to land on exactly what is going on with that mini-card. We haven't really given you enough clues to guess yet.
Too bad that isn't a gold star. That would mean he needs to read nine more books to get a free pizza from Pizza Hut!
So the newest card doesn't really need analysis. Card acceleration = good. Being able to discard during the acceleration is situational, depending on whether you can recur a good card you pitch back to hand/play or if you have a crap card (*coughbackfirescough*) that you want to pitch. But with so many undead monsters/adventures mentioned, we have to wonder if there are any lich/necromancer monsters that can use cards out of your graveyard... Yay for wild/baseless speculation!
Maybe not by itself, but it has introduced two new and exciting things: an orange background! And a gold header! Oh my goodness, can you imagine how many ways the speculation could run from here?! Well . . . it mostly runs to a summary. For headers, we've seen paper-like (Stunning Bash, Escaping Run, Arcing Zap), silver (Teleport Other, Maze of the Mind), black (Dropped Guard), and gold (Inspirational Thinking). The meanings remain unclear. For backgrounds, we've seen red (Stunning Bash), blue (Escaping Run), purple (Arcing Zap, Teleport Other), black (Dropped Guard), and orange (Maze of the Mind, Inspirational Thinking). These are more clear: orange, I would guess, contains all the mental stuff. I'm going to guess that small variations in the texture of the background (between the two purples, or between the two oranges) are not important and just reflect the development of the art. P.S.: Woo, hundredth post. Still a Mushroom Warrior. When do I become a Skeleton Warrior (TM)? Do I need a soul stone first? Or just a DVD player?
No, but let's speculate anyway. As an aside to Jon et al: I could see this kind of mindless speculation being a little annoying for the dev team to read. If so, I'm sorry, and I promise to post something of consequence at some point. I don't know about this. Two things would lead me to believe that the top row of two icons on the tiny cards are actually used by both damage/range and movement/[whatever]... Maze of the Mind's boxes are black, rather than white. This reads to me as being a section for penalties, or completely different mechanics, rather than another section for regular white icons. More importantly, can anyone think of a situation in which a card would need to have movement, range AND damage all listed in icons at the bottom of the card? In a world where you can slap one of those into the card's body text ("After you resolve Skirmish Strike, you may move two squares in any direction."), you may be able to get away with only needing two white icons for any particular card. So, for those reasons, I think I've changed my mind on Maze of the Mind and am willing to assume that it's a Backfire card. If that's the case, the card likely "does a star to you". There are a couple things I can think of which that might mean... It inflicts a status condition on that character, the details of which haven't been discussed yet. I'm going to flail wildly and say that the star indicates what status is being inflicted; flailing even more wildly, I'll guess that it's some flavor of "Stun". Presumably, if the card inflicted you with Poison, there'd be a different icon in place of the star. It removes a "Star" from that character, where a "Star" is some kind of meta-resource that you build up and spend in a single battle to play more powerful cards, kinda like Wizard101 "pips" for anyone familiar with that game. This definitely sounds contrary to some of the game's design precepts, but I decided to toss it out there anyway while I was doing all the flailing. This is the question that I'm still wondering about. What else is so core to the game as to need to be shown on an icon like range and movement? Healing? A related question: if we assume I'm right and the bottom two boxes are for penalties, are things like "discard" and so on indicated somehow by an icon? Maybe there's a "catch-all" penalty icon that can stand for discard, lose a turn, whatever. Maybe that icon is the star (but I'm kind of hoping it turns out it's for Stun). I still feel pretty strongly that those are rarities: the fact that they appear to be persisted across a piece of equipment seems to support that. If we again assume (and we've been doing a lot of assuming in this post) that Maze of the Mind is a Backfire card, then black-bordered cards would most likely be "commons" or "super commons" or "poor quality" or whatever. That makes sense, at least: I'm guessing the Unwieldy Harpoon isn't exactly artifact-level equipment.
First post. I'll be the first to speculate on "Inspirational Thinking" It says "Superb Tactics" in the card set space. I'd guess that refers to a class or race trait. We know that mages can equip Puppeteer's Headband to add cards to their deck, I'd bet that at Level ???, Thieves or Mages gain the ability to add Superb Tactics to their deck. That or maybe all Elves can have it.
More then you think, there is a subtle clue that adds a different sort of depth then you realize, mainly this is the first non-equip related card, or so we think. I think your on the ball with this one, perhaps there is a different type of card that hasnt been revealed yet, unlike equipment cards this is possibly some other type of filler card that more universal or specific(class/race of "type" only) that we havnt seen yet. Besides its freaking gold bordered! That means it must be rare!
Ooh, traits. We're still waiting for more info on how classes and races are unique, and it will presumably have something trait-ish. We do know that there's such a thing as an "Ogre deck," for one.
Very nice analysis again Roshirai and Sir Knight. I feel bad now that we simply haven't given you the information necessary to figure out what that star is all about. It really is a bit opaque I'm afraid.
Yep, I hoped you all would pick up on the Superb Tactics thing. Equipment isn't all there in the game!
*sigh* That's what I get for posting while working, didn't even pay attention to the card colors. So our total color count is red, purple, blue, orange, black (not counting the unseen multicolor cards, which we were specifically told purples were not) If we had seen a yellow card, it would potentially solidify or completely disintegrate my color theory: Purple is red & blue, the potential for movement or attacks, orange would be red and yellow, the potential for (so far) card draw or possibly attacks. So theortical yellow cards would be draw power/advantage(take an extra attack etc). And black being an absence of color (in the light spectrum), therefore made of fail. Other thoughts: Inspiration having a gold top is totally a rare or a 'costly' card by point values. Alternatively, if we look at black as a pigment (the combination of all colors) we get the ultimate mixed bag, which can also suck, based on circumstances. Glorious days off, and full pots of coffee.
I'm guessing Superb Tactics is a skill/trait you can apply to your character like equipment. I'd be somewhat surprised if it was a racial trait, because it seems like it could really hamper class diversity (And the element of surprise in PvP) if each character of a given race had similar deck control forced on it. It seems the majority of cards will enter your deck in groups, which can also provide ways for cards like Dropped Guard to enter your deck...let's say Unwieldy Harpoon comes with three excellent attack cards, at the cost of Dropped Guard tagging along. I wonder how the final set-building will look like, if everything will come in groups, or how many/what kind of cards you'll be able to select individually.
= Hold on, what about the green cards? The ones that are on the front site of Dragon Hunter when you click on Card Hunter Game Info and you see the elf rouge having it in his hand? Or are we not counting those?
Huh, I missed that entirely. Armor is also there with a yellowy-tan color. Well, unless Green are mostly move/advantage making cards, my color theory is shot. Good catch Zan!
