I have a passion for all things old and awesome. Also all things new and awesome. But in this case, Greek mythology is old and awesome.
I'm going to spill the beans about the card colors a bit. We haven't revealed all the card types yet (though I'm sure you can guess most of them). We did a big card color change in the last month (and it may happen again) so that has probably led to some confusion but this is what we are using currently. Red = Attack (i.e. cards that do damage or otherwise harm the target) White = Assist (i.e. cards that help or benefit the target). Heal is an example. Purple = Utility (i.e. cards that manipulate or change the target in ways that aren't strictly hurtful or helpful). Teleport is an example. Blue = Move Orange = Special (i.e. deck manipulation and other effects that don't fit into the above). Black = ? I might save the exact definition here, because I want to talk about these cards specifically in a diary. There are some other colours that I haven't mentioned, which I'm sure you can guess/speculate about. You'll note that these colours are very much based around the function of the card, not it's flavour. The reason we did that is so that you can scan your hand and very quickly see how many damaging cards you have, how many helper cards and so on. A previous colour coding style we were using was more flavour/content based. For example, all Spells were purple. That was cool, but since spells can vary so much in their effect, it wasn't as helpful as what we are using now.
That sounds like a great setup. It implies something I've kinda enjoyed the few times I've seen it: If there is no "magic" color, and instead the Attack/Assist/Utility/Special cards may all have magic or mundane elements, then the playing field feels more level. A warrior and a wizard are trying to do the same thing; they just have different priorities. You don't have any visual cues telling you that you have to think about your priest as a "healer" (and nothing more) because "duh, the healer uses healer cards." It makes it feel better to do things that people would ordinarily call "multi-classing" or somesuch, like having a "holy healing character" do the daring thing of also being a warrior. At least that's how it feels to me. I know there will be actual class differences and so on, but I like thinking about function before form sometimes.
When you watch people play MMOs and other games where they are able to arrange sets of abilities/effects, they are almost always arranged by function, for example, a healer might arrange their abilities in the following manner: Heals, Buffs, Debuffs, Damage. So this feels similar.
I was thinking "I know what a Cassandra Complex/Truth is, and I'm not 40" then I realized I know it because I was reading Extraordinary Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds which is over 150 years old at this point so never mind.
Getting back to the Maze of the Mind Mystery... In the context of this week's Dev Diary, could the bottom row of icons have something to do with a revamped version of the boost system Jon outlined? They line up nicely with the Damage/Movement and Range portions of the card... Maybe it can be played to somehow boost an Attack card that's been played? Or maybe it can be played in response to an opponent's Attack or Movement?
I can see that, although you see that there are 2 different squares so one is probably still related to the card speed increase perhaps, there is even room for another star perhaps for stronger types of boosts. It still doesnt explain what the other square is there for, perhaps maybe that could be related to armor/damage boosts to try to soak more from an impending attack or deal more for an impending attack Edit: added this post to Card Mysteries 2 post
