BetaDwarf has announced some big changes to the Wild Card mechanic in their game Minion Masters. The changes to this mechanic will completely change the way you build decks, and how your card collection can fuel different deck-building strategies.
If you’re unfamiliar, the Wild Card mechanic allows you to have more than one copy of a specific card in your deck. You can have as many as three of the same card before running out of Wild Cards and need to have access to multiple copies before you can use them as Wild Cards.
This sounds harmless – any game allows you to do that, right? Why would BetaDwarf want to limit players from building their decks with more than one copy of a card, and why allow players to even unlock more than one copy if it’s unusable anyway?
Wildcards rework test 🔄
Wildcards have always been a subject of discussion in the Minion Masters community. Read more about our plans regarding them and feel free to join the discussions on Discord or Reddit
▶️ https://t.co/g3zMk5SHeg pic.twitter.com/WYPvNIo5Wh— BetaDwarf | Working on Project F4E (@BetaDwarf) April 2, 2020
The thing is, games like Hearthstone or Magic: The Gathering have much bigger decks. A Hearthstone deck can have 2 copies of the same card for a 30-card deck, and a Magic deck can have as many as 4 for the standard 60-card deck, though deck size can vary depending on your game mode and block.
But in Minion Masters, decks are only 10 cards thick. Each card counts as 10% of your deck, so having three copies of the same card means nearly a third of your deck is a single card. This radically affects balance and playability and makes it so that players can unlock multiple copies of extremely strong cards that don’t need much else to synergize and just flood the game with them.
“At the same time, we acknowledge that there are more innocent uses of Wild Cards,” BetaDwarf states. “Users that make creative decks from them or simply use them to have fun with their favorite card even if the strategy isn’t viable. because of this we opted early on not to simply remove the mechanic, as we felt it would have been a significant loss to the game to outright remove a feature a sizeable portion of the playerbase enjoys.”
To that end, they’re now announcing alterations. To start a match, players must have 10 unique cards in their deck. Wild Cards will now be added as the 11th and 12th cards in your deck.
This may sound like a small change, but to those that are familiar with deckbuilding mechanics in games like this, that can make a huge difference. There are certainly pros and cons – the more cards in your deck, the less likely you are to pull the card you need; the more cards in your deck, the more variety you have in your answers to enemy’s tactics.
Overall, it’s a huge change that could massively impact the title. If you’re about to hop into a match, take a good look at your deck to see how it fits in with these new mechanics.
