Face Down + Hidden Mana

Exactly. Knowing "there's something big and scary coming to get me and I don't know what it is" seems like an excellent example of the sort of cool effects facedown allows.

See, I had in mind the opposite effect:
You see a card hit the field. it's face down. Your opponent had 20 mana of each type.
You look in your hand. You have creature destruction.

Do you use it? What if it's a 1/1 designed to fool you?

Probably I attack past it while keeping one monster back for defense, saving the monster-D for next turn, especially as an opponent with that much mana has presumably been building this hand for a while and likely has a counterspell. But that's a strategy answer, not a design answer, and depends a lot on the gamestate.

Really the decisive factor between these two versions for me isn't flavor--though I admittedly prefer the limited information approach to the no information approach because I think working with limited information is more interesting*--it's that I really don't want a tedious mana-tracking mini-game added to CMC. Like, verging on "I hate clickwars"-level don't want.

Mind you, there are ways to try to get elements of your vision with the tiered approach as well--things like

RoboNPC
0D4G4L
zero
(Facedown)
When Decoy is destroyed, gain 2G2L and draw two cards.
1/1

and

Mobile Mine
4D4G0L
zero
(Facedown)
When targeted by a spell, deals 40 damage to that spell's controller.
30/50

leap to my mind as rough drafts

*This probably goes back to our differing opinions on randomness, actually. You tend to see randomness as a way of making the game more interesting, whereas I tend to see it as making the game less interesting after a certain point. And obviously we disagree on where that point is, and this discussion is unlikely to produce any major shifts in opinion from either of us on the matter. Which is why I'm trying to lean instead on the "mana-tracking is unfun" issue, which I hope we can agree on more readily. Since, y'know, it's your game and I'm just a rabid fan.

Have you tried actually tracking the mana in a game Dav? As un-fun as it is, doing so will allow you to find out: A) if it really benefits the player to do it B) possible solutions based on experience rather than conjecture.

I'm not terribly bothered about what direction this goes, so long as it works well. But I'll say that if it completely (or largely) hides your mana then it's an additional boost to the card, and you should pay an appropriate extra amount for it.

Also, I am not a fan of randomness, but face down cards aren't random. They may lead to random decision making, but that's on the part of the player and not the cards.

A potential solution would be to have spells/effects/abilities that would induce Hidden mana for a certain period of time. The advantage being that hidden mana is a really useful ability that at the current system is too easily gained. Of course the downside would be extra work, creating/modifing cards with that effect.

So I figured I might as well throw the idea out here, and leave it in your hands Webrunner

Blue_Elite Wrote:Have you tried actually tracking the mana in a game Dav? As un-fun as it is, doing so will allow you to find out: A) if it really benefits the player to do it B) possible solutions based on experience rather than conjecture.

I know from past experience that knowing how much mana your opponent has is important; I've never had to do much work for the information before, but I've certainly used it a great deal.

masamunemaniac Wrote:Also, I am not a fan of randomness, but face down cards aren't random. They may lead to random decision making, but that's on the part of the player and not the cards.

This was more of a philosophic point than anything, but if you refer back to Webrunner's example of a facedown monster being cool you'll note he has set it up to deny the opponent any information on what the monster is, forcing them to guess; obviously in practice this is impractical (waiting until you have 20/20/20 is dangerous, probably not all facedown monsters are practical to play in good decks, etc.) but as a theoretical situation presumably it reveals what he sees as one of the major features of facedown monsters.

Bonebreak Wrote:A potential solution would be to have spells/effects/abilities that would induce Hidden mana for a certain period of time. The advantage being that hidden mana is a really useful ability that at the current system is too easily gained. Of course the downside would be extra work, creating/modifing cards with that effect.

Exactly which part of this do you see this as a solution to? (It certainly doesn't solve the mana-tracking problem, for example.)

you can get facedown cards for approx two mana, or just flip an existing card with that flippy spell. There's no need to have it be available separate to that

Denying your opponent information is what face down monsters are mostly about.

masamunemaniac Wrote:you can get facedown cards for approx two mana, or just flip an existing card with that flippy spell. There's no need to have it be available separate to that

Sorry, I was a little unclear. The making of hidden mana as a spell etc would replace the automatic effect of hidden mana with any face down card. That way you couldn't get that powerful information denial for 2 mana

I'd just like to state that from what I've seen, you already pay a substantial premium on most face-down cards that probably covers the value of hiding your mana, so I don't think we need any blanket cost-increases.

webrunner Wrote:Denying your opponent information is what face down monsters are mostly about.

Sure; we agree on that part. Hence my point earlier about being in favor of "limited information." I really have two seperate arguments, to break it down more straightforwardly:

1) Making basic information like mana levels extra work to find out makes me sad. Hopefully we can agree on this being bad in principle, though I begin to suspect we disagree on *how* bad it is.

2) I like the idea of limited information--"I wonder whether that facedown monster is X,Y, or Z, because if it's X or Y I should attack, but if it's Z I should stay on defense...in his deck it's more likely to be X or Z...hm..." but I don't like the idea of having *no* idea what a monster is--"I wonder what the heck that is. Huh."

Tamdrik Wrote:I'd just like to state that from what I've seen, you already pay a substantial premium on most face-down cards that probably covers the value of hiding your mana, so I don't think we need any blanket cost-increases.

I'm not suggesting across the board cost-ups, just that when we do rebalance those cards we make sure that we evalutate the (Face Down) as being 'worth' some mana, as it is pretty powerful (making the opponent play blind n'all). As in a 33 (Face Down) monster being noticeably weaker than a skelebird, for instance.

Here's an arguement for both sides:

All these monsters have the same cost but have radically different abiliities (Dragon's being the unusual sac).
Accordingly, it would be quite possible to make cost clones that are very different from one another.


Personally, I like not having a clue what monster was just played because it makes CMC less rigid. By that I mean that when a match is going downhill, save for a major spell, it's pretty obvious who's going to win. Rarely do back-and-forth close matches occur. Not being able to tell at all what monster was played makes opponents hesitant and gives you a chance to make a comeback if they over- or under-estimate what you've played. I wouldn't call it random just like I wouldn't call Trap Cards in Yu-Gi-Oh a matter of luck; you lay down a specific card and it's up to your opponent to decide if their position in the match is strong enough that it's worth taking a risk and triggering the card or better to hold back.


On a side note, and this is probably a bug but I'll bring it up here in case it is intentional: sniping facedown monsters causes their name to come up in the side box (actions box, whatever it's called). Not sure if that was intended as a way to identify monsters.

Blue_Elite Wrote:Personally, I like not having a clue what monster was just played because it makes CMC less rigid. By that I mean that when a match is going downhill, save for a major spell, it's pretty obvious who's going to win. Rarely do back-and-forth close matches occur. Not being able to tell at all what monster was played makes opponents hesitant and gives you a chance to make a comeback if they over- or under-estimate what you've played. I wouldn't call it random just like I wouldn't call Trap Cards in Yu-Gi-Oh a matter of luck; you lay down a specific card and it's up to your opponent to decide if their position in the match is strong enough that it's worth taking a risk and triggering the card or better to hold back.

And it's just that sort of educated guess of "is it worth it" that I think facedown cards should be used to require. But if I have absolutely *no* idea what the monster is then the "educated" part drops rather a bit, which makes it seem more random and less interesting to me, as per my previous post.

To choose a non-CMC example to illustrate my general point, wouldn't Blackjack be a rather less interesting game if you didn't get to see exactly one of the cards dealt to your opponent?

Though I seem to hear people saying that facedown monsters get entrenching--is that true? Because it makes them more powerful but less interesting, since there isn't the "should I attack that or would I die horribly" question but instead only the "should I attack or wait and see if it kills the monster of its choice" in which case I'm probably just gonna attack and hope.

I may remove the entrenching. I still dont like the bracket ideas (because you can still tell which -color- it is if you have brackets, too, so you can reasonably tell if the monster is going to have a high attack or high life)

How about this:
1) instead of ?/?/? it shows x?x?x? - a theoretical maximum, which goes up and down based on when he pays mana and gains it of visible cards.
2) entrenching removed.

That way you can make educated guesses- you know an upper limit to the monsters he has in play (if he's got a theoretical maximum of 6/6/6 and played 5 facedowns you can guess they're pretty weak)

Sounds like a good compromise to me.

Agreed.

Oh wait, facedown actually gave entrenching too? Wow, that was sillyoverpowerful then, the 76/1 type monsters would have a huge chance of getting that much needed shot in with entrenching... yikes...

Removing entrenching gives a massive 'YES!' from me (considering it usually adds tons to a card's cost anyway), and the 'theoretical' maximum would be very helpful indeed. It would remove an element of how hidden the card was, but it would still make Face Down very useful, without making it a bookkeeping nightmare.

The changes are implemented now. It gives a theoretical maximum- what your mana would be if every face down you've played is free - and no more entrenching.

There is a minor bug if both players have a face down and then one player doesn't, and then does again - it uses the old value, but that can wait for the next server update.