Hey Everyone-
So I recently discovered the Faeria card generator at: https://faeria-cards.com/create/ and kinda went nuts. I was inspired after Abrakam posted that they’re looking for new designers. Since I’m in the USA, I can’t really apply so instead I just went about making a whole 90 card set on my own to share with you all.
I started with a theme (Ice Age/Winter) and tried to introduce a couple new mechanics which went with it. I implemented just one new keyword- Freeze - which basically just renders a creature powerless for one turn. I also included some cards which force your opponent to make choices on your turn. I suppose a short countdown clock for that sort of thing might make sense, similar to mulligan phase.
I also might have gone a bit too far on the fatigue strategy for blue- but hey not like I can playtest or anything. The idea is for a set to come into a play environment (a la standard) and be replaced eventually by other sets. I also avoided multi-cards since Oversky is going into that so hard atm.
I had probably too much fun making these cards. There are so many different things you can do with Faeria, and I’m excited to see what they come up with next. All the art, by the way, is just the best fantasy drawings and renders I could find on Pintrest. Often I was mostly inspired by the art and lore I found. Hope some of you get a kick out of these, and I hope Faeria continues to grow and get more complex. Let me know what you think
-Iceboy
ps- I uploaded them as one 1.9mb image below, hope it works.
Winter’s Grasp (3f feed-the-forest for ALL your creatures)
Oradrim Mystic
Shaytan Tribute
Hassar’s Brood (OP but nice idea)
To Sacrifice the Mind
Freeze is a nice keyword. I’d thought of doing it in parts via pacify (can’t attack) + something like halt (can’t move) to make it more flexible. However, I guess you could do both and just make it so pacify and halt combine to make freeze. (I also didn’t have no-collect-faeria, but that’s probably a good addition).
Some things I’d note.
Asking the opponent to take an action during your turn causes a problem. Does it use up their time instead of yours? I guess that would be fair. But sometimes the player goes AFK for a bit till your turn is done - although I guess you can just use a sound effect to indicate they need to take an action. So, all problems are technically solvable, but IMHO it still breaks the gameflow.
Lots of your cards consider the color of enemy lands - for example everything that references mountains rather than “friendly mountains”. These cards are often hard to balance as their power directly depends on the opponent’s color.
Adding complex things to cards, like “Give a creature Production - Gain +1+1” is going to be really hard to follow visually (and mentally). Plus, many cards have no room for extra comments. It also significantly increases the game’s complexity (and is also possibly a nuisance to code, depending on how their engine works).
There’s also quite a bit of balancing needed IMHO. Especially when you remove cards to player’s hands (the Xi cards). That’s almost as bad as destroying them.
I did my own version of this much earlier (a new land color) when I was quite new (to try to prove a point to Ramora, but I did go a bit overboard), now looking back the balance wasn’t great and there were lots of problems.
Thanks for checking them out and sharing your thoughts!
Yeah many of these are likely OP or horrible if put through playtesting. And yes absolutely adding text to already text heavy cards in play would be dumb with the current way cards are displayed in Faeria.
These cards not balanced and iterated, but rather are more just examples of some different possibilities and mechanics you could explore with Faeria’s existing framework.
I’m not sure if adding complexity to the game is necessarily bad or good; it depends on players’ taste I guess. MTG has far more complex game-play than Hearthstone. And players choose which they prefer. I think Faeria is somewhere in the middle. That’s certainly why I play it.
Mostly I’m just excited to see where Abrakam takes the game next, and I hope they can deliver at least some fun stories and lore in future sets, and really take advantage of all the fun possibilities there are.
