Narziss had a good point earlier today about in the thread about Portal. I'm going to shamelessly hijack his thought and run with it. But for the record, the direction I'm going with it would be best filed under the "there's no idea too stupid to be blogged about" category.

Essentially, if I understood him correctly, his point was that there are some vocabulary issues with the game's non-ally cards. It's even a difficult topic to discuss because I don't want to let terms become conflated. So for the sake of this post: when I say "effect," I'm talking about the card's text ("your allies can attack the turn they are summoned," etc.); when I say "trope," what I mean is some sort of action necessary for that card's effect to go off that ISN'T directly written on the card at this point (in Portal's case: "this card stays active and in play until destroyed"). You see how the tropes are things you just sort of have to know? As card effects get more complicated, card effects will start to read like your credit card's terms of service. But since the target medium for this game is the iPhone's 3.5" screen, when it comes to reading the fine print of a card, less is more.

The most obvious way to keep cards from becoming novellas is to create card genuses, make some rules on how each is to be used, and then put each card under one of the genuses. Now, these have to be broad so you don't have too many--you don't want to have a game where you need a dictionary next to you to play--but specific enough that all your tropes are covered.

Right now, Shadow Era has three types of cards: heroes, allies and abilities. I think we get heroes and allies. Abilities however, have a bunch of different tropes that make reconciling them somewhat difficult. Look at Potal: how long does the effect last? Nowhere on the card does it SAY it's an ongoing effect. And yet, it's trope involves it being out on the field. With the exception of it, Engulfing Flames, and Poison Gas, every Ability card seems to appear on the field, do its business and leave. But these stick around. Okay, you say, sure, but any idiot can identify a card that stays on the field just by thinking about how the effect would HAVE to work. Well, how about we take a look at Clinging Webs.



What happens here? Does the card stay out or is the two turn paralysis a one-and-done effect? Ultimately, this is a question that answers the "can you kill the card's effect before the two turns are up" question. If you kill off Engulfing Flames, clearly the ally it was on stops taking damage. But this card says it inflicts two turns of paralysis. If it stays out, you should get to cancel the effect with a card that destroys a fielded ability card. But if not, the two turns effect is nonnegotiable because it is inflicted on an ally and then Clinging Webs immediately leaves the field. There are two tropes that could define the function of this card.

Every TCG hits this issue at some point. Magic resolved it by creating like six hundred different card types. Things weren't just a permanent. They were a legendary, green, permanent, elf with an ability that can be activated like an instant.

For all its many faults, Yu-Gi-Oh! actually had a pretty elegant idea for how to resolve the issue of there being a bajillion categories of cards. I don't know if you've ever played, but I'll explain it for the sake of those who never have. They only had three types of cards: Monster, Spell, and Trap. But they clearly they wanted to make game mechanics that were more complicated than could be created by just those three, so they decided on putting little symbols after the "Spell" or "Trap" text that explained how the card was to be used. There was a little infinity symbol for cards that stayed on the field until something destroyed it, a crosshair symbol for cards that got attached to a monster, a lightening bolt for cards you could play out of turn, etc. etc. etc.

The beauty of this system was that it was completely modular--if at some point, three sets down the line, they wanted to introduce a new game mechanic, they could do so just by adding a new symbol. It made learning how to use new cards a snap, and it meant that there was none of that "this card is a legendary, green, permanent, elf with an ability that can be activated like an instant, etc. etc. etc." nonsense. It was straightforward. Like in Magic, a card that targeted a Spell card could destroy any card that had the word "Spell" on it, but you never needed to explain the "equip this card to one of your allies" or "if this card is destroyed, its effect ends immediately" or "this card is activated and sent to the graveyard immediately" tropes because that was all explained by the little symbol right there on the card.

I'd like to see some sort of card taxonomy. One that fully encapsulates the different types of tropes implicit in the ability effects in the current set. Ongoing and non-ongoing will suffice for now, but only barely because of cards like Clinging Webs which stick around for a set amount of time. I'd expect that the game is going to want some new types of cards at some point, so setting a system up that includes modular potential would be wise.

How about this:

Heroes

• Human
• Shadow
• etc.

Allies

• Human
• Shadow
• etc.

Abilities

• Ongoing
• Lasting
• Spell
• Delayed

This way, you could create rules defining the tropes of cards you create, just by putting "Spell Ability" (one that does its thing and goes to the graveyard) or "Lasting Ability" (one that stays on its target for a few turns then dies) on the card. And as you come up with new and clever tropes for cards to use, all you have to do is come up with a word to put before Ability on the card and write an entry in the rules about that type of ability. The specific words aren't my focus here--it's the notion that there needs to be some subsets under Abilities to keep things straight that I want to argue.

Thoughts?