Turn and Refresh

Both of these keywords relate to existing mechanics in Ambal Tournament, they just didn’t have a proper name. I realized during playtest that not giving them a name was a mistake, so now they got one and should be easier to explain and write certain skill effects. Keywords help define mechanics so it’s easier to reference them and point out what is important and recurring.

Turn: During the Battle Phase, players place their cards face down and reveal them one at a time, each card played is a turn. Simple. It will be easier to create skill effects that play around with turns.

Refresh: Whenever a player has to draw cards but their Battle Deck has no cards left they must shuffle the Discard Pile forming a new deck and lose total Energy, that is a Refresh. Having this keyword will also make it easier to create effects using this mechanic.

Mastery

Now this is a whole new mechanic, how exciting! One thing that was in the back of my mind for the longest time was how to reward players for using many cards from the same School (if they wish to do that), or how I would be able to create some skills that were strong and prevent players from picking a School just to add that one strong card to their deck. While I did introduce some interesting interactions to reward using skills from the same school, I felt it wasn’t enough.

Since in Ambal there’s only one type of Energy and you can mix and match two different Schools, it creates the situation where, for example, a player can make an entire Fire Magic deck with only 1 skill from another School. I want to be able to create skills that are strong but can’t be used without the existence of other skills from the same School, and that’s why the Mastery mechanic was created.

[School of Knowledge] Mastery – Your Mastery of the indicated School is equivalent to the number of cards from that School in your Discard Pile. Mastery is checked before discard effects, unless stated otherwise.

Example: If you have 5 Fire Magic skills in your Discard Pile it means you have Fire Magic Mastery 5.

Imagine an Assassination Path card with the following effect: 

Cost 1. Interrupt target opponent’s skill.  

That’s a pretty powerful card, easy to use and could be added to any deck without effort. Now if we change the effect to: 

Cost 1. If you have at least Assassination Path Mastery 4: interrupt target opponent’s skill.

That’s still a pretty powerful skill, but now it’s much harder to fit it in any deck. This opens more options when creating new skills! Mastery can also be used to prevent certain cards from being triggered too soon, to reward players that commit to one School and ultimately is an extra resource players will have to consider. This allows a new layer of complexity and strategy without making the battle or skill interactions too complicated, while also giving me more control over the design.

Of course this mechanic could have been used without the creation of a keyword, but having to write “if you have at least X cards from Y School in your Discard Pile” everytime would be cumbersome and creating interactions would also be more complicated.

I believe this mechanic fits very well with the RPG theme and how some skills get stronger the more a character invests in an attribute or skill tree. Since Foundation is just the first set I don’t plan to add many skills with Mastery, but it’s definitely something I want to explore in the future! Let me know what you think about these changes.