Now that I have a link the First Blood rules up on the site its time for post about what currently thinking about it. Keep in mind I do this get my ideas straight, so if things get kinda murky it is because my thought process is too.
First Blood is an attempt by me to capture the spirit of playing 1 vs 1 Mid in a MOBA in a card game. My constraint is that I want to keep it playable as a physical product. This constraint forces me to be mindful of what systems I want to bring in and model, and to what level of detail can I afford to model these systems before the play becomes too clunky. I also am attempting to keep the play of the game under 30 min, ideally closer to 15-20 min.
The game currently takes about a half hour with weird coin based number and position tracking. The length is largely because the core action of moving cards down the line requires the movement of 4 cards every turn: 1 trashed, 2 advance, 1 played from hand. Its too much card movement. I have some ideas for other systems, but many of them would remove the simultaneous action from the game or ability to react to your opponent's cards, both of which I feel like are important to modeling a MOBA. For now it stays.
In the rules document there are 7 heroes roughed out if I remember correctly. The first 4 are the characters that I intend to work on. I intend to make Skywrath a magic burn deck, oP a magic utility deck (focused on tower killing), Caitlyn a physical auto attack burn deck and Vi physical utility. These are the four archetypes that I want to support and refine for the time being. Physical characters will have the least item support and trade HP for effect. Auto attacks will have item support and hate in the form of persistent effects, the aim being that they have the fastest means of ending the game when correctly itemized. Mages will have item hate and support in the form of hard counters and temporary buffs, the aim being that mages start well and lose effectiveness as itemized against. All these archetypes exist in these manners in the MOBA genera, and just like in MOBA balancing should be impossible. Yay?
I finally have the item shop rules roughed out, but no numbers yet as far as purchase and trashing cost, those will have to come out of play testing. I'm not pleased with the optional item list as it is currently, but the shop's core list of 12 feels solid. I feel like there are a lot interesting card effects in that list, and importantly they are generically good, good for all archetypes. Looking at the starter items though, I have no idea what to think. In theory they are interesting, but they look like a balancing nightmare. I'll have to play with them to really get a handle on it. The optional items currently support anti-movement, mages and auto attacks fairly well, but most everything else is lacking. I want at least 8 more items on the optional item list and I want every archetype to have more items that help them than they can bring in. Current thoughts are that each player will add 6 items to the shop, that number might go up to 8. If 6 is the bring in then I'm aiming currently for making sure each character has a at least 10 compelling items choices. I have some work to do.
I applied to Riot today, and I'm clearly using their character names. Looking forward to the take down request cause that means they looked at the website.