WI - The Capital Cycle

[fatolaf]

Fantasy Flight Games is pleased to announce the upcoming release of The Capital Cycle for Warhammer: Invasion The Card Game! Beginning in the third quarter of 2011 with The Inevitable City, The Capital Cycle brings a versatile new selection of units, tactics, and support cards to your game. Each of its six monthly Battle Packs emphasizes one of the major factions, providing a new level of synergy between that faction's most common traits. This, along with the introduction of the "Feared" keyword, makes The Capital Cycle an invaluable addition to any Warhammer: Invasion deck.

Feared is a powerful new keyword that will leave your opponent's units too terrified to use their special abilities. When a unit with Feared is declared as an attacker, the attacking player chooses up to X target units in any zone (or zones). As long as the unit with Feared is attacking, each targeted unit's text box is treated as blank (excluding Traits)!

For more on this exciting cycle, we present Lukas Litzsinger, developer of Warhammer: Invasion.

Opening new doors

Greetings Warhammer: Invasion players! I'm thrilled to be working on this fantastic game, and I look forward to the upcoming release of The Capital Cycle.

Each Battle Pack in The Capital Cycle is focused on one of the six races of Warhammer: Invasion, with half of a given pack devoted to the highlighted race. This makes The Capital Cycle Battle Packs good expansions for newer players who are interested in playing a particular race, but it also offers a chance for all players to experiment with new builds for a race when its pack is released. But before we take a sneak peek at some cards, I would like to talk about a more holistic concept: synergy.

Synergy is important in any customizable game. It's the result of combining different elements in a beneficial manner, and the act of creating a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Card combos are an obvious example of synergy, but focusing on a deck objective or win condition (e.g. 'this deck will attack my opponent's hand,' or 'this deck will destroy all units') and tweaking your cost curve for a good opening draw are other examples of synergy. Put simply, synergy is the goal of deck-building.

Why is this so important? Because increasing synergy was a guiding principle in designing The Capital Cycle. But what does increasing synergy really mean? Doesn't that happen naturally through the expansion of the card pool?

A few examples

Yes, new cards undoubtedly mean new interactions, but sets can have a lot of synergy within themselves, only to fit poorly into the overall mold of the game. So while there are undoubtedly new pieces to the puzzle in The Capital Cycle, these pieces serve to increase the interaction within the entire card pool. Take Inflame for example. In The Capital Cycle, loyalty is more than just a cost variable. Rather than being a drawback, having high loyalty cards in your deck can now be a benefit. By rewarding players that run cards with high loyalty, Inflame and other cards in the set lead to an integration of previous cards that were deemed too expensive to play.

Another example of how The Capital Cycle increases synergy is Guild of Engineers. Engineers are an important cog in Dwarf culture, and I felt that they needed a card to reflect their role as builders and innovators. The guild is not known for its flexibility, however, and so players must choose the guild's "policy" by playing it into either the Kingdom or the Quest zone. Like the Engineer trait, several other traits are given new levels of synergy in The Capital Cycle.

Finally, let's look at a card from the first pack, The Inevitable City, which focuses on Chaos. This pack will introduce an interesting twist on corruption. While the Skaven already use corruption as a cost for many abilities, Chaos takes this one step further. Since Chaos seeks to spread corruption across all of the civilised (and not so civilised) lands, it made sense for corruption to be a sign of favor from the Dark Gods, and provide benefits for corrupted Chaos units. With Khorvak Grimbreath in play, you may think twice about your target for Seduced by Darkness or Daemonsword.

[maelzch]

chaos just got good if their corrupted units can attack!

feared could be interesting

[fatolaf]

chaos just got good if their corrupted units can attack!

Yep 1 card suddenly opens up a whole load of possibilities for Chaos