Cactus Game Design Message Boards

Yes, yes, I know prophets are already strong. Hush for a minute.

A lot of the Old Testament is prophecy. Some of this is relaying God's word to his people (which is, strictly speaking, the definition of a prophet), while some is predictive in nature. I'll be focusing on the latter category here.

There are already a few takes on this kind of prophecy in the game - Birth Foretold comes to mind. However, since so much of the Bible (the OT especially) is prophecies, perhaps a completely new take is required.

My suggestion is this: Prophecy is a new identifier. The card itself will be a territory class enhancement, with two separate parts of its ability - a weaker first half, and a powerful second half. In the identifier, after Prophecy, the "fulfill condition" will be in parenthesis (akin to Taunt). Before the condition is fulfilled, the (weak) first part of the ability will be active; after the condition is met, the (strong) second part will activate. All prophecies have the implied identifier "Limit one per territory".

For an example, let's use Isaiah 53, twelve verses of prophecy about Jesus. The most famous verse - and the one I'll use here - is verse 5: "But He was pierced through for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities; The chastening for our well-being fell upon Him, And by His scourging we are healed." (NASB). Since this is a reference to Christ, the fulfill condition will be "Son of God is played". Even before Christ came, this was taken as referencing the Messiah, and was a message of hope, so the initial ability (the first half) will be something along the lines of, "When your hero loses a battle, you may reveal an opponent's hand." Certainly not useless, but not necessarily game-breaking either. However, after SoG is played, it will gain a much more powerful ability: "You may remove a good dominant from your discard pile to heal and make all evil characters vulnerable to all heroes." While still not game-breaking (by the limited number of uses), this is now a much more powerful card.

Here's the result:

Spoiler (hover to show)

Now, a lot of the OT prophecies are about Jesus. In fact, one of my concerns about this are actually that playing SoG will, with enough of these types of cards, set off a ridiculous chain of ubercharged abilities. One way to avoid this is to focus on other parts of Jesus' ministry (for example, Isaiah 35:5 "Then the eyes of the blind will be opened and the ears of the deaf will be unstopped." could have a condition related to blindness being removed, or an enhancement about Jesus healing blind/deafness). Still, there are other prophecies that don't involve Christ. For example, we could go to Jacob's prophecy concerning his sons:

Spoiler (hover to show)

You could even get evil in on the fun. One great example of a (true) evil prophecy would be Balaam's prophecies (okay, so maybe they actually blessed Israel, but Dreaming Pharaoh is evil too ):

Spoiler (hover to show)

So? What do you think?

To be on the more constructive side of things, I just want to remind you, Luke, that while many people think that this is a cool idea, everyone posting that would clog up the forums and wouldn't really lead to further discussion about the topic. So, for future reference, please include something more conducive to the conversation or at least be more specific about what aspects you think are cool and you could also add stuff that you think should be played a different way or whatever. Posting small little comments as you have in the past just to increase your post count or to just get a generic opinion out there can be irksome to most forum users.

Also, necroposting, or bringing a thread back from the dead, is typically frowned upon in these parts but it is excusable when you have something important you want to add, although just adding "sounds cool" doesn't quite make the cut.

Let's get this thread back on topic please. I will be communicating with LukeChips via PM regarding his posts. There's no need to continue discussing it here.


I personally like the idea of cards that get better when conditions are met. As long as you have varied triggers (that aren't too easy to trigger yourself) and interesting abilities I think it could be a neat mechanic.