Cactus Game Design Message Boards

These are my thoughts, and I'm going to strive to be gracious and level-headed with these observations.

1. Create-A-Card should be deserved for the categories that require the most skill and dedication to win. It doesn't take nearly as much time and dedication to win booster draft or sealed deck than it does to win T1 and T2 2P.

2. Create-A-Card should at least remain on T2-2P, or some other incentive should be offered for the most skill intensive category in Redemption. Winning T2 requires intense dedication, which I have noticed as a friend of Tyler Stevens and Justin Alstad. Such dedication deserves a reward of some sort.

3. Some players are incredibly averse to random deck building categories. I personally no longer can tolerate booster draft of any form and do not play anything outside of T1 and T2 2P at tournaments. I am very much the minority, however, people like myself do matter.

I apologize for being the dissident voice. I do respect those in charge making these sorts of decisions, even if I disagree with them, and in this case strongly. Thanks to the PTB for all that they do for this wonderful game I have been privileged to play since childhood, and I'll be at Nationals, playing my two categories that do not get to make a card but I do get to make good memories and tons of fun.

Jay,

I appreciate the well thought-out concerns and would like to respond and give you some insight since you did so in such a respectful manner.

We considered a few factors when deciding upon how to continue the card creation program this year.

Please know that this past year went extremely well in regards to ease of creation, testing, interactions with creator and Elder team, etc. This has not always been the case in the past. In fact we were very close to eliminating the program entirely before scaling back to two cards last year.

We are hoping that the increase to three cards this year doesn't revert us back to where we were before (And we think we have safeguards in place that will help with that)

We wanted each "Day" of play to have a category with this potential prize - That seems fair to us for players that can only make certain days.

On Thursday then, our choices are T2-2P and Booster. And while yes, T2-2P is a very skill intensive category, it has had the opportunity every year that we've ran the program thus far. I also disagree with your assertion that it doesn't take time and dedication to win closed categories - Booster certainly has far more RNG elements, but it still generally requires skillful technique in which cards to select, which cards to add to your deck, which you are building quite literally on the clock, and then skill in game as with all games.

On Friday then we have T12P or T2MP. So we go with T2MP - Preserving a prize for our dedicated T2-Players. T12P has also had this opportunity every year.

For Saturday we then have T1MP, TEAMS, or Sealed. T1MP is a horrible, horrible category, that probably has even more RNG than closed categories, so that's out. Logistically speaking TEAMS is a potential nightmare - Two players, only 1 card. and with the rule that Elder's pass the prize over half the TEAMS are potentially disqualified right off the bat - Leaving us with Sealed.

We do plan on rotating these again next year, and I think that's healthy for the game in general.

We do plan on rotating these again next year, and I think that's healthy for the game in general.

I think this quote illustrates the attempts by the PTB to make this special opportunity available to as many players as possible, along with the focus on making sure there is one per day. I applaud these efforts. 

Jay,

I also appreciate your respectful and well articulated feedback.

I agree with everything that John posted so there's no need for me to repeat all that, but I'll add a few additional thoughts...

T2 MP is going up against T1 2P -- while T2 MP is not for everyone, there is a very dedicated (albeit small) groups of players for that category and we felt they deserved the opportunity to go after the CaC prize. Additionally, many of them would be happy to see an increase in the number of participants so if the CaC prize gets us to say 4 tables instead of 2, then we consider that a win.

Also, the plan is to rotate the CaC through the various categories (except for TEAMS, T1 MP...TBD ) -- obviously it depends on the schedule for next year, but I'm guessing we won't go 2 years in a row without having T1 2P and T2 2P as "CaC" categories.