.png)
August 24, 2023 - Nathaniel Dalton
Unofficial FaB PvE is taking us on an adventure through a perilous time in Solana's history. This is based on the set Dusk til Dawn which saw the introduction of Vynnset as a new Shadow Runeblade. I knew that Vynnset needed to be in this 5 part story. As I started outlining the story it felt right to have it happen in chapter 2. It needed to have a "boss battle" early on.
Vynnset core mechanics
I needed to keep Vynnset as close as possible
to her mechanics loop. She would banish a card to gain a Runechant and attack with Flail of Agony. But there needed to be extra pressure and I'm always looking out for ways that Blood Debt can interact with the mechanics. Vynnset is about creating several Runechants each turn so without redoing the shadow deck I needed to come up with something. To recreate this, you discard the top cards of the debt until you reveal a non Blood Debt card and create that many Runechants.
In order to banish a card from her hand, she needed a hand. This allowed for Vynnset to play "normal" compared to other scenarios and created the loop of blocking and banishing from hand. But dominate and reactions were an issue, so the original concept had you put out cards from your deck that acted as equipment with temper that would block on react. What this created though was an incredibly tanky Vynnset, w
hich is a win, but it felt like a boring Oldhim match, which is not what we want. She didn't really do much damage and blocked out a ton of damage.
Updated design: How to un-Oldhim-ify Vynnset
To better help create the cycle of attacking, for this scenario every card now has the keyword Rune Gate and every attack action has go again because she needed to end her attack cycle with the Flail of Agony. Revealing the top card of the deck until she reveals a non Blood Debt felt really good, so I kept it. But instead of discarding, she pitches the cards. I wanted to have a timer in place so you couldn't simply turtle and Vynnset running out of deck was perfect. The problem was when she discarded, she always ran out.
What makes it all fit together is that when she attacks, all the Runechants pop so the only way to Rune Gate another card would be if it was a 0 cost card. Very rarely she will have some wild turns where she attacks for 7 with 11 Runechants and hits 0 cost attacks in the banish zone and attacks a couple more times. I love the fact that RNG does play a slight role in her attacks while keeping the attack pattern. You as the players also have some control because if you can keep pressure on her, she will block with her whole hand and not be able to banish a card (but watchout for those Brute cards that banish cards as a cost, they can build up quickly!)
There were two final pieces that needed to fall into place. One is the armor and the new Shadow armor from Dusk til Dawn is a perfect fit since it prevents 2 damage and puts it into the banish zone with blood debt. The second is that blood debt does trigger on Vynsett's turn. While that might seem obvious, originally that was not the case but with the inclusion of armor that has Blood Debt, it felt perfect. Vynnset can be incredibly tanky so that additional damage made it so that under the right circumstances you could turtle up if she had enough in her deck.
Conclusion
The main thing that I want to portray in this post is that when something doesn't quite feel right to keep pushing even if it "works". We play games for fun and if that fun factor isn't there then we as designers have failed!
Comentarios