FFTCG Champions Format Part 1

Allow me to begin with some of the deck building rules. We went up to 60 cards, we didn't want to add too many cards cards, but we didn't want to keep it 50. We originally thought 100 as MTG does with their format but found that the game doesn't support one hundred card decks at the moment. At opus X there are roughly 1500 cards available and this just isn't enough. during the deck building process we found that there was a solid 40 cards we wanted to put in to our decks and then 60 cards that we had to put in to make the deck complete. With 60 card we had just enough for singleton without getting bogged down by excess choices.

When it came to choosing champions, we didn't want any card to be eligible to be a champion. We thought of course of using MTG's version based on the legend rule (Uniqueness rule in FF) but it wasn't a very restrictive pool. It basically excluded standard units and manikins. We thought about using legend rarity cards, but at the end of the day we liked the idea of S abilities. It was slightly new player friendlier. From a deckbuilding point of view, highlander deckbuilding de-incentivizes playing multiple cards with similar names. It would be incredibly frustrating if you topdecked a porom, when you already had a porom when each of those are the only poroms you have in the entire deck. Yet, when your champion has an S effect two interesting things happen. The first thing that happens is that cards of the same name as your champion are never dead draws. If you draw it hen your champion is on the field you can trigger the s ability. If your champion isn’t on the field you can play the card in your hand. The other thing was that it incentivized having or card names that are shared by your champion. It incentivises playing cards that are very bad, to get a good effect. This can be seen when people play Opus 7 Shantotto to trigger the S ability of Opus 4 Shantotto, or when people play the dark sephiroths to trigger a shadow flare. People began playing cards that were terrible. This definitely showed me how much fun people wanted to do

When we first thought of this we allowed any card type, so long as it had an s ability. this allowed for backups and monsters to be champions. This gave us two issues.The first issue was that it didn't promote playing your champion multiple times. It prompted a very consistent start, but with the lack of interactions with backups it didn't bode well for the concept of champions. The second was the hero rikku. if she was played consistently on turn 1 mill would actually be very strong. In standard having 3 is not enough. At the height of wiwa mill, decks had the opus 2 paine and other backups (shinra/brother) to search for the card that would search for rikku. While that card also searched for yuna, it was of the utmost importance that riku was played as soon as possible. If you could play rikku on turn 1 every game it would be game altering, even in a singleton format that could only use the s effect a handful of times. This led us to make the champion a forward. Yet... I've been fond of the idea of making a monster a champion (at the moment the only options are Ozma and Deathgaze).

When it came to the singleton format, we took this straight from MTG. It has a very interesting effect on the game. It decreases the consistency of decks, while adding a very consistent factor. It also changes the strength of certain cards. cards like Illua become drastically weaker. Cards like locke also lose a lot of their strength. While a strong card, locke can be a looming threat with its S ability. Yet, in a singleton format, to keep locke that strong you have to use other cards with the same name. Other cards with the same name aren't as strong and they have less of an impact on the gameplay. So to increase the strength of a card the overall deck has to decrease. We found this to be true with many other cards. This really gives a chance to cards that normally don't see play to really shine. For example in this format summoner (6-031C) has really over performed! At 7 backups You find that you want to start clearing some backups and summoner gives you an extra two cards in the process, which is really valuable when they are summons! In standard the card is a bit too slow and a bit too expensive.

One of the many iterations we thought about was a kind of super title format. We had the idea that in deck building you had to have all your cards be from the same title as your champion, toying with the idea of allowing standard units. We found that the idea was a bit lackluster. It greatly favored categories that have lots of cards, (8 and 13 have over a hundred), as opposed to titles that didn't have as many cards (15 only has 12 cards). While the title format may still have this issue, we didn't want to inherit a format that people were already unhappy with. Strangely enough, we have found that many people pick their favorite character as their champion, and try to build around that! Many times this format captures the spirit of title (Play with your favorite characters). Where we set out to be separate from title and separate from standard, this format found a home in between.