Rules of Rarity

Welcome back Students! In this blog we will be discussing a topic which should be familiar to most collectible card game players; the rarity of cards. In Visions of Zosimos, we have four rarity types which ascend from least rare to most. There are Standard cards, Special cards, Exceptional cards, and Epic cards. Rarity determines more than just the probability of finding one in a booster pack but the quality of the card as well.

When playing any type of CCG, you generally find that the rarest cards are the most powerful cards. In VoZ, the same can be said… for the most part. When determining rarity, there are usually two key components that determine how rare a card is. Those two factors are Power Rating (as we discussed in an earlier post) and uniqueness. It is easy to determine the Epic cards because their Power Rating tends to be the highest in their respective category of card type. Standard cards are also relatively easy because of how low their Power Rating is. Special and Exceptionals tend to be a little trickier. We can look at Power Rating for the most part but the uniqueness of the card can change a Special to an Exceptional or even make take away the Epic to an Exceptional. Let’s look at an example shall we?

In Light Earth, we have two Epic Ambushes that have high Power Ratings but they aren’t the highest. Bottomless Pit has our highest Power of Rating and is listed as an Exceptional. The two cards that have lower Power Ratings but are Epic are Earthquake and Forbidden Fruit. The reason they are listed as epic comes to the uniqueness and versatility of the cards. Bottomless Pit is a very powerful card. It stops the minion from moving for the rest of the game and makes that minion very hard to kill creating an obstacle. Earthquake, however, is the only card in Earth that can wipe out the board of minions and Forbidden Fruit can remove minions from play immediately. There are many cards that stop movement in Earth so that immediately took Bottomless Pit’s unique value away and the fact that the minion can still attack and use abilities still make it a viable threat to the player.

I think it is important to note that Rarity does not affect Card Cost. Doing so would break our Power Curve because we determine Rarity after Card Cost. We also didn’t do it because it doesn’t make sense. Rarity has rules but they are not quantifiable like Power Rating. If we made rarer cards cost less, than they would be overpowered and vice versa.

Thanks for reading and we hope to see you this year at GenCon 2016 August 4th through the 7th! If you are new and would like to play the game yourself, click the link below and we will send you an Alpha Key! We are also currently running our IndieGoGo campaign and we are on Steam Greenlight! So if you like what you are seeing and want VoZ on Steam, vote yes in the link below!

http://visionsofzosimos.net/download.php

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/visions-of-zosimos/x/11444741#/

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=509966714