Finally! My name is Jacques Ernoult, and after years of development, I’m thrilled to talk to you about the wild idea and the delicate task of making Unique cards a reality for Altered.

There have been countless discussions around the topic and many questions raised, so as the main game designer working on it, it is my utmost pleasure to share the journey from inception to implementation with you all.

Let’s embark with me on my engineering journey!

At the core of the concept of Unique cards is the element of surprise and renewal Altered aspires to rekindle in the TCG scene. If you’ve played a TCG before, you know that the sense of discovery from the early days became lost as we entered the information age. Knowing which cards were available and which were played in what decks became mundane. This is to be expected after all. Players seek to use this information to fine-tune their strategy, to exert control over the game, and ultimately, be better at it.

Game Design can be seen as a race between players and game designers. The former try to optimize and exhaust everything the game has to offer, while the latter are all about making it a never-ending quest. For many, once the game is “solved”, gameplay can start to become stale. Tic-Tac-Toe is only fun as long as something remains to be discovered.

Playing and sharing information about a game innately contribute to solving it, slowly but surely. And at each step of the process, various aspects of the game can get solved. TCGs present many different “sub-games” as I would call them that players may partake in outside playing the game itself. Let’s focus on discovering cards and deckbuilding, being the aspects most at risk of being solved quickly with information.

The obvious answer TCGs give to this is to keep things fresh with new releases every few months. Nowadays giving the full preview of a set weeks before its release has become the norm, and top performing decklists are at your disposal to replicate mere days after. While some players don’t mind this and even enjoy it, we wanted to set Altered apart by finding a way to deal with this information hegemony and have players engage a little longer into these sub-games we care about.

From the beginning, we identified that one of the key aspects to work on was the fact that, for nearly 30 years now, opening a booster pack offered a strong sensation with the first few packs but quickly lost its emotional impact afterwards. At the same time, the very fact that the entire content of an edition is known in advance also contributes to this phenomena.

The initial pitch for Altered was to have “many” different versions for every card, think between 100 and 1000 each. Since we were going to rely on some automation to generate them anyway, coupled with modern printing technology to customize millions of cards each with a unique QRcode, we thought, “Why not take it up a notch?”. Unique cards truly encapsulate the concept of surprise, of a never-ending quest of discovery, where no one could claim to have seen it all (not even me!) and where two decks can never be exactly the same.

This concept was not without its challenges. The first constraint was to create a game that, while remaining accessible, could still accommodate cards with enough knobs built in so that they could be tweaked in an almost infinite number of ways. The second was, of course, building the system that would generate them.

While many things have to take place to initiate the whole ordeal on our end, I’ll make it as simple as possible and start with the generation process.

A first tool The Generator starts by spitting out millions upon millions of cards semi-randomly derived from each Character’s base characteristics (statistics, costs, and abilities) with little boundaries. At this point, all we get is a lot of cards unsuitable for the game since we want to be as broad as possible to get as many candidates before narrowing it down. Then begins the selection phase.

A second tool is then used, let’s call it The Filter, an evaluation algorithm whose goal is to rate them. This tool is the key to the system, as its efficiency is purely based on our ability to set it as properly as possible to ensure that it mostly filters out “bad” designs and not “good/great” designs. This is where the “craft” happens as the system is set with a lot of parameters.

• First, comes Rational Game Design or RGD for short. This approach on Game Design relies on breaking down the game into measurable, tweakable parameters. To keep it short, this means that we assign a weight to stats and abilities (let’s say, for the sake of the explanation, on a range from 1 to 10) out of a total possible budget we allow for each card (let’s say 25).
• Second, we ensure the essence of the factions are preserved. For example, Lyra cards have synergies when their region stats are 0, so the system is designed to slightly increase the chances of this happening for cards from this faction. The Ordis faction have equal stats on all biomes and that’s a trait that defines Ordis, therefore we wanted this trait to be mostly found on all Ordis Unique cards (but not always).
• Third, we have to prevent some abilities interactions, which in some cases, do not work and have to be avoided from being found on cards at all costs.
• Finally, some interactions that are following the rules are simply too powerful and can not be allowed.

Then, for each family of cards, a team of human beings, composed mainly of game designers and professional TCG players from other games, manually rate hundreds of Unique cards that came out of The Filter either by reading them or playing with them. When those cards are considered bad designs, we analyze why we think they are so and how we can update The Filter to prevent them from being generated again. The difficulty here being mostly that setting new rules in The Filter can also prevent good cards from being generated, and thus requires a lot of testing, again and again, until we reach the level of quality we expect. Then we do it all over again for the next family of cards.

First and foremost, we focused heavily on ensuring that the Unique cards would be playable. It would be disappointing to open a card whose abilities make no sense in terms of gameplay, and such situations could easily occur if we did not pay careful attention.

In terms of game balancing we set our goal to roughly try and match the power level of the Rare cards or slightly above as we believe Uniques should be attractive but not oppressive. Overall, we want the players to question their choices when deckbuilding, offering more possibilities with the Unique cards is part of the plan, as long as it brings complexity and interesting decision making.

The whole creation process took us more than two years in total, as we had to invent everything from scratch, and it did not yet face the test of millions of boosters being opened and cards being analyzed and played by thousands of players! We did our best to bring you an innovation that is as polished as possible at this stage of its inception, and I’m definitely confident that we did pretty good, but it is only with your help that we will improve our tools way more efficiently than we ever could do it on our own.

Unique cards being unique, it’s a certainty that some of them will make history, feel strange, be fun, overpowered, underpowered, feel unplayable, and eventually open up new deck concepts and possibilities! Together we are going to live the birth of a one of a kind design and we do believe it should bring everyone more fun and enjoyment than anything else. You can not imagine how excited we are (but also a little anxious to be honest 😅).

As explained above, the future is first and foremost all about you. The concept of Unique cards is not all about the power level of the cards but also about the perception each and every player has of them. Are they fun? Do you love them as they are? Do you feel they are too much this, or not enough that? How would you like us to tweak them in the future? There are a lot of open ways and we will learn by listening to the community ❤️.

We should work more and more in the years to come on improving the set of data we have about the unique cards (Board Game Arena will be helpful to do this as it’s a convenient solution to record game and player statistics). The better the data, the better the learning, the better the outcome.

You’ve come this far, so it wouldn’t be fair to leave you hanging without a demonstration by showing you concrete examples.

Some weeks ago, I asked people around on our Discord for a Character and a number. I went to our database to extract the corresponding Uniques, and lo and behold! Here are the cards that community members, @piar0, @florent8021, @fortunus and @infinight requested.

I wanted to be transparent and honest with this process, so no filter or selection - these are the cards as they will appear in a booster (if they are ever to be printed). They are as diverse as they are unexpected, showcasing how wild things can get.

We still have a lot of stories to tell about the Uniques so if you enjoyed this article, let us know! And if you would like to ask me some questions about them, do not hesitate to join us on our Discord server and tag me with your thoughts on #questions (@Voda - “Jacques - GD”).

You are more than welcome!