UFS Design Breakdown: Kula/Maxima

First thing first, I have to apologize for the delay on that next article. I planned to finish it weeks ago but this...

This game is crack, you have been warned ...

happened.

Civilization 5 and its sequel Civilization Beyond Earth. If you plan on checking those two games, don't unless you are okay with having countless hours of your life siphoned into oblivion.

Anyway, despite their obvious strain on people's productivity, games from the Civilization franchise are great examples of games that allow the player to create a story out of their games. The amount of customization, events, decisions, and effects, all the ways to interact with those effects, and ultimately the overlying theme of developing a human civilization, all those are almost perfectly combined together.

Anyway, back to UFS. I will now finish the review of Team K' from the KOF XIII, after reviewing K' himself last time this time I will focus on Kula and Maxima. So, without further ado, let's get this started.

Maxima

I have to admit. Outside of characters like K, I have a fetish for Heavies in UFS. Learning that Hugo*** (gods I hate those stupid stars) was OP was a great moment for me, until I learned that the character essentially was just about hand manipulation...

I get somewhat wary of abilities given to characters with low handsizes. The problem is that the reduced handsize is supposed to be there alongside powerful abilities and a big health pool to compensate the smaller handsize. And now if you give the card drawing AND the powerful abilities and big health pool, together it produces the likes of Hugo***.

What's the point of the small handsize if he ends up with more cards than you??

Still, a character with a small handsize and plenty of hitpoints is an archetype I like to see succeed in UFS, unfortunately the few characters of that archetype have never really been that great.

Now, when you hear "Maxima", the first thing you think about is that archetype, you expect something with tons of hitpoints, and with a big-bang laser-like effect.

6 handsize and 27 hitpoints...

Since I have already shared what I thought about that 'same handsize, same health' thing in my last article, I will steer away from it. Still I persist in that it shows a pretty huge lack of... "taste" from the designers.

Now to the abilities.

The usual Breaker ability of the team is there, no surprise. Once again, analysis of this one has already been done in the last article.

As expected, the second ability makes you add a foundation from your staging area to your hand. What it also do is allow you to either boost an attack or reduce its damage. What I really like is the simplicity of the ability, no thousand of lines, an okay theme (he is big and will either hit harder or brush off your blows) and the added flexibility make for an okay ability.

The third ability is a lot less commendable. Although the synergy with the team's theme is there, there is one thing that is seriously wrong with it, the theme.

Card drawing hardly scream 'big and slow but powerful guy', I would say that the ability in itself does not fit Maxima at all. The ability do rewards hitting the opponent, which is a good thing at least.

But still I think the card drawing here was added certainly not to convey any kind of theme but probably to give Team K' some card drawing, which is a pretty lame reason as that card can and will exist outside of its team.

Pretty much, the card suffers from a recurring problem, yes I know you saw it coming miles away, a lack of theme, of a cohesive theme at that. Pretty much nothing in those effects really scream "MAXIMA", they somehow do their job, but overall the card is just... boring.

Compared to its teammate K', Maxima has dull effects, effects that do not represent him well in the slightest and that are pretty tame at that.

Kula

Now to talk about Kula. My personal and obviously exclusive waifu. The Anti-K'.

She is one of those particularly well-inspired characters in the King of Fighters mythos, her relationship with K' that has everything to have them be at each other's throat and yet have some many things that bind them together to the point where they inexorably become allies.

Anyway, here is the character in the KoF XIII block:

Ain't she a cutie?

So now that I'm done making sure you guys know I'm kinda fond of Kula. Now comes the hard part.

That character card is supremely terrible. It is by far the worst card in Team K' and probably in the set.

Why? Because it does ONE thing that a character card should never, ever do.

It depends on the opponent.

Now this is going to be a pretty long talk where I'm going to try to explain why this is such a bad thing. And we are going to first start by answering this question 'why does a character card matters?'.
If there are any fighting games aficionados around here, you probably know the answer. The character is what entices you to play the game, either by its looks, its style, its gameplay, whatever.

It's the same in UFS, the starting point of a deck is most of the time the character, the character signs the deck, its effect being the ones you will always have on your face, the ones your deck should care about, else why not take another character?

And from there the character will define what kind of game you are going to play, by taking Reese you are not going to play a Control deck (nothing wrong if you do, but it means you probably hate fun), Reese entices you to play aggressive, and that not just by its mechanics, but also by its looks and the feel of the character.

And this why RH was the best set ever, everything was so damn right... oh gods...

Some could say that "but Kula is about freezing and controlling things, so this character card works?!", and I think this is what whoever designed that character card was thinking too.

And I will answer to that that the ability she has is a terrible way to represent control and freezing on a character card and that for two reasons.

Self-Reliance and Signing.

Abilities on a character ought to affect the game. They have to do it in a significant and defining way. To go back to the example of Hearthstone I made in my first article, a character has to impact the game in their own little way and they have to do it often.

What prevents Kula from doing that?

Well first, her ability depends on the opponent. Kula's ability counters enhances. Well that's nice, and quite powerful to be frank. But what if the opponent is not willing to have its things countered?

What if the opponent does nothing you might counter, what if he decides to not let you have your fun? You played Kula to be that player who would counter everything? Well he doesn't want you to have it your way, after all it would be bad for him right?
In that case you might as well been playing with a blank foundation as a character card. Those kind of character cards blatantly spit in the face of Self-Reliance and Signing.

Effects like countering are reactive, a character should be proactive, or better just active. It shouldn't care about the meta or be about destroying this strat or preventing things, something that affects the game in a direct way.

Unfortunately, UFS is littered with characters that suffer from blatant reactivenes and 'against the meta' themes.

Wooohh I don't like you drawing cards!!

One thing those character cards can be good at? Sideboard material. From there you know that if you are going to play that card it's because you know the card won't end up dead in your staging area, and seriously what business does a character card has being sideboard material.

One card in particular suffers from what is afflicting Kula, and one that also represents quite the popular character.

Why him?? WHYYYYY??!!!

At this point, it's as if the second E was not there. Not only will the opponent know that all he has to do is just... not play too much enhances and poof your damage and speed are gone.

Like Kula, I guess, they went with an idea ala "He is going to counter so many Es, when he plays his E he will have crazy damage", just that since they made that dependent on the opponent, well guess what?!...

So now what could have been done to avoid those mistakes.

First off, those effects would have made great Action cards. Why Action cards? Well, because for once the opponent would not be seeing directly that you have that thing hanging on his head. Again this show the distinction between what ought to be a character ability and what shouldn't, a character ability is something the player and character show proudly and publicly to all the other players, "this is what I am and this is what I do". Is it a good idea to make abilities that need the element of surprise be character abilities?...

For Kula, that ability would have to be completely replaced by something either active or proactive.

An action card that allow you to pump your damage if your opponent makes the mistake of over-committing on one attack? Not bad. Another that draws you cards when the opponent draws too much cards? Great sideboard material. Getting those effects on a character card? Stop right there!

The Team as a Whole

So now I will come back to the point I made about the Breaker ability that was shared by all members of Team K'. I argued that this ability was not the true theme of the team and thus was made even more useless and wasteful because of that. Now I will explain why.

The real theme of Team K' is obviously getting foundations back to your hand. Why did they decide that that theme alone was not enough for the team and then needed that Breaker ability added? Who the hell knows. What is sure is that because of that, team K' as a whole seems like a messy conglomerate of somehow similar but deceptively different characters. K' is the only one with a good, pleasant focus, Maxima is maximally meh, and Kula.... I'm just gonna go cry in a corner now.

Next time I plan on explaining why (4-5+) abilities are a bad thing for the game on character cards. Now that Civilzation:Beyond Earth ended up being the total disaster it is I will have more free time to get that article to you in a more timely fashion... unless I go back to BNW... ugghhhhh.

Until then, Don't Be Reactive!

UFS Design Breakdown: Team K'

I ended up having less time than I expected to get this one done but here is the second entry into this series, this time focusing on the character cards of Team K'.

But first, some trivia about our favorite hero team leader (at least mine), in french the Dash is pronounced "Prime", which made K' a lot cooler to pronounce. K Prime does sounds kinda cooler right?

Best WAIFU right here!

Anyway... Back to Team K.

So what I'm going to do is first analyze the team as a whole. KOF XIII, for all the ill I have harnessed for this expansion set, still had the great idea of making the teams matter either through the symbols, some shared abilities, or some team-only cards. And then I will finish the article with K'. The two other characters will be analyzed in the next article.

The Team

I'm sure they won't forever forget about Vanessa. she will be back, right??..

First off, I think the very first thing everyone will notice about that team is pretty clear.

6-27

It has to be a joke, right? Part of me want to believe that all members of the team having the exact same hand size and max vitality is simply a mistake done during the making of the spoilers, the other is seriously considering that this similitude was intended...

I won't linger too long on why this is silly as I expect that most here know why you shouldn't just copy-paste those values, but still I need to point that handsize and max vitality are the very first things that will define a character in the player's head. Mess those two values up, either by giving a bulky character a very low max vitality or the opposite, and you are well on your way to create a terrible card. And frankly, who could ever justify Kula Diamond having the exact same health as freaking Maxima!

Look at this giant cybernetic MONSTER!!!

The team also sports an ability that is shared among all its members:

"E(4+): If you block this attack, your block gains 'Breaker: 1'."

I kinda like and hate this ability. Love because the ability is about Breaker, a keyword that first came to the game with the first SNK set. Since it was a SNK set signature keyword, along with Desperation, with a pretty big push in Fortunes and Glory, the set where K' was introduced to the game. Thus having the team care about Breaker is kind of a nice touch. Hate because once again it does it in the worst possible way.

To begin, the ever-present (4-5+) cost... As I have said in the previous article, one of the biggest problems of the KoF XIII set is that the costs are all wrong.

Somehow, Team K' is supposed to care about Breaker. But now they shouldn't care for it enough to the point of a (4+) check being needed. The message being sent here is kinda schizophrenic.

And this ability takes a slot on a character card that could use a more distinctive ability. Although I can commend the idea of making the member of a team share some kind of effects, this shouldn't be forced to the point of it either surcharging or worse diluting the character and this is exactly what this ability does to the members of Team K' as I will show.

This ability is also tied to another big flaw of the set, Theme. But I will come back to this later in the article.

Character Card: K'

Now, the flagship hero of the NESTS era, K freaking Prime!

K' has a special place when it comes to the KoF mythos in my opinion. I started playing KoF back in 1999 (yea time flies) and was introduced to the series thinking K' was its "main character".

It was quite the discovery to learn that he was actually the SECOND main character of the series, Kyo being actually the closest thing to a main character. After years of Ryu never aging up and Mr. Bison still going after him, discovering a fighting game series where the plot evolved to the point of the main character changing was an eye-opener.

Since that day I ditched Street Fighter for King of Fighters and to this day King of Fighters is the superior game in my book.

So yes, K' does have a special place in my heart and that to the point of him being the first character I wanted to build a competitive deck around.

Quite the great card!

K' and his support in Fortunes and Glory was quite the well designed character. He was able to empower attacks with low damage as long as you kept the momentum coming, and he could seriously hamper the opponent with his control check manipulation. Overall a fair character, simple, and with some depth. Although his Signing could have been better with a less expensive E, but nothing game-breaking here.

That plus the resemblance of the ability to an ability I've always liked in Pokemon, Technician. This ability in Pokemon allows you to empower attacks that are too weak to be viable but still had great effects like reducing the opponent's speed or attack. Thus with this ability some Pokemon were able to use attacks that did a great job at controlling the battlefield.

K' E allows him to do just that. Many attacks would hypothetically pay for a very powerful effect by having reduced damage. K' E allows you to make the damage viable and then profit from the potent effects without worrying about your offense. Quite the nice touch.

Pretty much lots of fun ahead if it was not for those two:

 

Now all you had to do was auto-include those two and call it a day...

But that's a story for another time.

Pretty much, Fortunes and Glory K' provides a pretty good standard to which we can compare RoT K',

HELP!! MY HAND IS ON FIRE!!!

Since we have already covered the two big elephants in the room, the max vitality and handsize AND the the shared ability, we could go straight for the last ability.

But before I will talk about what I consider the greatest thing about this card, its support.

RoT K' support is by far the best support I have seen on a character of the set.

  

Can someone say COMBO??

The focus on a theme, on a mechanic here is great, but more importantly those cards tell a story, a story about how you could pulverize your opponent in the most combotastic way possible.

That coupled with the natural affinity of the character for combo cards? What's not to love!

The foundations too are great and they do a way better job playing around the team's true theme than any of the support of the other members of the team, Kula and Maxima.

Oh shoot! You mean I have to get this foundation back to my hand?? The pain!

So overall K' support shows that the character's Theme IS combo, and it also shows something more that I will discuss later.

And now to the last ability

Unlike the other parts of the card, this one is pretty much okay. The focus on combo is well-made, the cost is a bit heavy but the effect provided here is potent enough to warrant such a cost, recursion being quite the powerful thing in UFS and the cost offering ways to play around it (let's bounce that face down foundation or that one that is super easy to play again) unlike a (4-5+).

But once again problems arise when it comes to sticking to the theme. Suddenly the need to have the next combo card have -3 difficulty, or -3 difficulty to its block modifier...
As much as the first one could be useful, the other part of the ability once again dilute the card.

Is it there to push the breaker theme? The theme pushed by a terribly gated ability? When the card screams "let me care about Combo only"... Even the -3 difficulty is unneeded there and if anything would have made a great second ability a better one than the shared E(4+).

E, discard 1 momentum: If this attack deals damage, your next combo attack this turn gets -3 difficulty.

E, Add 2 foundations from your staging area to your hand: Add 1 combo card with a difficulty of 5 or less from your discard pile to your hand. Playable once per turn.

And here we have a cleaner, simpler, more focused card.

Also notice that the new E allow for more Signing than the Breaker E.

As I said earlier in the article, the ability messes with the Theme of the card, and that with the best intention possible, trying to create a team's theme. In the next article I will discuss why even that attempt was flawed, as a hint, it had to do with the second thing K' support showed. Until then, keep Breaking!

+1 block and Breaker 2?? That one will leave a mark!