"Life is a resource"

It's a pretty common phrase in card games, you use your life like a resource. That's mostly metaphorical, I think, it doesn't quite literally mean "drain it at all opportunities for advantage", it means "if you've got it to spend, use it." - but I wondered what would happen if it was just non-optional. What if you had to use your life as a resource?

In Final Notice, every card with a cost pushes that value up, the game becomes a balancing act of using the mortis while you've got it, and slamming the breaks when a turn swings sour, hitting 100 kills you after all, just as it does your divine opponent.

Stepping Away From Mana

It felt easier to just make things cost mana, after all there has to be some kind of limiter to stronger cards, right? Initially, when I was designing cards I kept running into the issue of "but why would I play this card over this card, unless I made the costs of mortis just ridiculously high, which ended up games lasting 3-4 turns, barely enough to see anything play out or to accomplish a gameplan. There had to be a mechanical change somewhere, but I was really sold on this idea of using what is effectively your own life to play cards, and I didn't want to just flood the game with a bunch of "lose x mortis" cards, since you'd just end up playing those over the cards that increase mortis.

Adding a Limiter

In the end, I'd decided to add a limiter of mortis requirements. A certain value you had to hit before you were able to play certain cards. I'd thought this a pretty effective tool, something that could give way to certain plays like Rubber Stamp's effect, that plays a card at random from your hand regardless of it's mortis cost, so you could pack a hand of bombs and throw them out early. However, this actually gave rise to a very unique form of playstyle that playtesters had asked for: Ramp.

Ramping?

Playtesters had made the point of with all these mortis restrictions, you can feel a bit disadvantaged in the early stages, or sometimes you just end up passing turns and not doing a bunch. In response, and what will hopefully see some great use in the deckbuilder when it goes live in 0.3.0, certain cards have the express purpose of just increasing your mortis value. The most apparent one that's in the preset decks right now is Stretch Goal - a card that instantly increases your mortis by a whopping 15, then gives you back 3 of that mortis per turn for 3 turns. Early, this card is great, it lets you really leap off the starting line with a large play, and can even be used for a few OTK setups in some closed deckbuilding tests - look forward to that - and opened up this whole new archetype of trying to rapidly increase your own mortis - quite literally get closer to losing the game - to pull it all back and win it right at the end.

Contentment

I'm still going to be changing how cards interact with mortis and what you can do with it as time goes on, development never ends after all, but I think on a thematic and mechanic basis, mortis is here to stay most definitely.

If you get some time, check out the game here or using the button below, and leave some feedback - what do you think of mortis? Is it something unique or something weird?

Till next time!