Almos: Territory Cycle #1

Territories are a big part of the Almos set that I’m designing. In addition to providing functionality on their own, they will be involved in a win condition card and a loss condition card. It’s likely that they will also feature in the design of other cards, counting the number of territories that a player controls.

As such, there will also be cards which can conquer territories for you. However, I’m getting ahead of myself.

First, territories need to be meaningful. What I don’t want to happen is for territories to simply become a rather meaningless little mini game to be played only if you happen to be designing around the win or loss condition cards. That means that they need to be powerful in and of themselves.

They shouldn’t be game-breakingly powerful, but I do think it’s okay for their design to be pushed, with the overall idea being that these are cards you’d want to play if you draft them, or build a deck around them.

Fortunately, there’s a lot of design room for them. I’m not sure how many territories I’ll shoot for at the end, but a rough idea would be something like:

• A Common Cycle
• An Uncommon Cycle
• A Rare Cycle
• An Allied Color Cycle
• Perhaps an Enemy Color Cycle

The rarity cycles alone would account for 15 possible territories. Adding in allied and enemy color cycles would bring it up to 25. That’s a lot of territory options, and that’s something I feel that I want for the set.

For now, however, I only have the uncommon cycle. The common cycle might be more difficult, we’ll see, but I feel like uncommons are particularly difficult to balance. Their relative rarity makes them good for pushing, because you know they won’t be oversaturated in a random pool. However, push them too much and they can take over the meta.

Since the only real meta for the set is Draft and Set Constructed, it’s perhaps less of a concern. However, the set being insular shouldn’t be an excuse for creating something with too high of a power level, or too linear of a meta. So the idea for uncommons is to create an appealing territory card, something you’d be likely to want to play if you could, but not something so powerful that playing it will break the games it’s in.

All that being said, let’s look at the actual cycle itself: