No champions this week. You know what time it is though?
Time for Spring Cleaning!
That meant that it was time for me to clean up my work. If I'm going to be making a set of cards, it's important that I stay organized. Though it's not for anybody else's sanity, it is definitely beneficial to my own.
Trying to keep track of the massive set I'm creating isn't simple for a multitude of reasons - I have to keep track of how many cards of each rarity I have and how many cards I have. On top of that, it helps to visualize progress in a clean shit rather than just seeing how stuffed my "Shurima Custom Set" folder is on my computer.
And so, I created an Excel sheet in Google Docs in order to organize the cards efficiently and cleanly. The PDF to view what it looks like at the moment can be found below.
Other than that, though, I have started some work on sculpting more of the class identity of Shurima and bringing forth what I have in the rest of the set. For Shurima, I have written the following note for myself: "Shurima:
- Class design influences: Demacia and Ionia
- Demacia:
-Board Control through strength of minions (Single Combat & Concentrated Strike). [Side Note: Actually thought that was the name of the card. It's actually Concerted Strike]
-Specializes in voltron/creature-buffing strategies (Stand Alone and Unyielding Spirit) and synergistic midrange (Elite)
- Spell sub-theme focused on further on unit-based board control (Back To Back, Barrier, Detain). Spell sub-theme often, from a meta standpoint, combined with Ionia, more specifically Karma, or P&Z, more specifically Heim.
- Allegiance card buffs board, pushing the board-control through unit strength
- Ionia:
- Spell Focus (Karma & Lee S), further pushed in last set.
- Unit and combat tricks (Combat tricks such as Twin Disciplines or Spirit's Refuge. Tricky units such as Elusive and Zed. Further focus on messing with units with stuns and recalls).
- Hand-buffing theme (Jeweled Protector and Inspiring Mentor further pushed with cards like Zed and Elusives).
- Ephemeral Sub-theme (may go with "tricky units")
- Often considered, meta-wise, the control-heavy class (Deny, Will of Ionia, Karma decks, majority of Lifesteal to sustain to late game).
- Allegiance card often pushes the elusive buff strategy (Freljord + Ionia Zed Elusive Aggro).
- Shurima Focus: Board Control through board positioning and buffing
- Buffs focus on whole board as opposed to single minions
- Buffs are from both minions and spells, and rather than a summon ability they will be a static, continuous effect
- Prominent keywords: Challenger, much like Demacia. Allows Shurima to force enemy units into positioning. Quick Attack: Can serve as a light way to force positioning in order to ensure favorable trades.
- Control elements, though do not want to take away from Ionia's identity as the control region. Implementing "soft" control, meant to more keep board advantage as opposed to necessarily 1-for-1ing the opponent through an attrition battle.
- Killing subtheme (Aatrox and Rek'sai): New mechanic that is meant to push the importance of minion trading even further.
- Poison theme to wither enemies down for a kill, similar to Frostbite from Freljord.
- Poison theme needs further exploration.
There's a lot here and not all of it is written the most clearly, but these were my general thoughts of the direction I wanted to go with Shurima so far. Laying down this groundwork early ensures that I can always look back to this small document and check, when looking at my cards I design, to see if I'm adhering to the class design thus far. And, if I feel that another direction can be explored with Shurima (since no region in the game only has a singular identity but instead has several different direction and identities for players to explore), then I can update the document to reflect so.
Now enough with all the boring words: Here are some cards that I have been working on!
Commander Hadja was meant to reflect both the board control theme and the killing subtheme, much like Aatrox and Rek'sai do.
This, inherently, is a very low-floor high-ceiling card. Sometimes, especially in the wrong match-up or wrong deck, this can just be a 5-mana 4/4. So, this card looks to push an archetype focused on trading taking specifically beneficial trades.
This card can be combo'd well with both Noxus and Demacia. They both ally allies to strike enemies without being hurt themselves and have a multitude of buffs, plus they both tend to be pretty minion-heavy regions.
I wanted to give another class access to a counterspell, but I didn't want to take Ionia's control identity away from them and shove it into my new region. That would just be wrong.
So, instead, I made Delay, which functions as a Deny-lite, if you will. It is mean to, as the name implies, delay the opponent, but not completely stop what they are doing. This helps specifically against board wipes and removal that would hurt your board, but only temporarily. It's also worth noting that, unlike Deny, it doesn't stop Skills, so there are still plenty of things that can hurt your board or you.
When creating this class, I didn't want to just have more buffs like Ionia and Demacia. Instead, I wanted to push the buffs towards things that stick to the board.
And so, here, I have Spire's Awakening. Having these vulnerable structures on your side of the board make almost a minigame between the both players, as the player of them definitely wants to try to keep these protected to keep the buff going.
Obviously, I'm not quite sure about the numbers on this card since the only similar thing really are the recently released barrels in Bilgewater.
I wanted to share this one because at first this started as a Shurima card. But, I felt that units protecting other units felt very very Demacia. When I changed this over is when I wrote the document about what I exactly want from Shurima in order to ensure that these different regions didn't bleed into each other too much and their identities remained distinct.
And that's all today for Spring Cleaning and new cards! Thank you to all that are reading the blog and seeing the set as I continue to develop it!