The treatment of villains in the Stargate Trading Card Game underwent many changes during design and development. This article aims to shed some light on why adversary cards turned out the way they did while revealing some of the iterative design process that we use at SOE-Denver.

We knew from the start of the project that we were going to want cards that represented some of the popular villains from the SG-1 series. How can you make a Stargate trading card game and not use Apophis as a card? However, we did have varied ideas in terms of how to represent these bad guys. One idea was this: they're just obstacles. Just because Apophis is a powerful villain doesn't mean he has to be treated, mechanically, any different from a minor road bump that the SG team runs into. Clearly he's working against them, so why can't he just be a high-cost, nasty obstacle?

Well, that idea didn't last very long - in fact, I don't think we ever made a prototype deck that had Apophis as an obstacle, even very early in the design process. These bad guys are really special in the show. Unlike a static barrier, they have a strong tendency to come back. Apophis appears, something bad happens, the SG team usually finds a way to work around the problem he created, but the team doesn't necessarily capture the villain. He comes back. And he presents an ongoing menace to Stargate Command and the galaxy. All of this led us to a swift conclusion that it is far more appropriate to have adversary cards that can stay in play from mission to mission.

Once we decided to reserve a card type for adversaries, we then had to decide on what rules to apply to that card type. We quickly came up with the concept of paying some cost to "revive" the adversaries at the end of a mission. But what didn't come quickly were the specific rules of revival. We weren't sure whether the villain player always had to pay a revival cost, or whether it was something that was paid only in certain circumstances. For example, we experimented with the idea that you only had to pay the revival cost if the hero player succeeded at the mission. That was a very realistic use of the "revive" metaphor; if the adversary won, why should he require reviving? After a couple playtest sessions, we decided that you had to pay a revive cost in all situations, because of balance considerations. If you didn't have to pay some cost, it was too strong when you managed to have just the right cards to beat down the hero player. Your villain forces would get stronger and stronger over time, leading to too many situations where the hero player simply had no chance to win.

I also want to talk about the revive cost itself and how that underwent changes during development. For a while, this cost was paid using the main form of currency in Stargate TCG: power. This unfortunately presented major design problems. We found that playtesters were generally not willing to pay a power cost for reviving an adversary that could be used later, as opposed to using their power for more ways to stop their opponent this turn. Also, playtesters didn't like playing an adversary and being in a situation where that adversary couldn't be used on the same turn without losing it. It didn't feel fun. For the most part, revival was ignored and we were right back to adversaries feeling just like obstacles. You play them, use them once, and they're gone.

One day I suggested to Evan and Chuck that players should have to discard cards from the top of their decks to pay for adversary revival, and explained briefly why that would be better than our current method. Their reaction was, for at least a few seconds, silent. I think Evan crooked his neck a little bit.

The silent reaction to a design suggestion can generally mean one of two things: the other designer is either thinking "you're crazy" and he's simply working out a polite way to tell you so, or he's thinking "interesting, let me think about that."

Why would I consider the "you're crazy" reaction to be a positive sign? Well, because being crazy during design and development is sometimes a good thing – it means that you're willing to think outside the box. The caveat is that your suggestions should have some design rationale. You should at least have a hypothesis to go on; otherwise, you could spend far too much time spinning wheels and getting nowhere.

I've found that an immediate answer to a design proposal usually means that the other designer has already considered that option, and he's merely explaining why he'd rejected the idea.

Unlike a lot of my suggestions that were rejected as crazy (and rightly so, I am not complaining here), we ran with the new form of adversary revival. This took power out of the revival decision, so that you never had to make that sad decision to assign an adversary when you didn't have enough power to keep him around. This gave the Stargate TCG an aspect very different from most trading card games. (This is in addition to the glyph-earning aspect, which is another distinguishing feature of the game.) In most trading card games, players are used to asking "what's the minimum deck size?" When they get that answer, a bar is immediately set – that value determines the size of all of their decks. That's because in most games, consistency is king. A smaller deck means you will be drawing into your most desirable cards and combos as soon as possible.

In Stargate TCG, being able to revive adversaries by discarding cards can be a very powerful mechanism. You've paid your power for Hathor, now "all you have to do" is discard six cards off the top of your deck to bring her back. While power is your main form of currency, you're now paying a secondary currency for revival, which leaves your main currency available for new problems to throw at your opponent. So, it's easy to walk into a game with an essentially limitless supply of this secondary currency. All you've got to do is add cards! Ah, but herein lies the problem and the fun! For each card that you add to increase that supply of your secondary currency, you are placing a limit on your consistency. These two components have inherent tension. Want more of one? Give up the other. Is there a "magic" range that gives you the best balance of consistency and adversary endurance? We worked hard during development to make sure that both avenues – smaller decks with good consistency and larger decks with endurance – have their place in the metagame. Finding your favored sweet spot of just the right consistency and enough endurance is part of the fun of exploring the game.