by Evan Lorentz, Game Designer

When designing cards for a trading card game, it's an incredibly rare thing for an idea to pass from its initial conception all the way to the finished product without undergoing some change. That's even more true for a debut set of a game, like SG-1, where even the rules themselves can change enormously during the playtesting process.

Out of the 292 cards that make up that set, you know how many weren't changed once from creation to release? Three. The 289 other cards in Stargate's first "graduating class" went through anything from minor tweaks to complete rewrites, anywhere from once to over a dozen times. Granted, not all 289 of those stories is interesting to tell, but I have picked one in particular with a few twists and turns that may interest some of you would-be Daniel Jacksons of card gaming, archeologists of the game's past. Today, I'm delving into the history of Vala Mal Doran, Con Artist.

First, let's take a look at how the final version ended up:

This version of Vala was always intended to capture the shiftiness of the character, how she'll try to "bargain" her way out of a problem. In fact, the finished card's image comes from an episode that is arguably the very best example of this, "The Ties That Bind." From the very beginning, we thought a good way to depict this would be to give her the chance to swap out low-experience missions for others that might potentially be worth a lot more. For 2 points (instead of the finished product's 5), here's what her first version looked like:

[Triangulum], Block Vala Mal Doran from the current mission, lose one of her glyphs -- Place the top card of your mission pile as a glyph beneath Vala Mal Doran.

Barring cards that ready a character (and granted, there are quite a few of those), the finished Vala can only swap out a glyph once a turn. But this Vala can do it once per mission. Against an opponent who doesn't have obstacles to punish you for failing missions, this Vala is basically saying you can swap out the first time for free, the second time for 1 power, the third time for 2 power, and so on, just paying the normal costs to play new missions. Now, maybe that's too good, or maybe (at a point value in your team of 2) it's not.

Either way, nobody seemed as excited by this Vala as they were by some of the other team characters out there. And so, in her next iteration, we tried to jazz things up a little bit. We adjusted her point value from 2 to 3, and changed to this text:

Block Vala Mal Doran from the current mission, put one of her glyphs on the bottom of your mission pile – Place the top card of your mission pile as a glyph beneath Vala Mal Doran.

First, we removed the requirement of needing a Triangulum glyph to make her ability work. Imagine that Vala with two glyphs beneath her, one Triangulum, and the other... well, anything else. You could swap out that second glyph as much as you wanted, but as soon as you got rid of the Triangulum glyph, the party would be over. Wearing the "designer's hat," it sounded like a fun "tough decision," whether to sometimes give up the ability to re-use this text for one desperate point grab. But putting on the "player's hat," it wasn't a tough decision at all. Strategically, it seemed like the only time you'd ever choose to give up the Triangulum glyph was when you only needed 1 or 2 more points to win the game. So in draft 2, we simply removed the "choice that wasn't."

You may also have noticed a purely cosmetic tweak, in the wording of the ability. In draft 1, for Vala to get the new glyph, she first had to "lose one of her glyphs." In draft 2 (as in the final version), you "put one of her glyphs on the bottom of your mission pile." Both phrases meant the same thing, but we decided to spell out our meaning in detail. We imagined that for some people, their first instinct about what it meant to "lose a glyph" would be to assume it meant "take it out of the game entirely." And if their second instinct wasn't to then check in the rulebook just to be sure they weren't wrong? Well, it makes quite a difference.

What was the verdict on this new Vala? Still not much interest. So along came draft 3. We continued to inch her point value higher and higher, creating a new 4 point version:

Block Vala Mal Doran from the current mission, choose one of her glyphs – Exchange that glyph for the bottom card of your mission pile.

This time around, the nature of the strategy surrounding Vala had changed significantly: her new glyph would come from the bottom of your mission pile rather than the top. On the plus side, you no longer needed to play "mission stacking" cards such as Receiving a Go to know if a mission you're about to swap for will be worth the trouble -- you can swap for a mission you just put on the bottom of your mission pile last turn, and thus know exactly how much experience it'll be worth. On the down side, it meant you did have to fail that mission last turn, which does carry some negatives of its own. Still, overall, this felt like a pretty significant upgrade for the card.

The results of playtesting this time? Well, that's a bit of a tricky part to this story. See, draft 4 of this Vala saw her point value change from 4 to 5. And her text:

No change.

The truth is, nobody had had much time to play with the new and improved Vala, because we were busy with a complete rewrite of the way we assigned numbers to missions and team characters. Without going into too much detail, all the point values on characters and experience values on missions were lower up to this point than they are in the final incarnation of the game. And for a variety of reasons, we decided to change all that at this stage of our testing. The missions got changed quite significantly, but the changes for the team characters were quite simple: every one of them had their point value increased by 1.

In other words, looking through the lens of how things ended up in the final version of the SG-1 set, all the point values I've talked about up until now should actually have been 1 higher than I said they were. Draft 1 Vala would have been a 3 (not a 2), and draft 2 Vala would have been a 4 (not a 3). Draft 3 Vala simply became draft 4 Vala when we made that translation.

It took more testing, but we soon determined that these global changes to team characters and missions had fixed the issues we'd set out to address. And once that was all ironed out, it wasn't long before we stumbled onto just how good the latest Vala had become. Which brings us to draft 5, with a point value of 5:

Stop Vala Mal Doran, put one of her glyphs on the bottom of your mission pile – Place the top card of your mission pile as a glyph beneath Vala Mal Doran.

We were getting close to the final version now. For the first time, you had to stop Vala instead of block her to do her swapping. This dialed back her strength a bit, and got rid of the circus-like ability to keep juggling her glyphs multiple times in a turn. In addition, we decided we'd gone too far letting her swap for the mission on the bottom of your mission pile. If you wanted to make informed choices about Vala's glyph swapping, we figured you should have to combo her up with cards to let you look ahead in your missions.

Off to playtesting, where we found we liked this version much better, but it was still a touch too good. We started to suspect that really, Vala had been "good" or "too good" all along, even in the earlier versions where we'd been trying to make her better. She'd just been an unnoticed gem amidst all the other big changes we'd been making. Whatever the case, we had a really strong Vala deck up and running in short order, even in this toned down version of the card.

One option for fixing it seemed to be dropping her point value a lot, back into the 2 or 3 neighborhood where she began. But we decided that this Vala should be a little more "specialized" in nature than her starter deck counterpart, and so we looked to making a small adjustment to her text instead. And that took us to draft 6:

Stop Vala Mal Doran, put a [Libra] or [Pisces] glyph from beneath her on the bottom of your mission pile – Place the top card of your mission pile as a glyph beneath Vala Mal Doran.

We would later do a wording cleanup in which we decided that the words "as a glyph" weren't necessary (what else would you think a mission stuck beneath a character is supposed to be?), but otherwise, this is the card's final version.

As you've seen, sometimes changing a card is just about changing a number. Other times, it's a major rewrite to the text. Still other times (though not so much in Vala's case), we start over again from the ground up. It all depends on exactly what purpose a given card is trying to fill in the set.