New on Desk #6 — Ascending the Spire

First of all, I wanted to start by saying something or other about sociology’s equivalent of astrology, the generation theory, and how I don’t really feel very Millennial despite having been born in the ’80s. However, I just now learned that the soothsayers at the sociology department have anticipated me with a “cusp model” that accounts for generational fuzziness: apparently people like myself can self-identify as Xennials when navigating self-help literature, thus alleviating the angst of having been born into the wrong star sign.

And now I notice that whatever it was that I wanted to say about my Xennial nature as it relates to video games isn’t very funny. Oh well. Shed of rhetorical flourish, the gist is that although I don’t play video games regularly anymore, not the way I did as a teenager, I do partake now and then. This winter, aside from sampling nostalgic remakes of X-Com and Fantasy General, the game that I’ve actually been playing with some concentration has been Slay the Spire, a one-player customizable card game with some roguelike elements. It’s been thought-provoking enough, and I’ve spent enough hours on it, that journalistic integrity demands I feature it in my newsletter.

What is it?

Slay the Spire is a single-player customizable card game implemented on the computer. A single campaign of the game spans a few hours all told, having the player draft their deck from a simple 10-card starter into something fully individualized and hopefully powerful enough to beat the endgame boss fights. There’s no collectible element in the traditional card-collecting sense, or alternate deck plans; it’s just you and a single deck you draft as you go. Successfully finishing the game enables you to start again at higher difficulty levels.

The game itself belongs in the general category of Magic: the Gathering variants: you get three mana and a draw of five cards per round, and ideally those are enough to protect yourself and destroy the enemy without getting hurt too badly in the process. The player has a life pool they carry from fight to fight as a kind of a ablative score-keeping device: it’s not difficult to win any single fight thanks to your ample life pool, but you won’t get far if you have to rely on the life points in every fight, as you’ll run out soon if you allow every fight to take a bite. The constant ideal you strive for is to win your fights and improve your deck without having to pay for it in blood.

A study in deck drafting

Slay the Spire is compelling to play, and I’ve spent quite a few hours on it over the winter. A large reason is that the game captures much of what used to be fun in MtG in my teenage years while obviating the more exhausting parts of the ur-CCG experience: there is no card collecting and you don’t create decks in a theoretical vacuum. Rather, deck creation is a desperate rolling draft where you win games, draft cards and make the best of limited resources. Theoretical competitiveness of different deck builds is not relevant, nor is the balancing between individual cards, as you’re building something usable out of limited ingredients rather than viewing the entire card set as a whole.

At its heart what makes the game go is the fact that the player starts the game with a deck of 10 default cards that are strictly worse than any comparable draft: the default strike card, for example, does 6 damage for 1 energy, while a theoretical vanilla strike card (if it existed; as one might imagine, cards generally have special effects on top of damage ratings) would weight in at around 10 points. This quality gap means that anything a player manages to draft will be an improvement on their deck, and any opportunity to remove some of these default cards also improves on your deck. Over time the deck drafting process slowly transforms the player’s deck into something that may not necessarily be improved by further drafts, but by then the game is coming to its end anyway. It doesn’t overstay its welcome.

This is something that MtG veterans have known for a long time: the game is at its best in constrained draft formats where the players don’t have too much perfect control over their deck design. In a desperately organic deck-building environment there’s no need to limit duplicates, set deck minimum sizes, carefully balance all cards against each other or engage with other structural bookaboos of the competitive MtG environment.

State of the Article Poll

The February polls have gotten to a good start. I interviewed the leading candidates to get a bit of a better sense of what they’re about:

Here’s the current poll:

Meanwhile, I should finish January’s articles in a week or two; the flu has kept me from being too efficient about it, but they’ll be finished at some point this month. I’ve declared myself cured of the flu at this writing, so hopefully next week will be a bit more exciting in all ways.