Agatha Harkness takes over your hand and plays your cards for you.
She essentially turns the game into an auto-battler.
[Unsurprising spoiler: my theories were deeply incorrect.]
Everything he told me was fascinating, so this is quite a long interview.
This piece contains major spoilers for the TV series Wandavision.
You have been warned.
Firstly, I saw your GDC talk this year about the development of Marvel Snap and it was fascinating.
Ben Brode:I’m really glad to hear that.
And we’re not done having new thoughts… You need someone to think outside the box, right?
You need people for that I think.
Or does it start many different ways?
Ben Brode:Sure.
And you’re right, it’s multi-directional.
So in card games, we often call the two directions top-down and bottom-up.
What should he do', right?
And then bottom-up design will be like: ‘Okay, we have a lot of cards that have downsides.
It’d be fun if you might make a deck where you could get rid of the downside somehow.
So let’s take a card that removes the context of the next card you play.’
Now, who could do that?
What kind of Marvel characters have power nullification abilities?
So we do both things.
They have pros and cons.
Going bottom-up, you get designs that could really help bring new deck archetypes into play.
You have to have stuff that does this.
So, maybe Iron Fist could punch him to the left or something.
I don’t know.
But going top-down really expands your brain.
As in, what would a cloning person do in this game?
What would Mirage, who causes hallucinations, do?
What would she do in this game?
Or what would Mysterio do?
Is there a world in which sometimes you have three or four potential ways you could take one character?
Was there a point at which maybe there were three or four competing Squirrel Girl designs?
I can already tell that’s a bad example.
Ben Brode:Oh, yeah, certainly, certainly.
So we often start out just spitballing.
So, for example, Colossus, right.
What is the fantasy of Colossus?
What is it about him that makes him, like, uniquely him?
Maybe it’s the fact that he throws Wolverine at somebody?
That’s a core fantasy of Colossus.
And which of those fantasies do we want to explore?
Because all of them, I think, are pretty iconic.
And so we’ll just like write designs for all of them.
And see if any of them stick.
Sometimes they have multiple ones that stick, and we’ve got to choose one.
And then we save the other ones for other future cards.
And sometimes we go with one and we try… For example, our initial Debris designs?
When you played her, she used wind powers to blast everybody else away from that location.
Eventually, we needed a new design for her.
And so now she creates debris across the board instead.
One of the interesting things from your GDC talk comes in here, I wonder?
I thought that was a brilliant observation.
Does that ever happen?
Ben Brode:Yes.
Constantly, that’s a constant thing that we have.
But the thing is, we can almost always get there, okay?
It just takes a lot of work.
So in card game parlance, we have this thing called templating.
So how do you say ‘destroy a card’?
So that’s the template.
And everyone’s like, ‘Well, that is just completely not understandable.’
Or they say, ‘It’s way longer than the other cards in the game.’
What’s the essence?
Maybe this card is doing two things, can they just do the one thing?
There’s ways to cheat, also!
Snowguard has three cards.
Because those are writerly problems?
I really struggle with that every day.
This isn’t really a question for anyone other than me, just being a writing nerd.
Suddenly I realise: ‘Oh, you’re experiencing the same glorious hell that I experience every day.’
And if you have more than eight words in the box, you’re not going to read it.
People just smash one of the buttons and are like, ‘Wait, what happened?’
They told you how to feel about the event.
It wasn’t just, you know, ‘Okay’.
It had some flavour and some emotion behind it.
And so I think it’s part of game design.
And words are the frontline defence.
That’s the thing that players experience most.
This is wonderful to hear.
I wanted to talk to you about a specific card, Agatha Harkness.
I’m not knowledgeable about Marvel, even though I play Marvel Snap.
I’ve been really gripped by this game.
And they’re all like, ‘Oh, no, she’s really quite famous.
She’s been doing this TV show now and everybody knows about her.’
I don’t think I’ve ever seen another card like her in a game ever.
She’s six mana, so she plays herself in turn six.
She just takes over your game and makes all the plays!
Ben Brode:Yes.
You need something that blows their mind and makes them think: ‘Hold on!
Anything could happen in this game!
I don’t know what to expect!
What else do these cards do?
I have to see all of these cards now!
This is wild!’
So the design space is basically every possible card that could exist in your game.
You’re never going to get every possible card.
But that’s that’s the space you have to play in.
And for collectible card games, you need something unique.
I get that!'
That just requires no game knowledge.
I gotta check this out.'
Once you knew what you wanted Agatha to do, how does she do it?
Ben Brode:Here’s how she works.
She always tries to play herself.
So if she can play herself, she’ll play herself.
If she can’t, she playscompletely randomly.
[Long pause.]
I’m not ready.
I’m not prepared for this.
This is the most shocking thing I’ve ever been told.
Ben Brode:Completelyrandomly.
And I’m always like, ‘Oh, how could you be so stupid?’
Agatha plays Medusa all over the place.
But it turns out I’m reading absolutely everything into that?
Was that the plan from the word go?
I would rather you don’t play Agatha, actually.
I’d rather you be making hard decisions and try and puzzle out the right play.
But we want there to be this really unique thing in the game.
And so having Agatha be somewhat, somewhere below the midpoint line works.
I want a really fun experience.
I want to do something different.
Well, how do you build a deck that takes advantage of her?
[Laughs] Probably don’t put Medusa in it!
I was actually afraid to tell you that I have even used Medusa recently.
I was thinking I should probably pick another example and lie about it all.
I’ve just grown attached to that card for some reason.
But this brings me on to something, actually.
As you’ve said when you create this card, you know it’s unique.
It feels like it’s going to be controversial, just because of what it does.
Did you have a sense of what people might make of it?
And did that turn out to be correct?
Ben Brode:Yes, sort of, I will say this.
The development process here?
We were terrified for years of this card, okay?
Because, you know, it’s like legal botting?
And botting causes problems for card games.
But we also knew that people would maybe bot our game whether Agatha existed or not?
And the existence of Agatha made it not something we can sweep under the rug and just forget about.
‘Hey, guys, Agatha exists!
That’s an important thing.
The randomness has still blown my mind.
Anytime you have any amount of pure randomness, people believe it is not random.
It’s just how humans perceive randomness.
Just you know, ‘Hey, I got heads five times in a row, the coins broken!’
This is how randomness works.
It’s a bell curve of distributions right?
I should say, it’s almost always a mistake to have pure randomness.
Because it doesn’t actually match our expectations of what a random system should do.
We don’t mind that she has done some really dumb stuff and some really brilliant stuff sometimes.
It’s just gonna happen randomly.
How do you want people to feel when they lose to someone playing Agatha?
Dark, frustrating, but also kind of magical?
Ben Brode:Ah!
This is why the card is Agatha Harkness in the first place.
So this card was not Agatha to begin with.
It was Adam Warlock once upon a time.
It was a bottom-up design.
I wanted to explore this design space.
But then Wandavision came out.
And there’s a moment - this is a spoiler, I’m sorry.
It’s Agatha and she has a theme song that plays.
The theme song is incredibly catchy.
It’s called, ‘It was Agatha all Along’ [He sings it for a moment.]
Like super, super catchy.
This became a very viral moment.
Everybody loves the Agatha theme song.
It was an incredible moment in this really, really good TV show.
Why would they play Medusa?
To the left side?
What is happening?’
And then on turn six Agatha comes down, you’re like, ‘Oh!
IT WAS AGATHA ALL ALONG!’'
It perfectly matches that moment.
That’s what I want.
That’s what I want players to experiences.
I like decks where things are slightly out of my hands.
So when I got Agatha, I played her for, honestly, a number of months.
And that was all I did in the game.
And halfway through that, I suddenly realised, I’m probably not meant to be doing this?
I’m meant to be moving on and doing other things.
So I wondered: how long should I have played Agatha?
How long do you want people to play her before they get on with their lives?
Do you want to play a more controlling strategy?
Do you want a deck where you have lots of decisions?
As for moving on eventually, I think like this is true of basically any deck right?
Agatha does provide a lot of new experiences for a long time.
But eventually people want to go off and discover new fun.
