I recently got a chance to check out the headquarters of Muti Labs, developers of Days of Discord, an upcoming card battler. While the game owes a debt to Hearthstone (Free), every card game does, it’s showing more than enough originality to justify its existence. And I’m not just talking about the fact that this game has a squirrel that tosses explosive acorns as a hero.
The structure is familiar: two players, each with increasing mana pools, and heroes with unique abilities, draw cards and face off…to the death! The thing that separates the game from many card battlers is apparent when you start to play it: the wall system. You have 5 slots in which to lay down cards, with each slot having 2 walls. Any damage will break down one wall, if the slot is unprotected, or if you have overflow damage on the card in the opponent’s slot opposite you. So, positioning plays a huge role, because a card can only attack the card that’s directly across from it, and protecting open slots is important, because if the walls are broken and no card is in that slot, then all damage goes directly to the hero. And of course, if a hero dies, then that’s game over.
When dealing cards, you will always have a full hand, but you can discard cards for new ones. It’s just going to matter on how much mana you have to play the cards you have, of course. And with boost cards that can augment the cards you have in play, it’s not just about deploying creatures on to the battlefield. You always have options.
It makes for interesting back and forths. Weak cards have value even just as quick ways to plug up defenses against cards. Different strategies come into play. You can try to bait your opponent to go after a strong card, before using boosts and hero abilities to make their efforts on that card thwarted – but ensuring that the rest of their line is more ripe for attack. Hero selection comes into play. Do you want a hero that can use a wide variety of cards, or do you want one with a more powerful ability, but can use cards of fewer types?
The pacing is interesting, because battles take place simultaneously, but each player’s moves of laying down cards goes back and forth. So, one player will play their cards first, then the other, the cards battle it out, the other player then goes first, then the original player, and so on. Obviously, by going last, you have the element of surrprise and can more easily counter your opponent’s moves.
The game is pretty easy to grok on to if you know card game mechanics, and having each card attack the one opposite to it is a simple enough system. But it takes some time in the build I played to understand just how wall and hero damage works – and I still might not understand, fully! I’ll need to jump into the soft launch version to play a bit more.
I talked to Muti Labs CEO Graham Hopper about how they optimize game length, and how a game like this can fit on mobile, and he has an interesting thought process: “If you play like a super-defensive deck, and you put two against each other, it might run on the longer side. But we do try to optimize so that it doesn’t go too long, because it feels tedious if you keep slugging it out and nothing ever happens. We have tried to optimize to prevent that. It’s not going to be uniform, but it’s within a range that allows people, to if you’re buying coffee, you’re standing in line, you can actually start the game…while you’re waiting for your order to arrive, you can receive somebody else’s turn and make your next move. You take the wait time plus the queue time plus a couple minutes drinking, you probably got a game done. Which is different from a game that requires your attention all the time like an endless runner. If you do something else, you’ve screwed up."
Another thing is that the game is in soft launch, and based on what I’ve seen at the studio, there’s a lot more coming down the road. One of my favorite character designs is in a class that won’t be available at launch. But how does a studio making a game like this, where “launch" is just one milestone where a certain number of people can now play a game, determine when launch is? Hopper says “Right now, the reason we haven’t launched it is because we think there’s all sorts of things we need to do with it. There’s a real qualitative difference between people playing in focus groups like we’ve done, and in tests in the studio, compared to people in the wild."
“The game doesn’t ever have to be finished. But there’s some indefinable point along the way where the baby has to get born."
And when that baby involves the aforementioned explosive-acorn-tossing squirrel, along with more serious heroes like the creepy plant heroes, this is one curious baby to watch out for. Muti Labs is going for a varied set of heroes and themes in the game’s post-apocalyptic universe, not all serious though, there’s some levity to the proceedings and characters. There is still a lore attached to it all, at least to the degree that they want everything in the game to feel justified and like it fits in the universe.
While there’s certainly plenty of card battlers on the way, and they’re all going to try to find that magic element that stands out from each other, Days of Discord is certainly set up to have a fair shot at being a notable game in the genre.
