In the tcg Infinity Wars they have this concept called faction purity. When making a deck you have to choose 3 'commanders'. The faction of the commanders sets the purity level for the rest of the cards in the deck. So for example if you use 3 Flame Dawn commanders, you can include cards that have a 3 flamedawn purity. Use 2 flamedawn commanders and 1 Verore commander, then you can only include cards that have upto 2 flamedawn purity, 1 verore purity, or 1 flamedawn/1 verore (a split faction card) purity. You get the idea. Poxnora has the beginning of this concept with the heros being full faction only, and some runes having loyalty (which makes them more optimal to use in ff decks) or ally X (which makes them optimal in split decks). But it would be kind of tedious to assign loyalty or ally x to every champ in the game, and then you would still have to figure out how to deal with non champ runes. So what if you removed things like loyalty and ally x and instead assigned a purity level to every rune. Where you would normally see the faction symbol on a card, you would now see upto 2 faction symbols. For example, a rune designed for a ff FW deck would have 2 FW faction symbols on it. An FW rune that could be used in any split would have only 1 FW symbol on it. And an FW rune designed for a specific split would have both faction symbols on it. I would keep the 2 faction per deck limit. Why do this? Because the rune set is huge and only getting bigger, and the potential to split any rune in the game with any other rune either limits their design, or leads to broken interactions. If this purity system were in place, it would allow more flexibility in design as well as cut down on complexity creep by having to use champ abilities which facilitate the same thing. It also allows some control over non champ runes.
The colors in Magic are similar, requiring set numbers of deployed lands of the same color to afford casting. A card with 2 greens and 2 whites requires that there be two green lands and two white lands played before you can cast it. Interesting concept, but not sure how it would play out.
To me this sounds complicated, we should be aiming to keep the game as simple as possible, not making it more complex.
I agree with this. If you wanted to restrict certain runes to only full faction, then maybe that would work. However there's many players that enjoy playing splits, so keep that in mind.
It's a cool idea, but that being said, I'm not sure it would work for us. Half of pox is deckbuilding, and placing large limits on which kind of decks you can build is, generally speaking, bad. The design of the card itself should limit itself into specific decks. Hero limits are different because if we didn't put limits on them, they would just be EVERYWHERE. Honestly, what deck wouldn't run Menelaus.
exactaly. if menelaus wasn't restricted to a 2 KF purity (if you will), then he would be in every KF split deck. BUT, because he is ff only, he is allowed to be powerful. Now look at the spell set for KF. Can you name any spells that are ubiquitous in every KF split and might be getting nerf calls for no better reason than people are tired of seeing it being used everywhere? Maybe using words like 'staple' or 'crutch'? So there is one reason to use this system. It will allow stronger spell design because there is another tool to limit their spamability besides over designing them to a specific theme, or simply overcosting them to the shoebox. Every time I suggest a deck restriction of any kind in any game I always hear the concern about 'limiting' deck variety. That confuses me because its the deck building constraints that allow for deck variety in the first place. How many different kind of decks do you think would be in the meta if there was no 2 rune per deck limit and no 2 faction per deck limit? Limits increase variety, not decrease it.
That's a strange concern to me, since deck building certainly plays an even bigger role in most traditional TCGs (including Infinity Wars I would presume) than in Pox Nora. The idea seems sound to me. Whether it's necessary or worth the effort I don't know, but certainly interesting.
I guess the tl/dr would be that this system would remove the need for loyalty and ally x abilities as well as provide a way to make non champ runes ff only.
I also have played Infinity Wars, and ironically even though I don't like the system as it exists in that game currently, I DO think that it would work well for Pox Nora. This would vastly lower the difficulty level of both designing balanced runes, and also re-balancing them in the future if necessary, since you have much smaller pools of potential interactions. It would definitely cut down on the amount of random split-meta decks (while still allowing split theme decks), and also trick decks, however I don't think that is necessarily a bad thing. +1 on this idea from me.
