Jazzpha wrote: Could be that tying two different conditional abilities to one set of activated gems might be a bit complex from a coding standpoint, or that the idea of voluntary mana payment is tricky to convert into PQ terms. I could see something like an effect similar to Sphinx Tutelage working, though. Activate the gem, then you're given a separate choice as to whether or not to sacrifice a vampire/zombie to buff Kalitas. Also similar to the way targeted spells function. But yeah, if that secondary effect got added, he would be a major force in my black vampire deck-- provided I ever opened him, of course hahaha.
Morphis wrote: Jazzpha wrote: Could be that tying two different conditional abilities to one set of activated gems might be a bit complex from a coding standpoint, or that the idea of voluntary mana payment is tricky to convert into PQ terms. I could see something like an effect similar to Sphinx Tutelage working, though. Activate the gem, then you're given a separate choice as to whether or not to sacrifice a vampire/zombie to buff Kalitas. Also similar to the way targeted spells function. But yeah, if that secondary effect got added, he would be a major force in my black vampire deck-- provided I ever opened him, of course hahaha. Basically the mechanic is already translated in our version. It's just that vampire is left out. It should just be reworked as "activate 3: the first zombie or vampire other than itself gets -2/-2....."
Plastic wrote: Thanks for the response. I wasn't really calling anybody out as being a slacker or anything, just wondering why it didn't include both creature types. Obviously you have the answer while we can only speculate and assume things.
Hibernum_JC wrote: Plastic wrote: Thanks for the response. I wasn't really calling anybody out as being a slacker or anything, just wondering why it didn't include both creature types. Obviously you have the answer while we can only speculate and assume things. Oh I know you weren't calling us slackers! I just figured it would be more interesting that just saying "I couldn't do it" and leave it at that. I know a lot of people (not you nor anybody who posted in this thread, really) are armchair game developers and often do not understand the realities of game development so if I can help some folks understand the different disciplines and time that is required to do some rather basic things it's worth the effort on my part.
Hibernum_JC wrote: Sorry guys, I just saw this thread and I can actually easily answer this. The plain and simple answer is that the current tech doesn't let me do "Target first creature other than itself". I won't go into crazy detail as to how the cards are built, for obvious reasons, but the fact of the matter is that I just don't have the tech to do that. I can target the first creature of a specific type, but if that type includes itself, then it will trigger and target itself. At the moment, I can't exclude the ability source. So I had 2 choices - either redesign the card entirely (it's happened before when cards are completely incompatible with our systems) or print it with a slight change, which is it can't target Vampires.
khurram wrote: Hibernum_JC wrote: Sorry guys, I just saw this thread and I can actually easily answer this. The plain and simple answer is that the current tech doesn't let me do "Target first creature other than itself". I won't go into crazy detail as to how the cards are built, for obvious reasons, but the fact of the matter is that I just don't have the tech to do that. I can target the first creature of a specific type, but if that type includes itself, then it will trigger and target itself. At the moment, I can't exclude the ability source. So I had 2 choices - either redesign the card entirely (it's happened before when cards are completely incompatible with our systems) or print it with a slight change, which is it can't target Vampires. How about making it something like "target vampire or zombie you control gets -2/-2 and this creature gains+2/+2" I am totally fine the way this card currently is btw and dont know anything about game development and programming so any answer is welcome ☺
Hibernum_JC wrote: There's 2 suggestions in this thread that I want to address - Changing it's type to something else than Vampire is a possibility, but the problem behind it is that if there are any Vampire interactions coming the future, I wouldn't want to neuter this card and make it not interact. (Considering the next set in paper Magic is very Vampire-themed, it will surely come up). The other suggestion is to make it manually target something instead of doing an automatic targeting thing. The reasoning behind that is that whenever an action does not come directly from a player casting a card, we do not want to use manual targeting. Doing so slows down the game flow quite a bit, and constantly interrupts you during phases where we don't want you to be interrupted. It's not like paper Magic, again, where it's okay to do these things, but in our game being interrupted like that really breaks the flow of the game and just slows down games quite a bit.