On to the cards?

Not. The rules need to come first.

I know, it’s very hard not to immediately start drawing up card templates, card text and great stuff to make card combos and interesting strategies. I too wanted to begin brainstorming right away.. and I did. Rules-wise.

What kind of rules do I want, what options in the game are there? How does a turn structure look like, what are the win conditions, etc, etc..

Unfortunately, I think it is safe to say that whatever cool rules you come up with, some of it (or all if unlucky) are already implemented in some way in a ccg or sorts. Tapping, destiny drawing, knocked out, agendas, locations, lands and missions are all done and accounted for.. So what I did was try to come up with a new mechanic, while taking some cool stuff from existing game that I and other players liked.

For example: Anachronism card game. People loved the idea of having a set of fixed warriors. That way, players would know what would come, without a so called “auto-loss”.

I wanted to implement this as well, by creating 5 fixed warriors in a stack for each player, who would battle for victory points (a bit what magi-nation had). First player to get 3 victory points wins. This way, you would be sure to get at least 3 fights, and a possible intense 5!
Not like most ccg´s where you are stuck with a single, long drawn out fight for your life total (magic, VS, WOW etc..), but a fight over 5 victory points, 5 games in one! Why do you think most CCG tournaments implemented best-out-of-3 games? To fix this problem of a single, right from the start race.

To create a possible way for a “losing” player (e.g. the player behind in victory points) to get back into the game, without the need of a killer hand, I created the following rule:

The player, who won a victory point last turn, MUST choose their new warrior first and show it to their opponent.

This way, the losing player can choose a warrior that have a good (or better) chance of defeating the opponent’s warrior, thus I am giving the losing player a step-up to get back into the game, without knowing the outcome 100% of course, since the combat still has to follow.

I think Wuxia Pian takes some card mechanics from the following card games:

Rage
Magi-Nation
Starwars (decipher)
Anachronism
And some more, no doubt….

I do hope, my combat zone is a new concept and will introduce some nice element to the game.
Next up: the rules itself.