Jordan Koruntoff

Duelyst – Game Design

Duelyst was a CCG released on April 27th, 2016 and was shut down on February 27th, 2020

the game was then revived by the community under the name Duelyst 2.

Overview

Duelyst was my first foray into the gaming industry, I worked on the project

for 2 years before eventually transitioning to other projects.

I helped craft, tune, and iterate on all Duelyst set releases except for the initial set launch.

As a card designer on Duelyst my duties included:

  • Developing cards within a set format that released every 4 months
  • Testing and tuning before release
  • Monitoring player feedback pain points/frustrations in the metagame
  • Conceptualizing future set releases

Overall, my time was largely spent creating, playtesting, and iterating on the various cards

that were slated for the next release.

Design Process

Duelyst had a number of set releases and with each release posed new problems and opportunities.

One of these releases was Trials of Mythron, and within that set we had a faction called “Vetruvian”

The Vetruvian faction had a number of themes within it, and one of the most notable was the “dervish” tribe, these cards generally cared about temporary units that they would generate called wind dervish’s.

  • Ethereal_Obelysk
  • Wind_Dervish

The Ethereal Obelysk would summon a temporary wind dervish nearby it at the start of the players turn however the Obelysk could not move so dervish’s would often end up out of range to participate in combat once they spawned in.

This particular theme however had largely been underperforming for awhile coming into Trials of Mythron – as such one of my key tasks for that set was to bring that theme into the limelight.

Why was Dervish Underperforming?

Dervish as a theme was underperforming largely because of 3 key reasons

  1. Inability to utilize dervishes that were out of position
    • this led to a lot of lost value/tempo to the player whenever this occurred
  2. Lack of a good comeback mechanic
    • If Dervish fell behind it had no ways to recover, which given point 1 was especially crippling
  3. Weakness to the dispel mechanic which removed effects from cards
    • Obelysks the structures that produced dervishes offered no combat potential if dispelled

Solution

The solution I designed for this looked to solve for issue #1 and #2, but left issue #3 as a valid weakness of the theme.

Enter: Khanuum-Kha

Khanuum-Ka helped resolve 2 of the 3 key issues the dervish tribe was facing by providing a way to utilize out of place dervishes and a comeback mechanic.

It achieved this through it’s Dying Wish (dying wish activates when the creature dies) which let it resummon itself by removing a random dervish and resummoning itself.

Paired with the keywords Flying (allows it to travel anywhere on the board), and Rush (allows it to attack the turn it is summoned) it meant that Khanuum ka was able to attack a threat, killing itself in the process and then resummoning by utilizing the dervishes that would otherwise be out of position.

Balance

The ability to attack from anywhere on the board and potentially multiple times in a turn was theoretically extremely threatening, but was counterbalanced by a couple key factors.

Leader characters only had 2 attack, meaning that Khanuum-Ka would never die after just attacking a leader, and that the dervish it replaced was random, meaning it could also consume more valuable dervishes rather than the wind dervishes you wanted it to replace.

Those factors going into the set release made us have faith that Khanuum-Ka would be extremely powerful, but not game warping.

Conclusion

After the sets release, we found that Khanuum-Ka achieved the goals we were aiming for it significantly increased the dervish tribes play rate, while not cannibalizing the play rates of other themes within Vetruvian.

Overall a success that myself and the team were very happy with.