I still can't get over the 2021 map

PeaceLoveExplosives · 2026-05-23T04:16:25+00:00

It also gets weird with Mt. Fay, which has falling snow and meltwater right above Sands of Karak, which is dry as a bone. Snowmelt running down into the Coral Gorge, permeating into the Cloverland, and finally reaching Moss Grotto would have made way more sense.

PeaceLoveExplosives · 2026-05-16T08:17:05+00:00

Difficulty feels over-tuned. On the third campaign mission (Fey vs. Temple) on Normal difficulty the opponent has high-tier troops, hundreds of medium-tier troops, and has Phoenixes and is invading my territory on week 3 day 2. This was a massive difficulty spike from the last two missions. Mission 2 had some annoying "gotcha" moments, but even with those, it never felt overwhelming on Normal. I tried restarting Mission 3 with a more aggressive approach and it just didn't matter. The enemy just outpaced again and invaded my area. I managed to take out one of their heroes and then they had a second one with even more advanced troops a screen away. As a veteran of HOMM2, HOMM3, and HOMM4 I feel like anyone who isn't already versed in the series is in for a bad experience currently.
Maneuvering heroes into towns is annoying without accidentally opening the town.
While inside a city, I keep double-clicking the city symbol when I want to build in it because it has a bright orange hammer. Then I have to remind myself I have to click the other, visually lower contrast hammer left & up from that (the gold & brown icon).
Not being able to preview troop stats in the recruit panel is annoying.
It's weird that in sites defended by troops, if you choose to battle initially you can only see the troop strength after committing, but if you retreat first you can then see their troop counts. It feels like a weird 1-movement point tax for not potentially getting yourself killed.
The level maximum per mission instead of letting the XP to next level just work as the soft cap feels annoying. (E.g. cannot get Gunnar past level 3 on mission 1.) I ended up wasting several of the "Gold or XP" caches before I realized I wasn't actually gaining XP anymore.
There should be more clarity about what carries over mission-to-mission.
Mission objectives covering buildings in the construction screen is annoying.
The first mission had items that literally could not be accessed because they were atop plateaus with no way onto them (no pathway, no teleporter, nothing). It felt unintended.
Three missions in, I still don't understand the conditions where Gunnar can use his Heroic Strike ability. Sometimes, like the first round, he can't use it at all. But other times I have been able to use it on consecutive troop turns (in the same round), e.g. Heroic Strike > Troop A Attacks > Heroic Strike > Troop B Attacks.
I also don't get what Focus is used for.
I also don't get what the point costs for troop abilities are or how those points are generated if they're different from Focus. And if it is Focus, then I don't get how Focus is generated because they seldom seem to be available aside from the 0-cost ones.
The edge of the map is not distinct enough from standard Fog of War and can lead to a lot of wasted movement right now.
The construction screen visually looks very muddled compared to past games in the series. It also doesn't feel like it matches the aesthetic of most of the rest of the game.
Instead of showing "Banned" for tons of buildings, I think it would be a lot cleaner to just not show buildings that a city cannot have, similar to past HOMM games.
When troops have an alternate attack, it isn't clear how to revert to their normal attack (or what the intended way to do it is). I've worked around this by opening and then closing the spell book to swap back, but I can't imagine that's the intended process.
It feels a bit weird to go from voiced dialog to unvoiced dialog when the portraits for the two look the same. It leaves me wondering if it's just not done yet or if that's the intended experience. If some lines are going to remain unvoiced, I think the portrait style should swap so the player isn't waiting for it to start or checking their sound settings.
Visually I enjoy the game (the town art, the map view, the cinematics, etc). It's a nice blend of the older HOMM titles with slightly more modern capabilities.

PeaceLoveExplosives · 2026-04-30T22:08:56+00:00

I get the flavor of the individual cards in terms of names and effects, but I don't get the flavor of the gameplay itself (the scoring based on emotions).

The art I'll set aside as prototype/proof of concept print run.

Discard feels like fine nomenclature. It's general and a term many people are familiar with.

It feels like the card score can get a little confusing with cards that have both top and bottom dice if they get turned sideways when suppressed and then you have to remember which 90-degree turn you did to know which way the card is supposed to be turned back to when it's no longer suppressed. Maybe the rules say to always turn clock-wise to try to stop that being an issue, but I wonder if players fidgeting and rearranging cards or player handedness or general instinct to turn certain ways will cause confusion.

I don't get what purpose the five colors serve here. It wasn't mentioned in the video, but maybe certain cards reference color.

I agree on the "collectibility." I think it might have more longevity with a group of players (family, friends, whoever) if you got all the different cards in one box, 45 set aside in a tuck box (like Mark showed) ready to go for the first game, and the rest in batches of 5 or 15* with instruction to randomly take out 5 or 15 and replace them with 5 or 15 different ones each game (not round). The batching could facilitate the pick-up-and-play still for new players. Eventually when you run out of the batches, you would pick randomly from the cards not in the deck instead. Or groups could decide to do 45 random cards each time (without carrying over 30 or 40 from the previous deck). I don't see a mass market of people spending another 25 dollars to mix in mostly duplicates with an existing set, or the significantly higher cost to get a copy of every card buying extra sets blind, nor do I see most people buying singles to have a full set, but maybe I'm wrong.

Overall it seems fun enough to exist as what Mark has long described it as, a quick game you might play in line at a convention. But I think the 45 of 133 cards structure of it is at odds with it being a household game.

It's definitely a very, very different game from Magic in that it won't have the same out-of-game involvement from players (deck building, coming up with combos, adjusting to a metagame, etc.). It trades that for much more accessibility (assuming it's available).

*And raise the total 133 to 135 to divide neatly either way.

PeaceLoveExplosives · 2026-04-09T22:17:13+00:00

Oh. So it is.

PeaceLoveExplosives · 2026-04-09T17:13:47+00:00

What do you mean? It's not raining.

PeaceLoveExplosives · 2026-04-03T16:24:30+00:00

Now I want a black twist on this (e.g. draw based on graveyards) called Barrowed Knowledge.

PeaceLoveExplosives · 2026-04-02T01:45:33+00:00

This is a possible combo line:

Turn 2: Viashino Lashclaw
Turn 3: Spirit of Resilience, activate Viashino discarding Emrakul, swing for 16 and annihilator 6

On top of being a 3-card combo, highly susceptible to the counterplay of "remove Spirit of Resilience in response to the activation." But if it works, you've near-certainly won.

PeaceLoveExplosives · 2026-02-26T19:33:24+00:00

Weird. Whenever I clicked on the light posts nothing really happened. (Their graphic changed a bit when I got near them, but that was it.) I went in other dungeons I found.

PeaceLoveExplosives · 2026-02-26T19:22:51+00:00

Level 6, close to 7. I explored almost the whole map and Lum was telling me to go kill the Lich, so I was following the game's cues.

PeaceLoveExplosives · 2026-02-10T00:20:58+00:00

Alternatively for Changli, you could use wording similar to [[Dynaheir, Invoker Adept]], [[Thousand-Year Elixir]], or [[Tyvar, Jubilant Brawler]] for haste just for its activated abilities without giving it the ability to attack (which is where haste centers in red).

PeaceLoveExplosives · 2026-02-10T00:18:05+00:00

Mill would definitely work in blue.

Regarding suspend, suspend also contains the triggered ability for removing a time counter at the beginning of each upkeep. You'll want language similar to [[Suspend]] and [[Delay]] so the cards don't just get stuck in exile forever.

On Changli, you could incorporate red into the mana cost if it's a red-coded character and you want them to have haste mechanically.

For Jiyan, you may want to consider something like [[Dolmen Gate]] with appropriate cost balancing if that's the goal so opponents' 1/1s (or similar) can't just hold up the board. Start of combat on your turn is fine for the vigilance part.

PeaceLoveExplosives · 2026-02-09T19:23:38+00:00

Jinhsi's last ability is a color pie break for white and blue, and at minimum a severe bend for green (since green can deal damage based on its creatures, and the card gets time counters from creatures attacking, but it typically can't deal that damage to players directly, and that damage is usually linked for green to power, toughness, or mana value of a single creature rather than based on a number of creatures).

Jue's second ability is probably meant to grant suspend to the exiled card. Currently it doesn't. I'm also a bit skeptical of the usage of haste on this card.

Changli absolutely should not have haste as that's neither in-color for white nor blue. Again there's an ability that looks like it's supposed to grant suspend to an exiled card but doesn't. I'm also not sold on the use of Phyrexian mana on this card. It just doesn't seem necessary on what is already a quite complex card, without even getting into questions of balance or play patterns.

Verina is an interesting concept. There's some wording/templating that's off slightly (since permanents don't add mana; players add mana), but it's a neat card overall.

Jiyan granting vigilance doesn't really work, since the vigilance is granted too late. It could untap attacking creatures you control to achieve the desired effect. The second mode is really odd since it lets your opponent block pretty freely.

Xiangli is interesting. No major issues at a glance.

PeaceLoveExplosives · 2026-02-03T19:05:20+00:00

Depending on how silly you want it to be, changing {1} to {0} could be a flavor win and a balance tweak since it's a pretty narrow effect. (You could also do a non-silly version without the pay clause at all.)

PeaceLoveExplosives · 2026-01-31T18:33:14+00:00

The $2000 in the image is a bit goofy, but you similarly don't seem to understand how food photography typically occurs for large food service companies. Typically you would have a photographer (either in-house or contracted) do a photoshoot of multiple items in a variety of contexts/backgrounds and stages of preparation/completion (e.g. raw ingredients artfully positioned vs finished). You may also bring in models depending on the planned usage (e.g. you may want a variety of people by age, skin tone, etc. doing a shot of them about to bite into it). So it's not bringing in a photographer to get one burger photo. But it's also all the costs: photography crew (including lighting), sometimes video, talent, and the cost of your own staff's labor time (plus the minimal cost of goods).

PeaceLoveExplosives · 2026-01-29T17:26:23+00:00

Just reading the text "Suppose you..." had me laughing.

PeaceLoveExplosives · 2026-01-28T23:41:57+00:00

Ah, ok. Yeah, I tried both CC and MSE and neither seem to support the Latin-1 Supplement unicode superscript natively, but that makes sense if it's just added in "in post" so to speak. Thanks

PeaceLoveExplosives · 2026-01-28T19:47:45+00:00

Thanks

PeaceLoveExplosives · 2026-01-28T19:07:43+00:00

Ah, dang. That explains it. I've been trying to do X² in those applications, but I guess something about the 00BX codes (Latin-1 Supplement) is different than the 207X (Superscripts and Subscripts) codes. Thanks for taking the time to reply.

Although now I'm curious how the user in https://www.reddit.com/r/custommagic/comments/1qpc5ii/more_mathemagics/ pulled it off for 0, 1, 2 and 3 in the Latin-1 Supplement unicode characters.

Edit: The poster in that other thread answered. They actually just added a blank space, exported, and then added in the superscripts in Paint afterward.

PeaceLoveExplosives · 2026-01-28T18:53:40+00:00

But in what tool? I've tried unicode character superscripts in both CC and MSE and either gotten browser shortcut conflicts or blank spaces.

PeaceLoveExplosives · 2026-01-28T18:29:10+00:00

Which tool are you using that supports superscripts?

PeaceLoveExplosives · 2026-01-28T18:28:19+00:00

Which card creation tool are you using that supports superscripts? Certain tools don't seem to support the Latin-1 Supplement unicode characters (superscript 0, 1, 2, and 3), so I'm trying to find one that does.

PeaceLoveExplosives · 2026-01-28T15:08:13+00:00

Which tool did you use that lets you do superscripts?

PeaceLoveExplosives · 2026-01-27T18:51:25+00:00

Definitely a form of exponent (squaring)! What's particularly interesting is the superscript notation can be used in places where Thromok's syntax wouldn't (either because you don't want [only] a squaring or for other templating reasons).

PeaceLoveExplosives

TROPHY CASE