Each Player starts with two decks: Resource & Transmutation.
There are 4 different type of cards: Resource, Homunculus, Item, Event.
Resource Cards go into the resource deck, everything else in the transmutation deck. Each turn a Player draws a card from their resource deck.
Each Resource card also has a classical elemental type (Fire, Earth, Air, Water and Aether). Everything in the Transmutation deck has 2 or more Elemental Symbols on it. A Player may play any card from their Transmutation deck by discarding a number of resource cards until they've discard enough with each matching elemental symbol on the card their trying to play.
Example:
Salamander (Homunculus/Fire/Earth) <-- To play this card, you can discard 1 card with the Fire Symbol and one card with the Earth Symbol.
Item & Effect cards are relatively the same, One might tend towards more permanent-styled effects. Homunculus are your monsters with a Power value and maybe an effect.
After a Player has played the cards their going to play, they may declare an attack against their Opponents Homunculus, bigger power defeats smaller power, left-over damage is inflicted to the defending player, if the defending player has no monsters, the offending player may attack the defending player directly.
Life is X. When X = 0, That Player loses.
Just a draft, tell me what you think!
*Slight rule addendum
Resource Decks are small (Say 20ish)
After X Resource cards were played (Transmuted) to play a card from the T.Deck, they're shuffled back into the Resource Deck, same goes for Transmutations and the Transmutation deck. (Which will probably also have some level of limit, probably also close to 20)
A couple of suggestions regarding the idea of transmutation.
Why not allow your homonculus cards in play to be transmuted into other cards, transmute your (untapped/ready) fire/earth salamander using an additional fire card from your hand in order to create a fire/fire/earth "Magma Shambler". Perhaps make it so that when a homonculus is transmuted into another card that it is removed from the game instead of being placed into discard.
I would possibly suggest an alternate victory condition of "when a player has no remaining resources in their resource deck and need to draw another one (they are out of material to transmute), they lose the game". This would only be viable with the addition of a few further rules. Allow players to sacrifice 1 homonculus per turn in order to shuffle the resources spent on it back into their resource deck. When a player destroys the homonculus of an opponent, they may take their opponents resources used to buy the destroyed homonculus and shuffle them into their own resource deck (or remove those resources from the game). If a homonculus attacks and directly hits an opponent, the attacking player may take the top card from his opponents resource deck and shuffle it into his own (or remove it from the game).
Players are then grand alchemists, battling in order to control all transmutable matter. Either by destroying the resources of their opponents or by subverting them for their own use.
I like the idea of further improving Homunculus with new Materials. So basically, you have Salamander - Fire/Earth but then you can play Magma Shambler by discarding the extra Fire. (But in some cases you could just play Magma Shambler by discarding the 3-card combination).
I don't like the idea of shuffling Opponent's cards into your deck, unless this was like a stand-alone game. I do enjoy the idea of Milling your Opponents cards to transmute with though. (Probably like Mill it as an extra material to whatever your using in your own hand) or using the RFP the Materials used for the Opponents Homunculus.
Sacrificing Homunculus to retrieve the materials is also a great idea, adding more to the idea of Transmutation and gives good reason for a discard pile.
Having thought more on it, the loss of all resources used to pay for a homonculus when it dies could be too severe. Also it may just make players not block so their resource losses are fewer! Perhaps a reworking to "damage taken by players is in the form of resources taken from the top of their resource decks", so if a homonculus does 2 damage to a player then that player is milled by 2.
On homonculus death a penalty of 1 resource used to pay for it being RFP could work better than losing all resources used to pay for it. This encourages players to make use of larger homonculi as making a ton of easy to kill small creatures could quickly lead to massive resource losses. It also encourages players to transmute smaller homonculi into larger (probably more sturdy) ones.
The difference between these would be that losses due to player damage go to the discard pile whilst losses due to homonculus death are RFP. So you can block a large attack with a chump block but you will permanently lose 1 resource, or you can take the hit and suffer a large amount of non-permanent damage.
Giving players options (such as events/spells/etc.) to allow regen of resources from discard piles effectively gives a "damage heal" option around which decks could be built.
The game is designed so that you have to kill (decompose?) your Opponents Homunculus before you can attack directly. Of course that isn't set in stone but just pointing out my original idea.
You mean that you wouldn't banish all the resources used for that Homunculus that was just destroyed because it interrupts too much with the "Decomposition for Resources to deck" mechanic?
So essentially, the game is now more of a Deck-Out as the Win Conditions?
And to summarise
Homunculus direct attack = Mill x Attack
Homunculus Penalty = RFP 1 (or more depending) of the various materials used for it when it is destroyed by your Opponent?
Your summary of what I wrote before is right.
Deck out as a win condition seems to fit thematically, an alchemist has no more resources available to transmute; though they will possibly still have resources in hand. It does make the size of the resource deck a very important factor to get right however (though that would come naturally through playtesting most likely).
It does also mean that players may have to consider sacrificing their homonculi in play in order to regain some resources into their resource decks. This might be a bit anti-turtle but it could make the game stay a bit more dynamic. Players would probably need to be limited to the number of homonculi they can sacrifice per turn (probably 1 per turn would be suitable).
I am liking where this is going anyway. Is there really a reason to limit the decomposition? You need Homunculus to battle in order to win, so how about we just have turns end after battle forcing the Homunculus stay out of the Transmutation deck and risk being destroyed and their materials being banished.
Of course a limit that the same Homounculus (and other permanent cards) can only be composed/decomposed once during the same turn should go without saying.
The decomposition limit to a single resource RFP on the death of a homonculus is more suitable if players are allowed to choose whether or not to block. Then they are deciding whether to risk a single permanent resource loss against a guaranteed larger but not as permanent resource loss.
Also there could be some homonculi that have less of a combat role and are more support oriented that players would be very unlikely to want to block with. If players are forced to block then that can remove some of the strategic options open to players. But then it would all depend on whether homonculi are granted abilities beyond a simple pair of power/toughness values.
I think you misunderstood what I meant
I was referring to decomposing your own Homunculus to return the resources used for it. I meant, you could only intentionally decompose (or compose) the same Homunculus once per turn rather than keep self-ordered decomposition restricted to one max a turn.
Inspired from the death penalty idea, what if each of the resources was the health homunculus which would.be placed.under it but each successful hit against it, one of the resources detach, when all of them are detached the homunculus is decomposed.
The resource = health idea sounds quite interesting. It keeps track of 2 major useful things:
The remaining health, and
The elements that the homonculus can provide when transmuting into a larger homonculus.
Allowing some homonculi to have abilities tied to the resources attached to them would add a whole extra level of depth. For example, the Earth/Fire cost Salamander could be a 1 power creature that has "+1 power for each Fire resource attached". Allowing players to attach additional fire resources to increase its power and also to prepare it for transmutation into a larger homonculus simultaneously.
Exactly! I had the idea of Resources adding extra power but wasn't entirely sure how to incorporate but I really like your idea. Obviously, we're on a very similar wavelength.
Definitely. Getting a lot of in-game usage out of the resources seems to be a very good fit with the theme, so keeping them in view of the players and interacting with homonculi in play is a very good idea.
We're going to have to make some examples on non-fire creatures and abilities eventually... though we need to get past the conceptual stage first :P
Indeed.
The win condition is somewhat unclear, at least the method of achieving it is.
The win condition being to deck out your Opponent. What we would need to help this is to define more attributes for Homunculi, the only one we have for sure now is their Element Type.
The cards that are milled could be from a different attribute than the actual creatures power (like "Critical" in CFV where power is to define who wins a battle in the game but the Critical is how much damage is done to the defending player).
Also any of the cards that are detached from a creature could probably be RFP'ed (gone through the gate or something in flavourful terms).
Edit- More to Add.
Thinking about it and we could have something that works in a manner simple to Pokemon.
You know how each turn you add an energy to a Pokemon to increase it's capability? Well the Homunculi would be like that, they would require X of each of Resource ability and if one of the resources got destroyed, they wouldn't be able to use that ability any longer.
Example -
Salamander
1 Fire/1 Earth
Skill 1: Requires Fire/Inflict 10 Damage
Skill 2: Requires Fire-Earth/Inflict 20 Damage. Stun Enemy Homunculi
If the Salamander got hit and the Earth Resource removed, it would only be able to use it's first Skill. Flavour-wise this is similar to the limbs of the creature breaking off and making certain manoeuvres impossible.
So with that idea we have Health & Powers.
I think I've found my Zodiac-themed game, replacing elements with Zodiac Symbols (or subverting them into deeper sub-categories anyway) to create different attributes based on the mixtures.
Could make for pretty interesting art if nothing else.
I'm not sure about the pokemon style skill based combat, though I have not played the pokemon ccg so I have no idea how well it plays. Personally, I prefer the idea that adding more and more of certain elements will add greater levels of power/ability to a homonculus (as in the "+1 power per fire resource" salamander example). It seems a simpler method and besides, having a number of resource/energy types (like pokemon) and then having creature skill based combat (like pokemon) may make it far too similar.
I did think that additional abilities on cards could be unlocked as additional resources are added. For example:
Name: Sprite, Cost: Air/Aether, Power: 0, Text: Air:Exhaust - Draw a card and discard a card, Air/Air:Exhaust - Draw a card.
would be a 0 power creature that let's you draw and then discard a card if it has 1 air resource attached, which is upgraded to simply drawing a card with 2 air resources attached.
On a different note, I have thought further that perhaps defining 4 "alchemy array" areas for players and allowing them to play 1 resource per turn to any of these areas. Then allowing transmutation to occur in these areas. So for example, a player could stockpile fire resources in one array in the hopes that they draw a particularly fire heavy card to transmute their later on. This adds a new level of player interaction with the potential to add abilities that allow you to move your (or your opponents) resources between arrays. It also allows new abilities that are dependent on resources in an array. For example:
Lightning bolt: Target an array with at least 1 water resource, any homonculus there takes 2 damage.
Or a more complex example:
Creature: Phoenix, Cost Fire/Fire/Fire/Fire/Air/Air, Power: 5, Text: When Phoenix dies, you may immediately transmute it in any array with at least Fire/Fire instead of discarding it.
QuoteSo for example, a player could stockpile fire resources in one array in the hopes that they draw a particularly fire heavy card to transmute their later on.
Draw a heavy fire card? So now your our Transmutation & Resource deck are combined? or we are drawing from our Resource deck?
I can understand affecting the arrays via effects and such but I don't enjoy the idea of drawing into Homunculus because that goes against the very idea of this game of giving players quite a choice based on their elemental cards on their own.
As far as Pokemon-Ability Skills go so far as being similar, it is a much less used concept than Power/Toughness (ATK/DEF) which seems a bit, I don't know basic. Not that I'm advocating either, I just want to find a battle system that seems fresher. The idea of Resource +1 is a good start too and helps what people would perceive as weaker creatures to overcome stronger ones.
Addendum: Three Types of Transmutation cards; 1 - Homunculus (Our Creatures) 2 - Permanent (Continuous Effects) 3 - Nature (Instant Effects)
Also considering shuffling isn't involved with our Transmutation Deck, we could afford to make the cards bigger to fit more onto them.