MAH. BOI. JASON. Oh my God. This is yet another time where I horrifically underestimated one of Mr. Ying's designs. How on earth I did that I've no idea. Do you think I would have learned by now? I thought I had. Ah, man's heart is hard and ungiving and his brains are mush. At any rate, I decided to wait and see. Me being wrong is something I've grown used to.
A few weeks ago I talked about Lauren Shiba and about how easy of a character she was to just go buck wild with. I also said that this flexibility will become more and more common as we get deeper into the game. Jason Gold is the guess seeing some fruition. Jason is so open, so ridiculously flexible, so freaking hard to figure out how to talk about... I love the challenge. Let's see if I do this design any justice.
So Jason Gold has the Gold Staff (GS) symbol on his cards. You can resolve a GS ability from your hand. You then have to put that card on the bottom of your deck and draw another one. This is the most dynamic character in the game so far. Your hand is constantly changing. So I make sure it's really well organized: Attacks, Maneuvers and Reactions. I do it that way because the sheer amount of information going through my hand requires that I organize my hand a bit better than I normally do. You may do it that way normally. But I sure don't. So I have to go and organize it with Jason Gold, to make sure that I know exactly what my hand has.
Now, the next thing I did was to consider what types of cards are in Jason's deck. The vast majority of Jason's cards are attacks, which locks most of Jason's approach into attacking. This is probably the balancing point of Jason's impressive arsenal, making him a bit less flexible than he looks. I know that's not saying much, given just how intimidatingly large Jason's arsenal is.But most of Jason's opportunities, by the numbers, are attacks. Gold Rush is his best attack card, if you ask me, as it allows you to either get a reliable attack or essentially regain health, if you donate the card to another played card of yours. Having only one maneuver and reaction puts Jason up front, hitting as hard as he can, as often as he can, with good dice values to back it up.
Honestly, when I look at Jason's deck my eyes cross. The amount of possible combinations in this ten card deck boggles my mind, enough to where I don't think I could write anything actually intelligible. I found myself having to look at cards as two-component bits and I just...
It's one thing to have a single use card that I can go "I like using this card like that". But when I look at this character that's not what I feel. I don't feel any particular card jumps out, because the cards bleed into each other and makes something so adaptive and powerful and fun that I could just play this dude, over and over, and have a completely different game each time. It's gotta be a pain to design, but as I said with Lauren, I want this to be the norm for this game. I want to look at those ten cards and feel like I just walked into a gigantic library of choices. And that's just a fantastic thing to encounter in a ten card deck.
Jason has an answer for practically everything. He's the ultimate jack of all trades, mixing and matching cards and cycling his deck to keep the toolbox constantly refreshed. Even his zord does a little bit of everything. Lauren was the start of a paradigm shift for this game, a shift I am more than willing to accept that I missed. Jason Gold isn't a character. He's a freaking infinite library.
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