Deathwhisperer

Faction: Monster

I’ve been working on World of Warcraft–related games (TCGs and Minis) for nearly two years now, so I have some experience making games based on other games. Obviously it’s very important to represent the online content as accurately as possible, but not everything can be a perfect translation. For example, we don’t have mana as a resource, but mana is very significant in the MMO. So how do we go about representing it? Well, abstractly speaking, your Action Bar cards and your personal clock represent the resources available to your character, so things that allow your character to go more often or ready Action Bar cards can represent a sudden burst of mana replenishment or cooldown reduction. These sort of leaps don’t read well immediately (that is, an MMO player who reads “ready an Action Bar card” won’t associate it with anything in the MMO if they don’t play Minis), but they work well for people who play both games. Some of our best work is with cards that, even if you had no minis background, would make sense. Charge is a great example. Someone who has never played a game of Minis can read that card and understand the translation; the same goes for Chain Lightning. Personally, I love a literal card or character. You read it, and you get it. If you’re like me, you’ll love Deathwhisperer.

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Check it out! The thing has six arms. How do you represent six arms? Well, scale the attack up to 6! Sometimes these things just design themselves. Seriously though, Deathwhisperer is a very cool, flexible character. The stats are pretty robust; a 2/2/9 for 7 honor is close to our top end for durability. The coolness, obviously, is with the attack, where you can pay up to 6 ticks to get that many dice on your attack. Clearly, a 4 for 4 or 5 for 5 isn’t a very exciting deal, though on the last tick of the game, the 6 for 6 option is basically free, and in the meantime Deathwhisperer can knock down Totems for a single tick, which is a nice option to have. Does the option to make any one of six pretty bad deals add up to a good deal? Probably not. To get the engine humming on this thing, we’re going to have to put something into those extra hands.

Deathwhisperer has two powers related to equipment, which is a new card type debuting in Spoils of War. Legendary designer Matt Hyra has already gone over this in an earlier article, but basically equipment cards are Action Bar cards that don’t have to be exhausted for costs, and they do all sorts of different stuff. Deathwhisperer has two sweet equipment-related powers. The first is Armed and Dangerous, which grants Deathwhisperer attacking rerolls for each ready equipment. Since I’m assuming you’re going to saddle this thing up with two equipment cards, you’re looking at two rerolls for free on every attack. Some of our equipment cards even grant attacks to the equipped character, so if the prospect of making 3-for-3s all day long doesn’t excite you, I’m sure you can find some equipment out there that lets you make a better attack.

I say that I’m sure you can find something because of her other ability, Master of Arms. Deathwhisperer can play any equipment in the entire game, which is a unique ability. To understand the impact of this, imagine that . . .

1)     You want to play a caster equipment, but you aren’t super thrilled with having a fragile character in your army.

2)     You want a certain piece of equipment in your Monster army, but you aren’t excited by the options with the necessary class.

3)     You want two different equipment cards on the same character, but those equipment cards come from different classes.

And those examples are off the top of my head. In any of those cases, Deathwhisperer is the character you want. She fills a unique role with equipment, and her ability to be armed with anything means that she is more customizable than any other character in the game. In addition, Deathwhisperer will get better over time. Not only will there be more equipment to suit her up with, but there will be more combinations of equipment as more get printed. And the more combinations of equipment, the more awesome things Deathwhisperer can do. So a few years down the line when you’re thinking to yourself, “Man, if only I could play this Rogue dagger with this Paladin trinket—that would be sick,” just remember we had this little conversation.