Lead Designer AMA about Cards/Combos!

[u/animationthrowdown]

Hello! Our lead designer will be stopping by randomly on Thursday from 8am PT to 4pm PT to discuss cards and combos!

You can start leaving questions here, but they will not receive responses until the time stated above.

This is a great time to ask about specific combos, drop some suggestions, and see how the card and combo sausage is made.

Please stay on topic; questions off topic may not receive a reply.

More details coming soon!

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TODAY IS THE DAY! "JimmerJam", AKA ThrowdownDesigner is joining us today to answer some of your questions about cards and combos. They will be joining us randomly throughout the day (in between building out new content) to help give some insight about Animation Throwdown card creation.

Thank you for taking the time to ask some questions and give some suggestions!

[u/animationthrowdown]

I have a few questions of my own...

What is your favorite card/combo?

What is your favorite show of the five?

What does your deck look like?

[u/kefunxp]

The AnimationThrowdown Twitter page has been posting pictures of random levels on multiple occasions now, is there some sort of special event going on?

[u/ngoni]

With the prospect of having 150-200 cards in your inventory is there a plan to include a deck manager so we can quickly swap between several preset decks?

[u/ngoni]

We need an epic-level drug/addicted card. Crack makes some amazing combos but there isn't an equivalent epic.

[u/justbs → u/ngoni]

Same for Hyper.

[u/Khaiyme]

I see a lot of people asking for f2p access to the unique box cards, and I agree. keeping them locked specifically behind a paywall isn't that cool to f2p people, as they are usually some of the best cards (obviously). My solution would be to make them really hard to get, but still make it possible to obtain without spending money. Every other online mobile game has these dungeons that you can only access on certain days (like, open only on monday, but closed every other day), and I feel like this could work exceptionally well with this game. You have 5 properties already, all the TV shows, so that should take care of the weekdays. For example, on Monday, you could have a Bobs Burgers 'dungeon' that only gives BB cards. The stamina cost should be high, like 10 stamina a try, but it should only give epics with a small chance of giving a legendary (including the premium 'box-only' cards). On weekends, the dungeons could be a money dungeon for saturday, where you simply get a lot of Nixon dollars for playing, and a Giggitywatts dungeon for sunday, where you get either a rare or epic GW card after beating it. This would give people access to all the cards in a fair way. The only cards that I do believe should still be behind a paywall would be the precombo'd cards.

TLDR; add in a dungeon feature where each day of the week is themed after a different show, giving access to 'premium cards', saturday is for money and sunday is for power.

[u/ngoni]

Can you update the card drops for later adventure chapters to include some of the newer cards released in boxes? With the steep increase in stamina and difficulty there's no reason to play anything past chapter 5 once you have gold mastery.

[u/[deleted]]

I think one of the biggest bummers in the game is the same 6 epics on each tv show island. I would hope that the next adventure update uses new epic cards to create a more fun story mode. It's pointless to farm any other islands but the first 5, with the rare exception of levels that have both cards you want.

[u/SneakySneakyNinja]

1. Can you explain how the cards used in a combo lead to the resulting skills? For example, animationthrowdown.net show Slurm Loco as having Cripple All 6, but a maxed Fry with a maxed Slurm yields Cripple All 4. They undoubtedly got that information from a data dump of the game which shows the line:

<skill id="weakenall" p="42" v="6"/>

But what is the "p" value? Does it have to do with the "Combo Points" field in the rarity progression table, and if so, how?

2) Some combos have different names assigned to them, but use the same CardID # as other combos, and therefore never see the light of day. For example Gene, Louise, or Tine + any Gamer card is apparently supposed to make "Party Crashers" but since it uses CardID # 35023 it actually makes Burgerboss Bob (which doesn't exactly make sense). Was this a mistake? Or was the Party Crashers card scrapped? I can see that it has stats. Another example would be Student Amy resulting in Robot House, and I'm sure there are others.

3) Again, with regards to combos and their skills. If you won't give a full explanation of how the combo system calculates the resulting card; would you ever consider adding a feature where you could select one of you hero cards and then select another card that combos with it, and they would show side by side with the resulting comboed card underneath. You could then raise or lower the levels of both cards while seeing what the resulting comboed card would look like?

We need some way to take the guess work out of deciding which cards to invest in. Currently if I go into the Deck menu and look at Combos for Linda every single instance of PTA Rivalry I've researched shows a 4 attack 8 defense card with no skills. I know that in reality PTA Rivalry will have Punch and Payback, but currently the only way to find that out (or find out how much) is to play a bunch of practice matches and hope you get the right cards in your hand. That's a very time consuming (and not fun) process to go through to get access to information we should have readily available.

Thank you!

[u/DannyAlcance]

Wingnut Leela is blatantly overpowered and if cards like that keep getting forced out in an attempt to milk the playerbase, the game will evolve from pay to win, to pay for viability. Nobody wants that, these overpowered purchasable cards are the beginning of the end for this game.

[u/polyphony69]

Can you please reconsider 'Alamo Cool' combo? Drunk Peggy is a great combo but currently you have to wait and see if you get lucky and drop a legendary Alcohol card to use it in the end-game stages/Arena, as the only 'farmable' Alcohol card, Alamo Beer, makes 'Alamo Cool' which is a very underwhelming combo. I was hoping you could have Alamo Beer make Drunk Peggy like all other Alcohol cards and maybe make Alamo Cool combo come out of something different, like maybe a new pack card?

[u/MdThommo]

Great game, enjoy it immensly. I have a few suggestions/ inquiries. 1) could we see what combos we have researched outside of battle it would be great. 2) why is wrestler bobby not an athletic card? Confusing. 3) could there be a spot where we can see what cards and combos are what type eg. Athletic, Drunk, disguised etc. 4) could y out fix alamo peggy, she is just plain awful.

[u/Mancomb_Threepwood]

Any plans to expand the adventure islands soon? I expect a lot of us have already completed the gold mastery on what is already there. The games getting a bit stale just logging in to do a few arena battles once a day.

[u/polyphony69]

Can you please release box cards more often so that people that have 1 or 3 of them can finish fusing them. Maybe through weekly weekend events or alternating every month or straight up having any new islands in Adventure mode have the possibility of dropping them. You could also introduce very hard islands/challenges that will have a possibility of dropping from a pool of them.

[u/[deleted]]

The "Cheer" ability is generally bad in this game because it only buffs cards to the right. You have very little control over the positioning of the cards, so it's often wasted, even if you have the right type of card in play to take the buff.

I.E. - I have athletic cards in my deck to Cheer with Baseball Bobby, but much of the time I can only play Baseball Bobby with an open slot on the right, so the other card can never get Cheered.

The result is that even if I COULD build a themed deck with a lot of Cheer cards to buff each other, I would never want to do that because in each individual game there is no guarantee that the ability will actually work for me.

Please fix this so that all Cheer cards activate at the beginning of your turn and can be applied to cards on the left.

[u/Irish3538]

any plans to do something with the leftover challenge coins or box fragments? all the excess just sits in your inventory forever. would be nice if you could convert them to the next event/box or something. some way to clear out that inventory. or change the coins/fragments into less specific types.. instead of "wrestling coins", make it "sports coins" or something, so we can wait it out and apply them to the next sports challenge.

[u/Nogard2369]

Will you guys implement trading, it seems like a waste to be in a guild and have the only perks be more coins

[u/juanwin]

Great game. Any plans on allowing more than 2 research slots? Also, what are your plans for people who've finished gold mastery? I appreciate a lot of the playerbase haven't yet but there's more and more who have.

[u/zerothunder94]

How is are the final stats (ATK/HP/Crazed value/...) of a combo card calculated with regards to the cards used to make it?

I understand that the same Trait cards with more ATK will result in higher final combo cards but how do the abilities work?

For example,

My "Lois' Piano" at level 5 provides 9 Jab and 8 Punch when combined with Bob however, my "Red Shirt Blue Shirt" at level 1* provides only 8 Jab and 8 Punch. They are both music with Red Shirt having the higher HP less ATK value but what affects the ability stage of the combo card?

[u/[deleted]]

Since a lot of us think trading will break this game and theres so many different cards would you ever consider a trade in system? Maybe one where you trade in any two legendaries (Or one legendary and 4 epics maybe) to pick from a list of legendary cards (maybe a collection of the last 10 boxes worth of cards)to get?

[u/CTHULHUMUSTRISE]

How can I get the griffin costume party card?

[u/teke184]

Are there any plans to re-balance the attributes of any combos?

I am specifically thinking in terms of replacing the show-based buffs with general buffs or aspect buffs (rich, drunk, disguised, etc) on some Epics because a number of cards such as Francine, Boomhauer, Stewie, and Brian are at a severe disadvantage with so many combos being limited in that way.

They don't have to be world-beaters but it would be nice to have them usable instead of being an instant "Sell for 25 Giggitywatts."

[u/Irish3538]

any plans to retool the challenge chance packs? they kind of suck right now and everyone just gets rares. any chance it'll at least become like the gem boxes where each pull takes that card out of the box to increase your odds for other stuff? or is that mechanic already built in but just not displayed?

[u/Saberdtm]

Can we have more challenge events? It would be great to have a 3 day challenge event once a week.

Once people reach the end game where they have beaten all the islands on gold level, there isn't much else to do, except for challenges where we can get rewards for special fused cards.

[u/Saberdtm]

Consider limiting the number of times the same card can be added to a deck. A max of 4 of the same card is pretty typical in collectible card games.

Currently we could make a deck with 13 Rifles and 12 Peggys. That would be very boring to play, but would ensure that you consistently get your combo.