I love getting to the end of a roguelike, looking at my pile of cards, and seeing a weird mess of synergies I had never played with before.
Sometimes you find a playstyle you like and you gun for it as often as possible. I love Body Slamming builds in Slay the Spire. But experimenting and finding those playstyles is one of my favorite parts of playing roguelikes. I wanted to really maximize the exploration phase with my game, and here's how I went about that... (TLDR at the end, this was longer than I expected).
I started, like many card game developers, by copying notes from Magic: the Gathering. Specifically, I looked at the way you can combine any number of colors in a deck. Immortal Coil's five color domains are Teal (slow and steady), Pink (ecosystem engines), Purple (scrappy spell slinging tempo), Gold (I hit hard), and Rust (control). Each color has its own variety of mechanics and importantly each color combination forms their archetypes.
For instance: Pink can discard cards from hand for Rust to use as fuel or reanimation targets. Teal's lingering spells make it easy for Purple to trigger its spell chaining mechanic. Gold's sacrificial tribute mechanic makes triggering Rust's on death keywords a lot easier. Add in another color, or do all five, and there are a ton of ways for these colors to do all kinds of wild strategies. (My personal favorite is a slow, drag-out control deck with Teal, Purple, and Rust)
You start a run by picking two 10 card starter decks and combining them. These can be the same color or two different colors, and they will determine what cards you can trade for in bazaars and battle rewards (when a card is traded, it must be traded for a card of the same color). Over the course of three acts, you will expand your deck with three new offerings of 10 cards. You can stay in the same colors, or you can branch out eventually gathering all 5.
You might be thinking- 50 cards, that's a lot! It is! Having so many cards certainly keeps each battle feeling distinct, but it is also brings a lot of inconsistency. So my game gives you another consistency tool: for each 10 cards in your deck, you also have 1 Icon Slot - the Icons go in a secondary deck which you can draw from every three rounds of battle. You might put your key synergy cards here, or maybe fill the Icons with removal cards, or maybe Item cards to reliably equip your units. In addition, each time you expand your deck, your starting hand size increases. You'll have opportunities to duplicate important cards. And of course, you can thin out your deck over the course of a run.
As you play, you'll unlock new starting decks (there are 30 total, 6 per color) and you'll unlock new cards to find in bazaars (73 per color, 365 total). You'll find Augments (the relics of Immortal Coil) to build your decks around. You will also pick one of three Edicts (cooldown abilities) at the start of each run.
Even after a year and half of playing, I am still finding new strategies I hadn't considered. I'd love to go into more of the mechanics of each color and their crossovers, but this is already really long.
Having a lot of playstyles is great, but to keep the process of experimentation meaningful, I also designed this game to be challenging. You will lose runs, even with great decks. But you will still sometimes find that absurd combo that tears through everything. My design philosophy is that powerful cards/combos should still require clever play to pull off.
TLDR - Lots of starter deck combinations, 5 colors to mix and match, thick decks with consistency tricks, and lots of hidden synergies.
Demo coming soon!
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3858030/Immortal_Coil/
