What Makes a Good Deckbuilder - Director's Cut

Hey, hey, hey and come on down to read the latest director’s cut - the special patron thing where I talk about a cut talking point from the latest video. The topic today? Hero Battlers.

For those not in the know, hero battlers are a fairly recent genre that see you going up against usually seven other players to buy heroes from a central market, plonk them down on a board and watch them fight to see who was the luckiest/best. Common features of the genre involve the ability to upgrade heroes by collecting three of them and a cast of characters stolen from mobas like DotA or LoL.

Hero battlers are an interesting example of convergent evolution - they’re often compared to Deckbuilders but actually have a completely different game design lineage. The original hero battler, as many people know is Dota Autochess, a mod for DotA 2. It is responsible for codifying most of the genre’s primary features but although it shares a lot of features with deckbuilding games, it has a completely different origin, namely in Mahjong.

Mahjong, on top of being waaaaay older than the likes of dominion functions in a fundamentally different way, namely in of the fact that it’s more of a handbuilder and the deck is a central one that everyone draws from. Because you can’t control what’s in the deck, nor what you draw from it, the game becomes much more focused on making do with what you do draw and managing the resources used to purchase heroes. 

Owing to the sheer randomness of the game, heroes are sorted into tribal types such as Murlocs, Pirates and Demons in Hearthstone or Alchemists, Blademasters or Wardens in Teamfight Tactics - this means that most of the game’s synergies are ultimately hard synergies, and they’re not all that tactical. Most of the game’s skill comes not in creating synergies and figuring out fun ways to abuse particular abilities but just in collecting as many of a particular type of hero as possible - this feels good to do, but isn’t particularly deep or nuanced. Instead, most of the skilltesting comes from how to handle your limited resources used to collect and play heroes.

For example, in hearthstone battlegrounds, the card shop offers a bigger selection of more powerful minions based on its level, but leveling up is very pricey - so you’ll have to choose between sifting through the options to find the cards you need right now, and leveling the tavern up to get more powerful cards later. And in both Dota Underlords and teamfight tactics, you’ve only got a limited amount of space on your bench. When you need to combine three one star heroes to get a two star, and three two star heroes to get a three star you’re really going to need to juggle your space, and make some tough choices about which heroes you want to try and get to 3 stars and which can just stay at two or even one, because if you try and rank up everyone, not only will you run out of cash, but you’ll also run out of space. 

Hero Battlers and Deckbuilders share a lot of the same design tips and tricks, but they’re also very different. Instead of focusing on designing interesting cards, players need to be encouraged to think in broader terms about positioning, managing their money and gambling on which kinds of heroes they’re going to go for. Much like mahjong upon which the genre is based, hero battlers are gambling games first and tactical ones second as opposed to deckbuilders which are the inverse. 

Hopefully with that explanation you’ll see why talking about Hero battlers in a video about deckbuilders might’ve seemed like a logical move but is actually way more difficult than it would appear!