I've always loved card games, but not for the reason many people do.  Playing a game is certainly fun, but what I truly love is to build decks and find synergies.  To come up with inane "Magical Christmas Land" combos and put them into my deck.  To durdle around for a stupid number of turns before winning out of nowhere.  Unfortunately, card games are also about optimization because usually your opponent is trying to win too.  If you don't get to it fast enough then you'll never get to do your 15 card combo that takes 7 real life minutes to execute.

Hand of the Divine was built out of just such a frustration for me.  I was enjoying myself playing Tales of Tribute, a fun little deckbuilding card game that's part of The Elder Scrolls Online, and had just ranked up to the point where the people I was facing actually knew what they were doing.  The worst part?  They were actively preventing me from doing my janky combos!  Now don't get me wrong, I love to screw up my opponent's plan as much as the next guy, but I wondered what a card game would be like without that interference.  And thus, Hand of the Divine was born.

Okay, it wasn't really born yet.  It actually took quite a while to refine the concept.  The first major issue was theming.  I knew I wanted to take the deck selection process from Tales of Tribute, but it was really hard to come up with an idea of how to distinguish the decks from each other.  I considered a few options, but none of them felt right.  Finally, I came upon the idea of playing as a god while reading a fantasy book.  In the book, there was a pantheon of gods, and each had a major function but also many minor spheres of influence.  For example, the fire goddess was also the goddess of Magic and Childbearing.  I thought it was a fun concept to have the combining of different decks represent the combining of these spheres of influence, and ran with the idea.  Plus, I enjoyed the idea that players could create absolutely ridiculous combinations (The god of law and dinosaurs, for example).

Second was ironing out how the mechanics should work.  I felt the original mechanics in tales of tribute wouldn't have enough friction when applied to a single-player experience, and felt that there should be more of a restriction on deckbuilding.  I found the restriction I needed after an offhanded comment from a friend that I should remake Uno for my next game.  Each card had a sphere and a cost, just like an Uno card has a color and a number.  The mechanic fit quite well, and I added the ability to change the top card of the discard pile by buying something to ensure that single-sphere or single-cost decks weren't the only viable options.

After getting accepted into catalog I was really able to lean in to the highscore aspect of the game as well.  While players weren't competing across from each other, there could still be a form of competition that echoed back to the origins of the game.  And thus, Hand of the Divine was born.

But it still had issues- not with bugs, but with something deeper.  For you see, my original idea for a game meant to allow for creativity in deckbuilding also led to issues with balance.  And without an opponent to reign in the shenanigans, shenanigans abounded.

You see, Hand of the Divine is sort of meant to be broken.  That's the fun of it- to smoosh three decks together and see what you can make of it.  But there's broken, and there's broken.  And soon, the game was about to be broken.

I'd like to dedicate this section of the article to niah_naiad, one of my most enthusiastic supporters and inducer of headaches.  While other people had broken the game before niah got to it, niah absolutely obliterated it.  With multi-hour runs consisting of hundreds of thousands of points, this player simply couldn't be stopped.  People thought there was a cheater on the leaderboard.  Nope, the scores were legit.

Now, I'm not one to nerf something just because it's powerful, but Hand of the Divine was meant to be the kind of game where you could start and finish a run over a short break.  These kinds of runs take HOURS.  And with no way to save your progress within a run, I didn't want players to have to dedicate their playdate only to my game just to be competitive on the leaderboard.

Working with niah, I identified some of the more broken cards and nerfed them.  I also added a mechanic to reign in card draw, something the community overwhelmingly said was the most powerful mechanic.  After your 10th card played each turn, you now get an "Exhaustion" card added to your deck that can't be played, meant to gum up your hand on future turns.  

After dropping the update, the leaderboards were reset and all was good in the world.  Hand of the Divine was fixed.

For two days.

Yeah, so it turns out that the real problem wasn't extra cards, it was extra turns, and in the absence of being able to draw tons of cards every turn ways to just take more turns were found instead.  And things just kept getting worse as the strategy became optimized.

So, today comes the launch of another patch.  It becomes exponentially harder to get extra turns as the game goes on now, so hopefully that should curb the length of these games.  Will this one fix my multi-hour run issue?  I'm optimistic, but I wouldn't put it past the evil geniuses who have apparently gotten addicted to my game.  I've also learned my lesson, and am waiting to see if anyone does anything egregious with the new patch before resetting the leaderboards again.  The patch also comes with a new deck- a thank you to everyone who's shown so much interest in this little game of mine.   I'm sure everyone will use it responsibly.

Either way, there's one major takeaway I've had from creating this game.  It's really hard to balance a game that's meant to be broken.