Why is Marvel's Midnight Suns a Card Game?
When Theme and Mechanics Collide Again
I recently re-printed “When Theme and Mechanics Collide” in anticipation of this post, so if you haven’t read it consider starting there.
When Theme Dictates Design
I recently came across this Reddit discussion: Comparing % based Accuracy vs Damage Range Systems
I have been reading some very interesting turn-based focused discussions on here and wanted to throw in this question I have been mulling over for a while: How does the game experience change between these two damage calculations:
a % based accuracy with fix damage
a guaranteed hit with variable damage range
Any Pros, Cons, and Examples are really appreciated
The question as posed asks for a comparison of competing rules sets. But in a real-world scenario the question of whether to use a miss-chance vs a damage range mostly answers itself, based on the theme of the game.
On one end of the spectrum of turn-based tactics games there’s X-COM. You control one character at a time, commanding them to squeeze off rifle shots with realistic presentation and a zoomed-in camera.
We know how guns and cover work. If you’re shooting at someone crouching behind cover with just their head poking out there are two possible outcomes: you miss (or hit the cover, which we’ll count as a miss) or you hit them in the head.
A fixed damage range with no miss chance makes no sense in that scenario. In a game like X-COM 50% cover reducing damage taken by 50% is just strange - more cover should increase miss chance, not reduce damage. As a designer you may like a damage range as it reduces randomness and allows players to fully plan out turns, but there’s a fundamental tension between those rules and what they’re poorly modelling.
On the other side of the spectrum are games like Advance Wars, Famicom Wars, Military Madnesss / Nectaris, Warsong / Langrisser, etc.
These games feature many vs many combat. They’re typically more abstract than X-COM, with zoomed-out graphics and lower overall fidelity. In X-COM when your character fires off three shots against an enemy that’s not an abstract representation of an action - canonically your character fires off three shots. In Advance Wars when your group of 5 soldiers fire one shot each that’s an abstraction of a firefight that lasted minutes or hours. Fights in Advance Wars are more like the fights in NES Ice Hockey - your characters wiggle nondescriptly, suggesting an action. (That would make X-COM combat Blades of Steel, where each punch is lovingly modelled.)
In Advance Wars you could internally model a 5v5 firefight as each soldier fires 10 shots, and each does 1 damage with a chance to miss. On the NES that might be computationally expensive, and the end result is just a bell curve anyway. A bell curve is a damage range, and if you chop off the extremes of that range you avoid one-off odd-looking outcomes like every member if your squad missing every shot and doing zero damage.
So in Advance Wars 50% cover reducing damage by 50% does make sense - with a large enough number of shots fired 50% damage reduction is the result you’d get by simulating each of those shots individually with a 50% miss chance.
Your pitch document or initial game concept almost certainly includes answers to basic questions like is this a squad vs squad abstract representation game or a highly-detailed individual-character X-COM style one? So if you care about the mechanics matching the theme (which you should), the decision of which rules set to choose has already been made: if you’re making X-COM you need to include a miss chance, and if you’re making Advance Wars you should use a damage range instead.
You can still do plenty of rules-wonk work - in the X-COM game you can mitigate the randomness of miss chance by giving characters machine guns, continuous-fire laser beams and grenades. In the Advance Wars game you could simulate each shot for a bell-curve distribution and allow for freak outliers, or could lean into the the damage range by forgoing simulation entirely in favor of an authored damage distribution. But that’s tweaks and mitigation.
The point of this section is that sometimes your hands are tied by the subject matter. Of course you could add a miss chance to Advance Wars - but you probably shouldn’t without a very good reason.
Why Cards in Marvel?
I’m approaching this as if I were a developer working on Marvel’s Midnight Suns as a fairly standard X-COM-meets-Marvel game, and was called into a meeting and told we were thinking of changing to a card-based system. This is the sort of feedback I’d give.
First the Midnight Suns system, as I understand it: each round you draw a selection of cards from your deck, where each card is a move someone on your team can perform.
This system has the pros you’d expect. Deck-building is a fun activity for players to explore. In theory each turn is unique, forcing players to think on the fly and come up with off-the-cuff strategies. (Though the game does have a redraw mechanic) I’m not sure if this is a pro as much as a choice but it reduces the number of possible actions each round - if you draw 6 cards you can do those 6 things. (And move around and such). Whereas in a game like X-COM you can have 8+ characters each with many available actions.
Card-based games can certainly be fun. (In fact I made one!) My reservation is that this system just seems so counter to a Marvel game. It’s a very bottom-up design: card mechanics are fun, what if we had some and put Marvel IP on top? I’m not convinced that this approach is more fun than classic X-COM, but even if it is that may not be enough. “Is this card-based approach mechanically more fun than X-COM?” isn’t the right question; the right question is “is it so much better that it makes up for the fundamental friction and awkwardness it introduces?”
What Marvel X-COM Would Look Like
I led off with “When Theme Dictates Design” because this is a case of the theme, if not outright dictating, at least strongly suggesting a clear path forward. Starting with the basic parameters of a tactics move-your-guys-around-the-map game you can quickly derive all sorts of natural-feeling game mechanics that leverage players’ familiarity with the IP.
In our theoretical Marvel’s X-COM Iron Man uses an energy-based mechanic. Flying takes moderate energy per turn, Repulsor blasts take small amounts, and Unibeam (his big chest cannon) takes large amounts. On turns where Iron Man does little - just walks around and punches - he regenerates energy.
The Hulk uses a rage-based system. As he becomes angrier he grows stronger and new abilities unlock. As a bonus he can start in human Bruce Banner form - a fun nod and something some players could have fun exploring. (“Hey check out this strategy where you stay in human form forever!”)
Wolverine also uses a rage-based system, but rather than a spectrum it’s more binary, like reaching full rage in Samurai Shodown. In this berserk state he’s a lot stronger and faster, has new moves, and killing enemies prolongs the state.
Spider-Man has abilities he can only use while targeted - that’s his “Spider Sense” in action. Maybe he can also use the environment - shoot a web at a dumpster behind someone and yank it into them, swing around a light pole, etc.
With this design each character has their own unique subsystem. (Mostly related to ability gating / resource mechanics) Normally this would be a lot to learn but that’s the advantage of using an established IP - the legwork of introducing these concepts has already been done. Everyone has seen a movie where Iron Man is plummeting to the ground because he’s run out of power, or where Hulk gets mad and smashes someone - were this an original IP with a character who grows stronger with anger players would think “oh - like the Hulk.” You can get away with the Hulk starting in human form because everyone knows that’s how the Hulk works - you don’t need to explain or justify it.
If the Hulk and Wolverine are on the same team maybe they start with their rage meters 10% filled already. Again with a fresh IP that’d make little sense, but with Marvel it’s a hat tip to an established backstory.
You don’t have to be a genius to come up with these mechanics. (To be clear I’m sure the team did think of things like these) They naturally flow from the game style and subject matter.
The Problem with Cards
With the card-based approach you lose all of the above and replace it with things much less on theme. In our alternate take on the game abilities are gated by character-specific systems. In the actual Marvel’s Midnight Suns abilities are gated by card draws and a shared “heroism” meter. (Effectively some cards cost mana to cast, where heroism is mana) What exactly is “heroism” and why would Iron Man need a certain amount of it to fire a Unibeam? Iron Man doesn’t have an energy mechanic and Wolverine doesn’t use rage - they don’t work the way players would naturally expect.
Instead you get some card-gamey things. You can use a skill that reduces the “heroism cost” of a card in hand, or that gives other cards “+10 attack”. These are very bottom-up ideas - mechanical ideas that have little do to with anything Marvel. I’m reminded of the Reddit quote from my previous article:
I got around this issue by starting to look at it as what it actually is: a combat system in a video game.
This system has strong “it’s a video (card) game” vibes.
Maybe Doctor Strange can meditate and then his next spell is more powerful - that sounds like a thing Doctor Strange could do. Is using a skill that makes his next “card” have “+10 attack” a thing Doctor Strange does? Eh….kind of? Functionally it’s not that different but the theming is off - it’s “imagine if everyone in the Marvel universe fought using cards” and that’s just not how it works. (That’s Gambit’s thing!)
A game like Back for Blood has cards but that they’re cards isn’t too relevant - instead of a “deck of cards” you could have a “pile of equipment” or something totally abstract like a “collection of buffs” and it would be the same thing. Midnight Suns treats the cards not just as representations but as cards, with text like “reduce the cost of a card in your hand.”
Why can’t Iron Man fire Repulsor Blasts this turn? In our alternate take, and in “real life” (aka the world of Marvel Comics) it would be because Iron Man is low on energy. In Midnight Suns it’s that he didn’t draw the card. Maybe you can convince yourself that not drawing the card is kind of like being low on energy?
Why can’t Spider-Man punch a guy this turn?
If I had to choose one sentence to illustrate the problem with cards it’s that one. If I don’t draw a “punch guy” card Spider-Man can’t punch a guy. Is he too tired? Is he just bored of punching?
You could say the same about Magic: The Gathering - if I’m a wizard why do I have to draw a Lightning Bolt to Lightning Bolt someone? But in Magic you can make up something about how magic is unpredictable and you have to “tap into fickle, ever-changing leylines” to cast spells. That’s hand-wavey but it’s at least something. More importantly, M:TG is basically a very fancy version of War, a game all about random draws. You can imagine the evolution of War to a game with Warhammer cards, where each card has multiple stat categories to compare.
Then you add permanence: you place the cards on a mat and they lose “toughness" when they clash, and you’re on your way to a Magic: The Gathering game. The card game mechanics make sense because Magic is a card game, from a long lineage of card games.
Midnight Suns isn’t a card game, and it’s not a descendent of card games. You move 3D characters around on a 3D map. It uses cards but it’s not cards. And you can’t say “Spider-Man can’t punch because he has to tap into fickle, ever-changing leylines.” That’s already a weak explanation in Magic - with Spider-Man it’s nonsense.
The Wrap Up
At work I often say that something feels “weird” or “off.” Now if you only say that that’s not very helpful, but it’s a fine starting point for conversation. Holding left bumper to aim and right trigger to fire in an FPS is weird. Switching bows in Breath of the Wild always felt off to me. A lot of working on a game is making it feel and behave the way it should. Making it internally consistent, with it’s own coherent visual language, button usage, rules set, etc. And making it externally consistent with the expectations players have going in.
Some players will look at Midnight Suns and think “I don’t like card games.” But some (I suspect many) will think “I’m fine with cards but this still seems weird.” The card game mechanics and themes are a poor fit for the material. They don’t bring to bear much of the knowledge and expectations that players will enter with, and in some cases actively work against those expectations.
With Overland I kept coming back to “why can’t 4 people fit into a car?” With Midnight Suns I keep coming back to “why can’t Spider-Man just punch a guy?” In both cases these aren’t fatal flaws but they’re slightly misshapen bits, puzzle pieces that don’t quite fit together.
That doesn’t mean Midnight Suns won’t be a good game. But that fundamental uneasiness, that disconnect between the Marvel theme and the card game mechanics, is always going to exist. Maybe on the whole the card mechanics are a net positive. But it does feel like the card game mechanics are starting the game behind the eight ball - to be a net positive they don’t just have to be better than X-COM rules, they have to be a fair bit better to make up for the inherent friction they introduce.
As a final note: in preparation for this I watched quite a few gameplay videos, including this one from the developers. In it the devs are well-aware of the mixed reactions to the card-based nature, almost to being apologetic.
If they’d said “check out all this cool stuff you can only do thanks to the power of cards!” I’d be a lot more sold. Instead this is what they said:
I want to make sure that people understand it doesn’t play that different from things we’ve done before.
Which raises the obvious question: why bother?
The card mechanics have some inherent downsides and the devs seem reluctant to articulate the upsides - they don’t seem particularly energized by the mechanics they chose so why should players be? I’m sure much of this is the devs downplaying the cards in hopes of reaching - or not turning off - a broad audience. But if the mechanics you’ve chosen are at first glance off-putting I think you need to convince players that they’re actually awesome and turn those players into believers. “You may not like these mechanics but they don’t really matter much anyway” is odd messaging.
I've always thought the Firaxis sort of design ethos really set back tactical games in a big way. Someone in the late 2000s figured out that a lot of people get bored after moving the fourth unit in a game and so that sort of limitation was born- the old X-com was born of Julian Gollop's weird brain worms of physical modeling (the world map aspect of UFO Defense was not added by his choice), so everything worked physically and he was fine letting you send 28 men into battle. Firaxis had a lot of capital D Design in their take on the game, so 4-6 units, strict limits on the use of things like grenades and missiles, and a heavily simplified action system. The joke is that if Enemy Unkown were designed in 2023, flanking would be a cooldown ability.
It's no secret that Firaxis for a long time used board game veterans to design stuff, from Twilight Struggle's Ananda Gupta (TS was the #1 rated game on BoardGameGeek before the kickstarter era of board games and stands the test of time as an excellent game) to Here I Stand's Ed Beach. Though i think in some ways perhaps they might have learned the wrong lessons from board games. I can understand the desire to use cards in this way- both games use a hand of cards to determine what you could do on your turn, and Jake Solomon did work with both, as far as I know, but there's a fairly significant difference.
In Twilight Struggle and Here I Stand, cards have an OP value, which are just generic points with tons of possibilities of what to do with them on your turn, and they also have an event, which is something special that has an effect well outside the normal game mechanics. Occasionally you'll use both, but it's a choice. The hand of cards and small quantity helps avoid choice paralysis, but the OP value, a sort of action point mechanic helps bring back a panopoly of options of what to do with your turn when it comes to your turn and it's time to play a card. The Protestant player in Here I Stand can play op points to engage in religious debate, build troops, move troops around, or make conversion attempts. You can always punch, as it were.
Here, i think the goal is to try to cut down on the choice paralysis, but then you only have three characters anyway. We've gone from 4-6 to three. This isn't that uncommon, a lot of tactical games on steam (Thankfully, not Jagged Alliance 3, thanks haemimont for letting me bring 18 guys into combat if i want) have done this, but now instead of a brace of cooldown abilities at the bottom of your screen, it's just, cards. If you've mastered it, you can generally eliminate the bad turns but there's very little power fantasy here. The way opposing events fire in Twilight Struggle when you use op cards and have to manage these crises works incredibly well in a game about the Cold War, where you often have to try to mitigate problems you create in the first place, but there's nothing like that in Midnight Suns.