One of the things I have always enjoyed most about UFS, from a design standpoint, is the fact that there are multiple symbols on (most) cards. Like many gamers, I was first introduced to CCG's through M:TG, and since that time, I have likened successive releases to an escalating arms race, of sorts. (Or evolution, if you prefer.)

With the most recent bannings, I feel like the game is headed toward a more healthy equilibrium between its twelve personalities, but I do have one nagging concern: symbol distribution for characters.

There has been a tendency for one or two symbols to stand above the rest at any given time, in terms of power, and I have made peace with that. However, now that each set will contain fewer characters, and the assumption is that each character's support cards will share all of that character's symbols, I have to wonder about access and equity.

I'm not talking about quality here, merely quantity - since its inception, UFS has favored certain symbols, with respect to character output. In Block 3, Chaos and Fire currently sport the largest stables of characters, while Life has almost twenty fewer options to choose from.

Some might look at this posting, and think that I am advocating for *affirmative action*, for lack of a better term. Kind of. Here's an idea: why not open up the vault? FFG still has access to characters from previous sets, and with the release schedules being reduced to one set (with fewer characters), it stands to reason that a few symbols will always be playing catch-up.

Close Throw being reprinted as part of prize support is, in my opinion, a very savvy move on FFG's part: new players get access to useful cards that won't cost them an arm and a leg to obtain, and veteran players can dust off their playsets, and break face all over again. Everybody wins(?)

I'm not suggesting that FFG should bring back promo Nakoruru or 8/23 Vega in a futile attempt to balance out power levels between symbols. But with a huge library of characters going unused at the moment, due to a lack of coherent Legacy support, it might be nice to allow a few familiar faces another chance to shine in Block 3. It would give orphaned symbols a few more soldiers to send in harm's way. Not reprinting them, per se, just making them B3 legal. With the exception of blue Cody, you only need one copy of a character per deck, and the secondary market for most Legacy characters is pretty inexpensive, making them accessible for new players.

Does anyone else have any thoughts about this?

Bring back the first two Ryus.

We do that for fun all the time, but it's not something I think is needed in official standard tournament play now. Symbols don't really possess strength by chracters, it's the other way around combined with abilities. For the most part Algol's strength will never be as a chaos character that draws alot. Choas has never been about drawing lots of cards. If you want to draw he'll be based off of All or Void. Life is considered weak right now because of the other life cards, not because of the life characters.

I personally believe cycling out characters (not any other card type) is one of the most pointless changes UFS has undergone. Interesting topic, I just don't think it's a necessary measure.

ROTBI said:

This is somewhat my point, as well. Newer sets will contain fewer characters, but every support card will match their symbols exactly. In this sense, the characters effectively dictate the symbols for every other card. At this rate, if FFG were intent on evening out the number of characters per symbol, they would have to devote 20 character slots- the equivalent of five sets worth of support cards- just to bring Life on par with the current leaders, Chaos and Fire. And even then, other symbols' options would increase as well, unless those characters were mono-symbol.

Whether the characters themselves are top-tier is irrelevant (remember Sankuro?) Remember, I'm not talking about power balance here. If I were, I would suggest that FFG reinstitute to the practice of printing cards that do not necessarily match all of a character's symbols.

One critique of my initial idea that I just thought of, however, is the fact that while more characters would be available for underrepresented symbols, by other symbols would inadvertently piggyback in more characters, as well. The solution, then, would be to find characters from underrepresented symbols (Life, Earth, Water) and find characters with one or more of these symbols, but not Chaos, Fire, or Air. Kind of tricky...

I am by no means, trying to be sarcastic here, but since when was chaos top-tier? I thought I was the only one who played that resource anymore, since there's no more LotM.

On a side note, nice signature. Makes me wanna listen to some old school G'nR.

I'm not making the claim that Chaos is a top-tier symbol; what I'm saying is that there is an inordinate number of characters with that symbol in the current environment. Maybe it's the filler that gets tacked on when the designers need a third symbol(?) Whatever the reason, the disparity exists.

Choice- or the illusion thereof- is a critical component to the success of a CCG. This could easily degenerate into a gripe about why certain characters are assigned specific symbols, even though they seem contrary to the characters' history and personae.

Suffice it to say, I believe that as the releases adhere exclusively to the concept of having every support card match their respective character's symbols, the divide will only widen, because the alternative is rather boring; several consecutive sets predominantly consisting of Earth/Good/Life cards. Remember, I'm not complaining about quality (power), but rather, quantity.

This was why I was curious as to other people's thoughts about making certain characters from previous sets B3 legal. From what I've seen on the forums, veteran players seem to be cool with selective reprints like Close Throw, so why not?

I honestly think they should eliminate symbols or abandon the support cards matching all three symbols the characters have. Just like in every block so far only really 6 symbols are competitive and the rest are dead in terms of competitive play. I would like to see the game go down to 8 symbols to eliminate the tons of cards that share 2 symbols.

What i mostly want to see is the symbols having themes to them and the support cards of characters reflecting the themes and not the characters symbols.

Red lotus of the sun has evil because its a kyo card but the ability is not an evil ability.

charismatic has order and outside of the bison foundations order never really gets that type of ability

see What i mean? I am all for flavor but i dont think that every support card should be playable off every symbol the character has. I think cards should be functionality first and flavor second. This would balance out the symbols alittle better and reduce the number of playable cards leaking on to the top two symbols and open up the enviorment.

what do you guys think?

I was, and always will be, a fan of character card prizes. If anything, I think that offering anything besides character cards or reprints in the weekly tournament prize pool is unhealthy (I'm looking at you SC promo foundations). I think it would be a good idea to offer up promo characters who represent symbols who weren't made available in whatever the current releases are would be a fantastic move in the right direction.

I also wouldn't be against the return of variable numbers of resources on cards. A number of sets back we had instances of cards with more or less then three symbols, and I wouldn't be against having that trend brought back into the game. Certainly you should make sure that any particular card can be played with it's appropriate character, but I didn't mind the flexibility of that often off-character third symbol at all. In this respect I agree with Rulemonkey, in that characters and their support should be defined by their symbols.

I'm not sure exactly what the current meta is like, but having played my first tournament in a couple of months last weekend, I hear from almost all the players that the recent bans and eratta has gone a long way to shaking up the mix, and making many more symbols contenders for Worlds.

VaporGecko said:

i agree with this and te prevoius post. i like cards like kft and tag along that have six symbols, and i also like the fact that in the past there have been cards with only two or one (FoP) symbols. i think symbols should be themed. death in my opinion should never have lifegain (old demitri) and life should never have burn (old demitri again). not every symbol needs to have momentum gain, card draw, recusion, t2 potential, comital, negation, discard, etc. i think right now symbols lack individuality.

a good example of a card that should have been made of symbol from it's char is twop. earth doesn't discard. if i was making twop i would either make it evil/void/death, or evil/void or even void/death. there is no reason to give a symbol a card which doesn't fit it's playstyle just for the sake of keeping it matching the character.

I was actually having this very discussion with one of the guys in my playgroup.

If we have 5 characters with 3 resource symbols each, that makes for 15 possible symbols. Assuming a pretty even distribution, it still means 3 symbols get a little more muscle than the other 9. I agree with the suggestion that trimming resource symbols on some (not all) cards could be a good idea. Maybe then you could even give the cards a little more 'oomph', to compensate for their narrower focus.

trane said:

I don't think it would behoove us to completely lock symbols into their specific abilities. I actually think the Demetri stuff worked out very well since it essentially represented vitality-drain mechanics which are stereotypical of how CCGs have treated death-related resources/powersources/colors in the past. I think it would be far more appropriate if every symbol had access to they whole spread of game mechanics and/or counters to them, but in their own distinct flavor. Void discarding cards seemingly for free (old school Dhalsim), Earth doing so with an attack-related cost (ala King's previewed attack), Death having a much greater cost, All never getting discard, but having discard-related card draw effects.

Another thing, I also wouldn't mind seeing characters who don't currently have tournament legal versions coming back.

VaporGecko said:

With non-character promos, there's a desire to collect more then 1 of them as you often need more then one to make a difference in your deck.

If we're going to open the can of worms known as "This Symbol should do THIS," I'm going to have to agree with the idea of more deliberation on symbol spread during the design process.

This thread was originally about the imbalance of symbols among available characters in B3, but I think that if FFG reverted to printing cards that did not match every symbol on their parent character, this would permit better delineation among the symbols. As I've mentioned before, I feel like reprinting/recirculating cards from previous sets would also be a way to work around this.

With respect to promos and prize support, I am also of the opinion that non-character promos are unhealthy for the game. VaporGecko hit the nail on the head: even upon their initial release, cards like Chester's Backing made it so that you already had to have a playset in order to get first place at most local tournaments. The first place player would then go for the obvious choice, and grab Chester's Backing as their pick. At the sake of sounding like a hypocrite, I, myself, fell into this category more than once.

In retrospect, it discouraged new players from getting into the game, especially if someone with deep pockets went on *that website that shall remain nameless*, and/or had access to them before they even hit the local prize support. (My opponent in the UFS finals at PAX last year was rocking a full playset, while my local meta hadn't even seen one in real life yet.)

While promo characters might lose their appeal after one dose, I feel that this is precisely the point- no hoarding. Should every promo be a character? Probably not: I keep hoping they'll make "Attacks of Power". (Fingers crossed.)

dshaffer said:

You solve that issue by offering up a slew of character cards. Instead of just 6 or so, you make twenty or so available. Or better yet, you offer up a bunch of reprints from previous sets. These are cards that new players I believe would find cool to get without having to trade/hunt, and veteran players could already have, leaving them able to pick up other things. The whole SC foundation thing really soured things up. Anything that you would need to collect a playset of, and is unique to tournament prize pools I know create a sour environment for the game. The most common complaint I heard while scouting in San Francisco was from new players never getting a chance to win those treasured foundations because the Vets already sported playsets of those killer cards.

The other thing is that there needs to be a desire to actually play the game for the sake of playing the game. I find it constantly frustrating that a slew of people will show up for a magic tournament, which only offers reprints or alternate artwork prizes get the tournout, while UFS needs to bribe with stapple promos.

I also don't think that having a glut of characters is neccessarily a bad thing. So what if there are 8 (9?) Ryu character cards? Ryu is dang popular for one, but if you ignore the liscensing and fan-boying, that's just a bunch of different styles to build a deck from. I had a roommate that used to ignore all of the liscensing and get excited about just the mechanics in the game. He once said: "Even if Victor was named 'Dumb Brick' - or 'George Bush' - I'd still play him."

Numbers of versions of the same character aside, you would still open up a world of symbols and decks by letting portions/all of them back in.

VaporGecko said:

I'm of the opinion that the overpowered Soul Calibur promos, especially Chester's, only had those problems because they were overpowered. Were there the same problems with Aurelia's Companionship, Hwang's Protection, or Strife's Patronage? (the anti-mill, anti-readying and anti-speed SC promos, respectively). Having character promos that were actually playable in the pool would help -- but what you describe as the solution, I believe, was tried once before in the SNK01 - SF03 - SC03 promo block that released (lemme check) 53 characters, and those characters soon dominated virtually every slot of every top 8 at major (FOP, coast championships, nats, worlds) tournaments, with only exceptional standouts from set releases (like Dhalsim*, Tira*, and Yunseong*) ever joining them. And what happened? Veteran players won tournamnets with their already-strong decks, took new promo characters, built new and stronger decks with the promo characters, and won even more handily the next week. We heard complaints that new players never got a chance to win a promo character, because veterans with promo characters always beat them. After a little while, complaints started flooding in from those same veteran players that there was nothing worth taking in the prize support -- everyone already had a copy or two of every promo character, and who ever needed another?

With promo characters, veteran players are much more likely to be willing to trade them down to newbies, because they don't need a set - sure. But really what is happening there is the tournament prizes are being devalued from the get-go. After a month, everyone will have the newest promo Ryu, and he'll just be another card sitting in binders. If a new player joins, he won't even need to win a tournament to get one -- if he doesn't get one out of the prize support from whoever got screwed into having to pick him, he can probably order one online for fifty cents.

I think the best solution would be to release a few playable characters -- maybe even from the licenses that aren't getting a release? -- and a few playable non-character cards, maybe even ones with negative synergy with each other. Stuff like Hulking Brute (which is a common, yes) -- once you play the main ability, you really can't do it again that turn, so you get the much weaker secondary ability, but it's still potentially useful.

One last thing -- honestly, the only time I didn't see one complaint that the cards in the prize support pool were overpowered and new players were losing to them, was when characters like Geki, Rikuo, and Rolento were in the pool -- characters so underwhelming that one of my playgroup's guys is still mildly famous for being a game win away from Top 16-ing World's last year with one of them.