In My Card Is Better Than Your Card, when I first noticed that the trade options are based purely on number of stickers, I immediately started putting three of my useless stickers on one card to get good stuff in return. Then I started going to higher numbers. Four has a bunch of options, but five and six are often the same; two strawberries, two candy boost potions, and one or two brownies. I stuck with six for a good while; candy is super important, and getting four excellent candy stickers is a great use of a trade. For some reason, I just kinda assumed six was the limit; the options are clearly thinning out, the opponents just don't have absurd stacks of stickers on their cards.
The limit is not six. I do not know how high it goes.
A nice side benefit of trades having random stickers from the same theme now is that we can see what stickers technically count as part of a theme! For example, the "Decrease Fever" stickers are apparently part of the same theme as the "Increase Fever" stickers. I don't think that should be the case.
EDIT: Hey wait I just noticed the walrus "remove 3 candy from opponent" is here too. I kinda get it because it's winter-themed to go with the hat and kinda stall-themed, but it definitely does not belong with the increase-fever stickers lol
My Card is Better Than Your Card just got an update, and one of the major goals was adding more "hybrid stickers" that act as bridges between sticker themes, to reward/incentivize using multiple different themes in your deck. It got me thinking about the different ways you can have themes and archetypes, so here's some thoughts.
TL;DR: The new hybrid stickers are cool and interesting and look fun, but I think a lot of them won't encourage hybrid decks like they're supposed to, because some of the themes just don't lend themselves to dedicated decks.
MCIBTYC is a roguelike deckbuilder (except you collect stickers instead of cards, but that's not important for this post). There's a bunch of different themes of stickers, like bugs, cars, sports, or pirates, most of which have starter packs that give you a deck. The obvious idea is to build a deck centered around a particular theme to benefit from synergy.
However, not all themes synergize the same way. In fact, some themes don't synergize at all. It's easy to see a bunch of stickers with the same mechanics on them and think "I'll build a deck around that!" but it sometimes doesn't make sense to do that. And with all these new hybrid stickers, the idea is that they combine the mechanics of two themes to encourage you to use both, but some don't actually encourage that.
There's a spectrum of how much a theme cares about synergy, and I've chosen four example themes to demonstrate.
Example 1: Synergy-Mandatory
The bug theme revolves around bug tokens. Bug tokens do absolutely nothing except allow you to use stickers that care about bug tokens. Likewise, those token-dependent stickers do absolutely nothing if you don't have bug tokens.
Bug-theme stickers really want to be in a dedicated bug deck. You can use them in small amounts, like a single card with butterfly+bee, but it takes a critical mass of them to really shine. That makes it pretty hard to play a bug deck without the bug starter pack. Bug stickers NEED other bug stickers to work, or else they aren't worth anything.
Example 2: Synergy-Capable
The vehicle theme's key mechanic is "ON DRAW" effects. You can just kinda throw stickers like racecar into your deck, and it'll give you 2 free stars when you draw it, no synergy needed. Helicopter is also a useful effect in any deck, turning blank cards into stars and giving a draw as a bonus.
But then you've got a racecar card in your hand that does nothing when played. That's an opportunity for discard effects like helicopter to profit off of. And of course, "ON DISCARD" effects are rather hard to activate without effects like helicopter. There are plenty of vehicle stickers that don't NEED synergy, but when combined, they make a stronger synergetic deck.
Example 3: Synergy-Agnostic
The sports theme does kind of a lot, but its most common mechanic is the "GOAL" keyword; a chance for an effect, with the chance dropping and the effect rising depending on how it's positioned. Risk-reward. Cool mechanic. So, what kinds of combos and synergies can you put together with these?
None. I don't think there's anything that synergizes with the GOAL stickers. Nothing that raises the chance or anything like that. Certainly nothing in the sports theme itself. A football sticker is good in any deck. It's not any better in a dedicated sports deck. This isn't a problem, it's nice to have stickers that are generically useful and just interesting to play with. When you pick the sports starter pack, you'll be having a fun time with risk-reward stickers, but there's no pressure toward staying in the sports theme.
Example 4: Synergy-Negative
The pirate theme is all about stealing. It steals various things, but stars is a frequent one. They're nifty; if your opponent has stars, you get to remove those stars AND gain your own, a 2-for-1 special! And if your deck is full of star-stealing stickers, then your opponent will run out of stars and... you'll have nothing to steal. Same goes for candy, another semi-frequent theft target.
Not only do these stickers work equally well in any deck, they'll actually be HARDER to use in a steal-heavy deck. It's a clear example of how just because two stickers are doing the same thing, it doesn't mean they'll work well together in a deck. Note: The pirate stickers CAN synergize; they work great with stuff like the dice and sunhat stickers. But they don't work great with each other.
Now let's talk about hybrid stickers. As far as encouraging hybrid decks, some of these are inherently not going to do that, like the pirate hybrid stickers.
These stickers are useful in bug or fruit decks respectively. They can be used in a pure bug or pure fruit deck. They will not encourage the player to find more of the pirate theme's steal effects, because steal effects don't synergize with each other. Effectively, these aren't hybrid stickers at all, they're just a pure bug sticker and a pure fruit sticker.
Likewise, putting the sports GOAL mechanic on a sticker doesn't encourage players to get more GOAL stickers. This is just a funky vehicle-theme sticker.
However, some hybrids do succeed in bridging two themes, to varying degrees.
Bug/Fish is a classic hybrid deck, and lilypad helps enable it. It helps out either theme, and once you have a lilypad, it makes it easy to start splashing the other theme.
I've never played the snow theme, but penguin would be a great way to get into it. It lets a fish deck create a ton of snow, easily setting up the other snow stickers. If you get a penguin, getting more snow stickers would let you combine them into a powerful card.
Fantasy is a weird theme for synergy; gems work equally well in any deck, but there's a pair of fantasy stickers that reward you for having three gems or for having four different token stacks, so there's a chance for synergy there. Carriage here is a simple enabler for either the fantasy or vehicle theme, helping either set up for their respective synergies, and so it could work alone or as a bridge to start a hybrid deck that can take advantage of both themes' payoffs.
I haven't seen very many of the new hybrid stickers; I only just started my first run in the new update. So I don't know how many of them are effective bridges between themes vs how many are "we used a synergy-agnostic gimmick to make a synergy-mandatory effect". My bet is that any hybrid sticker whose two themes are either synergy-mandatory or synergy-capable will be effective as a bridge. If either theme is synergy-agnostic or synergy-negative, it won't work.
Now that I've written this all out, I realize my point here isn't about hybrid stickers at all, but about themes that don't encourage building that theme. There's no problem with such themes, but it's odd that the designers are acting like those themes are supposed to be built and have synergy. So now my question is "Am I stupid or are the devs stupid?"
In the announcement, they talked all that talk about encouraging hybrid decks that use two themes, and then they showed the pirate hybrid stickers that blatantly only work in bug and fruit decks and don't encourage splashing the pirate theme at all. Have I made a critical mistake in how I think about synergy? Do these steal-effect stickers actually promote a steal-centric deck? That seems unlikely. Equally-unlikely is the idea that a team of people literally designing a card game don't understand how their own game works.
Fav shields also give me this feeling. There's so many fav shield effects in the game, and they even recently rebalanced a card that allows players to either gain stars or gain fav shields to make it give twice as many fav shields as stars. I still do not see the point at all, fav shields seem completely useless outside of a few specific synergies, and yet they keep pushing fav shields. Are fav shields actually good? Am I this stupid to not see it? What the fuck is going on?
Anyway, thanks for listening to me ramble. The hybrid stickers are cool and interesting and look fun, I just think some of them won't promote hybrid decks.
That is the Most Golden sticker I've ever seen and it deserves to be, the only thing preventing this from utterly destroying the entire game is that I'm playing the My Card is Shorter challenge
