Spotlight

Project Spotlight: Prismatic Heroes

Featuring Philippe and Fusegu

This month, we are featuring Prismatic Heroes, a project being developed by Philippe and Fusegu. To see the project in full as it stands, check out its Planesculptors page, linked here: https://www.planesculptors.net/set/prismatic-heroes

In a few sentences, what is the premise of Prismatic Heroes?

Philippe - "A set designed to capture the magical girl and super sentai genres, and the various "hero team" stories that draw upon similar themes. In theory it should create a sort of blended ur-setting for those genres, where just about any in-genre story has some sort of reflection."

Fusegu - "A top down set about love, friendship, and disparate people and personalities coming together to fight evil!"

What inspired you to begin creating Prismatic Heroes?

Philippe - "Dunno, I wasn't there."

Fusegu - "I wanted to toy with making a Magical Girl Set. I absolutely adore the Magical Girl Genre. Sailor Moon was my gateway into anime way back in the 90s and will always hold a special place in my heart. There's nothing quite like defeating evil with your friends, converting the bad guys to the way of good through empathy and understanding, and watching girl bosses kick butt.

And then I had a shower 🚿 thought. The Party mechanic, but for creature colors. You can have your color-coded super heroes in magic very naturally! After doing some mock designs and brainstorming a bit, I decided that unless I wanted to make a fan set, there wasn't actually enough trope space in the Magical Girl genre to fully encompass a whole magic set. Sentai, the working name of the party-esque mechanic my shower had created, could be used to unite other adjacent genres that had color coded teams of heroes that usually won victory through the power of friendship.

Satisfied with those directions, Prismatic Heroes became a side project for quite a long time while I brainstormed and tinkered with how to really capture those themes from mechanics to play patterns."

Where would you say Prismatic Heroes is in the development process?

Philippe - "It's late in design, but development hasn't started. We've done a lot of work, but we're doing it in stages so even now we still have plenty of holes at rare and mythic."

Fusegu - "Somewhere in the later Set Design stage. The core of the Limited Design is set up. That said, I'm no where near satisfied with all the patterns–flavor play or mechanical. Philippe and I have a lot more testing to do to get it to that sweet spot."

The Sentai mechanic asks the player to build heavily into multi-color. How have you seen that affect deckbuilding and how you approach the design of the set with regards to things like color-fixing or drafting?

Philippe - "So far, the effect on deckbuilding has been surprisingly small. We might need to work on that. But the effects on the design have been wide-ranging; sentai has led us to increase our creature count, to create the bystander mechanic, to include hybrid mana, and to have cards make off-colour tokens. In general, we've sought ways to let people's boards be more colourful than their manabases."

Fusegu - "From the early stages of exploratory, I wanted to enable Sentai WITHOUT creating a set that just leaned towards 5 color good stuff. I can't stand piles of Magic Cards with Spikes finding 'best card' for any given slot, and the mana fixing to ensure they don't get punished for it. So, part of that early challenge was asking, how do we allow players to splash for their Sentai without enabling just a muddy pile of gold mess. We wanted your traditional 2 color archetypes, and we definitely wanted to see those 2 color decks have 4 or 5 Sentai team members when possible.

Brainstorming this wasn't terribly difficult; however the practicality is challenging. Hybrid, Gold, Bystanders and our Team mechanic were all ways to ensure there were creatures of various colors that wouldn't be hard to splash for. One of the tools in our belt was also "If your Sentai contains three or more creatures..." which is to say, rather than asking for a "full party", we tell the players that "3" was a challenging enough of threshold you'd be rewarded for. I'm pleased to say we havn't had to use that one much as some later testing and design stuff has worked pretty well. Philippe approached the set from more of a bottom up perspective, and his common fixing lands were great for doing 'the thing." the Demiplanes are late game fixing such that your 4-5 color Sentai decks would have to work and stretch for their other colors, but it was possible.

So far, the way this has worked out, has been really encouraging. During draft testing we've seen lots of solidly 2 color decks, with splashes for a 3/4 color sentai. I have some goals and ambitions here that working with Philippe helps temper. I want to ensure we can see 4-5 color Sentai being reached atleast once or twice a draft. If people arn't able to gather the team and be excited to do it, whats the point right? But we need to do this without being heavy handed about it and just printing a bunch of tutors or place the sentai mechanic on every single one."

Most projects on the server are spearheaded by a single developer. How has working as a team since the beginning of the project helped your process?

Philippe - "First and foremost, it's kept the project going. There have been many periods where one of us wasn't doing much; in each of those periods, the other kept the set alive."

Fusegu - "As you may expect, it comes with its pros and cons.

Con: This isn't the set I would make if I was working by myself. Pro: This isn't the set I would make if I was working by myself.

The fact is, the set probably wouldn't be at this stage if Philippe and I were working independently. We both live busy lives. And I actually am pretty bad at individual card design. I'm not great at mentally playtesting and have to have the help of the server and people beating me with my own cards in playtesting while my jaw hangs agape and aghast. "that wasn't intended..." Phlippe's responsible for really keeping the ball rolling a lot of the time and making sure my more out there ideas get pulled back into something actually playable."

What is your favorite card in Prismatic Heroes?

Philippe - "To be honest, I don't really have a good reason for liking this card so much. It just feels right to me. I also considered Power Up! and Crystal Voice / Crystal Drums, which are arguably better representations of what the set's about. The Crystal duo, I should note, includes art from someone I've been trying to put on cards for years."

Fusegu - "My first set, Sivis, really taught me to not have any babies when it comes to individual cards. So this is a hard question for me. Even as I look through the card file, every few cards there are several "competing concept" designs for that slot.

I'll show case this one off as an example of some of the cards I find really exciting:

This "Team" card has a nice story beat we've been able to build into the set through a very careful curation of art: Cute but evil Cat familiar! In fact, until you see this card, you'll find many of those cats pictured through out arts appearing adorable, helpful and benign. Those that are familiar with the Magical Girl anime "Magicka Madoka" might know what we're going for here. Black/Red is one of our 'villains' archetype, so even though this card can be used to help fulfill your sentai, the sacrifice mechanic is a sort of signal to tell you that B/R doesn't really care if you pay off Sentai too heavily. Lastly, Ross Tran has to be one of my favorite artists out there in the world, and we got to use his art on the card and that 💖 sparks joy in my heart."

Would you like to give any special thanks to anyone on this server for their help?

Philippe - "There are a lot of people who deserve to be thanked here, but I especially want to give a shout-out to Zangy for sharing the art file for a somewhat similar project. It's a much-appreciated vote of confidence in what we're doing, since handing it over involved more or less abandoning that other project. And of course I have to thank Fusegu, for obvious reasons."

Fusegu - "I have to thank Philippe first, which may seem like a given, but seriously, you wouldn't be looking at Prismatic Heroes in this state if it wasn't for him. He helped during exploratory, and he picked it up and made it possible even after I was letting it sit languishing in a slush pile.

There are a lot of people on and off server that need thanking. What's more is I've been working on this project on and off for so long I'm bound to forget to name some. SO I'm going to cop out and not name any specifically here. If you've been with me since the beginning–you know who you are and thank you for believing in me, the project and Philippe all this time and giving us your precious art, thoughts feedback and help 🙇 If you just joined helping the project recently, thank you for sharing your time as well. Life is busy and while this hobby is fun, there is so much to grab our intention. Especially within the hobby itself! Look at all the projects being done simultaneously. Thank you for some of that attention, because just like our Super powered color coded teams, any set on this server is only as good as the number of points of view, personalities and perspectives that contribute to it. Thank you."

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