Arresting Display

by Lucas Thompson, Ambassador

28th November 2018

Often in the Q&A threads, someone asks if there were any cards that stayed the same throughout the design process. While it can feel good to hit the mark immediately, many of the cards that I've enjoyed working on the most started off quite different from their final forms. Arresting Display is one such card, let's see what the initial pitch was:

(?) iLittleEye
Unless you have Skills including Intelligence or Skills with an
attribute, all your personnel are stopped. If you played an
interrupt while facing this dilemma, return this dilemma to its
owner's dilemma pile.

That's already a pretty interesting card. If you needed an interrupt to pass it the first time then it bounces back and makes you need an interrupt again. The first change it went through was pretty simple. We felt we'd been leaning pretty hard on Intelligence requirements lately in design, and it was time to throw a bone to the intelligence-light affiliation. Those affiliations also happen to have more access to Telepathy. So that was change #1:

(?) iLittleEye
Unless you have Skills including Telepathy or Skills with an
attribute, all your personnel are stopped. If you played an
interrupt while facing this dilemma, return this dilemma to its
owner's dilemma pile.

The second change arose because, if you passed the dilemma the first time (even if it took an interrupt) it just wasn't going to sting as much for it to return to the pile. Placing it in the core was floated as an alternative, since it wouldn't just be going back to be faced and passed again that way. That still wasn't quite enough, and we talked about going in a couple different directions: either make it 8472 (getting it in the core is its own reward) or make it do something else in the core.

8472 decks are in a decent place right now, and interrupt-based decks are on fire, so we opted for text that hurt the interrupt user some more (and fleshed out the skill requirements some):

(3) Something Wicked
Unless you have Anthropology, Security, and Telepathy
or 2 Exobiology, Medical, and Cunning>38, all your
personnel are stopped. If you played an interrupt while
facing this dilemma, place this dilemma in your core. To
play an interrupt, you must discard an interrupt from hand.

I'm quite happy with the results, along with the process of collaboratively evolving an already good idea into an excellent final product. I hope you enjoy it too!

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