Designing Amon

Amon was a pretty risky character to try to fit into a card.

As the ultimate villain of StarCraft and a being with almost god-like powers, I knew he had to be powerful enough to feel unstoppable, unfair even.

On the flip side though, I knew that once the dust settled it would be best for the health of the game if seeing Amon was a relatively rare occurrence. Dominant auto-include cards really hurt card games, and thematically it just wouldn’t make sense if you saw 5 Amons every game. This meant that balance-wise it was probably best if he wasn’t cost-efficient or consistent enough for serious competitive use.

The last difficult element of the design was deciding on what part of Amon’s story to tell and how to tell it. After a bit of thought it seemed the most important story was about the villainous (or manipulated) factions trying to summon Amon from the Void.

I’m really pleased with how Amon turned out, as I think I managed to hit these three goals.

Capturing the Story

To capture the story of summoning Amon, I made the most interesting part of his card the cost: 6 minerals and 6 gas. How do you summon him when you literally can’t play his card?

Trying to find the answer to this strange problem puts you in the shoes of Amon’s cronies as they struggle to call him forth from the Void. I focused a lot on making sure each race had its own interesting way to play Amon. I’m particularly happy with how the Terran and Protoss methods turned out. As Terran you play as the Moebius Foundation doing slow but steady research. As Protoss you can tear a rift in fabric of reality, opening a door to the Void.

The final element of the story was what happens once you finally summoned him. In order to keep the focus on the summoning itself, I decided to keep Amon’s unit as simple as possible. But this leads us to the next major goal.

Making Amon’s Unit Feel Powerful

Although I wanted to keep Amon’s unit simple, he needed to feel strong.

Visuals were a major component of this. Shiraq’s custom skin for the Void Thrasher goes a long way towards communicating dark power. The drawn out summoning animation also helps build anticipation.

In terms of gameplay, the most powerful feeling part of Amon’s unit has to be the long-ranged structure attack. That moment when you first see Amon being summoned, and then he immediately launches a volley that begins the destruction of your base… that’s a viscerally powerful moment.

The last major contributing factor to Amon’s perceived power is the way he interacts with removal. No removal card other than Vortex (which thematically appears to pull him back into the Void) can kill Amon in one hit. And two removal cards will never target the same exact unit in the same turn, so unlike nearly every other large unit in the game you never see Amon get removed the moment he tries to move out.

In terms of actual power, the combination of a once-per-turn structure removal and the durability to survive at least one turn guarantees Amon gets some value before he dies, even if he gets removed as quickly as possible by savvy opponents who hold onto their key removal cards. In straight up combat he can turn the tides, but if you play him into an overwhelming force he can be mowed down pretty quickly.

Preventing Amon From Appearing Too Frequently

The third goal of Amon’s design was to ensure that he wouldn’t show up too much, at least once the excitement about the new set died down.

The first way I achieved this was by forcing you to build your deck around him. This reduces his frequency in games, as players naturally want to try out a variety of styles.

The second way was by making Amon inconsistent and difficult to play. This means that even in matches where players have him in their decks, you may not see him if the game ends too quickly.

The third way was his launch effect that discards your hand (possibly replacing it with Void Armies). This prevents you from ever replicating Amon, which was a degenerate possibility discovered during early testing that would have resulted in waves of Amons.

The final way was by making sure that Amon-based styles had a low enough overall power level. The inconsistency mentioned above and the readily available counters like Yamato Cannon and Brutalisk keep the power level of Amon deck’s relatively low, despite them being fun to play and feeling powerful.

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This post started as a retrospective on the design of Unnatural Experiments, but I had so much to say about Amon that he ended up taking over the whole thing! Typical Amon.

If you have any thoughts or questions about Amon’s design, or you just want to share a crazy story about him from one of your games, please share in the comments below.