Arena Cards

Oh, right. I guess they can, but Lum has to rely on pure chance for his healing, and Gwen only gets it as a special block. My point was that only Gloria can heal reliably, and even then it’s not 100% reliable and she’s healing so that Overdose will kill her opponent first.

I don’t think stockpiling would be much of an issue either, but I think that being able to heal just for revealing a throw at all might not be the best dynamic, hence why I suggested the damage reduction instead. Then again, maybe some other incentive to throw would be better? It’s hard to say. As for the location, if we have healing / damage reduction, it probably needs to change. If we replace that with something else, maybe we could keep it like that. Perhaps we need to focus in on this mental image you have. If I understand correctly, the players are running away from a wall of fire or something? What would it look like if someone blocked, if they dodged, if they threw? Healing and damage reduction don’t seem relevant to this scenario, but I don’t have time at the moment to think of what else would work.

Jokers Wild Resort

A) Jokers can actually be used as wilds, being any card in your deck at any time, but only in combos. If revealed as a combat card they are still only gold bursts and can still be used to rewind time. Alternatively, they could be used as anything during combat reveal, but after players have played their cards but before they are revealed, a player who played a joker must announce it and say what it is, such as ”8 of clubs, throw." In the unlikely event both players played jokers, they write down what it is secretly and reveal together.

or

B) At the start of the game each player rolls a d20. Using the standard layout of characters in the EX box, with Grave being 1 and Zane being 20, each player gets the innate abilities of the character they rolled regardless of the character they’re playing.

This is pretty cool! Since a reference card with a given character’s moves is included with that character, this should be easy to do in a real game – though Vendetta (and maybe others?) has an error on his reference card, so you might need to use this site to be certain. Still, I can’t see that being a real issue, since worse-case scenario you should be able to show them the card you’re using it as from your discard pile or deck (if you have to use one from your deck as a reference, shuffle it back into your deck afterward). Still, with a bit of rewording, this could definitely be an Arena card!

This… not so much. I’d rather not have something like this, partly because it slows the game down because you have to ask each other about Jokers every turn to make sure you don’t accidentally reveal too soon. Ironically, it’s the same reasoning for why Pandante 2nd Edition removed the color requirement from the abilities: What it adds to the game isn’t worth how long it takes to play with it, let alone the confusion some players will inevitably have.

Of course, anyone who wants to explore this idea can check out G. Panda! As you can see here, his innate is similar to this (which means this also falls under guideline #4 in the first post – even if G. Panda isn’t a “real” character, it’s still a Yomi character being sold by Sirlin Games).

This seems like it might also cause confusion, since you have to ignore what your character card says and use another innate from a character you might not even own… It also makes some characters, like Setsuki and Onimaru, just stop functioning in significant ways (Setsuki’s whole design is built around Speed of the Fox, and having strong Can’t Combo normals doesn’t help an Onimaru without Guard Crush).

Edit: Can’t believe I didn’t realize this immediately: Long Range being on anyone other than Bal-Bas-Beta (or BBB not having Long Range) pretty much breaks the game outright.