For reasons unknown, Mike and I played a bunch of Neopets this weekend. We haven't played that one in a while, so I guess we finally lapped back around to it. I have two decks for the game, neither of which have been touched since the game first came out... so I took a couple minutes to re-work them with cards from the various expansion sets. It was sort of a pop culture convergance moment: I was tuning Neopets decks, while Mike flipped through an Onion book and watched Sealab on DVD.
Anyway, we changed up the rules a bit to punch the game up. Neopets has this crazy "Neopet stack" thing going... which is a separate mini-deck comprised only of your selected Neopets. This is done to guarantee that you fill the table with 'pets, which would be awfully hard if they were shuffled into your main deck. But the way the game runs, the first three turns of the game are almost always total non-events, because each player has to draw and place a single Neopet on each turn. So we accelerated that by placing three Neopets before the game starts... facedown, so as not to encourage the slower player taking advantage.
The whole Neopets stack bugs me for one reason: if all Neopet cards are to live in a separate deck, why don't they have a differentiating cardback design? It just seems like they were intended to be shuffled into the main deck, but Wizards wanted to avoid the traditional spells-to-mana deckbuilding ratio problems. I fully support finding ways around that - Marvel/DC Vs. has a great solution - but the standalone mini-deck feels like a last minute patch.
We also noticed that you never drill into your deck very far, so we started drawing two cards per turn. That helped... although we still didn't see even half of the 60-card decks I built. The manual says custom decks have to have at least 40 cards. Sounds like a good plan. Or else we play to 50 points instead of the assigned 21.
Neopets has a fatal flaw in its design. On your turn, you can do one of two actions with each available Neopet card: you can tap it to attempt to score points to win, or you can tap it to do something else. It's almost always better to go for the points than to do something else. I shouldn't even have to italicize that; it seems terribly obvious. Playing equipment cards, moving Neopets around, switching out Neopets, tapping to play specialty cards... all of these effectively cost you the chance to score, which can keep you behind in the race for points. We found ourselves only choosing the "something else" option when one of our 'pets was hopelessly sucky... which is more the fault of a lame draw than anything.
We can't imagine the intended purpose for the Hero cards, aside from a surprise reaction to a Villain card. To play a Hero, you have to tap a Neopet... but then the Hero has to attack in that specific 'pet's arena, and the Hero goes away at the end of the turn. Given that your Neopet should already be strong in that arena, it seems overkill to have him blow his turn just to bring in a Hero to do the attack. Unless, of coure, you're attacking a Villain and you need to extra-ramped-up stats... but who knows when and where Villains will appear. If Heroes are meant to be a "reactive" type card, they're pretty poor ones.
Maybe we'll come up with a better purpose for Heroes too. Our existing modifications made the game work better, in our opinion. I usually balk at changing the rules like this (Mike doesn't), but as long as we keep to the game's flavor, I can deal.
It's not a bad little game at all, but given Neopets.com's target demographic of Girls 9-14, I can understand why it plays a smidge tame. I guess we're working on the Adults 18-35 edition.
