🔊 Picking Brains: Episode 03
The Official Zombie Battleground Podcast
In this episode:
- The Game Director’s favorite cards in Zombie Battleground
- Insights into building hordes that contain multiple factions
- Tips for choosing your initial hand and keeping pace during matches
Audio Interview (14 min.)
Transcript
We are Picking Brains: the Zombie Battleground podcast, brought to you by Loom Network.
Robert: Welcome to Picking Brains, the official Zombie Battleground podcast. I am sitting here with Game Director, Roy Shapira. My name is Robert, filling in for Extranji this week. I want to give our listeners some tips for playing Zombie Battleground, especially if they’ve never played the game before. I’ve put together a few questions here and Roy, hopefully you can help give some insight here.
Roy: Most definitely. Would be happy to.
Robert: Excellent. Let me just jump right into the first question here. Before we get into the strategies and stuff, a question about you — I’m wondering, do you have any favorite cards in the game?
Roy: That’s a pretty interesting question that I actually get asked quite a lot because people always have favorites and all that, but remember I kind of invented the world, and all its inhabitants, so I do love all my children quite equally, and I do try to make sure that all of them get the same amount of love and care and get them to grow and mature and become fully balanced cards and awesome in their own rights.
With that said, some of them are pretty cool like Cherno-Bill… he’s really close to my heart. I would have to say Gargantua is one of my favorites as well. He’s pretty cool. Tsunami has a nice story behind it, and he [also has] pretty awesome artwork, and it kind of got — [we] kind of grew together. It’s been a journey to try to find the right animation, the right kind of look and feel to it, so it’s also pretty awesome. But in general, they are all awesome and I do love all of them pretty much the same.
Robert: That’s great to hear. I was just picturing the game team like you with the whole team just trying to figure out, okay, what’s this zombie going to look like? Because I’m picturing Gargantua and Cherno-Bill because the illustrations are amazing.
Roy: Well, to be honest, it’s more like everything that you see is out of my head. And most of the game team — it’s kind of like “this is how I would like it to be” and the game team is trying to bring the vision closest to what I have in my head.
Robert: Yeah, they realize it.
Roy: Exactly. It’s less of a brainstorming session together and more like, okay, it should look like this one. I gave them several references and then they do sketches, and from the sketches do some color testing and iterations until it looks exactly the same as I had in my head. But each and every one of the zombies are kind of my own creations. It’s a pretty cool process.
Robert: Okay, okay. My second question is about horde building. So can you talk a little bit about element combinations when building hordes and maybe about some different styles of play, because I think they’re kind of connected. When you’re building your hordes, you might use one faction or two factions, and [are] there pros and cons for doing this and how does this relate to the different styles of play?
Roy: That’s a pretty elaborate question that will require kind of like a breaking it down, but… So each one of the elements kind of symbolizes a… kind of connects with one of the meta types of play in the card collection game. If we think about the aggressive deck, for example, an aggressive deck is usually more smaller costing cards and faster attack — “going face” as we call it — that connects to fire right away. Fire is just like the embodiment of fast-paced gaming.
On the other hand, if you’re thinking Earth, it’s more like making sure your side of the board is filled with these strong walls, these Heavies, that block the progression of the enemy. So that’s more like a control deck. If we’re looking at Life, then we have a lot of small pesky zombies that just reanimate over and over again and that’s kind of like a zerg deck, kind of like a zoo, we call it the zoo… it’s kind of like a Life zoo. Toxic is very much like an aggressive mid-range deck that you can tempo very nicely, so it works really well as a ramp deck. You can ramp up the goo really quickly and drop down the big ones relatively quicker than the others.
There is no singular best element or singular best style of play. You can actually create all styles of play with all the elements. It’s just each one of the elements kind of like is the embodiment of it, but you could also use that as a strategy trick. For example, you could use an Earth deck as a mid-range or a ramp deck. You just fill it up with the correct items, like the Goo Bottle and the Goo Beaker. You can have it augmented with the goo-giving cards and then you kind of like fool your opponents. He’s expecting a control deck, and he’s like okay if they charge this guy at the beginning and kind of knock out his defenses, I can go face and destroy him, and he’s like surprisingly a different style. So you could actually kind of mix and match it. You kind of mix and match. But you’ll have to when creating the deck you’ll have to think in advance what style of play is best suited to you and then augment it with the best cards possible.
To use the rank abilities and to use the Overlord abilities, it’s best to use the same faction, but you could use several factions if you stack up, for example — part of your deck would be Toxic, and you combine it with some Earth element, then you’ll have both the ramp element from the Toxic and you’ll have the control elements from Earth, and you combine them together for kind of like a hybrid deck that can do both of them fairly well. And you can do [it] either with the Earth Overlord or the Toxic Overlord for added abilities for that faction that you want to be a bit more pronounced in your game style. So I think the best option is here is [to] start with the style of play that you really, really like and go from there.
Robert: That’s an excellent answer! What about some tips on choosing the initial hand. So we have this step in the beginning called the Mulligan, where you have three cards and you can choose to redraw none or any of those cards. What should we keep in mind when we’re doing this?
Roy: Well that’s one of the earliest skills that we need to master. The Mulligan is kind of like a mini game inside of the game. You have to think in advance about two things. First of all, you have the RNG gods — everything is controlled by them. But then you need to remember that the Mulligan is basically your first hand, which means it needs to cover at least your Turn 1, Turn 2 and Turn 3. If you don’t have any lighter cards in your Mulligan, then you need to recycle them as quickly as possible. So if you have a Heavy card, let’s say 5-goo or more, then it’s kind of obvious — unless it’s a very specific card that you’re looking for in your game style, like a special General that you’re building your deck around or anything like that.
I would definitely try to get a 1-goo cost or a 2-goo cost zombie so you’ll have something in your opening hand that you can actually start ramping up and having the right tempo. It’s really important to keep the right tempo and keep with the curve of the game, which is basically making sure that each one of your turns you have enough zombies in play [that are] equal to the amount of goo that you have. So in Turn 1 you’ll have one zombie, Turn 2 you’ll have a 2-goo cost zombie, Turn 3 you’ll have a 3-goo cost zombie or the equivalent in several zombies and so on. That’s what I mean when I say curve and tempo.
Robert: Right. Playing the game, especially in PVP, I’m not able to play a card on the first and sometimes the second turn — it’s kind of nerve racking. They have all these zombies out and they start attacking my Overlord, and I can’t have any cards on the battleground yet.
Roy: Yeah, that’s exactly what I mean when I say the right tempo, right curve, and control. When I say control, it means you’re controlling your side of the board and you’re making sure that the enemy’s side is as least populated as possible. When I say tempo, it’s making sure that you have answers for any dishes that the enemy is bringing, like if they have a Heavy zombie, you have some way to remove it really quickly.
Robert: Right… Great, okay. My final question is basically a general question. Do you have any other tips for people who have never played Zombie Battleground before?
Roy: So this divides into people who have never played specifically Zombie Battleground or people who have never played a card collection game before, and the answer for both of them would be kind of similar… even though the people who have never played Zombie Battleground but have played other cards would feel right at home. So same general idea: you need to get your collection in order. You need to make sure that you have the right tempo, right curve, and all those main strategies that we use to play card collection games successfully. But for people who haven’t played Zombie Battleground or card collection games before, I would say: get one deck. Get to know it really, really well. Get to know the zombies inside and out, Make sure to understand the synchronicity, how they synergize with one another and after you have one faction mastered, try all the rest of the factions. So you’ll have an idea of all the different play styles.
So start with one deck. Understand how this works. Let’s say you really like the control type of game play. You like to have a lot of Heavies and make sure that your side is safe and all that, they will run out of cards before they will be able to remove all your guys. So if you like that, get to know the Earth faction really, really well. After you master that, try the rest of the factions to know all of your enemies, all your opponents. And just try. Just experiment.
Robert: Just keep playing, basically.
Roy: Keep playing. Experiment, experiment, experiment — always. The more you experiment, the more you try using cards that you’re not used to, trying different tricks on different places, using the goo carriers at the start, using goo carriers at the end. Trying different things, you’ll see what works better for you and what doesn’t. And obviously, the more you play people who are really good, the better you’ll get because you’ll try to analyze how they are playing and so when you see a really good player, you’re kind of like, okay, he’s probably going to do this and this. And I should answer with this and that. The more you can do that, the better you get as a player because a good player can know what’s going to happen for five, six, and even seven turns in advance and that will make him a lot more successful in the end.
Robert: Right, definitely. I’ve been doing that, too. Trying to anticipate what they’ll do and then seeing if I’m right kind of thing.
Roy: Then the more you do it, the more your gut feeling will be right.
Robert: Right, yeah.
Roy: I mean, Einstein once said, if you’re not failing 90% of the time, you’re just not trying hard enough.
Robert: Perfect. All right. Well I think we’re going to wrap it up here, Roy. Thank you so much for your time and giving us some insight into the game and getting started with the game. We’ll talk to you next time.
Roy: Thank you so much. See you next time.
Thank you for checking out Picking Brains: the Zombie Battleground podcast. We’ll be bringing you hordes of content about the game’s design, gameplay mechanics, strategy, and more.
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