Interview with PrimordialsDawn to Dusk and Timpa
are players long involved in the EtG and openEtG communities. They excel in gameplay and are significant contributors to community. In openEtG, specifically, they've shaped the game experience by contributing feedback to development (i.e. balance, bugs, sound boarding). They also created music, art, card design, designing AI decks like the Demigods, sharing new deck ideas, leading, and participating in events.
Who's been around longer? Or did you come from the EtG womb at the same time?Timpa: In the original forum my account is like 4 months older than dawn. In openEtG I was helping since very early on (my first contribution was the first, super crude versions of the quanta symbols
*) and I was there for the
first OETG tourney**, when regrade+nova was the meta (it used to give 2 quanta instead of 1 … that was short lived).
Dawn to Dusk: I started on Kongregate for some time before joining the forums. The date of which is rather difficult to find nowadays due to how much Kongregate has changed, though I would want to estimate it to around 2012 to 2013 times. I stayed around there for quite a few months, and enjoyed the forums around there, eventually moving to the official forums due to prospects of tournaments and mafia games. I think Justaburd was the one who first convinced me to join the forums with advertisements of the pvp leagues, interestingly.
***Interviewer's note: Timpa wasn't just 'there'; he won the first oetg tournament; see winning decks here
You both started off in original elements the game, were Masters of Elements, and significant contributors to EtG. What about openEtG appealed and pulled you in initially? Timpa: I was of the opinion that a stagnant game, as EtG was at the time, would start having a hard time bringing in new people. So I was all for something that shook things up.
Dawn to Dusk: I was friends with a few people who were either directly involved in the project, or who showed interest in it early on, so I naturally tended towards it with the new content on offer. That, and it was able to renew a fresh level of passion for the game in which I would otherwise have been becoming complacent with. When all decks are largely figured out in the base game, having new tools to explore is always a greatly interesting experience.
After stagnant EtG development, players had a chance to engage in the openEtG project with greater community involvement. openEtG added 100 new cards in the first year. But the community stayed small. Rather than comment on why more didn’t join; why did you engage with and embrace openEtG? Timpa: Some aspects of openEtG legit make it more fun to me. Some things I can cite is the much faster pace of the matches (specially PVP, vanilla was painful in this aspect). A reduced focus on grind so you could get to the interesting part of the game almost right away and an AI that sometimes even taught you cool combos also made PVE much more enjoyable. I think also joining the community in the late stages of vanilla (the only updates I ever saw was shards being rebalanced to being colored, the salvagers and dry spell) reduced the amount of nostalgia I had for it.
Dawn to Dusk: Slightly overlapping with my previous answer, a lot more toys to play with and a fresh experience to the game made finding decks greatly enjoyable. Combine this with my growing desire to play more card games (something that has stayed to this day, and I still play many card games now), and I was naturally invested in the game. As Timpa mentioned, the lessened grinding time introduced via the updated upgrading system was a huge plus for my openEtG retention time, and felt far more rewarding to invest time into.
What were the early days like? Bonfires? Stock options? Manifestos?Timpa: There was no shortage of drama. There are people that to this day swear we killed EtG 1.4 (the update that was supposed to bring an open world aspect to vanilla, that was announced around the same time), tho most of it was aimed at serp and Fippe.
Dawn to Dusk: Timpa covered most of the EtG side of things, so I’ll look at openEtG a bit. Some balance was quite a ways off (5 cost Metamorphosis), though I do have very fond memories of the early quad pillar decks. Cardinal was very much the favourite at the time, having access to such strong elements naturally created this situation, though I was rather fond of the 5-element Ghostmare list that became exceedingly powerful in leagues. Early openEtG after the quad-pillars were introduced, we ended up having “Material / Cardinal / Spiritual” guilds, of which I got to become Material master (hence my tag on the forums). With the lack of powerful stall options (I believe this pre-dated Magma but I may be wrong), honing in so hard on aggressive decks wasn’t exactly my forte, but I still enjoyed the time nonetheless.
You expended much energy into openEtG. Timpa, you contributed art. Dawn, you built early demigods. You participated in events. You tested and found bugs. Were you involved with card selection? Even in recent years you’re still contributing: bloodmoon card design (Dawn) and dispersion art (Timpa). What other contributions are you fond of in retrospect? Timpa: My favorite contribution was the
set of mark cards. I also wrote an opening theme (the playback is currently broken, but you can get to it from the
art credits page - it also needs a serious cleanup).
Dawn to Dusk: I believe I designed a few cards, I think Osmosis was one of mine? But in terms of the actual selection of cards, that was moreso picked from the CIA pool from the original forums. I will say I’m rather fond of my
"art" that still remains in the game, especially
squid cards 52 Pickup. I will admit I don’t remember a lot of contributions that I otherwise would state here, but I had a blast doing what I could at the time. Additionally, being involved in early deck exploration, especially during the early days of quad pillars, was a great highlight of the time.
Also dawn: So fun fact, 52 Pickup is supposed to be cards on fire being thrown at the opponent
Talk broadly about openEtG's gameplay, UX/UI, economy, cardpool, meta, etc. What do you like? What don’t you like? What part of the game would you like to see enhanced, changed, and developed? Timpa: Some of the innovations that were brought in was the possibility to interact directly with your opponent’s hand and deck, this created a whole new deck archetype (mill). One thing I really like about the UI is being able to use the keyboard
* more extensively than in the original, which allows for a more fluid game imo. About the economy, I miss the old bazaar, tho I have so much gold I can instantly dump a bunch into packs and get any new cards and ups with pretty much the same ease. The current bazaar (that works more like an auction) feels like it would need a much larger community to be more useful. About the cardpool, the only new card I genuinely dislike is Panda 3. There is borderline no reason to pack it in a deck you’ll use against a human, but it is kinda broken in the hands of the AI. I feel the meta is very underdeveloped because of the small number of players (specially in pvp). The only way to fix that is to bring in more people which is easier said than done.
Dawn to Dusk: The PvP system is infinitely better than EtG, and the complete eradication of desynchronisation issues is such a godsend. The grind is far better than the original game due to how upgrades are handled too. Honestly, I could talk for a long time about the QoL improvements that have been made in general (deck slots is another extremely large one). Similar to Timpa, AI predicting RNG was a small peeve I had, which became especially pronounced with Pande3, but is otherwise largely manageable (and not being removed any time soon. Gotta let the AI have its candy). I would like to see something more happen to quests, I feel like it has a large amount of potential, but at the same time it suffers from “do it once and forget about it” which is rather difficult to overcome outside of absurdly difficult challenges and careful theorycrafting. Effect clarity is something that I historically had some issues with as well, especially coming from EtG that did have a good visual clarity on effects. This is not something I blame Serp, or anyone else for, here. Serp did what he could and introduced the history bar, which certainly helps in this regard, but seeing the board disappear after a Pandemonium is always an interesting experience.
*Interviewer's note
Keyboard shortcuts for in-game play exist
1-8: allow you to select specific card in hand
W (in-game): target opponent directly
S (in-game): target yourself directly
W (after game ends): start next match
Space: end turn/advance
Despite openEtG being the spiritual successor to EtG, it’s a rather different community. You’ve experienced both communities. What’s the openEtG community like in and of itself; how about in comparison to the EtG community?Timpa: There’s less interaction imo in the oetg community. I know very few faces and have really no idea of how big it even is. The original etg community had its prime in 2012/2013 and then started to decrease once it was clear no updates would be coming. What is left now is a core of people that bonded over things besides the game.
Dawn to Dusk: I missed the peak of the EtG community, and a lot of longstanding faces had already left by the time I had joined. Naturally the EtG community was much larger, as expected of the original game, and thus the extent of forum games and events could have the capacity to be larger as well. The people in openEtG have been great though, and it’s been nice seeing the evolution of both the game and the community.
Help us capture pieces of openEtG history. New players are recently joining with no knowledge of the first 10 years of openEtG and didn’t play original EtG. What interesting stories or insights could you share about the game’s history, development, and community? Dawn to Dusk: The balance stories have always been rather fun. I mentioned earlier how centralising the quad-pillars were, when they always generated 2 quanta. There was a mad rush to see what the best quads were, cardinal showed to be the large favourite in this aspect. The war against Give Singu is fun to think about too. Giving the opponent a singularity is a rather powerful tool, so naturally the combo was nerfed. Until a different variant of the combo was brought out, which was then also nerfed. Regrade was a powerful tool here too. I think this interaction has happened at least 3-4 times already but I may be wrong. I also remember… I think it was Black Cat? Either on release or it was buffed, and was stupidly strong with Embezzle combos resulting in like 3 turn mills. My memory on the topic is shady so if someone can fill in the blanks here that would be amazing. Other fun highlights include GeoDiss decks which were *much* stronger than now, and early Tesseract Hand Drill decks which ruled the meta for the first few days of their release.
Timpa: I also remember in the early days wolfbond was the best grinding deck (that deck is the reason bonds have an upkeep). The mirrors were kinda broken at first (I like to believe “Dead Heat” contributed to their being nerfed XD). The guilds and the kinda quad war we had some years ago were pretty fun (for some reason I still had “cardinal guild leader” as a role until recently) and we really should do more stuff like that.
Filling the blanks about the embezzle decks dawn brought up (looks at Septima), rip
Ferrari Millcat, you won’t be missed XD
You have both made (found) some great decks. A sample of Dawn: Spirit Temper Saders, Mono Aether Mill, Pickpocket (Midasgoon), Shard of Wisdom reflect decks, and of course, Spite of Vengeance. Timpa’s craft: Dead Heat, Ectoplasm, Tessapult, Self-Destruct, Shady Dune, and Parallel Computing. Do you have a favorite you built? What is your deckbuilding style and process?Timpa: I don’t think I made a thread for this but I did use
this bombtal deck in some events. I like it for how silly looking it is and how it has a better WR than it looks like it should have. In etg this was my
signature deck. That I used when becoming master of gravity for the first time.
My deckbuilding process is to start with a core idea (like a combo or milling down the opponent, etc.) and focusing first on making every aspect of the deck work towards that goal and then making sure that the quanta is balanced. For example, every card of the bombtal deck I showed works towards, surviving until you have quanta for fractal and then preventing the opponent to messing with your bombs in the turn right after the fractal (ideally, if you do everything under the cloak, they might not even know what you are setting up)
Dawn to Dusk: I would need to put Temper Vader Saders as my favourite list that I’ve made, and is probably the one I’ve ran the most.
ButterShade (Chromatic Butterfly + Nightshade) is another deck that I’m quite fond of. Mono Aether Mill is one that I couldn’t not post about when I found the combo, but the deck itself is exceedingly painful to play against. I’m also quite happy with the
BH Whirlpool list that I made a while back, and is a good denial deck when it works.
My deckbuilding methodology involves finding a neat combo, interaction, or card that I like to build around. For instance the MidasGoon list, I tested to make sure the combo did indeed work, after which I filled out the deck with an appropriate quanta base to fit the core cards, and let the rest of the list be dictated on the playstyle of the first few cards. Another example is ButterShade, which involved making sure Nightshade didn’t override Chromatic Butterfly’s passive, then filling out the rest of the deck with ways that could abuse this interaction. With OEtG deckbuilding rules of 6 copies per card plus quanta requirements, the rest of the list comes quite naturally after the core cards, and inclusion of weapons and shields only further accentuates this. Other games like Magic, Hearthstone, Runettera and the like become a bit more difficult and require more tech cards against metas, which can still be relevant here (Deflag for Mono Aether, etc), but not being limited to 2 copies per card is extremely helpful in this regard.
Favorite element, openEtG card(s), Deck to play, AI target?Timpa:--Gravity.
--I’ll pick a card from each element: Reaper, Orochi, Magma, Give, Hand Drill, Tesseract, Pink Jelly, Boar, Georesonator, Clepsydra, Stormspike and Black Cat.
--I don’t have a favorite deck to play, just a huge list of decks. When I’m on the mood I pick something from it and try to play some AIs
--Champion
Dawn to Dusk: In vanilla it was Life for a while then went to Light after I became master of the element (which is a story for another day). Life in openEtG didn’t strike me as much, though I’m still quite fond of Adrenastaves which was one of my favourite vanilla decks. Light I do still quite enjoy though, and looking at SoW Reflect lists was quite enjoyable too.
Favourite cards would definitely be the quad pillars. Though I’m determined to find some way to break Jack o Lantern and the Mirrors. A lot of the new cards are quite well designed though, and building with anything is always fun. I do need to check out the new shields that I just found out about, see if they’re any good or fun to break.
AI targets vary quite a lot, Champion is a good baseline for me. I’m not as fond of Arena 1 but I can see the appeal, and poke my head inside from time to time. Designing decks for DGs and Arena 2 is definitely the long term goal for deck hunting, but unless I stumble across something special, it’s not something I aim for when making any deck.
Madame Sophia has given you her crystal ball. What do you see happening in the next 10 years of openEtG?Timpa: I hope we keep getting new people. I’m very curious how these new players found out about the game.
Dawn to Dusk: I would love to see the game thrive, more passionate people get involved in the game and design decks far beyond what has been currently explored. I’d love to see a meta properly develop too, and see it evolve as top decks get countered.
Thanks for the interview!
-Septima