Balance

I have great difficulties with balance; which I view as one of the biggest hurdles in my progress on Clash of Blades.
As an expandable card game, it is vital that there be multiple viable ways to build your deck, and that no single card becomes a necessary component of every deck.
And as a prepackaged game, each two deck set¹ must be evenly matched, at each stage of the learning curve.

At this point it is the latter issue which I am mostly concentrating on. The most unbalanced individual cards will reveal themselves during the testing of the decks: and fine tuning can be done later.
I'm fortunate in that my game is a small, 2 player, game. This makes it much easier to find opportunities to test it; all I need is another willing participant [preferably two- I can learn things from watching others play that I can't learn if I'm one of the players] and a pair of decks; which I carry in my jacket pockets.
And even for new players, it rarely takes more than 30 minutes, letting me fit a game in the gaps around longer activities, such as before/after a roleplaying session, or a long board game.

Another novice designer I met at Stabcon, who was playtesting his game Giant Stone Heads, is in a much worse situation: His game is a four (or more) player game and takes about 90 minutes. It's much harder to test such a game, unfortunately; although as a symmetrical game the balance situation is somewhat less precarious.

With Character Cards, there is a game; but not one in which fine-tuned balance is important. It's a symmetrical game, of the "beer and pretzels" variety: a game which is more about the social interactions it enables than the game itself. That's one of the reasons it's development can happen so much faster; and it prevents it taking much testing time away from Clash.
I'll discuss more of the details of that game next week.

I'll be back on Saturday, with a discussion of the Agility vs. Brutality deck pack.

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The term "Duel Deck" has been registered as a trademark by Wizards of the Coast, so I need to avoid referring to them by that name.