Scott Van Essen's Articles
Senior Game Designer at Wizards of the Coast
Scott Van Essen was Senior Game Designer on the Transformers Trading Card Game at Wizards of the Coast, and the clearest public voice on how the game’s systems were built. His Robots in Design column covered battle icons, variance, head characters, and the thinking behind stratagems.
His explanations remain load-bearing years later. Why Cards Are Banned or Replaced quotes his account of why Wave 1 shipped only four double-icon cards, which is the reason Peace Through Tyranny and Security Checkpoint were replaced rather than banned.
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Robots in Design #17: Stratagem of an Idea
In today's Robots in Design, Scott Van Essen shines light on how the Stratagem card type came to be!
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Robots in Design #16: Heads of the Class
Scott Van Essen discusses the design history of character cards' star costs in today's Robots in Design.
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Robots in Design #15: Three Variants of Variance
Variance is good. So are new Titan Masters Attack preview cards!
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Robots in Design #14: The Apple of My I(con)
In today's article, I'm going to lay out three separate issues we were facing in the Transformers TCG.
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transformerstcg.com: Antici...
Scott Van Essen is back to talk about ANTICIPATION, and from the SOUND of it, he's making some serious WAVES.
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Transformers TCG Systems Design with Scott Van Essen
Scott Van Essen is here to talk about designing what a Transformers Trading Card game should be.
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