Card Design Thoughts, Part Two

We talked last week about a few common problems I see with Munchkin card submissions from you lovely fans. I promised to continue the list this week, so here they are!

• Insta-Death cards. This is a surprisingly common category of cards for some reason. I think it's because people think how funny it would be to make their best friend lose all his hard-won gear right before he thinks he's going to win the game. Those people rarely stop to think how UNfunny it would be when it happened to them. In any event, it's not funny to us, so it's not happening.
• Go Up a Level and WIN cards. This is the flip side of the point above. A lot of "go up a level" ideas we see include some way for a certain category of players to use it to win the game. This isn't entirely unfair -- Divine Intervention was in the very first Munchkin game, after all -- but too many of these and the game becomes an attempt to find the magic winning GUALs rather than killing the monsters. We find this suboptimal, because we like killing monsters.
• Super über versions of cards that already exist. We get a lot of "Ultra-Cheat" cards, for instance, once that basically let you use anything and everything you want, all the time. Nope. Not happening. There isn't a lot of resource management in Munchkin, but what's there is there for a reason and we don't want someone to bypass that entire facet of the game.
• Cards (or, more usually, sets of cards) that require a very specific set of circumstances to operate. If Treasure A is useless unless its owner is fighting Monster B, Treasure A sits there most of the game just kinda sucking. It's OK to want to see wacky card interactions, but don't make them a requirement to use the cards you write.

I think that's enough to go on for now. If you have other thoughts about bad card ideas, post 'em on our forums and maybe we'll run a Part Three of this series!