--On Wednesday, September 7, 2005 9:58 PM +0000 kerry_and_ryan@xxxxxxx wrote:
Ooohhhh... new type of wild panels. I like it. But but but... There are 10 different Ferals panels: Fire-Water, Fire-Air, Fire-Earth, Fire-Space (since E is Earth and A is Air), W-A, W-E, W-S, A-E, A-S E-S (...or were you assuming that Fire could combine with, say Air and Ether but not Water or Earth?) That would obviously give you 10 possible Feral Aces.
Nope I want them to combine fully... Math just isn't my strong suit. See my previous recent post... But your abbreviations lack something. If E is earth, what's ether? You could use the letter P (sometimes I jokingly say the five elements are Earth, Air, Fire, Water, and Purple) Oh, I see now you have " Stars" well, I guess that works too...
What about halvsies? For just the horizontal split cards, there are 10*9/2 = 45 different combinations*. Similarly, there would be 45 possible vertical halvsies, 45 halvsies per bend sinister, and 45 halvsies per bend dexter (i.e. slash and backslash diagonals).
I'm glad you understood about the diagonals having to go both ways. Thanks for the heraldic terminology to help us out.
If you restrict the combinations to those where the two panels don't share an element, then you have 15 Feral/Feral halvsies of each orientation**.
Now how did I get only 10? (see above) I've worked it out now... yes, 15. 5 different elements that could be left out. The remaining 4 can be combined in three different ways. So if P is left out, the remaining elements can be combined EA-FW, EF-WA, and EW-FA. Right right right. I tend to do these things visually by brute force, working out math incidentally. This makes it easy to forget to draw a line or something, and my numbers are off.
Oh I was definitely restricting feral-feral halvsies (aka doubles) to those where the two panels didn't share an element. That eliminates the whole dumb "do I get to count this as two panels, or just one" problem that was brought up with multiple-panel cards that included a wild panel. That was part of the point of making ferals rather than wilds.
But if you could pair a Feral panel with a regular, such as Earth-Air over plain Air? That would add 10*5/2 = 25 additional halvsies of each orientation. (...or 10*3/2 = 15 Feral/Element halvsies where the two panels don't share an element.)
Don't go there...
FA AF
I'd say don't go there either, mostly because I'm trying to think of the _smallest_ feasible deck. But I actually considered this (but didn't write about it) when I thought about the diagonal quads. Because the weird thing about the diagonal quads is that they create dead ends, I wondered about letting them connect across the card. That would involve somehow indicating a sort of bridge and underpass on the card. Hard to do. But fun to think about... Or, I see now, you were thinking about letting one or the other of them connect. Interesting. I think it's less important to worry about letting them connect across the card with an orthogonal quad. It's that weird dead-end quality of a diagonal quad that made me think it might be neat. But hey... it might be neat whatever the quad configuration.
I think I _will_ conclude with a "don't go there"...
One of these days I'll write a computer program that outputs a web page that enumerates all possible Aquarius cards that satisfy various conditions. The only question becomes how complicated can you make legible artwork (such as for Feral panels) and how many cards you want in a deck.
Well, that could be cool...
(Of course, I've always thought that there is too high a concentration of action cards in Aquarius, so adding more tile cards would dilute the actions.) Ok, maybe I'm getting a little esoteric. I'll stop for now.