– Conquest of Fates Development Insights –
Hello Citizens!
This series offers a little peek behind the curtain at how Conquest of Fates is made—and how it’s evolved through brutal lessons, dramatic showdowns, and chaotic breakthroughs.
And there’s no better place to begin than with the origin story of one of our most defining mechanics: Lightspeed Deployment.
But to understand how it came to be, we need to rewind to an era known internally as Iteration 3—and to a now-infamous deck archetype called:
PRISON
In the yester-year of Conquest of Fates, there was no Lightspeed Deployment.
There was no way to respond to your opponent’s plays in real-time.
You had to set up your defenses and hope your strategy held. We called this a payload strategy—building up your ideal play and trying to either poke holes in your opponent’s combo or shield your own.
It made for tense matches—but it also had a big problem: no counterplay.
And for a long time we stubbornly said it was fine.
At least until:
Awe-Inspiring Specimen
“Upon Reveal effects do not happen.”
This wasn’t just a strong card—it shut down the entire game for certain deck types. And at the time, there was no way to respond to it once it was revealed. Effectively, it imprisoned your opponent. Hoping they could just score enough raw CQ to overcome the blockade.
THE META
To make things even more dramatic: almost every top-tier deck at the time revolved around Upon Reveal effects.
One of the more infamous builds involved chaining together cards that let you play your opponent’s top deck repeatedly, milling them to death. This even forced us to invent the “Mill” and “Deck Out” rules later.
But when you reflected on the numbers,
The Perfect Spawn faction was lagging behind the other factions. It’s simplicity meant it lacked a lot of the combos that the other factions had access to and thusly it would be out-classed as the other factions chained together effects.
So I gave them a tool. Something to stunt most of their combos…
Awe-Inspiring Specimen changed everything. Suddenly, every competitive deck was Perfect Spawn Prison.
Every match turned into a mirror match.
And spoiler:
It sucked.
No one had fun.
So I had to fix it.
I needed a counter to the counterplay.
Enter Yoshiyuki 1.0
The solution? A new kind of trigger.
“Whenever a unit is revealed, you may discard….”
Sure it doesn’t roll off the tongue.
But, think of it like a “hand trap” mechanic from other games.
Since it didn’t literally say “Upon Reveal,” it got around Awe-Inspiring Specimen’s lockdown—and muted it.
Success.
Players loved it.
Yoshiyuki became an instant favorite and ultimately became the foundation of what would become the Church of Zero.
The feedback was clear:
“Yes—give us more of this.”
So I added a cycle of 8 such cards—2 per faction—and started reshaping the game’s rules around this new interaction.
Iteration 4 & the Accordion
We called the new update Iteration 4, and it came with a massive question:
“If I can discard this card for its effect, why would I ever play it as a unit?”
We playtested this iteration a lot. But it was one specific mutliplayer game that solidified all of the data.
If the question was, why wouldn’t I Lightpseed Deploy this unit?
The answer was…
You wouldn’t.
So then came the real design challenge:
Is this a Unit, or something more like a “spell” from other games?
We decided it had to be both.
So we created a new rule:
These units could be deployed directly from your hand to an extra location zone.
This became the foundation of Lightspeed Deployment.
To manage all this complexity, we also developed a new internal rules structure we nicknamed “The Accordion”—a system which dictated each step of a unit’s deployment.
Legacy of a Spawn
Awe-Inspiring Spawn doesn’t exist in the current version of Conquest of Fates—and it may never return in its original form.
But Yoshiyuki is still around.
Stronger than his original form.
More terrifying.
And that’s all thanks to the chaos, broken mirrors, and panic playtests that forced us to rethink our game.
So I guess I should say:
Thank you, Awe-Inspiring Spawn.
You led to everyone’s favorite Digital Demon.
