Pirates of the High Seas 

Pirate stories and myths are abundant in popular culture, but many of them hark back to Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson. While this deck doesn't exclusively take from that book, it's inspired by the story and borrows a character or two from it.

The idea behind the Buried Treasure card was to take what was done with Fortress Walls in the Defenders deck and make it more pirate-like. Pirates are known for finding, hiding, and stealing treasure, so the idea that a pirate could both add might to the card as well as take it away became very interesting. The card went through various names through the design process, but "Buried Treasure" seemed to accurately capture the bi-directional ethos well.

Since there is not one singular pirate worthy of the top card in the deck, it became necessary to dig into pirate lore to get more mythical and monster-like. The Kraken, Davy Jones, and The Flying Dutchman all offered great opportunities to build in game mechanics that hadn't been used before (in the case of the Kraken), and offered interesting risk/reward scenarios.

Lastly, you may wonder how the Deckhands card came to use the Fibonacci sequence as its growth mechanic. The idea came from the notion that as pirate captains sailed from port to port, they would pick up new deckhands to work their ship. So the idea that Deckhands would grow with each move came from that. But how? Doubling was used initially, but that proved to be too powerful. After testing multiple approaches, the Fibonacci sequence offered an interesting scaling progression that worked well. It just had to be capped because a) the card would become to powerful, and b) you can only fit so many pirates on one ship!

The deck symbol is the Jolly Roger flag, the most iconic pirate symbol ever.