Less Is More

Apparently, continuing a series of … Is …

The subject of availability of V:TES cards came up recently.  Yes, it’s harder to get various packs/boxes/precons then it was.  That has actually been true for ages.  No, I can’t put myself in the shoes of someone trying to get into the game or expand what is possible for them to build.  But, I’d be curious to try.

I enjoy owning all of the cards for a CCG.  I enjoy having tons of chase cards others don’t.  I don’t think it’s a good idea when people can’t compete because it’s prohibitively expensive to get tournament necessary cards.  Of course, what is prohibitively expensive is open to question.

I can’t compete in constructed Magic formats with my current collection, with a few specific deck exceptions.  For instance, I could probably get a couple of sideboard cards and compete in Legacy with a Red Deck Wins deck.  I do own x4 Force of Will, though I read that Force is becoming less useful.

Staying on the subject of older formats, I’m missing largely two key things – modern creatures which are much more powerful and aggressively costed on average, multilands.  I have hardly any original dual lands and I’ve never tried to acquire sets of more modern multilands.  To me, fixing the land problem, by itself, seems prohibitively expensive.

In terms of more modern formats, though not so much Modern, I could run out and acquire a bunch of Standard legal cards, trade, pick up key singles, and become competitive only sinking a thousand* dollars into the game.  Again, that strikes me as prohibitive.

*  Based on typical value of singles of modern Magic decks adding up to $300-400 a deck, discounting because I’d buy boxes of cards rather than all singles.  Of course, this is a suboptimal way to compete in Magic from a cost standpoint.  Far better to draft against inferior players for rares, buy what is needed for a single tournament and turn around and sell cards that won’t get reprinted, and so forth – these strategies for cost containment, however, don’t sound appealing to me.

Getting back to V:TES, what is a prohibitive level of expenditure in effort and/or $$?

My recommendation to a new player (to an existing group) is to borrow decks until the player is sure that they want to play it for the long haul, then go find someone getting out of the game or putting a collection up on eBay.  That should give somewhere between 5,000 and 50,000 cards to work with at a cost of something along the lines of $50-$300.  Then, can hunt for harder to get cards to build weirder decks.

That’s not how I got into the game.  I did borrow decks before investing.  I decided I was interested in creating my own decks from my collection.  I started buying Jyhad boxes.  Then, I bought some Sabbat.  Then, I bought some Dark Sovereigns and Ancient Hearts.  At some point, I had a case or more of Jyhad – it being so cheap at various points that we played a single game of sealed box Jyhad.  I stupidly didn’t buy a ton of Sabbat when it was cheap.  I bought lots of every White Wolf published expansion.  I virtually never traded in the 16 years I’ve been playing.  I have bought singles on eBay at times but not for years and, obviously, not before eBay was a thing.

On a tangent, speaking of playing for 16 years, it’s kind of interesting to realize that.  I still enjoy the game quite a bit, testament to the value of CCGs I would say.  Why only 16 years?  I was introduced to the game in 1995 and started playing the following year.

I had an epiphany at some point with the Babylon 5 CCG.  I know I’m rambling, but I’m finally getting to the point.  I had all of the cards, for all intents and purposes.  My collection was defined more by how many autographed rares or chase promos I had.  One day, I thought about how much more fun it was to build decks when I had only a couple of boxes of starters and a couple of boxes of boosters, roughly my initial purchases.

Ever since then, I’ve always kept in mind that there are disadvantages to being a Mr. Suitcase.  Mark Rosewater goes on about restrictions breeding creativity, and I can see that with collection sizes.  I felt much more creative and passionate about decks I designed when I had to struggle to figure out how to compete.  I put this down to thinking way more about each card when:  I had less of them to think about; I couldn’t just play a better card all of the time.  Then, the more thought put into a deck, the more I care about a deck, so the more I’m likely to enjoy a deck.

I frequently restrict myself when it comes to deck construction.  It’s not just because of house rules for play groups I might play with or even laziness.  Nor is it something I do just for V:TES.  I built rareless decks for B5.  I wrote a Scrye article on a rareless, promoless deck for Wheel of Time, a game chock full of power rares/promos.  Likely, it has something to do with Ultimate Combat! being my first CCG and how that CCG restricts deck construction by rarity.  I built iceless corp decks for Netrunner.  Minionless V:TES tournament deck … that got the edge twice in one round.  An all ax kick deck for UC!.  And, so on and so forth.

There’s just something stimulating about limitations.  When I look at V:TES, B5, WoT, or UC!, I can almost build any deck possible.  That tends to inflict me with an ennui.  Why?  Too many options.  Lack of focus.  I can easily put together 20 decks; how am I ever going to be as emotionally invested in 20 decks as I would have been for the 1-2 I had to put real effort into?

Anyway, it’s all great to talk about my own interests, but how does this relate to someone trying to compete in V:TES?

Unlike most CCGs, I don’t see where someone needs much to compete with a reasonable variety of decks in V:TES.  This isn’t Magic, where multilands are essential to multicolor decks.  This isn’t WoT, where even Light decks wanted ultrarare recruitable Forsaken cards for their discard effects.  This isn’t Dragonball Z, Star Wars, or a multitude of other CCGs with similar ultrarare issues.

The more cards you have, obviously, the more options you have.  But, not having every option is supposed to be a feature of CCGs.  It would suck if the only deck someone with under 5,000 cards could build for V:TES that could compete is Malk SB.  But, that’s also not the case.

What is the case?  Again, I can’t really put myself into other people’s shoes.  This most commonly comes up when trying to think of how to recruit new players to games that I’ve been invested in for years.  But, that’s another topic.

If I were limited to around a thousand cards, which is like some starters and two booster boxes, what could I do?  I’d imagine there would be a lot of problems with V:TES at that level, mostly because of the need for wake effects, pool gain (blood conversion if you are reading Darby’s latest offerings over at Inferior Babble), and certain staples that might not come in the particular precons I started with (or I was using starters from the pre-precon sets).

By the way, the starter box + x2 booster box level is the level of investment that I think of when I think of the concept of when I enjoy a CCG most.

V:TES is hard on new players due to no card limits – a primary reason why I would always have card limits, in fact prefer 3cl in my CCGs.  At the same time, it’s a game where a lot of decks can win.

How many?

I’m curious.  There’s probably a tool out there to do simulated booster packs for this game, but I don’t have it.  Precons are easy, I even have a bunch unopened, nevermind how easy it is to rebuild them.  However, precons have largely been missing far too many essential cards, being light on the most important things of quality masters and wakes, while also often having bizarrely unplayable crypts.

In reality, I have enough unopened product or unorganized product (never sorted boosters I opened) that I can run a number of experiments on what it’s like to have a modest collection.

So, I guess I should.

You There, In The Woods

Perhaps a better title for a different sort of post.  If you’ve never seen the comic strip in Scrye Magazine about Dragonball Z where this comes from, well, missed out on hilarity.

Interaction.  Is a game a game if you don’t interact with anything?  Solitaire?  Interacting with random draws or layouts.  Too esoteric, maybe.  Interaction with opponents in a game with multiple people is a necessary element to a game.

As I often say, I once thought interaction was the key to making a CCG good.  Then, I realized just how much interaction in multiplayer CCGs is crap.  Player A trashes player B and either C or D wins, just because A’s deck only does the one thing of trashing another player.  If you did a cost/benefit table of two-player CCGs vs. multiplayer CCGs, I’d put something down on the two-player side about how two-player CCGs don’t have to worry about the kingmaking effects of negative interactions.

Which led to the idea of “quality interaction”, however subjective that is.

But, this isn’t a post about quality interaction.  This is a post about something I more clearly realized due to helping design a CCG/LCG style game.

You want to minimize m-… self-play.  The more time you spend dealing with your own “board” is that much less time you are spending engaging your opponent(s).  Seems obvious, but it also seems like designers forget about this when trying to come up with mechanics, especially when doing top-down mechanics, i.e. simulating the flavor of whatever the game is based on.

At least, if you are looking for enjoyable play.  For effectiveness, it’s something of a truism that the less you interact with your opponents, the better off you are.

I’ll run through the CCGs I know best.

Vampire: The Eternal Struggle

I hadn’t thought about this until yesterday.  The increased number of effects that happen during untap always struck me as being off, but it was only yesterday that I realized that at least part of this was because it was purely administrative functions that had no interactions with other players’ boards and card play.  (Burn option is not remotely interactive, just in case it bothers anyone I don’t mention this.)

To get kind of sidetracked already, people bitch a lot about Imbued, and a lot of the carping has to do with how long they take.  Then, you get counterarguments that people who know what they are doing don’t take very long.  It’s clearer to me now that it isn’t the actual time spent, but that the Imbued deck is doing lots of things that don’t involve other players.  Much like Freak Drive decks play with themselves for far too long.

There are some benefits to expanding the untap phase, such as helping people remember optional untap effects like taking pool for the Edge or using a hunting ground.  But, overall, it’s just more doing stuff that isn’t “playing a game” (interacting with people).  Similarly, expanding the master phase, the influence phase, and the discard phase all involve expanding phases where you aren’t playing with other people.

Which obviously brings up the minion phase.  The minion phase is the heart of the game.  A lot of people like combat because they see it being the primary interactive element to the game.  I see stealth versus intercept, bleed mods vs. bounce, actions vs. wakes being the primary interactive elements of the game.  But, I can see how some wouldn’t find those quite as compelling as the subgame that is combat as they like the feeling of more directly interacting.

Either way.  The point is that actions are where we engage other players.  Of course, it’s not just actions but the possibility of interference with actions.  Unblockability, such as from excessive amounts of stealth, is obviously less engaging.  I hate playing decks that don’t wake because being tapped out means not being involved in the game, even if all I’m doing is waking and bouncing – bounce is actually a pretty good form of interaction in the game, which is yet another reason I don’t see why people hate it so much.

Where Imbued are masters of the untap, Girls …, et al, are annoying for their abuse of the master phase.  No wonder people can find them more obnoxious than decks that do things I find far worse, like minion destruction.

Babylon 5

A lot of my observations about interaction have come from B5.  There’s no requirement that you interact with opponents, like there essentially is in V:TES.  B5 is a race game, so you can sit back and gain your influence/power as efficiently as possible and hope you outspeed everyone else.  This was one of the great criticisms of the game – that everyone could play multiplayer solitaire.

The whole beginning of the game, outside of some speed/hyperspeed openings was predicated on doing infrastructure work … which is why people so often hated the beginning of B5 games.  Sponsor, build, promote, build, build, build, build, okay … now we start interacting.

Then, as the card pool got bigger, it became easier and easier to spend more and more actions.  It wasn’t like those actions were increased participation in conflicts.  Those actions were often more infrastructure building.  It’s hard to choose one card as the worst card ever printed for B5 – too many options, but in terms of making action rounds as dumb as possible, Bogged Down has to rank up there.  The intention might have been noble – to force people to do important things, but the real result was to encourage people to do numerous trivial actions to prevent the inevitable Secret Strike that would guarantee a successful conflict if everyone else had passed.

Did B5 have a problem with too much administrative stuff outside of the action round?  I wouldn’t say so.  The game emphasized the action round as it should.  Possibly too easy to have a full hand of cards (20, 30), which slowed things down.  Probably too many ways to dick around for a while before doing important things.  And, often, lots of problems with conflicts being the focus of the game.

Wheel of Time

I enjoyed WoT a lot, so why don’t I ever try to argue for its greatness?  Because hardly any of the game involved interacting with your opponent.  Not to say that interaction never mattered.  Challenges could easily decide games depending upon deck matchups.  A basic Pattern Challenge contested might nuke enough resources to decide a game long before the Last Battle.  But, usually, the game was heavily oriented towards recruit, recruit, recruit, Last Battle.

It was particularly bad before the expansions added more brutal challenge cards.  Outrecruiting almost always won games.  The primary form of interaction was actually forced, random discard with Thom Merrilin, Liandrin Sedai, Sabotage (which I underplayed).  That’s not terribly fun, though Thom was the Light’s only hope.

Even after Invasion, Genocide, and the like got published, there were still many games where it was just recruit, recruit, recruit, Guarded by Fate not to die, see what happens in the Last Battle.

There wasn’t a lot of administrative nonsense.  However, there was a lot of time spent just on recruiting.  There was way, way too much time spent counting up symbols – an argument for turning WoT into an awesome electronic CCG.  Lots of card drawing and card searching.

Then, even if you did actually contest challenges, the system for determining who went to which challenges or wussed out was horribly clunky.  Possibly exciting in the rare cases it mattered, but just so clunky that playing with people you trusted was completely different from playing with strangers.

Magic: The Gathering

I think Magic “wins” this category in a couple of ways.  First, while there are ways to do things during upkeep or draw or end of turn, the game is focused heavily on the main phases and the combat subphase.  Second, Magic has lots of ability to interfere with what opponents are doing.  Counterspells might annoy me and be a general source of unfunnity … people like to have their cards do something … but they and things like instant speed creature elimination or responding to effects with card play or board effects all mean that the game has lots of ability to require players to be paying attention to what is going on.  Third, while I consider Magic’s draw one card a turn the primary reason it’s not as fun as it should be, limiting cards in hand does mean that each individual play has more relevance – compare and contrast with games where playing several cards might have no greater game meaning.

On the other hand, Magic does have interaction issues.  Creature combat may be far more important these days, but it’s historically been a minor part of constructed play.  My swarm of 2/2′s beat, your 5/5 flyer swings back, Bolt/Terror/Swords is more of an answer than Giant Growth.  Magic’s more open nature when it comes to card interactions also means far more combo decks than other CCGs, decks that just want to go off and you either can interfere or you can’t.  Can also be ground out by graveyard decks recursing creatures.  Can be hard locked or soft locked out of games a host of ways.  Armageddon or targeted land destruction to prevent being able to play cards, discard to destroy the hand, counterspell everything, whatever – all means games that suck.

In fact, as much as Magic should have better interaction due to its structure, it often has worse than other CCGs due to card effects.  Creature removal is far too easy, making any given creature unreliable.  Planeswalkers, which are awful for the game, become cardless ways that are hard to get rid (to the extent that anything in Magic is hard to get rid of) of that produce obnoxious, repeatable effects.  Equipment tries to solve the problem of creature enchantments being the suck, but they are a much more difficult way to interact with an opponent outside of environments where artifact removal is prevalent.

Ultimate Combat!

Why talk about Magic first?  Well, UC! is Magic.  UC! also has much less relevance to others.

UC! had far fewer effects to interfere with opponent card play, but it did have a lot of lockdown effects.  It had Time Walk.  It had a Time Walk variant.  It had Mindslaver.  It had Winter Orb (as a “sorcery”).  It had Armageddon.  It had lots of scary, scary things it could do to you and very little ability to stop those, mostly “Memory Lapse”, … in theory.

In practice, aggro plays are so strong that a lot of the control mechanisms just aren’t reliable enough.  One wonders whether it would be fair to compare UC! to a Magic format more like Legacy, even given the differences in curve and options, just because of the brutal nature of how decks won.

One thing I vastly prefer about UC! is that “creatures” are one-shots.  It may seem odd that I hate creatures in Magic as much as I do because of how easy they are to remove, but an undealt with creature just wins, often in a tedious fashion.  At least with UC!, you feel like you can recover permanentwise.  Though, I do find that Favorite Technique undermines this immensely.

UC! has about as many administrative needs as Magic, so nothing much there.  The combat subphase is far more important in UC! due to how few other ways there are to win and technique interaction is the norm rather than an accident.  Giant Growths are ubiquitous, which is a lot more interesting to me than Swords to Plowshares effects.

While I concede that proper Magic play requires a lot of thinking and that my numerous bad experiences often come down to poor planning (deck construction metagaming) or huge discrepancies in player skill, I’m quite the believer that proper play in UC! is a massive factor.  So, while the interaction may seem more limited and just generally less present, I find that I have to pay a lot of attention to the game state and making good decisions does get rewarded.

Tomb Raider

Sure, why not?  So, I didn’t play a lot of this game.  Who has?  I probably played my share through playtesting.

Two-player Tomb Raider never felt all that interactive.  Well, maybe starter versus starter was okay, though it wasn’t that hard for one player to get locked on one side of the board.  Multiplayer had a very different problem.

We often playtested multiplayer scenarios where you had to return home with your prize.  Not unexpectedly, it ran into the problem of people behind just waiting for someone to return and ambushing, much like you might see in RoboRally.

In addition, much of Tomb Raider had nothing to do with your opponent.  Getting stuff, overcoming board effects, deciding where to explore – the game was probably much better suited to solitaire play since decks designed to nuke your opposing adventurer(s) weren’t exactly fun for people who wanted to do things like tool up.  The balance of adventurer destruction just wasn’t really there.

Even worse was the intended interaction of card play obstacles.  A core mechanic of the game was supposed to be to throw obstacles in front of your opponent(s).  But, as with other games that had similar mechanics, like Shadowrun, obstacles didn’t do anything to help you and may just end up helping an opponent.  Nevermind that it was a major hassle to even be able to play an obstacle.  Again, I can think of how the game could work better as a solitaire game with there being an obstacle deck that randomly spit out additional obstacles to add to inherent ones on locations.

Just a strange entry in the history of CCGs.  I’m sure a far better game with much more appeal could have been created stealing a lot of elements from Tomb Raider.  Even reasonably likely such a game already exists as TR always reminded me of random dungeon games.

The Next Big Thing

So, if going to try to make some money off a new CCG/LCG or any sort of game, it may not seem like a key concern, but I would pay attention to just how much of the game is not designed around doing things that opponents are involved in.  Bookkeeping – bad.  Lots of plays that can’t be affected – bad.  Lots of phases to a turn where things must be addressed that don’t really engage the players – bad.

“Liveliness” in a game is tied to enjoyment.  I can think of boardgames that have similar problems, in fact very possibly a greater issue with boardgames, where there is lots of dead time for other players, but I think I’ve hit a reasonable word count limit.

Enjoy?

So, I was reading Starcitygames.com’s front page, free section.  (All the articles in this section are Magic related.)  One person’s post talked about what he enjoyed in Magic.  What prompted the thought for him, Matt Elias, is interesting in other ways since it was a game Matt played where his opponent played a land and a one-drop, Matt won on turn two, and his opponent asked him if he enjoyed playing decks like the one he was playing.  Matt goes on to explain that the answer was “yes” because he enjoys drawing lots of cards and not, assumedly, because he likes having games that don’t qualify as being an actual game.

When it comes to Magic, I also like drawing cards, though it’s probably not as important to me.  The reason why card drawing is important to me has more to do with how I believe Magic’s greatest problem is the draw one card a turn mechanic.

Anyway, I want to talk about more than Magic.  I want to think about what I enjoy most in the CCGs I have played or have been most invested in.  I’m going to try to go in order of what I’ve played the most.

Vampire: The Eternal Struggle

I’m sure I’ve spent more time playing this than anything else, perhaps as much time playing this as all other CCGs combined due to longevity of play and relative  consistency of play.  It’s also my largest CCG collection from a straight card quantity metric.

What do I enjoy most about V:TES?

Not deck construction.  I may be prolific, but I dislike many of my decks, certainly don’t have the same attachments as I’ve had with decks for other CCGs.  I don’t even consider deck construction all that important.

Not the source material.  I was once fond of Vampire: The Masquerade, back before I played much of it.  I have some connection to the source material, I guess.  Though, I’ve always had separate interests.  For instance, I actually enjoyed playing cards that require Dominate for many years whereas … to give an idea how little interest I had in Dominate in the RPG, my two main characters were a Tremere and a Ventrue – neither had any dots in Dominate.  I could go on about the differences, but there are so many examples that it would likely just be tedious.

Not the politics.  Funny thing is that politics was far less important in my early years of play – 1996 (when I started) to maybe 2002.  People were much more focused on either the player to the left or the right and doing what their decks did, which was often lots of bleeding.  My style of play, which is far more concerned with what the crazy people across the table are doing than with my natural partners to the left and right, developed in reaction to that.  Now, of course, I often lament how much table management is a consideration over having people get ousted.  I have a basic view that any table can be talked to victory, and that’s just annoying.  What interests me the most seems to be …

Card interactions?  I stress context.  For everything.  There is no meaning without context, an argument I remember making in a college philosophy course.  Card interactions, in and of themselves, probably don’t do it for me.  I think it’s because games, more so with some CCGs than with other CCGs or other games, have a feature to them besides just the numerical values of the components.  I’ll come back to this when I get to Babylon 5.  But, as a V:TES example, I find it hilarious to Shattering Blow someone’s Assault Rifle in constructed play.  It’s not so much the flavor, it’s that there’s a game context that Shattering Blow is a bad card and that the odds of being at close range against someone with an Assault Rifle are negligible, after all, the odds of even playing against someone with an Assault Rifle while running Shattering Blow are minute.  It’s these sorts of odd/surprising card interactions, where odd/surprising is determined within the context of how a game plays, that floats my boat.  Because they are so much more varied in CCGs than in other games is likely why I value CCGs so highly.

What about on a more tree level than forest level?

I enjoy having lots of minions, though I seem to forget this a lot.  I enjoy being successful at actions.  I enjoy surviving when survival seems implausible.  I enjoy guessing at what is in my opponents’ hands at any given time.  I enjoy discarding master cards to Pariah.  I enjoy lots of sound and fury signifying nothing – lots of cards played with little of consequence occurring, to an extent, anyway.  Far more than other CCGs, V:TES is the game where I can accomplish the least in results and still be enjoying playing.

Babylon 5

For a game that I didn’t start playing until the year after it came out (1997) and which I haven’t played in nearly a decade(?) at this point, I sure did play a lot once upon a time.  Once our group started playtesting, it was crazy how much we had to switch between living in the future and going back to what was already in print.

Far more so than V:TES for me, Babylon 5 was about the connection to the source material.  I didn’t start out a B5 fan.  I was far more interested in Deep Space 9 as the look of season one and the terrible acting of Sinclair were so offputting.  I only saw a couple of season one episodes and gave up on the show.  Then, I saw season two, and I became a fan.

Where V:TES is much more a “game” CCG, B5 was definitely a “genre” CCG.  You were required to play with main characters and numerous cards were recognizable, obviously virtually all of the character cards.  For me, this was an opportunity to mess with people’s expectations, a common theme throughout my gaming.  I think the first tournament I ever won was with a Centauri Diplomacy deck, pumping B5 influence.  That would have been the Fall of 1998, just a tad (3 sets) before Centauri Diplomacy was legit.  I played Minbari Intrigue before Shadows.  Londo got Vorlon Marks.  Sheridan, Shadow Marks.  I often played Centauri Military, in part to counteract obnoxious Narn war decks, but also because … well, there were a number of reasons, so maybe not a great example.

Some characters I liked better than others.  I kept trying to get a Walker Smith card created, including when I was working on the Anla’shok design team.  Again, the point is that B5 was a CCG that lived within the context of the flavor of the show.

Other things I enjoyed:  Non-player influence, especially B5 influence – Shadow and Vorlon influence could get annoying due to the major agenda, but even so, to me, the best part of the show was the Shadow War.  Marks – I loved me my marks, even Conspiracy Marks, even Doom Marks after they became far harder to convert to Destiny Marks and Seizing Advantage got rewritten.  I loved me my hyperspeed, especially hyperspeed military – unlike the V:TES players who virtually always see me screw around, my Spike-ness came through with trying to win major victories in 20 minutes with Conscription openings, even though it was incredibly unfun to play against.

Which brings up something deserving of its own paragraph.  Precedence CCGs allowed you to choose your opening hands.  This was huge, potentially large.  Choosing optimal opening hands was its own subgame.  I agonized about it more with Wheel of Time, but I spent more time (because I played more) on it with B5.  The Great Machine openings, Military Build-Up openings, Gambling Londo being all about not having an opening hand – I think it was a major fun factor to these games that one had so much control *and* so much variety with how to play the early game.  Of course, as B5′s early game was often anti-fun to play, it was likely essential to have something fun about it.  Also, this would be why any sort of aggro opening, like Conscription, was so much more fun – avoid the tedious building actions and taking entire turns just sponsoring or promoting someone.

Magic: The Gathering

I’m not so clear what the order should be after B5.  I think this is where Magic falls in how much I played a particular CCG, though with all of the playtesting we used to do for Precedence games, it’s hard to be sure how much Wheel of Time I actually played.

What do I enjoy about Magic?  This would seem to be yet another opening for me to rant about how frustrating it is that I don’t enjoy the game more, but that’s not the spirit of this post.

I enjoy building limited decks.  I hate building constructed decks for Magic as there are simply too many options.  Yes, the complaint that I’ve seen by others for various CCGs I’ve played where I built tons of decks of it being too hard to complete one deck without thinking of a bunch of others is exactly the problem I have with Magic constructed.  But, limited doesn’t have that issue.

Similarly, I enjoy drafting.  I don’t love it.  But, having a plan for what sort of limited deck to build is interesting.  Drafting Magic is a lot more interesting than drafting V:TES since Magic is designed to be drafted and may be the only good CCG for drafting.

I like burn.  I especially like burn that can go to the dome or nuke critters.  I very quickly developed a distaste for creatures given how easy it was for one to die to Terror, Lightning Bolt, Swords to Plowshares, or whatever.  On the other hand, Spitting Earth doesn’t kill your opponent.

I like multicolor cards and non-basic lands.  A lot of this might just be aesthetic appeal due to coloration and layout, but for some reason, I’ve always been attracted to lands that didn’t just tap for mana or that tapped for multiple colors of mana.  I think it’s because basic land is the most boring part of Magic.  Similarly, multicolor cards are rarer, thus more exotic.

I enjoy the ability to come out of nowhere for unexpected victory.  Pretty much the only thing I ever enjoy about a game of chess is when I make some unexpected sudden win move.  It’s a bit more likely in Magic.  I was playing Zak Dolan, that would be Magic’s first world champion, with sealed Tempest product when I had him shut down offensively with Humility, but I had to jump through a bunch of hoops with Capsize with buyback and pinging until I could get enough land in play with the last card in my deck to burn him out with Rolling Thunder for exactly how many life points he had left.  The game was dumb for him for quite a while as it looked like I’d just deck with the board choked with creatures, but I knew that the game was winnable for me.

I enjoy thinking about all of the various card combos.  Well, not all, I’m not that Johnny.  Some, with cards I think are cool.  And, that’s the thing.  Magic has so many cool cards.  In a more general sense, I enjoy thinking about deck archetypes and how to win the metagame.  I hate how Magic relies on hosers and I’m no fan of sideboards, but sideboards do enable vastly more metagame choices.

Magic, more than V:TES, where I don’t think it matters, more than Babylon 5, which is more about doing “what if” riffs on the show, is a CCG that appeals to my sense of efficiency and effectiveness.  Now, for two others.

Ultimate Combat!

I’ve probably played more Wheel of Time than Ultimate Combat!, but UC! is more important to me, and it makes sense to put it next to Magic, considering that it’s basically Magic, with the awesome flavor and variety of Magic replaced with fun game play.

I feel compelled to mention, yet again, that UC! was the first CCG I ever played.  My first game turned out to be frustrating after the fact, but it’s quite possible that failing to win that game after taking away 19 of my opponent’s 20 hit points in one turn motivated me to learn more about the game.

It’s an impossible sell.  For those who like UC!, it’s preaching to the converted.  For everyone else, can’t get past the art, the theme, and/or the card names.  Nevertheless, UC! is the most fun CCG to play.

Why?

Well, what makes games fun to play?

I’m fairly sure that the single most important thing to a game being enjoyable is closeness of result.  In other words, that every player had a good chance at winning the game.  A huge turnoff to me is when I feel like a game is unwinnable, including for an opponent.  Similarly, the sporting events I find most compelling are the ones where the winner barely wins.

This is why Magic is a vastly inferior game to UC!.  Sure, there are blowouts in UC!.  There are games where you can get a lock.  They are rare.  Or, at least, they are so much rarer than other games that I always think of UC! as the game where “if I don’t get you this turn, you win next turn”.

UC! is the CCG where games play fast, players get beat down hard, and both players are always in danger of losing.  It’s also a game where tight play and subtle moves matter.  Deciding whether to throw a Speed/Strength in defense may determine the game.  May deck one turn before putting an opponent away (decking is easy and has the same result as it does in Magic).

As for the limited variety that comes with only having two sets, I still believe that there are plenty of decks for me to build.  Sure, some day, the variety won’t be there not just because of the small card pool but because so many cards are functionally the same, but it’s sad that the game was never given a chance to be played out to that level.

Wheel of Time

A strange entry in that it was never particularly popular, I only had two regular opponents, and it didn’t last that long, but I was incredibly invested in the game.  Can I call myself a designer?  Maybe not.  I’m in the game credits as of the second expansion, but whether that’s because I helped enough with design or whether it was because I was doing things like art requests, I’m not so sure.

B5 introduced me to the awesomeness of choosing an opening hand for a CCG.  Wheel of Time was where I spent hours deciding on an opening hand for one deck.  While the dice mechanic was full of problems, some of which were fixed with the expansions, the probability calculations and permutations of results meant that a tremendous amount of analysis could be built just around the first few turns of the game.  This for a two-player game that often took us two hours.

I enjoyed the brokenness.  Typically, I get tired of brokenness quickly, but WoT was different in that it embraced brokenness to where it was the norm rather than the exception.  Okay, admittedly, a couple of card drawing cards got fixed as they were absurd, but the game was always a battle of broken card drawing, searching, and discard.  I really liked the different starting character possibilities.  Yes, this is just a subset of opening hand, but I became highly knowledgeable about the source material and the Forsaken options were particularly flavorful.

On a more general level, I can probably say that Wheel of Time was the one CCG I took seriously (most of the time) and really put my analytical skills and interest in efficiency/value to the test.  I can’t say I was a great player.  The one major I played in, I was screwed in the one game I lost because I was playing with a proxy, but I also didn’t feel like a great player during the event.  I was never top 10 in the world like I was with three other CCGs.  But, our playtesting was by far the best playtesting I’ve ever seen.  I still can picture sitting in Dave’s apartment, proving to ourselves that Forsaken.dec had no game against Maidens.  The level of analysis I read about with Magic is the level of analysis we were doing for WoT.

Tomb Raider

Yes, Tomb Raider.  What’s interesting here is that almost all of my Tomb Raider play was playtesting or demos.  I just really wasn’t that into the game.  So, why bother bringing it up?

I’ve defended Tomb Raider a lot.  I’m not an art guy when it comes to CCGs.  I appreciate great art, but it doesn’t determine whether I enjoy playing a game or not.  So, it’s hard for me to relate to people who will only get into a game that appeals visually, even if I did pass on checking out Magi-Nation because of aesthetics.  In terms of game play, Tomb Raider is not a strong CCG.  It’s not even that much of a CCG.  It’s really more of a boardgame with CCG elements.

Sure, I thought about opening hands with Tomb Raider.  My best recollection of one was running two copies of the “draw two cards” card.  And, I’m sure the CCG elements were important to having the game be something more than just a boardgame.  But, I think the main takeaway from my experiences with the CCG is that it could be a fun boardgame that could handle a range of players that, with a different genre (or much hotter Lara Croft art), could have been something as appealing as the HeroQuest boardgame, which I see similarities between.

Other?

I had a Netrunner collection once upon a time.  I could include Dragon Dice.  And, so forth.  But, really, this has gone on long enough and none of these were comparable to the above (except, maybe, Tomb Raider).

The Magic of CCGs

A trend started a few years back is to eschew the CCG model and go with a LCG model of fixed sets of cards for a given product.  Obviously, there was an economic reason for this.  The CCG industry didn’t just have a shakeout to where you no longer saw the ridiculous CCG of the Month launch situation but an environment where only a couple of handfuls of CCGs could even be considered surviving.

I’ve talked before about what a huge investment a CCG is … of time and thought.  I’d also add finding opponents for niche CCGs.  Certainly, the model of having regular releases of hundreds of new game components puts a great deal of pressure on the customer base.  Even putting aside any needs to remain competitive by acquiring either considerable cards for each release or very specific cards that everyone else would likely be interested in as well, a very real reality for most CCGs, there’s the ballooning of collections and mechanics/rules.

I’ve also mentioned how mechanics bloat ends up being a problem, the greatest being that the barrier of entry to new players keeps getting greater and greater over time.  But, even the constant and significant increase in how many cards someone owns becomes a downer.  I have boxes lying around of various CCGs that were never integrated into my collections’ organizations – Crusade for B5, Sword of Caine for V:TES, Visions for Magic are just some examples.

Without critical player mass and some selling point that keeps a player committed, it’s easy for someone to leave a CCG.  It may be easy to return, as Magic and V:TES often see, but if there’s nothing to return to because the playerbase crumbled away, then the game is essentially dead.

Not being a LCGer, I can’t say how the model in general or the marketing plan for specific games has panned out or will likely pan out.  While the perception that a game is no longer a treadmill may be strong enough to get someone to buy in to a LCG, how does the game not retain the longer term problems that CCGs have had?  New cards still means more things to remember, whether text or mechanics/rules, more things to store, more components to use for a game that someone may not have time for.

It’s not like you stop at just one set.  After all, that doesn’t make more money.  Dominion is a good example of how boardgame-cardgames can steal from the CCG model and keep putting out expansions.  The speed of those expansions as well as the importance of them is quite different, which is likely how they get away with it.  While my original Jyhad group didn’t allow expansions, believing there was sufficient variety already in the game and that expansions would only reduce the awesome, far more CCG players I’ve run across desperately want new cards on some sort of regular basis.

In this way, I think CCGs have “won” in a perception sense for their marketing strategy.  The CCG model is predicated on the idea that there must always be something new that shakes up the play environment, even though the play environment for CCGs often is far more diverse with premier sets or few expansions than people think, since the number of possible decks with 300 unique cards is effectively infinite.  Sure, some strategies will dominate and many cards are chaff, but there is often really interesting metagaming that can occur with limited options, and there’s always the option of playing different formats that limit what cards can be used or that have special rules that change the metagame.  For instance, with V:TES, if you never had anything past Sabbat, but you had storyline events like Eye of Hazimel, you wouldn’t need to ever print new sets.

If there’s one thing about Magic, from a marketing standpoint, that I would say it has annihilated most, possibly even all, of the competition at, it’s that the game is awesome for limited play (even taking into account my views on the funness of playing Magic).  If niche CCGs had anything even 10% as good as Magic for limited play, maybe they wouldn’t be niche and maybe they’d still be “alive”.

This is another area where I’m struggling to see the advantage of a LCG.  Sure, it’s possible to have some sort of limited format, even do some sort of randomization in special products to enable sealed/draft environments like those seen for CCGs, but this does kind of contradict the nature of LCGs.

So, what prompted my writing about this now?

I played some Legacy format Magic recently.  I could probably write a great deal more about this, but one of the main things that came away from my trying to build decks was that I have a large, disorganized, incomplete Magic collection.  A key card I couldn’t find was a common from a set I had cards from*, a card reprinted a decent number of times.  Do I feel bad about the limitations of my collection?  Sure, I was never competitive in constructed because there were virtually no tournament decks I could ever build.  But, I also find it interesting.  I find the completely imbalanced quantities of which sets I own tell a story of my participation in the game.

*  Back in the day, one of the local cons had a free sealed deck tournament.  Though it was like 8AM on a Monday, people were obviously going to show up for free Magic cards.  One year, it was Urza’s Saga, and I thought I was going to be done quickly to do stuff with people I knew.  In one of my few Magic successes, I played for like 9 hours, coming in second in the tournament, not only getting a couple of starters and some boosters for the sealed portion but a bit more as prizes.  I don’t know if I ever bought any Saga outside of that.

More important, at least to what I’m writing about today, is that I have some unopened product lying around that was meant to be used for Type P decks, and I opened a couple of boosters from Guildpact and, after playing, Dissension.  The idea was that I could not only get inspired for some additional Legacy decks but that newer cards are more powerful on average than older and maybe I’d crack some constructed worthy cards.

I hate opening boosters most of the time.  Why?  Because I buy enough for games I’m invested in to have everything and it’s just a matter of making sure I’m getting my fair share and cataloguing my quantities of chase cards to figure out what to trade for.  So, every pack is just an accounting exercise.  Good rare?  k, that’s what I’m looking for.  Bad rare?  Sucks to be me, hope the box gets better.

Magic isn’t like that, for me.  I’m never going to have everything.  There has never been a set that I bought enough of to have four-ofs of every card I care about.  This is what it’s supposed to be like for all CCGs.  The gambling element of whether you get good cards or bad cards is a huge part of the card crack addiction.

I might consider launching a CCG these days even with the huge hurdles of marketing and distribution because I think the CCG magic is still possible for a CCG besides the current crop that have proved themselves fit enough to survive.  An awesome limited environment is what I would focus on because the number of benefits limited provides a game from a marketing standpoint are just so great, including the lack of need for people to hop on a treadmill and invest in every set ever.  Of course, some CCG (Spoils?) took this approach and it didn’t work, so it’s not like this is the magic bullet of how to publish rather than perish.

It’s just amazingly frustrating to still enjoy opening Magic packs and thinking about how cool the cards are and how they could be used, when I don’t even want to play the game.  Why can’t other CCGs capture that magic?  (Part of it is that Magic actually has a really high coolness factor, what with awesome art, better new mechanics, etc.)

I’ve missed having a two-player CCG for quite some time, for those times when I didn’t want to care about table politics.  I’m now getting to the point of missing cracking packs to see what random cardboard I may never play with.  I have no idea how LCGs and boardgame-cardgames compete with that.  That they do suggests, yet again, that maybe I fall into a category of gamer too small to support the games that interest me.

Ramp-le

I don’t feel a compelling need to keep commenting on each week’s various activities, not even my experience yesterday playing an online LARP (LAORP?) which was, on balance, negative, even though it was predictable that the rewards wouldn’t make sense to me.

I was trying to think of five V:TES cards that hate me.  Not cards I necessarily hate but cards that don’t work when I play them and work well against me.  Major Boon was the inspiration for trying to think of a list, but I was struggling to think of other cards, even though I know they exist.

I might have continued to ponder such, but I decided to read Mark Rosewater’s Daily Magic column for Monday, 5/23 – http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/mm/144

Mana Action is all about how the cost system in Magic makes the game what it is.  I find this topic interesting in two ways.  First, as much as Mark defends the system as making the game better, I don’t agree with some of the details.  Second, the article does bring up an area of CCG play that is worthy of a lot more consideration.

Difference of Opinion

Taking each of his sections, let’s begin with #1.  Mark is saying that the cost system is a necessary point to making Magic a CCG.  I agree.  When we look at CCGs, we typically see some sort of costing system.  CCGs that don’t try to tie power to cost (I can’t think of one off the top of my head, but I recall ones that at least felt that way.  Wyvern?) come across as primitive and/or broken.

Moving on to #2.  Here is a quote of a section I have problems with:

Now you can start to see what the mana system is preventing. Magic is more fun if only one or two cards get cast a turn, especially in the early game. The mana system allows a slow buildup as players get to cast larger and more powerful spells. The mana system serves as a release valve that helps ensure that something happens each turn, but not too much.

While I believe that there should be a control on the flow of the game, what I find to be the largest problem in my Magic games is how little happens in many turns.  Sure, there are times when flurries of cards get played that twist the game in all sorts of directions.  And, yes, certain formats where you see more cards, have more exciting turns.  But, I am completely against the idea that only 1-2 cards should be played a turn in a CCG.  That’s far too dull.

The question, though, is how many cards should be played a turn?  What other CCG is better for card flow?

For whatever reason, maybe because it’s the game I playtested the most, I tend to think about how Babylon 5 does things first when these sorts of questions come up.  Babylon 5 can easily have too many actions, if not necessarily too many cards played, in a turn.  That was less true earlier in the game’s history when influence replenishment was less common and there wasn’t the ability to do the “I gain 20 Shadow Marks in one turn” deck or a lot of the other engine decks.  I like Event cards.  I like how they make games unpredictable.  But, many are sufficiently cheaply costed that it’s reasonable to say that too many can be played.  At least card play is more interesting than the supporting/opposing/attacking mechanic that takes up numerous actions.

Anyway, I’m getting away from card flow.  Babylon 5 clearly has a problem with hand size, in that there’s no maximum, so it’s easy to have 30+ cards in hand.  The card draw rate seems fine, but if you think about how expensive it is to put permanents into play and how easy it is to have a lot of permanents in play, there’s something off in the math of the game.  Perhaps the problem with permanents is how hard they can be to remove from the board.  Still, I often find that I have too many conflicts in hand or other cards that I never have any need to play.

For comparison, as a relative of Babylon 5′s, there is Wheel of Time.  Wheel of Time was not a great CCG.  I never would argue that it was.  But, I liked it.  What I didn’t like was random resource generation.  That the early game generation was subject to very high variance was particularly a problem, at least for the enjoyment of the game, even if better decisions could mitigate the pain of the randomness.  That the first expansion brought in starting characters who were far more consistent was huge.  Anyway, at first, resource generation was massively important because certain cards were card drawing engines and fed off of extra symbols; as well, the game was always exponential in growth, so small differences at the beginning meant large effects by the end.  However, after the first expansion, I’d say the game was more about how many cards you drew or searched out.  Playing cards as fast you could draw them became easier, in general.

If I were to complain about one thing in Magic, it wouldn’t be mana.  It would be card drawing.  Magic’s one card per turn is a lot of the reason you see so few cards played.  Wheel of Time is far ahead of Magic in having two cards per turn, though card drawing or searching is easily the most broken thing in Wheel of Time.  Getting back to costing, that you should generally be able to play your hand in Wheel of Time shows that the costing system is wrong.  Constraints are mostly about card draws and the inequality of strength of cards, which also supports that the costing system is off.

What of Vampire: The Eternal Struggle?  Is the card flow appropriate?  While getting it right for different decks can be tricky, this area likely being one of the most crucial to building better decks, I don’t find that the flow seems off.  Perhaps the restrictions on when cards can be played are so great that there’s really no fair comparison.  Constant replenishment of one’s hand is to me one of the better ways to do card drawing, but that in certain ways there’s no resource cost associated to many card plays means that the game is highly reliant on game mechanics not relevant to Magic.

As for Ultimate Combat!, which is only minimally different from Magic in basic structure, it has a very similar cost ramping system, with similar issues of how hard it is to correctly cost cards so that there’s a balance throughout the curve.

What I find amusing about reading #3 in his article is that his description of how things should be sounds okay for a CCG, great for a RPG, and is pretty much the opposite of how most Magic games turn out.  There’s rarely a sense of things building up.  Rather, some early play may be so much better than another that the disfavored side struggles to ever get back in the game.  Or, one card pretty much decides the game.  On the other hand, I don’t really see other CCGs capture the idea of fights getting more serious with interesting twists in what is happening.  V:TES is more about attrition of resources to where the “fights” become more serious as blood and pool get taken off the table.  WoT may build and build and build, but without any sort of meaningful removal, the game becomes one of whoever has a more optimal build with not a lot of endgame surprises.  Actually, this is a case where Ultimate Combat! is clearly superior to Magic.  Attacks get more brutal, yet the ability to win off the back of a single card is so much less.

Too many options, #4, is overblown with other games.  Sure, Babylon 5 has too many cards in hand and can easily put too many permanents into play that may be used.  But, it’s far better to be able to play multiple cards in a turn then not.  Of course, the two games have very different types of turns.  In B5, early game turns are generally simple and boring while everyone is building and the heart of the game is only a small number of turns after everyone has spent time building an infrastructure.  Now, that might have only been two turns early in the game’s history when going from 10 power to 20 power might have been two conflicts, some cheese, and 5 power off of an agenda.  Or, it might have been many more turns later in the game’s history when the ability to stop people from winning was greatly increased.  But, on average, the turns you cared about in B5 were a few epic ones of many plays, while a Magic game had more turns with fewer things happening, even if epic things happened on occasion.

An interesting question, which #4 really brings out, is:  how many cards should be played in a turn?

To me, the breakdown in the article shows a clear flaw in trying to have fun in Magic.  Late game, there shouldn’t be few cards.  Playing off the top is one of the most annoying features of Magic as it smacks of randomness.  While I can see limits, I would think a correlation between length of game and volume of cards played would be better than trying to have some sort of flat curve of card flow.

Many a CCG has around 7 cards in a hand.  If I were to put a number on about how many cards should see play in a meaty turn (midgame on), I’d probably say about six cards in a turn.  Some games have mechanics where you end up playing more than you should; I vaguely recall Buffy seeming to be like that, but I could be mistaken.  Obviously, some games have different card types that have very different frequencies.  B5 has conflicts, which are usually no more than one a turn.  In a B5 turn, I figure I’d want people to play 1 conflict, 2 permanents, 2-3 events, 1 aftermath … rather close to that 7 number, even though those numbers are highly variable and fall under different types of game restrictions.

Another way to look at it, still keeping in mind hand size, is how much of a hand should change from turn to turn.  Should you essentially have a new hand every turn?  In which case, that’s again about 7 cards a turn.  Or, should there be some holdover?  In V:TES, at least with my playstyle, there tends to be quite a bit of holdover from turn to turn.  I played a tournament round where I averaged half an hour a card played.  On the other hand, with V:TES, easily the most common horrible situation to be in is being handjammed.  Seven combat cards, for instance, tends to be a pretty awful hand that will get you ousted.

A typical CCG sees 60 card constructed decks.  If a game lasts 10 turns, 6 cards a turn would see running through the entire deck (ignoring the opening hand or saying that your initial draw is a “turn”).  What does this tell us?  Again, with Magic, it’s easy for a game to be decided in the first 20-30 cards.  That’s clearly not going through enough of one’s deck.  On the other hand, the norm with WoT of drawing your entire deck may not be optimal, either, as it seems like a good thing to have some inconsistency in what you draw over the course of a game to where maybe about 25% of one’s deck being undrawn sounds more right.  So, with an average of 5 cards a turn, with a 60 card deck, that means 9 turns is about how long the game should last.  What does this mean?  I don’t really know.  But, it seems fairly interesting to see how different CCGs fall on number of turns and percentage of deck remaining as a way to back into how many cards get played on average per turn.  Of course, that still leaves the question of variance in card flow.

I don’t find cutting down on the number of unique cards in a deck, #5, being all that meaningful.  First of all, there is an argument that card limits are a crutch, not only in V:TES, a game that didn’t design with them in mind, but in any CCG.  Magic didn’t originally have card limits and it could have remained without them by designing new cards without card limits in mind.  If you look at pritnear any CCG with card limits, you will find that people max out better cards and only run inferior cards because of card limits.  I find Magic decks that are something like x24 lands and nine x4′s to be pretty boring from a deckbuilding standpoint.  On the other hand, I do agree that having 40+ different cards in one’s decks is too much text that people have to process.  Note that Magic, and other CCGs, could easily reduce the number of unique cards by having lower deck size limits.

While I’m all in favor of variance, #6, I find that Magic has far too little variance in good things.  Redundancy is a big deal in Magic because you will only see a third to half of your deck much of the time.  Really, playing lands is not interesting.  The reason I play CCGs is to play cards, and I don’t consider basic resource generation to fall under “playing cards”.  Games would have a lot more interesting things going on if it were actually reasonable to play 6 cards turn after turn.  Meanwhile, the game has far too much variance in bad things.  Mark is trying to suggest that mana screw is a feature, not a bug.  Whatever.  Not being able to play what you draw because it’s too early … and late will never happen because you have already lost … is not in any way fun.  Rather than the typical game where even something like a 6-cost card may never get played because you are dead (or essentially dead) by the time it would come down, I want to see the tradeoff being playing at least one high cost card and other stuff going on or multiple lower cost cards that have significant impact turn after turn.

I don’t dispute that understanding how cards flow in CCGs requires skill, #7, so I’ll move on.

The Right Answer

I got somewhat into questions of how things could be or should be done to make for better, more fun CCGs.  Given the length of this post so far and how much there could be to say on this subject, I think I’ll try to do a part 2.  Of course, how motivated I’ll be to continue on with this topic I’m not so sure.

[Classic] Bannings, Errata, Oh My!

Some background on this post:  First of all, it’s weird to call something classic that I just posted.  I’m using the classic tag to denote comments elsewhere that are copied here.  In truth, I’ve pretty much said all of the things below at one time or another.  Then, this V:EKN.net post was in a thread on bannings vs. errata that arose due to there being a perceived lack of ongoing management of V:TES.

If you want to call Magic’s rotation system massive bannings, I guess no one can stop you, but it’s not particularly accurate and not terribly relevant to CCGs such as this one that don’t support set-restricted formats.

Here is a link for Magic’s banned lists, btw, Magic Banned Lists.

Sure, block constructed has banned cards, unlike Standard and Extended.  Sure, like V:TES, Vintage bans ante cards, and then goes crazy with the bannings by banning a card that creates subgames (and that can be used to create infinite subgames) and a card that requires throwing a card into the air.  Legacy is a format defined by cards being banned that are restricted in Vintage.

Anyway, not that I see much point in reiterating these sorts of comments since they get ignored all the time, but errata and banning are both tools that can be used to improve games.  To think that CCGs, some of the most complex competitive games in existence are somehow lacking in flaws is a view I can’t comprehend.  The reality is that most of the cards for a given CCG at a given time are essentially banned from competitive play due to being obviously inferior to other cards.  Sure, can always play a card as a joke, but a deck gets strictly better by not playing the card.  In V:TES, this isn’t as important since the multiplayer nature serves to mitigate strength and weakness, especially in V:TES unlike, say, Babylon 5, a CCG where there was no requirement to interact with opponents.

Banning a card may, for all intents and purposes, “unban” a lot more cards that weren’t worth playing because of the banned card.  That’s probably a good thing.

Is it desirable that cards exist that can’t be played?  Nope.  Is it desirable to have to remember that the text on a card isn’t how the card plays?  Nope.

It’s also not desirable to have cards that so warp the play environment that too many strategies are nonviable.  What is too many?  Judgment call.

It’s also not desirable for a CCG to have an unfun environment.  What is an unfun environment?  Judgment call.  How do CCG managers make these judgment calls?  Player feedback.  Hopefully, good feedback, not the tirades that a tiny minority of people make on forums that most players pay no attention to.

Want to argue that no such thing as an unfun environment exists in CCGs?  I’m sure thousands more would dispute such a belief.  Want to argue no such thing exists in V:TES?  Well, I can see that argument being a lot easier.  I would argue that there are plenty of unfun things about V:TES at this moment, from Imbued to Events to the increased hoser mentality to ubiquity of far too many cards printed in the game’s earliest days, but YMMV.

Yes, a CCG, especially a multiplayer one can deal with cards that are too powerful, cards that cripple strategies, cards that do incredibly stupid things.  Metagaming is prevalent.  That doesn’t mean the game is more fun because such cards exist.  Note that we are only talking about tournament play.  People who play in tournaments should be aware of banned lists, restricted lists, and card errata.  Sure, tournament players will typically adapt their casual games to tournament rules, but they don’t actually have to if they don’t want.

A Gnu CCG

I had a dream recently where I was playing a card game at a big table with a bunch of other players.  I had a strong hand that consisted of a forest, snow, polar bears (no gnus!!, though), and something I’ve forgotten (I think it was interior decorations) strategy.  This game, of course, doesn’t exist.  Or, if it does, hopefully, someone lets me know so that I have further proof that I’m psychic (but, then, so is everyone else, so it hardly matters).

It got me to thinking about how I would approach CCG design these days.  The more I thought about writing a post about how I’d step by step approach designing a CCG, the more I thought of two things:  one, I don’t know that I could design one step by step; two, there’s no point in designing one.

Why the latter?

Magic is the industry standard for mechanics even if other CCGs outsell it.  There are plenty of ways to do CCGs differently – see hundreds of CCGs that have been printed (and probably died).  But, many designs lack the elegance that Magic has.

For instance, one of the most defining elements to a particular CCG is one’s faction.  Whether race in B5, clan in V:TES, side in Star Wars, and on and on and on – factions provide structure.  What of Magic’s factions?  That would be colors.  Mark Rosewater often comments that the most important thing in Magic’s mechanics is the color pie.  Numerous games have identifiable factions and can expand the game with additional factions, providing important hooks for fans of the genre/source material, magic has its 5 colors (and some colorless “factions” like land and artifacts).

Why is the latter so much better?  Elegance.  Control over mechanics.  It’s not strictly better, of course, as I don’t find strong attachments to the colors (“I play green!”) in the same way that we see strong attachments to various CCGs’ more specific factions.

Elegant in that it’s both consistent and simple, with a lot of natural ways to build into greater complexity.  With just 5 colors, you get 10 two-color combinations, 10 three-color combinations.  Ultimate Combat!, with its 4 foundation types, loses a lot of variety in potential cards, yet still has a much more coherent structure around which to build a game.

On the flip side, games with factions often get out of control with the number of factions.  Though B5 limited its playable races, it still added Psi Corps, home factions, Drakh, corporate (well, would have if our set got published).  V:TES has over 30 clans.  Other games, such as VS, had to keep adding factions.  I even sort of forget how many allegiances Wheel of Time got up to.  Not only is this a headache for things like maintaining balance, but it’s a disaster when trying to sell sets.  With only five factions, you will build decks of every faction and every card is theoretically useful to you, but with some indeterminate/expanding number of factions, most players will get cards that are UOA (useless on arrival, ignoring that there’s such things as trading and selling singles).

As to controlling mechanics, one of the more frequent complaints of players of CCGs is that the distinctions between factions blur as more cards get made.  I heard this all of the time when I talked to Shadowfist players.  I get this a lot with V:TES even though my top suggestion is to open up a mechanic to everybody (and not just two discipline “factions” and an underpowered disciplineless card).  Naturally, the larger the number of factions, the less specialties each should have.  Overlap becomes inevitable as more and more cards see print.

So, Magic is it?  No, for the reason I often comment upon, even Friday when I had lunch with an old gaming buddy at work – Magic is not fun to play, not in comparison to other CCGs at any rate.  I’d so much rather play B5, which I often had terrible games of, Wheel of Time, which had virtually no playerbase and severe balance problems initially, and, of course, Ultimate Combat!  Hell, I’d probably rather play Dragon Dice.

Where does Magic go wrong?

I can bring up previous comments about strength of permanents and whatever, but I think I narrowed it down to one overwhelming factor, and it’s not lands/mana (which UC! also has).  Drawing one card a turn, while incredibly intuitive and quite elegant, is amazingly bad design for a CCG.  Drawing two cards a turn seems pretty bad as well, but it’s worlds better.  With such a low replenishment rate, card advantage simply becomes too important and playing off the top is too prevalent.  More than anything else, this is why Ultimate Combat! is so much more fun an experience (on average).

I have a hundred or so Type P Magic decks and I pull them out at times and goldfish them, though I don’t think about how I want to evolve them like I once did.  I tried playing some of them with a mechanic of refilling the hand every turn.  Of course, it was a problematic experience – Magic wasn’t designed to work that way, so the costing of cards would be way off.  Decks with more cheap cards would just overwhelm slower decks automatically.  Now that I think about it, maybe I should try playing them with a draw 2 mechanic to see how that would work.

So, yes, I think a much better CCG can be made than anything currently being played.  Unfortunately, I’d go with something akin to Magic’s five colors, something akin to Magic’s turn order, something akin to how a lot of Magic cards work (though very possibly without a land mechanic), etc.  I would just start with the concept that either the normal draw in a turn was refill, immediate replacement a la V:TES, or multidraw of some sort of fixed number, probably starting at 3 cards a turn and tuning from there.

This theoretical game fails on two obvious accounts.  The first is that it wouldn’t survive because people like Magic and there are simply not enough people who want to play a better version of Magic.  The second is that it would infringe upon intellectual property rights.

Sad.  What makes this more sad than just the fact that the attempt wouldn’t work because of economics and legal reasons is that there’s no chance that a sufficiently established CCG will reboot itself to fix fundamental problems.  Magic reboots itself constantly to fix short term problems, a major help for keeping it lively for the long term, but the fundamental flaw of drawing one card a turn just isn’t going to be addressed, nevermind that most CCGers wouldn’t even consider it important to be addressed.  For V:TES, sure, Nights of Reckoning could be banned, Dominate cards could get nerfed, bounce could be opened up to a far greater percentage of decks, etc., but there’s no feasible way to reboot the game as it invalidates so much effort that was put into the game over the years by existing players while offering nothing special to new players even if the game could be radically simplified to be more appealing to new players.

Sure, L5R rebooted a significant number of years down the line and other CCGs have done reboots, but such occurrences threaten a DOA game when they come back online.  I could see Magic, Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh! being able to survive a reboot, but where’s the impetus for it with those games?  When you are actually making a lot of money, are you going to remake your product?  For RPGs, which admittedly don’t make a lot of money, sure, as you need to have something new to sell always.  For CCGs, where a reboot eliminates all value of previous purchases, a painful sell.

Partial reboot?  Something more along the lines of Magic’s rotating formats?  I think the two are still fairly far apart.  Suppose, for instance, we partial reboot V:TES.  V:TES 21st Century has Brujah, Gangrel, Malkavians, Nosferatu, Toreador, Tremere, Ventrue and so forth with no Govern, no Conditioning, Deflection being disciplineless, etc.  You can still play any copies of the old game that got printed in the new; over time, the percentage will greatly increase.  Game expands to cover more clans/disciplines but not everything.  There’s never any sterile rule, scarce rule, events, Imbued, Red List/Trophy – the game contains mechanics to a much greater degree, has real timing rules, changes a bunch of wordings to make interactions clearer, rebalances cards.  In other words, it’s sort of a mass bannings/errata with some “you will eventually be able to play this, just not right now” thrown in to really irritate people.  In what way could this possibly sell to the numerous people who have kept the game alive by buying boxes of every expansion?  Even when many of the cards were reprints?  Who replaces those who leave?

Reach … in V:TES

The inspiration for this post comes from this article – http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtgcom/daily/mf37

The narrowest concept of reach in Magic is to be able to do the last few points of damage outside of creature combat.  Within Mike’s article, he does talk about reach a bit more broadly than that.

While V:TES has similarities to Magic in terms of putting “actors” into play that deal damage to an opponent, the card pools are quite different and the actors are far more sophisticated in V:TES.  There are some cards that are closer in concept if one were to try to port reach over as closely as possible from the one CCG to another:  Anarch Revolt, Antediluvian Awakening, Dragonbound, (most obviously) Personal Involvement, etc.

While some of those cards are commendable, in particular Antediluvian Awakening is underplayed in speed decks, I’m not all that enthralled by focusing entirely on such a narrow range of cards and such a limited concept.

Rather, I use the philosophy of reach fairly often when determining decklists these days to throw off expectations.  Though, to be fair, the way I use it is as old as people’s decks in 1994 in many ways.  But, let me speak of what I mean.  To me, reach in V:TES is the ability to get an extra few pool of damage out from one’s actions, especially with bleed actions.

Note that it isn’t the same as lunging.  Lunging is about devoting a concentrated effort during a prey’s apparent moment of vulnerability to attempt to put the prey out during the present turn.  Reach makes lunging easier, and the philosophy of doing those few points of extra damage are very much consistent with lunging, but I’m more focused on the details of an individual action.

Hey dude, isn’t Conditioning just a reach card and everyone has been doing this since day one?  The nature of CCGs is that there are expectations.  When you see Dominate, you can calculate fairly easily how many bleed of 5 or 6 will be coming.  The power of CCGs is that there are always unknowns, so it’s not the case that someone will always accurately predict the amount of damage someone will inflict.  What we are looking for with reach in V:TES is increasing that unknown, throwing off the “combat math” so to speak.

More in my mind, for the brokenness that is Dominate, is Command of the Beast.  Sure, if the deck is chock full of them, it tends to be as predictable as the expected Govern/Conditionings.  In truth, Dominate is not really where I’m concerned with the concept as Dominate’s ousting power is so unfair that it hardly matters whether you slip an extra point of damage in from a strategic standpoint (with the fun of Dominate being all about the tactical issues of maximizing damage).

So, what am I talking about when it comes to deckbuilding?  I had lent a Samedi Off Kilter deck for storyline use and a suggestion was taking out the one Computer Hacking and one Leverage, the former to make room for something more important and the latter because it lacked synergy with Off Kilter.  My response was very close if maybe not exactly, “But, that’s how you oust people.”  Or, maybe, it was, “But, how else do you oust people?”

Many of my decks actually have very little ousting power, light years less than the decks that run double digit Governs, et al.  Now, that isn’t just about reach, it’s about conservation of resources, well, and eschewing decks that just blow people off of tables, as that’s dull, especially when I’ve played so many bleed decks in the past.  Early on, after I adopted my more passive play style that relies far too much on lunging, I didn’t really need reach as I could just fire off some Changelings or whatever when someone left an opening; yes, for the day, it was reachy since people weren’t used to lunging.  But, anyway, over time, I see players being more cautious against me, expecting such antics.

The point of the casual (read:  low quantity) bleed pumps is to make the lunges just a bit deeper, to throw off the math a bit further.  Now, I do like tactical Anarch Revolt or whatever for similar reasons, but let’s get back to focusing on Computer Hacking and Leverage.  That these two cards can be played by any minion who can bleed, regardless as to how much bleed the minion has, is of exceeding importance.  In one major tournament, I only ousted one prey because I could Computer Hack with Mylan (aka Crowbait) to set up getting a couple of Conditionings through after expending my prey’s wakes.  That random Carlton, Repo Man, or Jake Washington might be the end of someone who, given another turn, would be able to hold out beyond my decks’ abilities.  Leverage is even more interesting since it starts a bit sneakier and can be followed up with more beats, say, a Monkey Wrench.

Of course, Power of One (Potence) is another way to go if the deck can support it and I contemplate (because I’m just that way) the Power of One into Monkey Wrench off of someone with copious amount of blood to burn.  A very different way to go, and one that has been obvious since its printing, is the reach possibilities with Force of Will.

Note that the concept I’m going for is really much about exceeding expectations.  There’s nothing tricksome about Force of Will when playing a Force of Will deck.  It’s the ones and twos of particular cards to put someone away or, at least, into a deeper hole that may be problematic.  A Force of Will for the kill is not the same as a Force of Will for the “reduce under double digit pool” play.

In one game, against the eventual tournament winner, we were down to the endgame and I had my opponent on the ropes; he survived due to a lot of wakes, some misplay on my part with On the Qui Vive on Carlton, and the fact that I had run out of Leverages in my deck even if Carlton could act on the relevant turns.  What was interesting was that my opponent, a far better player than I, was concerned with the possibility of my drawing Leverage having seen two come out earlier.

One question from this experience was whether the fear factor of reach had any benefits beyond the actual damage output effects.  Probably not, as I typically find that fear makes it harder to oust people not less so.  But, there’s a whole level of gaming where getting people to misplay, no matter the sort of misplay, is of interest.  Actually, I do think I’ve saved a grandprey or two due to representing a much greater threat than in fact was the case, which pales next to how many prey I’ve had wall up for no reason and throw the game to their prey, but whatever.

Nice Hat

I just took the multiple choice test for the current Magic designer intern exams.

http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/mm/114

Only 38 right, only maybe 2 I’d argue, so I guess it’s Sad Nature’s Loser* time for me.

* http://www.cracked.com/article_16054_6-endangered-species-that-arent-endangered-enough_p2.html

Anyway, I can’t bring up the issue that question 50 addresses enough when I talk about CCGs. Okay, spoiler for those who want to take the test, so stop reading long enough to do that.

While wasting spoiler space, I can talk about my weekend. Drove an hour, half of that on a single lane road I’ve never been on before, driving so fast I couldn’t see the turnouts in time to get out of the way of the person tailgating me, to get out to P-town for some 4cl V:TES. Two fortitude decks and Enkidu. Not being the type to play nothing but combat cards, I eventually get beaten down. Four player game sees swinginess as I go from just having Elimelech and no ability to afford a second dude, to having Luna, Zelios, and a Graverobbed Aleph after my prey spends down way too low, only to get ground out because I choke on bleed bounce. Saturday, drive about 45 minutes, supposed to play Conan and, maybe run Solomon Kane, ends up turning into just running SK. Sunday, drive about an hour (in the rain), rushing around to finalize my San Francisco storyline decks and then have awful games dominated by bleed decks, mostly packing huge quantities of bounce. I keep imagining some sort of interesting metagame will develop in storyline events, when really, I should never run less than two Archon Investigations in any deck.

So, CCG complexity. This cropped up in the SF storyline, unsurprisingly. One of the reasons design is hard is because of the quest for elegance. Many folks can design cards. But, one of the most common mistakes I’ve seen and had to suffer through with various CCGs where the cards made it to print is overly complicated text, usually because the CCGs I play are based on some material where the designer is trying to capture the flavor of something momentous – major character, unique item, major event, etc.

Take a look at Jyhad/V:TES cards. Yes, there are painful cards. Rotschreck was a disaster to understand. Then, there are cards that don’t have complex text, necessarily, but have complex interactions. But, take a look at Undead Strength, Enhanced Senses, Lost in Crowds, Boxed In, The Barrens, and on and on and on. The cards have straightforward text. Now, is Undead Strength elegant? I would tend to call it simple. The Barrens, on the other hand, is elegant. People use The Barrens wrong all of the time, so it’s clearly a skill card. It’s a terrible beginner’s card because newbs are more likely to think discarding is bad and just grossly undervalue the ability. In fact, my nemesis Sunday was a Dom/Obf deck that was pretty much just bleed, stealth, wake, bounce. It put The Barrens in play with the storyline rule for the Old Guard faction, and the player almost never used it, not even when I stole it. … maybe he had the goods all of the time.

Elegance is not about card simplicity, it’s about text simplicity. The goal should always be to only put in as much text as needed for the card to serve its purpose. This, of course, assumes the designers know what the purpose of the card is, but that’s a separate problem that CCGs tend to have.

Nor, is elegance about reducing text. Note that the use of keywords is not about reducing text. With Magic, yes, sometimes it occurs. But, if you read Rosewater’s articles enough, you know that the benefits of keywording abilities is not in text reduction – typically, Magic will explain what a keyword does on the card, increasing the amount of text. Keywords are to have consistency, to have something that you can reference, to have something you can easily modify, etc. In other words, they produce elegance as they make information to the players more digestible.

The downside of text complexity is that CCGs start complicated and grow exponentially more complicated as more cards are created and played. In my second round game Sunday, three of us lost 5 pool from Ancient Influence because we forgot that our Favor cards were tapped (can’t gain pool while they are tapped is a basic storyline special rule). The game state was not simple, the number of cards in play was large, and we were working under a rule we weren’t used to playing with.

What makes for a classic game? Chess – elegant (boring, but elegant). Go – elegant. Monopoly – not remotely elegant, but, then, it’s only argument for being classic is that it sells a lot and sees a lot of play (often incorrect play). Texas Hold’em is elegant; 5 card draw, deuces wild, not; 7 stud Baseball, not. Bridge – elegant. But, what about CCGs? Can Magic, for instance, ever be a classic game? Is Magic, overall, elegant?

Magic has such a major advantage over other CCGs because the basics of the game aren’t that complex, in fact fairly simple for a CCG. Whereas, the game becomes the most complex at its deepest levels. Now, a lot of that complexity is not from rules but from card text and large card pools. Though, the rules are actually extremely complex and pretty much incomprehensible before the 6th Edition cleanup of timing.

I can’t really see any CCG being elegant in a general sense, however, that just means that it’s essential to keep the complexity level under control. Chess can have Nightmare Chess added to it or be like Navia Dratp and people will still get it. I just gave up on trying to explain how the Babylon 5 CCG worked after around the Severed Dreams expansion. V:TES demoing? Can’t stand it. Pretty much at any point where the typical card has seven lines of text, the game has failed as a product marketable to the masses.

What’s so crazy about CCG design is that there are pretty much an infinite number of elegant cards. V:TES has no Celerity card that’s just maneuver at one level and dodge at another. Of course, there’s also a near infinite number of elegant cards that shouldn’t get made, whether for power reasons or because many variations on the same thing is deadly dull or because the effects simply aren’t needed. But, when talking about two nigh infinities, that still leaves no end to the number of elegant cards that could be made.

Not every card needs to be elegant. Some level of dense card text is not unreasonable. Spell of Life’s failure is not that it has a bunch of text and is complex in how it works; what makes it a failure is that it has draft text. Not because the draft text is broken, which it is, but because there was simply no reason to add draft text to a card that dense and that complicated. Most CCGs try to capture a specific flavor and sometimes the only way to do that well is to have some sort of unusual (therefore, probably complex) text.

Anyway, one can only hope that more designers and developers adopt a philosophy that card elegance matters. While the only CCG I play more than once in a blue moon is out of print, there’s still things like our storyline events where it would have been better if there was more editing of the storyline cards so that they weren’t overwhelming.

Miscellany

KublaCon is over.  There was more V:TES than usual as we played until late Saturday night.  Wackiest stuff was my bringing out Lithrac, Tashaing, Freaking, Computer Hacking, having my predator Hostile Takeover my one dude, paying 11 for him, as he bled with Democritus for 6, which I Archoned, leaving my predator down about 21 pool and me up, also kept the edge for like 4 straight turns, bring out Reg, who takes like 5 actions in a turn, including diablerizing a Preternatural Strengthed Homa, only to burn to Carlton.  Pentex on my axe’s first vamp finally got broken when I ousted my prey.

But, in general, I did very little.  Sure, we played 2.5 hours of my convention campaign of Solomon Kane, went better than normal.  Played some Type P Magic.  But, no role-playing.  Lots of sitting around doing nothing.  Lots of caring my manbag around for no reason. 

This all feeds into an actual topic – I got into a discussion with one of my SK players about how a lot of gamers stop doing scheduled events.  I’m even starting to get there with Gen Con, where Heroes of Rokugan is becoming my “I hang with people I know” thing instead of doing unusual stuff.  A theory he floated was that gamers go through a cycle where they don’t know other gamers, get to know them through events, hang with their friends, newbies backfill.  Gamers age.  I actually like getting some sleep at cons.  I’m more likely to get sick with lack of sleep as I was at DunDraCon and was starting to feel today.  I also have a been there, done that mental block to committing to a scheduled event that, in the past, I would have signed up for.  DDC, with its insipid signup errors and generally bad process, which has screwed me out of two conventions of gaming, has also left me with permanent mental scars.

Still, I see the pattern, with Gen Con being the collateral evidence.  I need to break this pattern, methinks.  SK is a lot of effort that I could instead spend time playing, and I’m tired of feeling like I have no real reason to be at some of these cons.

Technical Readout 3025 may very well be the best RPG supplement I’ve ever seen.  Why bring up a 1986 product I’ve owned since the ’80′s?  BattleTech has such a rich background/concept and mechanics that inspire.  I actually considered BattleTech at Kubla, a game I’ve played very little.

But, I was talking about this one product.  It’s so ludicrously better than other technical readouts.  But, it’s more than that.  First, I’m not much of an art guy, but the art is well suited to the concept, even if some of it is ripped off from RoboTech.  It’s also far better than other BattleTech products.  But, the heart of 3025 is that it tells stories.  Lots of stories.  The ‘mechs, et al, have stories.  The pilots have stories. 

BattleMech design in BattleTech is often moronic.  Nobody would ever choose A , B, or C when D exists.  I don’t own every supplement and I don’t think I own any of the novels, but 3025 does something I’ve only seen in BattleTechnology Magazine – justify stupidity.  The terrible, terrible designs have a story behind why they suck so bad.  Economics, politics, history, mistakes are all used.  There’s a verisimilitude to the product so lacking in not only other products for this game but for so many products (within the context that different genres have different levels of realism).

3025 sells me on the world, on what it’s offering up.  I’m into the idea of piloting a Blackjack to prove an underdog can win, even if the design is atrocious and pretty much unfixable.  In contrast, I was just telling someone how I’ve really lost interest in the Worlds of Darkness.  Too many problems with even the concept of the worlds working mixed with bad mechanics have left me cold.  As much as I don’t care to make any effort to do WW RPGs, even with all of the vast logic problems 3025 has and the undermining of the concept with other eras of play, I still am drawn in.

Now, everything is relative.  So, what’s wrong with other supplements?  Lot of times, it’s too little flavor.  Yes, I understand that numbers typically drive sales, but when I need something for my writing or for my GMing, it’s knowledge.  What was Santo Domingo like in 1607?  What are the rivers near Vera Cruz?  What are reasonable names for …?  Even books that are supposed to be flavorful are fails.  Emerald Empire is considered a superior L5R book, heavily in demand.  It’s very heavy on flavor, supposedly.  It’s very heavy on not having world info that I’m actually looking for, which just annoys me no end.  The books with new paths and advanced schools and other crunch generally have better info on the world.

I’m a big fan of GURPS books, not the game, which I don’t think I’ve ever actually played!  But, I’m constantly using the books for reference, whether Camelot, Aztecs, Russia, Blood Types, etc.

Anyway, 3025 tells stories, lots of stories, and good stories (even if they are a paragraph long).  That’s what RPing is all about – telling stories.  It’s not like other supplements aren’t great.  I just can’t think of any other product that tells a bunch of good stories.

Actually, it’s what other gaming is about, too, at least for me.  Why will I still play Magic?  Because some games have stories.  My main goblin deck – Wolf (I used a naming convention for Type P decks based on clans for other games, so when I ran out of BattleTech clans, I moved on to Vampire clans) – played Goblin Ringleader, got 4 for 0 card advantage, and lost when Wail of the Nim wrecked my board.

I realized recently that every fiction I did for HoR that had a mechanical effect made my characters worse.  The deadline is tomorrow, so I’m done with fics that can do anything mechanically.  I finished the last today.  Do I ask for a rank of Lore: Unicorn?  What do I do to screw over my character to keep my record intact?

It’s a failing of boardgames how bad they are for stories.  Sure, while the game is going on, there might be some epic drama, but afterwards, not so much.