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[poe]

What are your pet peeves, things you like, and general thoughts on trading card games? (Magic The Gathering, Hearthstone).

Personally I love the interaction of Magic, I like that things can be done during your opponents' turn, and I love that it caters to wildly different play styles.

I hate the obvious fact that balance is determined by how much money you put in.

[starsrift]

I think the biggest interest for me is the theoretically infinite nature of the ruleset and play elements, and then the challenge of plucking those elements that synergize well into the tightly confined structure of a deck to make a pseudorandom series of choices.

So, deckbuilding.

[wccrawford]

I hate the obvious fact that balance is determined by how much money you put in.

So design the monetization so that it isn't that way. 

Start them with a decent starter deck and an allowance of free "chips" to buy cards with.  Give them enough to buy an entire deck of replacement cards for free.  (Perhaps once they've finished the tutorial, or whatever.)  That eliminates the starter/free-player disadvantage.

Price the cards in the shop all at the same rate, and make them *all* available for purchase.  Nothing is locked away.

Sounds like all the money-making is gone, right?  Nope.  Players love making decks, and they hate destroying them.  That first deck may have set them on a level playing field, but it'll get boring.  They'll want more.  And to get more, they'll have to pay.  Don't make them re-buy existing cards to use in multiple decks, but make them buy cards they don't already have, or if they need more of the same card for the same deck. 

This won't monetize as well as the current systems, but it's a lot better for the user and provides a more level playing field for them. 

If you *really* wanted to level the field, you could let them trade in cards for other cards freely.  Only adding cards would cost money.  This would let them experiment freely, change when new cards came out, and generally not ever be at a disadvantage, except when it comes to time and effort.  They'd have to do a lot of futzing about to trade in cards every time they wanted to experiment or update their deck.  And if they had multiple decks they regularly played, it would be untenable.  And thus they'd pay for convenience.  And hats, or whatever visual gimmick you implement.  Perhaps custom play mats or dice or whatever other pieces other players would see while playing against them.

[Willy Elektrix]

Personally I love the interaction of Magic, I like that things can be done during your opponents' turn, and I love that it caters to wildly different play styles.

I imagine that the most daunting challenge of designing a customizable card game is balancing it. As you said, Magic allows players to succeed with vastly different strategies. The reason it works is that no single strategy is mechanically superior in all situations. The amount of testing that goes into making a card game that is so flexible, while still being approximately balanced is mind boggling.

Price the cards in the shop all at the same rate, and make them *all* available for purchase.  Nothing is locked away.

Sounds like all the money-making is gone, right?  Nope.  Players love making decks, and they hate destroying them.  That first deck may have set them on a level playing field, but it'll get boring.  They'll want more.  And to get more, they'll have to pay.  Don't make them re-buy existing cards to use in multiple decks, but make them buy cards they don't already have, or if they need more of the same card for the same deck.

This idea is great. I played Magic as a kid, but recently got back into it. What made me interested again is the fact that I could just order almost every card I want individually online, and most of them are not expensive. Therefore, it is now more about the strategy of deck building, and not about the luck of finding the good cards.

[poe]

I think the biggest interest for me is the theoretically infinite nature of the ruleset and play elements, and then the challenge of plucking those elements that synergize well into the tightly confined structure of a deck to make a pseudorandom series of choices.

So, deckbuilding.

Agreed!

So design the monetization so that it isn't that way. 

For sure that's the way to do it.

Start them with a decent starter deck and an allowance of free "chips" to buy cards with.  Give them enough to buy an entire deck of replacement cards for free.  (Perhaps once they've finished the tutorial, or whatever.)  That eliminates the starter/free-player disadvantage.

Price the cards in the shop all at the same rate, and make them *all* available for purchase.  Nothing is locked away.

Sounds like all the money-making is gone, right?  Nope.  Players love making decks, and they hate destroying them.  That first deck may have set them on a level playing field, but it'll get boring.  They'll want more.  And to get more, they'll have to pay.  Don't make them re-buy existing cards to use in multiple decks, but make them buy cards they don't already have, or if they need more of the same card for the same deck. 

This won't monetize as well as the current systems, but it's a lot better for the user and provides a more level playing field for them. 

If you *really* wanted to level the field, you could let them trade in cards for other cards freely.  Only adding cards would cost money.  This would let them experiment freely, change when new cards came out, and generally not ever be at a disadvantage, except when it comes to time and effort.  They'd have to do a lot of futzing about to trade in cards every time they wanted to experiment or update their deck.  And if they had multiple decks they regularly played, it would be untenable.  And thus they'd pay for convenience.  And hats, or whatever visual gimmick you implement.  Perhaps custom play mats or dice or whatever other pieces other players would see while playing against them.

Definitely a bunch of solid ideas here. I'm thinking perhaps a "crafting" system where you can take two cards of the same rarity and get one random card guaranteed at that rarity level. As opposed to being able to directly select cards they want. (Gotta make em work for it )

[valrus]

Another similar thing you could do to monetize is never sell cards, only have them given to you in various ways ("loot" for playing, crafting, gifts, freebies on special days, etc.), but have an inventory cap that players can pay to increase.  If cards are coming in at a regular pace, it will soon become hard to part with your favorites in order to get the new shiny, and that's an incentive for payment. 

Having a higher inventory cap wouldn't unbalance the game, though, so long as the inventory cap is higher than the number of cards you can have in a deck.  It's just a "packrat payment" for those who want to keep a bunch of cards aside just in case.

Definitely a bunch of solid ideas here. I'm thinking perhaps a "crafting" system where you can take two cards of the same rarity and get one random card guaranteed at that rarity level. As opposed to being able to directly select cards they want. (Gotta make em work for it )

It'd be cool to have full-on cardcrafting, where the player could choose the features of the card from a big set, and a balancing algorithm would work out the "cost" of that card in MP or whatever your limiting resource is.  Maybe even a little art program where they can decorate the card.

You could even have a marketplace where cardcrafters could sell their awesome creations, and split the proceeds 50/50 with the crafters  

[clinton_6eyedstudio]

The time investment and other upkeep costs of staying current with any one CCG is slowly pushing me away from the genre. That said, I still think M:TG is fabulous and feel glad that games like Hearthstone are opening up the genre to new audiences.

If you ever want to design a CCG that isn't so focused on the legendary card chase I would look to games like Android Netrunner and Summoner Wars. Summoner Wars is a game I keep coming back to because of its elegant design and how they present deckbuilding as an optional exercise in customization as opposed to a baseline requirement.

Lastly, having ways to properly manage my luck during play is also really important. Hearthstone has a dead-simple resource model as well as a flexible mulligan system.

[Elzy]

The thing that I have trouble with TCGs is the dedication you have to have to "your" TCG. There are so many cards that you need to be aware of to fully understand the game/opponent. Just watching Day[9] talk about Hearthstone makes my head spin.