I'm doing a bit of research into ways that different games control how soon you can play powerful cards within said game as research for my own that I'm attempting to develop. Here's what I've got so far from my own experiences but I'm looking for more raw data.
1. Magic uses a mana system. More powerful cards cost more mana to play. Mana ratios are part of deck building.
2. Yugioh uses levels. More powerful cards are higher level and usually require sacrifices to play (level 5-6=1 sacrifice level 7+ require 2, some higher levels require specific sacrifices of more)
3. Pokemon regulates the attacks more than the creatures themselves and uses the game's energy and the retreat cost idea. More powerful attacks cost more energy and if you want to pull the pokemon back you have to discard certain types of energy. Pokemon can't attack without energy and if they can't attack they're mostly just sitting ducks.
4. Warmetal Tyrant uses a timing mechanic that's like super summoning sickness. Cards have health that doesn't regenerate and a clock that ranges from 0-4 typically indicating how many of your turns before they can attack (It ticks down at the start of your turn). More powerful units have longer wait times and while they'll usually have high health they can be brought down before they have a chance to come online.
Those are the 4 ways I know of so far. Does anyone else have other examples of ways games handle the flow of play and encourage you to play a mix of weaker and more powerful cards?
Vampire: The Eternal Struggle tied the cost of cards to your life total. You could summon minions and play other cards by spending blood points. In turn, your minions could also spend their blood/life points to play cards and perform other actions.
WarCry split the game into two separate decks and two separate phases. During the Muster Phase each player received a predetermined amount of gold to play units and equipment from their Army deck. After both players had assembled an army, the Battle Phase commenced, with players switching over to their Action decks. Each unit had a certain number of tactics points. These points were used to play action cards, which had an associated tactics cost. A unit's tactics points refilled after each combat.
My Little Pony uses the combined power of your friends as a resource. Also, you get a number of action tokens each turn based on the highest score among all players. Each player starts the game with a free, preselected Mane Character who cannot be removed from the game. This card has a color and a number representing its power. Other cards require you to have certain colors, certain amounts of power in play, and certain amounts of action tokens. Power is reusable during a turn. Actions tokens are one-time use.
Thank you very much necrogenesis. WarCry goes on the list of things to check out since the two decks solution was something I was leaning toward based on the slowly developing flavor I've got. But more is always welcome. There are lots of things I can research here.
The simplest way is to force a mix with a predetermined or otherwise constrained distribution. Poker uses a 54 card deck, but with only 12 face cards and 2 jokers - you can't legally play with more. Netrunner uses a similar system to limit how many out-of-faction cards you can put in your deck (on top of a resource system). Doomtown actually uses poker values and suits as part of its deckbuilding rules (again, on top of a resource system). And beyond card games, in wargames like Warhammer, your army has a maximum total point value, so if you bring more high-point units, you have fewer units overall. And of course in chess you only get one queen (unless you promote a pawn).
A related mechanic is to limit the frequency at which more powerful cards can be played. Dungeons & Dragons does something similar with its magic system - a wizard of a certain level might be able to cast 2 3rd-level spells, 3 2nd-level spells, and 4 1st-level spells per day. Another approach is to limit the total number of actions that you can perform per turn, and have some cards cost more than one action. Netrunner does this too - sometimes you can do four things on your turn, sometimes you have to blow your entire turn doing one big thing.
In games where cards have a dual purpose - like being played as units or being discarded for a resource, say - you can have the cards that are more powerful one way be correspondingly less powerful another way. I recall one of the old Star Wars card games did this. All the badass Jedi had really low "fate values" or something.
AEG's defunct game Warlord had a clever little mechanic where you put your units in a pyramid-shaped formation with the front rank as the bottom. Higher-level units had to be played higher up on the pyramid, and move down to fight. You can easily imagine other ways to condition powerful cards on the current state of play. The possibilities are defined by the mechanics of the rest of the game - what card types are there? what properties do they have? how do the zones work? and so on.
Risk or uncertainty is a mechanic I haven't yet seen in a collectable card game but that is very popular in other kinds of games. One form of risk is pure chance - something like having to roll a number on a die to play a card, higher numbers for more powerful cards. But I'm not generally a fan of this mechanic. I'm really referring more towards risks involving the other players. In tons of board games, as diverse as Dominion and Illuminati, cards are played to a central location where any player can claim them. Perhaps through an auction system, perhaps just through opportunity costs, having more powerful cards out there means the risk that those cards will be used against you. A variant of this is simply to make stealing cards and resources a large part of the game system. In the very board-game-like computer game Solium Infernum, if you've got a big badass unit it might as well have a giant target on its head saying "steal me". And I know I said I haven't seen risk in a card game, but I lied - there's a lot of stealing in Netrunner, where very powerful cards might just net the runner more victory points. (Basically what I'm saying is study Netrunner very carefully, because that game is so incredibly rich.)
And a bad system that I only mention for the sake of completeness is to make more powerful cards physically rarer and more expensive. This was the balancing system Richard Garfield had in mind when he designed Black Lotus - he simply did not expect people to spend as much money on Magic as they did, so anticipated that seeing a Black Lotus in a game would naturally be an unusual and exciting occurrence.
The SW:CCG from Decipher (and many other Decipher products) used the card as a representation of the resources (Force). Moving cards from a resource pile to discard pile and recirculating them. The amount of Force is limited to the number of force icons printed on various Locations. The game is won when the opponent runs out of cards.
The LOTR TCG (also from Decipher) used a twilight pool to represent Free People vs Shadow. The Free People would play cards to add to the pool, while the Shadow player would be limited to playing cards and removing from the pool.
Thank you all so much. This data is really helpful. I'm cementing the flavor more since I'm better at doing top down design than bottom up but this is actually helping direct some of those thoughts.
So far the places for study that seem richest are
1. WarCry (the general story idea the game seems to be leaning toward right now is: Warring nobles hiring mercenary armies of different sorts) so the gold mechanic mentioned seems like it would be useful to understand.
2. Netrunner because the game seems REALLY deep and it's come up a lot as something to study just for general design (thank you blinking spirit because there's actually a lot of stuff there that I think might be interesting for a faction in the game if not the full scale mechanics)
3. Warlord's pyramid thing sounds kind of cool and is interesting to me because it plays into an idea I had about positioning of units being important in this game so that may prove useful as well.
I've never seen this done in a TCG, but restricting ratios of cards based on rarity, and making sure rarity depicts power level accurately, has always interested me. Basically, you could limit rares to 1 copy per deck, uncommons to 2, common to 4, or something similar. YGO kind of inadvertently does this with the limited list, though on a card by card basis. There was one format in YGO where I was very succsessful without loading my deck with like 8 one-ofs because I wanted more consistency with my deck's core engine. Everyone else thought I was crazy for not running X good card, but I had better results ignoring the random one-of power cards and focusing on the gameplan instead. I just really like the Chess-like feel of power cards being more restricted than pawns.
Ultimately balancing is always done one of two ways. The less common one is including some drawback so the total effect isn't as ridiculous. These are notoriously hard to balance. The more common method though is controlling when the cards can be played so that stronger cards can't be played before weaker cards have had a chance to do something.
This is primarily done by having "setup" cards and "power" cards. Magic has lands, as well as various cheap utility cards that can enable more powerful plays. Yugioh has powerful monsters that can only played by meeting certain conditions.
There is another thing to consider though. You need a faction system to make sure decks don't just play all the best cards. The more divided the factions, the more a game's decks rely on synergy. The more capable the various factions are at mixing, the more goodstuffy the decks will be. You can see this in magic with mana fixing. When manafixing is at its best you end up with generic goodstuff decks When manafixing is weak you see deck using synergy to beat the power cards other decks play. I consider striking a balance here a very important part of balancing a game on whole, rather than just cards.
Now, to answer your question more specifically.
Yugioh doesn't really use levels. It used to, and they are still in the game, but it's really just an artifact from when the game was made. The powerful cards usually come from the "extra deck;" a small pile of cards that have unique rules on how they are played. For example, an "xyz monster" is a card that can only be played by having two cards with the same level already in play. These unique monsters control the pacing of the game more than the level system.
Pokemon uses energy, but most decks are built around one setup pokemon and one power pokemon. The setup will be the starter, powering up you power pokemon (on the bench) for a few turns until it's powerful enough to start attacking.
The real pacing control is built more into the cards than the games usually. Magic is an exception to the rule really.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Lycanthropy Awareness Day.
Hoping for a cure, or at least an outbreak.
I've never seen this done in a TCG, but restricting ratios of cards based on rarity, and making sure rarity depicts power level accurately, has always interested me.
Actually Galactic Empires did that. Each card has something like a power value that determines how many cards of the same value you can include in your deck. So 1 power 10 card, 2 power 9 cards, 3 power 8 cards, and so on to 10 power 1 cards. So each deck must have variety of cards with different power values.
Guardians CCG limits the size of your armies. Creatures in an army are hidden under a Shield card. The total power of creatures under a Shield outside your home territories can not exceed 20. So there can be many variations of armies. You can have 20 little creatures with 1 power, or 1 big creature with 20 power, or anything in between.
I'm doing a bit of research into ways that different games control how soon you can play powerful cards within said game as research for my own that I'm attempting to develop. Here's what I've got so far from my own experiences but I'm looking for more raw data.
1. Magic uses a mana system. More powerful cards cost more mana to play. Mana ratios are part of deck building.
2. Yugioh uses levels. More powerful cards are higher level and usually require sacrifices to play (level 5-6=1 sacrifice level 7+ require 2, some higher levels require specific sacrifices of more)
3. Pokemon regulates the attacks more than the creatures themselves and uses the game's energy and the retreat cost idea. More powerful attacks cost more energy and if you want to pull the pokemon back you have to discard certain types of energy. Pokemon can't attack without energy and if they can't attack they're mostly just sitting ducks.
4. Warmetal Tyrant uses a timing mechanic that's like super summoning sickness. Cards have health that doesn't regenerate and a clock that ranges from 0-4 typically indicating how many of your turns before they can attack (It ticks down at the start of your turn). More powerful units have longer wait times and while they'll usually have high health they can be brought down before they have a chance to come online.
Those are the 4 ways I know of so far. Does anyone else have other examples of ways games handle the flow of play and encourage you to play a mix of weaker and more powerful cards?
WarCry split the game into two separate decks and two separate phases. During the Muster Phase each player received a predetermined amount of gold to play units and equipment from their Army deck. After both players had assembled an army, the Battle Phase commenced, with players switching over to their Action decks. Each unit had a certain number of tactics points. These points were used to play action cards, which had an associated tactics cost. A unit's tactics points refilled after each combat.
My Little Pony uses the combined power of your friends as a resource. Also, you get a number of action tokens each turn based on the highest score among all players. Each player starts the game with a free, preselected Mane Character who cannot be removed from the game. This card has a color and a number representing its power. Other cards require you to have certain colors, certain amounts of power in play, and certain amounts of action tokens. Power is reusable during a turn. Actions tokens are one-time use.
A related mechanic is to limit the frequency at which more powerful cards can be played. Dungeons & Dragons does something similar with its magic system - a wizard of a certain level might be able to cast 2 3rd-level spells, 3 2nd-level spells, and 4 1st-level spells per day. Another approach is to limit the total number of actions that you can perform per turn, and have some cards cost more than one action. Netrunner does this too - sometimes you can do four things on your turn, sometimes you have to blow your entire turn doing one big thing.
In games where cards have a dual purpose - like being played as units or being discarded for a resource, say - you can have the cards that are more powerful one way be correspondingly less powerful another way. I recall one of the old Star Wars card games did this. All the badass Jedi had really low "fate values" or something.
AEG's defunct game Warlord had a clever little mechanic where you put your units in a pyramid-shaped formation with the front rank as the bottom. Higher-level units had to be played higher up on the pyramid, and move down to fight. You can easily imagine other ways to condition powerful cards on the current state of play. The possibilities are defined by the mechanics of the rest of the game - what card types are there? what properties do they have? how do the zones work? and so on.
Risk or uncertainty is a mechanic I haven't yet seen in a collectable card game but that is very popular in other kinds of games. One form of risk is pure chance - something like having to roll a number on a die to play a card, higher numbers for more powerful cards. But I'm not generally a fan of this mechanic. I'm really referring more towards risks involving the other players. In tons of board games, as diverse as Dominion and Illuminati, cards are played to a central location where any player can claim them. Perhaps through an auction system, perhaps just through opportunity costs, having more powerful cards out there means the risk that those cards will be used against you. A variant of this is simply to make stealing cards and resources a large part of the game system. In the very board-game-like computer game Solium Infernum, if you've got a big badass unit it might as well have a giant target on its head saying "steal me". And I know I said I haven't seen risk in a card game, but I lied - there's a lot of stealing in Netrunner, where very powerful cards might just net the runner more victory points. (Basically what I'm saying is study Netrunner very carefully, because that game is so incredibly rich.)
And a bad system that I only mention for the sake of completeness is to make more powerful cards physically rarer and more expensive. This was the balancing system Richard Garfield had in mind when he designed Black Lotus - he simply did not expect people to spend as much money on Magic as they did, so anticipated that seeing a Black Lotus in a game would naturally be an unusual and exciting occurrence.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
The LOTR TCG (also from Decipher) used a twilight pool to represent Free People vs Shadow. The Free People would play cards to add to the pool, while the Shadow player would be limited to playing cards and removing from the pool.
So far the places for study that seem richest are
1. WarCry (the general story idea the game seems to be leaning toward right now is: Warring nobles hiring mercenary armies of different sorts) so the gold mechanic mentioned seems like it would be useful to understand.
2. Netrunner because the game seems REALLY deep and it's come up a lot as something to study just for general design (thank you blinking spirit because there's actually a lot of stuff there that I think might be interesting for a faction in the game if not the full scale mechanics)
3. Warlord's pyramid thing sounds kind of cool and is interesting to me because it plays into an idea I had about positioning of units being important in this game so that may prove useful as well.
Thanks a lot folks. Keep it coming please.
This is primarily done by having "setup" cards and "power" cards. Magic has lands, as well as various cheap utility cards that can enable more powerful plays. Yugioh has powerful monsters that can only played by meeting certain conditions.
There is another thing to consider though. You need a faction system to make sure decks don't just play all the best cards. The more divided the factions, the more a game's decks rely on synergy. The more capable the various factions are at mixing, the more goodstuffy the decks will be. You can see this in magic with mana fixing. When manafixing is at its best you end up with generic goodstuff decks When manafixing is weak you see deck using synergy to beat the power cards other decks play. I consider striking a balance here a very important part of balancing a game on whole, rather than just cards.
Now, to answer your question more specifically.
Yugioh doesn't really use levels. It used to, and they are still in the game, but it's really just an artifact from when the game was made. The powerful cards usually come from the "extra deck;" a small pile of cards that have unique rules on how they are played. For example, an "xyz monster" is a card that can only be played by having two cards with the same level already in play. These unique monsters control the pacing of the game more than the level system.
Pokemon uses energy, but most decks are built around one setup pokemon and one power pokemon. The setup will be the starter, powering up you power pokemon (on the bench) for a few turns until it's powerful enough to start attacking.
The real pacing control is built more into the cards than the games usually. Magic is an exception to the rule really.
Hoping for a cure, or at least an outbreak.
Level 1 Judge (yay)
Actually Galactic Empires did that. Each card has something like a power value that determines how many cards of the same value you can include in your deck. So 1 power 10 card, 2 power 9 cards, 3 power 8 cards, and so on to 10 power 1 cards. So each deck must have variety of cards with different power values.
Guardians CCG limits the size of your armies. Creatures in an army are hidden under a Shield card. The total power of creatures under a Shield outside your home territories can not exceed 20. So there can be many variations of armies. You can have 20 little creatures with 1 power, or 1 big creature with 20 power, or anything in between.
........................