Trading Card Game, entire deck in hand.

News & General Discussion
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I am actually thinking about building an online TCG (offline at first to check everything i need), something looking like magic_the_gathering / yugioh / hearthstone. But as i’m not a true fan of RNG, I thought maybe i could make one where players don’t have to draw cards but can directly choose any card from their deck and play it .

First problem is, how can players easily get the wanted card when their hand can contain something like 40 to 120 cards?
I thought about something like a binder with multiple pages, along with filters to display spell cards / creature cards etc, also along with sets of cards created by players to display cards they usually play together.
Does anyone have some ideas i could use to overcome this problem?

Second issue is about keeping balance.
What is the best way to ensure players won’t just use all their most powerfull cards during the first turn of the game and end it instantly?
I was thinking about an hearthstone mana feature, where every card has a mana cost, and every player has a mana pool with a number of mana equal to the number of turns played so far.
What other nice options should i think about?

About the maximum number of cards a player can have in his deck, i thought i could make avery card have a level, and a maximum level per Deck. (Example, if the max level is 180, a player can have 60 lv3 cards in his deck, or 90 lv2 card, a mix of the two, etc…)

About balance in between cards, i was thinking about a system of level too. For example, a spell card that destroys a monster card on the field mustn’t be ale to destroy a monster that is too high level.

Also, as there would be new cards every new updates, i’m scared that after a while, some players might for example create a deck containing only cards that destroys opponent’s cards, making the whole game annoying. Should I ensure that players can’t pick for example “More than 7 cards having an equivalent effect” ?
Must I have those max by categories have a fixed max? Use their level to have each category have a max of 30 levels? Should each category have a different max level?

But with cards having a mana cost + a board level + an in deck level + a category (maybe a sublevel for that category), along with attack and defense and summonning conditions, i’m a bit worried there would be too much infos to remember about every card, making the learning curve of the game really sharp.

I know that actually, all of these kind of are choices i have to make, but i’d like to have opinions. As TCG players, is there anything in there that seems tedious ? Is there any feature / limitations you think I should think of ?

Thanks a lot for reading me, I hope everything I said was clear enough.

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To be honest I think this is a bad idea for a number of reasons. Generally you’ll want to limit the number of possible choices a player can take on their turn. When you have 50 cards to choose from on your turn, that makes the choices harder and can slow down play in frustrating ways because people will take longer taking their turn. Also arn’t TCG/CCG games random by nature, because your opponent might just have a better deck than you? Unless all players have the same cards in their deck, I’d say randomness is basically required, because otherwise they’ll build the optimal deck and then play the optimal card sequence every time and no one has any fun anymore.
If you really hate RNG, which I can understand, then I’d rather consider letting players presort their deck, so that it becomes a sort of mind-game where they try to anticipate the strategy of the other player and plan ahead so that they get the optimal cards for that each time. That can however still lead to people always doing the same thing, which kills replayability. You might come to the conclusion in the end, that some randomness is needed. At least in a way of having random starting situations for each match so that they don’t all play out the same way.
And ultimately there most likely are more people who like randomness in games because they can defer their losses to bad luck. When you lose at chess you can’t blame luck, the other player was just better. Not everyone can deal well with that.

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Have you paper prototyped the game yet? Google “free card game templates” to find a template that you can use to print cards, or just use hand-written index cards. While an electronic version might make it faster to sift through an entire deck of cards, you’ll still gain a lot of insight from playing it on paper, observing how players manage their decks, and listening to their feedback and ideas. We could go back and forth with suspicions about how it might slow down play, address the problems of RNG, etc., but there’s nothing like testing it for real.

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Great suggestion Tony. I’d bet very few if any tcg’s have been successfully created without paper prototyping first.

I’m not a tcg player however my son does the Pokemon thing every once in a while. Would Pokemon be a good reference? It doesn’t have a rng element does it?

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Check out the Mage Wars Arena card game by Arcane Wonders, it might give you some ideas. It is comparative the game you are proposing in that each player has a “spell book” with their entire deck and can choose any of them during their turn. I have played it and it is pretty fun.

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Other games types you could investigate are the deck building games. You buy cards as part of your turn, and add them to your graveyard. When you’ve gone through your deck, you shuffle your graveyard and it becomes your deck again. You could modify this to remove the shuffle, so that it becomes important in what order you buy and play cards, since you’re setting the order for your deck further in the game.

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@theANMATOR2b @TonyLi : Pokemon like almost all card games have rng. You choose 60 cards before the game starts, and once it starts, you draw 7 cards, then at the beginning of each turn,you draw one more card. On top of that, pokemon has a lot of cards that makes you flip a coin to draw one more card / let you pick the card of your choice from your deck, it’s the TCG that has the “biggest” RNG, the game is won or lost since the very first turn almost without any way to comeback.

I’ve already attempted the all card in your hand style of game using Magic_the_gathering cards, each player has a binder containing 10 sheets, with 9 cards per sheet. With physical cards, turns are longer because players sometimes have hard time finding the card they want.
I’m actually looking for the best ways to search in a set of cards. For example, search systems are now able to find the item you are looking for in a database just when you type the two first letters. I could use that, but typing stuff can be tedious.

I didn’t create a paper prototype for this game yet, but i created some for earlier TCG games I made as a hobbyist. Right now i’m not even in the paper prototyping stage, i first need to create some “rules of thumb” helping me to create a big enough set of cards with different strength and weaknesses to be able to play it with friends for en entire week.
(90% of the card template is already created, i can create the card database through unity and use custom editor code to print them).

@Martin_H : About players using the optimal card sequence, it’s actually “the thing”. The cards will be divided in archetypes (“Magicians, Dragons, Warriors, Angels, Demons”), and it ends up like a paper rock scisors game. There will be also Sub-archétypes (“Magidragons, Angels-warriors, Demon-magicians and stuffs ending like Magidragons-Warrior-Angel-Archdemon”), as players can have access to their entire deck, they will have to chose their favourite archétype, and also other cards from other archétypes to be ready to flip the table if the game doesn’t go as planned. It ends up more like a Poker game where you try to force your opponent to show to you what he has inside his own deck.
As long as you don’t know what the opponent deck is, you don’t know the optimal sequence that will destroy him.

(All the cards will have conditionnal effects, some cards can only played during your own turn, some only if your opponent plays a card during your own turn, etc etc, lowering a lot the number of card you can play at the same time).
But the real fact is, player will take ages to choose what card to put inside their decks, because every possible moove has to be thought before the game begins. This is something hardcore TCG players already do, but beginners will certainly just hate that if they don’t have help.
Also, it makes me think that cards must have some visual indicators helping players to understand what the card does at first sight. This will help intermediate players, but won’t help beginners.
//Of course i won’t design icons now, but having an idea about how the final game should look like helps a lot even for designing the very beginning of the game in my opinion.

In a game where you have access to all cards, i guess turns will last longer, but the overall number of turn in a game session will be lower.

About RNG, you made me think about something. Just like in texas hold’em poker, i could add some cards randomly on the field when the game starts. Players might have to modify the way they play based on those cards. But that kind of things make it harder for me to analyze games, i can’t just watch which sets of cards win most of the time because the RNG could be the cause of it.

@quyrean I just looked at Mage War Arena and it seems my idea looks like some of it. Have you already played it? What was fun about it? What wasn’t fun ?

@Habitablaba Do you have an example of a deck building game I can look into?

Thank you a lot for the Inputs !

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That’s a smart first step, to try out the basic concept with Magic cards. If the gameplay is fun except for the long delay finding cards, then you can continue paper-prototyping search/index techniques to speed up finding cards.

For example, get a bunch of post-it tabs in different colors to represent different categories such as Magicians, Dragons, Warriors, etc. Affix tabs to the top of each sheet to indicate what kind of cards the sheet contains. Get a different set of colors to represent action types, such as Attack, Defense, etc., and affix these to the side of each sheet.

Then, if you’re looking for a Dragon archetype defense card, you can jump straight to the sheets that have those tabs. This lets you quickly approximate search filters without having to take the time to program them in an electronic version. If those tab categories don’t play well, you can easily try others, such as dropping the Attack/Defense/etc. tabs and replacing them with, say, power level tabs to indicate Low, Medium, and High-powered cards.

Once you’ve used paper prototyping to identify good filter categories, you can implement them in an electronic prototype. Maybe you’d have toggle buttons for archetypes and action types. To filter your deck by Dragon + defense cards, you’d simply click the Dragon button and the Defense button.

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The problem with is that people quickly find the optimum decks and many if not most games will be over before the begin (Sky Dragon deck always beats Mana Tower deck, so why play it out, etc).

A small to medium amount of RNG is what makes the games interesting and exciting. Although I think many games (e.g. Hearhtstone*) take it a bit too far.

I expect the only way to balance this will be to seriously reduce the power level of cards and restrict any kind of combo effects that can spiral out of control. Again the problem here is these type of effects are what make card games fun.

I have a card game prototype I’ve built that significantly reduces RNG by increasing the play space, and using a chaining mechanic which means moves have to be planned out, but even the presence of 16 cards at a time has led to predictable gameplay once a high skill level was achieved. It seemed really fun and exciting at first, but once we really knew how to play this disappeared.

( Chains of Command Windows, Mac, Web, iOS, Android game - IndieDB )

Balancing these kinds of games whilst keeping them fun is really hard, I’d suggest releasing a more standard game and getting deep experience before committing to something that is likely much harder to balance.

  • Still probably my favourite online CCG.
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There are loads of deck building games out there, and a few different systems within that category. The one that has been the most accessible in my experience has been the Harry Potter game, Hogwarts Battle
You might also check out Marvel’s Legendary, and its offshoots, Resident Evil, and Ascension

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@JohnnyA Actually you’re right, the project is a dead end. Actually even if i end up with a perfect balance forcing players to chose their favourite way of playing, they will end up knowing exactly (based on what deck the opponent plays) if they will win or loose. They will be like robots with 50% chances of winning not because of their skill but because of the oppopent chosen randomly, sometimes they will encounter someone they should lose to and win, feel good for a minute, and go back to being a robot.

That type of game could be a nice idea for some “hardcore gamers”, but at best, they will play it for one or two months ,climb the ladder by being better than others until they end up to their division, feel proud about how complexe that was, and drop it . Even if i imagine the game “as a marketing success” (a thing i’m not able to craft), only some twitch channels with poeple that don’t even like the game would broadcast it trying to make it feel like something amazing to those watching it would play it for more than a few months.

That kind of results (which is the best result i can imagine to it and include lot of luck to be acheived) isn’t even worth the work needed.

About chain effects, the tip was to make chain effects “hard to do” with very low income, but still a bit more income than not doing it. (Example with a monster needing an hard chain to be summoned, but that as only one more atk point than an usual monster). A player that masters chains would win more often, but a player that doesn’t master them wouldn’t see a really “incredible difference” in what happens in game.

Thing is, that type of gameplay is meant to be tournament targetted, but wouldn’t even be that fun during tournaments.

I don’t want to create a standard card game (i can’t even imagine catch up all the hard work that have been put into other well known card games), I’ll just try to find another game concept that pleases me.

Thanks a lot.

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