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  • Rants & Raves
  • Collectible Card Crack: How to Scratch that Itch Without Going Broke

Collectible Card Crack: How to Scratch that Itch Without Going Broke

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There Will Be Games
CCG


























I have a nearly uncontrollable desire to play CCGs.  Since that first sense of wonder when learned Magic: the Gathering 15 years ago, I have always felt drawn to these games.  I certainly don't miss the financial and chronological investment playing CCGs competitively requires, but there are still a lot of gaming experiences CCGs provided that are tough to get out of board games or RPGs.  I played Magic, Rage, Spellfire, Dragon Dice and Battletech in high school, in college I moved on to L5R, Shadowfist, A Game of Thrones, and lots of Raw Deal CCG.  When college was over, I quit the gamer crack cold turkey and tried to move towards board games since they are cheaper and less time consuming, but I still find myself drawn to the deckbuilding and variety of CCGs

So what is it about CCGs that makes them so appealing?  What is the CCG itch that is hard to scratch with boardgames?  There are several things about CCGs that make them irresistible to a certain large subsection of the gaming community.

First
there are the many advantages of pregame deckbuilding with thousands of different cards.  Deckbuilding is the element that so many other non-ccg games have failed to duplicate.  Deckbuilding is not only desirable because it is deep and rewarding strategically, but because it gives you something to do when you have no opponents.  No board game has done this yet, short of Blue Moon and similar stuff, despite what Dominion fanboys may claim.  Deckbuilding also leaves the player with a ton of creative license.  Half the fun of CCGs wasn't creating the killer deck, or the most efficient version of a popular deck, it was creating the deck that no one believed could work or figuring out some new nifty combo that no one else had thought of.  The creativity involved was really great, along with the more scientific nuts and bolts of deckbuilding like land/spell ratio, or whatever version your CCG of choice used. 

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Plus, the decks are based around a faction, or a character, or a clan, or types of magic, or at least a strategic theme of some sort.  This provides fantastic variety, compounded by the thousands of cards, making deckbuilding an almost infinitely repeatable exercise.  You could sit and tweak on decks for hours, even days, trying to get something whacky to work right, or preparing your killer deck to deal with the rock to its scissors, or whatever.  The delight you got playing with a deck that you so lovingly crafted was fantastic.  Although deckbuilding is one of the biggest draws of CCGs, even beyond deckbuilding, CCGs have a lot going for them. 


Second, Replayability
.
  Behind deckbuilding, this is the second biggest thing CCGs have going for them.  On top of the variety provided by the number of cards, different factions, random card draws, and individual deckbuilding, CCGs are typically highly interactive games where you spend the whole game interacting with your opponent.  Many are combat based, or involve competing for the same extremely limited resources.  No two games will be alike, even if you stacked your deck each time, because of interaction with your opponent.  Plus you have the variety of different decks, cards, factions, etc. to spice things up.  This interactivity and variety makes CCGs eminently replayable.  Just take a look at the "plays" statistics for M:TG on TOS.

Third, the themes
are usually highly integrated in the mechanisms and are often exciting fantasy or sci-fi type of stuff.  There has never been Sucking up to the Prince: CCG or Build Castle walls to get VPS: the CCG, and for good reason!  The themes of these games run the gamut from computer hacking to wizard spells to pro wrestling and everything in between.  The art is usually good or great.  In the world of weakly themed board games, CCGs would rank right up there with your typical FFG big box release- oozing theme through the art, mechanisms, and flavor.

CCG

Of course, there are lots of bad things about CCGs too.  Paying $3.50 a pack without knowing what you will get is the primary issue.  Time investment in rules, errata, card interactions, and deckbuilding is another.  The looming possibility that the game you have invested so heavily in may go out of business is always present.  Money is the obvious downside, but time is another big issue.  Many CCGs started out simple; they are easy to learn or pick up.  Problem is, as expansions are released, new mechanisms are inevitably added, making the game unwieldy and difficult to teach new players.  WWE Raw Deal CCG is a great example of this.  At its inception, it was an incredibly simple and fun card game.  Pick a wrestler, build a deck, pummel each other, just like wrestling.  As the years (and expansions) went by, they added pre-match cards, mid match cards, managers, pay per views, belts, side decks galore, and many unthematic rules which had nothing to do with the wrestling the game was based on.  All of this extraneous garbage eventually turned the game from a teach it in 5 minutes type of game, where anyone could sit and play, to a very complex pile of crap where even the most experienced players couldn't teach you the game in less than 20 minutes without stripping out half the mechanisms.  It is fairly common for CCGs to have a time investment prerequisite that makes it tough to play them casually or occasionally.   


Despite these various problems, the combination of varied strategic deckbuilding, highly interactive replayable tactical gameplay, and great theme draw me back to CCGs time and time again.  Unfortunately, I have responsibilities now, so dropping $500 bucks on boosters to get a full playset three times a year when a new set comes out doesn't sound too appealing.  What is an addict to do?  What are the potential solutions to scratch this particular gaming itch?


1.  Dominion-
the inspiration for this article.  When Dominion came out and the hype mongering sheep on T.O.S. were saying "its just like magic" I was intrigued.  Then I played it and realized that although it involved a type of deckbuilding, it wasn't the same as a CCG and lacked the variety and interesting tactical decisions of a CCG.  The cards in dominion are very limited (10 of 25 every game), the interaction is even more limited, and the deckbuilding is just not at all like the large scale strategic deck building you see in a CCG.  Dominion is a solid game, but it doesn't scratch the CCG itch at all.  If anything, it makes that CCG itch worse, like smelling a food you've been craving, but you don't get to eat it! 

2.  Other traditional board games
- I have not played Knizia's Blue Moon, so I can't comment on whether its deckbuilding process and gameplay is exciting enough to simulate the CCG feeling.  Many other boardgames provide some of the gameplay options and strong themes of a CCG, although few have anything similar to the deckbuilding process.  Tons of euros now use buildings, workers, or other components with variable powers to simulate CCG-like strategy decisions.  You can take merchants and money buildings in AOE:III to do a money strategy, or soldiers and war support buildings to do a combat strategy.  You can buy technology cards in various AT games (like starcraft) that feel similar.  However, the creative input on your own strategy and the variety of different ways to skin a cat available to a CCG players is hard for a boardgame to imitate. 

3.  Dead CCGs
- Well of course this will scratch the CCG itch, if you can find a decent set of cards.  Problem here is, the market for dead CCGs is alive and well.  Even if you find one you and your friends like, you are going to be paying through the nose most of the time, or you will be buying ebay lots with no knowledge of what cards are contained.  Plus, with no future support, you may never get all the cards.  This can be a game balance problem, as games are playtested by people with access to every single card.  You also have the issue of dwindling online communities for these games as their former players have likely moved on to new CCGs.  Moreover, the biggest problem with dead CCGs is the complexity level.  Its fairly common for a dead CCG to have several expansions under its belt, where it added a bunch of new stuff increasing the complexity.  Worst of all, the final expansion or two usually introduced some drastic crap to try to save the game/increase sales/balance things.  This means that rules investment time for new players is high.  Your buddies aren't going to own this game, they will learn to play from you and use your cards.  If you have to spend 30 minutes teaching them the rules, thats a waste of time.  Dead CCGs are not good for casual or occasional play.

CCG

4.  LCGs -
Fantasy Flight has started producing what they call living card games.  These are CCG style games, but instead of being sold in the traditional random booster method, "chapter packs" are sold with preset consistent contents.  This allows you to buy as many or as few cards as you want.  You could buy the starter set and have fun playing with that for months, or you could get into deckbuilding and for roughly $10 a month, you can keep up with every card.  This sounds a little like a perfect solution for the CCG problem, but it isn't perfect either. 

First of all, we have yet to see how FFG is going to handle this type of game long term.  Is the extensive playtesting required to produce a CCG going to occur for each of FFG's expansion packs?  As a former playtester for multiple CCGs, I can assure you one month is not enough time to playtest even a 40 card set.  The cost issue also looms its ugly head.  Sure, the Call of Cthulhu LCG starter is only $40, roughly the price of a board game, but what if I want to do multiple constructed decks?  How many starter sets will I need to buy?  If the deckbuilding aspect doesn't work until you have 3 core sets, that puts the entry point over $100, and at that point I might as well be buying magic commons off of ebay.  Plus complexity will be added to the LCGs with every expansion.  Over time, the LCGs will become less and less accessible to new players, just like a traditional CCG, but they do look promising.  If FFG handles them well and avoids the traps and pitfalls of traditional CCGs, they will have a real winner on their hands. 

5.   Some as of yet uncreated future board-game-ish design
-  Although dominion fails to capture the CCG deckbuilding strategic feel,  a game where you spent 10 minutes or so creating a deck out of a common pool of cards and 15-20 minutes battling each other would be incredibly popular.   I've been tossing around some ideas, but it is difficult to shorten and simplify the game enough for it to be a casual gaming hit and still have the depth required for it to have any staying power at all.  I'm sure others are going through the same thought process and coming up against a similar wall, but Dominion is going to open people's eyes to the possibilities with this sort of thing.  Agricola's cards probably already have some designers thinking that using cards to add variety is a good idea, even if your target audience is interaction hating efficiency monkeys.  Someone is going to hit a real goldmine if they find the middle ground between Dominion and traditional CCGs. Maybe FFG is going to do it with their LCGs, but I suspect those will be a bit heavy and long for the dominion crowd. 

If Dominion has done one good thing for the gaming community, it has gotten people excited about the possibility of mating a CCG with a more traditional board game design.  It is a very tough nut to crack, unless you give up on interactivity and variety as Dominion has.  Still, I'm excited to see what the future holds through dominion spinoffs and other as of yet undesigned board games.

 So what is the solution?  How do you scratch the CCG itch?  I'm not sure.  Maybe someone will pull something out in the comments I didn't think of.  I'm anxious to try the Cthulhu LCG, and I ordered starter packs earlier this week.  I'll report back if its any good.  Until then, I'll keep trying not to think about deck building, since I inevitably find myself scouring ebay for big CCG lots then asking myself "what the hell are you doing?"
There Will Be Games CCG
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