AVOID Over Designing Your Homemade TCG | TCG R&D

[@ImmacHn]

A great example of a Card too complex for it's own good is Pot of Greed, had to be banned because none knows what it does😢

[@sagethevvitch]

"I PLAY POT OF GREED AND DRAW 3 CARDS! WHICH ALLOWS ME TO PLAY POT OF GREED AND I DRAW 3 CARDS"

[@Mysterium-zy6ri]

Simplicity is soooo important. My friend tried to teach me ygo about 5-6 years ago. I could not get a single thing, the amount of text overwhelmed me. However, about 2 years ago my friend taught me how to play mtg, specifically commander, and I got it because it wasn't too much and eventually I got what most of the keywords did. I was also a lot younger which could contribute to me having a hard time learning ygo but one of the things mtg does right is not having most cards be massive amounts of text and/or it being simple to understand at a glance. These are just my thoughts though.

[@michaelvossen7253]

I think MTG has a very concise vocabulary. Their use of text conveys the effect of the card with as few words as possible. Two issues though. One is that there are keywords and game state interactions that require expert knowledge to fully understand. It's why most sanctioned events have a judge whose main job is to clarify interactions and make rulings. Second is a fairly recent issue where, because their vocabulary is so concise, designers have started adding more keywords and complicated effects to cards. It's a little bit of power creep and cards running out of simple design space to explore.

[@ImmacHn]

Me: This monster can attack during your own battle phase if you choose to. If you attack with this monster during you battle phase, you may choose an appropriate taeget for it's attack, if you do perform a battle attack (Compare the targeted card's vitality with this card's atrack power, if the opposing card has less vitality than this card has attack, destroy the target. If this card has less attack than the target has vitality, take damage equal to the difference between this card's attack and the target's vitality), you may only perform battle once per Battle Phase with this card. If this card is destroyed as a result of battle, send this card to the graveyard if appropriate, make sure you check if there are other card effects that would prevent this or send this card elsewhere. If this card is jn your hand during your Main Phase 1 Main Phase 2, If you have not normal summoned or set a card this turn you may summon it to you side of the field, this is treated as a normal summon. You ma

[@snarkychan7504]

ur so good at card design

[@younasdar5572]

Another thing that might be important is that as a card game player my rule of thumb is usually that between cards that are trying to achinve the same goal the one with less rules text tends to be the more powerful one. For example black and jeweled lotus both exist to give you a boost in mana temporarily, they cost the same and both have a tap effect that sacrifices them and both of thos effects add the same amount of mana, jeweled lotus however adds a bit of text specifiying that you can only use the mana it generates to cast your commander and not to pay any other cost. Yes if you had 2 creatures that each cost 2 mana and one is a 2/2 that has no abilities while the other is a 2/2 with flying then the flyer would be more powerful, so ofc there are exceptions like that but in general more text means more restrictions or additional costs to get the same benefit. And it makes sense from a design standpoint as well, if you make a card to be better in a niece than another and not make it worse outside of that niece then you just made a strictly better card which a niece card should not be. So for every niece interaction and effect you should have a "basic" version that will be the best version of the effect in a vacuum that the more situational cards are balanced around.

[@ConleyPMusic]

Definitely needed that tip about spreading effects out amongst different cards for combos. I deeply appreciate your work!

[@pbrown7501]

Yes! The fitness of a ruleset can be described as "elegance": functionality per complexity. I would assert that this is true for most any category of ruleset, not just card design. For example, Hangul is such a simple yet complete phonetic writing system that it can be learned in a few hours, unlike Chinese which takes many years. This contributes to greater efficiency in achieving high literacy rates.

[@ShardTCG]

Exactly! We don't play a game for the rules. We play for the emotional connections we make, strategy, and competition. This sounds like it is heavily tied into the rules, but the rules will just set a few hard boundaries to which the game exists inside of.

[@ButtersDClown]

While the term complex fits well for its own reasons, i like specific here a little more. The more specific something is, the more limiting it is. Good video as always friend 🙏

[@abderianagelast7868]

The funniest thing about this article to me as a Magic player is that, in a vaccuum, Shummit Shmowler is absolutely a better card than Summit Prowler. They trade if smacked into each other at base, meaning Shmowler has the slight mana advantage in that exchange. Shmowler comes out a turn earlier, so it can threaten life totals sooner. And to top it all off, Shmowler's effect isn't a once-per-turn, meaning it can easily become a 6/5 or higher for 3 mana in the right deck, probably a Rakdos deck. The ONLY reason Shmowler can be considered worse here is that Prowler was specifically designed for Tarkir limited, while Shmowler is designed to be more broadly applicable. Shmowler is a lot worse for the Temur decks at the time because they wouldn't really be planning on sacrificing creatures often, especially not outside of combat. The author's mistake in trying to make Shmowler a weaker card was in reducing its mana cost. If Shmowler was a 3/2 for 4 with conditional upside, I would still say it has a higher ceiling, but I wouldn't consider it a better card because it's so far below rate. As it stands, though, it feels like he's trying to gaslight me into believing that the card that is nearly always stronger is actually a worse option.

[@jumpkicking]

I think the reason why support becomes difficult is the mass of keywords and types that gets exponentially larger. I'm building Zimone from the new mtg Duskmorn set. Commander is 100 card singleton format (deck limit of one card, excluding basic lands) with a "commander", a card you can play like it is in your hand, but goes back to it's special zone when it leaves play and becomes more expensive each time it does so. The recursion and accessibility allows you to build around it. My commander uses a new mechanic. This new mechanic may see little to no support in future mtg sets. They have a tenancy to print new cards with the mechanic, but they are often just intentionally bad cards for draft and design space, even then good support may not be in the colours I'm allowed to play. The set has some exceptional support for this mechanic in Zimone's colours, but some are rather pricey as they are good cards for the rotation format. It's a strange mechanic and I had to read the card multiple times before I started playing it properly and stopped pseudo-cheating and playing myself (though the commander is one of the few cards that tells you what the mechanic does, as you always have access to it and your opponents can read it at any time during the game (unless you decide to shuffle it into your deck), you always have access to read the mechanic you;re playing around. However the mechanic is caused by a triggering ability "landfall" that triggers whenever you play a land. In mtg you can play a land once per turn (typically) and these are cards that make up roughly 34-36% of your deck (typically). There's a myriad of ways in the structure deck, the set, and prior sets, and it's something that will see in future printing no doubt. This means that although I'm limited to cards that interact with the mechanic specifically and enable it... because the mechanic is tied to a core mechanic, unconventional support is something i can always rely on. No commander deck (to my knowledge) runs no lands at all, so new lands will always be printed. The mechanic "manifest dread" involves looking at your top two cards, putting one face-down in play as a moderately weak creature with predetermined name/stats/type. The other goes into your graveyard. The face-down card can always be turned face-up if it is a creature card by paying the creature cards mana cost, all manifested cards can do this and this ability is tied to the new creature, not my commander, so even if my commander is not in play I still have agency. My commander lets me turn any face-down permanent card, face-up for free (this is not just creatures) if I manage to get any land out for the second time in one turn (many cards since magics creation enables this). So the mechanic is tied to my commander, I have more agency with my commander and a stable source of the mechanic, but without the commander any face-down cards I do have still have some agency. This is a card built around a mechanic, but won't require specific support, making it future-proof. This to me is pinnacle design.

[@tapntcg]

I just finished simple but affective rules theyre simple and the cards are the ones that are the strategy, Also just finished the video! Lastly if a card has what some consider overpowered itll be a combo move its one move doing. Mulitiple things at once or back to back priced a little high to use because of its intensity and the assist cards are cheap and strategy effective

[@DarthG33k]

Yeah, this is a good article. I like this guy!

[@HIMMBelljuvo]

YGO: I feel called out

[@darthnixilis304]

Oh man, thank you. I've broken so many phones on the like button.

[@ShardTCG]

It's an unnecessary risk. Be careful, friend.

[@majidoujaa5592]

funniest thing is, some of the most broken cards in yugioh have the simplest effects

[@DoodleStein]

I kamehameha'd the like button by accident.

[@ShardTCG]

OMG! I hope your device or PC is okay 👍

[@DoodleStein]

@@ShardTCG to my surprise, it actually fully charged my phone 👍🏻

[@doublestarships646]

It's important to have simplicity but it's also important to add depth for the long term players that ended up loving it.

[@diegocruzmachicao5642]

Very important, use Keywords.

[@sagethevvitch]

Absolutely and they need to be as common sense as possible too.

[@Flamewolf14]

If its a digital ccg having easy refrence like tool tips explaining them

[@travisbuschette8609]

Card complexity can hurt the longevity of a game as well. The more complex your effects, the more difficult you make the barrier to entry for new players over time. I know Yu-Gi-Oh gets dogpiled on for their walls of text, but teaching that game to someone now vs ten years ago, twenty years ago. It's too much information to expect a new player to maintain and absolutely prevents some people from ever picking it up.

[@allovertheworld5048]

It's funny to me that people say that any yugioh cards have a super complex wall of text as if all the cards had the complexity of linear equation canon or equation system cannon and the same amount of text as gladiator beast's assault fort or the version of the anime of the winged dragon of ra when in reality they are quite easy to understand

[@JamesJP]

I used to play yugioh years ago. Even if I was a returning player, I find the game too fast and complex.

[@dudono1744]

​@@allovertheworld5048The equation cannon cards are pretty easy to understand, just hard to use. It's not like Inspector Boarder where understanding what it does is challenging on its own.

[@illhomemadetcg3218]

This is my problem with yugioh these days

[@KJottu]

is the entire video just the article?

[@ShardTCG]

I have two series on TCG design. TCG R&D focuses on others' opinions and experiences through articles, surveys, and videos. Then, my Talk TCG series is based on my opinions and experience in TCG design. Hope that helps.

[@SenkaZver]

Simplicity is good, but also vanilla isn't necessarily better because simple, the biggest issue are conditionals. Conditionals add more information tracking and weaken the card (and fun).

[@dudono1744]

Conditionals can be fun, for example for alt win cons

[@IMPOSTERPEELY]

😁

[@DreadgateTCG]

I actually have more fun making games than playing them.

[@ShardTCG]

That's awesome! And Dreadgate is such a great name for a game

[@DreadgateTCG]

@ShardTCG thank you, my friend! I agree. Game used to be called Gateway but I realized it needed something spicier.

[@unhingedmanchild]

2:20 uhh... I disagree with this. As a matter of fact, I feel that many card games are guilt of this already (looking at you, MTG.) There's so many cards that do so much shit I'm personally completely baffled that anyone can follow that game, especially the casuals. I personally believe that the best games *do* have complex systems, though. Humans just tend to have that "herd" mindset with little critical thinking, and once something is "viral" they latch on to it even if they don't really "love" it bc they haven't truly thought about it more than "well, everyone else is doing it!"

[@supremacyecg6815]

This is exactly why I am not a fan of YuGiOh, one card is like four cards from Hearthstone lol.

[@sagethevvitch]

Yu-Gi-Oh really is a good game, but it's ran by a company that has milked it for all they could.

[@ShardTCG]

😂

[@supremacyecg6815]

@@sagethevvitch I'm not saying this game is bad. Because it gives inspiration over thinking up new mechanics. But I am incredibly turned off by the wall of text, which is why I play only single player. In multi there are a million effects on the board, and I have no idea what is going on, from where what and how, I already prefer Duel Masters Plays. Because there, despite many effects on the card there are used keywords.

[@allovertheworld5048]

The stupid meme of yugioh cards have a complex wall of text aside, yugioh cards are pretty easy to understand and the reason the card text is supposedly long is because most of the yugioh card text are activation/summon conditions, restrictions and occasionally an alternative activation/summon conditions to prevent them from being abused in degenerated ftks and in case you are wondering why Yugioh does not use keywords, it is because in Yugioh there is a huge, huge number of similar effects and unique effects and even some that change the way the game is played, so if they put keywords in Yugioh the The result would be thousands of keywords and I think that would be more intimidating than the supposed wall text

[@sagethevvitch]

@@allovertheworld5048 to be fair, Yu-Gi-Oh cards do have a lot of text, but it *could* be a lot easier to read if they formated and worded the text better.

[@skellious]

PLEASE put a link to any article you are reading in the video description

[@ShardTCG]

The link is there. Caps aren't appreciated, thank you.

[@trumtrum5136]

If you're lame