How To Solve the Queen's Problem - TCG Design Academy

[@RemptonGames]

Do you have any questions about Trading Card Game design that you want me to address in future entries in the series? Also, what Pokemon should I redesign in my next video, and what would you like to see changed?

[@zarjamar1883]

How about the validity of using dice or coin flips to supplement randomness in TCGs and the inclusion of dexterity/skill based abilities (Chaos Orb from MtG comes to mind)?

[@seifeldeensameh6661]

You forgot that Yu-Gi-Oh solved their queen's gambit problem with archetypes and if you played . modern in magic you will know that queen's problem happens in this format all the time ( eldrazi winter , jund , rakdos scam )and so on

[@chaosensuming9068]

@remptongames i own Chaos Ensuming tcg, i believe youd be interested in my games designs fixes and aims with my game, if you ever wish to speak your welcome to contact me. This subject far surpases the game itself and even dives into r and d aims as well as my aims for releases to benefit gameplay

[@tsilver33]

Good episode! Looking forward to more. To early MtG's defense, it's designer Richard Garfield has spoken about this in interviews before. It being the first TCG, his rationale was that only very few players would pay more than a standard board game in total for magic. Maybe a grand total of $60-$80 over the games lifespan. The modern internet was also not really a thing yet, so the idea of 'meta' decks wasn't really an issue, player info about cards was very very sparse. Someone (I believe it was his publisher?) brought up this very concern, what if the game grew so popular that players would chase down such cards. He responded that it'd be a good problem to have, and they could cross that bridge in the unlikely event they came to it. Fucking hysterical looking back, but I think it's a fair point in context. I doubt anyone would have guessed MtG becoming the giant runaway success it was.

[@terenceaaron1999]

It didn't help that he hated the secondary market too. He has insisted no MTG product should cost above 20 dollars. Guess where we're at now?

[@schwarzerritter5724]

The reason why the back of the cards reads "Deckmaster" is because Deckmaster was supposed to be a whole series of collectible cardgames. But Magic the Gathering turned out to be so popular, the other games got scrapped.

[@kaylaa2204]

@@schwarzerritter5724I always wondered why that was there. That’s a shame. I imagine other themes. Magic obviously being fantasy sorcery themed. Maybe another would be steampunk themed or sci fi themed So you might have Magic Cogs Cosmos And whatever else All sharing a similar design philosophy perhaps

[@Ghorda9]

@@kaylaa2204 netrunner was the sci-fi cyberpunk

[@Dasein23]

@@schwarzerritter5724they were designed and published - they were the vampire game Jyhad (which became Vampire The Eternal Struggle) and the cyberpunk game Netrunner. Both are amazing games, much better than Magic. But mtg took up all the oxygen and the games struggled to achieve commercial success. I played Vampire at a tournament level for many years, it’s one of the best games ever designed, I believe.

[@marcoasturias8520]

Super chess could be balance if we established that the value of the resulting board can´t exceed the value of the "normal" one. So, 39 points to allocate. Maybe even adding special "inflation" for backrow pieces starting in the front and vice versa.

[@HeavyMetalMouse]

So basically, introducing a Resource System, one of the suggested ways to balance such things as the video suggests for card games. :) Sounds like it could be a fun thing to try out!

[@icicubesgaming2876]

But what's stopping me from just choosing pawns for most of my big peices just to have more queens. Like that's how good the queen is.

[@franimer2107]

@@icicubesgaming2876 nothing, but you will have way too many pawns

[@franimer2107]

that already exist, its called "chess the lost pieces" and its a videogame

[@revimfadli4666]

​@@franimer2107 but "pawns are the soul of chess" and a good enough player could simply use them to create a solid formation

[@powertomato]

The queens problem in complexity theory is to put N queens on an N times N sized chess-board without a single one attacking the other. This is simple enough for small board sizes, but becomes very very hard with bigger boards. Since the video started with chess, I thought it would be about balancing with a similar setup. How to have N cards in a space of all possible decks, where neither card dominates the others.

[@dudono1744]

n = 2 doesn't have a solution

[@HaxDotCombo]

Yu-Gi-Oh's actually designed a lot of its newer cards and mechanics around anti-synergies and restrictions. It's frustrating going to bat for that game in the discourse because we're simultaneously the "play all the good cards, no variety" game and the "this card is so specific, opening packs feels bad because I can't use these cards" game. We're in a sort of design renaissance of softer restrictions with things medium-splashable, but for a long time it was conventional to just follow every xenophobic archetype restriction printed on your main engine pieces and basically play mono-color in a game that has more than 5 colors.

[@Ghorda9]

yugioh should of never deviated away from the basic tribute/type system in the first place

[@aprinnyonbreak1290]

I mean This is half of the critical yugioh onbording failure. Yugioh is kinda being strangled because nobody wants to play the game off of simulators, like yugioh pro. Between having to actually track down a deck that works on a fundamental level, let alone a deck that's actually good, and the fact that most of the cards do so many weird, situational things that the simulator keeps track of, it's just painful to think about actually, y'know, playing the card game, with physical cards. And then the cherry of really, actually thinking about how many times you need to shuffle your deck per turn, unless you agree on house rules like "you only have to shuffle your deck whenever the deck being in a random state should matter" to reduce it, and how long some plays will go without a simulator just finding your cards ect just makes it bleh. A 3 minute turn in a simulator can take like, 10 minutes irl, assuming the person actually knows what all their cards do, and knows in advance the combos they're going to use, and has to spend no time reading or verifying effects. It's not like MtG, where you can go grab a structure deck and some booster packs and play by ear from there. The cards themselves are overwhelmingly simple, with complexity tending to be isolated into particular cards that, frankly, can be ignored and the game works just fine until the players build the experience to use them. Pokemon is a bit more finicky, but making a deck out of some random cards is still possible, two people can make a game work if they collectively spend like, maybe 20, 35 bucks on cards, or buy one lot of random cards off amazon or something. You basically can't make anything resembling a playable yugioh deck for anything approaching reasonable upfront buy-in. Structure decks are the beginning and end of the discussion, before you just start buying singles, or spending hundreds on boosters to build up a library, which is tragic, because caveman yugioh WAS the easiest to get into. You actually COULD pick up like, 5 booster packs, and make a deck out of those entirely. Maybe not a GOOD one, but, a basically functional one. You can play the game with your friend on a whim. You can pick up some boosters and kinda understand how to play the game, while if your first exposure to yugioh is picking up a booster pack, odds are good that not a single card will be intelligible. You have to already be versed in terms, mechanics, and the overall flow of the game to even approach it. Whether it intended to or not, the way Yugioh plays is just on a path to being a purely virtual card game like Hearthstone, as the game becomes increasingly unfeasible for two humans to actually pick up, then sit down and play.

[@yami384]

Yes that's what i was thinking about the Holl time the Yu-Gi-Oh in her start was the perfect card game but after all this years the game is broken that if player go second he just (most of the ) waiting for his open build an breakable Wall literally it's just need to be fixed

[@GodzillaFreak]

@@aprinnyonbreak1290You’re just totally wrong on like every count about yugioh. Unless the players are actively reading all the cards, playing IRL is no slower than on an automatic simulator. Even manual simulators like Duelingbook where each action is clunky are still fully playable

[@aprinnyonbreak1290]

@@GodzillaFreak You're telling me you can fish a search target out of a deck of thirty cards, then adequately shuffle it in under 2 seconds?

[@pedrodarosamello64]

It's interesting how modern yugiho solved the problem: Cards are not powerfull enough in a vacum to be worth putting in a deck. Often times almost your entire deck will be built with the idea that each card will need to ahve sinergy with your other cards, so each of they multiply the power of each other, thus a card that is insanely powerful in a deck is almost worthless in another cause it does not multiply that decks power. A simple example in my last match, my oponent is playing a deck called mathmech, their most powerful card is easily mathmech circular, insane combo card. but if it somehow ended in my control, playing a different deck it is essentialy a blank card with no effect.

[@Vox24]

But this restricts deckbuilding creativity. Mathmech Circular, is it worth anything in any other deck?...

[@R055LE.1]

​@@Vox24yeah, it actually had the opposite effect and just ramped up power creep for the trouble

[@pedrodarosamello64]

@@Vox24 It doesn't 100% restricts creativity cause some cards have more lax restrictions, but effectively, cards pay for power with less splashability, the more powerful a card is, the less things it is supposed to work with. There are still cards that bridge 2 themes together or that struck a middle ground between power and versatility, but the trully insane cards NEED to be restrictive to not also restrict diversity by becoming mandatory in every deck. For exaple, a card like Mathmech Circular is insanely powerful, like, way ahead of the curve, but literaly only playable in a matchmech deck, it literaly does nothing in other decks. While a middle groud card like say, Ash Blossom is a popular interrupt tool, not because it is very powerful, but because it will have an impact in every single game. There are better interrupt tool for almost every single match, but only Ash Blossom is always usefull.

[@kaylaa2204]

Well we do still have staples, cards that are good regardless of your deck. Like Ash Blossom But it got a reprint in the Traptrix structure not too long ago so it’s actually pretty affordable for now

[@jaernihiltheus7817]

​@@Vox24 mathmech circular is useful (and played at as many copies as the format allows) in every cyberse-type deck.

[@altermann1991]

Yeah in the original anime of Yugioh the whole balance was essentially based around rarity early on with certain cards being intentionally op but only a handful of them existing on the whole planet (heck the toons weren't even available to anyone but Pegasus). Its kinda funny to see how the TCG had to go through some big changes in its card design to get around these initial design flaws.

[@yurisei6732]

This is how MTG is still balanced, it just turns out to not actually be a problem as long as you have enough cards in the format that "A deck filled with a bunch of overpowered rares and mythics" can be approached in many different ways.

[@jackventure3703]

The video Game Yu-Gi-Oh! The Duelist Of The Roses had an interesting way of tackling the Queens Problem. They used a "Deck Cost" system where every card had its own individual value and the total combined value was your Deck Cost. The more powerful the card the higher the value and the game only let you fight characters with Deck Cost equal or lower than your own. This meant you couldn't fight a weak opponent with a deck stuffed with Blue-Eyes White Dragons whether you wanted to or not.

[@tails55]

This approach is also used in "Astral" series of games (Astral Masters, Astral Heroes), with an additional factor of a multiplier for the cost depending on the number of colors used ("default" cost is for using 2 out of 4 colors, monocolored decks get a small discount while decks with 3 or even 4 colors get a big markup on their costs). It helped with the variety at the time (you could play a very strong multicolored combo at the cost of filling your deck with garbage to fit in the cost or sacrifice access to three colors to maximize internal synergy of the fourth one), but the games are old, no new content is released and the meta for the existing content is figured out, so the few people who still play these games main random decks mode instead.

[@Johnhamsta]

I remember this game! Was incredible!

[@kaylaa2204]

Lmao so you’re telling me they added what was essentially weight classes to Yugioh? I mean it’s a good solution don’t get me wrong I just find it funny Wonder how that would work in a real world card game… comps would certainly be different. It would certainly have the effect of being more inviting to casual players and new players. And people could stay at a power level they’re comfortable with, without the need for individual formats.

[@davisranger]

this was used in most early YuGiOh decks but I hate it this solution ngl

[@snowboundwhale6860]

They did this in Reshef of Destruction as well but w/out the restriction of who you can duel with your deck and it's fairly enjoyable imo, though that does come in part from the affinity system which is just advanced rock paper scissors and allows weak low costed monsters a place by being able to out stronger ones if they have the correct affinity matchup. The catch of course is that your own strong monsters can be taken out the same way, so you do need to build around the affinities you know the opponent will be using to secure a good chance of winning.

[@mra4521]

2:37 This flooded my brain with childhood memories of hating the Pokémon TCG’s Charazard. I now feel very vindicated for my hatred, despite having too many friends who said I was just jealous.

[@hexzyle]

There are documentaries on the history of Pokemon TCG meta and trust me, there were many cards much more unfair than charizard that ended up in most decks

[@mra4521]

@@hexzyle I believe it, but it was 1999, and I picked squirtle as my starter.

[@Bralore125]

I’m working on a tcg, and this problem has been in my mind sense I started. The idea of limitations of what cards you can use is great. I made a rule that you declare a type, and the monsters you use have to be of that type, except 5. Idk, I feel that is the best way to handle it, unless those five cards are extremely good.

[@axel15forever]

I highly appreciate this video, I was in such a rut with rule making that when I saw this I just had to fix a ton of stuff and now the game rules look and feel more natural. I think it might be great to give this series more videos like this, ones explaining major problems and how to fix them through the design process, I'm new to your channel and if you haven't already, you may want to do demos of you yourself building a card game.

[@four-en-tee]

Well now hold on, that's not necessarily why Yugioh's card design is a problem. The entire reason I enjoy Yugioh is because of the amount of freedom it gives during deck building, and the game balances this out by being a very archetype driven game in modern Yugioh and by either creating new archetypes or printing new support for older archetypes in order to shift the meta. The problem in this, though, comes from the amount of generic support that also exists, but again, that's why we have the banlist in order to further regulate the meta if necessary since powercreep is such an issue in this game (although the powercreep tends to get a bit more overblown than people are willing to admit, the only archetypes which come to mind that are just inherently broken and deserve to have multiple pieces on the banlist are stuff like Zoodiacs and the upcoming Tearalaments). I will admit though that while this all sounds fine conceptually, Konami (especially here in the TCG) will use the banlist sometimes in order to push new product. It's understandable, they're a company at the end of the day and the game doesn't have set rotation, but it can get pretty annoying sometimes when a problem card is fucking the meta (like Scythe) and Konami lets it stay around a while longer simply because its getting reprinted in another product. This segways somewhat into the other issue: card prices. The reason why the game is so expensive as it is is mainly because Yugioh (the TCG) doesn't make cards accessible enough. In the OCG, Konami will often print super rare copies of meta staple cards along side the higher rarity variants. This isn't very common anymore in the TCG. For example, a card like Forbidden Droplet has never been printed below ultra rare because its a meta staple and Konami knows its competitive player base is willing to shill out that much money. By comparison, cards like Solemn Strike, Infinite Impermanence, etc. have received lower rarity prints in the last year and have been able to drop down in price. The only cards that really tend to hold their value are meta staples that can or must see play in any deck such as Ash Blossom, Pot of Prosperity, Accesscode Talker, the aforementioned Forbidden Droplet, etc.

[@keltikglider9188]

Good thing this is the first time I’ve seen this video, now I don’t have to wait for more content since this video is a year old 😂 I subscribed so I will be checking out this series 🤘

[@LandOfTheFallen]

This was definitely one of the challenges I faced when developing Land Of The Fallen. My solution was to limit each card to 1 copy per deck, as well as create rules to prevent people from abusing the most powerful cards.

[@mx.winterwolf]

Is Land of the Fallen still in development? This comment peaked my interest but I can't find any info of the game online.

[@finnfinity9711]

Idk the rules of the game but if it's similar to magic, limiting each card to 1 copy per deck makes it more rng, multiple copies adds some consistency to your deck

[@LandOfTheFallen]

@@finnfinity9711 the goal is to have variability in the experience from game to game and to work with the cards you’re dealt. Though there is a “cycling phase” that allows you to put cards back with the goal of getting better cards.

[@Keilanify]

Subbed. As an amateur card game designer, I'm always looking for more insight from a veteran of the genre. Great stuff dude.

[@Always.Smarter]

Wow these videos are so well made and helpful, thanks for posting! You deserve way more subs/views

[@chuckolator1859]

Absolutely fantastic video. You conveyed several complex design problems in a concise, well paced, easy to digest format. Your points were very easy to understand. Thanks for this - God bless!!

[@tribesofdieutcg2672]

Thank you for doing this series! Some good brain food

[@__________Troll__________]

*Thanks for putting this together!*

[@sfghost3079]

I'd like an episode on card layout, what makes for a good layout and a bad one.

[@RemptonGames]

That’s a great idea, thanks for the suggestion!

[@sonicrocks2007]

I think for the Yugioh tho it works for a casual player not buying online. Buying sets in order of release. Gradually building a new decks more powerful. And that is a cool feeling. Cards costs and finding a good one currently or trade is cool too. I think you aren't supposed to hold on good cards. You are supposed to sell or trade. But where it fails is when it gets competitive and online and bulk shopping. The game isn't nessarily built for fair strategy. And this gets really obvious when one turn the first player played 30 cards and OTK the opponent. So how you play the game or buy also changes it

[@gocardsandstuffshatteredle2406]

awesome. stoked I found your channel. been looking for a "spiritual successor" to kohdok since he started slowing down with uploads.

[@prosamis]

I didn't know that's the name of this problem! The core of the CCG I'm designing tackles this first and foremost while attempting to maximize freedom of deckbuilding

[@MikeyForrester]

queen is good but a pawn can be promoted to anything, it can even be promoted to queen, the strongest piece in the game

[@SunsetArchive]

Great video! Keep up the good work. Couldn't help but notice there were a couple of Throne of Glass books in the background 👀 have you read the whole series by chance?

[@RemptonGames]

I haven’t read any, but my wife has. Not sure if the whole series or not

[@turkychuck3679]

So what happens if im playing the super chess and decide to use 16 kings? Do i lose if just one of them gets checkmated or do all of them have to be at the same time?

[@RemptonGames]

I didn’t really think about that haha. Probably you would still be limited to 1 king, since taking it is the objective of the game

[@onatkorucu842]

does not matter. all your opponent has to do is to play Qa6 and win. :)

[@theuseraccountname]

Going based off of the concept of double check - where your king is in check by two pieces at the same time, causing you to only be able to move your king to avoid check - it would stand to reason that if one of them gets checkmated, you lose. Seeing as how you can't move all checked king pieces at once, one of them would still be in check, meaning you have not avoided the check, hence you lose.

[@floridaman6982]

@@theuseraccountname wait thats a very cool variation. Adding kings makes it easier to lose

[@thecringeman9198]

Me trying to play ancient gears and getting OTK’d bye literal desserts

[@Dyllon2012]

Rarity totally does work, but only for games like draft/limited MTG. While you can almost count on seeing at least one particular common, the whole table may not pull a particular mythic. Yu-Gi-Oh also has restrictions these days, but it’s more flexible and ad-hoc using archetype locks and the material requirements on extra-deck monsters.

[@j453]

Great vid, lots of good points.

[@edwinmanhand4022]

Finally a game design guide, need this!

[@SickBoy353]

Super enjoyable episode. Your tgc theory is a very interesting topic for me. Whats you opinion on Marvel Champions drawing and resource system? For me its simply the best in existence haha

[@GoToBedSheeva]

You’re 100% right about the yugioh problem but it’s affecting the extra deck with how generic those cards are more than the main one these days because the game took to making archetype cards that work within archetypes. (Al this also led to a good majority of those banned cards coming off the list because they aren’t searchable lol)

[@drewhalcro6082]

I have boiled it down to 2 main factors; Identity and Resources. A deck MUST contain certain things and can NOT have more than 1 of another etc. You also need to pay in order for cards to be played, either when they come down or you have to pay for them to stay out. Bigger cards == bigger resource loss == less actions.

[@BlazeMakesGames]

One thing I'm surprised more games don't do is scale copy limitations based on rarity. Like in MTG they still kinda fall into that same problem where cards are balanced by how hard they are to get a hold of. A Deck composed of mostly Rares and Mythic Rares is probably going to beat a deck with only Commons 90% of the time. And the only thing stopping a player from filling a deck with rare cards is money. They did introduce the card limits in general to help balance this out, so that by having only a max of 4 of any one card at a time you can never fully rely on being able to draw a specific mythic rare card in a deck that has at least 60 cards. But that still doesn't solve the overall problem of just filling your deck with tons of different rare cards. I would think that a better idea would be to impose Limits based on the card rarity so that the rarity is itself a balancing mechanic. So for example you could have up to 4 of any Common Card, 3 Uncommons, 2 Rares, and 1 Mythic Rare. Now suddenly there's actually a reason to focus a deck around Commons and Uncommons. Like yeah you could still technically fill a deck with nothing but Rare and Mythic Rare cards with the only thing stopping you being your wallet and your ability to find them, but it would probably be a bad idea. Now a Deck that consists of only Rares and Mythic Rares would be a lot less consistent. In a 60 card deck with 25 lands. You would need something like 15 unique Mythic Rares and 10 unique Rares in order to fill it out. Compared to a deck with Commons and Uncommons which might only need 10-15 unique cards in total. This means that a common-filled deck is going to play a lot more consistently than a Rare-filled deck. Which can be a huge advantage, even though the Rare cards are objectively more powerful.

[@10001vader]

basically, the reason they don't do that is that balancing by consistency isn't very good for a healthy competive game. That's why mtg doesn't do partial bans like yugioh does. (in yugioh, every good deck has 8 million ways to search out any cards, so removing copies doesn't really affect consistency as much as it does how hard a deck is to shut down). Nowadays, for magic at least, rarity is mostly only important in the limited formats where the lack of ability to 100% choose what's in your deck means that you are primarily going to use commons/uncommons.

[@ericslingerland5472]

I like Sorcery's take on this, where not only is there a colored resource system like magic, but the rarity determines how many copies can be put in a deck. 4 copies at common down to 1 for the rarest

[@k0v4n0v4]

cardfight Vanguard had a strict clan system. had a neat side effect of a pride for your clan like it is your culture and nationality.

[@brighamalva9998]

Great video! Keep up the good work.

[@chaosduelist6503]

I know this video came out 2 years ago, but I do wanna say a few things about Yugioh and the Queen's problem. Yugioh does regularly ban very powerful staple cards, but the video does kinda frame it as if that is the only thing that Yugioh did. Not saying that was intentional, I thing it's highly likely that talking about what Yugioh did was cut for time purposes or a feeling that what could be said wouldn't do it justice. Most Yugioh players know that Konami changed a lot about how they design cards to make it so that Yugioh wasn't just the same deck over and over. Now Konami does release staples on a regular basis and they can get really expensive (like triple tac in the video) but that's more of a "Let's make more money by putting this really good card at high rarity and short printing it" which is while related a whole other issuse. Other than that this video is really well made, explaining a really weird thing about trading card games in a very easy to understand way.

[@jaernihiltheus7817]

Yugioh has designed around the queen's problem since GOAT format, though they did it slowly. Firstly by making archetypes synergistic with only themselves. So unless the boss monster was designed to be generically used, it was essentially only playable in that archetype. And even the generic ones you wouldn't stuff multiples of it in there because of limited extra deck space. The current method still revolves around archetypes, but the archetypes are looser and tend to only restrict you to type, attribute, summoning mechanic, etc. Allowing for more flexibility without everything just being a "good things" pile deck like it was in the early-mid 2000s.

[@Soleniae]

surprised you glossed over card frequency limits. magic currently has a 4-copy limit for everything that's not a basic land. but imagine how much more diverse decks (and thus matches) would be if it were a 3-copy limit. once the strongest cards are included, players are forced to start making decisions about how to fill out the rest of the deck. (this was actually wizards' solution to the queen problem, as prior to the first official tournament rules being published, decks had a 40-card minimum and no per-card copy limit.) in a similar vein, wizards sometimes will designate a particularly strong card as 'restricted', allowing a 1-copy limit for those cards in the relevant format (currently only vintage). this helps limit how much average impact those cards provide, while still allowing the card to exist. this is actually how the queen is balanced in chess, as you only start with one, which is fewer than all the other non-king pieces. (this might actually be a decent use of rarity, eg. cards with mtg's 'mythic rare' could be a broad restricted list, and allow for relatively more powerful playing pieces but with an inherent restriction on their usage from the moment they're printed - a category of queens, in other words.)

[@dudono1744]

Pokemon has "ace-spec" cards you can only have 1 total in your deck.

[@shadowseeker97]

Great video and super accurate yugioh was clearly not designed with the queens problem in mind

[@admiralcasperr]

4:16 The more colours of cards you have the more difficult it becomes to cast them WotC: SIKE triome fetch shock cast Scion of Draco. Total cost of the 4 cards played: 300$

[@empireyouth5791]

OK well I like your video I feel like you are forgetting other factors that can help limit this problem (factors that Yu-Gi-Oh has used) example making cards specifically designed to support types or attribute, for example you aren’t going to see reinforcements of the Army played in a deck primarily focused on beast warriors, or fairies, despite the card being arguably broken enough to be limited to one, and that’s because it’s specifically designed for warrior like decks, this prevents the amount of mixable attributes players could have, you can also do archetypes where cards are name lock two other cards , this unlike The examples you have provided insurance please have to bend over backwards in order to make cards that aren’t supposed to go to each other go to each other, and you can control how name lock cards become, Finally while this is a problem I think you’re forgetting the part where this can also help, universal staples while dangerous can help so long as they are not the end all be all, for example I think dark ruler no more is a good example of this as well technically every beck can play it, not everyone does, mainly because it makes it so you can’t Deal damage to your opponent, this means if you’re playing a deck designed to kill your opponent as fast as possible the card is actually slowing down your strategy even if it makes your opponents field temporary useless, another example being heavily poison it has a broken scale to protect back row but there are plenty of decks that don’t play back row to maximize their special summoning potential, meaning even though there is nothing stopping them from playing the card they can’t optimize it so they play something else You can also go with body fights option in having so much Queens that you physically cannot fit all of them in your deck and have to pick between them depending which one is best suited for your play style,

[@empireyouth5791]

Also there is a danger to making things to unmixable, if things are extremely hard to mix together then the game feels less like a TCG’s and more like one player is playing Uno Flip while the other is playing uno attack, basically cards become unmixable and decks become predetermined and fun and interesting

[@dandyspacedandy]

i know its been seven months, but have you figured out how to use periods yet?

[@joe-wi8nj]

right there rarity you made my point becuase I had a 5 color old school magic deck half was from the banhammer list. but it's so much free fast mana and half the deck was obscenely rare. but it was so fun. wrath of God force of will and so on.

[@admiralcasperr]

6:25 Magics entire monetisation scheme in 12s

[@DiaborMagics]

Awesome, I'm checking more of this series out, because I have started making and then scrapped 3 iterations of a card game, because I just A don't really know what I want/how I want it to play, B don't want it to be a near carbon-copy clone of games I already know with different art and C... struggle to balance things in the initial concept. Sure sure, playtesting and then adjusting can fix that, but if the balance is TOO out of whack from the get go, it gets hard and even more work to balance it all. I feel like oftentimes I just put an effect on a card just to put an effect on a card. And... that is probably the wrong approach. I have 0 real world experience with this, it is just a hobby for now that I want to get into more, but basically I was playing a game with a robust character creator and I ended up making like 70 characters... then I thought: hey, I love card games, it would be cool if I could make one out of this (just a private game for myself of course, I am not going to plagiarize anything from the game I make the characters in and like anybody would be interested in my characters, I'm not that delusional xD ). So I made screenshots and card borders etc and so basically I have the cards... without proper effects and what not because I keep erasing all of that and starting over xD It is probably good practise for if I ever want to do the real thing, just like how I keep coming up with board game and tabletop RPG concepts and other stuff (I am also a writer so my tabletop RPG concepts are based on the world I build myself). But I felt like I needed some guidance as I'm just shooting in the dark. So a series like this is definitely appreciated :D :D

[@clothandleather2838]

The only reason some people have pet decks is because art or funny card designs

[@Maxusxavier]

Yugioh solution to this wasn't the ban list, the ban list is it's solution to not having set rotation, it's self-dependant archetype system is it's modern andwer to the queen problem

[@thisisiampie6946]

Ban list also adds more flavor and who doesn't like seeing true problem cards go

[@Yubl10]

The queen in chess a long, long time ago used to have the same movement as the king. That got changed, and the thought process at the time was to speed the game up because games of chess took forever back then. So what if the queen change had never happened? I wonder what analogy would have been used instead. In an alternate universe, a different analogy was used because games of chess were still super slow.

[@guccijake7776]

fantastic analysis

[@Cardboardgrinch]

Would love to hear your oppinion of FleshandBlood, especially related to this videos topic they seem to have listened but lets see ^^

[@MG-mh8xp]

one of the main things I dislike about trading card games is something that, keeping with the theme, I'd call the problem of pawns. say you had super chest with a form of restriction that *worked* at keeping the queens at bay. well now, the pawns have no use. no one uses a single pawn, or maybe a single rook, or bishop. and using them, is now unviable. some card games fix this by allowing pawns to be upgraded or sacrificed. pokemon uses evolution, and magic the gathering has the greens elves that use their magic to provide more mana, and also the reds where sometimes it's just good to overwhelm your opponent with a million angry fire goblins. but then, with the reds there are bigger stronger cards that go unused, because the viable strategy is to not waste time with them. I dislike this, because it makes a lot of strategies unviable, and at worse, it makes everyone use the same decks *again* (albeit with *some* more variety?) because why use anything else. in pokemon there are hundreds of amazing and cool pokemon with unique abilities that makes the game more interesting, which go completely unused in favor of the legendaries and whatever cool new pokemon is being used by literally almost every other deck. in mtg green has really cool mega strong monsters which no one will ever use, because it's not completely optimal. this is partially why I hate professionally playing these games, and much more prefer kitchen table trading card games.

[@RedOrbTalon]

I appreciate that you're trying to communicate (through spinning) the rock-paper-scissors relationship of the different deck types (5:01), but spinning the graphic just makes it harder to read; I had to pause the video and go back. Your audience shouldn't have to put in extra effort to understand you.

[@captnweasle]

Great video

[@petersmythe6462]

How would you go about making a chess variant TCG (or probably OCG for practicality reasons) 1. Everything should go on the board. Most spells should be field spells unless they are one turn effects. 2. Pieces should have costs, summoning restrictions, and abilities. 3. However summoning points are obtained should also be on the board. 4. Have spells that can change the board geometry by adding or subtracting rows. 5. Make it players usually have to decide between an action and a move rather than being about to do both.

[@billberg1264]

I don't know about a chess-based TCG, but I've wanted to make a chess-based RPG ever since I saw High School DxD. The anime has a sporting event where you "purchase" team members by allocating magic chess pieces to them. Pieces have point values, as are commonly used in chess scoring. More powerful team members require more total points worth of chess pieces. All chess pieces "spent" on a single team member must be of the same type, and which type you pick determines what special extra bonuses the team member gets. (Rook gives a defense boost, Knight gives a speed boost, Bishop gives a magic boost, and Queen gives a boost to both defense and magic.)

[@Cyberium]

The reason why some games have color and cost restriction was precisely to ensure that people cannot have access to all the power cards without putting in effort. In MtG these days though, there are too many color fixers that color pie restriction is almost nonexistent.

[@wojciechniemirski1782]

4:33 Hearthstone also has other simple system: you can only put in 2 cards of a kind in a deck (or 1 in case of legendaries)

[@shadowmarez7457]

Every player just chooses the most broken Card/Combo they have aka The Queen.

[@arrynchaos9912]

Rarity works if you impose a limit based on rarity. Just a little something to add.

[@Kindlesmith70]

2:16 Hm. Sounds like every TCG ever. There will always be a best card, or best card combo. I think I am pretty sure I understand, and it's something I've known for years from experience. You really can't balance two different things on an equal level. You can try, but it will always fail. Just so you know, this game you "invented" is pretty much Navia Drapt, and it's quite a lot of fun.

[@SvargasName]

@5:15 Looks like "Control beats Aggro", which is obviously backwards.

[@jamjar1726]

i am making a card game called contagion. i have a solution where each card has a unique limit on the amount you can have in your deck. is this a good idea?

[@RemptonGames]

I would say it depends - is the game physical, or digital? I think something like that would be really finicky to deal with in a physical game, and it would be really easy for players to skirt the rules. Not that it’s impossible - games get by with limiting the amount of certain cards, but I think it would become very difficult to track if there wasn’t a default. It also depends on how you implement the system. Suppose you had gold, silver, and bronze cards, and you could only have 1 of each gold, 2 of each silver, and 3 of each bronze. That might be manageable. The advice is just to try to reduce the cognitive load, and make it as verifiable as possible. If your game is digital, the computer can handle all the details so go nuts

[@dudono1744]

Don't print that value on the card tbh, unless that value should be ∞ (i.e. Rat Colony in MTG). Just set a default and a banlist.

[@ArmyNavyAcademy]

Can't stop staring at your glasses

[@ezconnie9309]

Did this man just say that limiting the amount of available cards a player has, will increase the variety of decks we see? Have you played a single card game on a high level? There is a maximum of 3 decks that players play each meta cycle. And the genius solution to this problem you made up is... a mana cost. Revolutionary. I subscribed.

[@sawderf741]

Rarity could work if the rules limit how many cards of any given rarity could be put into a deck.

[@HeavyMetalMouse]

That's less a rarity limitation as a deckbuilding/resource limitation. There is no specific reason that a card's rarity of acquisition should be directly tied to its limit-per-copy in deck - it would be just as reasonable to give every card a "Limit" stat that determines how many copies max can be in a deck, as a potential balancing factor to its power. Or just have there be a Limited and Semi-Limited list, like YGO has, that can be dynamically altered to adjust how much impact a card can have by its copy limit.

[@petersmythe6462]

Point count chess is an actual playable thing. Like, you can definitely let players create their own setup if you impose a cost on the pieces.

[@jbrenneman8526]

You really should have explained the Yugioh segment better. Yugioh, did, and to an extent, still does have the problems mentioned with a lack or restriction on what cards can go into a deck, but it's highly disingenuous to say that the ban list is the only thing they do to try and prevent it. Using your super chess example, if banning was all that was done, just banning the queen wouldn't really make people innovate, it would just make them all play all knights, or all rooks. What Yugioh does instead of focus on 'Archetypes', or high synergy card groupings. For example, instead of having 1 queen, we have a variant of the queen, that can also move like a horse, but only if you have 4 or more horses on your board setup. Then maybe have a pawn variant that lets you bring back a horse when it dies, and ta-da, you now have a 'horse based' chess build, that forces the use of other pieces rather than all queens. This focus on archetypes is great if your designing a game without a resource system, or a very loose system overall, as it allows near infinite deck building, but still guides new players into 'starting points' for their deck without creating a queen problem. Just Remember: Always make your archetype support better than generic support!

[@dudono1744]

And make sure your archetype doesn't devolve into a generic engine.

[@Knokkelman]

While watching this, I imagined a modern format where you can only put X cards of a certain rarity into your deck, like 4 mythics, 8 rares, 16 uncommons max, commons as much as you want - is this already a thing? If not, could it be?

[@jameswilliams2269]

Sometimes a game is made better by some cards or pieces being more powerful than others. Take chess for example. The queen is obviously the most broken piece, but it's ok because both players start the game with one. Another example is Yugioh. Pot of Greed is legal in many old formats of Yugioh, but you being able to get an easy plus one is balanced by the fact that your opponent can do the same. One idea I like is the concept of "Deck Points". Unlike mana, these are not points you spend during the game, but rather points you spend when you build the deck before the game begins. This means that you could spend those points on a spell that lets you draw two, but your opponent could spend the same number of points on a spell that grants equal advantage in some other way, such as by making the opponent discard two cards.

[@RemptonGames]

I think deck points is an interesting system, and I mention it in my “gwent” video. As for your “pot of greed” point, I somewhat disagree. There will always be varying power levels among cards, but I don’t think it’s good when any single card is so powerful that everyone feels compelled to play it. Customization is a big appeal to the genre, so you shouldn’t feel like you have to play a specific card to be successful

[@jameswilliams2269]

@@RemptonGames Sometimes people try to make the perfect format by banning all the overpowered cards, but then the game becomes too dull, because everything is a one for one trade. Solemn Judgment adds a lot of skill to the game, because you can negate anything, but at a huge cost to your LP. In Teledad format, who wins the duel is largely based on knowing when to use or not use SJ. But SJ sees less play when there are no OP cards in a format. Another example is Mirror Force and Mystical Space Typhoon. With MST, you could hit Sakuretsu Armor, but you prefer to hit Mirror Force. Since the controller of MST cannot see the Face Down card, there is a lot of skill needed to read what the opponent sets. Deck points solve the problem by permitting you to play OP cards, but people don't have to spend their deck points on the same cards.

[@HeavyMetalMouse]

A card that is powerful, but not so powerful that everyone needs to run it, is a good card. A card that is so powerful that every deck needs to run it or else it is a worse deck, no matter what other choices are made in building it, is a card that breaks the game. In the latter case, the fact that the other player is also running it doesn't 'balance' anything, it *un*balances it, by now making things more about who happens to get to use theirs first. Consider a variant of Super Chess in which some new kinds of pieces have been invented. If there was some piece (say, a 'Jester') that was somehow different from, but as powerful as, the Queen, then there would be a real choice as to which to play, or how many to play of each. If there were some kind of 'Points' system limiting how powerful a force you could field, now you have even more choices to make - do you want a Queen, or a Jester? Or would you do well to allocate more points away from your lesser pieces to have one of each, or two of one? Now there are choices, and a framework that makes those choices meaningful in relation to one another, making them nontrivial. Deck Points is a fairly good idea, if there is a simple way to enforce them - for example, an electronic game could automatically enforce that rule, while a tournament could require you to log your deck and its point value. But if you're just sitting down to play a game with someone, there is no real way they have to check that your deck is valid, or even to know if it's valid during play or if you're a couple points over, without being allowed to actually count your deck points. For simpler limits, like copy-limits and cards-in-deck limits, it's fairly easy to tell when someone is cheating, by comparison.

[@Ninjamanhammer]

Problem with your Pot of Greed argument is that it gives the player that draws their busted card a huge advantage. It makes the game much more random than when cards are more balanced.

[@ArceusShaymin]

This is something that the "Canadian Highlander" variant format of MtG does. As a 100-card singleton format, there's lots of need to have redundancy and raw power/versatility in your pile. It uses the Vintage banned/restricted list as a baseline - that is, only *101* cards from ALL of Magic's history are banned, which is a miniscule list; and notably, NONE of them are due to power, but ancillary reasons like cards requiring physical dexterity challenges (Chaos Orb), forcing players to bring side decks to tourneys in order to be more competitive (sticker and attraction cards), having card types that only work in draft (Conspiracies), cards made for betting (Ante), or just creating a shitty game state (Shaharazad). The restricted part of the list doesn't even matter due to the singleton nature of the format - that is, you can only use 1 card with the same name ANYWAYS so limiting them to 1 does literally nothing. Yes, the Power 11 are, in fact, legal in the format. But what Canadian Highlander does instead of creating a separate banlist is assign "point values" to very powerful cards. In order to prevent all CanHigh decks from becoming "The best stuff" value piles, you only get 10 points worth of value to stuff into your deck. Black Lotus alone costs SEVEN of your ten points, meaning you can't run it with, say, Ancestral Recall, which costs EIGHT. You want power? You have to pick and choose.

[@icicleditor]

The queens problem assumes balance between each choice will be lackluster or straight up terrible, and the suggested solution still doesnt fix the original problem-- an ecosystem where one choice is much better than the others. In a subset solution, if there is poor balance on one card, decks will still gravitate to that one card, but now the other colors are left in the dust and you've worsened the problem, same for pokemon, and if the balance is worse enough the rps turns into rock, paper, worse rock The solution to the queens problem in super chess specifically is a cost system or other limitation like limited queens per setup, both of which have been applied in tcgs

[@leodaza2151]

I have said for many years that the Queen in chess needs to be nerfed, it is too OP and has dominated the meta for centuries. I would propose limiting how many squares it can move in one turn, as this would keep its original ability, but reduce it in power so that the Rook and Bishop still have a use

[@Cqlr-q4l]

I don't like the rock papper sizors because it again makes the gameplay redondan you know you loose before the first turn but i thing rotation is something yuguioh should implement at some point

[@calinvlad858]

If you really want to solve this problem, you just need to balance the cards well. That's it. The variants of restrictive deck building you named aren't by any means solutions to this problem. Actually there is a chance this might end up worse. If one atribute has stronger cards then the others, then player either are forced play with that atribute and not one they prefer just to keep up with the meta or all together leave the game. The cost solution makes more sense but let's not forget that the Power Nine exist.

[@fernandobanda5734]

How would it be different if the attributes weren't there? If there are stronger cards and people need to keep up with the meta, they WILL use them, regardless of whether those limit the rest of the deck or not.

[@calinvlad858]

@@fernandobanda5734, okay, I hope I did not misunderstood you here, but if I did, please tell me. I am not arguing against those kinds of elements in card games or trying to say that not having them is better. That was not my point. My point was that they are not an answer to the "Queen's Problem". The "Queen's Problem" is a general card game problem. Every game might end up facing it at a point. This problem should be adresed using basic game design logic. Every "solution" presented in the video are just game specific elements. Even though they are the what makes games different from one another, they are pretty much superficial game design. Now, yes those things can offset the problem, but they are at best demns working on wishful thinking. The game designers could still mess up the balancing of the game by making card too strong. This was my point. Also, I think I should be more clear about one part of my original comment. I said that things could end up worse. There was a game called Magi Nation. You were capable to mix different atributes, but they would be more expensive by +1. The creators introduced a new atribute that was stronger, but unmixeble. No one was mixing atributes, so the new one was stronger for no reason.

[@arbitrarygroundpigeon1801]

Balancing the cards well isn't really a solution to the problem. (Not to mention a virtually impossible task when the pool of a card game gets very large.) The core of the problem isn't just that some cards can be too powerful compared to others, but that if no restrictions are placed on cards, it's possible for there to be an objectively best strategy. If any card can go in any deck, synergies and combos be found that make one, uncontested best deck, even if all cards are balanced. Cards are never balanced in a vacuum. All decks are more than the sums of their parts. So, if given enough time with no restrictions, the player base will eventually find a combination of parts whose whole is strictly better than everything else. The only genuine way to prevent this is by making sure that not even deck can have every card. That way, even if there is a best deck, it won't be objectively better than every deck because there are resources it doesn't have access to. Placing limits on cards is the solution to the queen's problem. It can be done ineffectively, as you showed, and cards should still be balanced, but the core of the queen's problem can only be solved by limiting cards.

[@Gravitysonic0]

Regarding Yugioh: "The rules didn't have any way of handling it" The rules STILL don't have any way of handling it. Because the game evolved and continues to evolve in a way that every card, specifically the effect monsters, act in a way that either break the basic rules of the game AND OR addenda to said rules just by the fact that their card text says so. Here's to the current tier 0 and many others to come 🥂. I respect Yugioh Rush for not including any searchers/tutor effects and making infinite normal summons as a rule more every passing day.

[@im7254]

Queen is the most fun piece, literally what makes chess fun

[@Beware_Of_Dogg]

What if you just put the amount of copies your aloud to have per deck on the cards?… for example “Queen of Hearts” ✨ ✨❤✨ ✨ ATK/ 100. DEF/ 100. x1. Queen of Hearts Can be played per deck.

[@joaomenezes1951]

Is it a good option to use randomness(dice, shuffling,...) to solve the queen problem?

[@dudono1744]

How is that supposed to work ? You mean through stuff like drafts ?

[@joaomenezes1951]

Yes, In "Deckbuilding Games" such as "Dominion" and "Ascension," this could be done to mitigate access to very powerful cards. In "TCGs," randomness could be attributed to the card's power. Risk and reward - cards with weaker effects - are more consistent, while very powerful cards have a lower accuracy percentage. @@dudono1744

[@Anon-zl7zw]

There's a TED talk on this and the answer is: No. In a game, there's skill and chance. A game with high chance pushes players away that play in a competitive manner because the variance of losing is decided on coin flips and dice rolls. Competitive players want less chance, more skill based games. In a tcg, deciding who wins solely on the roll of the dice will die faster than it would take for the company to announce it.

[@theparticularist5373]

This problem appears in competitive online video games and strategy video games as well. Why play anything besides the top meta of whatever the current patch is?

[@dudono1744]

The element of surprise.

[@ddbros789]

Most good yugioh cards are archetype locked there are some generic cards mostly in the extra deck but competitive yugioh decks aren’t just the same good cards haphazardly thrown together

[@SapphoAi]

Thanks

[@Torterra_ghahhyhiHd]

could it help decentralice the power? the mana card seem crypto curretcy. that hable to activate scmart contracts ;u..!!

[@renren4236]

Funny how Marvel Snap use exactly the methods you mentioned that won't work.

[@JaimeAGB-pt4xl]

This series can be All about YGO... its the McDonald's of TCGs 🤣

[@chadisnotachad]

I like your moxie

[@oscarguzman3017]

Complimentary engagement

[@franco2796]

I think this analysis misses some points: Giving a limitation to decks like Hearthstone with or Pokemon with the energy system only MOVES the queens problem a level, to the deck instead of the cards. Now you have a deck that is better than the other ones and how do you prevent everyone playing that deck? The rock paper scissors dynamic between decks is better than having all decks being the same (queens) but creates some frustration because you feel like you lost the moment the match starts. Hearthstone showed this symptoms most of its life and I'm not sure where it is right now since I'm not a millionaire. I think the solution to this problems it's two-folded: True balance and secrecy. True balance means zero powercreep, making all cards playable and so, new strategies with old cards are able to come up. With this ecosystem making the metagame a flow of ever more complex difficult nature to predict, rewarding deck exploration. On the other side, secrecy is why decks are shuffled and face down and hands are private, this hidden objects are what keep the game unpredictable and force players to make suboptimal moves. Hearthstone secrets, Digimon digital card battle rock paper scissors attacks, side decks, trap cards, ETC in hearthstone are interesting examples to have in mind.

[@nemesis666first]

You should not just use the word "TCG", since this apply to every CG, like LCG.

[@BahamutEx]

Only create bad/mediocre cards, got it.

[@Laxerjan]

Interesting video but fundamentally wrong. Your problem here is of balance, not of game design. If players were allowed to use any combination of units except for king and queen limited to one each, it would indeed create a better and more diverse game (the pawn would get completely left out but whatever). Saying that it's bad for a game to give freedom because you are making balance mistakes makes no sense. Learn to balance your game well, then give all the freedom it can get. The more freedom it has the more fun and diverse it is, so long as it stays balanced.

[@_occult-claymore_5170]

Someone has NEVER played the big 3 card games.

[@Ninjamanhammer]

Restrictions are a part of balance. In a TTRPG the warrior can't cast fireball but has more health and defense than the wizard. You're saying every TTRPG would be better by just letting the wizard cast fireball.

[@jmurray1110]

Pawns coukd likely stay due to there promotion gimmicks if matches were long enough

[@kylezimmerman9690]

Balance is a part of game design

[@BlazeMakesGames]

the issue you're not considering is that a perfectly balanced game is both impossible and boring. When you're making hundreds if not thousands of different cards, striving for any kind of perfect balance is always going to be a fool's endeavor. The only realistic way to achieve 'perfect' balance is for all of your cards to have very very rigid design restrictions and similar kinds of abilities and in that case you're going to end up with a very boring game to play. It is in fact way healthier for the game, easier to produce, and ultimately more fun, for a game to be imbalanced, but to try and make those imbalances themselves sort of balance each other out by introducing things like counter strategies to popular techniques and card archetypes. And plus designing limitations in a game is part of the game design. In the chess example you're using design to create limitations in an attempt to fix it. If you wanted a perfectly balanced game then you'd take say a knight and a bishop which are both worth 3 points and then design every other piece to be worth exactly 3 points and then all pieces are perfectly balanced. But in a more fun version you might instead just impose a total point limit. So you can have 2 queens if you want, but those cost 9 points each so you'd now be much more limited in your choice of other pieces. The pieces themselves are still just as imbalanced, but the game design helps make up for it.

[@dimitriskontoleon6787]

All is about money. Just money... The company sale cards by a lot.

[@josephpurdy8390]

A simple way is to limit duplicate cards. Only one of each card within a deck. Eventually every deck is going to be cookie cutter. Unless factors outside a player's control are introduced. Players are going to choose cards that place them in best possible chance of winning. The downside is that player's losing agency may not find it desirable to play. Each and every card for a TCG should have some reason to be useful. Even in nitch cases where a player has to pick other less desirable cards. In order to optimize their deck. This will reinforce only cards with acceptable outcomes to be added. Thus, less total cards created to be sold.

[@Crypt4l]

The problem doesn't occur in chess...

[@Crypt4l]

You don't have a chess board? Oo

[@NathanieiJerry-s9v]

Jeffery Mills

[@bradensorensen966]

I mean, this is a pretty basic concept. I thought there was gonna be clever takes on it.

[@drewsexton9424]

Hey I'm view 23000🎉

[@AKYinYang96]

Hearthstone uses a rarity system

[@royalecrafts6252]

Well......start to say the very first problem is that tcgs are pay to win by definition

[@thekittenfreakify]

...difficult to design. C'mon I keep seeing this type of video nobody mentions how every tcg ignores its established rules and then get suprised they get a tier 0 format. Stick to the rules you made.

[@kingpin6173]

Cool video, but your idea that only letting players use a subset of cards is good is way off imo. Especially the rock paper scissors thing makes it fun "because of built in checks and balances". Rock paper scissors is not fun. Building a card game based around RPS will not make a fun game. It removes skill from the game, and makes it almost entirely luck based. Pretty much everything else you said is correct though.

[@davidrafferty2491]

Its not a hard system like RPS is tho (i.e. Rock CANNOT EVER defeat paper, by definition). It more describes how the inherent tendencies of given playstyles will, on average, succeed over certain others. RPS describes opportunity cost. To do something is to not do something else. It is a way to conceptualize not having a deck that does it all. For instance you could cut some stuff from an agro deck to give it a better matchup against control but you will loose dominance over your typical good matchup. without some RPS the game devolves into simply Rock Paper. without RPS elements the game quickly gets solved. Think about it like monotype pokemon. if you are doing an electric team you will struggle against ground (this is the RPS element). But you can run Rotom Wash with scald and levitate which now subverts the RPS without totally destroying the inherent advantages. RPS is not a luck based concept when applied to TCGs. you can tech against your inherent disadvantages at the cost of some inherent advantage against another deck type. finding the efficiency sweetspot for this is a Huuuuuge part of the fun of deckbuilding. Conceptual RPS in TCGs boils down to: "everything has to be weak against something". Even massive MtG Eldrazi or something like that are weak to the economic cost of casting it. in order to make a deck that can get those out there it will have to spend so many resources on mana ramp or mana cheat that this inherently means there will be things you cannot respond well to. 70-80% of the game should revolve around RPS while the last 20-30% are little tricks that can subvert it. i really like how MtG does it without hard x2 advantages like pokemon. certain colors have access to more effective cards of various purposes. if you want to fill in against your color's deficiency you have to maybe add in another color at the cost of mana draw consistency. RPS is just the idea that strengths must come with weaknesses. Flexibility harms consistency. dont think of it like the actual game of RPS but more like the classic Armour vs Firepower vs mobility (vs cost) "triangle" in tank design. Does armour always beat firepower? not exactly