The New Digimon TCG and the Problem of Resource Systems

[@SeraSmiles]

Even just bringing up Duel Masters for a second reminds me how much I absolutely adored that game as a kid. They really took the most promising game & shot it behind the shed

[@derpderpson8796]

I never threw away mine and forgot about them in the "Misc. TCG" box. A year or so I rediscovered them and brought them to game night. WE had way more fun than anyone would expect, having a dedicated Duel Masters Saturday once a month! Really wonder why this game couldn't get a second wind.

[@derektom14]

I've only played two games of the Digimon TCG, but one thing that I found really nice about it compared to Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh! was that there wasn't a single point where I had to search my deck for a card, then shuffle my deck, which can slow down play considerably. This is in part because of how cards could digivolve into each other by steps interchangeably instead of fixed lines or requiring fixed combinations of cards.

[@andychamberlain1085]

9:22 correction. The old digimon card game didn't have particularly fixed evolution lines. They frequently had multiple digimon they could digivolve from or to, although the list was fairly restricted compared to today's open digivolution paths.

[@tcgacademia]

Nice video! I've heard a bunch of praise for Digimon's resource system in passing, but this does a really good job laying out why people like it so much.

[@VazGabo]

Great video! I agree a lot with how digimon resource system tries to fix some very well known issues with other systems. A piece of feedback, though: please make sure your slides show up long enough for people to read text/cards. Some are shown for a split second of time, like the tts logo.

[@revimfadli4666]

I suspect the TTS logo was more like "if you know, you know *wink*"

[@liondovegm]

Some guys at work have been playing digimon way more than actually working

[@revimfadli4666]

This game really reminds me of some European-style modern boardgames, particularly Patchwork with the memory resource system, and Wingspan with the effect stacking. Maybe the tight & elegant gameplay elements were inspired by those styles of games?

[@anab0lic]

Tbh a lot of game design is just pulling mechanics from other games, combining them, iterating upon them and conjuring up something new.

[@revimfadli4666]

​@@anab0licIndeed, though the Western/American TCG scene seems surprisingly unfamiliar with the world outside the big 3, to the point that the "clone MtG's land system or have no resource at all" mindset is apparently a prevalent one, and copying any Eurogame or Japanese TCG mechanism suddenly becomes super innovative

[@cantrip7]

This game's memory gauge is lifted from Chrono Clash, a multi-franchise game from Bandai designed by Ryan Miller. So it feels like a nice mix between east and west from that, I'd wager.

[@revimfadli4666]

@@cantrip7 I wonder if that was inspired by an even older game, and what that game was

[@kagemushashien8394]

@@revimfadli4666 Know any games from there I can borrow from?

[@SpektralJo]

My completly arbitrary rule for playing a tcg is it being turing complete

[@ben_8998]

True I don’t play games that aren’t Turing complete

[@kagemushashien8394]

How do I make my game Turing Complete?

[@vonakakkola]

@@kagemushashien8394 you need to make your game so that it could implement a Turing machine, if your game can simulate a turing machine, that means your game could compute whatever thing you want sorry if it's not a so great explanation, but i couldn't tell you more

[@kagemushashien8394]

@@vonakakkola OK, what needs to be done to make a Turing machine?

[@pandasmooth]

Loved this video, please make more. I’m researching developing a card game and this was very insightful

[@duelme1234]

Finding this after Kohdok's video on resource systems.....very "interesting" perspective.

[@deadlypandaghost]

Eternal CCG was similiar to magic. You play sigils which increase your mana per turn but also generally gave you influence in one of the five factions. Cards would then have a mana cost and influence requirements that both must be met. Mana isn't colored but how much of each color you had played affected what you could play. For instance there was a 0 mana cost spell that required 3 time influence to play. So it was just free once you met the influence requirements. Thus ramp effects increased power while color fixing increased influence. While commonly together they could be seperated out for different effects. Acted as an effective splashability valve while still allowing low cost cards. Additionally it took advantage of its digital nature and skewed some probabilities when drawing your opening hand so you would generally have enough mana for it to be playable. Effectively you had guranteed sigil slots in your opening hand but it was required to run at least 1/3 of your deck as sigils.

[@darthnixilis304]

Other resource systems you might find interesting are WWE Raw Deal Lord of the Rings TCG, and the Star Wars CCG (Decipher)

[@nullpoint3346]

Simultaneous Resolution needs to be tested more often.

[@Yinyanyeow]

One thing to keep in mind, the oldest digimon card game failed here with how the game play got edited.

[@LukeLavablade]

That resource system does seem pretty cool, makes me want to check the game out. I wish there was a digital client for international players.

[@phorchybug3286]

Yeah, it is a pretty cool idea for a game.

[@admiralcasperr]

Lands are a problem, but IMO are very fun. 'Explore' effects and dual lands are cool. And of course then building a nice manabase can be satisfying AF.

[@goncaloferreira6429]

nice video. Some thoughts: 1- Hard stops is an interesting term. i dont think i heard it before. In any case what you start by talking about is having a good/strong set of base rules. Father mtg has the strongest base rules of the industry, something that i link to the colour pie and colour identidy. 2- 1:59 not a very good point. They are not arbitray. As part of the game´s identities they define the basic intended gameplay experience. 3- 2:30 that may or may not be the case. Ramp in mtg is just a way of playing the game and it usually is well balanced within metagames. 4- complaining about mtg lands became normal. people never mention the benefits of the system. 5- Yugioh evolved badly in the sense that it it didnt have strong enough base rules and the good it had, strongly influenced by mtg and pokemon, quicky was forgotten, overrun in the name of growth and change. 6- Pokemon was quick to change the supporter rule and overal had an healthy and conservative growth. Too conservative?

[@twenty-fifth420]

3 and 4: Ramp and Mana are incredibly tricky to balance but to be frank, I think there isn’t any ‘benefits’. A stronger argument would be magic has an excuse for its resource system because it was the first. Numero Uno. My issue is that old and new magic are vastly different. My brother and I own a lot of old cards. The problem with most is that they are terribly balanced in the modern day, usually creatures with the tone shift beginning roughly around 5th and solidifying after 8. The one exception actually…is lands. But that doesn’t mean lands themselves are ‘good design’. Because fetch and ramp have been mainstays since even Alpha. It is not that hard to find ramp in Green and sometimes Red, or literally search it with Blue or Black if you wanna be on the edge. The only color that sucks with ramp is White, and they have an excuse because most white creatures either have flying/evasion, cost cheap and/or get tribal synergy. It was like Blue and Card Draw. It was too valuable to lock up in one color, so it had to be moved around some, either unofficially with ‘search’ effects, or officially by making Mana Alternatives like Mana Generation from Spells or Artifacts. The best I can say is Mana is too valuable arguably for game balance because Magic has one resource system. Technically Yu Gi Oh has three, as you use creatures to fuse, spells to summon tribals or special summon, or even tokens like Magic. You claimed it didn’t have strong enough base rules and I reject that outright. It is actually kind of worse. Yu Gi Oh always played fast and loose with its rules. Literally an anime trope. In the actual game itself, Life Points were changed literally two times, we had to tweak spell speeds and hand traps exist because apparently the design team didn’t get the memo that the anime didn’t even use quick-play hand spells correctly. Mana flooding and screwing are literally the achilles heel of MTG game design. Hearthstone generates mana far more reliably from just by having a mana turn-based counter basically until you hit turn 10. Or even Kaijudo/Duel Masters where creatures produce mana when in the Mana Zone. If anything, I think both examples demonstrate the sort of agedness of Mana in Magic. Now, you mention some elusive benefits. As a last food for thought since I can’t read your mind, I want to give Magic the benefit of the doubt. Like I mentioned early, Mana Ramp is relatively colorless if you know where to look (but of course Green dominates still like Blue does for Card Draw or Red for Direct Damage/Mana Gen Spending). But Magic’s resource system does get a free fucking pass for once for not only being the oldest, but innovating card economy so much Yu Gi Oh took the opposite approach and imho, both work great. Spending Mana should feel good and it does, assuming you don’t miss a drop or two, or ten. The economy of progression is very solid but if not forced because like I said, if you look at older creature cards, most of them are terrible. I think this comment is too biased in Magic’s Corner. Mana is a big problem. I have seen other games do it better and in my game, I also think I did it better. It is probably also why Dual Lands exist both from the collector point of view and design, since Mana Screwing for One Color in a 3 Color Wedge Deck without a Green Splash is just the worst.

[@aruretheincomprehensible20]

@@twenty-fifth420 Mana flood and mana screw are, in my opinion, the worst experiences in any card game, but the mechanics that allow for flood and screw make for a much more compelling experience overall. Magic's land system solves multiple game design problems by allowing for cards to be balanced against each other, inhibiting the ability to create tier 0 strategies that put all the game's best cards together, and to have a tactile resource system without the need for an external resource like pen and paper. Hearthstone's resource systems can't handle the creation of tier 0 strategies by itself (to which is uses a class system to fix that problem), and resource allocation only works without external resources because it's a digital card game. In addition, Magic has more levers to tune the cost/power ratio of their cards by allowing for different types of colored/colorless lands and offers more choices to tune your deck between the consistency of playing any card at any point in the game and the power offered by mixing cards of different colors that Hearthstone cannot provide. Even when you exclude the ability to play cards on your opponent's turn Magic has more depth than Hearthstone has at every point of the game, a feature common when comparing any CCG with dedicated resource cards to any CCG that has cardless resources. Resource cards are good design because they not only solve multiple problems that card game designers have to solve if they want to design a compelling card game experience, but they also solve those problems in a way that allows players to have a more compelling deckbuilding experience overall by asking them to gauge risk/reward in how they construct their deck.

[@MrVovoda]

Complaining about Yugioh base rules became normal. People never mention the benefits of the system.

[@goncaloferreira6429]

@@MrVovoda please, tell me about those benefits and yugioh card and game design.

[@kagemushashien8394]

So, do I includ Hard Stops or not?

[@endtimestcg5146]

3:00 Thank you! How VS System, and Warhammer TCG handled it was cool, but a bit dull. The Screew and Flow from MTG ain't good - but it has it's great Flavour... Even Magic I would say: When you gather up those lands and Cast stuff. Just a Bit Jucier than Playing cards face down and getting free colorless mana. Something in between would be cool. I like the DIGIMON APPROACH.

[@nickxzone]

Thats was cool!

[@TheEvilCheesecake]

Sweet video! Looking forward to the next one.

[@j453]

The digimon game sounds fun...but I hate the art.

[@phorchybug3286]

Oh... Kay... 😶

[@anab0lic]

For me the art is really hit and miss, some I like some looks very meh.

[@GardoGamer]

I bypassed the "I don't liked the art" phase on this game.. the thing that made me quit is that EN cards are not available in our country... and if was it was, few players are using EN cards coz in our country JP cards are the one's officially used...

[@JustinTuthill]

nah google it or check their site, art of the new game is nice enough

[@kateslate3228]

I find it very interesting how people praise this game so much when pretty much everything BUT the resource system is a Duel Masters rip-off.

[@reezmoguriz2742]

Does duel master have evolution mechanism and its inherit ability?

[@kateslate3228]

@@reezmoguriz2742 Evolution yes. Inherit, no.

[@revimfadli4666]

@@nmr7203 I'd take a Duel Masters rip-off over MtG ripoffs

[@anab0lic]

​@@nmr7203 tbh I don't think there is hardly anything new in terms of mechanisms in game design anymore, its just interations of something that came before it.