Magic the Gathering Campaign System

The Pitch
In standard Magic games, players take the role of planeswalkers who encounter one another and duel. The assumptions are that each competitor arrives fresh to the fight, fights for nothing, and fights to the death (0 life). That's fine for a tournament environment that has to be equivocal, but I'd rather have someone show up bloody to a fight, victory mean more than just winning, and close matches carry more weight than a one-sided beating.

Overview
Linked Campaigns use two teams of three decks (whether that's three decks with three players or three decks with one player on each team is up to you). Each Round, both teams put up a deck that will be playing while its other two decks Recover from their previous Beatings. The players for each playing deck prepare for the game, but lose life or mill cards according to their previous Beatings before they mulligan. At the end of the duel, each player totals up the beatings for their deck and the winner takes a Location card for their team's Command Zone. Location cards have points (some have abilities) and the first team to 20+ points wins.

Spent to Cast: Ruminations

"Spent to Cast," aka Ogre Savant Ability, aka Sunburst, aka cards in the Shadowmoor/Eventide cycles including River's Grasp and Moonhold.  These cards care about the mana that was spent to cast them. Sunburst doesn't care what mana was spent so long as it's different and it provides one of two set effects related to that. That makes it different enough that it discussed in depth elsewhere.

Spent to Cast encourages splashing other colors. It usually requires mana of one color to cast, but gives a bonus if another color is spent. It's popular on instants and sorceries and when it's used on creatures, it often confers a one-time effect , even if that effect is just to keep the creature, in the case of the Simic, Azorious, and Rakdos implementations (where Spent to Cast acts like strange Evoke instead of a strange Kicker). This avoids memory issues in much the same way that Sunburst does with counters.

Cons

The spell taped to a creature issue sometimes results in cross-color abilities: Court Hussar has a very blue ETB effect, but has a white ability, one you only get to use if you pay white mana for it. While it's an interesting approach, it ends up being a blue card with vigilance, just like Azorius Herald is an unblockable white card and Crypt Champion is a black card with Double Strike. That particular approach to the color pie might not work in a core set.

Crypt Champion itself raises an interesting point; while Crypt Champions can't reanimate one another, these strange evoke creatures are very resistant to being cheated into play. This might discourage new players and even cause uncertainty when the appropriately colored mana is spent on an ability that puts them into play (Quicksilver Amulet or Birthing Pod). This is either an opportunity for education or a dangerous point of confusion.

Monday's Pitch: The Boxes Precinct

Fuck! This was supposed to go up last Monday. Bear with me, Blogger does this "I know you clicked, 'Post,' but I wanted to keep this blog our little secret forever," bullshit. It's saccharine and disturbing, Blogger! Quit it!

What about a story told from the perspective of the unused Magic cards that sit obsessively in long boxes? Not even the pauper-level cards, but the real, unusable, passed-over stinkers that aren't worth the cardboard they're printed on, along with a few overlooked gems put in for variety?

Imagine, a player's hunt for a particular, elusive card that they just know is in their collection anthropomorphized as one of these cards as a...noir/semi-noir detective. It spans from the long boxes to the utility pile, to the dregs of half-completed decks, and--the Valhalla for Magic cards--played, constructed decks.

A buddy-buddy cop format might also be cool, pairing something like Shauku's Minion with a planeswalker card like Jace, the Mindsculptor in a good/evil playable/unplayable combo only united by their common purpose in finding a missing card.

Magic Formats, Part VII Finale

The Weepies

These formats technically exist and are just shy of being too pathetic to share.

Pack Wars is about trying to make a playable deck out of a booster pack. It’s fifteen cards with no rhyme or reason and I’m supposed to shuffle in seven basic lands and act that like the short unsatisfying game divorced almost entirely from my skills as a player is a thing that people do and that I should buy another pack and do it again. It isn’t. I shouldn’t. Fuck you.

Type 5 is Pack Wars, except you use more boosters and don’t bother shuffling in lands, you just open packs and start using spells as lands that tap for their converted mana cost. Irrationally, I’m not as offended by this much quicker hand to mouth model of opening booster packs. Perhaps I’ve transcended into some higher plane of unfamiliar ur-disgust.

Type 4/DC 10 are two ridiculous formats that only work in a well manicured environment. Mana is infinite, but you can only cast one spell per turn. I believe they are also singleton formats. Activated abilities can be activated infinitely. The only difference, I think, is that DC10 has a stated limit of setting X equal to 10, while Type 4 relies on more counterspells. I much prefer DC10. I don’t mean to dismiss this format out of hand, it’s just that it seems like it could be fun, but I certainly don’t have the cards to pull it off.

Landless is, according to the account I have, the result of two people trying to play Magic without any lands. They got a good compromise going, and I’m pretty interested. Like Type 5, Type 4, and DC 10, it’s a landless format, and like Type 5, you can play spells as lands. However, a spell played as a land only gives one mana of one of its colors. After it’s played as a land, that card can’t be used for anything else and acts like a non-basic land until it changes zones.

Magic Formats, Part VI

Revolutionaries

There are also formats which are decidedly more difficult to get into. These formats usually have deck construction requirements which require multiple players to create specific decks in order to play, in addition to having tweaked play rules.

Singleton is a deck building restriction for duels or multiplayer that say that with the exception of basic lands, you may only have one of each card in your deck. Just like the Limited formats, Singleton ensures that a deck is overall less consistent than it could be and encourages a player to work with cards they might not normally work with.

Commander is the much loved granddaddy of alternative formats. It’s a Singleton format the proscribes a 99 card deck with a 100th, Legendary Creature card (The eponymous Commander) that limits what other colors can be included (or even referenced) by other cards in the deck. The Commander hangs out in the Command Zone where he/she can be cast whenever their owner could cast a creature spell. If the commander would be exiled or destroyed, they may be put into the Command Zone again. The rules of Commander are myriad, but intuitive and fun. Each player starts with 40 life, and that goes a long way towards keeping games long, swingy, and exciting.

Star is quite possibly the least revolutionary of the revolutionaries, simply requiring five monocolored decks of each of the five colors. Players square off in a circle representing the colors on the back of a Magic card: white, blue, black, red, and green. The goal of each color is to kill off their enemy colors. A player doesn’t have to do this themselves; if the White and Red players have both been eliminated, then the White player can win if the Black player is eliminated and the Red player can win if the Blue player is eliminated. Green in this scenario is screwed. It’s a flavorful format that tends to be quicker than most multiplayer formats as there isn’t much hidden information and objectives-based games tend to be quicker than “last man standing” matches.

Godzilla is a format built for fatties. In each 75 card deck, at least 20 of them must be 4/4 creatures or larger. Each player has three individual turns where they can’t interact with another player. Players earn a point for removing other players, being the last man standing, votes from other players for good gamesmanship, and of course, for constructing your deck to have the biggest creatures you can (every total 40 points of power and toughness [above 140] of creatures in your deck gives you an additional point).

Then, before we get to the depressing formats, we get to The Cube. The Cube is a draft format designed to accommodate eight players. It’s a singleton format composed of cards hand selected to create a specific play environment. Each player takes three ‘packs’ of fifteen cards at random from The Cube and drafts normally to make a deck. Players then play normally.

Magic Formats, Part V

Detailing

There are also a number of ‘formats’ which can be easily applied on top of most normal games of Magic—multiplayer or duel—to change how the game plays.

Planechase is the best of these. Ideally, each player has their own deck of double-sized plane cards, but I’ve found that pulling from a common pile tends to make things more interesting. None the less, Planechase requires a few special cards, but otherwise works with any other format. It isn’t an alternative way to play so much as a way to infuse additional randomness into how you’re already playing. In a nutshell, there’s a plane card that gives a regular effect for as long as its face up. As a special action, a player can roll a planar die (1D6). If they get a Planeswalk symbol (1), they can put the current plane on the bottom of the planar library and reveal the next plane from the top of that library. If they roll Chaos (6), they activate a special ability of that plane instead. Other results do nothing.

House Rule: In order to (partially) circumvent the unreliable planeswalking system, my group uses two planar die, with a player having the option of choosing which applies. This makes walking away and activating chaos abilities more reliable, instead of leaving players at a hobbling plane on a streak of bad luck with no hope of egress (though that certainly still happens).

Respawn Magic is a multiplayer variant where a player may reenter the game once they’re eliminated. They lose a point for being eliminated (or conceding) and whichever player controlled the effect that eliminated them gains a point. Whenever they reenter, they get three immediate, free turns and then resume playing in the main game. Respawn Magic is fun and flexible, allowing latecomers and players who’ve been eliminated by a run of bad luck to enter the game and come up to speed. It also helps prevent stalemates and allows kamikazie runs on winning players to break their hold on the board. Respawn Magic doesn’t work so well with formats where eliminating other players matters (Archenemy, Ukatabi Kong, Star [see Monday's article]), but it’s great for any other sort of running game.

The Rumble Rule is a helpful rule to keep multiplayer (or even some duels) games from bogging down. It is only good in limited format games, or games where all players have a sideboard. Whenever a player deals damage to another player or gives them a poison counter, they get a rumble point. Whenever a player has twenty rumble points, they may immediately take a card from their sideboard/unused card pool and exile it. They may cast that card at any time they could normally play it from exile without paying its mana cost (though any non-zero values of “X” must actually be paid for.). It encourages players to be aggressive and to attack, even when the board state might not be optimal.

Assassins can spice up almost any multiplayer game. Players are given the name of another player to eliminate. That other player is their mark. Whenever you eliminate your mark, you get a point and that player’s mark. If you were their mark, gain a point and discard that mark without getting another one. If someone else removes your mark, you get no points. The last player standing gets 1.5 points.

House Rule: Colorbind Assassins: Alternatively, each player can choose a basic land to represent them. A basic land corresponding to each player is shuffled into a pile and dealt to each player. This game proceeds just like a regular game of Assassins, except that your mark can be any player with a basic land of that type in play. Whenever you eliminate a player who controls that basic land type, you gain one point and may switch your mark for his. A player with no basic land types may be anyone’s mark. Last player standing earns 1.5 points.

Magic Formats, Part IV

Fundamental Tweaks

Howevercomma beyond the reach of these safe variations, there are yet more ways to shake up a game. The first, of course, is multiplayer.

Booster drafts, by default are a form of multiplayer. The official rules assume you have four to eight friends that both play Magic and that you want to play Magic with (while I, personally, find the number to be closer to two and a half, depending on just what I've been drinking.), but that's surmountable. Drafting is great fun in that you're playing the game before you play the game. Trying to figure out who's pulling what, where that game breaking card went, and just who the hell is stealing all of your Black is usually as much fun as playing Magic itself, even if the format, as designed, eventually breaks down into a series of duels.

The simplest fix for this is Multiplayer Group Drafting, which is just drafting with a fourth booster pack per person to soften the edges of those times when you end up with some poor-quality late picks in the third round.

The best way to shake up your game in multiplayer is with “Plug and Play” multiplayer formats. While it’s certainly possible to optimize decks for these formats, for the most part, a regular 60-card duel deck can work in this format without major tweaking. Two-Headed Giant, Emperor, Archenemy, Ukatabi Kong, and Zero Sum are all multiplayer formats that work well with an existing deck, and fundamentally change much of how the game operates.

Two Headed Giant is probably one of the oldest variations on this theme. It features two teams of two players each who share a life total and work to reduce their opponents’ life total to 0. The players share a turn and attack together. Two Headed Giant is fun and lets two players work together without concern that the weaker link will be eliminated. However, its rules are sometimes complex due to the nature of players sharing life totals and turns.

Emperor is another venerable format in which six players form two teams. Each team consists of an Emperor flanked by two Generals. The Generals can only attack and target players adjacent to them and Emperors may cast spells on any adjacent player and any player adjacent to them. This means that the first General to fall exposes his Emperor, and the loss of an Emperor is the loss of a game. Allies can also transfer creatures to adjacent friends by tapping them. Once the range of influence and attacking options become familiar, Emperor is a fun and flavorful method of play.

Archenemy is one of the summer filler releases, designed to put focus on multiplayer formats and entice players to buy something during the summer. Archenemy doesn’t seem to have been successful in that respect, but it’s still a fun format. Instead of a free for all or team versus team match, a deck of Archenemy cards make one player powerful enough to take on all comers. A one-versus-all format, Archenemy is long on flavor, but short on actual innovation. Let’s face it though, if you read the flavor text on all of your schemes as you set them into motion, everyone wins!

Ukatabi Kong is an unusual format where one player is randomly (and secretly) selected to be Ukatabi Kong and the rest are hunters. If another player kills the Ukatabi Kong, they win the game and gets points for each other player eliminated before them. When the Ukatabi Kong is the last player standing or has a total of 20 power worth of creatures on the board, they win instantly and gain points equal to the number of players eliminated plus the number of players who started the game. After several rounds, points are totaled and winner declared.

Finally, Zero Sum is an interesting format where each player divides their life total between left and right sides, defaulting at 10 each (10/10). Whenever they take damage from a player immediately to their right or left, the corresponding side takes that much damage and their opposite side gains that much life. A player at full health who’s hit by a Serra Angel from the left would then have a life total of 6/14. A player is only killed whenever one of their life totals is at -10, representing twenty damage from a single player (and of course, poison, decking, concessions, Doors to Nothingness, etc.). Whenever a player takes damage from a player not directly to either side of them, the damage is applied equally to both halves of their life and nothing changes.

Magic Formats, Part III

Solomon Drafts are conducted with only two people, but instead of passing packs, all players put the cards from their boosters into a common pile. Then each player takes turns drawing eight cards and separates them into two face-up piles. The other player picks which pile they want and the player who separated them gets the other pile. Then, they switch roles and continue until all of the cards have been drafted. While this doesn’t quite have the mystery of a regular draft, it does make players make hard decisions before the game starts and tests each player’s ability to correctly gauge the value of their cards.

The Winston Draft is another two player favorite. In the Winston Draft, like in the Solomon Draft, each player’s boosters are shuffled together into a single pile. Three cards are drawn face down from that one to make three smaller piles. Each player in turn may look at each of the smaller piles in turn and either take that pile or pass to look at the next pile. If they take it, another face-down card is taken from the main pile to put in its place to start a new pile. If they opt to look at the next pile, they still add another face down card from the main pile to that one. If the player doesn’t want any of the three piles, they take a single card from the top of the main pile.

Winston Draft preserves quite a bit of mystery of drafting while still being interactive. However, it is slow and slightly more random than a standard draft.

Winchester Draft is much quicker, but loses quite a bit of that mystery. In it, each player has their own pile made up of their own booster packs. When the draft begins each player puts two cards from their main pile into two face-up piles in front of them (making four face-up piles, two for each player.). Each player in turn then chooses a pile—theirs or an opponents—and takes it. Then, on each subsequent turn, the players switch order and put another two cards from their main piles onto their own face-up piles (making a new pile if the old one was selected last turn) and choose one to add to their card pool, repeating until all main piles are empty and all cards are chosen.

The Continuous Draft (no direct link) is the final two player draft. It also features three booster packs. Each player opens their own booster packs, but unlike the Winston and Solomon Drafts, they peruse their cards before hand and choose one to put aside; it won’t be in this draft and it won’t be in this game. Then, with a 44 card pile, the first player reveals the top four cards of their pile and chooses one. The other player then chooses two of the remaining cards, and the first player takes the last. The other player then reveals four cards from their pile and the process repeats itself until all cards have been chosen. The Continuous Draft is quite quick and open. In fact, in the format it suggests drafting with other players before matches. This is great for a mercurial draft environment for players who are eager to see what a new set or play environment holds.

Back Draft (again, no direct link) is a fun twist on any drafting format. Instead of drawing the best possible, you take the worst cards you can. Whenever you face off against an opponent, the two of you switch card pools and they make the best deck they can with your terrible cards and the both of you try to win. Back Draft sees rarely-used cards hitting the field and clunky, non-synergistic decks trying to take each other down.

While luck is a larger factor in Limited formats than it is in non-Limited formats, the ability to judge cards for their worth and anticipate the strategies of others is far more potent than it would be in other games. It’s also less susceptible to net decking and simply following a metagame, though powerful cards do tend to be powerful cards, regardless of what decks one plays for or against.

Naturally, Limited and Set-based card pools work with one another. Random packs of cards from a specific set can be found for $4(+) and work with most of these variations. They're transparent and quite equivocal and work very well with the stated rules to create controlled environment for sanctioned play.

Magic Formats, Part II

Limitations as Challenges

Of course, a player can (theoretically) choose the best cards of these formats and make a finely-tuned deck that plays the same (or almost the same) in each game. Because of Magic's rather rapid turnaround time (especially when speaking of duels), this gets boring rather quickly.

An alternative is artificially limiting a card pool through Limited formats. Limited formats can be constructed or drafted and rely heavily on randomized booster packs of 15 cards from a particular set. Ideally, one booster pack from each of a block’s sets, but since a block’s sets are usually released several months apart, it’s rare for a block that’s in vogue to have all of its sets out at once.

None the less, in constructed limited, approximately six boosters from the block are used by a player to put together a constructed deck of sixty cards. Any unused cards are used as sideboard options. This means that powerful rares will rarely ever be duplicated, and even potent uncommons won’t usually have more than one copy in a Limited Constructed deck.

The jewel in the eye of limited is the draft. Drafts are usually held with four to eight players (though two is also possible, see the Solomon Draft and Winston Drafts below), and as a format incorporating multiple players, they provide new and different challenges.

In a regular draft, each player starts with three booster packs. They then open up a booster pack, select a card from it, and pass the remaining cards to their right. They then look at the cards they received from their left, choose another, and pass the remaining cards to their right. Players repeat this process until each player has fifteen cards and all cards from each player’s first pack has been chosen. Then, players open their second pack and repeat this process, passing to the left instead. After the cards from the final packs have been passed (to the right this time) and selected, each player has a pool of roughly 45 cards). From that pool, they can add any number of basic lands to make a deck of at least 40 cards, with any unused cards acting as a sideboard.

The games from that point forward are standard duels, but just like with Limited Constructed, they tend to have fewer rares and uncommons than a non-limited deck.

Variations on even these themes is common.

Rochester Draft is an open variation on a draft. Instead of secretly passing each pack of cards around the table, a Rochester Draft has the first player put their first pack face-up on the table. After a short period of orientation, the first player picks a card, followed by the second, until the eighth player picks a card. Then, the eighth player picks another card, followed by seventh, back up to the second player, who takes the remaining, fifteenth card. After the first pack is opened, the second player’s first pack is opened and the second player makes the first pick, followed by the third. This time, the first player chooses after the eighth, and chooses twice, and the order is reversed from the eighth back to the third, who takes the final card. After each player opens their first pack, the order reverses; the eighth player chooses after the first player, the second player makes two picks in a row, and the eighth player takes the remaining fifteenth card. The third pack is drafted just like the first.

This format is slower than a regular draft, but it’s more open and allows players to see what others are doing. It also makes sure that players who pick later get some compensation. While the player to open a pack will usually get the best card from it, a player who gets the eight pick gets two mid-level cards from it while everyone else gets the leftovers. Rochester can also be more sociable, as normal drafts technically prohibit talking during the draft.

Rotisserie Drafts are like Rochester Drafts, except that instead of laying out one pack, the players lay out one of each card from a set, block, or even all of Magic, and allow players in order from first to last to pick a card. Then, the last player makes a second pick and each player back up to the first makes a second pick, just like Rochester Draft (except with one giant ‘pack’ instead) The process repeats until either all cards or a specific number of cards for each player are chosen. Because there are about as many commons per set as there are rares, but rares only appear with about one tenth of the frequency of commons, Rotisserie Drafts allow players to play with a higher concentration of rares than a normal limited environment. While this defeats some of the purposes of a Limited format, its one-of, or Singleton, quality helps blunt the effect of multiple copies of powerful rare cards.

Magic Formats, Part I

Damn, there are a lot of Magic formats, some official, and a great number less official. Changing up formats is a great way to add variety to Magic and to get those cards that aren't so great in a duel (one on one game) into play.

Most formats differ in terms of how many players there are, how decks are constructed, how life totals are tallied, which other players you can attack, and what your victory conditions are. The baseline game of Magic starts with two players (a duel), each with a deck constructed of to 60+ cards drawn from most of the cards in Magic's history (with a general limit of four of each card). The players begin with twenty life and play lands and spells in an effort to reduce their opponent's life total to 0 (or to achieve a few other game states that removes their opposition from the game.)

Standard Variations

Of course, changing these assumptions changes the way the game is played. Part of the fun of games is exploring the cause and effect; exploring the fullness of the rules. One of the advantages of Magic is that the cards are the rules and exploring the rules is a never-ending quest, as there are always more cards. None the less, when “more cards” simply doesn’t suffice in terms of broadening one’s play horizons, new conditions and variations often do.

The simplest variation is simply not playing with every card. Granted, most players do this simply because they don’t own every card. That, however, is a natural limitation, and one that follows a player no matter what format they play. Artificially limiting the card pool is a horse of a different color. By definition, more available cards mean more available options means more optimal choices. By eliminating some cards from the pool, optimal choices are cut down and players must find new optimal choices within the new set.

The publishers of Magic, Wizards of the Coast, know this and officially support many formats where this is the case. Most common is the Standard format. It usually consists of the last two blocks to have been released, plus a core set. These cards only stretch back about two years, meaning that Wizards can control the Standard format better than any other format. This might seem ominous at first glance, but in fact it allows them to manipulate the format in such a way that most players can enjoy participating in it.

Next to that is the Extended format. As it might sound, the Extended format is simply the Standard format with a slightly longer reach, usually incorporating a few more older blocks and another core set.

Unlike Extended and Standard, the Modern format begins at one block, Mirrodin, and incorporates all subsequent blocks and core sets instead of measuring backwards from the most recent block.

On the other hand, Vintage and Legacy formats incorporate all Magic cards by default, with subtle differences in the list of cards they ban and restrict distinguishing them from one another.

Block formats only allow cards from particular blocks, sometimes with the option of adding cards from a related core set.

It's the Magic: Cubic Leagues

My favorite Magic format is the Cube Draft. There's only one of each card, you can manage what unfun cards are or aren't in it, it's multiplayer by default, it negates fiscal and net decking advantages; it's just tops.

However, it occurs to me that its stable format allows for a different type of play; true League play. Most of you are familiar with fantasy sports leagues, where you measure the performance of players throughout the season and the victory of your imaginary team is affected by the performance of real-world players over a season. In some leagues, a computer game like Madden is used to that players can focus more on the trading, buying, and the interactive portions of the game.

The Draft
A Magic Cube league would incorporate many of those ideas. The players pull their three 'booster packs' of fifteen, and draft as normal (taking one from their pack, then passing the pack to their left or right until all cards are chosen).

The Season
After The Draft, each player makes a 40 card deck out of his or her drafted cards (their roster) and there is a series of games (most likely multiplayer, but some one on one as well) constituting The Season. A player's deck may change between games as they switch out cards from their roster.

Trade, Recruiting, and Retirement
At the end of The Season, players can try to shuck off some of the cards that aren't pulling their weight. Each player can offer up to twice their ranking - 1 cards from their roster (1st place can offer 1, 2nd place can offer 3, 4th 5, 5th, 7, etc.).

Trade
Players discuss any terms of negotiation for trading offered cards. It doesn't have to be 1:1, but any trades made exist within the game and are binding (ie, you can't offer money, nor can you offer a future service (such as the forfeiture of a game) and renege later.). After Trade, players return any untraded cards they want to keep to their roster.

Recruitment/Retirement
Then Recruitment begins. Recruitment is basically another draft, with all offered cards being retired and a new card being recruited for each retired card. Seating places the player with the highest (numerical) ranking is the first player, with the next-highest (numerical) ranking on his right, descending to the player ranked 1st.

A regular draft begins, save for a few additions:
-There is only one booster, with one card in it for each card being retired.
-First player 'opens' and takes first pick, then passes right.
-Direction does not alternate, as there is only one pack.
-A player cannot draft more cards than they have retiring, and only takes one pick at a time.
-A player may opt not to pick during a round, but must pick to end recruitment.

Replicants
Once per season, starting with the highest (numerically) ranked player, a player may suggest that one of their offered, untraded cards is a replicant. Only one card may be suggested as a replicant. That player recruits normally and at the end, instead of being shuffled back into The Cube with the rest of the retired cards, the replicant is removed from the cube and a new card of the same color, from the same collection, suggested by that player, and ratified by The Cube owner, is shuffled in to replace it.

Optional(ha-ha!) Rule: Ante
Play some or all Cube League games with ante. Losers simply recruit the difference as if it was a retiring card and the winner gets additional (mandatory) offers for their spoils(which will be retired if no one trades for them).

Example: Arthur, Bruce, Clark, and Diana play a league game and ante up. Bruce wins, and has a roster with three extra cards while Arthur, Clark, and Diana are each short a card on their roster. Whenever Trade starts, Bruce offers his maximum of one of his cards for trade (2x1st place-1), plus the three he won for ante. Arthur is 4th and can offer up to seven cards, but only puts up one. Clark offers no cards. Diana offers two. No one trades, so recruitment begins. 

All seven offered cards are retired. A booster of seven cards is drawn out of the cube. Arthur was 4th, so he is the first player for recruitment. He takes one card (his limit), Clark has no retiring cards, so he's playing Wii and Diana is the next player. She takes one card and passes to Bruce. Bruce takes the first of his four picks and passes back to Diana (Arthur's completed all of his picks so he's out, and likely playing Wii Sports or something). Diana takes her second (and last) pick and the other three are Bruce's.

Zombie CCG: What I Want, pt 5

Apparently, I have Google’s top result when people search for “Zombie CCG.”
Because my initial ideas were sound, and I don’t see any reason I
wouldn’t firmly grasp this sliver of internet relevance, I’m continuing
that project.

Story & Flavor

CCGs are inimical to storytelling because they are—by definition—random, and stories are structured. CCGs do better at evoking atmosphere. That said, a game without any evocative nature is just pushing cards with numbers around a table. Games are fun because events happen; Putting 3 tokens onto to a card that is put into a discard pile whenever it has 3 or more tokens on it isn’t fun; Lighting Bolting a Putrefax is fun.

On the other hand, the ability of a game to reflect real world objects (or objects very similar to real-world objects) has to be balanced by simplicity. Sure, buildings can be damaged, people can be injured or infected, guns can run out of ammo, but how much time and effort should a game spend trying to track all of these status effects? Not only does it take time and rules, but it also requires non-card elements.

Trying to get the mechanics so that players feel like they're controlling survivors barely escaping from zombie hordes without bogging down the game in (exploitable) mechanics is one the key objectives I have. Whenever a player uses a gun, it should feel like they're blasting zombies apart and like they're expending a diminishing resource. Whenever they go to a new location, there should be a moment of tension: will there be enough food, medicine, and weapons...or will there only be more zombies?

The Wrap-Up

Every game is a craps-shoot. I don't know if I can make engaging gameplay that feels like a desperate run for you life versus hordes of undead that's also merely a larger chapter in a tome and usually leaves both (or more!) players laughing. I think if I leave that as my four-point mission statement I can't fuck more than four things or so up.

Zombie CCG: What I Want, pt 4

Apparently, I have Google’s top result when people search for “Zombie CCG.”
Because my initial ideas were sound, and I don’t see any reason I
wouldn’t firmly grasp this sliver of internet relevance, I’m continuing
that project.

Variety/Simplicity

A CCG’s ability to play through a deck multiple times in different ways and to house surprising card interactions stand as one of it’s major merits. Knowing that something different and unexpected can happen is the spark of any game. However, everyone who’s played Magic hasn't been land screwed,or drawn an early game card when they needed a late game card. The randomness can be entertaining, or disappointing. No one wants to lose a game because they drew eight lands straight; it’s not fun or interactive. It’s not even a test of skill; its just an inevitable slog of successive turns of hope followed by dashed hope.

In addition, complexity creep is a problem for a lot of CCGs. Simple rules that rely on cards to develop them mean that players are pulling rules instead of cards from their packs(again, Star Trek CCG). God forbid they want certain play style and can’t find a relevant rules card. Depending on implementation, even getting those rules into effect may force them to forgo alternative, more beneficial play options. On the other hand, no one really wants to play through a 50 page rule book for a game. Magic has an extensive game rules PDF, but its quick-start guide is a giant, fold-out page that’s easily accessible and understandable. A CCG should be that simple to start playing, but come with significant nuance to allow added rules to be “plugged in” organically.

That simple rule base can hurt nuanced play, as well as the versatility of some cards. Having a rule system that keeps order and can cut in game actions/effects both ways is a hard balance to find.

Finally, I’d like to talk about purity. Purity, for the present context, is the play of the game without setting up actions outside of the play area. A game’s premise is affects tone, and playing within that premise is the lure of many players. While to some degree, all CCGs are about card advantage and resource management, those are necessary evils to play a game in a card-based medium and building up from earlier stages to later stages of the game creates a feeling of progression.

Fostering consistency, simplicity, and purity without harming versatility or exploration is hard. I don't really think I'm talented enough to balance these points; I don't think the best CCG on the market right now does that, but again, I'm entitled to my fantastical goals.

Zombie CCG: What I Want, pt 3

Apparently, I have Google’s top result when people search for “Zombie CCG.”
Because my initial ideas were sound, and I don’t see any reason I
wouldn’t firmly grasp this sliver of internet relevance, I’m continuing
that project.



Interaction/Quick Play

Interaction is more than simply responding to another player’s actions; it’s the ability of game elements to have effects on one another and for a player to react to another player’s ability to make an instant, winning play. No one wants to play a game where one card will essentially win you that game instantly. At that point the game becomes about playing that card. A card that builds the game in a direction of victory will spur more action by interacting. In addition, the utilization of differing victory conditions means that one or both players can win, as a player can keep playing after victory is achieved, just to stymie their opponent. The win/lose model is simple, but not necessary.



On the other hand, long complicated games with no point aren't fun either. Even if forward momentum is hard to stop, it can still get set back. Putting the game into overtime where only one player is left, the game can get long. Without power cards(see the post on "Equivocal"), the same thing can happen.



Games that take a long time to play are, logically, not played much. Games with a quick turnaround time can be played far more and can provide (over a period of time) a more even probability curve. Battletech isn’t great for many, many, reasons, but the two that combine like a roach-flavored snow-cone  and melted-rubber topping are randomness and time. One unlikely critical hit in the early came can lead to a long, slow game which promises the faint chance of hope in the form of a reciprocated shot, but doesn’t deliver. Ever.



That is not fun. One idea-if victory conditions can be played as other cards, is that they have a rider--in the case of my Zombie game, this is the classic “twist” at the end--where the player who isn’t winning can play a particular type of card(s) to counter or diminish the victory card’s win. Discarding win/lose isn't about not having winners and losers, it's about scaling victory and loss. Competition should be efficient and nuanced, not necessarily quick or widgety.



Tomorrow: Fun stuff.

Zombie CCG: What I Want, pt 2

Apparently, I have Google’s top result when people search for “Zombie CCG.”
Because my initial ideas were sound, and I don’t see any reason I
wouldn’t firmly grasp this sliver of internet relevance, I’m continuing
that project.

Options/Denial


A player should have options. Two of the most important options are hope and potence (most commonly represented by drawing cards and playing cards, respectively). Hope is the anticipation of a reversal of a game's current unfavorable state. Potence is the ability to act to affect the game's state. These two may sound similar. In fact, potence must be felt to have hope. If a deck has a solution to the threat an opponent poses, then there is hope each time a card is drawn that that card will be that answer (or at least a part of it). Whether that card has the impact on the game state that the player anticipates is another issue entirely; potence. A stalemate condition may have both players without potence, but both may still draw cards which can break the stalemate.

This means that on the one hand, the ability to blunt an established foe’s moves is important, but implies the ability of both players to do so, allowing a winning player to shut down a losing player's chances of a reversal. Changing card effects to reflect game status could avoid these effects being used as part of a ‘win more’ strategy. Victory conditions that praise imbalance and allow a lagging player to pull back a sprinting one by attacking weaknesses which emerge upon nearly victory are also good for this. A system whereby advancement brings risk--karma--would also serve to provide fuel to a player who’s falling behind, or calculated risk for a player to shoot ahead.

Those approaches risk two quickly advancing players short-changing each other, which can cause long games, as each side approaches completion, but can’t quite finish. A less dramatic alternative is to simply have a net Karma; only one player at a time has it, and if the other player gains karma, the other player loses it instead, perhaps utilizing a shifting pool, where a player can’t gain/lose karma unless another player loses/gains karma.

Despite giving lagging players a chance to catch up, the game should make moving forward hard to stop. Using alternative win conditions could give players a “moving target” in terms of being permanently stymied by a stalemate. Instead of trying A and being consistently shut down, a player can pick a victory condition that's much closer to Not A.

Ideally, I'd like to balance versatility of defense with versatility of offense; things should happen in a game, but just what kind of things should happen is a discussion for tomorrow.

Zombie CCG: What I Want, pt 1

Apparently, I have Google’s top result when people search for “Zombie CCG.”
Because my initial ideas were sound, and I don’t see any reason I
wouldn’t firmly grasp this sliver of internet relevance, I’m continuing
that project.

Finding the parameters for a game is the most important part of making it work. I've played games with exceptional depth in terms of representing a universe I was already familiar with, but exceptional shittiness in terms of how that game played (Star Trek). I've played games with very sound rules and elements that explored every facet of a game played with cards, but had a threadbare attachment to their theme (it's actually a very popular game). Both games appeal to me equally, but they both fall short of balancing flavor with gameplay. Balances between all the things a game can be and all the things it should never be are the heart of making CCGs good.

I just want to note that I've designed shit for CCGs. I have no experience in the industry. I've never designed a game, published a story, or even pitched a skit (oh wait, I did, but we don't talk about/remember that). I have two You Tube videos. One is a music video I made in six hours on Window's default video editing software featuring an array of friends and set to Piebald's “Karate Chops for Everyone But Us” and it brings a tear to my eye every time I watch it. The other is six seconds of live footage of my friend Terry playing with a house dog that crawled into his shirt and licks him in the face.

Everyone loves the dog video.

My point is that if I speak authoritatively about this, it's because you don't want to read a long-winded (oh, and it will be long-winded) analysis of CCGs where every paragraph has an "I think" or a "from what I've seen" in front of it. It's shit writing to do that (I think), and instead of that I'm going to write like I know what I'm doing and you're going to give me feedback in the comments section because I don't.

Customizable/Equivocal

It's right in the name. Look, Munchkin is great, but it's not mine. I don't feel ownership for my game of Munchkin. Now, look, losing a Magic game (or ten Magic games in a row) with your deck that has your name on it and is yours sucks more than losing a game of rummy, but it's still worth it to play your way.You make the choices, you make the calls, and eventually, you make the decisions that work for you. It increases investment and that increases enjoyment.

However, having dead-end game elements doesn't give me options. It gives me faux-options. Have you ever seen Viashino Skeleton? It's a 2/1 for four mana. But don't worry, if one toughness isn't enough, you can regenerate it by paying half of its cost in another color and discarding a card. This thing doesn't do anything you want to do well well. Poor cards and good cards might be a necessity, but there's no reason for god-awful or ridiculous cards. The value of the cards a player selects for his deck should be based on the other cards he's playing and the victory he's trying to achieve, there shouldn’t be stillborn cards when a player opens a pack.

I know this is a tall, perhaps unreasonable, order as I say it, “For any given victory condition a deck aims for, there should not be a single card or a sliver of cards necessary to reasonably achieve that victory condition.” Some of this gets into my 'variety' point later, but for right now, let's just say that if every archetype that has two staples, and there are hundreds of cards to choose from, then you need several competing archetypes to make your cards useful. There are three ways to change these parameters: diversify the cards capable of carrying an archetype, diversify the archetypes by varying win conditions, and narrowing the card pool. Ideally, you could implement all three (though the third one is most tricky, since you have people owning cards[presumably by buying them], then you declare them off limits). My main approach, equivocation, addresses the first. If all cards have a similar level of utility, then you have quite a bit of variety.

The conflict comes from keeping those cards equivocal without them feeling 'samey.' What's the point of creating a deck if you can throw any forty (fifty. whatever) cards together to make a deck? What's the point of a card that only works in four archetypes instead of six? Not only does equivocation hurt customizablility, but it faces scaling issues that make it a bitch to actually implement (which kinda works out because those scaling issues do make everything distinct again, but let's not pretend we can't make a heap of generic cards of various effectiveness levels. I have played a lot of CCGs and speak from personal experience when I tell you that shit happens).

The second point, that of diversifying archetypes by varying win conditions, is pretty compelling. Sadly, a variety of attack options can lead to degeneracy, which leads me to my next points of balance...tomorrow.