Front Page

Content

Authors

Game Index

Forums

Site Tools

Submissions

About

KK
Kevin Klemme
March 09, 2020
35142 2
Hot
KK
Kevin Klemme
January 27, 2020
20819 0
Hot
KK
Kevin Klemme
August 12, 2019
7405 0
Hot
O
oliverkinne
December 19, 2023
3967 0
Hot
O
oliverkinne
December 14, 2023
3495 0
Hot

Mycelia Board Game Review

Board Game Reviews
O
oliverkinne
December 12, 2023
2075 0
O
oliverkinne
December 07, 2023
2582 0

River Wild Board Game Review

Board Game Reviews
O
oliverkinne
December 05, 2023
2250 0
O
oliverkinne
November 30, 2023
2495 0
J
Jackwraith
November 29, 2023
3014 0
Hot
O
oliverkinne
November 28, 2023
1971 0
S
Spitfireixa
October 24, 2023
3692 0
Hot
O
oliverkinne
October 17, 2023
2619 0
O
oliverkinne
October 10, 2023
2461 0
O
oliverkinne
October 09, 2023
2289 0
O
oliverkinne
October 06, 2023
2505 0

Outback Crossing Review

Board Game Reviews
×
Bugs: Recent Topics Paging, Uploading Images & Preview (11 Dec 2020)

Recent Topics paging, uploading images and preview bugs require a patch which has not yet been released.

× Talk about collectible card here.

How CCGs got killed and Magic survived

More
01 Dec 2012 13:21 #138724 by Erik Twice
Since we are talking about Magic a lot lately why not talk about the CCG craze? Why do you think Magic gained an upper hand and all other games crashed? What problems did each specific game have?

Because what is surprising is that a couple of games lasted for a couple of years and didn't fizzle and die. The CCG format strengthens the community, making players come together to trade and play but also increases its realiance on it, getting the game killed if it isn't big enough to keep a network of players and shops.

In a sense, I think the distribution model made even the surviving CCGs suffer in the long run. There's a reason why Wizards is obsessed with keeping retailers happy.


So, what do you think harmed CCGs while Magic survived? What are the differences beyond being the first? Magic dodged dozens and dozens of bullets that hurt other games.

From the top of my head, these three are important:

1) It was a short two player game.

Richard Garfield lists this as the main problem with the design of Vampire. Being multiplayer makes it hard to get your friends involved because you can't just loan a deck nor you can take new players one by one and being "long" makes it much harder to customize your deck.

Games affected with this (Make suggestions!): Vampire, Legend of the five rings.

2) It wasn't overprinted.

Most games started with a black mark against them when supply greatly exceeded demand, which is never a good thing. Magic suffered this too with one of their expansions but I don't think it was as bad as with other games.

Games affected: Vampire, Netrunner

3) It didn't suffer from power creep.

Magic has suffered from broken cards but broken cards just warp the metagame and can be banned or fought with other broken cards. Making everything faster, meaner and stronger can't be fixed with a ban.

Games affected: Battletech (Killed by it), Legend of the five rins (According to BGG comments)

4) It didn't grow more complex and more complex as expansions got added.

Magic introduces dozens and dozens of mechanics each set but they are all in cards, they are not new rules. But many just decided to add more and more kinds of cards which is a losing proposition.

5) It has several formats, so you can both paly with your older cards and have a newbie-friendly enviroment.

If you have to jump into a game with 14 years of cards like Vampire, it's going to be very, very though. Magic's formats are a very important compromise.

Games affected: Vampire


This post is so poorly written. Anyways, discuss!
The following user(s) said Thank You: dragonstout, charlieturtle

Please Log in or Create an account to join the conversation.

More
01 Dec 2012 15:32 #138728 by Sagrilarus
I'll mention one other survivor -- Pokemon CCG is still going very strong. I'm sitting at an open gaming session right now, a weekly event for three hours, 26 players currently in games and a few more milling around and trading.

Your points still stand though, and I think Pokemon survives because it has the same facets.

This should be an article on the front page.

S.
The following user(s) said Thank You: jeb

Please Log in or Create an account to join the conversation.

More
01 Dec 2012 15:44 #138729 by Da Bid Dabid
As a huge fan of the Decipher SW:CCG I remember playing and buying cards even beyond the point the "game crashed" when they lost the Star Wars license to WotC. Although losing the license stopped production of new cards to this day a player's committee runs tournaments and releases virtual cards so I would argue the community still exists.

However for me the Star Wars game was about the original movies I cared about, not the prequels where the system was heading. I could care less about decks pitting Darth Maul and Vader against Luke and Qui-Gon (spelling correct? not even sure if this was a strong card). So for me the system died when the stories I cared about stopped with the Death Star II expansion. Sure they littered some original trilogy cards into later expansions and made some crazy combo/cards and rule changes affecting older decks. But as a non-tournament player I wasn't ever buying packs again or using the new rules... now had they gone back and made revised re-releases of the original trilogy sets it makes it more interesting but I'm not even sure I'd be buying more cards. Perhaps a few singles here and there but as a whole in my mind the game had run out of source material that I was interested in.

I'm not sure keeping the license would have even been good for the game, as the new rules and such may have completely turned me off the game (Its tough to speculate though because additions like objectives in later sets gave a fun way to tell specific stories and get the correct cards out to tell the stories). A few times I've looked at the cards released by the player's committee and it seems they have done a great job, but it has not inspired me to fire up the printer and try them out. I think SW:CCG, at least for me and my friends that played, was a CCG with a timeline and that timeline simply ran its course and finished. Sure the mechanics were used afterward in what apparently was a great game called Wars:CCG, but I'm sure most of the fan base came for the Star Wars and stayed for the game mechanics not the other way around.

Magic obviously is not held to these types of restrictions. Its generic theme actually is an advantage here as they can tell stories of individuals if they want (Planeswalkers or something?) or if they want can pick and choose different themes to apply, Zombie based expansion, artifact expansion, big creature expansion, "whatever flavor they want to add to this set" expansion. I guess I'd call this versatility of game expansion or growth, something Magic has in spades.

Please Log in or Create an account to join the conversation.

More
01 Dec 2012 23:42 #138742 by Erik Twice

Sagrilarus wrote: Your points still stand though, and I think Pokemon survives because it has the same facets.

Pokémon is an interesting case because it's attached to one of the more popular franchises ever made but, unlike Yu-Gi-Oh, is actually a good game. Sure it's not what I would call amazing, but it's kind of fun and I can respect it. It's like a less serious MtG in a sense, better for kids than the cardboard crack.

What Pokemon has managed to evolve and not kill itself in the process. That's harder than it looks because there was a huge amount of power creep when the game changed hands and it seems to me it was obligatory, they were running out of design space.

For any other game it would be a terrible gamble capable of killing the game but given its popularity and audience, the could take it and moved from a cash-in to something they wanted to keep alive for a while. Because if Wizards had taking the game more seriously they wouldn't have translated Wheel of Fortune and Ancestral Recall, two of the most powerful MTG cards to the game. Even as a kid I could tell Profesor Oak and Bill were broken and filled my decks with them.

The most important thing it did was imposing a rotation schedule. That's really, really important. Let old mistakes die! Don't try to get newbies on a decade old game!

This should be an article on the front page.

Haha, I'll take that as a compliment.

I was actually thinking about turning it to one but I have to streamline it down, probably focusing only on Magic. Each CCG has been its own world in a sense and just explaining what killed Battletech takes a paragraph more than I can give it.

Da Bid Dabid wrote: Magic obviously is not held to these types of restrictions. Its generic theme actually is an advantage here as they can tell stories of individuals if they want

Magic's theme was a huge advantage. It has an inmense design space that the designers have really exploited from the beginning and took cues from the crazy parts of D&D, like Spelljammer more than the generic high fantasy look that makes so many games look boring.

Also Magic tends to look like Magic no matter what the setting is, probably because they work hard to keep a semblance of consistency. Urza isn't overpowered in Ice Age of Kamigawa and the mechanical beings of Mirrodin don't have a huge edge over the fairytales of Lorwyn.

Planeswalkers or something?

Yes, Planeswalkers is the name. I wonder if the player was called that when the game was first released or you were just a wizard.

Please Log in or Create an account to join the conversation.

More
02 Dec 2012 01:39 #138744 by Ken B.
Pokemon just ran up a big ol' powercreep wall within the past few sets. The best Pokemon routinely have 180-200HP (used to be only one Pokemon that had that much) and dish out tons and tons of damage.

I saw a strategy article my son was reading that lamented some new Pokemon "only" dealing 80 damage. ONLY 80 damage.

So even without rotation, Pokemon would currently be undergoing an entire bum's rush on new sets because you simply couldn't compete without them. From a game I always felt was fairly pure and great for kids, that's a pretty big disappointment for me.

Bakugan wasn't a CCG exactly but it was probably the worst case of power-creep I've ever seen. (I'm not sure if it's still being made or not.) Early set, powerful Bakugan had like 600 power. Then boom, the next sets, the best dudes have like 700+ power. Then 800. Soon, power pieces with 1100 strength were not unheard of. I pretty much encouraged my boys to pursue other hobbies when that crap started going on.

Here's the big thing...Magic is simply a good game with an open design not seen in many CCGs whose game systems end up limiting them in terms of scope and space. The distribution method is a blessing and a curse because to get the best stuff you gottta fork out hand over fist, but then again, it would never have this variety without the booster pack method of distribution, because few would pay for weird, fringe cards to get made.

Magic would have come crashing down, just like the rest I'm sure...because after all, several damned good CCGs died over the years....but because it reached a critical mass, people were willing to keep buying into it, which kept it alive.

You couldn't take a deck of Jyhad, or On the Edge, or Battletech, or even Legend of the Five Rings to the local comic store and realistically hope to find an opponent unless you begged them and provided the decks yourself, and even then...probably not.

But I can walk into most comic and game stores right now, hang out for maybe fifteen, twenty minutes, and I almost guarantee you I can score a pickup game of Magic.

There were plenty of CCGs over the years I never bothered to go whole hog for, precisely because I knew they wouldn't hit critical mass. And if *everybody* waits for that to happen for a game, well, guess what? It ain't happenin'.

The CCG resurgence in the early 2000s was fueled by companies who took a different tact--money prizes. Spoils, VS, Dreamblade--and each saw some support and play. But when the money dried up, boom, so went the game.

Please Log in or Create an account to join the conversation.

More
02 Dec 2012 03:59 - 02 Dec 2012 04:01 #138749 by QPCloudy
Ken, those 180 - 200 hp pokemon you're speaking of are the EX's. I hate those fuckers. And every person at our league stuff their decks with them. You can get around them with the right sets of trainers, but shit it's difficult. The plus side, if you take down an EX Pokemon, you get two prize cards instead of the standard 1.

I'll go hide in the corner in shame now, lol.

My daughter has really gotten into it so now I'm moving away from Magic and getting into Pokemon as well. I still have three decks I built, but all my other Magic stuff is gone now.

And you know what REALLY grinds my gears? Those fucking EX fuckers are BASIC FUCKING POKEMON. You don't have to evolve them to get to that power. The come out of the gate shoving hot steel rods up your ass.
Last edit: 02 Dec 2012 04:01 by QPCloudy.

Please Log in or Create an account to join the conversation.

More
02 Dec 2012 07:41 #138756 by tscook
Land is a fucking terrible mechanic, it kinda sucks M:tG survived. I read a good analysis of how WotC fucked up Netrunner but I can't find it again.
The following user(s) said Thank You: Shellhead, Bull Nakano

Please Log in or Create an account to join the conversation.

More
02 Dec 2012 11:48 - 02 Dec 2012 11:51 #138762 by Erik Twice

Ken B. wrote: Pokemon just ran up a big ol' powercreep wall within the past few sets. The best Pokemon routinely have 180-200HP (used to be only one Pokemon that had that much) and dish out tons and tons of damage.

Oh, it did? That's a shame, I remember reading in Smogon that actually the best cards were stuff like Shuppet because they dealt good damage with just one energy and anything big tended to be terrible because of the cost requirement.

Magic would have come crashing down, just like the rest I'm sure...because after all, several damned good CCGs died over the years....but because it reached a critical mass, people were willing to keep buying into it, which kept it alive.

But, you know, it almost crashed down despiste that critical mass. Tons of people left with Urza's Saga, and I'm sure a company less involved in the competitive scene would have lost the game right there because they wouldn't have taken the emergency hammer to kill Memory Jar.


But I can walk into most comic and game stores right now, hang out for maybe fifteen, twenty minutes, and I almost guarantee you I can score a pickup game of Magic.

I have always thought that the huge focus on retail and creating a community was what put Magic away from the clutches of a constant survival into a snowballing juggernaut.

If you think about it, Vampire and L5R survived for that long thanks to their communities too. They just didn't have any retail presence, which hurts.

tscook wrote: Land is a fucking terrible mechanic, it kinda sucks M:tG survived.

Oh, c'mon that the game has a couple rough edges doesn't mean it can't be amazing. It's like lambasting Citizen Kane for having a plothole, it's true but kind of dimissive in a sense.

BTW, I would be interested in reading that article if you can find it. What I've found is an article ( oracle.wizards.com/scripts/wa.exe?A2=ind...=netrunner-l&P=10184 ) which talks about one of the first Netrunenr tournaments. Surprisingly, it had been only one year after the game was released but the knowledge of the game suffering from overpowered combos, centralization or "cheese" was out there.
Last edit: 02 Dec 2012 11:51 by Erik Twice.

Please Log in or Create an account to join the conversation.

More
03 Dec 2012 03:22 #138796 by Shellhead

tscook wrote: Land is a fucking terrible mechanic, it kinda sucks M:tG survived.


Yep. Magic survived, but not because it was the best CCG. Other games came along and did certain things better, but Magic was the first and most famous, so it endured. The game did get somewhat better over time, thanks to a great development team, but I won't play anymore because too many Magic players are utterly humorless dicks.
The following user(s) said Thank You: Rliyen

Please Log in or Create an account to join the conversation.

More
03 Dec 2012 21:16 #138865 by dragonstout

Da Bid Dabid wrote: I guess I'd call this versatility of game expansion or growth, something Magic has in spades.

I've said over and over again this is one of the biggest things that has contributed to Magic's survival and other CCGs dying: Magic has tons of space to play around in, both in terms of worlds and themes to explore as well as in terms of rules. Nearly every other CCG's rules were much more restrictive and heavy, instead of letting the cards themselves do the heavy lifting of making the game fun.

I think the other two big things are 1) being the first matters a lot when building a critical mass is important, and 2) the best game development team in the entire non-electronic gaming business, period. Oh, and generally taking the attitude that if you make the game as fun as possible, you'll maximize profits without needing to add an additional gouging of the customer beyond your standard CCG-gouging. Decipher was awful about this.

Whoever said that "lands is a shitty mechanic"...bullshit. There are two key reasons why lands are a GREAT mechanic: 1) it increases variance and creates drama, waiting for that one land. Being able to *rely* on always having enough resources, a la Call of Cthulhu or Vs, is more boring and predictable, and also makes the expensive cards MUCH more powerful. 2) Magic is a complex game with complex board states, even WITH 40% of the cards being basically blanks. I have no interest in upping that complexity by 66%. Call me an idiot who likes simplified shit if you want, but Magic has shown itself to have plenty of depth to the gameplay.

Funny thing about the OP: Magic has committed lesser variants of several of those crimes, and each time it has cut a big chunk out of the playerbase:

2) Wasn't overprinted:
Fallen Empires, Chronicles, Ice Age, and Homelands were all overprinted, all in a row, and it WRECKED people's faith in the collectibility of the game, so badly to the point where they created the motherfucking Reserve List to keep from dying right then and there.

3) Didn't suffer from power creep:
Urza's Saga and Mirrodin blocks both were WAY more powerful than the previous block had been, so powerful that tournament attendance crashed hard and necessitated very UNDER-powered blocks as immediate followups to recalibrate the power level. Lots of people left the game during these eras.

4) Didn't grow more and more complex:
Sometimes I'm blown away by how badly the other CCGs did this, particularly Star Wars and Middle Earth. But anyway, the most recent crisis Magic had that cost them a lot of players was due to increased complexity, in the Time Spiral and Lorwyn blocks. In Time Spiral (my favorite block of all time by a wide margin, so it makes me pretty sad that it was a major failure), they decided to reuse literally dozens of old keywords, under the assumption that it wasn't something *new*...except that they were new to new players. This block had by far the strangest cards ever made, in addition to reprinting tons of bizarre and nonsensical old cards for nostalgia reasons. Then Lorwyn, the followup block, tried to dial down that complexity, but instead of having complex cards, it produced the most complex board states the game has ever seen, to the point where *employees of Wizards* left the prerelease due to being so confused.

Please Log in or Create an account to join the conversation.

More
03 Dec 2012 21:56 - 03 Dec 2012 21:58 #138869 by Erik Twice
I didn't want to mention the mistakes too much so I just gave them a nod. Some comments:

2) The reserve list was made after the Chronicles reprints caused an outrage among retailers. I don't think overprinting had much to do with it, it was just the idea of making old cards availble again.

Fallen Empires was the overprinted set I mentioned. They needed to print more cards but they went overboard.

The problem with Homelands was it being made. More than overprinting it was overexisted. And I like Serrated Arrows.

However, overprinting some of the expansions, while bad is nowhere as bad as overprinting the base set which was what affected Vampire and Netrunner.

3) I think Urza was broken, not an exercise in power creep. People left the game because you every deck killed in turn one and had Wizards not banned Memory Jar in two weeks I'm sure the game would have died right there. Brokeness aside old cards were still as useful as with any other set.

I think that's the important difference compared to Battletech. There were powerful cards, some of them broken. But there were no strictly better cards making obsolote the entire concept of the game everywhere.


EDIT: BTW, talking about the positives and negatives of the land mechanic would take a very long time but it's like dice. They are clunky, prone to ugly results and random. But they can add a lot to the game, more than the uglyness they bring.
Last edit: 03 Dec 2012 21:58 by Erik Twice.
The following user(s) said Thank You: dragonstout

Please Log in or Create an account to join the conversation.

More
04 Dec 2012 05:48 #138885 by tscook

dragonstout wrote: Whoever said that "lands is a shitty mechanic"...bullshit. There are two key reasons why lands are a GREAT mechanic: 1) it increases variance and creates drama, waiting for that one land. Being able to *rely* on always having enough resources, a la Call of Cthulhu or Vs, is more boring and predictable, and also makes the expensive cards MUCH more powerful. 2) Magic is a complex game with complex board states, even WITH 40% of the cards being basically blanks. I have no interest in upping that complexity by 66%. Call me an idiot who likes simplified shit if you want, but Magic has shown itself to have plenty of depth to the gameplay.


Land is Richard Garfield's biggest regret in designing magic (and he is right). In a competitive game, there is no reason to have boring shit clogging up your deck. It isn't like dice at all, where you can have some real risk management. You ~can~ mitigate it by getting additional draws or searches, but that isn't enough. When I plunk down money at a FNM I don't want an otherwise great draft ruined by drawing five lands in a row, fuck "narrative" and "drama".

Please Log in or Create an account to join the conversation.

More
04 Dec 2012 05:53 #138886 by QPCloudy
Any suggestions for an alternative to land? One thing a buddy and I do is cube draft where you form a 40 card deck, no lands. You may use x card as a mana source for that cards color. So a red green cost card would tap for one red and one green. It's a pretty interesting mechanic. Like getting a 7 cost badass on first draw and playing it for mana thinking you'll never get a chance to get it on the field anyhow, only to have the game run super long and eventually having the resources to bring it out but you can't because you used it for mana. Damnit, I could have won that game if I just held on to that card!

Please Log in or Create an account to join the conversation.

More
04 Dec 2012 06:19 #138887 by Ken B.

QPCloudy wrote: Any suggestions for an alternative to land? One thing a buddy and I do is cube draft where you form a 40 card deck, no lands. You may use x card as a mana source for that cards color. So a red green cost card would tap for one red and one green. It's a pretty interesting mechanic. Like getting a 7 cost badass on first draw and playing it for mana thinking you'll never get a chance to get it on the field anyhow, only to have the game run super long and eventually having the resources to bring it out but you can't because you used it for mana. Damnit, I could have won that game if I just held on to that card!



This is pretty much--almost exactly, in fact--the resource system that Wizards of the Coast is using for Kaijudo (formerly Duel Masters, this is a relaunch.) And it works pretty well.

Please Log in or Create an account to join the conversation.

More
04 Dec 2012 06:21 - 04 Dec 2012 06:41 #138888 by dragonstout
QPCloudy, that's what Vs, Call of Cthulhu, and probably a few others do, as an alternative to lands. As I said, I vehemently dislike the mechanic, and however appropriate it might be for the other games, it's very inappropriate for Magic and drastically changes the power level of more expensive cards, makes aggro much weaker, makes all color-fixing incredibly weak, and, well, the land/mana mechanic is quite literally a central mechanic that the game is designed around, eliminating that is like eliminating area control from El Grande or worker placement from Agricola.

Richard Garfield regretted the land/mana mechanic initially, but I believe he has come around to it, and certainly Mark Rosewater, the lead designer for Magic for the last decade, considers it literally one of the three most brilliant ideas Richard Garfield had for the game.

This BS that "unlike dice, which you can risk manage": WTF does that even mean, that's a nonsense statement. There are plenty of mechanisms involved to allow to manage your mana risk: most importantly, at a deckbuilding level, you control how much mana is in your deck and what kind it is to a completely customizable degree. At a play level, that's what the mulligan rules are all about: you can and should toss back a hand that doesn't have enough mana, or even one that just doesn't seem like it'll win: not properly mulliganing is responsible for a huge number of losses for inexperienced players.

If I seem cranky about criticism of the land mechanic in Magic, it's because it *is* like dice in that many gamers, for a long time, think "dice are bad" and "randomness is bad" and all this garbage that you still see in so many people at BGG, but that most (all?) folks here realize is utter garbage, possibly in part because dice is such a deciding difference between Euros and Ameritrash that we've all had to repeatedly explain to morons why dice are an important tool that can add a lot of fun and drama. Since we haven't had to all be similarly repeatedly defensive about mana, though, there's no AT guilt about parroting the same anti-luck bullshit about lands that used to be parroted about dice.

You can draw roll nothing but 1s in Backgammon just like you can get mana-screwed in Magic (or at a more general level, you can play games of Backgammon where no matter what you do the dice had you doomed to lose), but last I heard Backgammon was still a plenty tournament-worthy and awesome game. There's nothing more pathetic nor more enjoyable to heckle than a player at a Magic tournament complaining about bad luck. You played your best and you still lost? No shit, welcome to a possibility in every game with luck elements *ever*. Them's the breaks.
Last edit: 04 Dec 2012 06:41 by dragonstout.

Please Log in or Create an account to join the conversation.

Moderators: Gary Sax
Time to create page: 0.174 seconds