That doesn't apply to Gacha Games, where you don't own the game.. but your account in it! And these are usually live servers that can go away at any moment! No server, no game. The simple answer to that is : Don't waste money and time on such games. But that doesn't really work if one wants to enjoy them! What are you going to do? Pirate a Server to play the stolen game (if getting the code in first place is even possible?)
@@Big_Dai two words: fan servers. My favorite gacha game that is now long dead, Dragalia Lost, is still being upheld by fans who host their own servers that you can even shift over your original account to. it's not a perfect solution and i agree that most games with this service format isn't really worth most people's time, but even games with online servers that aren't free to play do this like Super Smash Brothers Brawl and Mario Kart Wii. This was also what people did to play the 2007 Runescape and old expansions of WoW before their respective classic editions came out
This is a flawed statement though. The end doesn’t justify the means. People are always more comfortable going to just satisfy their own needs instead of working towards a better solution for everyone.
@@NeroVingian40 This, doesn't engage with what I said? Blankly stating that the ends don't justify the means, doesn't just win an argument. The fact of the matter is, that companies do not respect your purchase. You can buy a full game, digitally, you buy the game, but to them you do not own it. If that purchase, means nothing, then when you pirate that product, you are not taking anything. Purchases should mean ownership. That's the end goal with thinking like this. If I buy something, I should fucking own that thing. If not, there is no reason to purchase it, because you aren't purchasing it.
I like your thoughts on "ableism" I think it's important to add accessibility where it doesn't take away from anything. That doesn't mean you can never do things that can't be made accessible.
Ableism is when things can be accessible, but either intentionally or due to not caring aren't. Making it so not everyone can climb a rockwall isn't ableist. Making it so colorblind people can't tell the rocks from the wall is ableist.
Small correction: Iono does work if it's the last card in your hand. It only fails if both players have no cards. I have no idea why they decided to go with that restriction though since it only ever applies once in a blue moon.
The way the Pokémon TCG works is you cannot play a card if it would do nothing based on public knowledge. Iono, even if *your* hand is empty, would still put the opponent's hand on the bottom of their deck and make you both draw cards, so you can play it because it does *something* But for example you wouldn't be able to play a Potion if there is no damage for it to heal, as the card would do absolutely nothing. Searching always works because the contents of the deck is private information, so even if there is no valid target in your deck, you can search it (and you shuffle the deck anyway, so it still does something even if you fail to find a target)
As a colour blind person I hate when games make their main colours be in the same gradient like white are you using dark blue and purple, those are practically the same for a colourblind person
At my prerelease, I had one person who was colorblind. Specifically red-green colorblind. I use colored gems in the upper left corner for quick reference, and Weapons and Armor are red and green, respectively. Thankfully, I had other identifying features on each card that make it possible to identify what's what. If I didn't have that, he'd have been screwed.
@@NexusVFD Thanks for the heads up. I was using blue and purple for my game, and wanted the blue to be sort of dark to contrast the light blue we often see in like Pokémon and Magic. I was going to do color blind tests and use symbols too but this is good to take into account, thanks!
Speaking of companies killing games people spent tons of money on, the Accursed Farms TH-cam channel's Ross Scott is working on a class action lawsuit to stop companies from being able to kill games.
I like how they handled colorblind accessibility discreetly in Magic for the Phyrexian mana, in that every card with it has reminder text for the mechanic that includes the normal mana symbol for that color complete with its symbol representation.
My personal concern about the Grand Archive part of your last video was mainly to do with calling the Re:Collection Decks “starter decks” and implying that they didn’t have other cheaper ways to currently get into the game. Aside from that, I do think that your other criticisms are perfectly valid, even if I don’t entirely agree. I’m personally excited for the Re:Collection decks and all of their contents, I see it kind of like a mix of the Pokemon League battle decks and an ETB, a more competitive deck with some bells and whistles included. That is from the perspective of someone who started with the starter decks and worked their way up to it, like you pointed out in the original video. As for the CSRs, for myself at least, it would be exciting to get one but I’m not purchasing these expecting to get it. I just want these products to play the game because I think that the mechanics are fun and they’ve put a lot of meaningful thought into the gameplay itself. But again, a fair criticism when looking at the perspective of someone who would be hunting the chase cards. I’d be curious to know your thoughts on the mechanics and gameplay feel, though if you don’t want to because of everything else, while a shame it’s fair. And finally, “if purchase is not ownership, then piracy is not theft”, chef’s kiss! Hopefully the fight for ownership of digital media trends toward the consumer in the future
I don’t think he implied they don’t have any other product. He just said these products are unaccessible. They are expensive and shouldn’t be the primary way to sell your product. Your subjective view of willing to buy them doesn’t change that fact.
@@Zutang777 The box he keeps whining about isn't the primary way to sell the product, it's a mix of League Battle Box and Secret Lair. He just refuses to admit he's wrong about it.
I wanna give a shoutout to the Digimon TCG. At launch not only were its factions purely divided by color, but also it had a massive amount of colors (7 in total), so when I first saw it immediately concerned me, but eventually Digimon adjusted their design to have a notched circle on the card's play and evolution cost, with each notch matching to one of the colors in the game. It's such a perfectly succinct solution, it plays well with the games multi colored cards because you can put together any combination of the notches, and it only requires memorizing the position of each color on the wheel.
A big thing with the warmachine starter that didn't go mentioned is that they're 3D printed models, not hard plastic kits. Not only is $200 is most of the way towards just buying an entire printer for yourself, but if you have a friend already with one $200 is enough resin to 3d print dozens of armies for other games. When they announced they were 3d prints, every ex-warmachine player locally assumed they would be about £50-60 ($60-70ish dollars) and unanimously balked at the price. We used to hold events around here in the hundreds of players. Just sheer madness.
One thing I thought was great was when I was first getting back into Magic, they had these Welcome Decks. There were mono-colored 30-card half decks, and you would shuffle two of them together, and you had something you could play right there to test out the game. They weren't anything competitive, but they were simple enough to learn from. The best part was that WOTC actually encouraged stores to give them out for free to new/potential new players. Sure, this meant they had nothing of real value, but it was a great example of sacrificing a little up front to be able to hook a customer you can profit more from later. Obviously, this is much easier to absorb the cost of if you are an established game with a mostly entrenched player pool. But, still, I think it's a good model for making it accessible to new players, both from a cost and complexity standpoint.
Can confirm this works. It's how i got into Force of Will - I was in a game store and was vaguely interested in it, and the store owner gave me an expensive-looking promo they must have had left over from an event, just because I looked at a starter deck. That was enough to make me buy the deck - show me how damn nice the promo cards look.
@@yurisei6732 Yeah, free/cheap things you can buy off the shelf and play with that night go a long way. One recent complaint I've had about Magic is they haven't released any new Challenger decks in recent years, which were great, because they were decks ready to go out of the box that could generally hold their own at the game store, had full playsets of several cards, included sideboards, and had some obvious spots for improvements. So, if I wanted to give Standard a try, I could (in the past) buy a deck for like $25-35 at my LGS, and just play that night. Precons are a great way of getting people in, either to a game or a new format.
The thing about physical accessibility with a physical game is that its both easier and harder than a digital product. For digital things, its restricted to what can be programmed but once the system is in there, it can be added to and modified if needed (i.e. subtitles and colorblind options, or controller remapping). Physical games have the advantage that, as a physical medium, it is far easier to just make aids for them, like something designed to help roll dice, or shuffle a deck, or even just hold cards. There's a wide variety of physical and neurological disabilities and it can be near-impossible to create options for people that fit their specifications.
For sure, it just falls on the individual to accommodate for themselves with physical games (which can be as simple as a magnifying glass or as complex as a one on one aid functioning as a player's hands)
On the other hand, a digital game has no need for dice roll assists or deck shufflers at all. It doesn't really make sense to compare digital vs physical on this angle because the accessibility tools you can make for a physical game are largely separate from the actual game.
In the UK, the phrase in the equality act is ‘reasonable adjustment’ and I think that’s a reasonable framing device here. Make reasonable adjustments to your game wherever possible to help folk with disabilities. Hell those adjustments often make the game more accessible to a general audience too, so it’s win-win-win.
Am I the only one that sees a flaw in Kohdok's logic? Kohdok said Starter decks are loss leaders you sell to get new people into the game, but also we want players to buy 2 copies of each deck to get full playsets of cards. Like would that not cause problems when talking to anyone you are trying to get funding from to tell them "We are going to lose money every time we sell one of these, but don't worry, we only expect to sell 2 of them to every member of our player base."
I fail to see how this is a contradiction. Opening the gate to multiple purchases (Within reason) for people who want to become more committed helps product sell through. It's the difference between a small profit and a total loss.
@@Kohdok Not so much a contradiction, just an ill advised business decision. From what I am aware, loss leaders are meant to entice new customers into your ecosystem so they can start spending money on other products that do make money. Whereas the way Kohdok describes a good starter deck means the first thing they will buy after buying your loss leader, is another loss leader. I just think, from a business standpoint, the best way to design a starter deck is to only need to sell one per customer.
@@Oudmealsoup If you were taking this approach, you'd factor costs of things like marketing into your loss. The marketing cost applies to the first purchase only - once someone is buying their second or third copy of the product (or is an established player buying 3 copies upfront), they already know it exists and know why they want to buy it. That can turn a 3x buy into a profit where a 1x buy is a loss.
@@Oudmealsoup its extremely common to have a loss leader. Consoles for video games are all loss leaders. Starter decks in most games are loss leaders. There are multiple companies that functioned from a no profit position during their early days with the intent of creating a large customer base before looking to make tremendous profits. Loss leaders are very very important for giving players a way to try the product with the intent of having them come back for more product in the future. For example, a lot of people that have bought/buy yugioh starter decks also buy packs from time to time and the starter decks are most likely the reason they got interested enough to buy packs in the first place.
If you really wanna get down to it, every single card game is "ableist" because cards aren't printed in braille, and card sleeves wouldn't support braille on cards even if they were, but that's not really what "ableist" is supposed to mean. And for a game like Bakugon (admittedly I've never played), if you're not able to roll the little ball onto the table, then you're probably not able to hold cards or roll dice either, so the ball rolling isn't what's preventing you from being able to play anyway. And if you can find workarounds for holding cards, then surely you can find a reasonable workaround for rolling a ball too (like how bowling alleys have those little bowling ball slides for younger kids). If we ever reach the point of literal "card games on motorcycles", THAT could be considered ableist, or introducing some sort of dexterity challenge mechanic into a game that didn't previously have one as part of only some cards could potentially discriminate against existing players of that game, but having one built into the core of the game's design is really not an issue.
i don't disagree with what you're saying, but braille card sleeves actually are a thing iirc or i heard of at least one story of someone playing that way
@@Envy_May while I'm sure someone could do that for themself as a custom job, unfortunately it would probably disqualify them from organized play because it would amount to playing with marked cards, but at least that doesn't have to stop you from playing at a local or casual level
So, the Warmachine section is actually somewhat off, but needs some history in there to explain first. Over time they were working on converting their entire miniature line into plastic minis instead of metal, but to do so they had to work with a Chinese company to produce them. Molds for plastic minis are extremely expensive to make up front, but once they're done it's cheap to knock things out. So, things were going good... until somehow the Chinese company "lost" the molds for the entire line. (I say "lost", but it sounds more likely that they were stolen.) And since China doesn't give a crap... said molds are probably gone for good. So they had to decide what to do: spend a bunch of money remaking molds for minis people probably already have, shut everything down, or start fresh. What they went with is sort of a hybrid approach. The current edition of the game has two formats: Prime (think Standard) and Unlimited. In Prime, there are Legacy armies made up of every faction that has ever existed in the game, for those people who already have models. They're a bit more like the old theme lists, except sculpted to be a bit more balanced. For the smaller factions they basically got everything they had wholesale in the new army, but for some of the larger ones there *are* some units that fell between the cracks that didn't really fit the Legacy armies for balance reasons... but they *have* been going and tweaking the contents of the Legacy armies as time goes on. There's also the MKIV Armies, the new stuff. Balance so far actually seems pretty good between the two types, with some of the stronger ones actually being Legacy. In regards to Unlimited, every model that has ever existed has rules in that format. It's a bit of a free-for-all, but it's there. General plan is that it gets a balance pass around the start of the year. In regards to the starter price: It's funny, they actually agree. Starting with the new Cryx Necrofactoirum army coming in the summer, they're actually reworking it to have a bit more of a traditional starter with a warcaster, character warjack, a unit, and a support solo. Don't have MSRP off hand, but I remember hearing something around $70ish? I think having a unit in there actually is a better representation of game-play than the old battle boxes with just two 'jacks. Word is that they want to go back and eventually re-do the existing faction starters in this style. In regards to cards and the rulebook... I do hope that we eventually get POD cards and a rule-book somehow, but I totally get wanting to push people to the app so they always have the most updated rules for their stuff. The old card decks with errata and balance were always a bit of a mess, since they were often out-dated by the time they came out and would just take up shelf space. We *are* supposed to get the option to print them in the app for local use, there's been some tech problems delaying it.
Them basically binning the old lists and the entire Hordes line was the final goddamn straw for me. I still hadn't forgiven them for what they did to me as a Skorne player going into Mark 3 and rendering my old Fist of Halaak force all but unplayable.
They can't come in your house and take your cards, but I have had several moments where they banned cards I owned and I saw their value plummet. Not the same but it can feel like it.
Nothing is sacred anymore in this world, even physical games (or in this case, cards) can be “taken away from you”. You have a physical retro game but your old console is broken? Emulate it instead with your actual ROM dump! But be careful, Nintendo doesn’t even let you dump your own ROMs today. With cards, it’s just like you said, they can just not let you play with the cards anymore outside of the most casual setting ever (kitchen table). Banning cards has its uses (to balance a meta), but it also is a tool to just force players to buy more cards, we know this is how Konami abuses their banlists, while also actually making it useful by balancing their meta.
...Privateer has done the edition incomaptibility refresh several times as far as I can tell. This was the first time I had heard that they made the old minis fully incompatible too. However, at least it is the RPG, where each edition of Iron Kingdoms is a different rules system. Not even kidding, they did that too. First edition was 3.x d20 based, Second was essentially using the then current Minis rules, currently it is 5e, but considering what went down with D&D just before the third wave of it was crowdfunded...
Funnily enough, it's really hard for me to tell the difference between rare and mythic MtG cards because of the gold and red. Was looking through my collection the other day and found some mythics that I had originally thought were rares.
"Johnny's... aren't interested in having one or two alternate collectibles." Proof that I'm a Johnny! If the card functions as a game piece, that's all that matters. I feel like there's a bit of Timmy in me (big creature go boom is fun), but I will always pick the standard version of a card at the standard price, rather than the premium version of the card at the premium price.
@@grantflippin7808 oh, yeah that makes sense. Nah, I don't like buying something when I don't know what I'm buying, I avoid boosters and similar products. I preferred to buy Challenger decks, but those aren't a thing anymore... so now I just buy singles. If Wizards sold 60-card modern or standard decks, I would buy them!
Kodok what about instead of selling Boosters for the cardgame you sell like Training boxes akin to Pokemon where you buy the box and you get the cards featured in it?
@rickmel09 Could you elaborate on that? I have a friend that wants to starts his own tcg but instead of featuring booster boxes he wants to go for that model where introduces a product that gives you a pair of cards featured in the set
The color blindness thing just made me realize that while magic usually uses symbols there are times they only use colors: in cards with no casting cost/backside of certain cards, they used to write "this card is [colors]" as the first line of text, but replaced it with a circle with the colors next to the type line On the topic of ableism, I agree with you that games with a dexterity/skill component as their core gameplay aren't ableist, there is a line at which certain cards/mechanics can be seen as ableist E.g. I would say Magic got it right with banning Falling Star and Chaos Orb everywhere and not printing dexterity card except for the Un-Sets. MtG has dexterity be so far from it's gameplay that they were both outliers, nuisances in how people responded to their effects by raking up insane amounts of space while playing and limiting factors for accessibility, banning those two let magic focus and have a bigger audience I don't disagree with you, just wanted to put this example of where removing dexterity was a good thing (Befoe I get weird comments, of course people can play what they want, I know there are a lot of people who play with chaos orb in kitchentable/oldschool formats)
I've never been good at button mashing and wish alot of games had means to turn it off or reduce it. I find it completely unfair that the skill/strategy cultivated over the game was thrown out the window in favour of "can you press the button X times in Y seconds?" which is something I physically cannot get better at. Thank god for turbo buttons.
Even without getting into the ethics of it, being inaccessible is intrinsically limiting the market. If you're a business, you want to make your game color-blind-friendly so color-blind people will give you their money. You want to have options for people with less money because it's a much larger market, and the people with a lot of money can be targeted with premium products. Another bonus to cheaper cards: People are more likely to share an old deck to get a friend into the game if they have an abundance. I got into TCGs because a friend gave me some Pokemon cards when I was 6. Keyforge was easy to get others into before they overcomplicated it in the third set. It was easy enough to play with just the cards and some pennies, and it was easy to end up with more decks than one needed.
I wish all card games with colours gave every colour its own symbol, like MTG and Pokemon do. It's especially bad when they put holofoil effects on the coloured parts of the card. I'm not even colourblind, and I've had situations where I mistook blue holofoil cards for green, and the other way around. Also, the symbols add a little bit of character to every colour, making the game just a little more interesting.
It is a long and tired story. My relationship is based not on how they designed Vanguard, but how they MARKETED it, which is something to attribute to the company. They know I do not like them. I do not expect them to change to appease me or even give me any mind (Which, fair enough).
@@Kohdok I got that. I was around when Vanguard first came out but I heard about it through word of mouth and didn't see any of its marketing. What was its marketing like?
Speaking of Digital Card games. Have you ever looked into those NFT TCGs that claim that you own the digital card even if/when the game shutsdown, with a marketplace to sell for money.
I love that NFT bros are still using the "you own the thing" line. If the game shuts down, you don't own the card, you own a dead link to what used to be the card.
So you mentioned privateer press and their horrible entry point for mk4. Ive said the same sort of stuff on their discord and sent actual feedback to the company saying similar stuff and they finally got a hint. More recently they started selling 80$ starter boxes that are similar to the old starters where they have a caster and 2 jacks. The new starters are never in stock, but that's a different issue. Also they did the aos thing because they literally lost their old moulds. The company fell off a cliff because they were put into a bad situation and also made bad choices.
I think deck size is an accessibility issue. I'm Commander's number one hater so maybe I'm just fishing for reasons to be salty. But shuffling 100 cards is not easy for new players let alone people with hand and wrist issues.It's gotten to the point where when i see commander tables, people arent really shuffling their decks. 40 or 50 cards is ideal, 60 is just fine, bigger is just too much
To be fair, if you only like one Star Trek show, it might be better to just say that the Star Trek game isn't for you than to complain that the game expects you to pay £150 for one ship. The target audience is people who like all of Star Trek, who are going to view the starter set as the collection of 6 ships it actually is.
Really appreciate taking down the "If your game has any skill difference then it's able-ist" argument. I get that there are certain things that are ACTUALLY accessibility features, but a lot of attacks come down to some impossible ideal of demanding every game be playable by every human being on earth, yet somehow pretending like that won't affect the game's actual integrity. I feel like these arguments always *start* in a good place but spiral quickly into "over-activism," where the actually reasonable arguments get drowned out and covered up by the wholly unreasonable ones, leading to the reasonable arguments getting discounted in their entirety by the people who most need to actually hear them.
The cost of having a non-fence sitting opinion is that every so often, we all must eat our helping of crow. Be proud though, I bet alot of content creators would wish they could say only ONE section of one of their vids aged as bad as that ownership screed post-pinkertons.
If games like Bakugan are considered "ableist" then video games are ableist. Sports are ableist. Wrestling is ableist. Everything is ableist. What is really ableist are people's attitudes thinking the world revolves around them. Just because you can't have fun or do something doesn't mean everyone else has to stop for you.
I agree that its silly to say that “Bakugan is ableist because it has a dexerity element” is a silly thing to say. But if you think that the logical conclusion to that belief is that everything would be considered ableist and disabled people are whiny and entitled for not wanting those things so be ableist, you’re kind of implying that “literally everything in this world excludes disabled people, but that’s okay and disabled people should not demand accommodation.”
@@rosa28373 My main point is that disabled people can always find a way to have fun. Either find a different game to play or don't give up on what you really want. And people with the fake outrage on behalf of disabled people need to just go touch grass.
@@rosa28373 Except I'm not. I'm drawing a clear line. What applies to things like building access, mobility accommodations, all of that, cannot begin to be compared to a simple entertainment product. Like I said, take it to its other logical extreme and you're screaming red-faced at every pub with a crokinole table. For things like that, you have to accept your limitations so the people at the top of their craft can show their stuff.
In the context of a children's toy, its not. In the context of a trading card game it absolutely is, because being a TCG sets an expectation of what you need to be able to do to play and adding a dexterity challenge violates that.
My dude you have got to stop talking about Grand Archive! You've said your piece. The GA community thinks the re:collection decks are amazing products and they have sold quite well. Also, I recently donated opened starter decks to a new local game store that I searched for character super rares. Such a thing would never happen if a chase inside the starter did not exist. Real shame about Warmachine. i was introduced to it when it was the plucky little game eating Games Workshop lunch but I never played past an intro game. I got into miniature painting because I was buying old warmachine models on clearance, I just really like the aesthetic. MKIV has been a completely failure, very few people want to pay 200 dollars for a set of medium quality 3d printed miniatures. Hope someone leaks the STLs when privateer press goes bankrupt.
"The GA Community thinks they're amazing"? The crowd reaction at the reveal says otherwise. The clip I used in the prior video was them filming the reveal, turning the camera towards the crowd expecting an explosive reaction, but there was basically no reaction aside from a little hemming and hawing. I can imagine the person operating the stream muttering "Oh crud! Oh crud!" before cutting the feed. Gonna trust my eyes and ears on this one. And, really, your generosity is no excuse for them putting such a system into a $50 box that advertises itself as a "One-time-purchase".
@@Kohdok What the guy wrote really reads as a gacha player trying to defend the predatory system that charges absurd amounts of money for something that doesn't even guarantee they will get what they want because people pay for it.
@@Kohdok The same reveal where that same crowd gave said explosive reaction when Tristan's Re:Collection set was announced and they understood the full details of the product? Weird to disregard your eyes and ears for that one... You have the product dead to rights with the CSR chance and being bundled in lots of 8, the rest feels like it's coming from personal distaste than being an actual issue with what's on offer.
@rickmel09 So people who play Genshin obsessively and surrender all of their free time to it? Still sounds like they're paying to me. Also, Genshin Impact can, any time they like, say "Actually, you have no five-stars. In fact you have no One-stars. You have nothing. No recourse. We aren't giving you that time back. Goodbye!"
If purchase is not ownership, then piracy is not theft is an incredibly succinct way to sum that all up. I love it.
That doesn't apply to Gacha Games, where you don't own the game.. but your account in it! And these are usually live servers that can go away at any moment! No server, no game.
The simple answer to that is : Don't waste money and time on such games. But that doesn't really work if one wants to enjoy them!
What are you going to do? Pirate a Server to play the stolen game (if getting the code in first place is even possible?)
@@Big_Dai two words: fan servers. My favorite gacha game that is now long dead, Dragalia Lost, is still being upheld by fans who host their own servers that you can even shift over your original account to.
it's not a perfect solution and i agree that most games with this service format isn't really worth most people's time, but even games with online servers that aren't free to play do this like Super Smash Brothers Brawl and Mario Kart Wii. This was also what people did to play the 2007 Runescape and old expansions of WoW before their respective classic editions came out
This is a flawed statement though. The end doesn’t justify the means. People are always more comfortable going to just satisfy their own needs instead of working towards a better solution for everyone.
@@NeroVingian40 Someone with actual brains, and they use them.
@@NeroVingian40 This, doesn't engage with what I said? Blankly stating that the ends don't justify the means, doesn't just win an argument. The fact of the matter is, that companies do not respect your purchase. You can buy a full game, digitally, you buy the game, but to them you do not own it. If that purchase, means nothing, then when you pirate that product, you are not taking anything.
Purchases should mean ownership. That's the end goal with thinking like this. If I buy something, I should fucking own that thing. If not, there is no reason to purchase it, because you aren't purchasing it.
I like your thoughts on "ableism" I think it's important to add accessibility where it doesn't take away from anything. That doesn't mean you can never do things that can't be made accessible.
Ableism is when things can be accessible, but either intentionally or due to not caring aren't. Making it so not everyone can climb a rockwall isn't ableist. Making it so colorblind people can't tell the rocks from the wall is ableist.
Small correction: Iono does work if it's the last card in your hand. It only fails if both players have no cards. I have no idea why they decided to go with that restriction though since it only ever applies once in a blue moon.
They really didn't want her to just be like Petra for whatever reason
The way the Pokémon TCG works is you cannot play a card if it would do nothing based on public knowledge.
Iono, even if *your* hand is empty, would still put the opponent's hand on the bottom of their deck and make you both draw cards, so you can play it because it does *something*
But for example you wouldn't be able to play a Potion if there is no damage for it to heal, as the card would do absolutely nothing.
Searching always works because the contents of the deck is private information, so even if there is no valid target in your deck, you can search it (and you shuffle the deck anyway, so it still does something even if you fail to find a target)
Your comment about color blindness is thoughtful and practical. It is amazing how many people are color blind!
As a colour blind person I hate when games make their main colours be in the same gradient like white are you using dark blue and purple, those are practically the same for a colourblind person
At my prerelease, I had one person who was colorblind. Specifically red-green colorblind. I use colored gems in the upper left corner for quick reference, and Weapons and Armor are red and green, respectively. Thankfully, I had other identifying features on each card that make it possible to identify what's what. If I didn't have that, he'd have been screwed.
@@NexusVFD Thanks for the heads up. I was using blue and purple for my game, and wanted the blue to be sort of dark to contrast the light blue we often see in like Pokémon and Magic. I was going to do color blind tests and use symbols too but this is good to take into account, thanks!
Speaking of companies killing games people spent tons of money on, the Accursed Farms TH-cam channel's Ross Scott is working on a class action lawsuit to stop companies from being able to kill games.
I am aware of this. Unfortunately, the USA is apparently the toughest battleground.
Lol
I like how they handled colorblind accessibility discreetly in Magic for the Phyrexian mana, in that every card with it has reminder text for the mechanic that includes the normal mana symbol for that color complete with its symbol representation.
My personal concern about the Grand Archive part of your last video was mainly to do with calling the Re:Collection Decks “starter decks” and implying that they didn’t have other cheaper ways to currently get into the game.
Aside from that, I do think that your other criticisms are perfectly valid, even if I don’t entirely agree.
I’m personally excited for the Re:Collection decks and all of their contents, I see it kind of like a mix of the Pokemon League battle decks and an ETB, a more competitive deck with some bells and whistles included. That is from the perspective of someone who started with the starter decks and worked their way up to it, like you pointed out in the original video.
As for the CSRs, for myself at least, it would be exciting to get one but I’m not purchasing these expecting to get it. I just want these products to play the game because I think that the mechanics are fun and they’ve put a lot of meaningful thought into the gameplay itself. But again, a fair criticism when looking at the perspective of someone who would be hunting the chase cards.
I’d be curious to know your thoughts on the mechanics and gameplay feel, though if you don’t want to because of everything else, while a shame it’s fair.
And finally, “if purchase is not ownership, then piracy is not theft”, chef’s kiss! Hopefully the fight for ownership of digital media trends toward the consumer in the future
I don’t think he implied they don’t have any other product.
He just said these products are unaccessible. They are expensive and shouldn’t be the primary way to sell your product. Your subjective view of willing to buy them doesn’t change that fact.
@@Zutang777 The box he keeps whining about isn't the primary way to sell the product, it's a mix of League Battle Box and Secret Lair. He just refuses to admit he's wrong about it.
I wanna give a shoutout to the Digimon TCG. At launch not only were its factions purely divided by color, but also it had a massive amount of colors (7 in total), so when I first saw it immediately concerned me, but eventually Digimon adjusted their design to have a notched circle on the card's play and evolution cost, with each notch matching to one of the colors in the game.
It's such a perfectly succinct solution, it plays well with the games multi colored cards because you can put together any combination of the notches, and it only requires memorizing the position of each color on the wheel.
and even then, if the colors are ROYGBIV, just put the notchwise clockwise starting from top as red and there's hardly any memorizing to be done
A big thing with the warmachine starter that didn't go mentioned is that they're 3D printed models, not hard plastic kits. Not only is $200 is most of the way towards just buying an entire printer for yourself, but if you have a friend already with one $200 is enough resin to 3d print dozens of armies for other games. When they announced they were 3d prints, every ex-warmachine player locally assumed they would be about £50-60 ($60-70ish dollars) and unanimously balked at the price. We used to hold events around here in the hundreds of players. Just sheer madness.
One thing I thought was great was when I was first getting back into Magic, they had these Welcome Decks. There were mono-colored 30-card half decks, and you would shuffle two of them together, and you had something you could play right there to test out the game. They weren't anything competitive, but they were simple enough to learn from. The best part was that WOTC actually encouraged stores to give them out for free to new/potential new players. Sure, this meant they had nothing of real value, but it was a great example of sacrificing a little up front to be able to hook a customer you can profit more from later. Obviously, this is much easier to absorb the cost of if you are an established game with a mostly entrenched player pool. But, still, I think it's a good model for making it accessible to new players, both from a cost and complexity standpoint.
Can confirm this works. It's how i got into Force of Will - I was in a game store and was vaguely interested in it, and the store owner gave me an expensive-looking promo they must have had left over from an event, just because I looked at a starter deck. That was enough to make me buy the deck - show me how damn nice the promo cards look.
@@yurisei6732 Yeah, free/cheap things you can buy off the shelf and play with that night go a long way. One recent complaint I've had about Magic is they haven't released any new Challenger decks in recent years, which were great, because they were decks ready to go out of the box that could generally hold their own at the game store, had full playsets of several cards, included sideboards, and had some obvious spots for improvements. So, if I wanted to give Standard a try, I could (in the past) buy a deck for like $25-35 at my LGS, and just play that night. Precons are a great way of getting people in, either to a game or a new format.
The Re:Collection pre-orders are sold out at most stores. It is a successful product.
Yeah I still don't see how this point has been brought up in 3 videos already
The thing about physical accessibility with a physical game is that its both easier and harder than a digital product. For digital things, its restricted to what can be programmed but once the system is in there, it can be added to and modified if needed (i.e. subtitles and colorblind options, or controller remapping). Physical games have the advantage that, as a physical medium, it is far easier to just make aids for them, like something designed to help roll dice, or shuffle a deck, or even just hold cards. There's a wide variety of physical and neurological disabilities and it can be near-impossible to create options for people that fit their specifications.
For sure, it just falls on the individual to accommodate for themselves with physical games (which can be as simple as a magnifying glass or as complex as a one on one aid functioning as a player's hands)
On the other hand, a digital game has no need for dice roll assists or deck shufflers at all. It doesn't really make sense to compare digital vs physical on this angle because the accessibility tools you can make for a physical game are largely separate from the actual game.
I love the honesty and applicability of your output. Thank you. One of my favourite channels because of honesty
Totally agree
In the UK, the phrase in the equality act is ‘reasonable adjustment’ and I think that’s a reasonable framing device here. Make reasonable adjustments to your game wherever possible to help folk with disabilities. Hell those adjustments often make the game more accessible to a general audience too, so it’s win-win-win.
Where is the audio thing about you change of opinion after the Star Wars video?
Am I the only one that sees a flaw in Kohdok's logic? Kohdok said Starter decks are loss leaders you sell to get new people into the game, but also we want players to buy 2 copies of each deck to get full playsets of cards. Like would that not cause problems when talking to anyone you are trying to get funding from to tell them "We are going to lose money every time we sell one of these, but don't worry, we only expect to sell 2 of them to every member of our player base."
I fail to see how this is a contradiction. Opening the gate to multiple purchases (Within reason) for people who want to become more committed helps product sell through. It's the difference between a small profit and a total loss.
@@Kohdok Not so much a contradiction, just an ill advised business decision. From what I am aware, loss leaders are meant to entice new customers into your ecosystem so they can start spending money on other products that do make money. Whereas the way Kohdok describes a good starter deck means the first thing they will buy after buying your loss leader, is another loss leader. I just think, from a business standpoint, the best way to design a starter deck is to only need to sell one per customer.
@@Oudmealsoup If you were taking this approach, you'd factor costs of things like marketing into your loss. The marketing cost applies to the first purchase only - once someone is buying their second or third copy of the product (or is an established player buying 3 copies upfront), they already know it exists and know why they want to buy it. That can turn a 3x buy into a profit where a 1x buy is a loss.
@@Oudmealsoup its extremely common to have a loss leader. Consoles for video games are all loss leaders. Starter decks in most games are loss leaders. There are multiple companies that functioned from a no profit position during their early days with the intent of creating a large customer base before looking to make tremendous profits.
Loss leaders are very very important for giving players a way to try the product with the intent of having them come back for more product in the future. For example, a lot of people that have bought/buy yugioh starter decks also buy packs from time to time and the starter decks are most likely the reason they got interested enough to buy packs in the first place.
3:38 red and green are mainly used because the colors are opposites, which is weird (to me) how it overlaps with the most common form of daltonism
If you really wanna get down to it, every single card game is "ableist" because cards aren't printed in braille, and card sleeves wouldn't support braille on cards even if they were, but that's not really what "ableist" is supposed to mean. And for a game like Bakugon (admittedly I've never played), if you're not able to roll the little ball onto the table, then you're probably not able to hold cards or roll dice either, so the ball rolling isn't what's preventing you from being able to play anyway. And if you can find workarounds for holding cards, then surely you can find a reasonable workaround for rolling a ball too (like how bowling alleys have those little bowling ball slides for younger kids). If we ever reach the point of literal "card games on motorcycles", THAT could be considered ableist, or introducing some sort of dexterity challenge mechanic into a game that didn't previously have one as part of only some cards could potentially discriminate against existing players of that game, but having one built into the core of the game's design is really not an issue.
i don't disagree with what you're saying, but braille card sleeves actually are a thing iirc or i heard of at least one story of someone playing that way
@@Envy_May while I'm sure someone could do that for themself as a custom job, unfortunately it would probably disqualify them from organized play because it would amount to playing with marked cards, but at least that doesn't have to stop you from playing at a local or casual level
What about people who have issues with depth perception? we can see cards just fine, but having to aim something is a non-starter.
9:45 Like...Digimon has done? Oop
Is that audio diary you mentioned publicly available?
In terms of digital CCGs, options for screen readers & integrating audio cues for basic actions should be important.
I always appreciate your moral stances on gaming, you're saying what I am feeling but don't have the words to say!
So, the Warmachine section is actually somewhat off, but needs some history in there to explain first. Over time they were working on converting their entire miniature line into plastic minis instead of metal, but to do so they had to work with a Chinese company to produce them. Molds for plastic minis are extremely expensive to make up front, but once they're done it's cheap to knock things out. So, things were going good... until somehow the Chinese company "lost" the molds for the entire line. (I say "lost", but it sounds more likely that they were stolen.) And since China doesn't give a crap... said molds are probably gone for good. So they had to decide what to do: spend a bunch of money remaking molds for minis people probably already have, shut everything down, or start fresh.
What they went with is sort of a hybrid approach. The current edition of the game has two formats: Prime (think Standard) and Unlimited. In Prime, there are Legacy armies made up of every faction that has ever existed in the game, for those people who already have models. They're a bit more like the old theme lists, except sculpted to be a bit more balanced. For the smaller factions they basically got everything they had wholesale in the new army, but for some of the larger ones there *are* some units that fell between the cracks that didn't really fit the Legacy armies for balance reasons... but they *have* been going and tweaking the contents of the Legacy armies as time goes on. There's also the MKIV Armies, the new stuff. Balance so far actually seems pretty good between the two types, with some of the stronger ones actually being Legacy.
In regards to Unlimited, every model that has ever existed has rules in that format. It's a bit of a free-for-all, but it's there. General plan is that it gets a balance pass around the start of the year.
In regards to the starter price: It's funny, they actually agree. Starting with the new Cryx Necrofactoirum army coming in the summer, they're actually reworking it to have a bit more of a traditional starter with a warcaster, character warjack, a unit, and a support solo. Don't have MSRP off hand, but I remember hearing something around $70ish? I think having a unit in there actually is a better representation of game-play than the old battle boxes with just two 'jacks. Word is that they want to go back and eventually re-do the existing faction starters in this style.
In regards to cards and the rulebook... I do hope that we eventually get POD cards and a rule-book somehow, but I totally get wanting to push people to the app so they always have the most updated rules for their stuff. The old card decks with errata and balance were always a bit of a mess, since they were often out-dated by the time they came out and would just take up shelf space. We *are* supposed to get the option to print them in the app for local use, there's been some tech problems delaying it.
Them basically binning the old lists and the entire Hordes line was the final goddamn straw for me. I still hadn't forgiven them for what they did to me as a Skorne player going into Mark 3 and rendering my old Fist of Halaak force all but unplayable.
They can't come in your house and take your cards, but I have had several moments where they banned cards I owned and I saw their value plummet. Not the same but it can feel like it.
Nothing is sacred anymore in this world, even physical games (or in this case, cards) can be “taken away from you”.
You have a physical retro game but your old console is broken? Emulate it instead with your actual ROM dump! But be careful, Nintendo doesn’t even let you dump your own ROMs today.
With cards, it’s just like you said, they can just not let you play with the cards anymore outside of the most casual setting ever (kitchen table). Banning cards has its uses (to balance a meta), but it also is a tool to just force players to buy more cards, we know this is how Konami abuses their banlists, while also actually making it useful by balancing their meta.
Killer summary. I’ve seen a lot of mistakes on accessibility
Who do you main in Melee? Which players do you like to watch?
Mained the Puff since N64. More watch Street Fighter analysis and occasional replays.
...Privateer has done the edition incomaptibility refresh several times as far as I can tell. This was the first time I had heard that they made the old minis fully incompatible too. However, at least it is the RPG, where each edition of Iron Kingdoms is a different rules system. Not even kidding, they did that too. First edition was 3.x d20 based, Second was essentially using the then current Minis rules, currently it is 5e, but considering what went down with D&D just before the third wave of it was crowdfunded...
Funnily enough, it's really hard for me to tell the difference between rare and mythic MtG cards because of the gold and red. Was looking through my collection the other day and found some mythics that I had originally thought were rares.
Deep Space Nine mentioned: Like button pressed.
"Johnny's... aren't interested in having one or two alternate collectibles."
Proof that I'm a Johnny! If the card functions as a game piece, that's all that matters. I feel like there's a bit of Timmy in me (big creature go boom is fun), but I will always pick the standard version of a card at the standard price, rather than the premium version of the card at the premium price.
Same here, but if I pull one I absolutely will put it in my deck over a regular card.
Counter point: you could trade or sell popular alternative cards for a playset of the base form
@@grantflippin7808 why would I buy a card with the intention of selling it? Sounds like something I would do with company stock, not cardstock.
@@havenfractal I was assuming you pulled a rare version from a pack or box
@@grantflippin7808 oh, yeah that makes sense. Nah, I don't like buying something when I don't know what I'm buying, I avoid boosters and similar products. I preferred to buy Challenger decks, but those aren't a thing anymore... so now I just buy singles. If Wizards sold 60-card modern or standard decks, I would buy them!
WarmaHordes mentioned, miss my days with that game. Shame what the company turned into
Apparently the company who manufactured their minis "lost" all their molds.
Kodok what about instead of selling Boosters for the cardgame you sell like Training boxes akin to Pokemon where you buy the box and you get the cards featured in it?
@rickmel09 Could you elaborate on that? I have a friend that wants to starts his own tcg but instead of featuring booster boxes he wants to go for that model where introduces a product that gives you a pair of cards featured in the set
The color blindness thing just made me realize that while magic usually uses symbols there are times they only use colors: in cards with no casting cost/backside of certain cards, they used to write "this card is [colors]" as the first line of text, but replaced it with a circle with the colors next to the type line
On the topic of ableism, I agree with you that games with a dexterity/skill component as their core gameplay aren't ableist, there is a line at which certain cards/mechanics can be seen as ableist
E.g. I would say Magic got it right with banning Falling Star and Chaos Orb everywhere and not printing dexterity card except for the Un-Sets. MtG has dexterity be so far from it's gameplay that they were both outliers, nuisances in how people responded to their effects by raking up insane amounts of space while playing and limiting factors for accessibility, banning those two let magic focus and have a bigger audience
I don't disagree with you, just wanted to put this example of where removing dexterity was a good thing
(Befoe I get weird comments, of course people can play what they want, I know there are a lot of people who play with chaos orb in kitchentable/oldschool formats)
I've never been good at button mashing and wish alot of games had means to turn it off or reduce it. I find it completely unfair that the skill/strategy cultivated over the game was thrown out the window in favour of "can you press the button X times in Y seconds?" which is something I physically cannot get better at. Thank god for turbo buttons.
Even without getting into the ethics of it, being inaccessible is intrinsically limiting the market. If you're a business, you want to make your game color-blind-friendly so color-blind people will give you their money. You want to have options for people with less money because it's a much larger market, and the people with a lot of money can be targeted with premium products.
Another bonus to cheaper cards: People are more likely to share an old deck to get a friend into the game if they have an abundance. I got into TCGs because a friend gave me some Pokemon cards when I was 6. Keyforge was easy to get others into before they overcomplicated it in the third set. It was easy enough to play with just the cards and some pennies, and it was easy to end up with more decks than one needed.
I wish all card games with colours gave every colour its own symbol, like MTG and Pokemon do. It's especially bad when they put holofoil effects on the coloured parts of the card. I'm not even colourblind, and I've had situations where I mistook blue holofoil cards for green, and the other way around.
Also, the symbols add a little bit of character to every colour, making the game just a little more interesting.
Warmachine fumbling the bag so hard after almost usurping Warhammer was legendary
Just curious, I've heard you mention in other videos that you don't like Vanguard, but what made you dislike the whole company Bushiroad?
It is a long and tired story. My relationship is based not on how they designed Vanguard, but how they MARKETED it, which is something to attribute to the company.
They know I do not like them. I do not expect them to change to appease me or even give me any mind (Which, fair enough).
@@Kohdok I got that. I was around when Vanguard first came out but I heard about it through word of mouth and didn't see any of its marketing. What was its marketing like?
5:24 weaponized autism
Speaking of Digital Card games. Have you ever looked into those NFT TCGs that claim that you own the digital card even if/when the game shutsdown, with a marketplace to sell for money.
I left that to Jauwn
I love that NFT bros are still using the "you own the thing" line. If the game shuts down, you don't own the card, you own a dead link to what used to be the card.
Iono can be the last card in your hand
I’m hoping you one day look at the game that has a nuclear sword. For no reason but, nuclear sword and teddy bear cannon.
So you mentioned privateer press and their horrible entry point for mk4. Ive said the same sort of stuff on their discord and sent actual feedback to the company saying similar stuff and they finally got a hint.
More recently they started selling 80$ starter boxes that are similar to the old starters where they have a caster and 2 jacks.
The new starters are never in stock, but that's a different issue.
Also they did the aos thing because they literally lost their old moulds. The company fell off a cliff because they were put into a bad situation and also made bad choices.
I think deck size is an accessibility issue. I'm Commander's number one hater so maybe I'm just fishing for reasons to be salty. But shuffling 100 cards is not easy for new players let alone people with hand and wrist issues.It's gotten to the point where when i see commander tables, people arent really shuffling their decks.
40 or 50 cards is ideal, 60 is just fine, bigger is just too much
To be fair, if you only like one Star Trek show, it might be better to just say that the Star Trek game isn't for you than to complain that the game expects you to pay £150 for one ship. The target audience is people who like all of Star Trek, who are going to view the starter set as the collection of 6 ships it actually is.
We do symbols and also do colors
Really appreciate taking down the "If your game has any skill difference then it's able-ist" argument. I get that there are certain things that are ACTUALLY accessibility features, but a lot of attacks come down to some impossible ideal of demanding every game be playable by every human being on earth, yet somehow pretending like that won't affect the game's actual integrity.
I feel like these arguments always *start* in a good place but spiral quickly into "over-activism," where the actually reasonable arguments get drowned out and covered up by the wholly unreasonable ones, leading to the reasonable arguments getting discounted in their entirety by the people who most need to actually hear them.
Tbf we yugioh players traded our amazing maths skills for poor reading comprehension
The cost of having a non-fence sitting opinion is that every so often, we all must eat our helping of crow. Be proud though, I bet alot of content creators would wish they could say only ONE section of one of their vids aged as bad as that ownership screed post-pinkertons.
I think people often comment on videos to air there insecurities in the form of an attack. That’s why those people have excessive nose hair.
That's such an unprofessional and flippant thing to say.
Oh here it is, haha
If games like Bakugan are considered "ableist" then video games are ableist. Sports are ableist. Wrestling is ableist. Everything is ableist. What is really ableist are people's attitudes thinking the world revolves around them. Just because you can't have fun or do something doesn't mean everyone else has to stop for you.
I agree that its silly to say that “Bakugan is ableist because it has a dexerity element” is a silly thing to say. But if you think that the logical conclusion to that belief is that everything would be considered ableist and disabled people are whiny and entitled for not wanting those things so be ableist, you’re kind of implying that “literally everything in this world excludes disabled people, but that’s okay and disabled people should not demand accommodation.”
@@rosa28373 My main point is that disabled people can always find a way to have fun. Either find a different game to play or don't give up on what you really want. And people with the fake outrage on behalf of disabled people need to just go touch grass.
@@rosa28373 Except I'm not. I'm drawing a clear line. What applies to things like building access, mobility accommodations, all of that, cannot begin to be compared to a simple entertainment product.
Like I said, take it to its other logical extreme and you're screaming red-faced at every pub with a crokinole table. For things like that, you have to accept your limitations so the people at the top of their craft can show their stuff.
In the context of a children's toy, its not. In the context of a trading card game it absolutely is, because being a TCG sets an expectation of what you need to be able to do to play and adding a dexterity challenge violates that.
That reaching and extreme to say it that.
People that use the word "ableist" unironically are a glaring example of how good life is in the West.
My dude you have got to stop talking about Grand Archive! You've said your piece. The GA community thinks the re:collection decks are amazing products and they have sold quite well. Also, I recently donated opened starter decks to a new local game store that I searched for character super rares. Such a thing would never happen if a chase inside the starter did not exist.
Real shame about Warmachine. i was introduced to it when it was the plucky little game eating Games Workshop lunch but I never played past an intro game. I got into miniature painting because I was buying old warmachine models on clearance, I just really like the aesthetic. MKIV has been a completely failure, very few people want to pay 200 dollars for a set of medium quality 3d printed miniatures. Hope someone leaks the STLs when privateer press goes bankrupt.
"The GA Community thinks they're amazing"? The crowd reaction at the reveal says otherwise. The clip I used in the prior video was them filming the reveal, turning the camera towards the crowd expecting an explosive reaction, but there was basically no reaction aside from a little hemming and hawing. I can imagine the person operating the stream muttering "Oh crud! Oh crud!" before cutting the feed.
Gonna trust my eyes and ears on this one.
And, really, your generosity is no excuse for them putting such a system into a $50 box that advertises itself as a "One-time-purchase".
@@Kohdok What the guy wrote really reads as a gacha player trying to defend the predatory system that charges absurd amounts of money for something that doesn't even guarantee they will get what they want because people pay for it.
@@Kohdok The same reveal where that same crowd gave said explosive reaction when Tristan's Re:Collection set was announced and they understood the full details of the product? Weird to disregard your eyes and ears for that one...
You have the product dead to rights with the CSR chance and being bundled in lots of 8, the rest feels like it's coming from personal distaste than being an actual issue with what's on offer.
@@Cooldude112233445570 By then, the "Please Clap" message had been passed around. Also, seems like they're cheering more for Tristan than the product.
@rickmel09 So people who play Genshin obsessively and surrender all of their free time to it? Still sounds like they're paying to me.
Also, Genshin Impact can, any time they like, say "Actually, you have no five-stars. In fact you have no One-stars. You have nothing. No recourse. We aren't giving you that time back. Goodbye!"