It’s astonishing how Hearthstone so elegantly resolved a lot of issues with the other 3, but let RNG, Powercreep, and Microtransactions ruin it to such a point I would rather play ANY of the other 3 games mentioned here.
heartstone oversimplified the other three and in process create some sort of monotone in the meta. In HS generally speaking there's only limited board state that could happen turn per turn and the victor will be the one who have the right cards at the right time or sometimes they just can't because they're playing bad deck that doesn't have answer for them. I never played HS but I used to play SV which basically HS for weebs, and in that game there's some meta where some hero (class in SV) is just unplayable, e.g There once a meta where board swarming is prevalent and there's only 2 class who actually playable because they have access to board wipe. But basically in those games generally speaking you'll see the almost exact move for early and mid games and late game are determined by how good you are in the previous game state.
@@Chex_Mex wow, agreed. The tempo elements of hearthstone feels so unfair. I was mainly a Rogue/Warlock player.back in Naxxramas / Goblins vs Gnomes era. I felt that control/combo decks never had the time to stall. If the aggro player had a good hand you would effectivally loose on turn 4-5. Also the 1 and 2 mana creatures were way too strong.
@samuelabreu4349 i got tired of rogue getting nerfed when it wasn't meta, and never getting new cards besides "copy random shit from your opponents hand/deck"
@@luizfernandotesck144 Actiblizz has quite the history of both bad business moves *and* really bad sexual assault/abuse/misconduct drama. Worst thing about the game might be a stretch, because it isn't as directly impactful, but definitely something to be aware of.
@@Cybertech134 I mean some of their bad business decisions are directly parts of hearthstone, so no. The other scandals aren't directly related, but people should know the kind of people who are getting the money they spend on hearthstone
@@angel-memeroftheisles yugioh players refuse to admit that their favorite format wasn't actually the best thing since jesus and that everything else after it is garbage 🤷
Brother slow down and take a breather!! 🤣 This is the first time i had to SLOW DOWN a video on youtube. You are not slim shady, don't run away with your words :D
Regarding the Yu-Gi-Oh section, the negatives you brought up are not at all relevant to how the standard format of the game has been played for at least the last 4-5 years. Nearly all trap cards are rarely played outside of niche trap focused decks due to powercreep making waiting one turn to activate their effects too slow. The actual primary concern with losing on the draw in Yu-Gi-Oh is the ability for the first turn player to setup a board that prevents the opponent from playing on their turn (yes that's how bad it has become). In modern Yu-Gi-Oh this is usually done via negates, cards that outright prevent certain cards or effects from being used at all (called "floodgates"), building a so called "unbreakable" board that either is extremely difficult to actually destroy or can rapidly recover no matter the amount of damage done (although with this type of deck it typically doesnt matter if they go first or second outside of mirror matches), and/or even boards with effects that literally skip portions of the opponent's turn (or otherwise force them to pass/prematurely end their turn). In the last two years the meta decks have usually been able to accomplish two or more of these at once. If you ever revist this topic in a future video this would be the primary correction you'd need to make (assuming nothing worse becomes problematic by then).
You yap too much, it's more rhetorically effective to say 'if my opponent sets traps' than 'if my opponent makes monsters that have trap effects, don't question it'
Wha... you do not like to have to endure 11+ interactions from Yubel or 9+ from SEFK and their limitless grind game or play against a floodgate deck like Branded that says "you cannot play this game, LITERALLY"?? How odd (sarcasm)
It’s not that traps aren’t used they just have to be really good like the Solemns, Infinite Impermanence, or Dimension barrier. Imperm is especially used because it can be used from the hand if you go Second.
Legend of Runeterra is a good example of trying to improve upon Hearthstone's design. Almost from the beginning, they had "restrained" randomness that could only generate cards from a known pool. The Celestial "Invoke" is an incredibly well-designed mechanic that felt both rewarding for the player, and fair for the opponent (mostly). It also tried to fix the concept of "turns" in card games, where one player has to wait for the other to finish their turn before they can play, and it led to a very interesting gameplay. The game has other problems of course, but it really tries to innovate in a lot of areas.
I describe LoR as a mix between Hearthstone and Magic. It has the advantages of Magic with the ability to interact on your opponents turn and provide disruption, but it also has the 1 mana per turn advantage of Hearthstone that allows players to not really suffer from the downsides of having to play core resource cards in their deck. I really enjoyed the game, and was sad when Riot quit supporting the game on the PvP side
@@jakehr3 1 mana per turn is not an advantage, it is a disadvantage. Getting mana drawned/draught/missing a color in Magic sucks, but it amounts to multiple things. I played Runeterra a lot, A LOT, and it wasnt trying to fix Hearthstone, it was trying to fix Magic and making it an Online TCG. However, as every game that tried to fix MTG mana system, they didnt understand it and they came to the same problems that every game with automatic mana has, which is consistency. Decks with automatic mana are overly consistent. They do one thing and theres no roadblocks in that gameplan. You can sequence your turns ahead and play the same game over and over again. Irelia Azir, Poppy, Shurima Sun Disc, Elusives... Ben Brode already spoke about this and explained that the randomness of Hearthstone was precisely trying to solve this issue. Except that Runeterra didnt even have randomness.
@@eduardosanz9434 Ok, but I never said it was trying to fix anything. I was trying to give what I tell people who know nothing of LoR, the gist of LoR. That gist is that it is Magic's spell/stack system (with exceptions for burst speed) with Heartstone's mana system (with some tweaks). Most new card games do not want to implement Magic's mana system because no new game will survive Magic's mana system. I don't think it is a very fair to point out all the positives of a system, when its flaws are pretty glaring. Yes, sometimes you curve out perfectly, you have to navigate what your mana gives you at any given point, or you get the satisfying comeback of being on the side of screw vs flood. But sometimes, you get screwed. You keep a 2-lander, and your top 6 cards are all 3+ mana spells that you can never cast and you die on turn 8, finally turning a corner against an opponent who wasn't have any mana issues the whole game. And to say that a specific card game is consistent, I feel lacks imagination. Even if a card game has no random elements on any of its cards, by being a card game, it will inherently be random. The celestials were a random mechanic, traps were randomly placed in decks, putting an indeterminate timetable on players, Seraphine generated random spells, random keyword generation was a plague on design since Pantheon released, and there's more. But even if all of that didn't exist, it would still be an unpredictable card game that you needed to navigate your turns around because the game intentionally lacked tutors, or any way to provide consistency beyond the top of the deck being setup with a predict (literally 1 mechanic in 1 region of 10). You say you had the same turns every game, but I was able to get to Masters level in Runeterra when those seasons existed, and while games had similar play patterns (as you would see in any card game) they were rarely, if ever, the same exact game. It's a card game, you are always playing around the top of the deck. Honestly, my games playing Pokemon feel far more samey than any Runeterra game ever felt like. Open up nest ball, squawk, nest ball, ogrepon, grass, draw, attach to active bolt with lightning, discard hand (has fighting), nest, ogre, grass, sada's, hit for 280, your turn. I've had that turn so many times on turn 1 in pokemon, I've even had it in back to back games before. I never had such an experience with Runeterra.
I feel like objectively speaking Runeterra had amazing game design,having the best elements of MTG and hearthstone combined,but for some reason I just couldn't get into it
The Dragon Ball Super card game, and I'm sure plenty of others, did this too (years later, of course). Any card can be used as energy so you don't need to account for another set of resource cards in your deck, nor worry about having too much or not enough at any given time. Makes for a nice balance of having a resource mechanic to balance cards out while not having to worry about getting screwed by it.
@@josiahclarke3535 Haven't had the pleasure of playing DBS in a good few years unfortunately, since my friend fell out of the game and the locals scene where I am is beyond dead. So I'll take your word for it. Although ngl, with my main game being YuGiOh, decks popping off in 3 turns just sounds like I get 2 extra turns to play, lol
Only problems with Legends of Runeterra: - They never figured out how to finance their game. - They never figured out a good draft format. Everything else about that game is just perfection.
Legends of runeterra was never met to make money. It's a loss leader. It's meant to bring in people to hopefully get them to play League of Legends where the real money is. It's like the food court at Costco or Sam's club. They're cheap food because they're hoping that you go there and then buy more stuff
@@abranlucero7246 Nope lol. LoL was successful thus they made excess money thus they had some fun wasting a bit of this money to create a cool card game. They didn't think it was necessary to advertise LoR properly as it was originally just made for fun, so it ended up having a very tiny number of players. Then they completely changed their mind and decided that LoR should make money by itself even though LoL was still making tons of excess money. This was of course impossible to do because too few players and nothing interesting to buy ingame, so they gave up and kinda left the game to die for now. LoR never brought players to LoL and LoL never brought players to LoR. The kind of players that like one of these two doesn't like the other and vice versa.
not be that guy but discover was revealed much earlier than Un'goro, in an expansion called League of Explorers which was 2 years earlier. Its a great video btw.
Yep and discover was a great mechanic initially, but I recently returned and now all the good cards have the discover effect and it's so annoying. People essentially put their entire deck with op discover cards and finds whatever answer they need for the situation. It's way overdone now and my least favorite keyword now.
The actual way MTG tackles its land "flaw" is by having a meta almost exclusively revolving around cheap spells that do as much as possible for the mana they cost. The overwhelmingly majority of staples in MTG is under 3 mana, most of them being at 1 mana (cards like thoughtseize, spellpierce that sees more play than counterspell just because it costs 1 less mana, fatal push being arguably the best removal spell in the game, the iconic lightning bolt, a common creature like delver of secrets being played in every blue deck, and so on) And when it does not, it aims to "cheat" the mana system by either ramping (getting ahead of your mana curve by playing extra lands or having means to generate extra mana) or by literally cheating big creatures or big spells in play by ignoring their cost through some card effects. And when it does neither, it just uses utility lands as resource, there's a control deck in legacy that remains always viable if not strong that only runs utility lands.
Thats just latestage powercreep in a manabased cardgame. Which is why mana is incredibly unhealthy for game design. You end up printing tons of cards that will just never see play solely because they cost 1 mana more than can be afforded in a real game. Regardless of rotation or whatever you choose to combat this core flaw its just always gonna evolve in the same direction. Print good card > print good card but 1 mana cheaper > print good card with more text > etc. This is why not tying your cards to "hard" mana makes games more flexible. You don't always have to play the same turn 1 followed by turn 2 etc.
that's not true. Cards have their power, abilities and thoughness attached to their mana value, some cards have a downside to justify the smaller cost, but the "majority of staples in mtg is under 3 mana" is a complete lie. Sheoldred for example is one of top 3 most know cards of the game and is 4 mana. The game tends to follow the rule of mana value, and when it doesn't , in cases like reanimate, lightning bolt or counterspell, is because these are cards created before power creep was a thing to look out for, and to solve this problem they created formats with cards that do similar effects for same mana but with a downside, and banned the broken originals in these formats. If you wanna play with these broken cards, stick to older formats like modern or legacy, because in formats like standard, pioneer or pauper, the power creep ,is still a problem, but its more stabilized. (Commander is a format mostly for fun with 4 players, so 1 mana tends to not make such a diference)
@@pan.parker You're misunderstanding what the word "majority" means here. Sheoldred is one card in the deck that plays it (usually as a two-of in dimir midrange). The rest of the deck is 3-cost or less besides Ertai if you choose to play him at all. The vast majority of staples are still 3 or less mana. 9/10 of the top decks in current standard follow this trend, the only exception is domain ramp
@@pan.parker This is not true, even for standard. Of the top 10 most played cards in standard right now, only 2 cost more than two mana, Urabrask's Forge and Aclazotz, the rest are all 1-2 mana interaction or aggro cards
@@yuseifido5706 standard is not the metric for this. Its a fast format, famous for its agro meta.Its not even close to being one of the most played formats. Besides the guy was making a reference to the staple cards itself, not the decks, óbviously decks will have a proportional mana to its strategy, the first turns have to have low cost value cards, but the staples are the winning condition like cards. Of course we have Monstrous Rage 1 mana, but we also have Atraxa, Sunfall, Phyrexian Obliterrator, Ghalta.
Loving the content. Here's some tips: - Get a pop filter or a dynamic mic (I'd go for a proper mic and a pop filter if you can) - Learn some really basic EQing and compression, or search around for a preset-oriented approach for dialogue - Slow down a tiny bit! I talk super fast too, but your words need to be audible above all.
I feel like he has already noticed how fast he talks and is trying to fix it. In my opinion, he talks faster in his older recent videos. Don't get me wrong, he still talks a bit too fast here, but it's better nonetheless. I might be imagining that tho
Many actually hate handtraps, but Yugioh's power level is so high that without them winning would be just a matter of who goes first. Then there's a deck that is designed to win going second AND plays handtraps.
The people that hate hand traps haven’t enjoyed the game since 5Ds then. Yes Kuriboh is technically the first hand trap, but that card is ass. DD Crow and Effect Veiler however are ancient. DD Crow saw play up until the Bystials came out and Veiler still sees play as a marginally worse Imperm. Maxx C is also a 5Ds era card and has (thankfully) been banned for years. Even what we consider to be modern hand traps are pretty old. Ghost Ogre is seeing a resurgence again and is from 2015. Ash Blossom has seen consistent play for nearly forever and is from 2017. Ghost Belle is from 2018, Spooky Dogwood is from 2019, Phantazmay is from 2019, Imperm is from 2018, Ghost Mourner is from 2020, etc. Veiler started the trend of playable hand traps back in 2010 and still sees play in 2024, and most of the hand traps that still see play are pretty old at this point too. Even looking at modern hand trap design, the only new ones we’ve gotten are the Mulcharmy cards and the Bystials, with the latter being entirely format dependent compared to how ubiquitous cards like Ash, Veiler, and Imperm have been for 6+ years.
It's a little "chicken & the egg" esque, but handtraps existing have mostly been the cause of the power creep in the game. Handtraps take up space that would be used for engine, so engine cards have to be designed so that they pull far more weight than they should to compensate. Eventually the only design space that will be left to explore is where every single piece of engine is also a handtrap. Havnis, Sharvara, and the Bystials are already the early iterations of this.
I think you misidentified Hearthstone's system level problem. RNG isn't the issue, it's the solution. The issue in hearthstone is that it's too consistent without the introduction of that RNG. Your deck size is small, the mulligan is generous, you're guaranteed a mana each turn, and you always have one hero power per turn. This leads to games that play out very similarly to each other at a base level. So all of those factors force the game to rely on RNG to keep the game fun and exciting game in and game out.
While this is true from a design standpoint, I think it's a pretty terrible solution. Perception hurts a lot. If your players notice what you're doing and hate it, that's just bad.
Yep. Just look at metas where decks with little to no randomness happen to dominate. Or worse, metas with top tier decks that focus on improving the hero power.
I don't understand how randomness according to you can have positives, if a roll of the dice determines player win/loss. Randomness is a lazy mechanic from a designer's perspective who didn't care enough about solid mechanics. Not to mention effects like summon random unit that costs X, or draw random card that costs X. This is stupid and poorly designed. Then there's nonsense like Jaina using death knight's weapon. That's why I quit HS...
@@supremacyecg6815 The tcg genre is built around randomness. If we didn't like that, then instead of playing different card games we would play chess or other similar games without randomness. The main benefit is the fact that randomness allows for more varied gamestates adding replay value to the game. There is also an important note that there are different kinds of randomness. It was mentioned in the video but the correct term hasn't been used, it's input randomness vs output randomness. In short it affects when they player has the chance to something - before the effect is activated or after. In general it is considered better game design to have more input randomness (essentially dealing the cards to the player and seeing what the player does, excavate and discover mechanics are examples of input randomness) while output randomness generally tends to cause more frustrations, but is also more welcomed by younger audiences becauseit is simpler to understand and use (play ragnaros/yogg and cool things happen). The problem with HS was that the underlying game mechanics were so simple that there was little to no room to interact or outplay opponent. To alleviate this issue HS team overused rng mechanics, which compounded and led many to believe rng to be the core issue. To be fair it IS a big issue, but not the only one. tldr There are many randomness mechanics that make the games more interesting and fun, but HS overindulged in those.
It’s honestly one of the biggest downfalls of the game. Like you’re gonna make me pay $20 for a card that’s the least exciting part of the game? Why is this the thing they’ve choosing to make exclusive? Baffling.
@@Rudepetsclub imaging being me and invest in your 8 expensive lands just to meet a local playerbase of 80% monored. sold my shit after 2 weekends again
As someone whose friends play magic, but does not own any cards myself, very much this. Sometimes I play against my friends with decks they lend me, and I once looked into putting together a deck myself. It turns out all the decks of theirs that I enjoyed playing have $150 worth of lands in them. I guess it would be cheap to have a mono-color deck, but I never much enjoyed any of the mono-color decks I've borrowed.
The problem with pokemon is snowballing. That's bang on. Only you got the reasoning wrong. Yeah, you get resources and your opponent loses resources whenever you take a ko. That's completely irrelevant because you draw about 10-20 cards a turn in Pokemon. Either that or you can tutor for any card you want. The problem is whoever takes the first ko often wins the game. That's because the pokemon deal too much damage. Almost every hit is one hit ko. When I started playing the game every deck was running potions, now people don't even know potions are in the game.
Tbf, every tcg will have powercreep, pokemon has been around for a long time, and considering the powercreep hearthstone went through in barely 10 years, I'd be surprised if pokemon didn't change drastically in 30. Now I'm not framliar with the pokemon tcg meta prior to black and white, but I was always under the impression that potion was never good in meta decks, even in the old days. Anyway, I do disagree that the main problem with pokemon (at least right now) is snowballing, prize races have always been a thing, but there's always counterplay. Chien Pao tries to always take 2 prizes with cards like greninja and iron hands, but if you can gust up their Baxcalibur and reset their hand with iono/unfair stamp, they need to start stalling until they can find another Baxcallibur. Raging bolt Ogerpon almost always gets the turn 1 attack going second, on average hitting 210/280 damage, but due to their entire deck being linear 2 prize attackers, decks like gardevoir can afford to just go down a few prizes before taking 3 clean knockouts with single prize attackers. Charizard specifically *wants* to go down in prizes in order to power up charizard and activate counter catcher. Charizard will almost always be a 2hko anyways, and they need time in the early game to set up their pidgeot and duskclops'. Radient charizard in particular is a single prize attacker who explicitly needs you to be down in prizes to attack. Obviously the solitaire esque nature of pokemon isn't for everyone, and it is true that some decks can snowball hard if the opponent gets a poor draw, but that really goes for every card game. Counterplay has always existed in pokemon, it's probably the 2nd most skill intensive card game in this list behind yugioh. If you ask me though, the real problem with the pokemon tcg is just prize cards... sometimes you prize your most valuable card, and you literally just can't play the game. 6 cards is a lot to give up, so the chances of getting screwed over by what you prize is pretty high. Like when regidrago is up against lugia and needs knock out a cinncino or up against lost zone box and needs to knock out a crammorant on the bench but then "oops, you prized your kyurem, guess you lose". Sorry for the block of text, I kinda just started typing and couldn't stop lol
At least in pokemon your games often last more than 1 turn, unlike yugioh. I switched from yugioh to hearthstone, but hearthstone has its powercreeping problems too. In my opinion though, the biggest problem of hs is netdecking. Since its only played online, at high legend you only ever face the same 4 decks and it gets way too repetitive. I love how pokemon and yugioh at least maintain a good variety of decks you can play for a long time
@@Chimeraeateverything Have you tried out Magic? I have played all four mentioned card games and I think Magic has the best compromise of all of them. I love to play obscure decks in Magic and am a fan of brewing stuff up. I do sadly admit that it got much harder with the powercreep that's happening recently, but I just stick to the older formats or community formats like Commander. That's what I feel like is especially missing in Yu-Gi-Oh. It really has no official formats at all. I like how Wizards have designed cards tailored to Commander, even though it started out as a community format. Imagine if Konami would show any love to for example GOAT Format. Like having a option to play GOAT Format in Master Duels for example. Or supporting GOAT Format Tournaments. I myself am a huge fan of the Edison Format too. I haven't played the Pokemon TCG all too much, but have heard from a friend who regularly plays it, that he Powercreep in the cardgame is crazy. And Hearthstone's RNG was just beginning to bug me. Even if some of it is controlled, it still feels like a Coinflip sometimes. Same with Yu-Gi-Oh tbh to decide who goes first.
The solution is: 1 never play meta decks 2 play with your friends 3 play with your favourite and suboptimal strats 4 have fun because its a card game and unless you wanna earn money becoming pro, it makes 0 sense getting frustrated losing to the same decks again and again
100% agree with this take. Idk why competitive players are so aggressive to casual players. If you want a card game that will grow and expand over time you need to be friendly to new comers. Otherwise only the most dedicated and competitive players are gonna remain.
Flesh and Blood does a good job addressing the variance issue by making all cards multi-purpose. Every card has a block value, a resource value, and abilities + attack value if the card is an attack. You also draw cards up to your hero's intelect at the end of your turn, so you draw more cards than an average game of magic. It is not unusual to go through your entire deck at least once (cards are returned to the bottom of the deck when used as a resource), so adding a single copy of a card actually has a lot of impact as part of your deck build and you can rely on playing that card if you play carefully. These aspects make it so you can always do something with your hand, even when you draw a low resource hand. The number of actions you can take are limited by actions points, which are 1 per turn by default unless you play cards that generate more which are balanced with the power of taking extra actions in mind. You also sideboard before the match.
I was looking for the FaB comment. How FaB handles resources is honestly genius and really makes the game skill intensive. If you pitch away a power card, you can set up a turn in the late game to take back the tempo. If your opponent is on a hero that is great at blocking, you can opt to do less damage that turn and instead setup that late game. It’s honestly genius and the system lends itself to skill expression well
Your videos are always a treat to watch. Slight correction: Switch doesn’t give your Pokemon free retreat, it just retreats the mon. This is often better than free retreat because a) you can only hard retreat once per turn, b) there are cards that can prevent you from retreating no matter your retreat cost [Block Snorlax], c) there are tools and other effects that interact with retreat cost which you might lose access to if your mon suddenly has 0 retreat
Many decks in Pokémon rely on falling behind in prize cards. There was one deck a few years ago that albeit had a cool strategy of suiciding your own Pokémon and getting your opponent down to one prize card. Got banned, because it locked them out of the game as a result of controlling their top deck and discarding important cards out of their hand.
I've recently gotten into Battle Spirits Saga, and I have been really enjoying it. I now understand why, the designers learned and solved all these issues!
I'm currently playing Digimon TCG. Something that you can see was taken into account was ramping. They used the Duel Masters shield system to stop it from happening to an extent. And the memory system used for resources is really fun to use.
Dude me too, I love Digimon. The memory system is great, it makes it more exciting, it also means you have to weigh each decision every turn, you can't just ignore your opponent, it's much more interactive and dynamic. It's the best card game and I hope they make a proper online game (other than the fan made simulator). I'll say this tho, it's really not suitable for playing physical decks face to face, there are way too many effects from digivolutions that you have to account for, without a video game taking care of it for you it's hard for new players to keep track.
@@lemonstealinghorse for real, I specifically play a janky Lucemon spam deck that almost entirely has 0 triggers on digivolution so i can ignore them xD
@@lemonstealinghorse It's kinda tough, but once you get used to your deck it's not that hard. I've been playing some tournaments and as long as you know the basic gist of the other decks you just have to know what to ask about their digimon.
One of my favourite things about Digimon is how clear it is that the designers of the game have paid attention to all of these other games, and have tried to address them in the game's design. Digimon's resource system, memory, is a sliding scale from ten on your side, to zero in the middle, to ten on your opponent's side. The game starts at 0, meaning that on your first turn you could spend up to 10 memory and start with a really expensive card - but once the memory is at 1 on the other player's side, the turn will pass as soon as all abilities have resolved. Then, your opponent can spend 10 memory without even passing the turn, and could potentially spend a whopping 20 memory on a single play. This incentivises making smaller plays to pass less memory, but key cards in the game also help to mitigate that concern. The first player classically doesn't draw. By default, Digimon have a similar effect to summoning sickness if they've been played that turn, with a keyword similar to MTG's Haste, that being Rush, allowing you to swing anyway, and another keyword, Blitz, allowing you to attack with that Digimon before the turn passes if you've exceeded memory, but they don't go hand in hand, so I don't believe there's currently a way to attack on the first turn. The life system, Security, is also more limiting than a numeric point value. Similar to Pokémon, at the start of the game you set aside cards from your deck as your health, but they're reversed; where in Pokémon, you win by taking your prize cards, in Digimon you win by depleting your opponent's security. 5 cards to start, and every attack can remove one security card. There are ways to check more security cards, or slow your opponent by limiting their ability to check your security, or block attacks. However, you still need to make a final attack after removing the last security card. This means that while OTKs are possible, they require a LOT of setup without your opponent stopping it or killing you first. And, where in Pokémon by taking a prize card you're gaining resources whilst depriving your opponent of theirs, in Digimon, attacking security is risky; if the security card is a Digimon, it gets to battle the attacking Digimon and potentially delete it. Otherwise, many cards have effects when checked in security; Tamers play themselves for free, and Option cards can have various effects, from replicating the effects if played normally, to adding themselves to hand, to entirely unique effects to being checked. Some Digimon even have security effects, and might even play themselves for free after the security battle, so by removing one shield, your opponent could be down a Digimon and you could be up a Digimon. As mentioned, absurd OTK combos are possible, but they require a lot of work, and the core gameplay mechanics mean that most games will constantly go back and forth. I think I'd need someone else to help out with what's the worst aspect of playing Digimon, though, because I can only think of these positives right now 😅
*"where in Pokémon, you win by taking your prize cards, in Digimon you win by depleting your opponent's security."* ------------------------- So Duel Masters' Shield system.
Digimons two biggest negatives are defense-scaling with how many cards are hard to interact with nowadays, as well as how overly-consistent decks have become. It feels like I’m doing the same thing almost every game.
@@wakkaseta8351Essentially, yes. With the added caveat that if your attack reveals a digimon from the opponent's security, your attacking digimon and the digimon revealed in security battle each other. This means that your weaker digimon have a very real chance of dying upon attacking the opponent.
I feel like with the pokemon segment you missed out on mentioning the fact of them just continuing to make bigger and stronger pokemon that give more prize cards that on top of a ko giving such an advantage, can likely leave them 1 more KO away from just winning the game with even some pokemon that straight up make your KOs take more prize cards.
Power creep has happen to all of those tcg. Also the bigger pokemon for 2 prizes as been in the game since 2004 with the of ex pokemon. IMO the biggest overall issue is no option mulligan rule leading to very quick game because 1 player was unable to set up.
I appreciate this video. Having played every single one of these card games, their flaws become apparent over time and it leads me to get tired of the game. I appreciate how quickly and how well you explained everything.
I’ve always wondered why pokemon doesn’t do it where if you get knocked out you get to take prize cards instead of the opponent doing it, in which case the person who draws all of their cards first loses.
Idk but I think in pokémon it doesn't matter that much beacause you already draw a lot of cards each turns. The Real snowballing problem Comes from the fact that Speedrun IS limited in pokémon so when you opponent IS winning, you can't stop them, you just have to Hope the whiff a turn to let you win the race
spellbook of judgment is completly legal btw. if all the cards you draw are in the endphase and they all do basically nothing its not that big of a deal.
Spellbook of Judgement is legal BECAUSE the meta has reached the point where drawing 5-6 cards in the end phase is nothing. Back then, you're basically guaranteed to have your next turn, so getting 6 cards just by setting up your board or doing your own plays is enough to nearly drag Spellbook to Tier 0 status (becoming rivals with the Dragon Rulers). Compared this to todays' broken ass cards, like Snake Eyes Ash allowing you to start your entire combo out of just 1 card, or Tear making you build your own board at Turn 0, or Kashtira locking the board itself.
As a casual Pokémon enjoyer, Pokémon’s biggest design flaws are big basic syndrome and stat hyperinflation over the years that renders all but a rare few select mon cards utterly unusable even in noncompetitive/meta play. Haymaker being a menace back in the day showed that basics with decent stats were much more efficient than stronger evolved Pokémon. They designed around this, making things like the Rare Candy card and mechanics like LV X, where the strongest two prizes all required investment and couldn’t be slapped on the board turn one. Gen 5 made the baffling decision to undo all those lessons learned by making all EX basic. Gen 7 somehow made things even worse with Tag Teams and the introduction of triple prizers with stats so comically high (All on BASIC Pokémon!) that card stats seemingly doubled overnight, way beyond the natural powercreep curve across the game’s history. The single prizers did see a power increase as well, but nowhere near enough to even be able to even be an inconvenience against the hyper inflated threats. Most embarrassingly of all is the fact that single prize mons were still getting printed with stat levels compatible to older sets. Even now that they’ve backtracked with the power level, doing away with basic 3 prizers in Gen 8, then making EXs evolution Pokemon again if they’re not already single stage in Gen 9, the ugly inflated numbers still remain
Having that issue of trying to get back into PkmnTCG after a LONG break, and 1) it’s LIVE, not Online which so far is inferior IMO, but mainly 2) all of the cards I collected (basically since B/W and in the game are more or less overpowered by the newer stuff. Even my V and VMAX are getting 2 shot by the new EX stuff - and I know my TagTeam cards are not worth playing if the opponent gets 3 prizes from them. (Also doesn’t help that LIVE doesn’t have all the old cards playable for some reason and the UI for finding them is abysmal. And I swear some of my stuff didn’t migrate from Online)
No the went back to pokemon ex (lowercase) from before gen 5. Even when tag teams were a thing it's not like they made up the entirety of the meta. Baby bloons I remember being pretty good for example. There's also a reason expanded format is so unpopular and it's not even because of big basics. It's the control decks, at least last I heard. There's also a huge focus on evolution pokemon this format. Look at charizard ex and Lugia Vstar and regidrago Vstar and gardevoir which combined make up the majority of winning decks the current format, which kinda suggests the opposite to your point
Also, of the decks I mentioned before, Lugia and gardevoir both have single prize pokemon as their highest damage output attackers that can (and consistently do) 1hko charizard ex which has tye highest base hp of the format. Even charizard decks use radiant charizard as a single prize attacker.
Worst part about Pokémon are the investment bros by far. There's nothing more soul-sucking than trying to play a game for fun with friends and having a bunch of sweaty, foul-smelling adults circling around you and trying to build hype for their shitty full art promo card of choice.
@@inff3rno Yeah... I really miss when card collecting was something disconnected from the endless grifting culture of online "finfluencers". Sure, there was always an economic component since the hobby costs money, but it's gone way overboard. Most of the people I know who play Pokémon now spend more time talking about the value of their collection than the actual card game. They have apps like Collectr that are literally investment trackers with graphs and trends and it's like I've walked into an MLM meeting whenever I go to play in league challenges. "Did you know this Umbreon spiked in value this week? You should probably buy it now and get it graded before it goes to the moon!" No, and I don't care. I have a job and I own stocks in companies who produce things and whose value can actually be measured. I'm not a loser who grifts vulnerable people who are just looking for a social space. On the positive side, I recently started playing Sorcery with a group of pals from my LGS and if you like cool art cards, I would recommend maybe checking it out if you can find someone to play with. Every single card is full art and it's in that old school fantasy style and the print quality is stellar. The game is pretty interesting since it's like a blend of a board game and a TCG. So far it's been a lot of fun. There's supposedly an official tabletop simulator mod for Sorcery, but I haven't tried it. Do not get into it if you care about cards retaining value or really making any profit at all. Even if you somehow pull a foil Philosopher's Stone, there aren't many players to sell it to. It's a small, new game and it could easily collapse in the future like others before it, but it is a lot of fun. They release around one set per year and it's a lot easier to keep up with than Pokémon and Magic's diarrhea spray of sets every other month.
Cool comparisons. Some advice for future videos: 1. Speak up. It sounds like you're talking to your friend in the back of a classroom and trying not to get caught by the teacher. 2. Edit to take out breaths/stutters etc. 3. 6:23 use Grammarly or something similar to check for spelling errors like this. I always love videos comparing Yu-Gi-Oh and Magic, but the Pokemon and Hearthstone additions were cool too. Keep improving and keep up the good work!
I would say that rather than scry/surveil lands, cycling (both lands with cycling and spells with landcycling) are more significant additions to reduce the mana-screw/flooding in games.
It's worth noting that in practice, what Yogg-Saron did most of the time when it was played was clear the board of minions- board clears, minion removal and damaging spells make up the majority of spells in Hearthstone. So most of the time, he was played as a "Hail Mary" card by slower decks that lacked a more consistent means to clear the board. There were only a couple of decks that actually used him, since playing him still had the potential to backfire (Some spells come with potential drawbacks like damaging yourself, summoning minions for your opponent or even discarding your hand), but he played an important role in at least a few tournament-level decks, so it was enough for him to gain infamy.
I know it's way too younger than the other games but I wish you talked about Rush Duels too, the spin off game of Yugioh. It would be interesting to talk about the changes from the main game to balance the game. Still great video.
I'll add that the prize card mechanic in Pokemon also adds a level of RNG to the game that can really screw you over in some games. If your pieces necessary to get your engine started/take knockouts are prized, and you can't take knockouts until you get your engine started, your chances or winning are drastically reduced. You can mitigate this issue with good deckbuilding but ultimately the prize card mechanic affects the quality of a LOT of games.
I really, really liked force of will, because it fixed a lot of these problems in cool ways. It had the lands of magic and the commanders of the commander variant, but the lands had their own deck alongside the main deck. You didn't automatically draw from the land deck, instead your commander would have an ability to draw from the land deck; but if you used that ability, it usually precluded the use of one of their other abilities, so you had to choose between getting more lands and a potent effect (which would usually also cost mana depending on how good it was). It also had pokemon's prize cards, but in reverse: as your opponent ran out of life, *they* drew from their "prize" cards they set aside from the game, giving the loser more cards to make a comeback with instead of the winner more cards to snowball with. Instead of you winning when you ran out of prize cards, you won when the opponent ran out of prize cards. Even cooler, some cards had effects that worked when they were acquired this way, like some of the 'green' creatures would just play themselves. Neat cardgame, that was. If I was still interested in cardboard games, I'd probably still be playing it.
Don't think anyone has talked about this but One of the games that has tackled mana and comeback the best is definitely the new Digimon TCG, it has a tug-of-war mechanic that starts both at 0 mana, the first player can play cards of any value, but will give the same amount of mana to the opponent. So if you use 10 mana on your turn, your opponent will also have 10 to work with when you pass it over to them, letting you have explosive first turns but also means that the opponent can react with equal power. Also they have a raising zone that lets you boost up and build a strong character in the safety of "outside of the game" so you'll always have something to attack with even if the opponent hits you a board wipe. While you'll still be in bad shape you won't be completely helpless.
For real. I replayed that game recently (free on Switch, thanks Nintendo). I swept the entire game, 0 losses, when I got my rain dance deck built... Until the literal end. Lost the E4 gauntlet twice; once to not drawing my evolution cards (they were ALL bottom-decked) and once for not drawing energy. Despite running the broken old-school Oaks and Bills. TCGs have matured a lot over the decades lol
I couldn't believe when he was talking about pokemon being slow... compared to what it used to be, it's lightning quick now. The draw power in modern pokemon has ruined me for other TCG. I played a couple games of One Piece and couldn't get over it
Alright boss. I tried to get through it but here are my notes: 1.) Move away from the mic to breathe, go full Chocolate Rain. It's really annoying hearing someone gasping for air after every sentence. 2) Just retake the line if you fuck up. Start fresh, it'll sound more relaxed and that makes it more pleasant to watch. 3.) You don't have to speak quickly, especially with a video like this where you're *showing* more information to add to your points. Take your time, maybe try to execute like you got a buddy who's vaguely aware of the topic (but very interested) & you're telling him all about it. Glhf homie!
@@FirstnameLastname-iq9oo these got me to stop watching the video. Rather than just leaving without giving homie feedback, I pointed out the issues since I'm probably not alone in being turned off from the channel by shit like this. If constructive criticism instead of a "fuck you, video sucks" is insane to you, that's on you lol
At 4:55 you give good examples, but I think you'd be remiss not to include cards that can't be responded to like Dark Ruler No More, Forbidden Droplet, and Super Polymerization. They provide another way for players going second into established boards
i hope you'll include legends of runeterra in your discussion videos soon, it does a lot of really interesting things with the different aspects of TCG design!
The now-defunct Scrolls (The card game that Mojang made) had some fascinating corners they designed themselves into. It had a positional board system, where you put units on a board with 5 rows and 3 columns. Opposing you was your opponent's 5x3 board, and units hit the first thing in the opposing row. Behind each row was an objective unit, destroy 3/5 to win. It's very difficult to defend them all, but as you lose them, it becomes easier to defend the remaining ones. Units had a countdown stat, and attacked automatically when their countdown was up (typically every other turn). This was great, and opened up whole new parts of the game to design around. (Board manipulation spells! Countdown manipulation, or just varying countdown values!) Also, they decided to fix mana. Once per turn, you can discard a card to generate a "land", or draw 2 cards. If you end up drawing your expensive cards early, just discard them! ...what if I needed those later? Don't worry! When you're out of cards, the discard pile shuffles into your deck. And now, the game is not guaranteed to end. It's very easy to turtle up in front of your last 3 idols, you never lose to decking, and some depraved decks want to ramp and heal forever. Some new mechanics were added that made specific cards cost more each time you played them to counteract these decks, but in hindsight, it's refreshing that most games deterministically end. (Most games didn't stall out forever, but these dynamics did make games a lot longer than most card games are today). **************** Bonus second game: Netrunner! Made by Richard Garfield himself, and then repeatedly reincarnated, it's such a drastically different game to creature battlers that it's impossible to give it the introduction it deserves. But basically, it's an asymmetrical game. One player has cards in their deck that are worth victory points, and must spend time and money to defend and complete them. The other player is trying to steal them. You want enough of these agenda cards to score points for yourself, but not too many that they're hard to defend and end up being stolen by your opponent. Resources are completely different. Instead of mana, you have credits. It's a bank account, it doesn't refresh. So you have to keep playing cards to gain credits. To make this all work, the game runs on an action system: 4 actions per turn, which can be spent to gain a credit, draw a card, play a card, and other important stuff (too long to explain here). It's more efficient to gain credits/draw cards through playing cards, but you're never stuck, because you can always use the basic action to get that. And with this, land flood/screw was solved! ...Remember those agenda cards? That you want neither too many nor too little of? Flood hasn't been fixed, merely moved from resource management to victory points! They ended up printing a card that allowed you to shuffle cards back into your deck, and it was one of the most important cards in the whole game. It was a pretty good, solution honestly. This is a very old problem, and that card was printed in 2013. The modern metagame anxieties are fascinating, but require too much explanation to fit into one comment.
I feel PTCG biggest problem is its lack of control. Like 6 random cards that you can’t access every game without taking KO’s is still insane. So many people have lost due to prizing integral cards of the deck and there’s pretty much nothing you can do about it. Another thing is once you end your turn that’s it. Your opponent can make you discard cards in your hand, switch your bench with your active, discard the top cards of your deck, put Pokémon from your discard pile or deck onto your board, etc. While I’d imagine these effects are common in other card games in PTCG there’s little to no counters to any of them.
Thought about making this the point as it is a pain point commonly mentioned, however there are cards which specifically look at your prize cards to swap one out so it seems like more of a deckbuilding requirement/risk to me.
I have always wondered why they don't let the player create the prize deck, like many other games. I can choose my Ride Deck in Vanguard, my Extra Deck in Yu-Gi-Oh, but I cannot choose 6 cards to take from my deck?
As a Pokémon (TCG Live) player I can tell you that with the introduction of Dusknoir from Shrouded Fable and the Supporter "Briar" from Stellar Crown, letting your opponent get more prizes is even stronger now especially in combo with cards like Charizard ex, Iono or Roxanne. Dusknoir is so strong now in the meta that many people want it banned.
Yogg Saron wasn't bad RNG. It was actually very controlled. You would only include this in your deck as a bail out. If you had no chance to win then you pray to Yogg. Bad RNG is babbling book.
Best solution to the 'Land Problem' that i saw, is in the SpellWeaver game. Their lands (called Shrines) have 2 major abilities. One of them makes you a level (similar to a color of Magic, i supose), the other one gives you mana + draw. So, every turn, you have to choose between leveling or making mana and draw. Cards cost mana and requires an amount of level, so you can have a card lvl 1 that costs 3 mana, or a level 2 card that costs 1 mana, and so on. Mana refreshes every turn, so you can spend them agressive. But, here is the major thing: They have an ability that allows you to use it once each turn, for free. It reads: you can put a card from your hand on the bottom of your library. If you do, look at the top 5 cards and pick up one shrine. It prevents you to mana screw. And, since shrines gives you draw, it also prevents you to mana flood. They have even added a shrine that if you failed to find with this ability, you can search your library for that specific shrine and add to your hand, so you 'never' misses. That's a hell of a solution.
Can you please make a follow up video with other card games? Flesh and blood, Force of Will, Digimon, legends of Runetera, Shadowverse evolved, Lorcana, One Piece, Dragon Ball, CardFight Vanguard!!, Duel Masters and probably many others I missed.
Have you tried Gwent? It's very interesting - The player who goes first (Blue Coin) is given a bonus instead of the second player (Red Coin) - Most of the RNG elements are similar to Discover where card pool is limited and one often picks 1 of 3 from that pool. It's slower like Pokemon & has no resources to draw or generate similar to Yugioh. It has the best mulligan rule I've seen in a TCG and is often cited as the least random TCG (but those elements do exist such as Opening Hands & the Discover mechanics).
I would recommend you checking out the weird pvz card game spinoff, it’s entire core mechanic is that each player is assigned to one of two factions with not only completely different keywords and deck lists but a predetermined turn order, with one team playing its minions first, the other playing minions, spells, and environments all at the same time, and finally the first player having an opritunity to play spells and environments after the second player has their turn
A lot of people have brought up games where any card can be turned into a resource (e.g. lorcana) but personally I prefer the way Inscryption handled the land problem by creating a separate basic resource deck and giving you the choice of which deck to draw from
Altered is a new card game that I believe has the best of both worlds (MtG and Hearthstone) where you start the game by drawing 6 cards and you pick 3 cards to become mana and then every turn you draw 2 cards and choose one to become mana. The complexity and depth comes later in games and both players decide which cards are best but also balance when you’re mana is high enough where just drawing 2 cards is better. If you’re interested you can play for free on board game arena. Highly recommend it to anyone looking for something new.
If I could rework the mana system in magic I'd just have two decks you draw from, one with land and one with creatures. Draw from only one each turn. Then change card additional draw effects to specify "Draw a land," "Draw a nonland," or simply "Draw a card," meaning from either. Doing that would make it so the various means of searching for lands could easily just change to "Draw a land." This would make some current mechanics potentially less useful (Scry), but had this been the method from the beginning and gameplay built with that in mind, I feel like it'd ultimately be a better experience.
It was never too popular but I loved how PvZ Heroes handled a lot of things save for blocks/Supers there was no real Going first or second since a single turn was composed of 4 phases: Zombie Player plays Zombies (monsters creatures minions) Plant player can play Plants, Tricks and Environments (Monsters, Spells and lane specific modifiers) Zombie player can play Tricks and Environments and combat resolves automatically from the heights lane to the water lane. Zombies creatures were designed to be more proactive and larger since the plant player is fully reactive but at the same time their spells tend to be proactive and stronger than zombies because zombies get the last say before combat. There's no mana cap so on turn 99 you'd get 99 mana but games are so fast it'd never come up. Every hero/class? has a suite of 1 unique and 3 less unique but powerful cards that all cost 1 the 2nd tier have 2 cost worth of value and their signature is ~3 mana worth of value. You start with 1 randomly and the only way you get them is by taking damage, you have 8 bars of block whenever you take damage it charges 1-3 randomly and if an attack would charge your block 8 you take no damage and can either cast that suler power then and there or add it to your hand and play it later. If I had to rework this game I'd let players pay 2/3 mana to remove 1 of their super blocks to add the 2nd tier/signatures to hand and reduce their cost to 0 so you can trade survivability for the most efficient cards in the game and at the same time make super block a 4 block meter and each attack charge by 1 since rolling multiple 1s or the opponent rolling double 3s and a 2 feels bad since on average you should get a block in every 4th hit It still has that hearthstone rng element but they're usually weak enough to be casual and most competitive cards have no or very predictable rng
I believe the most elegant solution to the mana/cost problem is the one from AGot LCG, in which you play a small secondary deck from which you choose a card each turn. That card then decide what are your ressources (gold) for the turn, as well as the impact of your attacks, and other secondary effects. This lets you choose wether you want a high ressources turn where you are going to be somewhat passive and setup for a more impactfull turn next.
very nice video, i liked it a lot (i maybe would like to see LoR but the only problem i can think of rn is that they put all my decks randomly into wild format xd)
We've tried to improve upon magics mana system by having 2 decks. 1 for RAM (resource) and 1 for everything else. Players draw 2 cards per turn and can pick which deck they draw from. To a lot of people it sounds like too much consistency but its becomes really strategic what deck you draw from and when. Early game is fast out the gate, but late game also doesn't slow to a crawl because you can shift your draw focus. I think it's one of the stronger systems in our game. Curious what you think! :)
The other comment talking about Yu-Gi-Oh! seems to have totally missed the point, which is that the game is primarily about fielding resources so that they can be used. Regardless of whether they are setting 5 trap cards in Stun/Labrynth or building a full Adamancipator Negate board, or even FTKing, the core problem is still that YGO is a game where the first player has an extreme advantage thanks to being able to set up interactions first. I think you nailed this exactly, regardless of how they manifest. After all, you did literally mention the whole thing about being able to special summon, activate spells, etc, and those are the core part of the game.
I am developing a card game. That doesn't allow drawing a bunch of cards to be a problem. You are limited by the number of cards put into play. The more you put into play, the less you draw. I went with a standard deck format. Every player has the same cards in their deck. You have dice to roll to trigger effects on the cards in play. That combined with which cards are drawn adds to the randomness. There are only 5 different functions, which narrows the play style methods one chooses. However, there are enough cards that share a strategy to keep the probabilities for what you want. The who goes first issue may be troublesome for experienced players. I have considered making rules that have players take each phase of their turns at the same time. It will slow the game down somewhat. Each player does a step, then proceeds to do the next, then the next. The winning of a player most often happens at the end of the turn anyway. There is an edge case where it can happen earlier in the turn. Yet, a player has plenty of turns to prepare for it.
i'd argue that the reason why hearthstone has so much rng in its card design is that it's fighting the fact that its base ruleset makes it a very consistent game. Your mana count ramps up evenly each turn and you only have 30 cards in a deck meaning you generally are playing through the majority of it.
Dude, in Yu-Gi-Oh you can special summon as many monsters of any level you want in 1 turn. The restriction is 1 normal summon/set of any level per turn, with higher level monsters needing tributes.
Don't listen to this guy. Half of tcg content creators talk slow asf and I have to listen on 1.5 speed. If people think you're too fast then they can slow down the speed of the video.
@@FumBungo You can speed up stuff just fine, but if you slow it down then it gets super warped. A more important thing is that he's super out of breath all the time, which makes his voice sound strained as hell and it's just generally a bad habit that causes unnecessary wear if you do it for years. But also, how selfish do you have to be to say "I'm not listening to stuff on 1.5x. you have to listen to it on 0.75 because of my personal preference"? you really think that's an alright thing to say?
I mean yes that is fair? Both are opinions on how fast someone should speak, not necessarily better than the other. How do you complain someone is policing your want to him to be slower by saying that is an opinion without lookong at yourself. Also I am pretty sure the "breathe in" is not really an "out of breathe" thing. That is a thing you will see in any type of presenting (and singing). Usually people will go out of their way to edit or use a mic that removes that. Honestly, I really feel you shouldn't be that annoyed by simple breathing in. You seem to think going slower would fix it but you still have the breathe in between sentences, all that does is make the video longer and spread out the breathe ins. Anyway a good example of this being normal is "chocolate rain" you can literally see him have to turn away from the mic to do a quick breathe in.
@@TheKastellan I want the video to be longer. If you want it shorter use 1.5x. but right now it sounds like he's trying to suffocate himself to get sentences out quickly. It's common with people that aren't confident behind a microphone and it causes videos with lots of information, like this one, to be hard to follow. My issue isn't with the breaths being heard but that he's going as fast as he can which is making him more out of breath than if he just took his time.
On the Yu-Gi-Oh! section: Going second still isn’t too fun a good deal of the time, since unless your opponent opened really badly & their hand dies to a single hand trap like Ash Blossom or you’re playing a ridiculously well-made going second deck which just doesn’t give a single shit about what they’ve done, they can still set up a decent board with various cards & tactics such as simply putting most of their monsters in Defense Position to avoid Lightning Storm, and while you can still potentially out them with a card like Raigeki, they could have a monster negate it or even use something like the recently released Iron Thunder or an older card like Solemn Strike/Judgment/etc. Pretty much the same applies to Evenly Matched, and this is ignoring the fact the guy who just went full combo can _also_ still use some counter cards like Ash Blossom or even Maxx "C" if you’re playing in the OCG or on Master Duel. Not trying to say the segment is terrible or you’re wrong or anything, but just wanted to chime in with the fact going second can still be a massive pain even if you run something like 3x each of Raigeki, Lightning Storm, Evenly Matched, Dark Ruler No More, etc., but can also be massively rewarding if you can do it. Just pointing out the fact Yu-Gi-Oh! is still a pretty flawed game I still enjoy, but also the fact I’m not nearly qualified enough to single-handedly solve all its problems. Although personally I’m a little miffed when I sit there & let my opponent do all their stuff after opening no disruptions just for them to quit before I get to do a single thing after they see me drop a Lightning Storm + Forbidden Droplet… win game, feel nothing.…
Regarding mana screw, one idea would be to make your energy generating cards, in addition to more interesting, also not something you're expected to play every turn. My current iteration of a TCG test design has a "corruption" mechanic where expanding your territory worsens the output quality of all of your existing territory and the new territory. To remove corruption from a territory, it has to tap, but this competes with actually using it, and so the result is that you need to carefully balance how much territory you add if you want your economy to look anything like reasonable.
Iono is an even better catch-up supporter. It doesn't shuffle the hand into the deck, then draw. You shuffle your hand, put it to the bottom of your decks then draw. So if your opponent has a very good hand, they no longer have that hand, and its at the bottom, with no way to draw them without shuffling.
Final Round Fighting Card Game has a different approach to TCG. Life-decking with a secondary deck made up of cards lost from the primary deck being the source for cards drawn, and drawing as many as nine cards during the players turn solve some of the issues around card bottlenecks. It does borrow a little with mana-cost like effects, but only with the finisher moves, and even then it worked in a versatility that makes for a choice between exact and at-any-cost.
Flesh and Blood feels to me like solved a lot of issues TCGs fall into balance wise. Everytime I've played with friends and strangers at the LGS it felt like games were always down to the wire and that felt really good. The only issue I found which is pretty common across card games is that meta cards are usually in the higher tiers of rarity and get price crept super hard
Lorcana is a nice balance between games IMO. It uses the MDFC mechanic of Magic and turns almost every card into a playable "land" (aka Ink). Some of the stronger cards can't be played as ink to help balance them.
I feel like for Pokémon, not just mentioning card advantage for comeback but cards like Counter Catcher, Reversal Energy, and Defiance Band is key. Certain decks like to take advantage of these by even knocking out of their own Pokémon early (Dusknoir currently) and then being able to counter KO something that gives 2 prizes.
About Hearthstone flaw In board games we call it input randomness and output randomness. Input randomness is before decision(discover mechanic) and output randomness is after(Implosion). Obviously one is better than the other
Rep from another trading card game, Redemption. Worst part of playing Redemption is something called "soul drought". In Redemption, you use your Heroes to defeat your opponent's Evil Characters, and when you win, your opponent has to surrender a card to you from their field of play called a Lost Soul. So if your opponent doesn't draw into their Lost Souls, you can't rescue them, and since you win the game by rescuing five Lost Souls, you're basically stuck doing nothing. Redemption will turn 30 years old next July, and a few things have been done over the years to try to address soul drought. There are now a fair amount of splashable cards you can fit into most decks that have "soul gen" abilities, cards that will either play Lost Souls directly from your opponent's deck or increase the likelihood of your opponent drawing into them. As good as some of these cards can be, you still need to draw into them, and there aren't a ton of them to begin with, so soul drought is still the absolute worst thing about playing Redemption.
My solutions to these problems. Magic: Do like in Inscryption and give player to decks to draw from. One with regular cards and one with mana cards. Give player a choice to draw from either deck but not both. Yu-Gi-Oh: Either do a mana system like in Hearthstone or add better punishments for going first and/or rewards for going second. Or simply balance the game so you can't win in the first 2-3 turns. Pokemon: Create an archetype focused around losing. If enough cards supporting such archetype are printed to make it viable it will cause the opponents to take a second guess whether to attack for a prize card or wait a turn for better opportunity. Hearthstone: Tbh this one needs complete rework. On one hand RNG is what breaks the game. On the other it's what makes this game fun and makes it feel balanced. Even with the shitty deck if you are lucky enough then you have a chance to win against ranked player. That feeling is hard to come by unless you either keep the RNG or make vital cards in each set easier to obtain. I would solve it by adding more adventure expansions where you are guaranteed to receive all cards in the set including legendaries. I would also make them cheaper, make few free adventures for beginners and make some of them very hard so the players must have some skill to obtain cards from them.
I played Shadowverse for a couple of years and I liked it more than Hearthstone, which I played a bit beforehand. What I didn't like too much about shadowverse was that the deck building was quite restrictive in the rotation format, because not too many cards were available at one point in time. The other format, where all cards are allowed, was too crazy and fast for me to enjoy.
This makes me really interested in what other people would think the “problem” of my card game is since it’s very different from all of these games I guess the best way to describe my card game is imagine if YuGiOh didn’t have an extra deck and you could normal summon level 5+ or 9+ monsters but only if it’s turn 2 or 3 of the game. (And if YuGiOh monsters were actually balanced to have the stronger monsters be higher level and the lower level monster be weak) You are on a 3 turn timer before you can use your strongest cards but other than having 1-2 dead card in hand on turn one, you really can just pop off. Spam the board with weak monster, hell maybe don’t even put any higher level monsters in your deck at all. Or only put higher level monsters and play defensive spells so you don’t die early. Do whatever you want. Monsters in my game can also only deal damage to the player equal to their level (Monsters range from 1-3) so turn one even if your opponent spams the board and wambo combos youre 100% gonna be fine You may not even feel the need to do anything in response. Just pass turn waiting to summon your big level 3 monsters to crush everything But the gap between level 1, 2, and 3 monsters are balanced enough where having bricks you can’t use until turn 3 feel worth it without being instant wins against people who want to play only level 1 monsters Does such a leveling system make a game too slow? It’s not like anyone is forced to use it
I think the manabased cardgames have a way bigger fundamental weakness and that is having mana at all. Mana funnels the entire card design into a scale of cost vs effect with a heavy favor towards lower costs. So the powercreep that these games experience is almost always incredibly mindnumbing and boring they just start printing 3 drops that cost 2 mana and eventually 4 drops that cost 1 mana. The card design never fundamentally changes because you will still have 1 mana at turn 1 and so on. As the game naturally accelerates with the printing of more efficient cards it the game very quickly falls apart and requires outside interference in the form of rotation. Games like Yugioh do not have this problem which is why they can avoid rotating as the card design isnt constraint by arbitrary resources. Mana just isn't a good system for a game that expects to release many sets and is much better at home at in a cardgame that is meant to be complete at release. Stuff like Hearthstone or Shadowverse have incredible core sets that then got ruined by further expansions accelerating the game so that carefully balanced mechanics broke under the added speed.
You should have mentioned Digimon's cost system, which I think is very elegant. It's a pendulum that starts at 0, and playing a card moves it a number of steps equal to that card's cost. Once it goes past 0, it's your opponent's turn.
So, in Pokemon the "snowball" effect is greatly minimized when actual competitive players build their decks. It's mitigated by recovery cards like Super Rod, Nightly Stretcher, Lana's Aid, etc. In the standard format, any type of Card in the game can be recovered if need be. Furthermore, most decks simply play more copies of cards to mitigate or delay the need to use recovery cards. Also, I think Mew ex was a terrible example in the use case, as it is known for being a 2 Prize card liability that is easy to KO. It is a frequent target of Boss's Orders and the like. What the free retreat cost usually does in practice is bypass energy acceleration effects only applying to benched Pokemon. For example, Electric Generator or Dark Patch only attach energy to your benched Pokemon. So youd use the Mew to bypass this by pivoting after accelerating the energy.
Some of the content was interesting, but as I've seen some other commenters say, the speaker talks way, way too fast. They really need to slow down. Another issue, which is partially due to the above, is the very noticeable breathing. If someone is talking very quickly, it means they're not breathing at all while doing so. And when they inevitably need to breathe, the breath is therefore bigger and louder than normal.
I really like your videos and I think the editing and mic quality is quite alright for someone your size, but you need to get a bit more natural with recording your voice. You are prolly nervous, so you're rushing your speech and that makes you have to gasp for air way too often, so just relax. You could also try to cut out the breathing but that breathing, but that might make the audio sound choppy
It’s astonishing how Hearthstone so elegantly resolved a lot of issues with the other 3, but let RNG, Powercreep, and Microtransactions ruin it to such a point I would rather play ANY of the other 3 games mentioned here.
I think also hearthstone's combat is very unfun and un-interactive. It's a very easy card game to play so it's not very engaging
heartstone oversimplified the other three and in process create some sort of monotone in the meta. In HS generally speaking there's only limited board state that could happen turn per turn and the victor will be the one who have the right cards at the right time or sometimes they just can't because they're playing bad deck that doesn't have answer for them. I never played HS but I used to play SV which basically HS for weebs, and in that game there's some meta where some hero (class in SV) is just unplayable, e.g There once a meta where board swarming is prevalent and there's only 2 class who actually playable because they have access to board wipe.
But basically in those games generally speaking you'll see the almost exact move for early and mid games and late game are determined by how good you are in the previous game state.
@@Chex_Mex wow, agreed. The tempo elements of hearthstone feels so unfair. I was mainly a Rogue/Warlock player.back in Naxxramas / Goblins vs Gnomes era. I felt that control/combo decks never had the time to stall. If the aggro player had a good hand you would effectivally loose on turn 4-5. Also the 1 and 2 mana creatures were way too strong.
@samuelabreu4349 i got tired of rogue getting nerfed when it wasn't meta, and never getting new cards besides "copy random shit from your opponents hand/deck"
@@JeSt4m what dose SV stand for
Worst part about Heartstone is that was made by Activision-Blizzard
@@luizfernandotesck144Hahahahahaha, you know NOTHING then
@@luizfernandotesck144 Actiblizz has quite the history of both bad business moves *and* really bad sexual assault/abuse/misconduct drama. Worst thing about the game might be a stretch, because it isn't as directly impactful, but definitely something to be aware of.
I honestly stopped playing Hearthstone because of the direction Blizzard went through out the years. And I don't regret it :)
@@melonsaway3929 All that is entirely irrelevant to Hearthstone itself.
@@Cybertech134 I mean some of their bad business decisions are directly parts of hearthstone, so no. The other scandals aren't directly related, but people should know the kind of people who are getting the money they spend on hearthstone
Stop! Breathe!
Yes, I agree
These videos never miss - I’m a longtime yugioh player, but I’m so happy to finally be learning about these other games
I kinda agree as a player of all 4
Konami has failed us another format in a row. TOSS format was the last time the game was actually fun
@Zweis Correction, Agov format 1 year ago. That was the super interactive format with like 20 different decks
@@angel-memeroftheisles yugioh players refuse to admit that their favorite format wasn't actually the best thing since jesus and that everything else after it is garbage 🤷
@@zweismost of them were so bad ngl. But last few formats were Aweful. Tear, Kashtira and Snake Eye extremely broken decks
Brother slow down and take a breather!! 🤣
This is the first time i had to SLOW DOWN a video on youtube.
You are not slim shady, don't run away with your words :D
.75 is perfect, felt my heart speeding up at normal speed
Regarding the Yu-Gi-Oh section, the negatives you brought up are not at all relevant to how the standard format of the game has been played for at least the last 4-5 years. Nearly all trap cards are rarely played outside of niche trap focused decks due to powercreep making waiting one turn to activate their effects too slow.
The actual primary concern with losing on the draw in Yu-Gi-Oh is the ability for the first turn player to setup a board that prevents the opponent from playing on their turn (yes that's how bad it has become). In modern Yu-Gi-Oh this is usually done via negates, cards that outright prevent certain cards or effects from being used at all (called "floodgates"), building a so called "unbreakable" board that either is extremely difficult to actually destroy or can rapidly recover no matter the amount of damage done (although with this type of deck it typically doesnt matter if they go first or second outside of mirror matches), and/or even boards with effects that literally skip portions of the opponent's turn (or otherwise force them to pass/prematurely end their turn). In the last two years the meta decks have usually been able to accomplish two or more of these at once. If you ever revist this topic in a future video this would be the primary correction you'd need to make (assuming nothing worse becomes problematic by then).
You yap too much, it's more rhetorically effective to say 'if my opponent sets traps' than 'if my opponent makes monsters that have trap effects, don't question it'
Wha... you do not like to have to endure 11+ interactions from Yubel or 9+ from SEFK and their limitless grind game or play against a floodgate deck like Branded that says "you cannot play this game, LITERALLY"?? How odd (sarcasm)
It’s not that traps aren’t used they just have to be really good like the Solemns, Infinite Impermanence, or Dimension barrier. Imperm is especially used because it can be used from the hand if you go Second.
@@Zmon3595 Correct, which is why I said "nearly all" trap cards are rarely played as the vast majority of traps are not like this.
Bro speaks the truth & is told to stop 'yapping', there's not even a brain to rot at this point.
Legend of Runeterra is a good example of trying to improve upon Hearthstone's design. Almost from the beginning, they had "restrained" randomness that could only generate cards from a known pool. The Celestial "Invoke" is an incredibly well-designed mechanic that felt both rewarding for the player, and fair for the opponent (mostly).
It also tried to fix the concept of "turns" in card games, where one player has to wait for the other to finish their turn before they can play, and it led to a very interesting gameplay.
The game has other problems of course, but it really tries to innovate in a lot of areas.
Spell mana feels like a good improvement upon the one more mana per turn system too
I describe LoR as a mix between Hearthstone and Magic. It has the advantages of Magic with the ability to interact on your opponents turn and provide disruption, but it also has the 1 mana per turn advantage of Hearthstone that allows players to not really suffer from the downsides of having to play core resource cards in their deck. I really enjoyed the game, and was sad when Riot quit supporting the game on the PvP side
@@jakehr3 1 mana per turn is not an advantage, it is a disadvantage. Getting mana drawned/draught/missing a color in Magic sucks, but it amounts to multiple things. I played Runeterra a lot, A LOT, and it wasnt trying to fix Hearthstone, it was trying to fix Magic and making it an Online TCG. However, as every game that tried to fix MTG mana system, they didnt understand it and they came to the same problems that every game with automatic mana has, which is consistency.
Decks with automatic mana are overly consistent. They do one thing and theres no roadblocks in that gameplan. You can sequence your turns ahead and play the same game over and over again. Irelia Azir, Poppy, Shurima Sun Disc, Elusives... Ben Brode already spoke about this and explained that the randomness of Hearthstone was precisely trying to solve this issue. Except that Runeterra didnt even have randomness.
@@eduardosanz9434 Ok, but I never said it was trying to fix anything. I was trying to give what I tell people who know nothing of LoR, the gist of LoR. That gist is that it is Magic's spell/stack system (with exceptions for burst speed) with Heartstone's mana system (with some tweaks). Most new card games do not want to implement Magic's mana system because no new game will survive Magic's mana system.
I don't think it is a very fair to point out all the positives of a system, when its flaws are pretty glaring. Yes, sometimes you curve out perfectly, you have to navigate what your mana gives you at any given point, or you get the satisfying comeback of being on the side of screw vs flood. But sometimes, you get screwed. You keep a 2-lander, and your top 6 cards are all 3+ mana spells that you can never cast and you die on turn 8, finally turning a corner against an opponent who wasn't have any mana issues the whole game.
And to say that a specific card game is consistent, I feel lacks imagination. Even if a card game has no random elements on any of its cards, by being a card game, it will inherently be random. The celestials were a random mechanic, traps were randomly placed in decks, putting an indeterminate timetable on players, Seraphine generated random spells, random keyword generation was a plague on design since Pantheon released, and there's more. But even if all of that didn't exist, it would still be an unpredictable card game that you needed to navigate your turns around because the game intentionally lacked tutors, or any way to provide consistency beyond the top of the deck being setup with a predict (literally 1 mechanic in 1 region of 10).
You say you had the same turns every game, but I was able to get to Masters level in Runeterra when those seasons existed, and while games had similar play patterns (as you would see in any card game) they were rarely, if ever, the same exact game. It's a card game, you are always playing around the top of the deck.
Honestly, my games playing Pokemon feel far more samey than any Runeterra game ever felt like. Open up nest ball, squawk, nest ball, ogrepon, grass, draw, attach to active bolt with lightning, discard hand (has fighting), nest, ogre, grass, sada's, hit for 280, your turn. I've had that turn so many times on turn 1 in pokemon, I've even had it in back to back games before. I never had such an experience with Runeterra.
I feel like objectively speaking Runeterra had amazing game design,having the best elements of MTG and hearthstone combined,but for some reason I just couldn't get into it
Duel Masters offers a good alternative to land cards. Instead of drawing land cards, any card can play any card down as a resource.
Lorcana
The Dragon Ball Super card game, and I'm sure plenty of others, did this too (years later, of course). Any card can be used as energy so you don't need to account for another set of resource cards in your deck, nor worry about having too much or not enough at any given time. Makes for a nice balance of having a resource mechanic to balance cards out while not having to worry about getting screwed by it.
That mana system is perfect, and multicolored cards enter manazone tapped. And 5 colored cards give perfect fixing but give 0 mana
@@Yanhime97DBS problem is every deck popping the fuck off on turn 3. Games feel too fast and are determined by massive floodgate effects usually.
@@josiahclarke3535 Haven't had the pleasure of playing DBS in a good few years unfortunately, since my friend fell out of the game and the locals scene where I am is beyond dead. So I'll take your word for it. Although ngl, with my main game being YuGiOh, decks popping off in 3 turns just sounds like I get 2 extra turns to play, lol
Only problems with Legends of Runeterra:
- They never figured out how to finance their game.
- They never figured out a good draft format.
Everything else about that game is just perfection.
Legends of runeterra was never met to make money. It's a loss leader. It's meant to bring in people to hopefully get them to play League of Legends where the real money is. It's like the food court at Costco or Sam's club. They're cheap food because they're hoping that you go there and then buy more stuff
@@abranlucero7246 Nope lol.
LoL was successful thus they made excess money thus they had some fun wasting a bit of this money to create a cool card game.
They didn't think it was necessary to advertise LoR properly as it was originally just made for fun, so it ended up having a very tiny number of players.
Then they completely changed their mind and decided that LoR should make money by itself even though LoL was still making tons of excess money. This was of course impossible to do because too few players and nothing interesting to buy ingame, so they gave up and kinda left the game to die for now.
LoR never brought players to LoL and LoL never brought players to LoR. The kind of players that like one of these two doesn't like the other and vice versa.
Lol brought me to LoR, I love mobas and card games. ( Master on LoL and Top 200 in LoR when it had more people)
@@EvilCherry3 they still update the game
@@EvilCherry3the game is not death... they just don't focus the pvp... and for better if you ask me.
not be that guy but discover was revealed much earlier than Un'goro, in an expansion called League of Explorers which was 2 years earlier. Its a great video btw.
Yeah this is definitely some kind of Mandela effect. I’ve seen others reference discover coming out in ungoro
I came down to the comments, just to see if someone else would call out League of Explorers as the first discover set.
You shuffle your hand and put it on the bottom of the deck for iono if you shuffle them in it's an instant loss
Alot of his videos are badly researched tbh
Yep and discover was a great mechanic initially, but I recently returned and now all the good cards have the discover effect and it's so annoying. People essentially put their entire deck with op discover cards and finds whatever answer they need for the situation. It's way overdone now and my least favorite keyword now.
The actual way MTG tackles its land "flaw" is by having a meta almost exclusively revolving around cheap spells that do as much as possible for the mana they cost. The overwhelmingly majority of staples in MTG is under 3 mana, most of them being at 1 mana (cards like thoughtseize, spellpierce that sees more play than counterspell just because it costs 1 less mana, fatal push being arguably the best removal spell in the game, the iconic lightning bolt, a common creature like delver of secrets being played in every blue deck, and so on)
And when it does not, it aims to "cheat" the mana system by either ramping (getting ahead of your mana curve by playing extra lands or having means to generate extra mana) or by literally cheating big creatures or big spells in play by ignoring their cost through some card effects.
And when it does neither, it just uses utility lands as resource, there's a control deck in legacy that remains always viable if not strong that only runs utility lands.
Thats just latestage powercreep in a manabased cardgame. Which is why mana is incredibly unhealthy for game design. You end up printing tons of cards that will just never see play solely because they cost 1 mana more than can be afforded in a real game.
Regardless of rotation or whatever you choose to combat this core flaw its just always gonna evolve in the same direction.
Print good card > print good card but 1 mana cheaper > print good card with more text > etc.
This is why not tying your cards to "hard" mana makes games more flexible. You don't always have to play the same turn 1 followed by turn 2 etc.
that's not true. Cards have their power, abilities and thoughness attached to their mana value, some cards have a downside to justify the smaller cost, but the "majority of staples in mtg is under 3 mana" is a complete lie. Sheoldred for example is one of top 3 most know cards of the game and is 4 mana. The game tends to follow the rule of mana value, and when it doesn't , in cases like reanimate, lightning bolt or counterspell, is because these are cards created before power creep was a thing to look out for, and to solve this problem they created formats with cards that do similar effects for same mana but with a downside, and banned the broken originals in these formats. If you wanna play with these broken cards, stick to older formats like modern or legacy, because in formats like standard, pioneer or pauper, the power creep ,is still a problem, but its more stabilized. (Commander is a format mostly for fun with 4 players, so 1 mana tends to not make such a diference)
@@pan.parker You're misunderstanding what the word "majority" means here. Sheoldred is one card in the deck that plays it (usually as a two-of in dimir midrange). The rest of the deck is 3-cost or less besides Ertai if you choose to play him at all. The vast majority of staples are still 3 or less mana. 9/10 of the top decks in current standard follow this trend, the only exception is domain ramp
@@pan.parker This is not true, even for standard. Of the top 10 most played cards in standard right now, only 2 cost more than two mana, Urabrask's Forge and Aclazotz, the rest are all 1-2 mana interaction or aggro cards
@@yuseifido5706 standard is not the metric for this. Its a fast format, famous for its agro meta.Its not even close to being one of the most played formats. Besides the guy was making a reference to the staple cards itself, not the decks, óbviously decks will have a proportional mana to its strategy, the first turns have to have low cost value cards, but the staples are the winning condition like cards. Of course we have Monstrous Rage 1 mana, but we also have Atraxa, Sunfall, Phyrexian Obliterrator, Ghalta.
Loving the content. Here's some tips:
- Get a pop filter or a dynamic mic (I'd go for a proper mic and a pop filter if you can)
- Learn some really basic EQing and compression, or search around for a preset-oriented approach for dialogue
- Slow down a tiny bit! I talk super fast too, but your words need to be audible above all.
He could also slow down a bit, this one was quite hard to follow with how fast he was speaking
@@CaptainGulasch I forgot to add that, thank you! Fast speaking is usually a-ok with me, but dude is really going for the any% lmao
I feel like he has already noticed how fast he talks and is trying to fix it. In my opinion, he talks faster in his older recent videos. Don't get me wrong, he still talks a bit too fast here, but it's better nonetheless. I might be imagining that tho
Retakes is possible
Just Watch at 0.75 speed, it was perfect for me
Many actually hate handtraps, but Yugioh's power level is so high that without them winning would be just a matter of who goes first. Then there's a deck that is designed to win going second AND plays handtraps.
The people that hate hand traps haven’t enjoyed the game since 5Ds then. Yes Kuriboh is technically the first hand trap, but that card is ass. DD Crow and Effect Veiler however are ancient. DD Crow saw play up until the Bystials came out and Veiler still sees play as a marginally worse Imperm. Maxx C is also a 5Ds era card and has (thankfully) been banned for years. Even what we consider to be modern hand traps are pretty old. Ghost Ogre is seeing a resurgence again and is from 2015. Ash Blossom has seen consistent play for nearly forever and is from 2017. Ghost Belle is from 2018, Spooky Dogwood is from 2019, Phantazmay is from 2019, Imperm is from 2018, Ghost Mourner is from 2020, etc. Veiler started the trend of playable hand traps back in 2010 and still sees play in 2024, and most of the hand traps that still see play are pretty old at this point too. Even looking at modern hand trap design, the only new ones we’ve gotten are the Mulcharmy cards and the Bystials, with the latter being entirely format dependent compared to how ubiquitous cards like Ash, Veiler, and Imperm have been for 6+ years.
It's a little "chicken & the egg" esque, but handtraps existing have mostly been the cause of the power creep in the game.
Handtraps take up space that would be used for engine, so engine cards have to be designed so that they pull far more weight than they should to compensate.
Eventually the only design space that will be left to explore is where every single piece of engine is also a handtrap. Havnis, Sharvara, and the Bystials are already the early iterations of this.
I think you misidentified Hearthstone's system level problem. RNG isn't the issue, it's the solution. The issue in hearthstone is that it's too consistent without the introduction of that RNG.
Your deck size is small, the mulligan is generous, you're guaranteed a mana each turn, and you always have one hero power per turn. This leads to games that play out very similarly to each other at a base level.
So all of those factors force the game to rely on RNG to keep the game fun and exciting game in and game out.
While this is true from a design standpoint, I think it's a pretty terrible solution. Perception hurts a lot. If your players notice what you're doing and hate it, that's just bad.
Yep. Just look at metas where decks with little to no randomness happen to dominate. Or worse, metas with top tier decks that focus on improving the hero power.
I don't understand how randomness according to you can have positives, if a roll of the dice determines player win/loss.
Randomness is a lazy mechanic from a designer's perspective who didn't care enough about solid mechanics. Not to mention effects like summon random unit that costs X, or draw random card that costs X. This is stupid and poorly designed. Then there's nonsense like Jaina using death knight's weapon. That's why I quit HS...
@@supremacyecg6815cause its fun
@@supremacyecg6815 The tcg genre is built around randomness. If we didn't like that, then instead of playing different card games we would play chess or other similar games without randomness. The main benefit is the fact that randomness allows for more varied gamestates adding replay value to the game. There is also an important note that there are different kinds of randomness. It was mentioned in the video but the correct term hasn't been used, it's input randomness vs output randomness. In short it affects when they player has the chance to something - before the effect is activated or after. In general it is considered better game design to have more input randomness (essentially dealing the cards to the player and seeing what the player does, excavate and discover mechanics are examples of input randomness) while output randomness generally tends to cause more frustrations, but is also more welcomed by younger audiences becauseit is simpler to understand and use (play ragnaros/yogg and cool things happen). The problem with HS was that the underlying game mechanics were so simple that there was little to no room to interact or outplay opponent. To alleviate this issue HS team overused rng mechanics, which compounded and led many to believe rng to be the core issue. To be fair it IS a big issue, but not the only one.
tldr There are many randomness mechanics that make the games more interesting and fun, but HS overindulged in those.
I am loving your videos, it's so rare to find someone that doesn't take card games as a religion and only play one lol.
The biggest problem with lands are the price tag
It’s honestly one of the biggest downfalls of the game. Like you’re gonna make me pay $20 for a card that’s the least exciting part of the game? Why is this the thing they’ve choosing to make exclusive? Baffling.
@@Rudepetsclub imaging being me and invest in your 8 expensive lands just to meet a local playerbase of 80% monored. sold my shit after 2 weekends again
@@GARCIIIAmonster Proxy 👍
As someone whose friends play magic, but does not own any cards myself, very much this. Sometimes I play against my friends with decks they lend me, and I once looked into putting together a deck myself. It turns out all the decks of theirs that I enjoyed playing have $150 worth of lands in them. I guess it would be cheap to have a mono-color deck, but I never much enjoyed any of the mono-color decks I've borrowed.
The problem with pokemon is snowballing. That's bang on. Only you got the reasoning wrong. Yeah, you get resources and your opponent loses resources whenever you take a ko. That's completely irrelevant because you draw about 10-20 cards a turn in Pokemon. Either that or you can tutor for any card you want.
The problem is whoever takes the first ko often wins the game. That's because the pokemon deal too much damage. Almost every hit is one hit ko. When I started playing the game every deck was running potions, now people don't even know potions are in the game.
Tbf, every tcg will have powercreep, pokemon has been around for a long time, and considering the powercreep hearthstone went through in barely 10 years, I'd be surprised if pokemon didn't change drastically in 30. Now I'm not framliar with the pokemon tcg meta prior to black and white, but I was always under the impression that potion was never good in meta decks, even in the old days.
Anyway, I do disagree that the main problem with pokemon (at least right now) is snowballing, prize races have always been a thing, but there's always counterplay. Chien Pao tries to always take 2 prizes with cards like greninja and iron hands, but if you can gust up their Baxcalibur and reset their hand with iono/unfair stamp, they need to start stalling until they can find another Baxcallibur. Raging bolt Ogerpon almost always gets the turn 1 attack going second, on average hitting 210/280 damage, but due to their entire deck being linear 2 prize attackers, decks like gardevoir can afford to just go down a few prizes before taking 3 clean knockouts with single prize attackers. Charizard specifically *wants* to go down in prizes in order to power up charizard and activate counter catcher. Charizard will almost always be a 2hko anyways, and they need time in the early game to set up their pidgeot and duskclops'. Radient charizard in particular is a single prize attacker who explicitly needs you to be down in prizes to attack.
Obviously the solitaire esque nature of pokemon isn't for everyone, and it is true that some decks can snowball hard if the opponent gets a poor draw, but that really goes for every card game. Counterplay has always existed in pokemon, it's probably the 2nd most skill intensive card game in this list behind yugioh.
If you ask me though, the real problem with the pokemon tcg is just prize cards... sometimes you prize your most valuable card, and you literally just can't play the game. 6 cards is a lot to give up, so the chances of getting screwed over by what you prize is pretty high. Like when regidrago is up against lugia and needs knock out a cinncino or up against lost zone box and needs to knock out a crammorant on the bench but then "oops, you prized your kyurem, guess you lose".
Sorry for the block of text, I kinda just started typing and couldn't stop lol
@@Oldmantic I tried reading that but it's 4 am. I'll get back to you tomorrow.
@@tindekappa9047 No worries dude, it was like a paragraph and a half of rambling. I get it if no one wants to read all that lol
At least in pokemon your games often last more than 1 turn, unlike yugioh. I switched from yugioh to hearthstone, but hearthstone has its powercreeping problems too. In my opinion though, the biggest problem of hs is netdecking. Since its only played online, at high legend you only ever face the same 4 decks and it gets way too repetitive. I love how pokemon and yugioh at least maintain a good variety of decks you can play for a long time
@@Chimeraeateverything Have you tried out Magic? I have played all four mentioned card games and I think Magic has the best compromise of all of them. I love to play obscure decks in Magic and am a fan of brewing stuff up. I do sadly admit that it got much harder with the powercreep that's happening recently, but I just stick to the older formats or community formats like Commander.
That's what I feel like is especially missing in Yu-Gi-Oh. It really has no official formats at all. I like how Wizards have designed cards tailored to Commander, even though it started out as a community format.
Imagine if Konami would show any love to for example GOAT Format. Like having a option to play GOAT Format in Master Duels for example. Or supporting GOAT Format Tournaments. I myself am a huge fan of the Edison Format too.
I haven't played the Pokemon TCG all too much, but have heard from a friend who regularly plays it, that he Powercreep in the cardgame is crazy. And Hearthstone's RNG was just beginning to bug me. Even if some of it is controlled, it still feels like a Coinflip sometimes. Same with Yu-Gi-Oh tbh to decide who goes first.
The solution is:
1 never play meta decks
2 play with your friends
3 play with your favourite and suboptimal strats
4 have fun because its a card game and unless you wanna earn money becoming pro, it makes 0 sense getting frustrated losing to the same decks again and again
this is such a childish take lmao
@@AndrewVaillant it's not, most of the time the game is fun but the meta is not, so don't play meta
@@AndrewVaillant Having fun is childish?
You must be fun at parties.
The solution is even simpler:
1 play Domain Monarchs
2 Brick and go next
100% agree with this take. Idk why competitive players are so aggressive to casual players. If you want a card game that will grow and expand over time you need to be friendly to new comers. Otherwise only the most dedicated and competitive players are gonna remain.
Flesh and Blood does a good job addressing the variance issue by making all cards multi-purpose. Every card has a block value, a resource value, and abilities + attack value if the card is an attack. You also draw cards up to your hero's intelect at the end of your turn, so you draw more cards than an average game of magic. It is not unusual to go through your entire deck at least once (cards are returned to the bottom of the deck when used as a resource), so adding a single copy of a card actually has a lot of impact as part of your deck build and you can rely on playing that card if you play carefully. These aspects make it so you can always do something with your hand, even when you draw a low resource hand. The number of actions you can take are limited by actions points, which are 1 per turn by default unless you play cards that generate more which are balanced with the power of taking extra actions in mind. You also sideboard before the match.
I was looking for the FaB comment. How FaB handles resources is honestly genius and really makes the game skill intensive. If you pitch away a power card, you can set up a turn in the late game to take back the tempo. If your opponent is on a hero that is great at blocking, you can opt to do less damage that turn and instead setup that late game. It’s honestly genius and the system lends itself to skill expression well
Now make the game not have a $1000 buy-in
@@josiahclarke3535 it isn’t nearly close to that kind of price for a deck. You can build a good deck for well under 100 dogs
@@josiahclarke3535yeah this is literally the only thing stopping me from getting into FaB, i just do not want to spend so much on equipment
If only FaB would stop gating entire mechanisms behind the legendary rarity.
Your videos are always a treat to watch.
Slight correction: Switch doesn’t give your Pokemon free retreat, it just retreats the mon. This is often better than free retreat because a) you can only hard retreat once per turn, b) there are cards that can prevent you from retreating no matter your retreat cost [Block Snorlax], c) there are tools and other effects that interact with retreat cost which you might lose access to if your mon suddenly has 0 retreat
Many decks in Pokémon rely on falling behind in prize cards. There was one deck a few years ago that albeit had a cool strategy of suiciding your own Pokémon and getting your opponent down to one prize card. Got banned, because it locked them out of the game as a result of controlling their top deck and discarding important cards out of their hand.
I've recently gotten into Battle Spirits Saga, and I have been really enjoying it. I now understand why, the designers learned and solved all these issues!
I'm currently playing Digimon TCG. Something that you can see was taken into account was ramping. They used the Duel Masters shield system to stop it from happening to an extent. And the memory system used for resources is really fun to use.
Digimon is too much fun, shame I didn't get into it until now
It feels like its 1 or 2 steps away from being a balanced yugioh and i fckn love it.
Dude me too, I love Digimon. The memory system is great, it makes it more exciting, it also means you have to weigh each decision every turn, you can't just ignore your opponent, it's much more interactive and dynamic.
It's the best card game and I hope they make a proper online game (other than the fan made simulator). I'll say this tho, it's really not suitable for playing physical decks face to face, there are way too many effects from digivolutions that you have to account for, without a video game taking care of it for you it's hard for new players to keep track.
@@lemonstealinghorse for real, I specifically play a janky Lucemon spam deck that almost entirely has 0 triggers on digivolution so i can ignore them xD
@@lemonstealinghorse It's kinda tough, but once you get used to your deck it's not that hard. I've been playing some tournaments and as long as you know the basic gist of the other decks you just have to know what to ask about their digimon.
One of my favourite things about Digimon is how clear it is that the designers of the game have paid attention to all of these other games, and have tried to address them in the game's design. Digimon's resource system, memory, is a sliding scale from ten on your side, to zero in the middle, to ten on your opponent's side. The game starts at 0, meaning that on your first turn you could spend up to 10 memory and start with a really expensive card - but once the memory is at 1 on the other player's side, the turn will pass as soon as all abilities have resolved. Then, your opponent can spend 10 memory without even passing the turn, and could potentially spend a whopping 20 memory on a single play. This incentivises making smaller plays to pass less memory, but key cards in the game also help to mitigate that concern. The first player classically doesn't draw.
By default, Digimon have a similar effect to summoning sickness if they've been played that turn, with a keyword similar to MTG's Haste, that being Rush, allowing you to swing anyway, and another keyword, Blitz, allowing you to attack with that Digimon before the turn passes if you've exceeded memory, but they don't go hand in hand, so I don't believe there's currently a way to attack on the first turn.
The life system, Security, is also more limiting than a numeric point value. Similar to Pokémon, at the start of the game you set aside cards from your deck as your health, but they're reversed; where in Pokémon, you win by taking your prize cards, in Digimon you win by depleting your opponent's security. 5 cards to start, and every attack can remove one security card. There are ways to check more security cards, or slow your opponent by limiting their ability to check your security, or block attacks. However, you still need to make a final attack after removing the last security card. This means that while OTKs are possible, they require a LOT of setup without your opponent stopping it or killing you first. And, where in Pokémon by taking a prize card you're gaining resources whilst depriving your opponent of theirs, in Digimon, attacking security is risky; if the security card is a Digimon, it gets to battle the attacking Digimon and potentially delete it. Otherwise, many cards have effects when checked in security; Tamers play themselves for free, and Option cards can have various effects, from replicating the effects if played normally, to adding themselves to hand, to entirely unique effects to being checked. Some Digimon even have security effects, and might even play themselves for free after the security battle, so by removing one shield, your opponent could be down a Digimon and you could be up a Digimon.
As mentioned, absurd OTK combos are possible, but they require a lot of work, and the core gameplay mechanics mean that most games will constantly go back and forth.
I think I'd need someone else to help out with what's the worst aspect of playing Digimon, though, because I can only think of these positives right now 😅
*"where in Pokémon, you win by taking your prize cards, in Digimon you win by depleting your opponent's security."*
-------------------------
So Duel Masters' Shield system.
Digimons two biggest negatives are defense-scaling with how many cards are hard to interact with nowadays, as well as how overly-consistent decks have become. It feels like I’m doing the same thing almost every game.
@@wakkaseta8351Essentially, yes. With the added caveat that if your attack reveals a digimon from the opponent's security, your attacking digimon and the digimon revealed in security battle each other. This means that your weaker digimon have a very real chance of dying upon attacking the opponent.
I feel like with the pokemon segment you missed out on mentioning the fact of them just continuing to make bigger and stronger pokemon that give more prize cards that on top of a ko giving such an advantage, can likely leave them 1 more KO away from just winning the game with even some pokemon that straight up make your KOs take more prize cards.
Power creep has happen to all of those tcg. Also the bigger pokemon for 2 prizes as been in the game since 2004 with the of ex pokemon. IMO the biggest overall issue is no option mulligan rule leading to very quick game because 1 player was unable to set up.
@@ryanm9257 I never said anything about 2 prize pokemon, which was something mentioned in the video anyways.
@@Dragonmist19X but 3 prize pokemon don't even exist anymore
Oh right you're talking about Iron Hands. Skill issue
@@larry8375 Oh yeah Iron Hands does do that. The main thing I was thinking of was tag teams and ADP.
So good! This is the content i was missing ❤️
I appreciate this video. Having played every single one of these card games, their flaws become apparent over time and it leads me to get tired of the game. I appreciate how quickly and how well you explained everything.
I’ve always wondered why pokemon doesn’t do it where if you get knocked out you get to take prize cards instead of the opponent doing it, in which case the person who draws all of their cards first loses.
Idk but I think in pokémon it doesn't matter that much beacause you already draw a lot of cards each turns. The Real snowballing problem Comes from the fact that Speedrun IS limited in pokémon so when you opponent IS winning, you can't stop them, you just have to Hope the whiff a turn to let you win the race
spellbook of judgment is completly legal btw.
if all the cards you draw are in the endphase and they all do basically nothing its not that big of a deal.
Well, when the next turn is the last turn having several spellbooks doesn't do anything...
Spellbook of Judgement is legal BECAUSE the meta has reached the point where drawing 5-6 cards in the end phase is nothing. Back then, you're basically guaranteed to have your next turn, so getting 6 cards just by setting up your board or doing your own plays is enough to nearly drag Spellbook to Tier 0 status (becoming rivals with the Dragon Rulers).
Compared this to todays' broken ass cards, like Snake Eyes Ash allowing you to start your entire combo out of just 1 card, or Tear making you build your own board at Turn 0, or Kashtira locking the board itself.
As a casual Pokémon enjoyer, Pokémon’s biggest design flaws are big basic syndrome and stat hyperinflation over the years that renders all but a rare few select mon cards utterly unusable even in noncompetitive/meta play. Haymaker being a menace back in the day showed that basics with decent stats were much more efficient than stronger evolved Pokémon. They designed around this, making things like the Rare Candy card and mechanics like LV X, where the strongest two prizes all required investment and couldn’t be slapped on the board turn one. Gen 5 made the baffling decision to undo all those lessons learned by making all EX basic. Gen 7 somehow made things even worse with Tag Teams and the introduction of triple prizers with stats so comically high (All on BASIC Pokémon!) that card stats seemingly doubled overnight, way beyond the natural powercreep curve across the game’s history. The single prizers did see a power increase as well, but nowhere near enough to even be able to even be an inconvenience against the hyper inflated threats. Most embarrassingly of all is the fact that single prize mons were still getting printed with stat levels compatible to older sets. Even now that they’ve backtracked with the power level, doing away with basic 3 prizers in Gen 8, then making EXs evolution Pokemon again if they’re not already single stage in Gen 9, the ugly inflated numbers still remain
Having that issue of trying to get back into PkmnTCG after a LONG break, and 1) it’s LIVE, not Online which so far is inferior IMO, but mainly 2) all of the cards I collected (basically since B/W and in the game are more or less overpowered by the newer stuff. Even my V and VMAX are getting 2 shot by the new EX stuff - and I know my TagTeam cards are not worth playing if the opponent gets 3 prizes from them. (Also doesn’t help that LIVE doesn’t have all the old cards playable for some reason and the UI for finding them is abysmal. And I swear some of my stuff didn’t migrate from Online)
You are a fanboy -
-except a hypocrite
No the went back to pokemon ex (lowercase) from before gen 5. Even when tag teams were a thing it's not like they made up the entirety of the meta. Baby bloons I remember being pretty good for example. There's also a reason expanded format is so unpopular and it's not even because of big basics. It's the control decks, at least last I heard. There's also a huge focus on evolution pokemon this format. Look at charizard ex and Lugia Vstar and regidrago Vstar and gardevoir which combined make up the majority of winning decks the current format, which kinda suggests the opposite to your point
Also, of the decks I mentioned before, Lugia and gardevoir both have single prize pokemon as their highest damage output attackers that can (and consistently do) 1hko charizard ex which has tye highest base hp of the format. Even charizard decks use radiant charizard as a single prize attacker.
Worst part about Pokémon are the investment bros by far. There's nothing more soul-sucking than trying to play a game for fun with friends and having a bunch of sweaty, foul-smelling adults circling around you and trying to build hype for their shitty full art promo card of choice.
It's the downside of being the most marketable of these games unfortunately 😔
Honestly I love full art cards. It’s just a shame it’s become expensive now because some people thought “investing” in them was a good idea
@@inff3rno Yeah... I really miss when card collecting was something disconnected from the endless grifting culture of online "finfluencers". Sure, there was always an economic component since the hobby costs money, but it's gone way overboard. Most of the people I know who play Pokémon now spend more time talking about the value of their collection than the actual card game. They have apps like Collectr that are literally investment trackers with graphs and trends and it's like I've walked into an MLM meeting whenever I go to play in league challenges. "Did you know this Umbreon spiked in value this week? You should probably buy it now and get it graded before it goes to the moon!" No, and I don't care. I have a job and I own stocks in companies who produce things and whose value can actually be measured. I'm not a loser who grifts vulnerable people who are just looking for a social space.
On the positive side, I recently started playing Sorcery with a group of pals from my LGS and if you like cool art cards, I would recommend maybe checking it out if you can find someone to play with. Every single card is full art and it's in that old school fantasy style and the print quality is stellar. The game is pretty interesting since it's like a blend of a board game and a TCG. So far it's been a lot of fun. There's supposedly an official tabletop simulator mod for Sorcery, but I haven't tried it. Do not get into it if you care about cards retaining value or really making any profit at all. Even if you somehow pull a foil Philosopher's Stone, there aren't many players to sell it to. It's a small, new game and it could easily collapse in the future like others before it, but it is a lot of fun. They release around one set per year and it's a lot easier to keep up with than Pokémon and Magic's diarrhea spray of sets every other month.
Cool comparisons. Some advice for future videos:
1. Speak up. It sounds like you're talking to your friend in the back of a classroom and trying not to get caught by the teacher.
2. Edit to take out breaths/stutters etc.
3. 6:23 use Grammarly or something similar to check for spelling errors like this.
I always love videos comparing Yu-Gi-Oh and Magic, but the Pokemon and Hearthstone additions were cool too. Keep improving and keep up the good work!
Digimon has a shared resource between players to make actions. The memory gauge is unique and helps pace the game.
These videos are splendid, they feel like top game design classes. Seriously keep this up🙏🙏
These type of videos are awesome. Keep them coming buddy
I would say that rather than scry/surveil lands, cycling (both lands with cycling and spells with landcycling) are more significant additions to reduce the mana-screw/flooding in games.
It's worth noting that in practice, what Yogg-Saron did most of the time when it was played was clear the board of minions- board clears, minion removal and damaging spells make up the majority of spells in Hearthstone. So most of the time, he was played as a "Hail Mary" card by slower decks that lacked a more consistent means to clear the board.
There were only a couple of decks that actually used him, since playing him still had the potential to backfire (Some spells come with potential drawbacks like damaging yourself, summoning minions for your opponent or even discarding your hand), but he played an important role in at least a few tournament-level decks, so it was enough for him to gain infamy.
Good video I hope you cover lorcana, it kinda takes care of the mana/land problem.
I know it's way too younger than the other games but I wish you talked about Rush Duels too, the spin off game of Yugioh. It would be interesting to talk about the changes from the main game to balance the game. Still great video.
I'll add that the prize card mechanic in Pokemon also adds a level of RNG to the game that can really screw you over in some games. If your pieces necessary to get your engine started/take knockouts are prized, and you can't take knockouts until you get your engine started, your chances or winning are drastically reduced.
You can mitigate this issue with good deckbuilding but ultimately the prize card mechanic affects the quality of a LOT of games.
I really, really liked force of will, because it fixed a lot of these problems in cool ways.
It had the lands of magic and the commanders of the commander variant, but the lands had their own deck alongside the main deck. You didn't automatically draw from the land deck, instead your commander would have an ability to draw from the land deck; but if you used that ability, it usually precluded the use of one of their other abilities, so you had to choose between getting more lands and a potent effect (which would usually also cost mana depending on how good it was).
It also had pokemon's prize cards, but in reverse: as your opponent ran out of life, *they* drew from their "prize" cards they set aside from the game, giving the loser more cards to make a comeback with instead of the winner more cards to snowball with. Instead of you winning when you ran out of prize cards, you won when the opponent ran out of prize cards. Even cooler, some cards had effects that worked when they were acquired this way, like some of the 'green' creatures would just play themselves.
Neat cardgame, that was. If I was still interested in cardboard games, I'd probably still be playing it.
Don't think anyone has talked about this but One of the games that has tackled mana and comeback the best is definitely the new Digimon TCG, it has a tug-of-war mechanic that starts both at 0 mana, the first player can play cards of any value, but will give the same amount of mana to the opponent. So if you use 10 mana on your turn, your opponent will also have 10 to work with when you pass it over to them, letting you have explosive first turns but also means that the opponent can react with equal power. Also they have a raising zone that lets you boost up and build a strong character in the safety of "outside of the game" so you'll always have something to attack with even if the opponent hits you a board wipe. While you'll still be in bad shape you won't be completely helpless.
10:30 This might be said a million times but League of Explorers introduced the Discover mechanic.
This is the first video I completely watched on 0.75x speed and it makes it much more pleasant to listen to
so true
The perfect card game exists, its cards wars from adventure time
Drawing no energy kills me when I played the pokemon tcg games on GBC
For real. I replayed that game recently (free on Switch, thanks Nintendo). I swept the entire game, 0 losses, when I got my rain dance deck built...
Until the literal end. Lost the E4 gauntlet twice; once to not drawing my evolution cards (they were ALL bottom-decked) and once for not drawing energy. Despite running the broken old-school Oaks and Bills.
TCGs have matured a lot over the decades lol
I couldn't believe when he was talking about pokemon being slow... compared to what it used to be, it's lightning quick now. The draw power in modern pokemon has ruined me for other TCG. I played a couple games of One Piece and couldn't get over it
Loving your channel, man.
Btw what would be the *best* parts of each game?
A video on how ever card game deals wiy powecreep and the ups and downs would be awesome.
1000 subs blew my mind, this quality is of a channel pushing 1m. Got a sub from me!
Alright boss. I tried to get through it but here are my notes:
1.) Move away from the mic to breathe, go full Chocolate Rain. It's really annoying hearing someone gasping for air after every sentence.
2) Just retake the line if you fuck up. Start fresh, it'll sound more relaxed and that makes it more pleasant to watch.
3.) You don't have to speak quickly, especially with a video like this where you're *showing* more information to add to your points. Take your time, maybe try to execute like you got a buddy who's vaguely aware of the topic (but very interested) & you're telling him all about it.
Glhf homie!
what an insane comment lmao
@@FirstnameLastname-iq9oo these got me to stop watching the video. Rather than just leaving without giving homie feedback, I pointed out the issues since I'm probably not alone in being turned off from the channel by shit like this.
If constructive criticism instead of a "fuck you, video sucks" is insane to you, that's on you lol
At 4:55 you give good examples, but I think you'd be remiss not to include cards that can't be responded to like Dark Ruler No More, Forbidden Droplet, and Super Polymerization. They provide another way for players going second into established boards
i hope you'll include legends of runeterra in your discussion videos soon, it does a lot of really interesting things with the different aspects of TCG design!
Im not going to lie your videos are like weirdly calming, like some unintentional asmr
The now-defunct Scrolls (The card game that Mojang made) had some fascinating corners they designed themselves into. It had a positional board system, where you put units on a board with 5 rows and 3 columns. Opposing you was your opponent's 5x3 board, and units hit the first thing in the opposing row. Behind each row was an objective unit, destroy 3/5 to win. It's very difficult to defend them all, but as you lose them, it becomes easier to defend the remaining ones. Units had a countdown stat, and attacked automatically when their countdown was up (typically every other turn). This was great, and opened up whole new parts of the game to design around. (Board manipulation spells! Countdown manipulation, or just varying countdown values!)
Also, they decided to fix mana. Once per turn, you can discard a card to generate a "land", or draw 2 cards. If you end up drawing your expensive cards early, just discard them!
...what if I needed those later?
Don't worry! When you're out of cards, the discard pile shuffles into your deck.
And now, the game is not guaranteed to end. It's very easy to turtle up in front of your last 3 idols, you never lose to decking, and some depraved decks want to ramp and heal forever. Some new mechanics were added that made specific cards cost more each time you played them to counteract these decks, but in hindsight, it's refreshing that most games deterministically end.
(Most games didn't stall out forever, but these dynamics did make games a lot longer than most card games are today).
****************
Bonus second game: Netrunner!
Made by Richard Garfield himself, and then repeatedly reincarnated, it's such a drastically different game to creature battlers that it's impossible to give it the introduction it deserves. But basically, it's an asymmetrical game. One player has cards in their deck that are worth victory points, and must spend time and money to defend and complete them. The other player is trying to steal them. You want enough of these agenda cards to score points for yourself, but not too many that they're hard to defend and end up being stolen by your opponent.
Resources are completely different. Instead of mana, you have credits. It's a bank account, it doesn't refresh. So you have to keep playing cards to gain credits. To make this all work, the game runs on an action system: 4 actions per turn, which can be spent to gain a credit, draw a card, play a card, and other important stuff (too long to explain here). It's more efficient to gain credits/draw cards through playing cards, but you're never stuck, because you can always use the basic action to get that. And with this, land flood/screw was solved!
...Remember those agenda cards? That you want neither too many nor too little of? Flood hasn't been fixed, merely moved from resource management to victory points!
They ended up printing a card that allowed you to shuffle cards back into your deck, and it was one of the most important cards in the whole game. It was a pretty good, solution honestly. This is a very old problem, and that card was printed in 2013.
The modern metagame anxieties are fascinating, but require too much explanation to fit into one comment.
I feel PTCG biggest problem is its lack of control. Like 6 random cards that you can’t access every game without taking KO’s is still insane. So many people have lost due to prizing integral cards of the deck and there’s pretty much nothing you can do about it. Another thing is once you end your turn that’s it. Your opponent can make you discard cards in your hand, switch your bench with your active, discard the top cards of your deck, put Pokémon from your discard pile or deck onto your board, etc. While I’d imagine these effects are common in other card games in PTCG there’s little to no counters to any of them.
Thought about making this the point as it is a pain point commonly mentioned, however there are cards which specifically look at your prize cards to swap one out so it seems like more of a deckbuilding requirement/risk to me.
I have always wondered why they don't let the player create the prize deck, like many other games.
I can choose my Ride Deck in Vanguard, my Extra Deck in Yu-Gi-Oh, but I cannot choose 6 cards to take from my deck?
Mtg and Heartstone player here. You were spot-on about them.
you can get a prize card on your first turn through poison for example. other that that, great video!
As a Pokémon (TCG Live) player I can tell you that with the introduction of Dusknoir from Shrouded Fable and the Supporter "Briar" from Stellar Crown, letting your opponent get more prizes is even stronger now especially in combo with cards like Charizard ex, Iono or Roxanne. Dusknoir is so strong now in the meta that many people want it banned.
Yogg Saron wasn't bad RNG. It was actually very controlled. You would only include this in your deck as a bail out. If you had no chance to win then you pray to Yogg. Bad RNG is babbling book.
Excited to see the issue with The Bazaar
Best solution to the 'Land Problem' that i saw, is in the SpellWeaver game. Their lands (called Shrines) have 2 major abilities. One of them makes you a level (similar to a color of Magic, i supose), the other one gives you mana + draw. So, every turn, you have to choose between leveling or making mana and draw.
Cards cost mana and requires an amount of level, so you can have a card lvl 1 that costs 3 mana, or a level 2 card that costs 1 mana, and so on. Mana refreshes every turn, so you can spend them agressive.
But, here is the major thing: They have an ability that allows you to use it once each turn, for free. It reads: you can put a card from your hand on the bottom of your library. If you do, look at the top 5 cards and pick up one shrine. It prevents you to mana screw. And, since shrines gives you draw, it also prevents you to mana flood. They have even added a shrine that if you failed to find with this ability, you can search your library for that specific shrine and add to your hand, so you 'never' misses. That's a hell of a solution.
Yes and unfortunately that game died without ever be recognised, I thing after first set we only get few "promo" sets in few years this game exist
Can you please make a follow up video with other card games? Flesh and blood, Force of Will, Digimon, legends of Runetera, Shadowverse evolved, Lorcana, One Piece, Dragon Ball, CardFight Vanguard!!, Duel Masters and probably many others I missed.
Have you tried Gwent? It's very interesting - The player who goes first (Blue Coin) is given a bonus instead of the second player (Red Coin) - Most of the RNG elements are similar to Discover where card pool is limited and one often picks 1 of 3 from that pool. It's slower like Pokemon & has no resources to draw or generate similar to Yugioh. It has the best mulligan rule I've seen in a TCG and is often cited as the least random TCG (but those elements do exist such as Opening Hands & the Discover mechanics).
I would recommend you checking out the weird pvz card game spinoff, it’s entire core mechanic is that each player is assigned to one of two factions with not only completely different keywords and deck lists but a predetermined turn order, with one team playing its minions first, the other playing minions, spells, and environments all at the same time, and finally the first player having an opritunity to play spells and environments after the second player has their turn
A lot of people have brought up games where any card can be turned into a resource (e.g. lorcana) but personally I prefer the way Inscryption handled the land problem by creating a separate basic resource deck and giving you the choice of which deck to draw from
Altered is a new card game that I believe has the best of both worlds (MtG and Hearthstone) where you start the game by drawing 6 cards and you pick 3 cards to become mana and then every turn you draw 2 cards and choose one to become mana. The complexity and depth comes later in games and both players decide which cards are best but also balance when you’re mana is high enough where just drawing 2 cards is better. If you’re interested you can play for free on board game arena. Highly recommend it to anyone looking for something new.
If I could rework the mana system in magic I'd just have two decks you draw from, one with land and one with creatures. Draw from only one each turn. Then change card additional draw effects to specify "Draw a land," "Draw a nonland," or simply "Draw a card," meaning from either. Doing that would make it so the various means of searching for lands could easily just change to "Draw a land." This would make some current mechanics potentially less useful (Scry), but had this been the method from the beginning and gameplay built with that in mind, I feel like it'd ultimately be a better experience.
It was never too popular but I loved how PvZ Heroes handled a lot of things save for blocks/Supers
there was no real Going first or second since a single turn was composed of 4 phases:
Zombie Player plays Zombies (monsters creatures minions)
Plant player can play Plants, Tricks and Environments (Monsters, Spells and lane specific modifiers)
Zombie player can play Tricks and Environments
and combat resolves automatically from the heights lane to the water lane.
Zombies creatures were designed to be more proactive and larger since the plant player is fully reactive but at the same time their spells tend to be proactive and stronger than zombies because zombies get the last say before combat.
There's no mana cap so on turn 99 you'd get 99 mana but games are so fast it'd never come up.
Every hero/class? has a suite of 1 unique and 3 less unique but powerful cards that all cost 1 the 2nd tier have 2 cost worth of value and their signature is ~3 mana worth of value.
You start with 1 randomly and the only way you get them is by taking damage, you have 8 bars of block whenever you take damage it charges 1-3 randomly and if an attack would charge your block 8 you take no damage and can either cast that suler power then and there or add it to your hand and play it later.
If I had to rework this game I'd let players pay 2/3 mana to remove 1 of their super blocks to add the 2nd tier/signatures to hand and reduce their cost to 0 so you can trade survivability for the most efficient cards in the game and at the same time make super block a 4 block meter and each attack charge by 1 since rolling multiple 1s or the opponent rolling double 3s and a 2 feels bad since on average you should get a block in every 4th hit
It still has that hearthstone rng element but they're usually weak enough to be casual and most competitive cards have no or very predictable rng
I believe the most elegant solution to the mana/cost problem is the one from AGot LCG, in which you play a small secondary deck from which you choose a card each turn. That card then decide what are your ressources (gold) for the turn, as well as the impact of your attacks, and other secondary effects. This lets you choose wether you want a high ressources turn where you are going to be somewhat passive and setup for a more impactfull turn next.
Chaotic: plays and feels nothing like the show
very nice video, i liked it a lot (i maybe would like to see LoR but the only problem i can think of rn is that they put all my decks randomly into wild format xd)
Good video! I enjoyed it, a shame so many comments are so annoying. I think it was a good analysis for a short time and a good overview
You forget that most spells/traps have the basic restriction of once per turn and you can only set up to 5 traps..
We've tried to improve upon magics mana system by having 2 decks. 1 for RAM (resource) and 1 for everything else. Players draw 2 cards per turn and can pick which deck they draw from. To a lot of people it sounds like too much consistency but its becomes really strategic what deck you draw from and when. Early game is fast out the gate, but late game also doesn't slow to a crawl because you can shift your draw focus. I think it's one of the stronger systems in our game. Curious what you think! :)
The other comment talking about Yu-Gi-Oh! seems to have totally missed the point, which is that the game is primarily about fielding resources so that they can be used. Regardless of whether they are setting 5 trap cards in Stun/Labrynth or building a full Adamancipator Negate board, or even FTKing, the core problem is still that YGO is a game where the first player has an extreme advantage thanks to being able to set up interactions first. I think you nailed this exactly, regardless of how they manifest. After all, you did literally mention the whole thing about being able to special summon, activate spells, etc, and those are the core part of the game.
Love these videos!
This was a fun video. I played both Magic and Yu-Gi-Oh, but I always return to Yu-Gi-Oh. One day I'll try the Pokemon TCG as well
I am developing a card game. That doesn't allow drawing a bunch of cards to be a problem. You are limited by the number of cards put into play. The more you put into play, the less you draw.
I went with a standard deck format. Every player has the same cards in their deck. You have dice to roll to trigger effects on the cards in play. That combined with which cards are drawn adds to the randomness. There are only 5 different functions, which narrows the play style methods one chooses. However, there are enough cards that share a strategy to keep the probabilities for what you want.
The who goes first issue may be troublesome for experienced players. I have considered making rules that have players take each phase of their turns at the same time. It will slow the game down somewhat. Each player does a step, then proceeds to do the next, then the next. The winning of a player most often happens at the end of the turn anyway. There is an edge case where it can happen earlier in the turn. Yet, a player has plenty of turns to prepare for it.
Crazy
i'd argue that the reason why hearthstone has so much rng in its card design is that it's fighting the fact that its base ruleset makes it a very consistent game. Your mana count ramps up evenly each turn and you only have 30 cards in a deck meaning you generally are playing through the majority of it.
Dude, in Yu-Gi-Oh you can special summon as many monsters of any level you want in 1 turn. The restriction is 1 normal summon/set of any level per turn, with higher level monsters needing tributes.
Damn remember tributes 😂
@@namecannotbeblank8920 hahahaha
Tributes eventually got buffed like crazy too@@namecannotbeblank8920
That's litterally what he said...
@@namecannotbeblank8920 I often tribute monsters - my opponent's. Kaiju! Muhahahaha! 😈
Dude please slow down and breathe. You have a great voice and amazing points but it feels so rushed I'm focusing on that way more.
Don't listen to this guy. Half of tcg content creators talk slow asf and I have to listen on 1.5 speed. If people think you're too fast then they can slow down the speed of the video.
@@FumBungo You can speed up stuff just fine, but if you slow it down then it gets super warped. A more important thing is that he's super out of breath all the time, which makes his voice sound strained as hell and it's just generally a bad habit that causes unnecessary wear if you do it for years.
But also, how selfish do you have to be to say "I'm not listening to stuff on 1.5x. you have to listen to it on 0.75 because of my personal preference"? you really think that's an alright thing to say?
I mean yes that is fair?
Both are opinions on how fast someone should speak, not necessarily better than the other. How do you complain someone is policing your want to him to be slower by saying that is an opinion without lookong at yourself.
Also I am pretty sure the "breathe in" is not really an "out of breathe" thing. That is a thing you will see in any type of presenting (and singing). Usually people will go out of their way to edit or use a mic that removes that.
Honestly, I really feel you shouldn't be that annoyed by simple breathing in. You seem to think going slower would fix it but you still have the breathe in between sentences, all that does is make the video longer and spread out the breathe ins.
Anyway a good example of this being normal is "chocolate rain" you can literally see him have to turn away from the mic to do a quick breathe in.
@@TheKastellan I want the video to be longer. If you want it shorter use 1.5x. but right now it sounds like he's trying to suffocate himself to get sentences out quickly. It's common with people that aren't confident behind a microphone and it causes videos with lots of information, like this one, to be hard to follow.
My issue isn't with the breaths being heard but that he's going as fast as he can which is making him more out of breath than if he just took his time.
@@FumBungo I'm so glad someone said it lol
On the Yu-Gi-Oh! section:
Going second still isn’t too fun a good deal of the time, since unless your opponent opened really badly & their hand dies to a single hand trap like Ash Blossom or you’re playing a ridiculously well-made going second deck which just doesn’t give a single shit about what they’ve done, they can still set up a decent board with various cards & tactics such as simply putting most of their monsters in Defense Position to avoid Lightning Storm, and while you can still potentially out them with a card like Raigeki, they could have a monster negate it or even use something like the recently released Iron Thunder or an older card like Solemn Strike/Judgment/etc.
Pretty much the same applies to Evenly Matched, and this is ignoring the fact the guy who just went full combo can _also_ still use some counter cards like Ash Blossom or even Maxx "C" if you’re playing in the OCG or on Master Duel.
Not trying to say the segment is terrible or you’re wrong or anything, but just wanted to chime in with the fact going second can still be a massive pain even if you run something like 3x each of Raigeki, Lightning Storm, Evenly Matched, Dark Ruler No More, etc., but can also be massively rewarding if you can do it. Just pointing out the fact Yu-Gi-Oh! is still a pretty flawed game I still enjoy, but also the fact I’m not nearly qualified enough to single-handedly solve all its problems. Although personally I’m a little miffed when I sit there & let my opponent do all their stuff after opening no disruptions just for them to quit before I get to do a single thing after they see me drop a Lightning Storm + Forbidden Droplet… win game, feel nothing.…
Or you can just play a brain dead going second tenpai deck, god I won't miss current Yu-Gi-Oh
This channel is gonna get big.
Love your videos!
Regarding mana screw, one idea would be to make your energy generating cards, in addition to more interesting, also not something you're expected to play every turn. My current iteration of a TCG test design has a "corruption" mechanic where expanding your territory worsens the output quality of all of your existing territory and the new territory. To remove corruption from a territory, it has to tap, but this competes with actually using it, and so the result is that you need to carefully balance how much territory you add if you want your economy to look anything like reasonable.
Iono is an even better catch-up supporter. It doesn't shuffle the hand into the deck, then draw. You shuffle your hand, put it to the bottom of your decks then draw. So if your opponent has a very good hand, they no longer have that hand, and its at the bottom, with no way to draw them without shuffling.
Final Round Fighting Card Game has a different approach to TCG. Life-decking with a secondary deck made up of cards lost from the primary deck being the source for cards drawn, and drawing as many as nine cards during the players turn solve some of the issues around card bottlenecks. It does borrow a little with mana-cost like effects, but only with the finisher moves, and even then it worked in a versatility that makes for a choice between exact and at-any-cost.
Flesh and Blood feels to me like solved a lot of issues TCGs fall into balance wise. Everytime I've played with friends and strangers at the LGS it felt like games were always down to the wire and that felt really good. The only issue I found which is pretty common across card games is that meta cards are usually in the higher tiers of rarity and get price crept super hard
Lorcana is a nice balance between games IMO. It uses the MDFC mechanic of Magic and turns almost every card into a playable "land" (aka Ink). Some of the stronger cards can't be played as ink to help balance them.
I feel like for Pokémon, not just mentioning card advantage for comeback but cards like Counter Catcher, Reversal Energy, and Defiance Band is key. Certain decks like to take advantage of these by even knocking out of their own Pokémon early (Dusknoir currently) and then being able to counter KO something that gives 2 prizes.
About Hearthstone flaw In board games we call it input randomness and output randomness. Input randomness is before decision(discover mechanic) and output randomness is after(Implosion). Obviously one is better than the other
Rep from another trading card game, Redemption.
Worst part of playing Redemption is something called "soul drought". In Redemption, you use your Heroes to defeat your opponent's Evil Characters, and when you win, your opponent has to surrender a card to you from their field of play called a Lost Soul. So if your opponent doesn't draw into their Lost Souls, you can't rescue them, and since you win the game by rescuing five Lost Souls, you're basically stuck doing nothing.
Redemption will turn 30 years old next July, and a few things have been done over the years to try to address soul drought. There are now a fair amount of splashable cards you can fit into most decks that have "soul gen" abilities, cards that will either play Lost Souls directly from your opponent's deck or increase the likelihood of your opponent drawing into them. As good as some of these cards can be, you still need to draw into them, and there aren't a ton of them to begin with, so soul drought is still the absolute worst thing about playing Redemption.
My solutions to these problems.
Magic: Do like in Inscryption and give player to decks to draw from. One with regular cards and one with mana cards. Give player a choice to draw from either deck but not both.
Yu-Gi-Oh: Either do a mana system like in Hearthstone or add better punishments for going first and/or rewards for going second. Or simply balance the game so you can't win in the first 2-3 turns.
Pokemon: Create an archetype focused around losing. If enough cards supporting such archetype are printed to make it viable it will cause the opponents to take a second guess whether to attack for a prize card or wait a turn for better opportunity.
Hearthstone: Tbh this one needs complete rework. On one hand RNG is what breaks the game. On the other it's what makes this game fun and makes it feel balanced. Even with the shitty deck if you are lucky enough then you have a chance to win against ranked player. That feeling is hard to come by unless you either keep the RNG or make vital cards in each set easier to obtain.
I would solve it by adding more adventure expansions where you are guaranteed to receive all cards in the set including legendaries. I would also make them cheaper, make few free adventures for beginners and make some of them very hard so the players must have some skill to obtain cards from them.
I played Shadowverse for a couple of years and I liked it more than Hearthstone, which I played a bit beforehand. What I didn't like too much about shadowverse was that the deck building was quite restrictive in the rotation format, because not too many cards were available at one point in time. The other format, where all cards are allowed, was too crazy and fast for me to enjoy.
This makes me really interested in what other people would think the “problem” of my card game is since it’s very different from all of these games
I guess the best way to describe my card game is imagine if YuGiOh didn’t have an extra deck and you could normal summon level 5+ or 9+ monsters but only if it’s turn 2 or 3 of the game. (And if YuGiOh monsters were actually balanced to have the stronger monsters be higher level and the lower level monster be weak)
You are on a 3 turn timer before you can use your strongest cards but other than having 1-2 dead card in hand on turn one, you really can just pop off. Spam the board with weak monster, hell maybe don’t even put any higher level monsters in your deck at all. Or only put higher level monsters and play defensive spells so you don’t die early. Do whatever you want. Monsters in my game can also only deal damage to the player equal to their level (Monsters range from 1-3) so turn one even if your opponent spams the board and wambo combos youre 100% gonna be fine
You may not even feel the need to do anything in response. Just pass turn waiting to summon your big level 3 monsters to crush everything
But the gap between level 1, 2, and 3 monsters are balanced enough where having bricks you can’t use until turn 3 feel worth it without being instant wins against people who want to play only level 1 monsters
Does such a leveling system make a game too slow? It’s not like anyone is forced to use it
I think the manabased cardgames have a way bigger fundamental weakness and that is having mana at all.
Mana funnels the entire card design into a scale of cost vs effect with a heavy favor towards lower costs.
So the powercreep that these games experience is almost always incredibly mindnumbing and boring they just start printing 3 drops that cost 2 mana and eventually 4 drops that cost 1 mana.
The card design never fundamentally changes because you will still have 1 mana at turn 1 and so on.
As the game naturally accelerates with the printing of more efficient cards it the game very quickly falls apart and requires outside interference in the form of rotation.
Games like Yugioh do not have this problem which is why they can avoid rotating as the card design isnt constraint by arbitrary resources.
Mana just isn't a good system for a game that expects to release many sets and is much better at home at in a cardgame that is meant to be complete at release.
Stuff like Hearthstone or Shadowverse have incredible core sets that then got ruined by further expansions accelerating the game so that carefully balanced mechanics broke under the added speed.
You should have mentioned Digimon's cost system, which I think is very elegant. It's a pendulum that starts at 0, and playing a card moves it a number of steps equal to that card's cost. Once it goes past 0, it's your opponent's turn.
So, in Pokemon the "snowball" effect is greatly minimized when actual competitive players build their decks. It's mitigated by recovery cards like Super Rod, Nightly Stretcher, Lana's Aid, etc. In the standard format, any type of Card in the game can be recovered if need be. Furthermore, most decks simply play more copies of cards to mitigate or delay the need to use recovery cards. Also, I think Mew ex was a terrible example in the use case, as it is known for being a 2 Prize card liability that is easy to KO. It is a frequent target of Boss's Orders and the like. What the free retreat cost usually does in practice is bypass energy acceleration effects only applying to benched Pokemon. For example, Electric Generator or Dark Patch only attach energy to your benched Pokemon. So youd use the Mew to bypass this by pivoting after accelerating the energy.
Some of the content was interesting, but as I've seen some other commenters say, the speaker talks way, way too fast. They really need to slow down.
Another issue, which is partially due to the above, is the very noticeable breathing. If someone is talking very quickly, it means they're not breathing at all while doing so. And when they inevitably need to breathe, the breath is therefore bigger and louder than normal.
I really like your videos and I think the editing and mic quality is quite alright for someone your size, but you need to get a bit more natural with recording your voice. You are prolly nervous, so you're rushing your speech and that makes you have to gasp for air way too often, so just relax. You could also try to cut out the breathing but that breathing, but that might make the audio sound choppy