I love how Sorcery Contested Realm does it with a 40 card 'Spellbook' deck and a 20 card 'Atlas' deck of your resource cards. Essentially you have the best of both worlds between a 40 and 60 card deck and you can choose which deck to draw from each turn. They also limit the # of copies of each card by rarity: 1 Unique, 2 Elite, 3 Exceptional, and 4 Ordinary.
I'll be honest, the limit based on rarity seems like a very bad idea - it limits how cards can be reprinted, since they'll always have to match their first printed rarity.
@@AtomTomZeitalter I hate the concept of changing rarity so that's fine with me. It makes it easier to get a playset of the more expensive cards. It also adds a lot of complexity because higher rarity cards can be more "broken" as they are essentially restricted like in Legacy MTG but you are paying the trade off of consistency with them.
@@TuxThinks At the same time, Commons can be just as broken, if not more broken than higher rarities. You can't find all possibilities during playtesting, Multiple cards, that were originally printed at common are restricted in Legacy. Examples include: Gush, Lotus Petal or Brain Storm. There is a reason, why Pauper decks in MtG (a format restricted to only cards that were at some time printed at common) can beat Modern decks.
Haven't played it yet, but Sorcery is a gorgeous-looking game. It is interesting that most games with extra decks (creatures or lands), still tend to fall in the 40-60 range whether you count the extra deck or ignore it. I don't love limiting by rarity, though, as it tends to just make the game more swingy - like when one player draws their one-of Pot of greed and/or Raigeki, and the other doesn't. And it doesn't fully stop decks from gradually becoming all Unique or Elite cards, it just slows it down a bit.
The draw power of card effects also has a major interaction with deck-size. For example, in Pokémon, the draw and search power of cards is much higher than all other major TCGs to the point where running out of resources in deck becomes a common way to lose the game (not strictly decking out-although that is also a way to lose-but simply running out of options after not planning far enough ahead). Most Pokémon decks have poor ratios of consistency cards to resources because they need more resources, so if you could play 70-80 cards in a deck, you would.
Pokemon's card economy is kind of wild. Tons of card draw and consistency, but the rules act as a kind of natural floodgate to keep everything under control. Definitely an interesting game system!
Pokemon is like modern yugioh, but the rules and "mana system" keep the degeneracy at bay, while also not having a strong graveyard recursion plan to get extra resources
@@tcgacademiait's also the fact Pokemons interaction is almost non-existent, and I don't just mean disruption, pokemon cards don't really have things like 'enter the battlefield' so the combo potential is super low besides energies
Yep. something like Pot of Greed in Yu-Gi-oh is probably the single strongest draw card printed in any TCG ever, even with a general three card limit. if it were legal to have 3 of them, you basically start playing with a 34 card deck instead of a 40 card one, raising the overall percentage value of each card from 2.5% to 2.94%, vastly increasing how consistent a deck is. as for something like MTG, it's been _relatively_ balanced by the fact that drawing two cards has almost always been a 2+1 affair. two mana + one more mana two mana + sac a creature two mana + 1/10th of ypur life total (assuming 20 life) two mana + discard a card or even one mana + discard two cards. cards that went lower than that have almost always been HIDEOUSLY broken in the metagame...Nectopotence anyone?
@@meepilee7991 Maybe I'm not understanding correctly, but the Pokémon does have come into play effects. The most relevant one in the current game is Lumineon V
Also I was wondering if youve played any ccg or games with more extreme deck sizes and how they affect things. Hearthstone has 30 with a unique deck out punishment while something like Eternal has a massive 75 card deck with 25 min for lands.
@@TempestDacine Thanks! I can't think of any off the top of my head with more extreme sizes, outside the obligatory Commander format. I feel like there are some factors that could make going above or below that range work out, but they're pretty specific and most games are going to just be better off sticking in the standard range. For Hearthstone, for example, I've heard it generally tries to have faster games than most other tcgs - so in that case a smaller deck size is less of an issue.
Another indicator I use is how much of the deck you're expected to see in a given game. Magic's starting hand is 7 and it lasts about 6-8 turns depending on the format and matchup, so you see about 15 cards out of 60. Digimon's starting hand is 5 and it lasts about 4-6 turns, but you draw everytime you digivolve, which is most cards you play, so you see maybe 20 cards out of 50. This can give you an indication of how much variance you have (in some games, you may never see a particular card) and give you some feedback on how many searchers and card draw you might want.
Good point! I definitely simplified the variance a little, but the size of the starting hand definitely plays a role in how much of the deck you see, and what size of deck will work for the game.
@@ItsPForPea And the 2-3 turns includes your opponent's turn. Yeah, the game is degenerate. It wasn't like that which is why it has 40-60 cards (Used to be 40+ but 2 german trolls went to a tournament with a 2222 deck).
@@N12015IIRC those two were judges, and they saw the lack of upper deck size as a potential source of issues, so they pulled the stunt to grab attention to it and fix it. And it worked.
@@ItsPForPea Yu-Gi-Oh! is a bit of a strange case because every deck can tutor for exactly what they need multiple times. I think there's zero expectation that you'll draw into anything other than your combo starter.
I'm not sure if other games have this, but in MTG the 60 card deck size is a MINIMUM. That means you can indeed have more if you wish. There are two cards that I know of that reference deck size in Magic: Yorion, Sky Nomad and Battle of Wits. Yorion actually makes it a requirement that your deck has at minimum 20 more cards than the deck minimum, so 80 in most formats. Battle of Wits is a card that says "At the beginning of your upkeep (one of the beginning of the turn phases) if you have 200 or more cards in your library (deck), you win the game." I've seen a Battle of Wits deck. ITS MASSIVE and the consistency was AWFUL. But it was funny, so I respect it.
Yu-Gi-Oh! also has 40 as a minimum, but after some guy abused the absence of a higher bond ( aka the image where two people carry a big deck at 1:22 in this video ), a limit of 60 was put in place. Most players stay at 40, for consistency issues, but some strategies work best with more cards, like ones based on That Grass Looks Greener ( mills card from the top your deck to the graveyard until your deck is the same size as your opponent's ).
@@draghettis6524 MTG's max decksize rule is simply "can the average person shuffle unassisted quickly" with a "You'll know it when you see it" advice for judges. So while on paper the ultra thick deck could be submitted, you can be told to fuck off regardless and that counts as a legal enforcement lf the rules.
My favorite deck I ever played was around 100 cards that milled itself and put out super trample creatures based off of my graveyard + life regen based off of my graveyard. Could face-tank everything without blocking and swing to wipe or win. It wasn't terribly inconsistent either. But I don't recommend decks that large...
Ricard Garfield, creator of MtG, was tasked with creating a TCG for Battletech [Mechwarrior]. he came up with a game with a MAXIMUM deck size of 60 cards and 5x copies of cards in your deck. There were no life point totals. Damage was dealt to the deck in the form of cards that you "scrap" from the top of your "stockpile" into the "scrapyard." You "life total" was literally the size of your deck. Apparently there were some meta decks that ran 40 or so cards with 5x copies of fast and overly efficient Mechs and Pilots who could get out early in a swarm and deal massive damage that having a smaller deck size didn't hurt you as you would win before it was a problem and your smaller deck size meant increased consistency. Those mechs and pilots would later get banned as they completely warped the format of the game.
Interesting! I didn't realize Garfield worked on the Mechwarrior TCG. He's definitely a great game designer, it's interesting seeing all the different mechanics he's played with over the years. Does not surprise me at all to learn he's designed a game using a life deck.
@yurisei6732 - Maybe in other games, but the lifedecking didn't kill the game. There were 5 expansions [or 4 expansions and the core set?], and it was a profitable game, but wasn't pulling the margins of MtG and Pokemon. If I recall, WotC canned it before they sold themselves to Hasbro. It was just a niche within a niche. You pretty much need to already be a Battletech fan to want to play it, as it doesn't directly draw you in otherwise. There is still a community of players, including a subset that meticulously makes custom cards adapted to the curent story and newer mechs desugned within the balance of the game.
@@yurisei6732 Just because it failed in other games doesn't mean it was a failure in this game. It is a flavor win for the setting. You are the one who has failed to justify why you might think it was bad for Battletech.
While it's not a paper game, I play a lot of deckbuilder roguelikes and they usually give a standard deck size of about 15-20 cards for a "standard" build with the risk-reward factor of needing to pick up a card that might be a brick if you don't get a good run but could also be vital to a specific strategy. They also often will let you go as low as 1 if you get specific RNG. Because they're designed to cycle through your deck for specific cards, they have small decks and a ton of draw power (with usual card game roguelike rule being "discard your hand and draw 5 every turn" but also you see some utterly insane draw power in the genre). It would be a potential design space if someone wanted to make a game with a smaller deck to take that sort of inspiration to make it function, but at the same time the reason why roguelikes can get away with such small decks is because they aren't using a pre-constructed mechanic - if you could build a deck of 20 cards that the player can freely choose at the start of a run in most roguelikes you'd probably need it to be bigger just to prevent people from abusing a broken combo. The smaller deck size in a roguelike to that extent seems like it's so that the uncertainty aspect comes from the deckbuilding process rather than a game designed for constructed as a format where the uncertainty being loaded into the full game is more vital. I think smaller deck size has some risk of making abusable strategies more consistent but really in most TCGs (not really as much in roguelikes) more than a small deck size, high amounts of searching is more likely to lead to the power curve being way out of whack compared to anything else, which is probably why most newer games have shifted away from it in favor of a more simple "look at x cards from the top of deck and add one applicable to hand if possible, then put the rest on the bottom." On top of searching requiring more time to be spent shuffling the deck). Which is kinda ironic that a mechanic that is easier to include in a digital game tends to not be very powerful in games that use that digital format but in paper games where it's an inconvenience it's generally one of the more broken mechanics.
Yeah I believe the reason rogue like deck is usually 15 to 20 cards is because most of the cards are unique and each game is meant to be completed relatively quickly when compared to a full TCG game TCG‘s usually expected to have full plays sense of your core strategy, and expect their games to last from 5 to 20 minutes unlike rogue lakes that benefit from not having complete play sets and expect you to finish each opponent encounter quickly to get onto the next opponent encounter Of course there are exceptions Slay the spire has most of your deck be strike and defense and card apocalypse has games that goes Way past five minutes easily
Deckbuilders and the like can get away with much smaller decks since so much randomness comes into how the decks are constructed in the first place. It's a bit interesting the Keyforge uses 36 card decks, just a bit below what is normal in TCGs, and has a very generous card economy (draw to 6 each turn). So there's definitely some interesting design space for smaller decks, even if they wouldn't necessarily work as a full constructed TCG.
Also should point out, Yugioh's *Minimum* deck size is 40. You can actually play between 40 to 60 cards, plus a 15 card extra deck and a 15 card side deck
I've compared this aspect and very glad you put those two main consideration, as they are not the most obvious but very impacting aspect on gameplay experience
Vampire the Eternal Struggle is a very interesting case here. A VtES deck has 60 to 90 cards, but what makes it interesting is that there is no limit to how many copies your deck may have per card, and this system makes some decks want to be small and some want to be large. For simplicity, I'll pretend your deck is made up just of 2 cards and those are spread 50/50 among your deck. In a 60 card deck, you'd have 30 of card A and 30 of card B. Now if you draw card A, your next draw has a 30/59 chance of being card B. In contrast, in a 90 card deck, after drawing card A, your next hard has a 45/89 chance of being B. So in decks where you need both A and B together, you want small deck size, whereas in decks where you want your draw chance for each card to stay more or less the same as the game goes on, you want a larger deck. Also how fast you cycle through your deck depends highly on the deck too, because you redraw a card any time you play a card, so your hand stays at 7 cards all the time. small decks that play a lot of cards per turn would run out of deck very quickly. And lastly, when your deck runs cards that you don't want to draw and would much rather get via searchers, you would want a larger deck to minimize your chance of drawing those cards. I wanted to mention this game because usually in TCGs, the minimum deck size is also the only viable deck size.
That is very interesting! I've heard of VTES before, but I hadn't heard that particular aspect. Having no maximum does sound a bit risky in terms of balancing, sine any unbalanced cards will have a much higher impact on the game, but it does make deckbuilding really interesting.
Yu-Gi-Oh also has the Speed Duel/Duel Links format, where the minimum deck size is 20 and the maximum deck size is 30, with the maximum amount of copies of a card still being 3. also the starting life points are halved from 8000 to 4000
Its definitely a unique case compared to the games mentioned here. Snap games always end on turn 6 (unless you run Magic or you get Limbo location). You tend to draw most of your deck each game. Also the decks are only allowed 1 copy of a card per deck. So a smaller number makes sense. You probably couldn't get away with a 12 card deck and 3 card starting hand (plus draw) in a game that goes longer than 6-7 turns. You would just run out of things to do and the game would likely stall out.
One that I find interesting is Chaotic. You have monsters and equipment in play at the start of the game, you have a certain amount of spells in hand, but your deck consists of attacks. You always have 20 cards and 20 points of cards with 1 point cards being the basic attacks, there are attacks up to 5 point which needs to be offset by putting it very weak 0 cost cards.
I wanna dedicate this comment to make a special mention of Sakura Arms: only 7 card decks, and you get to draw through them multiple times per match. But they're made from a 14 card pool based on the characters you select, and also you have 3 Ultimate cards sitting aside face down (out of a pool of 8), so there's quite a lot of choice before the match and within a match. It is definitely more of a boardgame/LCG because rather than use random card packs, characters are sold in groups of 6 (at least in the latest english edition by L99, in japan maybe they sell the characters one per box who knows). The point being, you don't need a lot to have a fun, interesting game where the balance is tight and different strategies play differently and feel differently. Just 7 cards of deck and 3 ults on the side is more than enough (provided you have good core rules and ways to interact with the opponent without using the cards)
Definitely sounds interesting! And yeah, it make sense that it would work more like a board game or LCG, but there's definitely a lot of interesting design space for card games with smaller deck sizes!
Clicked on this video to make this comment! Sakura Arms is a beautiful game and the tiny deck size does a ton of interesting stuff. Even with only 14 options, it can be wickedly difficult picking what to cut. Since decks are so small, you can build your deck directly in response to your opponent's chosen characters, which leads to lots of interesting decision making around matchups. And the strategy considerations with shuffling go deep. Do I take damage to shuffle early, knowing I have a 1 in 3 chance to draw the card I want? Do I hold onto this card for the right moment, even though I'm about to shuffle and it'll miss the shuffle if it's in my hand? So many tough decisions in every game trace directly back to the seven-card deck. And it makes the game really accessible, too! Just an absolute gem of design.
@@BLiZIHGUH I'm officially sold - I'm bookmarking Sakura Arms to pick up. The gameplay sounds really neat and focused, and I do really love games that work with small deck sizes. Thanks for the recommendation!
Something I'm curious about is deck size variance. Is it better to have a range and let players do what they will with it (Yugioh's 40-60), codify a standard size (Pokemon's 60), or just have a minimum (MtG's max deck size is "whatever you can comfortably shuffle")?
I'm not sure - personally I prefer just having a set number, since it minimizes the number of unexpected things that can happen with variable deck sizes, but Magic's relative freedom in deck size is also nice, even if almost all decks fall into the minimum anyway. I think it depends on the game, really.
Personally I prefer a min deck size, but in practice a min and max deck size is most often ideal for deck building creativity. Think of it like this: if a game has a min and max deck size the deck builder when building a deck including cardsthat either want more of certain cards to function, or the more of particular cards u have access to the bigger the payoff, has to weigh the prose and cons of how many cards they want to run. Do they want to run the min to increase consistency or have more cards to maximize the payoff. And if a card can and does want more cards to increase it consistency or something and there is some groups of cards that can each be used to get said card, do they want to run more of said groups of cards to get that card at the cost of the consistency of other unrelated cards, or do they want to add in more of those groups of cards to having more chances to c the card they want. This allows for more deckbuilding philosophies to form in the game and makes for greater variance in deck builds. Altho I personally do think the max deck size in yugioh is rather tight for some decks, maybe 80 MD and 30 ED, I like the option to throw in 1 additional 3of that doesn’t fit in 40 cards but is a huge help in consistency.
I’d say the range style of deck limit is better overall, since it allows for deck variety and variance. If you have a strict limit on how many cards can be played, it could limit the strategies, but too much freedom could lead to shenanigans. I mean, yugioh USED to only have a minimum of 40 cards, with no max deck size limit for a good while. Then two guys made a 2222 card deck that needed a special apparatus to carry it and brought it to an event with the sole purpose of shuffling it over and over again. The 60 card limit was put in place not long after.
In theory a range is better for creativity, but in practice people end up almost always treating the minimum as an absolute number to increase the chances of drawing what you need. A larger deck may be tempting to run since you'd have more options, but all that really does is make it harder to draw your key cards. So I'd say there's not really a difference - the minimum of a range will be treated as a fixed number anyway. The only exception to this is if you have a "life deck" system like the original DBZ TCG, where damage is handled by milling. In that case you might want to have a bigger deck.
Most people will stick to the minimum size anyway. That said: • A range is better if you want to avoid people bringing comedically large decks they can't shuffle, or making mill strategies miserable by including more cards. • No maximum is better for designs like Yorion and Battle of Wits, which are fun but also extremely niche.
One of the games I've designed actually only has a 20 card deck for multiple reasons, but because the playset size is only two, it actually has the same level of consistency as Wixoss!
That reminds me of YuGiOh Duel Links. While it has the three card maximum normal for YuGiOh, it uses a 20 card deck, and outside of your combo starters you actually don't want to run more than two copies of a card.
@@VestedUTuber Duel links (and Hearthstone, to a lesser extent) are interesting outliers here. It seems like they work because the games are noticeably faster than standard tcgs, but I am kind of curious how good the gameplay is. If it's just as good, or nearly as good as more standard deck-size games, it does open some options in how to approach deck size.
@@tcgacademia I've played both Hearthstone and Duel Links, albeit early in their releases, and at the time they felt really well-paced. Duel-links' pacing actually kinda reminded me of earlier Yu-Gi-Oh formats, albeit with better consistency due to more modern cards existing and shorter duels due to lower life point amounts. However, as you'd probably expect, both games have experienced significant power creep since then and have sped up quite a bit. I think a game with smaller deck sizes can definitely work but power creep needs to be kept in check even more to maintain the same game pace.
@@VestedUTuber That's kind of what I figured - power creep seems like an even bigger risk in a shorter game. I know a lot of people really enjoyed Duel Links when it first came out, though.
You completely missed the mechanic of Pokemon's TCG where 6 cards are taken out of your deck for Prize Cards. Losing 1/10th of your deck does have a factor in how a deck plays, since you can't use the cards that are prized without either taking knock outs or using cards to specifically swap the cards in your prizes.
It's not exactly unique to Pokémon since some TCGs including Duel Masters, WIXOSS, and Digimon have similar systems that withhold certain cards from your deck at the beginning of the game to track your life (and WIXOSS is this channel's main game I guess). While it makes it impossible to search for certain cards, Prize cards and other similar mechanics don't affects the odds of drawing a card (just think of the cards as being the very bottom 6 cards of your deck). In TCGs where you don't have the ability to go through your entire deck, the mechanic doesn't impact the way the game plays very much. In Pokémon, the cards you can't access by searching and going through your deck could screw you over since you usually expect to go through your entire deck in the first few turns
I don't mention it specifically, but it is part of the second consideration - it is definitely important to think about! I mention Weiss Schwarz pulling cards from the deck to track damage, and there's not much of a difference between pulling them out during the game as damage and pulling them out at the start of the game as life. And like Chiffonaise mentioned, it doesn't actually impact percentages of drawing them - it can screw up searches, but that's more a gameplay consideration, and I don't think it impacts deck size much.
You can actually learn a few things by looking at extreme outliers. For example, Marvel Snap uses 12 card decks with no duplicates. As a consequence, variance of card draw is extremely low and every game you are expected to draw at least 75% of your deck. And each card has a chance of 1/3 to start in your opening hand. So what they did is add other sources of randomness in form of locations that affect both players and are only revealed as the game progresses.
Another thing to consider is how long your game is, and what the average amount of cards drawn during a single game is. Or, more simply, how many cards in your deck will you not see/will be a complete non-factor in a given game? If you play a game where you're likely to get 20+ cards into your deck, that's very different than a game where you get 10~ cards in, even if you have the same deck and playset size. The bigger the portion of the deck that goes unseen in a single individual match is, the more likely it is you don't see a single individual card. Games which have larger "unused" deck portions have to have more generalist card design about accruing incremental advantage rather than pivotal blowout cards, because of the greater chance of not seeing any particular card. If you fail to see any copy of a card in 40% of matches, then you cannot create a game where decks are contingent on seeing a specific card to win.
I'm making a card game with my wife. Deck size was one of the first things we settled on. Being a 20 card deck and only 1 copy per card gives it a 5% chance to draw a specific card. Thanks for the video, I hadn't considered the draw percentage before now.
A lot of the time it's just going to come down to what feels right while you're playtesting - but it is good to keep in mind! Good luck with your game!
That's a good topic, although it's also a bit intimidating! There's a lot of different approaches different games have tried over the years, but it's consistently a very difficult thing to balance.
I played a 20 card singleton game. Each turn you shuffle your deck grave and hand draw up to 5. In this game you had 2 actions instead of mana system. You can either play 2 creatures or play 1 creature evolve 1 creature or evolve 2 creatures. This game pushed you to evolve creature because after an evolved creature dies, the evolved form is shuffled back in the deck. You sacrifice tempo for value type of gsme. Even though it's a 20 card deck. With this shuffling mechanic it felt like a 60 card deck because you generally saw each card 3 times in a game.
That actually sounds like a really interesting system! I'm not sure how well it would work as a tcg, purely from the economics side, since having to collect 3 or 4 copies of a card for a playset will sell a lot more boosters, but it does sound like a really good way to make a smaller deck size work in a tcg-style game.
@@tcgacademia it was a video game tcg. Frozenshard is the company name. They actual had 5 tcg I was competitive in 3 of them. All had the evolve and shuffle mechanic. One of them a war tcg. Had a 3 grid for melee soldier and a second 3 grid behind it for ranged soldiers. Let's say I battle my 5/12 to your 10/10 then my 6/8 archer behind my 5/12 would do his 6 damage to your troop. Without receiving damage back like the foot soldier. In order to damage an archer you need to clear the soldier in front of him. That version had a 4 action system. Instead of evolve this version called it ranking up as in the military ranks.
@@Serjohn Video game-based systems do seem to have a slightly more forgiving environment than paper distribution. It definitely leads to some interesting mechanics and experimentation.
one interesting, definitely unintentional, impact of magics 60 card deck is that it creates a big gap in consistency between formats. standard has pretty weak card selection and card advantage, creating a higher variance game compared to eternal formats. you can see this most clearly when looking at mana bases,an average standard deck runs on 23 lands and an average legacy runs 17
I did that caveman spongebob meme irl when I saw that. Still go :o when I see stuff like that outside of vtuber spaces despite the literal millions of subs across all their channels
One of my favorite games, Star Trek 2nd edition, has a minimum draw deck of 35 cards with a max of 3 of each card and a 20 card dilemma pile (to try to stop you opponent from completing missions). The interesting thing is that the size of the draw deck is seldom 35 cards in a finnished deck. In day 2 of the worlds from 2023, the draw deck size varied from 42 to 63 cards. I have myself played borg decks with close to 100 cards with success in tournaments. I really like that optimal deck size is different dependent on the deck you are playing. It adds another layer to deck construction, to try to figure out how many cards should I put in this deck. And it also makes the games more varied in a very positive way.
One thing that I've seen is that when you have a minimum and maximum deck size instead of a set size, people will almost invariably build their deck to the minimum size, no more, because it increases the chances of drawing what you need. In Yu-Gi-Oh, for example, only VERY search-heavy toolbox decks will run anything more than 40 cards.
Unless you're running That Grass Looks Greener (For those who don't know, it's a Yu-Gi-Oh card that, if you have more cards in your deck than your opponent does, mills your deck until it's the same size as theirs, so people using it will run the maximum deck size of 60 cards to maximise its benefit)
Very true - it's why I mentioned the deck sizes in the video as the minimum, rather than as a range. There are some interesting situations where players play more than the minimum, though, like in DBZ, where the deck is also you life, and some decks want the consistency while some just want more life.
I like Commander a lot as a format, but I don't know if it would work in a game just starting out. It really benefits from 30 years of cards with similar effects. If you wanna discard and draw, or sacrifice your creatures to do damage, or whatever else, there's going to be like 50 different cards with similar enough effects, so you can make sure to have a decent amount. It does however create very unique games because you're never sure quite what you'll get, so I think it could be interesting for more games to play with singleton/highlander rules, maybe with 30-50 card decks. That's basically how I built the Yu-Gi-Oh decks I'd play against my friends at recess, cause my collection was unimpressive and I was unlikely to have more than one copy of anything, and it was great! Really made cards feel special. I think it's worth trying as a default for a new game. While I have other misgivings with that game, I actually like Hearthstone's take on this, with 2 card limits for most cards, and 1 for the generally more powerful and deck-defining legendary cards. I think more games should steal that. It made pack opening exciting, because when you pulled a legendary, you were like "Wow! Time to put that in a deck!" instead of being like "Nice, now I just need the other 3 copies". I also think more games should consider stealing Legend of Runeterra's format, especially now that that game is essentially dying. Where you have standard card limits, but there's a certain class of, again, special and deck-defining cards, "Champions" in Runeterra's case, and your entire deck can only contain a certain number of those. In Hearthstone you could play with 30 legendaries if you wanted, but a new game could make it like "Ok you have 40 cards, and 3 copies of everything, but only 6 legendary cards, so make them count!". Then you accomplish two goals at once, you maintain some consistency with the regular utility cards of the deck, small, unremarkable creatures and draw spells and such, but you have a class of cards that get to feel special, and important when you draw them. This comment ended up being longer than I intended I didn't know I had this many thoughts about this
While not really a TCG, I want to highlight the videogame Library of Ruina for having a strict 9 card deck size limit. With a duplicate limit of 3. At this point it stops being about consistency and more about trying to fit everything you need into such a small space. Quite a fun game, I bet you'd enjoy it.
The game looks neat - I don't play a ton of digital games, but I've bookmarked this one! Smaller deck games are really interesting (even if not exactly TCGs), and there's a lot of interesting design space there.
there's also shuffling games which can have way smaller decks, like 10 cards, but your cards are cycled. an example off the top of my head is after us which isn't a tcg, but a deckbuilding card game, where you draw 4 at the start of each turn, and discard those cards at the end, and if you deck out you shuffle the discard into the draw pile. games like clash royale have a similar deck system. an interesting one imo is the magic legends arpg deck system, where spells you cast "draw" after a cooldown. (you have a 12 spell deck and 4 spell slots, casting a spell costs mana, and you'll get a new spell from the deck in that slot after the cooldown ends)
Games that use smaller decks are definitely interesting cases to consider, but I think the economics of tcg systems generally pull to a larger range close to what I have in the video.
@@tcgacademia yeah the TCG with lower card count tend to go towards being video games and use a leveling system, or a point/rank system where you need more powerful cards (which you can't get/use at lower rank) at higher ranks, that's either whole new cards, or just upgrading the cards you have. the other card games with low deck count tend to be on a "buy the whole game and buy expansions" model. though having cosmetics might be an interesting way to go around the small number of cards needed. another option may be to have a mana deck and a creature deck (or some other form of multiple deck) edit: an obvious solution would be making the official format BO5 with 3 deck elimination, so there's a need for 30 cards with a deck limit of 3x10
so fun fact about magic is there is no maximum deck size to speak of in fact the card Battle of wits is an enchantment that states "At the beginning of your upkeep, if you have 200 or more cards in your library, you win the game." making it a ridiculous win condition
I've actually had some discussions with Magic friends about whether Battle of Wits is essentially soft-banned from tournament play due to shuffling rules XD
Rather than deck size, I believe one of the more interesting variables here is copies to deck size ratio. MtG constructed does 4/60, so that you have around base 1 chance in 15 that any draw is a card you need. When you account for lands being between 33 and 50% of your deck, this means that you're running a very small amount of different cards, especially considering the available card pool. IMO this has big implications on card playability in Constructed, as you have few reasons not to run 4 copies of the most optimal cards for a given strategy over copies of the second best choice, and results in a smaller than ideal constructed playable card pool and metagame variance, along with a polarization of card value in the secondary market. This is especially true when the optimal card for a given slot is known, but there's contention for second best. I keep wondering what might happen if MtG dropped the max allowed copies to 3 or 2. Combos become less consistent and resilient, more second-best cards are played, game variance increases across the board, and likely the metagame slows down a notch or two. Power also dilutes considerably among low-cost cards, because something that's insanely powerful on turns 1-2 tends not to do as well on turns 4+.
Also you need to account for variance in general ( meaning 60 and 4 is not exactly the same as 45 and 3) Also card pool. Standard isnt the same as modern or legacy. Commander is 99 cards decks + 1 commander.. but also singleton meaning 1 copy of each card
I prefer 40 or 50 card minimums because it makes it much easier to get sleeves, which are usually sold in packs of 60 or 100. In a 50 card game, 60-sleeve packs mean you naturally start to build up a supply of extra sleeves, which can be used for things like side decking or binders, or for extra decks, and 100-sleeve packs cover two decks exactly. In a 40 card game, 2 60 sleeve packs covers 3 decks, or 1 60 sleeve pack covers one deck with full side deck or extra deck. I've personally been experimenting with 30 card minimum singleton, it's pretty interesting.
An important part of deck size is how my copies of a card can be added (mtg has a minimum of 60 cards and a playset max of 4 as an example) if you divide the minimum cards included by the maximum amount of copies per card you'll get the minimum amount of cards that must be played in your game. Generally most card games try to sit around 13-15 minimum cards (hearthstone and mtg sit at 15, yugioh sits at 13~), as if you get too low decks will feel too repetitive and if you get too high decks may feel too inconsistent.
The minimum number of unique cards is a really good point! It's also interesting that those also fall into a really similar range. Definitely worth mentioning in the video if I had thought of it!
Thank you so much for this vid lol i was literally thinking about the deck size while thinking on my own tcg, and now im fully convinced that this is my calling to create a good tcg jk lol
Most Roguelikes I tried seem to get wrong how premium Draw is when you can also draft discount mechanics. Putting a Draw 1 into a 12 card deck with 0 mana Cards means you might aswell not make it a card game if you are gonna have all your actions available at all most all times.
Haven't played any games like that, so I can't comment with any authority, but one thing going in their favour is that card acquisition is somewhat random - so it's not as crazy as it would be in more standard constructed games. Still not exactly a class of card I'd be designing a ton of, though!
One interesting question here is what happens if you remove all restrictions on duplicates and deck size and just leave that to the player? Obviously this means you need to avoid ZTK combos and whatnot or they'll just go for maximum consistency by making a deck that's exactly large enough for the combo. But if you make sure that the buildup of the game is slow and there are good ways to search out cards from your deck, it's not necessarily obvious that consistency will always trump diversity.
Definitely a really interesting thought experiment! It is really dangerous, though, even if the game is built for that. Too much freedom in deckbuilding, and you have to be really, really careful about balance, and I'm honestly not sure that level of balance even possible for a human or AI over a game as large as a tcg. It would be interesting, though. Using Magic as an example, you could probably make a FTK kill with disruption in only 7 cards. But then all you need to beat that is a mana source and targeted card draw - with only 8 cards in the deck (in case you're on the draw), it would be really easy to deck you out. Or the opponent could just build a deck stacked with Force of Wills. The number of playable cards in a format like that would still be very low, but it would be interesting to see where the meta settles.
Lacking in this video is Hearth Stone with 30 card deck / 2 max and a kill counter at the end of your deck. Which is a really different creature on its own
30 cards and three copies limit is basically Duel Links’ maximum card limit for speed duels (plus 8 card extra deck without skills that add cards to the extra deck) and the minimum for rush duels.
It is a balance I really like, but I think it does work better for smaller, faster games. Come to think of it, it could be an interesting video why physical tcgs and digital tcgs are typically built at different speeds - although I haven't played enough digital tcgs to really be able to speak with any authority on it.
Meanwhile be me, designing a game for 20 card Decks, where every card doubles as a resource card, cards are 3-of maximum, and due to the way resources work it's possible to draw 5 or 7 cards a turn (you just pay 1 resource to draw a card - you always have 5 resources at the start of the turn, plus 1 for each of your resource cards, and you can overdrive a used resource card to get an extra resource). I also remove deck-out completely (if you have no deck, your standard draw is replaced by shuffling the discard pile into the deck). So yeah, I might run into issues with hyper consistency due to the starting hand being a quarter of your Deck AND each player being able to draw cards by the truckload, but at least that's what I signed up for.
La+ actually got a few really cool sleeves as part of a collab with Shadowverse. I still have a few packs I haven't opened - so many cool sleeves, not enough decks!
Great video, I've also thought about this concept a while ago and especially liked the 30 card deck size. I personally think that the 40 card deck size in YUGIOH was especially useful, because back then we could just put the whole deck into out pockets and run to friends. No need for deck boxes and sleeves. I have an unrelated point. I was researching some alternate player 1 turn 1 mechanics and many of them only use the: First player skips first draw. There are some outliers like in One Piece, but my favorite right now seems to be the Coin or Biscuit(one time only refresh 2 mana with cost of 0) in Hearthstone. I really think that the design space is much bigger and was also experimenting with multiple Turn 1 rules where one player decides the specifics, like P2 draws +1 or gets coin or biscuit. Haven't found other people talking about it and thought maybe I bring it up here (in some random niche on TH-cam^^)
While turn 1 advantage is arguably even too powerful for "skip first draw" to be a hindrance one issue is that if the turn 2 advantage is too noticeable it can "feel" like it's worse. If the going second player has a handicap in card advantage and the games still are generally advantageous to the going first player it might be enticing to try and give them a better handicap but it might make the game seem like it's a bit too skewed towards the going second player. Like if you had a game where you said, "The going second player gets to add to their hand 1 dummy card every turn that does nothing but could be used for discard fodder or whatever," even if the game is structured such that it has very little mechanical use for this dummy card, just the idea of the going second player getting a +1 every turn "feels" more broken. I've heard that for instance in Yu-Gi-Oh one proposed rule change is, "Neither player draws on their first turn but the going second player opens with 6 cards" which on its face is exactly the same as it currently is except what it does do is it gives them far more consistency in being able to hand trap the going first player. It's a very subtle change but one that statistically benefits the going second player way more than a lot of possible alternate changes.
In Shadowverse (I play the online version but I believe the physical version is similar), the 2nd player draws 2 cards on his first turn, as well as something related to one of the game's core mechanics called Evolving. In Shadowverse, you can evolve all followers once per turn, giving them the ability to attack other followers on the same turn they are played (similarly to Hearthstone, in Shadowverse, the attacker decides what to attack, and followers usually have summoning sickness), as well as some other effect. Usually this other effect is a +2/+2, but it can also change the card entirely. If you're starting first, you can evolve starting on your 5th turn, and can evolve twice throughout the game (this is called having 2 evolution points). If you're starting second, you can evolve starting on your 4th turn, and have 3 evolution points. This means that if you're going second and losing on tempo, you get to evolve earlier, and due to the removal of summoning sickness this should usually help you stabilize, and you aren't really penalized for doing this as you'll have the same amount of evolution points as the player going first, even after using one on T4 to stabilize. (That said, going 2nd is still significantly worse especially after the first few sets, so there have been many cards that give a strong extra effect if you have more evolution points than your opponent, which almost always helps the player going 2nd) I'd also like to mention how Legends of Runeterra has no method of compensating for you going second, because on average the difference in win rate is extremely minor. This is because each player takes turns to attack, ie. 1st player attacks on turns 1,3,5,7... and 2nd player attacks on turns 2,4,6,8... so if you're going second you're kinda able to invest more into your turn 2 attack compared to if you went first and attacked on turn 1.
Thanks for your replies :D So, what I got out of it was: Goind 2nd still is worse. Now I wonder, what would be a nice little effect to add that's not too much "in-your-face", but still helpful enough to the second player. Again, when thinking about my example set of possible 2nd player 1st turn options, could the first player choose what benefit the 2nd player gets? They would have to be "balanced" somehow, but this would give the 1st player control over what kind of benefit the 2nd Player gets. And also, what happens in a multiplayer (3+ players) game? I'm especially interested about the player base in general. How would players new to the game react to and deal with that? How would power games react to and abuse that? Basiacally, I want to create something that let's most people enjoy the game, but I'm definitely focused on these 2 edge cases, because for 1 group it shouldn't feel too unfair and the other group could see it as a chance of disruption or an extended part of the game. What do you think?
@@fruitspunch As someone who has played YuGiOh, Pokemon and digimon, having tried a bit of Magic, I feel like Digimon has a good balance of the first-second turn. Because you have to pay memory for most actions (playing a card or digievolving unless the cost is 0) and the memory gauge starts at zero (once it passes to the other player, what you could say -x, your turn ends) there are fewer plays you can make, while the going 2nd player usually can make 2 or more moves. Player 1 might only give them 1 memory, something know as memory chocking, but that play might be inefficient for player 1. Also, something that is not talked about much because of the modern state with the game, and I understand that many games have it, but in YuGiOh the inability to attack the first turn nor have enemy targets to interact with is bad for certain decks. As someone who plays with non-meta decks and archetypes, I have some that, if going first, either I waste effects or I can just create a wall of bodies hoping that my next turn I can go on the offensive.
@@fruitspunch I think that it's really important to point out the significance of individual card design for balancing going first. Shadowverse and Yugioh both lean into either extreme at different points in time: In Shadowverse digital, the player going second gets one extra evolution point, worth about 2 mana, very similar to Hearthstone. This worked alright for the first couple of years of the game's existence when evolution points were a precious resource. But nowadays everything evolves for free, so it doesn't really make a difference. So card design ruined the balancing mechanism for going second. In Shadowverse Evolve, the physical game, the player going first no longer gets any evolution points, the player going second gets 3 and they are worth 1 mana each. This is already much more balanced, but the real key comes in some individual cards: 2 mana cards that evolve for 1. Going first, these cards reach their full potential on turn 3. But going second you can already use them on turn 2, which allows you to catch up right away. This concept can also be applied in the midgame, where some powerful cards will come out one turn earlier for the player going second. This balance works so well that voluntarily going second is a very valid strategy in this game! Everyone knows that going first is broken in Yugioh. Decks usually aim to get to a winning position on the very first turn, usually by preventing the opponent from playing the game. There have been tons of bandaid fixes to this, some well designed (Fantastical Dragon Phantazmay), some not so much (Dimensional Shifter). High attack monsters that negate opposing cards are fundamentally broken and make the issue of going second much worse. But there was actually a period in time where going second was preferred! This was due to a blend of powerful going second cards like Shaddoll Fusion and Nekroz of Trishula, but also due to a lack of oppressive moves going first. Some decks would prefer to draw the extra card going second and some would prefer to set traps going first. Game design and card design go hand in hand! Make cards that use your rules to the fullest.
Found this gem of a channel just now. Might be too late as it has been a month since the video was posted, but I am curious about the math used to figure out the consistency in relation to the deck size, and max copies per card. I want to experiment with different combinations, and rates of drawing.
The issue with a 1 of rule is that it really limits engine decks and pushes games more towards good-stuff piles. There are plenty of neat strategies in tcgs that use 1 or 2 main cards and build the rest of the deck to support them, and that's a lot harder to do in singleton formats without a ton of search effects, which have their own problems.
@@tcgacademia then it's a design choice not an issue, I was tinkering with making a board lock centric card game, and that could definitely be one of the elements. it does make tutoring and discard way more powerful when you only have one of, so yeah one trick poney decks are very glass cannon because removing one part of the combo makes the deck dead, but you can include more than one combo also if you do heavy keywording you can get away with same card but not same, let's say you have a 3/4 for 4 that tutors and a 5/4 for 5 that tutors, they are basically the same card.
@@satibel Yeah, I don't think it's necessarily bad game design, I was more just getting at why so few games do it. Commander is a thing and people do really enjoy it, so it is definitely a fine game concept. Although you do bring up another issue with singleton games - they need a ton of unique cards, which means more time balancing and a whole lot more money on art. If you have a 3/4 for 4 that tutors and a 5/4 for 5 that tutors, they are very similar, but they both require unique art, which can be a substantial up-front cost. It's a lot easier adding singleton formats into pre-existing tcgs , because they already have a large card pool, and also they have a much better sense of how large their audience is, which helps them set an art and development budget with a lot more confidence.
As a side note, Magic the Gathering 60 card formats also use a 15 card sideboard. While this isnt as relevant to the video to say, depending on the format it isnt uncommon to use cards that grab cards out of that sideboard which winds up turning in to an extra deck. Also, technically you dont lose when you run out of cards. Only when you attempt to draw from an empty deck. Id also like to ask your opinion on whether or not youd consider games with a highly interactable "graveyard" zone as impacting what deck sizes should be?
It's hard to say with how interactable the graveyard is, since that can change quite a lot over the course of a game as more mechanics are added. In most situations, I don't think it impacts deck size much, but I could imagine systems where it would make a difference, and maybe let you go a little smaller with deck size.
There is exactly one card that can grab other cards from your sideboard without being absolutely terrible, and it deserves to be banned because it's missing the words "unless they're mana abilities"
@laytonjr6601 I can name 3 cards that aren't bad that grab cards from sideboards. Obviously, you're talking about Karn, the Great Creator which is indeed an incredibly potent card. Enough to get restricted in Vintage at least. Burning Wish is played in Legacy Storm decks as a hedge against surgical effects. It just fits well in the deck as a thing that serves its purpose well. Living Wish used to be a massive contender when it was first introduced to standard, but it's relatively unplayed right now. I'd say it's still a very good card. Honorable Mention to Cunning Wish, which is still a super solid card.
I think it's interesting to compare Magic the Gathering with Hearthstone. The former has a 60-card minimum with a limit of 4 of any one card(excepting basic lands), and the latter has 30-card minimum(and maximum, usually) with a limit of 2 of any one card(excepting legendary cards). On the face of it, this does feel rather similar and would give similar consistency, since the latter just divided the numbers of the former by two, although Hearthstone becomes even more consistent because you will never end up drawing a resource card, as the game lacks those. It's also notable that card pool also affects consistency. If you have two cards that do a similar enough thing, then your 4-of card limit can start feeling more like an 8-of card limit. As a card pool grows larger, the more and more likely it is that you'll have multiple cards that do a similar thing. This is unlikely to be a problem for a new game, but it's something that becomes more of a potential issue as the game gets older and more cards are added. Potentially, I think exploring different sorts of card and deck size limits can be interesting, like how Hearthstone limits legendaries to 1-of each. Although a very different sort of game, the Mega Man Battle Network series also limits the types of chips(basically cards). You can only have 5 Mega chips in your folder(deck), and only one of each individual one. Giga chips are even more limited, as you can only have one of those in a folder. There should be a number of tools for playing with consistency and other effects.
Dependent on format, Magic's decks can range from a 40 card minimum for limited and draft formats (with no multiple copy limits), 60 plus a 15 card sideboard for most constructed formats (with the 4 of copy limit through main deck and sideboard, with notable exceptions for restricted cards which is only a one of in a deck), and up to 100 for commander which is by far the most popular and widely played format for magic (which is entirely a singleton format, no copies of cards unless stated on the card).
Legend of the Five Rings has two 30 card decks per player (On top of the Stronghold and provinces) One, the province deck being more permanent things like characters and locations and the other, the combat deck is more ephemeral things like spells or combat tactics.
@@tcgacademia have you reached out to the creators? I'm seen some other channels reviewing them and think it'd be cool to see more. Their Discord is also very involved
And then .. entered Marvel Snap. 12 cards, all max 1 copy of each. That works only because the game ends after turn 6, but it showed you can redesign some foundations of card games
Then there's Hearthstone that took Magic's 60/4 ratio and just halved it to 30/2 (Legendary cards being limited to 1-ofs), while also removing ressource cards and pushing the starting life total to 30, leading to multiple successful decks across its history where the entire wincon was decking your opponent out - and sometimes yourself! Also, La+ spotted
Flesh and Blood uses a 40 card deck in its blitz format with 2 copies of each, BUT each card comes in 3 different colours, which each count as a different card, so if you wanted to (though not recommended) you could have 6 copies of "the same" card in the deck for a 15% chance of drawing the card you want. In the classic format you instead have a 60 card deck and 3 copies of each colour, so a potential of 9 of each card, or an 18% chance of drawing what you need.
It is interesting how Flesh and Blood approaches card uniqueness - depending on how you look at it, it could be 18%, or 6% to hit a specific card. Which is either really consistent, or not very consistent -- although in both cases the draw system means you'll see most of your cards anyway.
@@tcgacademia Yeah, and due to the nature of how most real decks are constructed, you most likely won't ever have all 9 copies of a card in your deck, since certain colours synergise with your hero better than others, so it could really be a huge mix of ranges. Like, one of my blitz decks for example, has a single card in all six copies, 2 of each red yellow and blue, but that's really the only one, all the other ones I only have in either blue or red. So for everything in the deck, it's around 5% chance of drawing what I need, but around 15% for a variety of that one card instead.
I started playing Commander in 2011(I guess many did) and since then it's actually been my favorite format in Magic, and the main reason is randomness. Randomness and the “diplomacy” on a 4 player table. Multiple rounds with the same deck, don’t feel the same, and the probability of the games being nearly identical is close to 0. My old Academy/Mind over Matter 60 card deck is basically the exact opposite. The game ends pretty save between rounds 3-4 on average when the combo is in and I let the opponent draw his entire deck. Too much consistency. And the matches always looked the same…really always. Use tutor or card draw to pull combo, keep mana open for a reaction. Play combos and hope that you are faster than your opponent. Maybe that’s why I am not a huge fan of too many tutors in a commander deck. It is kinda… against the point of the format…
1:21 A maximum deck size limit, or somebody is going to pull **** like this... glad it was some judges that pulled that first, to encourage that rule to be added.
The other approach is MTG, where you need to be able to properly randomize your deck within a time limit or get hit with slow play warnings - similar result in either case, though, and definitely a good thing to have in the rules (hopefully before someone shows up to a tournament with a 2222 card stack).
Playing yugioh, there are a lot of weird deckbuilding methodologies. Because of the the lack of resourse systems. There are several cards that are one for one theoretically making your deck smaller.
While the poker deck has 52 cards, in Germany and Central Europe there also exists a deck of just 32 playing cards. There are also Italian and Spanish decks with 40 cards. On the other hand, no traditional playing card deck I know of has more than 52 cards. I guess there's Mahjong...
That's really interesting! I didn't know that, although I'm not surprised that other deck sizes exist for traditional playing card games, given all the variants of chess that exist. One thing that could have been added is that less cards can work if the game is meant to be faster than usual, like yugioh speed duels. Thanks for the European context, I love learning about things like that!
@@tcgacademia Different suits and designs entirely as well - e.g. Spanish suited decks (also used in Southern Italy, because centuries ago that was under Spanish influence) use swords, coins, cups and clubs, and the ranks go ace, 2 to 7, then jack, horse, king, no jokers. Also, the suits don't have two matching colours like in French-suited decks (which are the ones that are now everywhere). This has a lot to do with card games in these countries using 40/36/32 card decks for faster games (though games existed which instead added Tarot cards, but those are rare now), which manufacturers then matched by just selling a smaller deck, while British games preferred a full deck, and the Americans later added the Jokers. You can still see this today with card games in Italy/Spain usually either using a traditional deck or using a french-suited deck and throwing out the 8s, 9s, 10s and Jokers, and with Jokers being rare in card games especially in the continent because they're much newer. I like the spanish-suited Neapolitan cards myself because nostalgia and also because of the colourful designs, but I believe that's at least part of the reason why the much simpler French-suited designs won out when cards started to be mass produced (besides the cultural dominance of France and the UK, of course).
@@randomguy555 Really interesting stuff! It definitely makes sense that french-suits caught on since it's probably significantly easier (and cheaper) to print. I was always curious how the evolution of tarot cards intersected with the evolution of deck games, but I never really heard much about it until now. I might have to do some digging - it's a really interesting subject!
@@tcgacademia Really is! Tarot cards are probably the most interesting to me, since their connection to fortune telling was almost entirely invented in the 18th century, while they were originally just a massive suit of trump cards (the original Jokers, in a way, but entirely unrelated) from the 15th century which mainly originated and were popular in in France/Northern Italian States/Southern German States but spread everywhere in Europe except the British Isles. On the other hand, the Victorian fascination with the occult meant Tarot cards quickly became popular in the English speaking world solely for that and never as part of any card games. From the perspective of the game design, it seems to boil down to the fact that in the many centuries and hundreds of varieties of trick taking games (the most common type of card game, where each player plays a card matching the suit of the first card placed if possible and the best card (matching the leading suit) wins all cards that were just placed down, and then at the end the person with the most tricks/the tricks with the highest point value wins) the entirety of Europe managed to make pretty much only two additions to the genre: Trump cards (which beat regular cards) and Bidding (where players estimate from their hand how well they'll think they do at the start of the round in some kind of contract/auction and get rewarded for being correct). What better way of adding trumps than adding like 20 of them? Though since most of the trump cards couldn't be placed if you could have placed a normal card of the same suit, they couldn't just win every trick. If you want a browse for a couple of hours, there's an excellent website called www.pagat.com that's just one massive collection of rules for basically every card game in existence (and some that have been reconstructed from the historical record, which is something historians do surprisingly often). I sometimes wonder - especially after having played Balatro for a while - if TCGs could ever borrow some mechanics from traditional card games, or if the whole standardised deck thing is too fundamental a difference for that to happen. Extra fun fact: Queens in French-suited decks originate from Tarot decks. Originally there were only the jack/horse/king of Italian/Spanish decks, which then had queen added to it as part of tarot decks (they weren't part of the trump suit, just an extra card between King and Horse) and then in French suited decks the horse was dropped and the queen kept. For reasons.
I haven't played a ton of online tcgs, so I may be talking nonsense, but I feel like the desired pace of a card game is different depending on if you're playing online or in person. Online games want to fire quickly and end quickly - they're something you hop on and do whenever the urge hits you, but you might have to stop and do something else soon after - so you want a faster paced game, which means you can get away with smaller decks. Physical games, though, are often an event you specifically allocate time to - even if it's just a local game night - so you want a slower game that runs a little longer, which means deck size is generally better to be a little larger (40-60, generally).
Zack the creator of the (Chaos Galaxy) TCG made his minimum deck size to be about 36 cards, so a smaller deck can be done; you just need to figure out the best way to do it.
I think there's reasons out there to make a game outside of any of the norms. You just want to be aware of why the norm exists, and what the trade-offs are of going above or below it.
or u could play the rat deck in MTG that lets u go past the 4 copy limit & have any number of a few cards. Rats just became the popular name as it was the first good deck to take advantage of cards that say u can include any number of copies of that card.
I think a fair rule of thumb is that 50 is both random and consistent, add +10 with resource cards, and your side deck kinda counts as size. Digimon has 50 plus a tiny Egg deck, and Lorcana uses 60 but really could’ve been 50 and feels like an outlier, with most cards kinda being resources. I kinda adore shadowverse and hearthstone being 40 and 30 just since they were meant to be rapid fire games with automatic turn by turn resource progression. I like how board states still differ, but if you swap out one or two cards you’re bound to encounter the difference in a few games. Like you said for quick testing.
Good point! If the game is meant to be faster and take less turns than the average tcg, then you can definitely get away with smaller deck sizes as well.
Digimon decks are always 50 cards + 4 digitadas, 5 go to the security, you dont draw the first turn and you draw everytime you digievolve. There no Limit hand size and usually people have 8 cards in hand
I haven't personally played it, but it is an interesting example. It'll be interesting to see how balanced it stays long term, since OTKs seem way easier, but if it could be an interesting counter-point to this video.
Then Yu-Gi-Oh rush duel came about, 40 to 60 card deck with a draw up to 5 per turn and still has 8000 LP. I think the deck size has more to do with how much draw power they decide to give you. Pokemon has always had a lot of draw power, in fact some formats have decks built to see your whole deck turn 2-4 and then recycle a few cards to never deck out. Rush duel is built on drawing 5 cards a turn and recycling cards from the grave. Master format Yu-Gi-Oh doesn't have much draw but has a lot of searching so a smaller deck size makes more sense.
with so much search does deck size actually matter? outside initial hand math, of course. also, why doesnt yugioh have mulligans? all comes downto consistency and balance.
so, if I understood the math. Hearthstone for example with 30 cards and 2 of each card at maximum it means you have 15% per cent of drawing that card you actually need?
It's actually the same as Magic - 0.0666etc. Each card can be a maximum of 2 out of 30, or 2/30. If you just plug 2 divided by 30 into a calculator, it converts the fraction into a decimal (x100 to make it a percentage).
It's definitely an interesting case! High consistency, but also very high speed. It's great as a mobile game, but I'm not sure how well it would work in person - in person the speed seems like it could be more of a debuff if you're trying to have a solid game night. I can definitely see how it would be fun, though!
MTG has 2 different formats, and one of them is Commander. 100 card deck, 1 copy of each card, PLUS a Commander Card (Commented this before you mentioned this, NVM
Technically it can apply to any card in the deck. For example, there's a 7.5% chance card 12 is a specific card. As soon as you get external information about the location of cards (cards in hand, cards scryed to the bottom, etc) those odds start to shift, but the abstract odds of a particular card in a particular location is 7.5%. Definitely more useful as a point of comparison than any kids of gameplay analysis, though.
Momentary possibility of drawing a specific copy of a card doesn't cover the whole story. While a 60 card deck with 3 copies max will have the same possibility at face value as a 40 deck with 2, the former will have a higher variance across multiple draws. Need only 1 copy for your gameplan? Screw you! You've now got 2 dead draws. If you expect to have multiple key cards that are needed for a deck but useless if drawn in volume, consider lowering the deck size to avoid the curse of dead draws.
Very good point! Another thing I didn't mention, but is also worth considering, is how many options you can fit in below the maximum. 30 cards with a 3-of rule and 40 cards with a 4-of rule both have the same draw odds for a card at the maximum number of copies, but it's much easier to sneak in a few tech one-ofs into the 40 card game.
This is a very important point, although it's hard to quantify variance other than by bringing up a calculator and trying out some numbers. But yeah, bigger deck is bigger variance even if you adjust the number of copies.
unless u play commander in MTG. That is 99 + 1 commander. or u could also let people play "Yorion sky nomad" to have 80 cards in a non commander format well still having Yorion like a commander able to call the one copy of him to your hand once from the side deck. Meaning 81 cards & 100 cards is also a min that some people play
Commander is a weird one in terms of deck size, and while it does have a solid play base, I think there's a pretty good reason no tcgs start with base rules calling for 100-card decks - mostly shuffling and a lack of consistency.
this made me wonder about the maximum deck sizes of games I already knew yugioh was 60 max. did not realise mtg just had no maximum deck size except the ambiguous rule of it being reasonably shuffled without taking too long lorcana is also in the no max club. schwarz has exactly 50 rule with given it's rules makes sense, I was surprised to learn pokemon has a rule of exactly 60 card decks wonder if there is a reason for that.
Not too sure why certain games go for hard maximums and other games just shrug and say "whatever you can shuffle". I think it comes down to designer preference, since in 99% of games players are going to be playing the minimum number regardless.
@@tcgacademia from what I know no deck size limit tends to be the starting point, probably cause mtg does it, and is only changed if necessary yugioh's hard limit for instance only exists cause a judge thought the lack of a limit could be easily exploited so showcased what a troll could do with no limit so limits got imposed. schwarz limit is for game design reasons which are quite obvious. pokemon is still the odd one out odder still as it used to be made by wotc so if any game was gonna follow mtg no limit rule you'd think it would be pokemon maybe it has to do with prize card I really don't know
“Once you get to a deck size more than 60, you start having problems with shuffling” As a MTG Commander player, where decks are 99 cards + a commander, …yeah. Shuffling.
I just looked over a few cards when it came out and it looked like another DM clone (nothing wrong with that, but there are a lot of them). The field of play and passing actions back and forth do look interesting, though - so thanks for the recommendation! Hopefully it doesn't have the distribution issues One Piece and Lorcanna both ran into :(
This isn't a TCG game, the megaman battle network series use a set of battle chips similar a deck of cards which the limit is 30 you can't add more and you can't use less of 30 which is in the "consistent" range but like the series the chip folder (deck) change this rules in the main line games In the first is the base of first game have the basic rules for the series - each chip have a letter but in battle only can use a same chip or same letter in the turn - draw 5 chips which you can expand up 15 during battle but only can use 5 per turn - if have no more chips you must end the battle whit the mega buster a basic attack - certain combination of chips 3/5 make a powerful attack, is know as program advance - not all chips are used for damage also have support or healing chips - also have some chips which are summons o very rare -the limit of copy's per folder are 5 In the second game the changes are - now the chips can have the asterisk "letter" which counts a any letter (mostly support chips) -you can expand the chip selection by discarding chips - the copys of deck is now 4 per chip But in the 3 game have some important changes for the which alters the deck building from the series The chips class, this class are classification for the chips. "standard" for the most common and you can use up 30 (the deck limit) "Mega" for summons and more powerful attacks/supports only can use 1 copy and only use 5 of this chips "Giga" the most powerful and rare chips in the game only you can use only 1 per deck This system alters the form of deck building and only the chips themselves and maximum copy per deck (in the sixth game is only 3 copy's) making a good game for player vs player/enemy
I'm definitely interested in the game, but there's a lot of other channels with good overviews. Honestly, one of the reasons I make game-specific videos is so I can remember how to play smaller, less popular TCGs. It's really easy to forget the specific mulligan rule of Dragoborne, for example. I think it's also more interesting for most people to learn about a game they've never heard of, so that's where I'm mostly focusing my single-game videos for now. If time wasn't an issue, though, I'd love to dive into Star Wars!
![ละลาย (LALALYE) - DAOU PITTAYA ต้าห์อู๋ พิทยา [OFFICIAL MV]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/wo6r9TgausI/mqdefault.jpg)
I love how Sorcery Contested Realm does it with a 40 card 'Spellbook' deck and a 20 card 'Atlas' deck of your resource cards. Essentially you have the best of both worlds between a 40 and 60 card deck and you can choose which deck to draw from each turn. They also limit the # of copies of each card by rarity: 1 Unique, 2 Elite, 3 Exceptional, and 4 Ordinary.
Their card designs are very very good as well
I'll be honest, the limit based on rarity seems like a very bad idea - it limits how cards can be reprinted, since they'll always have to match their first printed rarity.
@@AtomTomZeitalter I hate the concept of changing rarity so that's fine with me. It makes it easier to get a playset of the more expensive cards. It also adds a lot of complexity because higher rarity cards can be more "broken" as they are essentially restricted like in Legacy MTG but you are paying the trade off of consistency with them.
@@TuxThinks At the same time, Commons can be just as broken, if not more broken than higher rarities. You can't find all possibilities during playtesting, Multiple cards, that were originally printed at common are restricted in Legacy. Examples include: Gush, Lotus Petal or Brain Storm.
There is a reason, why Pauper decks in MtG (a format restricted to only cards that were at some time printed at common) can beat Modern decks.
Haven't played it yet, but Sorcery is a gorgeous-looking game. It is interesting that most games with extra decks (creatures or lands), still tend to fall in the 40-60 range whether you count the extra deck or ignore it. I don't love limiting by rarity, though, as it tends to just make the game more swingy - like when one player draws their one-of Pot of greed and/or Raigeki, and the other doesn't. And it doesn't fully stop decks from gradually becoming all Unique or Elite cards, it just slows it down a bit.
The draw power of card effects also has a major interaction with deck-size.
For example, in Pokémon, the draw and search power of cards is much higher than all other major TCGs to the point where running out of resources in deck becomes a common way to lose the game (not strictly decking out-although that is also a way to lose-but simply running out of options after not planning far enough ahead). Most Pokémon decks have poor ratios of consistency cards to resources because they need more resources, so if you could play 70-80 cards in a deck, you would.
Pokemon's card economy is kind of wild. Tons of card draw and consistency, but the rules act as a kind of natural floodgate to keep everything under control. Definitely an interesting game system!
Pokemon is like modern yugioh, but the rules and "mana system" keep the degeneracy at bay, while also not having a strong graveyard recursion plan to get extra resources
@@tcgacademiait's also the fact Pokemons interaction is almost non-existent, and I don't just mean disruption, pokemon cards don't really have things like 'enter the battlefield' so the combo potential is super low besides energies
Yep. something like Pot of Greed in Yu-Gi-oh is probably the single strongest draw card printed in any TCG ever, even with a general three card limit.
if it were legal to have 3 of them, you basically start playing with a 34 card deck instead of a 40 card one, raising the overall percentage value of each card from 2.5% to 2.94%, vastly increasing how consistent a deck is.
as for something like MTG, it's been _relatively_ balanced by the fact that drawing two cards has almost always been a 2+1 affair.
two mana + one more mana
two mana + sac a creature
two mana + 1/10th of ypur life total (assuming 20 life)
two mana + discard a card
or even
one mana + discard two cards.
cards that went lower than that have almost always been HIDEOUSLY broken in the metagame...Nectopotence anyone?
@@meepilee7991 Maybe I'm not understanding correctly, but the Pokémon does have come into play effects. The most relevant one in the current game is Lumineon V
Earned a sub for discussing more than just the big 3 and having a broad analytical approach to card design. Great vid
Also I was wondering if youve played any ccg or games with more extreme deck sizes and how they affect things. Hearthstone has 30 with a unique deck out punishment while something like Eternal has a massive 75 card deck with 25 min for lands.
@@TempestDacine Thanks! I can't think of any off the top of my head with more extreme sizes, outside the obligatory Commander format. I feel like there are some factors that could make going above or below that range work out, but they're pretty specific and most games are going to just be better off sticking in the standard range. For Hearthstone, for example, I've heard it generally tries to have faster games than most other tcgs - so in that case a smaller deck size is less of an issue.
Another indicator I use is how much of the deck you're expected to see in a given game.
Magic's starting hand is 7 and it lasts about 6-8 turns depending on the format and matchup, so you see about 15 cards out of 60.
Digimon's starting hand is 5 and it lasts about 4-6 turns, but you draw everytime you digivolve, which is most cards you play, so you see maybe 20 cards out of 50.
This can give you an indication of how much variance you have (in some games, you may never see a particular card) and give you some feedback on how many searchers and card draw you might want.
Good point! I definitely simplified the variance a little, but the size of the starting hand definitely plays a role in how much of the deck you see, and what size of deck will work for the game.
You start with 5 in Yu-Gi-Oh, a game lasts 2-3 turns, but you see your whole deck and extra deck.
@@ItsPForPea And the 2-3 turns includes your opponent's turn. Yeah, the game is degenerate. It wasn't like that which is why it has 40-60 cards (Used to be 40+ but 2 german trolls went to a tournament with a 2222 deck).
@@N12015IIRC those two were judges, and they saw the lack of upper deck size as a potential source of issues, so they pulled the stunt to grab attention to it and fix it.
And it worked.
@@ItsPForPea Yu-Gi-Oh! is a bit of a strange case because every deck can tutor for exactly what they need multiple times. I think there's zero expectation that you'll draw into anything other than your combo starter.
I'm not sure if other games have this, but in MTG the 60 card deck size is a MINIMUM. That means you can indeed have more if you wish. There are two cards that I know of that reference deck size in Magic: Yorion, Sky Nomad and Battle of Wits. Yorion actually makes it a requirement that your deck has at minimum 20 more cards than the deck minimum, so 80 in most formats. Battle of Wits is a card that says "At the beginning of your upkeep (one of the beginning of the turn phases) if you have 200 or more cards in your library (deck), you win the game." I've seen a Battle of Wits deck. ITS MASSIVE and the consistency was AWFUL. But it was funny, so I respect it.
Battle of Wits sounds to me like an Un-set card.
Yu-Gi-Oh! also has 40 as a minimum, but after some guy abused the absence of a higher bond ( aka the image where two people carry a big deck at 1:22 in this video ), a limit of 60 was put in place.
Most players stay at 40, for consistency issues, but some strategies work best with more cards, like ones based on That Grass Looks Greener ( mills card from the top your deck to the graveyard until your deck is the same size as your opponent's ).
@@draghettis6524 MTG's max decksize rule is simply "can the average person shuffle unassisted quickly" with a "You'll know it when you see it" advice for judges. So while on paper the ultra thick deck could be submitted, you can be told to fuck off regardless and that counts as a legal enforcement lf the rules.
My favorite deck I ever played was around 100 cards that milled itself and put out super trample creatures based off of my graveyard + life regen based off of my graveyard. Could face-tank everything without blocking and swing to wipe or win. It wasn't terribly inconsistent either. But I don't recommend decks that large...
@@SenkaZverYou should try Commander.
Yu-Gi-Oh's maximum deck size is 60 cards with 15 extra deck not 40, but players only use 40 to 50 for consistency
42
XD
41 with 1 Upstart Goblin is peak deck building
@@sephikong8323 xd
last i checked it was 60 because decks where stupidly consistent and people wanted more card economy and options instead
@@Ghorda9 When was the last time you checked?
Ricard Garfield, creator of MtG, was tasked with creating a TCG for Battletech [Mechwarrior]. he came up with a game with a MAXIMUM deck size of 60 cards and 5x copies of cards in your deck. There were no life point totals. Damage was dealt to the deck in the form of cards that you "scrap" from the top of your "stockpile" into the "scrapyard." You "life total" was literally the size of your deck. Apparently there were some meta decks that ran 40 or so cards with 5x copies of fast and overly efficient Mechs and Pilots who could get out early in a swarm and deal massive damage that having a smaller deck size didn't hurt you as you would win before it was a problem and your smaller deck size meant increased consistency. Those mechs and pilots would later get banned as they completely warped the format of the game.
Interesting! I didn't realize Garfield worked on the Mechwarrior TCG. He's definitely a great game designer, it's interesting seeing all the different mechanics he's played with over the years. Does not surprise me at all to learn he's designed a game using a life deck.
Lifedecking is pretty common, and never goes well.
@yurisei6732 - Maybe in other games, but the lifedecking didn't kill the game. There were 5 expansions [or 4 expansions and the core set?], and it was a profitable game, but wasn't pulling the margins of MtG and Pokemon. If I recall, WotC canned it before they sold themselves to Hasbro. It was just a niche within a niche. You pretty much need to already be a Battletech fan to want to play it, as it doesn't directly draw you in otherwise. There is still a community of players, including a subset that meticulously makes custom cards adapted to the curent story and newer mechs desugned within the balance of the game.
@@PaulGaither Just cos a decision didn't result in complete product failure doesn't mean it wasn't a bad decision.
@@yurisei6732 Just because it failed in other games doesn't mean it was a failure in this game. It is a flavor win for the setting. You are the one who has failed to justify why you might think it was bad for Battletech.
While it's not a paper game, I play a lot of deckbuilder roguelikes and they usually give a standard deck size of about 15-20 cards for a "standard" build with the risk-reward factor of needing to pick up a card that might be a brick if you don't get a good run but could also be vital to a specific strategy. They also often will let you go as low as 1 if you get specific RNG. Because they're designed to cycle through your deck for specific cards, they have small decks and a ton of draw power (with usual card game roguelike rule being "discard your hand and draw 5 every turn" but also you see some utterly insane draw power in the genre).
It would be a potential design space if someone wanted to make a game with a smaller deck to take that sort of inspiration to make it function, but at the same time the reason why roguelikes can get away with such small decks is because they aren't using a pre-constructed mechanic - if you could build a deck of 20 cards that the player can freely choose at the start of a run in most roguelikes you'd probably need it to be bigger just to prevent people from abusing a broken combo. The smaller deck size in a roguelike to that extent seems like it's so that the uncertainty aspect comes from the deckbuilding process rather than a game designed for constructed as a format where the uncertainty being loaded into the full game is more vital.
I think smaller deck size has some risk of making abusable strategies more consistent but really in most TCGs (not really as much in roguelikes) more than a small deck size, high amounts of searching is more likely to lead to the power curve being way out of whack compared to anything else, which is probably why most newer games have shifted away from it in favor of a more simple "look at x cards from the top of deck and add one applicable to hand if possible, then put the rest on the bottom." On top of searching requiring more time to be spent shuffling the deck). Which is kinda ironic that a mechanic that is easier to include in a digital game tends to not be very powerful in games that use that digital format but in paper games where it's an inconvenience it's generally one of the more broken mechanics.
Yeah I believe the reason rogue like deck is usually 15 to 20 cards is because most of the cards are unique and each game is meant to be completed relatively quickly when compared to a full TCG game
TCG‘s usually expected to have full plays sense of your core strategy, and expect their games to last from 5 to 20 minutes
unlike rogue lakes that benefit from not having complete play sets and expect you to finish each opponent encounter quickly to get onto the next opponent encounter Of course there are exceptions
Slay the spire has most of your deck be strike and defense
and card apocalypse has games that goes Way past five minutes easily
Deckbuilders and the like can get away with much smaller decks since so much randomness comes into how the decks are constructed in the first place. It's a bit interesting the Keyforge uses 36 card decks, just a bit below what is normal in TCGs, and has a very generous card economy (draw to 6 each turn). So there's definitely some interesting design space for smaller decks, even if they wouldn't necessarily work as a full constructed TCG.
the main thing about roguelikes is that they aren't pvp, so degenerate strategies are fun, while in pvp games only one player has fun.
Also should point out, Yugioh's *Minimum* deck size is 40. You can actually play between 40 to 60 cards, plus a 15 card extra deck and a 15 card side deck
I've compared this aspect and very glad you put those two main consideration, as they are not the most obvious but very impacting aspect on gameplay experience
Vampire the Eternal Struggle is a very interesting case here. A VtES deck has 60 to 90 cards, but what makes it interesting is that there is no limit to how many copies your deck may have per card, and this system makes some decks want to be small and some want to be large. For simplicity, I'll pretend your deck is made up just of 2 cards and those are spread 50/50 among your deck. In a 60 card deck, you'd have 30 of card A and 30 of card B. Now if you draw card A, your next draw has a 30/59 chance of being card B. In contrast, in a 90 card deck, after drawing card A, your next hard has a 45/89 chance of being B. So in decks where you need both A and B together, you want small deck size, whereas in decks where you want your draw chance for each card to stay more or less the same as the game goes on, you want a larger deck. Also how fast you cycle through your deck depends highly on the deck too, because you redraw a card any time you play a card, so your hand stays at 7 cards all the time. small decks that play a lot of cards per turn would run out of deck very quickly. And lastly, when your deck runs cards that you don't want to draw and would much rather get via searchers, you would want a larger deck to minimize your chance of drawing those cards.
I wanted to mention this game because usually in TCGs, the minimum deck size is also the only viable deck size.
That is very interesting! I've heard of VTES before, but I hadn't heard that particular aspect. Having no maximum does sound a bit risky in terms of balancing, sine any unbalanced cards will have a much higher impact on the game, but it does make deckbuilding really interesting.
Seeing cards in no sleeves just eats away at my soul.
If it makes you feel better, the cards in the thumbnail aren't actual decks, just piles of bulk I counted out to the right deck size XD
@@tcgacademia
Oh thank God.
@@lvl5Vaporeon seeing gingers who have no soul eats away my card sleeves 😂
Yu-Gi-Oh also has the Speed Duel/Duel Links format, where the minimum deck size is 20 and the maximum deck size is 30, with the maximum amount of copies of a card still being 3. also the starting life points are halved from 8000 to 4000
How does the 12 deck size of Marvel Snap fit into this?
Its definitely a unique case compared to the games mentioned here. Snap games always end on turn 6 (unless you run Magic or you get Limbo location). You tend to draw most of your deck each game. Also the decks are only allowed 1 copy of a card per deck. So a smaller number makes sense. You probably couldn't get away with a 12 card deck and 3 card starting hand (plus draw) in a game that goes longer than 6-7 turns. You would just run out of things to do and the game would likely stall out.
It's digital, thus the game you compare it to should be other digital games. Like say Clash Royale.
@@j453or Hearthstone. Or Faeria. Or mtg arena. Or yugioh master duel
The Devs have said that locations add a lot of variance to snap, such that you can get away with more deck consistency.
@indiejarm then proceed to do location spotlights to remove some of that variance.
One that I find interesting is Chaotic. You have monsters and equipment in play at the start of the game, you have a certain amount of spells in hand, but your deck consists of attacks. You always have 20 cards and 20 points of cards with 1 point cards being the basic attacks, there are attacks up to 5 point which needs to be offset by putting it very weak 0 cost cards.
I've heard good things about Chaotic in the past - it does seem really interesting.
I wanna dedicate this comment to make a special mention of Sakura Arms: only 7 card decks, and you get to draw through them multiple times per match. But they're made from a 14 card pool based on the characters you select, and also you have 3 Ultimate cards sitting aside face down (out of a pool of 8), so there's quite a lot of choice before the match and within a match. It is definitely more of a boardgame/LCG because rather than use random card packs, characters are sold in groups of 6 (at least in the latest english edition by L99, in japan maybe they sell the characters one per box who knows). The point being, you don't need a lot to have a fun, interesting game where the balance is tight and different strategies play differently and feel differently. Just 7 cards of deck and 3 ults on the side is more than enough (provided you have good core rules and ways to interact with the opponent without using the cards)
Definitely sounds interesting! And yeah, it make sense that it would work more like a board game or LCG, but there's definitely a lot of interesting design space for card games with smaller deck sizes!
nice call out
Clicked on this video to make this comment! Sakura Arms is a beautiful game and the tiny deck size does a ton of interesting stuff. Even with only 14 options, it can be wickedly difficult picking what to cut. Since decks are so small, you can build your deck directly in response to your opponent's chosen characters, which leads to lots of interesting decision making around matchups. And the strategy considerations with shuffling go deep. Do I take damage to shuffle early, knowing I have a 1 in 3 chance to draw the card I want? Do I hold onto this card for the right moment, even though I'm about to shuffle and it'll miss the shuffle if it's in my hand? So many tough decisions in every game trace directly back to the seven-card deck. And it makes the game really accessible, too! Just an absolute gem of design.
@@BLiZIHGUH I'm officially sold - I'm bookmarking Sakura Arms to pick up. The gameplay sounds really neat and focused, and I do really love games that work with small deck sizes. Thanks for the recommendation!
Something I'm curious about is deck size variance. Is it better to have a range and let players do what they will with it (Yugioh's 40-60), codify a standard size (Pokemon's 60), or just have a minimum (MtG's max deck size is "whatever you can comfortably shuffle")?
I'm not sure - personally I prefer just having a set number, since it minimizes the number of unexpected things that can happen with variable deck sizes, but Magic's relative freedom in deck size is also nice, even if almost all decks fall into the minimum anyway. I think it depends on the game, really.
Personally I prefer a min deck size, but in practice a min and max deck size is most often ideal for deck building creativity. Think of it like this: if a game has a min and max deck size the deck builder when building a deck including cardsthat either want more of certain cards to function, or the more of particular cards u have access to the bigger the payoff, has to weigh the prose and cons of how many cards they want to run. Do they want to run the min to increase consistency or have more cards to maximize the payoff. And if a card can and does want more cards to increase it consistency or something and there is some groups of cards that can each be used to get said card, do they want to run more of said groups of cards to get that card at the cost of the consistency of other unrelated cards, or do they want to add in more of those groups of cards to having more chances to c the card they want.
This allows for more deckbuilding philosophies to form in the game and makes for greater variance in deck builds.
Altho I personally do think the max deck size in yugioh is rather tight for some decks, maybe 80 MD and 30 ED, I like the option to throw in 1 additional 3of that doesn’t fit in 40 cards but is a huge help in consistency.
I’d say the range style of deck limit is better overall, since it allows for deck variety and variance. If you have a strict limit on how many cards can be played, it could limit the strategies, but too much freedom could lead to shenanigans.
I mean, yugioh USED to only have a minimum of 40 cards, with no max deck size limit for a good while. Then two guys made a 2222 card deck that needed a special apparatus to carry it and brought it to an event with the sole purpose of shuffling it over and over again. The 60 card limit was put in place not long after.
In theory a range is better for creativity, but in practice people end up almost always treating the minimum as an absolute number to increase the chances of drawing what you need. A larger deck may be tempting to run since you'd have more options, but all that really does is make it harder to draw your key cards. So I'd say there's not really a difference - the minimum of a range will be treated as a fixed number anyway.
The only exception to this is if you have a "life deck" system like the original DBZ TCG, where damage is handled by milling. In that case you might want to have a bigger deck.
Most people will stick to the minimum size anyway. That said:
• A range is better if you want to avoid people bringing comedically large decks they can't shuffle, or making mill strategies miserable by including more cards.
• No maximum is better for designs like Yorion and Battle of Wits, which are fun but also extremely niche.
One of the games I've designed actually only has a 20 card deck for multiple reasons, but because the playset size is only two, it actually has the same level of consistency as Wixoss!
Also depends on starting hands, naturally, but there's definitely some interesting design space for smaller tcgs!
That reminds me of YuGiOh Duel Links. While it has the three card maximum normal for YuGiOh, it uses a 20 card deck, and outside of your combo starters you actually don't want to run more than two copies of a card.
@@VestedUTuber Duel links (and Hearthstone, to a lesser extent) are interesting outliers here. It seems like they work because the games are noticeably faster than standard tcgs, but I am kind of curious how good the gameplay is. If it's just as good, or nearly as good as more standard deck-size games, it does open some options in how to approach deck size.
@@tcgacademia
I've played both Hearthstone and Duel Links, albeit early in their releases, and at the time they felt really well-paced. Duel-links' pacing actually kinda reminded me of earlier Yu-Gi-Oh formats, albeit with better consistency due to more modern cards existing and shorter duels due to lower life point amounts. However, as you'd probably expect, both games have experienced significant power creep since then and have sped up quite a bit. I think a game with smaller deck sizes can definitely work but power creep needs to be kept in check even more to maintain the same game pace.
@@VestedUTuber That's kind of what I figured - power creep seems like an even bigger risk in a shorter game. I know a lot of people really enjoyed Duel Links when it first came out, though.
You completely missed the mechanic of Pokemon's TCG where 6 cards are taken out of your deck for Prize Cards. Losing 1/10th of your deck does have a factor in how a deck plays, since you can't use the cards that are prized without either taking knock outs or using cards to specifically swap the cards in your prizes.
It's not exactly unique to Pokémon since some TCGs including Duel Masters, WIXOSS, and Digimon have similar systems that withhold certain cards from your deck at the beginning of the game to track your life (and WIXOSS is this channel's main game I guess).
While it makes it impossible to search for certain cards, Prize cards and other similar mechanics don't affects the odds of drawing a card (just think of the cards as being the very bottom 6 cards of your deck). In TCGs where you don't have the ability to go through your entire deck, the mechanic doesn't impact the way the game plays very much. In Pokémon, the cards you can't access by searching and going through your deck could screw you over since you usually expect to go through your entire deck in the first few turns
I don't mention it specifically, but it is part of the second consideration - it is definitely important to think about! I mention Weiss Schwarz pulling cards from the deck to track damage, and there's not much of a difference between pulling them out during the game as damage and pulling them out at the start of the game as life.
And like Chiffonaise mentioned, it doesn't actually impact percentages of drawing them - it can screw up searches, but that's more a gameplay consideration, and I don't think it impacts deck size much.
You can actually learn a few things by looking at extreme outliers. For example, Marvel Snap uses 12 card decks with no duplicates. As a consequence, variance of card draw is extremely low and every game you are expected to draw at least 75% of your deck. And each card has a chance of 1/3 to start in your opening hand. So what they did is add other sources of randomness in form of locations that affect both players and are only revealed as the game progresses.
Another thing to consider is how long your game is, and what the average amount of cards drawn during a single game is. Or, more simply, how many cards in your deck will you not see/will be a complete non-factor in a given game? If you play a game where you're likely to get 20+ cards into your deck, that's very different than a game where you get 10~ cards in, even if you have the same deck and playset size.
The bigger the portion of the deck that goes unseen in a single individual match is, the more likely it is you don't see a single individual card. Games which have larger "unused" deck portions have to have more generalist card design about accruing incremental advantage rather than pivotal blowout cards, because of the greater chance of not seeing any particular card. If you fail to see any copy of a card in 40% of matches, then you cannot create a game where decks are contingent on seeing a specific card to win.
Very good point! I play both MTG (see a small portion of your deck) and Wixoss (see all of your deck every game), so I definitely see both extremes!
I'm making a card game with my wife. Deck size was one of the first things we settled on. Being a 20 card deck and only 1 copy per card gives it a 5% chance to draw a specific card. Thanks for the video, I hadn't considered the draw percentage before now.
A lot of the time it's just going to come down to what feels right while you're playtesting - but it is good to keep in mind! Good luck with your game!
I hope you would make a video on how to balance first player's turn, I had been wondering about it lately. Love this series and keep up the good work!
That's a good topic, although it's also a bit intimidating! There's a lot of different approaches different games have tried over the years, but it's consistently a very difficult thing to balance.
I played a 20 card singleton game. Each turn you shuffle your deck grave and hand draw up to 5. In this game you had 2 actions instead of mana system. You can either play 2 creatures or play 1 creature evolve 1 creature or evolve 2 creatures. This game pushed you to evolve creature because after an evolved creature dies, the evolved form is shuffled back in the deck. You sacrifice tempo for value type of gsme. Even though it's a 20 card deck. With this shuffling mechanic it felt like a 60 card deck because you generally saw each card 3 times in a game.
That actually sounds like a really interesting system! I'm not sure how well it would work as a tcg, purely from the economics side, since having to collect 3 or 4 copies of a card for a playset will sell a lot more boosters, but it does sound like a really good way to make a smaller deck size work in a tcg-style game.
@@tcgacademia it was a video game tcg. Frozenshard is the company name. They actual had 5 tcg I was competitive in 3 of them. All had the evolve and shuffle mechanic.
One of them a war tcg. Had a 3 grid for melee soldier and a second 3 grid behind it for ranged soldiers. Let's say I battle my 5/12 to your 10/10 then my 6/8 archer behind my 5/12 would do his 6 damage to your troop. Without receiving damage back like the foot soldier. In order to damage an archer you need to clear the soldier in front of him. That version had a 4 action system. Instead of evolve this version called it ranking up as in the military ranks.
@@Serjohn Video game-based systems do seem to have a slightly more forgiving environment than paper distribution. It definitely leads to some interesting mechanics and experimentation.
one interesting, definitely unintentional, impact of magics 60 card deck is that it creates a big gap in consistency between formats. standard has pretty weak card selection and card advantage, creating a higher variance game compared to eternal formats. you can see this most clearly when looking at mana bases,an average standard deck runs on 23 lands and an average legacy runs 17
formats should be diferent, right?
5:49 Laplus sleeves spotted
I did that caveman spongebob meme irl when I saw that.
Still go :o when I see stuff like that outside of vtuber spaces despite the literal millions of subs across all their channels
Not sure how big an overlap there is between tcg players and vtuber fans, but there's definitely a few of us!
@@tcgacademiabased choice 😊
One of my favorite games, Star Trek 2nd edition, has a minimum draw deck of 35 cards with a max of 3 of each card and a 20 card dilemma pile (to try to stop you opponent from completing missions). The interesting thing is that the size of the draw deck is seldom 35 cards in a finnished deck. In day 2 of the worlds from 2023, the draw deck size varied from 42 to 63 cards. I have myself played borg decks with close to 100 cards with success in tournaments. I really like that optimal deck size is different dependent on the deck you are playing. It adds another layer to deck construction, to try to figure out how many cards should I put in this deck. And it also makes the games more varied in a very positive way.
One thing that I've seen is that when you have a minimum and maximum deck size instead of a set size, people will almost invariably build their deck to the minimum size, no more, because it increases the chances of drawing what you need. In Yu-Gi-Oh, for example, only VERY search-heavy toolbox decks will run anything more than 40 cards.
Unless you're running That Grass Looks Greener
(For those who don't know, it's a Yu-Gi-Oh card that, if you have more cards in your deck than your opponent does, mills your deck until it's the same size as theirs, so people using it will run the maximum deck size of 60 cards to maximise its benefit)
Very true - it's why I mentioned the deck sizes in the video as the minimum, rather than as a range. There are some interesting situations where players play more than the minimum, though, like in DBZ, where the deck is also you life, and some decks want the consistency while some just want more life.
I like Commander a lot as a format, but I don't know if it would work in a game just starting out. It really benefits from 30 years of cards with similar effects. If you wanna discard and draw, or sacrifice your creatures to do damage, or whatever else, there's going to be like 50 different cards with similar enough effects, so you can make sure to have a decent amount.
It does however create very unique games because you're never sure quite what you'll get, so I think it could be interesting for more games to play with singleton/highlander rules, maybe with 30-50 card decks. That's basically how I built the Yu-Gi-Oh decks I'd play against my friends at recess, cause my collection was unimpressive and I was unlikely to have more than one copy of anything, and it was great! Really made cards feel special. I think it's worth trying as a default for a new game.
While I have other misgivings with that game, I actually like Hearthstone's take on this, with 2 card limits for most cards, and 1 for the generally more powerful and deck-defining legendary cards. I think more games should steal that. It made pack opening exciting, because when you pulled a legendary, you were like "Wow! Time to put that in a deck!" instead of being like "Nice, now I just need the other 3 copies".
I also think more games should consider stealing Legend of Runeterra's format, especially now that that game is essentially dying. Where you have standard card limits, but there's a certain class of, again, special and deck-defining cards, "Champions" in Runeterra's case, and your entire deck can only contain a certain number of those.
In Hearthstone you could play with 30 legendaries if you wanted, but a new game could make it like "Ok you have 40 cards, and 3 copies of everything, but only 6 legendary cards, so make them count!". Then you accomplish two goals at once, you maintain some consistency with the regular utility cards of the deck, small, unremarkable creatures and draw spells and such, but you have a class of cards that get to feel special, and important when you draw them.
This comment ended up being longer than I intended I didn't know I had this many thoughts about this
While not really a TCG, I want to highlight the videogame Library of Ruina for having a strict 9 card deck size limit. With a duplicate limit of 3. At this point it stops being about consistency and more about trying to fit everything you need into such a small space. Quite a fun game, I bet you'd enjoy it.
The game looks neat - I don't play a ton of digital games, but I've bookmarked this one! Smaller deck games are really interesting (even if not exactly TCGs), and there's a lot of interesting design space there.
there's also shuffling games which can have way smaller decks, like 10 cards, but your cards are cycled.
an example off the top of my head is after us which isn't a tcg, but a deckbuilding card game, where you draw 4 at the start of each turn, and discard those cards at the end, and if you deck out you shuffle the discard into the draw pile.
games like clash royale have a similar deck system.
an interesting one imo is the magic legends arpg deck system, where spells you cast "draw" after a cooldown. (you have a 12 spell deck and 4 spell slots, casting a spell costs mana, and you'll get a new spell from the deck in that slot after the cooldown ends)
Games that use smaller decks are definitely interesting cases to consider, but I think the economics of tcg systems generally pull to a larger range close to what I have in the video.
@@tcgacademia yeah the TCG with lower card count tend to go towards being video games and use a leveling system, or a point/rank system where you need more powerful cards (which you can't get/use at lower rank) at higher ranks, that's either whole new cards, or just upgrading the cards you have.
the other card games with low deck count tend to be on a "buy the whole game and buy expansions" model.
though having cosmetics might be an interesting way to go around the small number of cards needed. another option may be to have a mana deck and a creature deck (or some other form of multiple deck)
edit: an obvious solution would be making the official format BO5 with 3 deck elimination, so there's a need for 30 cards with a deck limit of 3x10
so fun fact about magic is there is no maximum deck size to speak of in fact the card Battle of wits is an enchantment that states "At the beginning of your upkeep, if you have 200 or more cards in your library, you win the game." making it a ridiculous win condition
I've actually had some discussions with Magic friends about whether Battle of Wits is essentially soft-banned from tournament play due to shuffling rules XD
@@tcgacademiaIt's definitely better to play that kind of deck in digital
Rather than deck size, I believe one of the more interesting variables here is copies to deck size ratio. MtG constructed does 4/60, so that you have around base 1 chance in 15 that any draw is a card you need. When you account for lands being between 33 and 50% of your deck, this means that you're running a very small amount of different cards, especially considering the available card pool.
IMO this has big implications on card playability in Constructed, as you have few reasons not to run 4 copies of the most optimal cards for a given strategy over copies of the second best choice, and results in a smaller than ideal constructed playable card pool and metagame variance, along with a polarization of card value in the secondary market. This is especially true when the optimal card for a given slot is known, but there's contention for second best.
I keep wondering what might happen if MtG dropped the max allowed copies to 3 or 2. Combos become less consistent and resilient, more second-best cards are played, game variance increases across the board, and likely the metagame slows down a notch or two. Power also dilutes considerably among low-cost cards, because something that's insanely powerful on turns 1-2 tends not to do as well on turns 4+.
That would be an interesting experiment to see what happens. Magic especially has the card pool to make it a viable option.
Also you need to account for variance in general ( meaning 60 and 4 is not exactly the same as 45 and 3)
Also card pool. Standard isnt the same as modern or legacy. Commander is 99 cards decks + 1 commander.. but also singleton meaning 1 copy of each card
looks like we have a fellow symphogear fan over here, between the mug at 0:21 and the choise of cards for weiss schwarz at 5:04
Good catch on the mug! Symphogear is one of my favourite anime series - I'm always glad to see other fans in the comments!
I prefer 40 or 50 card minimums because it makes it much easier to get sleeves, which are usually sold in packs of 60 or 100. In a 50 card game, 60-sleeve packs mean you naturally start to build up a supply of extra sleeves, which can be used for things like side decking or binders, or for extra decks, and 100-sleeve packs cover two decks exactly. In a 40 card game, 2 60 sleeve packs covers 3 decks, or 1 60 sleeve pack covers one deck with full side deck or extra deck.
I've personally been experimenting with 30 card minimum singleton, it's pretty interesting.
Good point with sleeves. I hate buying a 60 pack for a Magic deck and praying none of them have a fault.
An important part of deck size is how my copies of a card can be added (mtg has a minimum of 60 cards and a playset max of 4 as an example) if you divide the minimum cards included by the maximum amount of copies per card you'll get the minimum amount of cards that must be played in your game. Generally most card games try to sit around 13-15 minimum cards (hearthstone and mtg sit at 15, yugioh sits at 13~), as if you get too low decks will feel too repetitive and if you get too high decks may feel too inconsistent.
The minimum number of unique cards is a really good point! It's also interesting that those also fall into a really similar range. Definitely worth mentioning in the video if I had thought of it!
Thank you so much for this vid lol i was literally thinking about the deck size while thinking on my own tcg, and now im fully convinced that this is my calling to create a good tcg jk lol
Glad it's helpful, good luck with your game!
Most Roguelikes I tried seem to get wrong how premium Draw is when you can also draft discount mechanics. Putting a Draw 1 into a 12 card deck with 0 mana Cards means you might aswell not make it a card game if you are gonna have all your actions available at all most all times.
Haven't played any games like that, so I can't comment with any authority, but one thing going in their favour is that card acquisition is somewhat random - so it's not as crazy as it would be in more standard constructed games. Still not exactly a class of card I'd be designing a ton of, though!
One interesting question here is what happens if you remove all restrictions on duplicates and deck size and just leave that to the player? Obviously this means you need to avoid ZTK combos and whatnot or they'll just go for maximum consistency by making a deck that's exactly large enough for the combo. But if you make sure that the buildup of the game is slow and there are good ways to search out cards from your deck, it's not necessarily obvious that consistency will always trump diversity.
Definitely a really interesting thought experiment! It is really dangerous, though, even if the game is built for that. Too much freedom in deckbuilding, and you have to be really, really careful about balance, and I'm honestly not sure that level of balance even possible for a human or AI over a game as large as a tcg. It would be interesting, though. Using Magic as an example, you could probably make a FTK kill with disruption in only 7 cards. But then all you need to beat that is a mana source and targeted card draw - with only 8 cards in the deck (in case you're on the draw), it would be really easy to deck you out. Or the opponent could just build a deck stacked with Force of Wills. The number of playable cards in a format like that would still be very low, but it would be interesting to see where the meta settles.
Lacking in this video is Hearth Stone with 30 card deck / 2 max and a kill counter at the end of your deck. Which is a really different creature on its own
30 cards and three copies limit is basically Duel Links’ maximum card limit for speed duels (plus 8 card extra deck without skills that add cards to the extra deck) and the minimum for rush duels.
It is a balance I really like, but I think it does work better for smaller, faster games. Come to think of it, it could be an interesting video why physical tcgs and digital tcgs are typically built at different speeds - although I haven't played enough digital tcgs to really be able to speak with any authority on it.
Meanwhile be me, designing a game for 20 card Decks, where every card doubles as a resource card, cards are 3-of maximum, and due to the way resources work it's possible to draw 5 or 7 cards a turn (you just pay 1 resource to draw a card - you always have 5 resources at the start of the turn, plus 1 for each of your resource cards, and you can overdrive a used resource card to get an extra resource). I also remove deck-out completely (if you have no deck, your standard draw is replaced by shuffling the discard pile into the deck). So yeah, I might run into issues with hyper consistency due to the starting hand being a quarter of your Deck AND each player being able to draw cards by the truckload, but at least that's what I signed up for.
5:46 those Laplus sleeves look so cool!
La+ actually got a few really cool sleeves as part of a collab with Shadowverse. I still have a few packs I haven't opened - so many cool sleeves, not enough decks!
@@tcgacademia I am the jealous.
Great video, I've also thought about this concept a while ago and especially liked the 30 card deck size.
I personally think that the 40 card deck size in YUGIOH was especially useful, because back then we could just put the whole deck into out pockets and run to friends.
No need for deck boxes and sleeves.
I have an unrelated point.
I was researching some alternate player 1 turn 1 mechanics and many of them only use the: First player skips first draw.
There are some outliers like in One Piece, but my favorite right now seems to be the Coin or Biscuit(one time only refresh 2 mana with cost of 0) in Hearthstone.
I really think that the design space is much bigger and was also experimenting with multiple Turn 1 rules where one player decides the specifics, like P2 draws +1 or gets coin or biscuit.
Haven't found other people talking about it and thought maybe I bring it up here (in some random niche on TH-cam^^)
While turn 1 advantage is arguably even too powerful for "skip first draw" to be a hindrance one issue is that if the turn 2 advantage is too noticeable it can "feel" like it's worse. If the going second player has a handicap in card advantage and the games still are generally advantageous to the going first player it might be enticing to try and give them a better handicap but it might make the game seem like it's a bit too skewed towards the going second player. Like if you had a game where you said, "The going second player gets to add to their hand 1 dummy card every turn that does nothing but could be used for discard fodder or whatever," even if the game is structured such that it has very little mechanical use for this dummy card, just the idea of the going second player getting a +1 every turn "feels" more broken.
I've heard that for instance in Yu-Gi-Oh one proposed rule change is, "Neither player draws on their first turn but the going second player opens with 6 cards" which on its face is exactly the same as it currently is except what it does do is it gives them far more consistency in being able to hand trap the going first player. It's a very subtle change but one that statistically benefits the going second player way more than a lot of possible alternate changes.
In Shadowverse (I play the online version but I believe the physical version is similar), the 2nd player draws 2 cards on his first turn, as well as something related to one of the game's core mechanics called Evolving. In Shadowverse, you can evolve all followers once per turn, giving them the ability to attack other followers on the same turn they are played (similarly to Hearthstone, in Shadowverse, the attacker decides what to attack, and followers usually have summoning sickness), as well as some other effect. Usually this other effect is a +2/+2, but it can also change the card entirely.
If you're starting first, you can evolve starting on your 5th turn, and can evolve twice throughout the game (this is called having 2 evolution points). If you're starting second, you can evolve starting on your 4th turn, and have 3 evolution points.
This means that if you're going second and losing on tempo, you get to evolve earlier, and due to the removal of summoning sickness this should usually help you stabilize, and you aren't really penalized for doing this as you'll have the same amount of evolution points as the player going first, even after using one on T4 to stabilize.
(That said, going 2nd is still significantly worse especially after the first few sets, so there have been many cards that give a strong extra effect if you have more evolution points than your opponent, which almost always helps the player going 2nd)
I'd also like to mention how Legends of Runeterra has no method of compensating for you going second, because on average the difference in win rate is extremely minor. This is because each player takes turns to attack, ie. 1st player attacks on turns 1,3,5,7... and 2nd player attacks on turns 2,4,6,8... so if you're going second you're kinda able to invest more into your turn 2 attack compared to if you went first and attacked on turn 1.
Thanks for your replies :D
So, what I got out of it was: Goind 2nd still is worse.
Now I wonder, what would be a nice little effect to add that's not too much "in-your-face", but still helpful enough to the second player.
Again, when thinking about my example set of possible 2nd player 1st turn options, could the first player choose what benefit the 2nd player gets?
They would have to be "balanced" somehow, but this would give the 1st player control over what kind of benefit the 2nd Player gets.
And also, what happens in a multiplayer (3+ players) game?
I'm especially interested about the player base in general. How would players new to the game react to and deal with that?
How would power games react to and abuse that?
Basiacally, I want to create something that let's most people enjoy the game, but I'm definitely focused on these 2 edge cases, because for 1 group it shouldn't feel too unfair and the other group could see it as a chance of disruption or an extended part of the game.
What do you think?
@@fruitspunch As someone who has played YuGiOh, Pokemon and digimon, having tried a bit of Magic, I feel like Digimon has a good balance of the first-second turn.
Because you have to pay memory for most actions (playing a card or digievolving unless the cost is 0) and the memory gauge starts at zero (once it passes to the other player, what you could say -x, your turn ends) there are fewer plays you can make, while the going 2nd player usually can make 2 or more moves. Player 1 might only give them 1 memory, something know as memory chocking, but that play might be inefficient for player 1.
Also, something that is not talked about much because of the modern state with the game, and I understand that many games have it, but in YuGiOh the inability to attack the first turn nor have enemy targets to interact with is bad for certain decks. As someone who plays with non-meta decks and archetypes, I have some that, if going first, either I waste effects or I can just create a wall of bodies hoping that my next turn I can go on the offensive.
@@fruitspunch I think that it's really important to point out the significance of individual card design for balancing going first. Shadowverse and Yugioh both lean into either extreme at different points in time:
In Shadowverse digital, the player going second gets one extra evolution point, worth about 2 mana, very similar to Hearthstone. This worked alright for the first couple of years of the game's existence when evolution points were a precious resource. But nowadays everything evolves for free, so it doesn't really make a difference. So card design ruined the balancing mechanism for going second.
In Shadowverse Evolve, the physical game, the player going first no longer gets any evolution points, the player going second gets 3 and they are worth 1 mana each. This is already much more balanced, but the real key comes in some individual cards: 2 mana cards that evolve for 1. Going first, these cards reach their full potential on turn 3. But going second you can already use them on turn 2, which allows you to catch up right away. This concept can also be applied in the midgame, where some powerful cards will come out one turn earlier for the player going second. This balance works so well that voluntarily going second is a very valid strategy in this game!
Everyone knows that going first is broken in Yugioh. Decks usually aim to get to a winning position on the very first turn, usually by preventing the opponent from playing the game. There have been tons of bandaid fixes to this, some well designed (Fantastical Dragon Phantazmay), some not so much (Dimensional Shifter). High attack monsters that negate opposing cards are fundamentally broken and make the issue of going second much worse.
But there was actually a period in time where going second was preferred! This was due to a blend of powerful going second cards like Shaddoll Fusion and Nekroz of Trishula, but also due to a lack of oppressive moves going first. Some decks would prefer to draw the extra card going second and some would prefer to set traps going first.
Game design and card design go hand in hand! Make cards that use your rules to the fullest.
Found this gem of a channel just now.
Might be too late as it has been a month since the video was posted, but I am curious about the math used to figure out the consistency in relation to the deck size, and max copies per card.
I want to experiment with different combinations, and rates of drawing.
Max copies divided by deck size x100. It's fairly simple, but it makes for a good point of comparison.
Being able to use only one copy of a card sounds most interesting to me. 50 cards is also easier for odds math.
The issue with a 1 of rule is that it really limits engine decks and pushes games more towards good-stuff piles. There are plenty of neat strategies in tcgs that use 1 or 2 main cards and build the rest of the deck to support them, and that's a lot harder to do in singleton formats without a ton of search effects, which have their own problems.
@@tcgacademia then it's a design choice not an issue, I was tinkering with making a board lock centric card game, and that could definitely be one of the elements.
it does make tutoring and discard way more powerful when you only have one of, so yeah one trick poney decks are very glass cannon because removing one part of the combo makes the deck dead, but you can include more than one combo
also if you do heavy keywording you can get away with same card but not same, let's say you have a 3/4 for 4 that tutors and a 5/4 for 5 that tutors, they are basically the same card.
@@satibel Yeah, I don't think it's necessarily bad game design, I was more just getting at why so few games do it. Commander is a thing and people do really enjoy it, so it is definitely a fine game concept. Although you do bring up another issue with singleton games - they need a ton of unique cards, which means more time balancing and a whole lot more money on art. If you have a 3/4 for 4 that tutors and a 5/4 for 5 that tutors, they are very similar, but they both require unique art, which can be a substantial up-front cost. It's a lot easier adding singleton formats into pre-existing tcgs , because they already have a large card pool, and also they have a much better sense of how large their audience is, which helps them set an art and development budget with a lot more confidence.
Also worth noting about DBZ is your deck range was 55-85, and different decks clung to both sides of that extreme for different reasons.
Great video!
Really interesting that both ranges are viable, especially with such a wide difference between them!
As a side note, Magic the Gathering 60 card formats also use a 15 card sideboard. While this isnt as relevant to the video to say, depending on the format it isnt uncommon to use cards that grab cards out of that sideboard which winds up turning in to an extra deck. Also, technically you dont lose when you run out of cards. Only when you attempt to draw from an empty deck.
Id also like to ask your opinion on whether or not youd consider games with a highly interactable "graveyard" zone as impacting what deck sizes should be?
It's hard to say with how interactable the graveyard is, since that can change quite a lot over the course of a game as more mechanics are added. In most situations, I don't think it impacts deck size much, but I could imagine systems where it would make a difference, and maybe let you go a little smaller with deck size.
There is exactly one card that can grab other cards from your sideboard without being absolutely terrible, and it deserves to be banned because it's missing the words "unless they're mana abilities"
@laytonjr6601
I can name 3 cards that aren't bad that grab cards from sideboards.
Obviously, you're talking about Karn, the Great Creator which is indeed an incredibly potent card. Enough to get restricted in Vintage at least.
Burning Wish is played in Legacy Storm decks as a hedge against surgical effects. It just fits well in the deck as a thing that serves its purpose well.
Living Wish used to be a massive contender when it was first introduced to standard, but it's relatively unplayed right now. I'd say it's still a very good card.
Honorable Mention to Cunning Wish, which is still a super solid card.
Fun fact: In Dragon Ball Super you do lose immediately when your deck runs out of cards. You don't need to draw or wait until you next turn.
I think it's interesting to compare Magic the Gathering with Hearthstone. The former has a 60-card minimum with a limit of 4 of any one card(excepting basic lands), and the latter has 30-card minimum(and maximum, usually) with a limit of 2 of any one card(excepting legendary cards). On the face of it, this does feel rather similar and would give similar consistency, since the latter just divided the numbers of the former by two, although Hearthstone becomes even more consistent because you will never end up drawing a resource card, as the game lacks those.
It's also notable that card pool also affects consistency. If you have two cards that do a similar enough thing, then your 4-of card limit can start feeling more like an 8-of card limit. As a card pool grows larger, the more and more likely it is that you'll have multiple cards that do a similar thing. This is unlikely to be a problem for a new game, but it's something that becomes more of a potential issue as the game gets older and more cards are added.
Potentially, I think exploring different sorts of card and deck size limits can be interesting, like how Hearthstone limits legendaries to 1-of each. Although a very different sort of game, the Mega Man Battle Network series also limits the types of chips(basically cards). You can only have 5 Mega chips in your folder(deck), and only one of each individual one. Giga chips are even more limited, as you can only have one of those in a folder.
There should be a number of tools for playing with consistency and other effects.
Netrunner is a 3-of with minimums for most decks of 45, so right in there.
Dependent on format, Magic's decks can range from a 40 card minimum for limited and draft formats (with no multiple copy limits), 60 plus a 15 card sideboard for most constructed formats (with the 4 of copy limit through main deck and sideboard, with notable exceptions for restricted cards which is only a one of in a deck), and up to 100 for commander which is by far the most popular and widely played format for magic (which is entirely a singleton format, no copies of cards unless stated on the card).
I played some otber TCG games not mentioned in this video such as the 90s digimon YCG, Card Wars, & Kaijudo
I like 30 card deck. I used that when I taught my kids Pokémon. It made for brisk games. 5-7 Pokémon, 15 trainers, 10 energy.
Legend of the Five Rings has two 30 card decks per player (On top of the Stronghold and provinces) One, the province deck being more permanent things like characters and locations and the other, the combat deck is more ephemeral things like spells or combat tactics.
Love to see you review "Ward TCG" only 30 card decks, and they are crazy fun battles
Hadn't heard of this game before, but I like the aesthetic, at least!
@@tcgacademia have you reached out to the creators? I'm seen some other channels reviewing them and think it'd be cool to see more. Their Discord is also very involved
And then .. entered Marvel Snap.
12 cards, all max 1 copy of each.
That works only because the game ends after turn 6, but it showed you can redesign some foundations of card games
Then there's Hearthstone that took Magic's 60/4 ratio and just halved it to 30/2 (Legendary cards being limited to 1-ofs), while also removing ressource cards and pushing the starting life total to 30, leading to multiple successful decks across its history where the entire wincon was decking your opponent out - and sometimes yourself!
Also, La+ spotted
Every card game should have a deck size of exactly 69 cards.
Nice
Flesh and Blood uses a 40 card deck in its blitz format with 2 copies of each, BUT each card comes in 3 different colours, which each count as a different card, so if you wanted to (though not recommended) you could have 6 copies of "the same" card in the deck for a 15% chance of drawing the card you want.
In the classic format you instead have a 60 card deck and 3 copies of each colour, so a potential of 9 of each card, or an 18% chance of drawing what you need.
It is interesting how Flesh and Blood approaches card uniqueness - depending on how you look at it, it could be 18%, or 6% to hit a specific card. Which is either really consistent, or not very consistent -- although in both cases the draw system means you'll see most of your cards anyway.
@@tcgacademia Yeah, and due to the nature of how most real decks are constructed, you most likely won't ever have all 9 copies of a card in your deck, since certain colours synergise with your hero better than others, so it could really be a huge mix of ranges.
Like, one of my blitz decks for example, has a single card in all six copies, 2 of each red yellow and blue, but that's really the only one, all the other ones I only have in either blue or red. So for everything in the deck, it's around 5% chance of drawing what I need, but around 15% for a variety of that one card instead.
I started playing Commander in 2011(I guess many did) and since then it's actually been my favorite format in Magic, and the main reason is randomness. Randomness and the “diplomacy” on a 4 player table.
Multiple rounds with the same deck, don’t feel the same, and the probability of the games being nearly identical is close to 0.
My old Academy/Mind over Matter 60 card deck is basically the exact opposite. The game ends pretty save between rounds 3-4 on average when the combo is in and I let the opponent draw his entire deck. Too much consistency.
And the matches always looked the same…really always. Use tutor or card draw to pull combo, keep mana open for a reaction. Play combos and hope that you are faster than your opponent.
Maybe that’s why I am not a huge fan of too many tutors in a commander deck. It is kinda… against the point of the format…
1:20 how expensive are card shuffler mschines?
I bought one for Star Realms but I don't remember the price... And it was years ago!
XD
1:21
A maximum deck size limit, or somebody is going to pull **** like this... glad it was some judges that pulled that first, to encourage that rule to be added.
Yeah 2,222 cards was a bit much
Also the extra deck used to be 20 cards not 15
The other approach is MTG, where you need to be able to properly randomize your deck within a time limit or get hit with slow play warnings - similar result in either case, though, and definitely a good thing to have in the rules (hopefully before someone shows up to a tournament with a 2222 card stack).
@@tcgacademia well that was a protest deck no reasonable person would show up with that many cards simply becisse of how impractical it would be
@@jmurray1110 The extra deck used to be "all the fusion cards you own"
I like marvel snap and they decks of 12 cards without copies
Playing yugioh, there are a lot of weird deckbuilding methodologies. Because of the the lack of resourse systems. There are several cards that are one for one theoretically making your deck smaller.
While the poker deck has 52 cards, in Germany and Central Europe there also exists a deck of just 32 playing cards.
There are also Italian and Spanish decks with 40 cards. On the other hand, no traditional playing card deck I know of has more than 52 cards. I guess there's Mahjong...
That's really interesting! I didn't know that, although I'm not surprised that other deck sizes exist for traditional playing card games, given all the variants of chess that exist. One thing that could have been added is that less cards can work if the game is meant to be faster than usual, like yugioh speed duels. Thanks for the European context, I love learning about things like that!
@@tcgacademia Different suits and designs entirely as well - e.g. Spanish suited decks (also used in Southern Italy, because centuries ago that was under Spanish influence) use swords, coins, cups and clubs, and the ranks go ace, 2 to 7, then jack, horse, king, no jokers. Also, the suits don't have two matching colours like in French-suited decks (which are the ones that are now everywhere). This has a lot to do with card games in these countries using 40/36/32 card decks for faster games (though games existed which instead added Tarot cards, but those are rare now), which manufacturers then matched by just selling a smaller deck, while British games preferred a full deck, and the Americans later added the Jokers. You can still see this today with card games in Italy/Spain usually either using a traditional deck or using a french-suited deck and throwing out the 8s, 9s, 10s and Jokers, and with Jokers being rare in card games especially in the continent because they're much newer.
I like the spanish-suited Neapolitan cards myself because nostalgia and also because of the colourful designs, but I believe that's at least part of the reason why the much simpler French-suited designs won out when cards started to be mass produced (besides the cultural dominance of France and the UK, of course).
@@randomguy555 Really interesting stuff! It definitely makes sense that french-suits caught on since it's probably significantly easier (and cheaper) to print. I was always curious how the evolution of tarot cards intersected with the evolution of deck games, but I never really heard much about it until now. I might have to do some digging - it's a really interesting subject!
@@tcgacademia Really is! Tarot cards are probably the most interesting to me, since their connection to fortune telling was almost entirely invented in the 18th century, while they were originally just a massive suit of trump cards (the original Jokers, in a way, but entirely unrelated) from the 15th century which mainly originated and were popular in in France/Northern Italian States/Southern German States but spread everywhere in Europe except the British Isles. On the other hand, the Victorian fascination with the occult meant Tarot cards quickly became popular in the English speaking world solely for that and never as part of any card games.
From the perspective of the game design, it seems to boil down to the fact that in the many centuries and hundreds of varieties of trick taking games (the most common type of card game, where each player plays a card matching the suit of the first card placed if possible and the best card (matching the leading suit) wins all cards that were just placed down, and then at the end the person with the most tricks/the tricks with the highest point value wins) the entirety of Europe managed to make pretty much only two additions to the genre: Trump cards (which beat regular cards) and Bidding (where players estimate from their hand how well they'll think they do at the start of the round in some kind of contract/auction and get rewarded for being correct). What better way of adding trumps than adding like 20 of them? Though since most of the trump cards couldn't be placed if you could have placed a normal card of the same suit, they couldn't just win every trick.
If you want a browse for a couple of hours, there's an excellent website called www.pagat.com that's just one massive collection of rules for basically every card game in existence (and some that have been reconstructed from the historical record, which is something historians do surprisingly often). I sometimes wonder - especially after having played Balatro for a while - if TCGs could ever borrow some mechanics from traditional card games, or if the whole standardised deck thing is too fundamental a difference for that to happen.
Extra fun fact: Queens in French-suited decks originate from Tarot decks. Originally there were only the jack/horse/king of Italian/Spanish decks, which then had queen added to it as part of tarot decks (they weren't part of the trump suit, just an extra card between King and Horse) and then in French suited decks the horse was dropped and the queen kept. For reasons.
Tarot has like 78 card deck
Ashes Reborn uses a 30 card deck with 3 copy limit, and you choose your starting hand!
With the 40 - 60 cards deck rule, I'm curious what do you think on TCG/CCG with deck less than 40 cards like Gwent, Duel Links, etc.?
I haven't played a ton of online tcgs, so I may be talking nonsense, but I feel like the desired pace of a card game is different depending on if you're playing online or in person. Online games want to fire quickly and end quickly - they're something you hop on and do whenever the urge hits you, but you might have to stop and do something else soon after - so you want a faster paced game, which means you can get away with smaller decks. Physical games, though, are often an event you specifically allocate time to - even if it's just a local game night - so you want a slower game that runs a little longer, which means deck size is generally better to be a little larger (40-60, generally).
@tcgacademia That makes sense, I haven't found a tabletop TCG with less than 40 cards deck too.
WHOA ORIGINAL DBZ CCG MENTION i loved that game to DEATH
I haven't met a ton of people who know about the game, but the few fans I have run into all seem to really love it.
Zack the creator of the (Chaos Galaxy) TCG made his minimum deck size to be about 36 cards, so a smaller deck can be done; you just need to figure out the best way to do it.
I think there's reasons out there to make a game outside of any of the norms. You just want to be aware of why the norm exists, and what the trade-offs are of going above or below it.
@@tcgacademia
Indeed
Let me play a hundred cards to make it simple and a thirty card extra deck. Thank you.
instead of draw chance %, you should've used the % chance for it to appear in your starting hand.
Whenever i try to add even one creature to my deck i need 70 other cards just to keep it alive
or u could play the rat deck in MTG that lets u go past the 4 copy limit & have any number of a few cards. Rats just became the popular name as it was the first good deck to take advantage of cards that say u can include any number of copies of that card.
I think a fair rule of thumb is that 50 is both random and consistent, add +10 with resource cards, and your side deck kinda counts as size.
Digimon has 50 plus a tiny Egg deck, and Lorcana uses 60 but really could’ve been 50 and feels like an outlier, with most cards kinda being resources.
I kinda adore shadowverse and hearthstone being 40 and 30 just since they were meant to be rapid fire games with automatic turn by turn resource progression. I like how board states still differ, but if you swap out one or two cards you’re bound to encounter the difference in a few games. Like you said for quick testing.
Good point! If the game is meant to be faster and take less turns than the average tcg, then you can definitely get away with smaller deck sizes as well.
I always thought 52 pickup was more than a fancy word for a generic standard/game
Mega Man NT Warriors has an exact 59 deck limit. I'm scared.
Digimon decks are always 50 cards + 4 digitadas, 5 go to the security, you dont draw the first turn and you draw everytime you digievolve. There no Limit hand size and usually people have 8 cards in hand
The Digi-Egg deck can have 5 cards actually, it's just that most people prefer only 4.
It sounds like a sixty card deck is good if there are resource cards needed in the game.
i know its the mininum so your not wrong but yugioh is 40 minimum- 60 maximum
what about yugioh speed duel which has 20 card decks, basically no extra deck, and 3 copies of a card allowed?
I haven't personally played it, but it is an interesting example. It'll be interesting to see how balanced it stays long term, since OTKs seem way easier, but if it could be an interesting counter-point to this video.
Then Yu-Gi-Oh rush duel came about, 40 to 60 card deck with a draw up to 5 per turn and still has 8000 LP.
I think the deck size has more to do with how much draw power they decide to give you.
Pokemon has always had a lot of draw power, in fact some formats have decks built to see your whole deck turn 2-4 and then recycle a few cards to never deck out.
Rush duel is built on drawing 5 cards a turn and recycling cards from the grave.
Master format Yu-Gi-Oh doesn't have much draw but has a lot of searching so a smaller deck size makes more sense.
with so much search does deck size actually matter?
outside initial hand math, of course.
also, why doesnt yugioh have mulligans? all comes downto consistency and balance.
so, if I understood the math. Hearthstone for example with 30 cards and 2 of each card at maximum it means you have 15% per cent of drawing that card you actually need?
It's actually the same as Magic - 0.0666etc. Each card can be a maximum of 2 out of 30, or 2/30. If you just plug 2 divided by 30 into a calculator, it converts the fraction into a decimal (x100 to make it a percentage).
Or you go for Yugioh Duel Links with 20 cards and 3 copies per card. Insanely high consistency, I enjoyed it
It's definitely an interesting case! High consistency, but also very high speed. It's great as a mobile game, but I'm not sure how well it would work in person - in person the speed seems like it could be more of a debuff if you're trying to have a solid game night. I can definitely see how it would be fun, though!
MTG has 2 different formats, and one of them is Commander. 100 card deck, 1 copy of each card, PLUS a Commander Card
(Commented this before you mentioned this, NVM
the 7.5 % only counts for the first card of the deck you draw, right? After that the change goes %tage goes up for every other one card
Technically it can apply to any card in the deck. For example, there's a 7.5% chance card 12 is a specific card. As soon as you get external information about the location of cards (cards in hand, cards scryed to the bottom, etc) those odds start to shift, but the abstract odds of a particular card in a particular location is 7.5%. Definitely more useful as a point of comparison than any kids of gameplay analysis, though.
@@tcgacademia But as soon as you draw that first card of 7.5%, there are only 39 cards left. Raising the %tage of the others, right?
Momentary possibility of drawing a specific copy of a card doesn't cover the whole story. While a 60 card deck with 3 copies max will have the same possibility at face value as a 40 deck with 2, the former will have a higher variance across multiple draws. Need only 1 copy for your gameplan? Screw you! You've now got 2 dead draws. If you expect to have multiple key cards that are needed for a deck but useless if drawn in volume, consider lowering the deck size to avoid the curse of dead draws.
Very good point! Another thing I didn't mention, but is also worth considering, is how many options you can fit in below the maximum. 30 cards with a 3-of rule and 40 cards with a 4-of rule both have the same draw odds for a card at the maximum number of copies, but it's much easier to sneak in a few tech one-ofs into the 40 card game.
This is a very important point, although it's hard to quantify variance other than by bringing up a calculator and trying out some numbers. But yeah, bigger deck is bigger variance even if you adjust the number of copies.
I like the concept of Marvel Snap, the deck has 12 cards no duplicates
I think it works well for Snap because the game time is so tightly controlled. It's definitely neat looking at the outliers and seeing why they work!
unless u play commander in MTG. That is 99 + 1 commander. or u could also let people play "Yorion sky nomad" to have 80 cards in a non commander format well still having Yorion like a commander able to call the one copy of him to your hand once from the side deck. Meaning 81 cards & 100 cards is also a min that some people play
Commander is a weird one in terms of deck size, and while it does have a solid play base, I think there's a pretty good reason no tcgs start with base rules calling for 100-card decks - mostly shuffling and a lack of consistency.
I like the 12 card deck marvel snap does.
Snap is a really interesting one - I think it's the kind of game that would struggle a bit as a physical tcg, but really works well digitally.
Nice video.
It's Bakugan, 3 field cards, 3 ability cards, 3 Bakugan.
Yugioh has a max of 60 cards tho
this made me wonder about the maximum deck sizes of games I already knew yugioh was 60 max. did not realise mtg just had no maximum deck size except the ambiguous rule of it being reasonably shuffled without taking too long lorcana is also in the no max club. schwarz has exactly 50 rule with given it's rules makes sense, I was surprised to learn pokemon has a rule of exactly 60 card decks wonder if there is a reason for that.
Not too sure why certain games go for hard maximums and other games just shrug and say "whatever you can shuffle". I think it comes down to designer preference, since in 99% of games players are going to be playing the minimum number regardless.
@@tcgacademia from what I know no deck size limit tends to be the starting point, probably cause mtg does it, and is only changed if necessary yugioh's hard limit for instance only exists cause a judge thought the lack of a limit could be easily exploited so showcased what a troll could do with no limit so limits got imposed. schwarz limit is for game design reasons which are quite obvious. pokemon is still the odd one out odder still as it used to be made by wotc so if any game was gonna follow mtg no limit rule you'd think it would be pokemon maybe it has to do with prize card I really don't know
Then there is hearthstone random with 30 cards xD don't know if they want random or consistency
“Once you get to a deck size more than 60, you start having problems with shuffling”
As a MTG Commander player, where decks are 99 cards + a commander, …yeah. Shuffling.
Or 98 + a Commander and Background or Partner. Depending on what you run.
Triple sleeve your deck. It's fun. Trust me bro. Then run all the fetchlands to make your mana consistent. 👍
Me with my 2222 Card Deck 😅
You need to check out Star Wars Unlimited. It's pretty darn good man.
I just looked over a few cards when it came out and it looked like another DM clone (nothing wrong with that, but there are a lot of them). The field of play and passing actions back and forth do look interesting, though - so thanks for the recommendation! Hopefully it doesn't have the distribution issues One Piece and Lorcanna both ran into :(
This isn't a TCG game, the megaman battle network series use a set of battle chips similar a deck of cards which the limit is 30 you can't add more and you can't use less of 30 which is in the "consistent" range but like the series the chip folder (deck) change this rules in the main line games
In the first is the base of first game have the basic rules for the series
- each chip have a letter but in battle only can use a same chip or same letter in the turn
- draw 5 chips which you can expand up 15 during battle but only can use 5 per turn
- if have no more chips you must end the battle whit the mega buster a basic attack
- certain combination of chips 3/5 make a powerful attack, is know as program advance
- not all chips are used for damage also have support or healing chips
- also have some chips which are summons o very rare
-the limit of copy's per folder are 5
In the second game the changes are
- now the chips can have the asterisk "letter" which counts a any letter (mostly support chips)
-you can expand the chip selection by discarding chips
- the copys of deck is now 4 per chip
But in the 3 game have some important changes for the which alters the deck building from the series
The chips class, this class are classification for the chips.
"standard" for the most common and you can use up 30 (the deck limit)
"Mega" for summons and more powerful attacks/supports only can use 1 copy and only use 5 of this chips
"Giga" the most powerful and rare chips in the game only you can use only 1 per deck
This system alters the form of deck building and only the chips themselves and maximum copy per deck (in the sixth game is only 3 copy's) making a good game for player vs player/enemy
Interesting! I'm not sure how well 30 works for a pure TCG, but there's definitely some tcg-ish games that can make good use of that deck size.
My game has a 25 card deck with 2 copies of a card per deck.
Would love a video on Star Wars Unlimited
I'm definitely interested in the game, but there's a lot of other channels with good overviews. Honestly, one of the reasons I make game-specific videos is so I can remember how to play smaller, less popular TCGs. It's really easy to forget the specific mulligan rule of Dragoborne, for example. I think it's also more interesting for most people to learn about a game they've never heard of, so that's where I'm mostly focusing my single-game videos for now. If time wasn't an issue, though, I'd love to dive into Star Wars!