It's definitely something that keeps me interested in the game, and I think it's accidentally taught me a decent amount about tcg design while it was at it!
@@tcgacademia 1 of the many things I love about yugioh is that while I can put heros and something else into the same deck together it is usually optimal not too. But if I wanna get cheeky I can sure do some wacky combos if my brain can figure something out. I've seen some wacky long ass combos that had to utilize like half a dozen different archetypes into the same deck to work. It's entertaining to watch those duels.
@@baileydombroskie3046 Deck-building in yugioh seems completely wild to me. Yeah, you can stick to the archetypes and staples, but like you said - once you start mixing and matching partial archetypes, weird splashes, and pet cards, the amount of choice in deckbuilding is really mind-boggling. Most games hold your hand at least a bit with a level or cost curve, but yugioh is just beautiful chaos.
YGO nowadays usually revolves around engines. That’s why you see cards from different archetypes being mixed together; in essence, it’s not really mixing different archetypes together, rather, it’s incorporating an engine into a deck because those engines usually works in most decks that wants what the engine does and also have the deck space for it.
I like how Wixoss adds a layer of "domain manipulation" on top of the MtG-inspired color archetypes, with each color also having the ability to manipulate the draw pile, ener zone, hand etc
first thank you've been such a help nobody's like me in the Caribbean, I've been working on tcg for over 2 years now and through your videos I might end up actually finish it, I'm broke so I have the money for gamecrafter so I have draw it on my phone and print it at my near by library. just finished highs school let's see if I can make something and oh my tcg is called "sole commander"
I've printed a ton of custom games at my local library. In some ways its even better than printing on card stock, especially if you're really going deep into game design - it's much easier to reprint anything that needs to be changed (and tcgs go through a lot of changes - just when you think you're in a good place, someone will find a use for something you never considered, and suddenly your game's a broken mess).
I'm also from the Caribbean and started to work on 1 had ideas for years but only started to design artwork a few months ago I have my mechanics and rules already continue to do what you doing you'll get there💯
I hadn't seen that video before - it's kind of neat how we manage to hit a lot of similar points (although he's played the Austin Powers tcg, so he's obviously more based than me).
@@tcgacademia indeed, though his vid was mostly about the dangers of overly unmixable attributes, while yours is more about how less-mixable ones could prevent a "tier-0" problem due to overly mixable attributes
@@revimfadli4666 Yep, mine was more 'you need this in your game', while his was 'don't go overboard.' Vanguard is an interesting example, since it's now gone down to only 6 factions, so it seems that like starting hand sizes, the number of core factions a game can support may naturally be limited as well.
Comment for the TH-cam algorithm! Also, the naming convention in Yu-Gi-Oh as a faction is pretty interesting, considering there are so so many different of these name based categories that are all super diverse in the number of types and classes within them. It makes deck building a little too complex for me, tbh
Appreciate the comment! Yeah, deckbuilding in yugioh is... interesting. Archetypes are divided by name, but then you have support cards that don't share the naming convention at all. And you cant just look by set either, because there'll be random support dropped in the middle of sets years later. The wiki is a decent source, at least, but it does feel like you have to get into an archetype while it's new and just keep building as support becomes available and the meta shifts, or be ready to blindly net-deck. What makes it even worse is the massive card pool with no rotation. Actually, stream of thought aside, rotation might make for a good topic to cover in a theory video...
Don’t forget when they just randomly fuck it up Spygal couldn’t be searched because the archetype is spyral Some cards need effect or flavour text to force them into the archetype (like summon skull or manga rya rya being sn arch field and a toon respectively) Or when an old card gets put into a new archetype by accident so all new support had to expressly deny them (think frog the jam being a frog monster or hundred-eyes dragon because it became red-eyes b. Dragon support
Or even worse eye of timaeus who can’t be searched as a dark magician support card because it specifices a dark magician monster rather than dark magician
An alternative to having a faction system (if the purpose is just to keep deck-building interesting) would be to have weekly development patch notes that shift the meta. Not a very realistic solution for real-life cards, but extremely easy for digital card games.
I feel like you'd still want some kind of faction system just to help separate archetypes, but being able to patch cards on the fly definitely takes some pressure off the faction system.
I’m struggling to decide if whether or not I should include factions in my card game. As of right now it works more so as a sort of Uno deck, where each player draws from one deck at the middle of the table, so it’s all luck based. The Monsters still have Attacks, Health, abilities, etc. and there’s also stuff like Items, so perhaps a soft faction system could work (many are based on archetypes like lightning, fire, dragons, etc.). If I were to add factions or the like I feel it’d highly restrict what cards they can and can’t play. If I decide to go with a more TCG approach with it or a future game though I’ll definitely plan more so around it.
Yeah - I think these are essential for TCGs, but they're definitely not all necessary for smaller games. Especially with games based off a common deck, factions are definitely less important.
I'm actually very happy with what Yugioh does. Despite it usually destroying what the meta is with having tier 0 formats pretty much every other set, if even that infrequent, I'm not playing the top of the top so I don't care. Claiming the naming conversions are a "hard" restriction isn't exactly true because you can make a yugioh deck with enough to fuel one archetype while being able to run an engine of a completely different name or entire other archetypes with clever deckbuilding. It's a lot lot more fun to design stuff in yugioh than it has ever been to use the very *very* boring absolute hard locks other games do where you pick your class and you can only use those cards and neutrals. The deckbuilding becomes very obvious at that point: You run the most recent sub-archetype added in the latest set and then whatever else to fill out the rest of your colored deck. I've played these games a couple times and I have never enjoyed how any hard restriction made it feel like a color in the numbers game. It also doesn't solve the problem because if there is a goodstuff in the neutral pile every deck is going to have it guaranteed no matter what anyway, and that especially ruins the game if the goodstuff card is extremely unfun. Again, zero care for actual competitive viability, I wanna have fun in games showing people my Amazement Machine deck that searches out Master's Diploman to create a very interesting play experience, or my Fabled Unicore Melffy deck that uses the normal play pattern of Melffys to get free hard negate and destroys on the opponent's turn, and having other completely strange and mystical cards outside of those strategies completely that bring it all together. That doesn't feel like something any other game with harder restrictions could pull off.
The VS system, I feel, is an example of a different type of soft faction system than mentioned here. Each (for the most part) character card corresponded to one team, and only cards of a certain team could team attack (essentially allowing a bunch of weaker characters to take out a stronger character) or Reinforce (essentially preventing breakthrough damage when attacked). Couple that with faction specific abilities, and "team-up" cards that let two factions be treated as they were the same faction, and this made for, I feel, a good basis for a faction system that had the benefits of a soft-faction system, but without the "color screw" aspects of resource-based faction systems (it also got around the "mana screw" aspects of other resource systems, with "any card as a resource" done in one of the only ways I've ever liked that system implemented, as any card can be a resource, but some cards are a lot more useful as resources than others, giving the benefits of both dedicated recourse systems and "any card as a resource"). Unfortunately I feel the IP hampered it, not just because it was incredibly dependent on retaining the licenses to remain in print, but also because it was based on Marvel and DC hero and villain teams, there were just too many factions, and the generic "team-up" cards weren't really good enough to play, because they had to be worse than the faction-specific "team-up" cards (which also a lot of the times were underwhelming), lead to most decks winding up effectively as a hard-faction system. If a nearly identical game came out, but had the number of factions pared down substantially, I feel like it would be a hit.
I really need to get around to trying VS at some point. And yeah, that's an interesting take on factioning - technically soft factions, but locking certain mechanics behind factions. I like the sound of it better than yugioh, at least - you get a similar blend of hard and soft restrictions, but without having to spell out that the card only works with other cards of the same faction in the text of every ability.
On the subject of Yugioh's faction problem, the fact that the game's hard factions are essentially tied to names, and what names are relevant in the meta is changing constantly due to power creep and there just being a bunch of different name factions, means that Yugioh suffers from a problem of constantly shifting game identity and a much higher likely-hood for players to eventually lose interest with the current state of the game, IE, MTG has 5 colors right? It's always had those 5 colors, it probably will always have those 5 colors, and each color has unique things it's good at, creating color identity, most players will generally be drawn to 1-2 colors and play with decks mostly using those colors (Green and Black are my favourites) what this means is that even as archetypes come and go through rotation, the core style of each deck remains relatively the same, a popular Green deck today probably won't look too fundamentally different from a popular green deck 10 years ago, and then there's Yugioh... if MTG worked like Yugioh we would have had dozens of colors by now, they would have introduced Orange and Purple, Yellow and Brown, and as they'd introduce new colors they'd phase out old colors, "Oh was Green your favourite color? Sorry about that but Orange is the new 5th color in the color pie now so you should try that instead!" "So does Orange play anything like Green?" "Nope." Unless your favourite archetype is exactly Heroes, since they never stop giving that one new support, you'll be forced to shift to different play styles over and over as the factions you like stop receiving support, and inevitably you'll reach a point where you just don't care for any of the faction identities at play, at which point you'll either primarily switch to playing legacy formats like Goat/Edison which had playstyles you actually enjoyed, or you'll quit altogether, I quite Yugioh awhile ago cuz of this, though at the time I hadn't quite pinned down this as the exact reason, my interest in the game has picked back up again in the last year cuz of said legacy formats, but my interest in the current game is still basically 0.
Power-creep invalidating strategies you used to really enjoy is something I feel can apply to pretty much any tcg, but good point on why yugioh is uniquely vulnerable to it because of how it deals with factions. I've only ever been super-casual with yugioh, and while I do like all the new Cyber-Dragon support, it is definitely disheartening seeing how much of the meta gets dominated by the newest flavour of deck out of the most recent few boosters.
the colour pie and identity are the most important things mtg gave the genre. Thanks to them, as you said, the game and the player have an identity. other games, like yugioh, all decks feel the same with just another paint.
ah yes, my (hypothetical) yellow battle spirits deck themed around math cat and her waifu form. battle spirits' colors are interesting because there aren't any restrictions even in gameplay per se, only synergies: symbols don't restrict the kinds of cards you can play rules-wise, but can give discounts. and also cards of the same color tend to work in overlapping playstyles. the number contract "soft faction" being one of i dunno how many that has explicit effect synergy, like the untranslatable genius-ly named card "陀武竜ドロー" a pun on "double draw" because you draw two cards and "武竜" (pronounced "buryuu", meaning "war dragon") because it returns a 武竜 card from the graveyard to the hand. a very specific season of the anime got me into the game and i'm low-skill but obsessed. help
This got me thinking a lot... I've been working for a while now on a game that I did not think would make sense with a rules-relevant faction system (and especially now it's awkward to put in a "color factions" system when the card types are partially distinguished by UI color...) And also because it's a biiiit less of a TCG because it's designed with Drafting as a main way of play first and foremost. Buuut... I feel like there must be some cool creative way to make it work that would really help the flavor of the game, and even help balance, even if not as much as in normal TCGs. I just cannot really tell.
Dominion and Sushi-go are draft-style games that don't have a faction system and they work just fine. On the other hand, It's a wonderful world does use a faction system, and that works too. Definitely a tricky problem!
@@tcgacademia Oh what I meant was still a lot more TCG-style in core gameplay, just designed around Draft more than Constructed, if that's the word. Something more along the lines of those would be fun too though!
@@skipthewave Faction system is probably a good idea then. Although for several of my tcg-type games I've been guilty of just shoving a faction system in after the fact, and figuring out how it's supposed to work later. It's often one of the last parts of the game I finalize.
@@tcgacademia I've been delving a whole lot into the game's "tags" for non-rules "factions" and it's been going pretty well so far, with a lottttt of room to grow still, it feels. While also feeling thematically solid with the game's identity. So I couldn't really ask for more.
What about card types? These generally goveren how the card is played and are very important. You play a Land differently then a Creature and differently then a Sorcery, so it's also kinda important if you want to have cards that are played differently and not spell it out in the text box each time.
I think it's an important element, but Vangaurd managed without any card types (or rather, just one - unit). So I'm not sure it's an essential element, but it's probably worth a video at some point down the road. Thanks for the idea!
You are wrong about Yugioh. A lot of these Types and Levels have gained meaning over the years, stuff like Spright supports Level 2 monsters or Tri-Brigade with Winged-Beast/Beast-Types. It also doesn't feel very awkward with Yugioh, most archetypal decks use cards from other archetypes or are a mish-match of multiple different ones. One of my favorite is Runick Spright Fur Hire. A combination of Runick, Spright, and Fur Hire. I think it is a better system than some other card games that force players to only use cards of a certain "faction". There are multiple overlapping synergies between archetypes (rex being level 2 and the fur hires all combing into one another whilst providing even more draw power, sprights supporting level 2 and extending off 2's and helping by providing a few negates, runicks having a level 2 and being a good draw engine whilst also turning on Folgo. This deck, if it goes uninterrupted can go +7 off it's main combo which is it's main win con). I guess I just disagree that it feels awkward when it's some of the best deckbuilding available imo. If you are talking about in the past, like when the game first released fine, but none of that awkwardness is really felt today.
The point was more that the rules don't say types and attributes are relevant - card text does. I do think it's really interesting how so much of yugioh is built on card text rather than rules, but for the sake of this video, it's still a faction system, but one that needs extra card text to work to separate archetypes.
@@tcgacademia I do understand what you are trying to say, I was more taking issue with the part of the video that was talking about how it restricted deckbuilding because payoffs are so archetypal reliant or a hard restriction as you call it. It feels as if to me that this isn't restricting at all with my previous example of a deck that combined 3 different archetypes together. Most decks are like this, you will seldom find a deck that is only composed of a single archetype and not 2 or even 3. I'm not really sure of any cards games that have similiar Deckbuilding to Yugioh, where a lot of the focus is on finding cards that act as synergistic bridges between archetypes. Like one of my biggest complaints about Yugioh is that it isn't restrictive enough, some of the Extra Deck tools are too generic and end up overshadowing almost every single archetypal pay off you might play. Even some of the main deck like Fenrir or Ash Blossom are becoming like this. I don't think it should be the opposite where everyone is only playing with archetypal cards, but I'd say yugioh falls almost too far on the unrestrictive side when it should be in the middle.
@@SeveNStarSeveN I can agree with that - especially in modern yugioh, mixing archetype packages does seem more like a soft faction system than a hard lock on deckbuilding, so fair point!
@@tcgacademia ye, that was all I was taking issue with. I do agree that the game has a major problem with being designed around card text as you say, making cards extremely long novels.
As a yugioh player i find your description of yugioh having to force game elements in retroactively very funny and accurate
It's definitely something that keeps me interested in the game, and I think it's accidentally taught me a decent amount about tcg design while it was at it!
@@tcgacademia 1 of the many things I love about yugioh is that while I can put heros and something else into the same deck together it is usually optimal not too. But if I wanna get cheeky I can sure do some wacky combos if my brain can figure something out. I've seen some wacky long ass combos that had to utilize like half a dozen different archetypes into the same deck to work. It's entertaining to watch those duels.
@@baileydombroskie3046 Deck-building in yugioh seems completely wild to me. Yeah, you can stick to the archetypes and staples, but like you said - once you start mixing and matching partial archetypes, weird splashes, and pet cards, the amount of choice in deckbuilding is really mind-boggling. Most games hold your hand at least a bit with a level or cost curve, but yugioh is just beautiful chaos.
YGO nowadays usually revolves around engines. That’s why you see cards from different archetypes being mixed together; in essence, it’s not really mixing different archetypes together, rather, it’s incorporating an engine into a deck because those engines usually works in most decks that wants what the engine does and also have the deck space for it.
I like how Wixoss adds a layer of "domain manipulation" on top of the MtG-inspired color archetypes, with each color also having the ability to manipulate the draw pile, ener zone, hand etc
first thank you've been such a help nobody's like me in the Caribbean, I've been working on tcg for over 2 years now and through your videos I might end up actually finish it, I'm broke so I have the money for gamecrafter so I have draw it on my phone and print it at my near by library. just finished highs school let's see if I can make something and oh my tcg is called "sole commander"
I've printed a ton of custom games at my local library. In some ways its even better than printing on card stock, especially if you're really going deep into game design - it's much easier to reprint anything that needs to be changed (and tcgs go through a lot of changes - just when you think you're in a good place, someone will find a use for something you never considered, and suddenly your game's a broken mess).
I believe in you!!! I hope to play your game one day
I'm also from the Caribbean and started to work on 1 had ideas for years but only started to design artwork a few months ago I have my mechanics and rules already continue to do what you doing you'll get there💯
I like how this video complements Kohdok's 7 Deadly Sins video on unmixable attributes
I hadn't seen that video before - it's kind of neat how we manage to hit a lot of similar points (although he's played the Austin Powers tcg, so he's obviously more based than me).
@@tcgacademia indeed, though his vid was mostly about the dangers of overly unmixable attributes, while yours is more about how less-mixable ones could prevent a "tier-0" problem due to overly mixable attributes
@@revimfadli4666 Yep, mine was more 'you need this in your game', while his was 'don't go overboard.' Vanguard is an interesting example, since it's now gone down to only 6 factions, so it seems that like starting hand sizes, the number of core factions a game can support may naturally be limited as well.
Actually, hidden rules of tcg design might be an interesting video -stuff like standard hand sizes, number of factions, and the like...
Comment for the TH-cam algorithm!
Also, the naming convention in Yu-Gi-Oh as a faction is pretty interesting, considering there are so so many different of these name based categories that are all super diverse in the number of types and classes within them. It makes deck building a little too complex for me, tbh
Appreciate the comment! Yeah, deckbuilding in yugioh is... interesting. Archetypes are divided by name, but then you have support cards that don't share the naming convention at all. And you cant just look by set either, because there'll be random support dropped in the middle of sets years later. The wiki is a decent source, at least, but it does feel like you have to get into an archetype while it's new and just keep building as support becomes available and the meta shifts, or be ready to blindly net-deck. What makes it even worse is the massive card pool with no rotation. Actually, stream of thought aside, rotation might make for a good topic to cover in a theory video...
Don’t forget when they just randomly fuck it up
Spygal couldn’t be searched because the archetype is spyral
Some cards need effect or flavour text to force them into the archetype (like summon skull or manga rya rya being sn arch field and a toon respectively)
Or when an old card gets put into a new archetype by accident so all new support had to expressly deny them (think frog the jam being a frog monster or hundred-eyes dragon because it became red-eyes b. Dragon support
Or even worse eye of timaeus who can’t be searched as a dark magician support card because it specifices a dark magician monster rather than dark magician
That opening jab at yugioh was too true…
Great video and super succinct!
An alternative to having a faction system (if the purpose is just to keep deck-building interesting) would be to have weekly development patch notes that shift the meta. Not a very realistic solution for real-life cards, but extremely easy for digital card games.
I feel like you'd still want some kind of faction system just to help separate archetypes, but being able to patch cards on the fly definitely takes some pressure off the faction system.
I’m struggling to decide if whether or not I should include factions in my card game. As of right now it works more so as a sort of Uno deck, where each player draws from one deck at the middle of the table, so it’s all luck based. The Monsters still have Attacks, Health, abilities, etc. and there’s also stuff like Items, so perhaps a soft faction system could work (many are based on archetypes like lightning, fire, dragons, etc.). If I were to add factions or the like I feel it’d highly restrict what cards they can and can’t play.
If I decide to go with a more TCG approach with it or a future game though I’ll definitely plan more so around it.
Yeah - I think these are essential for TCGs, but they're definitely not all necessary for smaller games. Especially with games based off a common deck, factions are definitely less important.
I'm actually very happy with what Yugioh does. Despite it usually destroying what the meta is with having tier 0 formats pretty much every other set, if even that infrequent, I'm not playing the top of the top so I don't care.
Claiming the naming conversions are a "hard" restriction isn't exactly true because you can make a yugioh deck with enough to fuel one archetype while being able to run an engine of a completely different name or entire other archetypes with clever deckbuilding. It's a lot lot more fun to design stuff in yugioh than it has ever been to use the very *very* boring absolute hard locks other games do where you pick your class and you can only use those cards and neutrals. The deckbuilding becomes very obvious at that point: You run the most recent sub-archetype added in the latest set and then whatever else to fill out the rest of your colored deck. I've played these games a couple times and I have never enjoyed how any hard restriction made it feel like a color in the numbers game. It also doesn't solve the problem because if there is a goodstuff in the neutral pile every deck is going to have it guaranteed no matter what anyway, and that especially ruins the game if the goodstuff card is extremely unfun.
Again, zero care for actual competitive viability, I wanna have fun in games showing people my Amazement Machine deck that searches out Master's Diploman to create a very interesting play experience, or my Fabled Unicore Melffy deck that uses the normal play pattern of Melffys to get free hard negate and destroys on the opponent's turn, and having other completely strange and mystical cards outside of those strategies completely that bring it all together. That doesn't feel like something any other game with harder restrictions could pull off.
The VS system, I feel, is an example of a different type of soft faction system than mentioned here. Each (for the most part) character card corresponded to one team, and only cards of a certain team could team attack (essentially allowing a bunch of weaker characters to take out a stronger character) or Reinforce (essentially preventing breakthrough damage when attacked). Couple that with faction specific abilities, and "team-up" cards that let two factions be treated as they were the same faction, and this made for, I feel, a good basis for a faction system that had the benefits of a soft-faction system, but without the "color screw" aspects of resource-based faction systems (it also got around the "mana screw" aspects of other resource systems, with "any card as a resource" done in one of the only ways I've ever liked that system implemented, as any card can be a resource, but some cards are a lot more useful as resources than others, giving the benefits of both dedicated recourse systems and "any card as a resource").
Unfortunately I feel the IP hampered it, not just because it was incredibly dependent on retaining the licenses to remain in print, but also because it was based on Marvel and DC hero and villain teams, there were just too many factions, and the generic "team-up" cards weren't really good enough to play, because they had to be worse than the faction-specific "team-up" cards (which also a lot of the times were underwhelming), lead to most decks winding up effectively as a hard-faction system. If a nearly identical game came out, but had the number of factions pared down substantially, I feel like it would be a hit.
I really need to get around to trying VS at some point. And yeah, that's an interesting take on factioning - technically soft factions, but locking certain mechanics behind factions. I like the sound of it better than yugioh, at least - you get a similar blend of hard and soft restrictions, but without having to spell out that the card only works with other cards of the same faction in the text of every ability.
On the subject of Yugioh's faction problem, the fact that the game's hard factions are essentially tied to names, and what names are relevant in the meta is changing constantly due to power creep and there just being a bunch of different name factions, means that Yugioh suffers from a problem of constantly shifting game identity and a much higher likely-hood for players to eventually lose interest with the current state of the game, IE, MTG has 5 colors right? It's always had those 5 colors, it probably will always have those 5 colors, and each color has unique things it's good at, creating color identity, most players will generally be drawn to 1-2 colors and play with decks mostly using those colors (Green and Black are my favourites) what this means is that even as archetypes come and go through rotation, the core style of each deck remains relatively the same, a popular Green deck today probably won't look too fundamentally different from a popular green deck 10 years ago, and then there's Yugioh... if MTG worked like Yugioh we would have had dozens of colors by now, they would have introduced Orange and Purple, Yellow and Brown, and as they'd introduce new colors they'd phase out old colors, "Oh was Green your favourite color? Sorry about that but Orange is the new 5th color in the color pie now so you should try that instead!" "So does Orange play anything like Green?" "Nope." Unless your favourite archetype is exactly Heroes, since they never stop giving that one new support, you'll be forced to shift to different play styles over and over as the factions you like stop receiving support, and inevitably you'll reach a point where you just don't care for any of the faction identities at play, at which point you'll either primarily switch to playing legacy formats like Goat/Edison which had playstyles you actually enjoyed, or you'll quit altogether, I quite Yugioh awhile ago cuz of this, though at the time I hadn't quite pinned down this as the exact reason, my interest in the game has picked back up again in the last year cuz of said legacy formats, but my interest in the current game is still basically 0.
Power-creep invalidating strategies you used to really enjoy is something I feel can apply to pretty much any tcg, but good point on why yugioh is uniquely vulnerable to it because of how it deals with factions. I've only ever been super-casual with yugioh, and while I do like all the new Cyber-Dragon support, it is definitely disheartening seeing how much of the meta gets dominated by the newest flavour of deck out of the most recent few boosters.
the colour pie and identity are the most important things mtg gave the genre. Thanks to them, as you said, the game and the player have an identity. other games, like yugioh, all decks feel the same with just another paint.
ah yes, my (hypothetical) yellow battle spirits deck themed around math cat and her waifu form. battle spirits' colors are interesting because there aren't any restrictions even in gameplay per se, only synergies: symbols don't restrict the kinds of cards you can play rules-wise, but can give discounts. and also cards of the same color tend to work in overlapping playstyles. the number contract "soft faction" being one of i dunno how many that has explicit effect synergy, like the untranslatable genius-ly named card "陀武竜ドロー" a pun on "double draw" because you draw two cards and "武竜" (pronounced "buryuu", meaning "war dragon") because it returns a 武竜 card from the graveyard to the hand. a very specific season of the anime got me into the game and i'm low-skill but obsessed. help
This got me thinking a lot... I've been working for a while now on a game that I did not think would make sense with a rules-relevant faction system (and especially now it's awkward to put in a "color factions" system when the card types are partially distinguished by UI color...)
And also because it's a biiiit less of a TCG because it's designed with Drafting as a main way of play first and foremost.
Buuut... I feel like there must be some cool creative way to make it work that would really help the flavor of the game, and even help balance, even if not as much as in normal TCGs. I just cannot really tell.
Dominion and Sushi-go are draft-style games that don't have a faction system and they work just fine. On the other hand, It's a wonderful world does use a faction system, and that works too. Definitely a tricky problem!
@@tcgacademia Oh what I meant was still a lot more TCG-style in core gameplay, just designed around Draft more than Constructed, if that's the word.
Something more along the lines of those would be fun too though!
@@skipthewave Faction system is probably a good idea then. Although for several of my tcg-type games I've been guilty of just shoving a faction system in after the fact, and figuring out how it's supposed to work later. It's often one of the last parts of the game I finalize.
@@tcgacademia I've been delving a whole lot into the game's "tags" for non-rules "factions" and it's been going pretty well so far, with a lottttt of room to grow still, it feels. While also feeling thematically solid with the game's identity.
So I couldn't really ask for more.
What about card types? These generally goveren how the card is played and are very important. You play a Land differently then a Creature and differently then a Sorcery, so it's also kinda important if you want to have cards that are played differently and not spell it out in the text box each time.
I think it's an important element, but Vangaurd managed without any card types (or rather, just one - unit). So I'm not sure it's an essential element, but it's probably worth a video at some point down the road. Thanks for the idea!
Awesome video
You are wrong about Yugioh. A lot of these Types and Levels have gained meaning over the years, stuff like Spright supports Level 2 monsters or Tri-Brigade with Winged-Beast/Beast-Types. It also doesn't feel very awkward with Yugioh, most archetypal decks use cards from other archetypes or are a mish-match of multiple different ones. One of my favorite is Runick Spright Fur Hire. A combination of Runick, Spright, and Fur Hire. I think it is a better system than some other card games that force players to only use cards of a certain "faction". There are multiple overlapping synergies between archetypes (rex being level 2 and the fur hires all combing into one another whilst providing even more draw power, sprights supporting level 2 and extending off 2's and helping by providing a few negates, runicks having a level 2 and being a good draw engine whilst also turning on Folgo. This deck, if it goes uninterrupted can go +7 off it's main combo which is it's main win con). I guess I just disagree that it feels awkward when it's some of the best deckbuilding available imo. If you are talking about in the past, like when the game first released fine, but none of that awkwardness is really felt today.
The point was more that the rules don't say types and attributes are relevant - card text does. I do think it's really interesting how so much of yugioh is built on card text rather than rules, but for the sake of this video, it's still a faction system, but one that needs extra card text to work to separate archetypes.
@@tcgacademia I do understand what you are trying to say, I was more taking issue with the part of the video that was talking about how it restricted deckbuilding because payoffs are so archetypal reliant or a hard restriction as you call it. It feels as if to me that this isn't restricting at all with my previous example of a deck that combined 3 different archetypes together. Most decks are like this, you will seldom find a deck that is only composed of a single archetype and not 2 or even 3. I'm not really sure of any cards games that have similiar Deckbuilding to Yugioh, where a lot of the focus is on finding cards that act as synergistic bridges between archetypes. Like one of my biggest complaints about Yugioh is that it isn't restrictive enough, some of the Extra Deck tools are too generic and end up overshadowing almost every single archetypal pay off you might play. Even some of the main deck like Fenrir or Ash Blossom are becoming like this. I don't think it should be the opposite where everyone is only playing with archetypal cards, but I'd say yugioh falls almost too far on the unrestrictive side when it should be in the middle.
@@SeveNStarSeveN I can agree with that - especially in modern yugioh, mixing archetype packages does seem more like a soft faction system than a hard lock on deckbuilding, so fair point!
@@tcgacademia ye, that was all I was taking issue with. I do agree that the game has a major problem with being designed around card text as you say, making cards extremely long novels.
Amazing
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