My personal favorite has to be Digimon’s “memory” system. For those who don’t know, in Digimon theres the memory gauge that goes from 10 to -10. Anytime you play a card that card’s play cost to subtracted from the memory, but the big difference maker is that you’re allowed to go negative. If you only have 1 memory and play a card that cost 3, you’ll just go to -2. But the once you go negative, the cards currently activating will resolve and your turn immediately ends. Your opponent will start with the memory you went into the negative. So in the example above, you went -2, so your opponent will start with 2. It creates a fun back and forward game of chicken. You can ball out, but then you’r opponent can ball out for no penalty, or you can play safe and try to choke your opponent out, but you’ll also be short handed.
Big fan of "Force of Will"s Mana Stone system. Basically, you have a secondary deck of Mana Stones (Like Lands) that you can top-deck a resource card off of each turn by tapping your "Ruler". It purs control of when you get more resources into your hands while also keeping some Luck based twists because there "Non-Basic" and Duel Colour Mana Stones in the randomized deck as well as creating a cost for Mana Stone generation (If you generate a Mana Stone, you can't use your Ruler that turn.).
And technically the Pendulum Summon. But the most tangible resource nowadays is your Deck/Extra Deck, running out of cards in grind game is pretty common.
I think even more interesting for Yugioh is, that the cards themselves are becoming the resources. There is a reason why a draw 2 effect card is completely fine in magic but banned for the longest time in Yugioh. As when the cards themselves are the resources, card advantage becomes super powerful.
Hard once per turns matter infinitely more than your normal summon. Like you could normal summon something like SE Ash 3 times and it wouldn’t even matter because only the 1st one will have an effect. Yugioh is very good at establishing resource loops that let you repeat certain combos turn after turn, but a hard once per turn is what forces the combo to eventually stop. Even looking at banned cards, a lot of them end up banned because they lack a hard once per turn. Like pre-errata Firewall Dragon was just infinite material for burn FTKs and now that it has a hard once per turn it’s just an okay end board piece in Cyberse piles, which ends up being like a tier 2/rogue strategy. Unlike in other mana-based card games where you can use a card as many times as you have copies of it and can pay the cost, which is how you get infinite mana loops in games like Magic.
@@jayfeather9063 "cards themselves are becoming the resources". as opposed to magic or pokemon where after you resolve a card it just goes back into your hand and is not discarded I guess
Digimon mana system is not only very lore accurate, but it also creates a very strategic dynamic of PASSING mana for the opponent to use. Possibly the best system in card game yet.
This. Decks actually have ramp times without forced clinkiness of wincon pieces + lands. Just Scry tutors + wincon pieces. The problem of choking to 1 Memory becomes non existant in early-midgame with "Set to 3 Memory" tamers or options like the Memory Boost/Trainings or Inheritables that gain Memory to keep turn. The borrowed Shield system from Duel Masters make the game so defensively sound. Brilliant game.
I actually hate the Digimon system. I don’t like the feeling of forcing balance through cost. It takes away most of the design space for investing purely in economy (at least in a way that’s not arbitrary)
Balance is boring imho. I like how green in magic create consistent mana advantages, and how red creates sporadic mana advantages. It gives us another way to make games more dynamic. The pendulum style mana system for Digimon specifically turned me off from the game.
@BS-gk2cb I would disagree greatly, because they have worked around it in several ways that have created dynamic deck concepts that really pushes the way the game works. As the most basic example, look up fanglongmon, the deva-sovergin deck. It just slaps a body down for 7 mem, it draws you a card, and then slots another body in the breeding zone. While this is a high cost, it is mitigated in several ways. You are setting up 2 bodies for one price, and it an an eminent ace deck. Meaning that you can go into large lol 6 bodies as interrupts.
The best energy systems for me were either Duel Masters, which allowed you to play any card in your deck as a mana resource, which in turn led to some interesting resource management or Force of Will, which used an extra deck for your mana, which let you play without worrying about getting screwed/flooded while also not being completely broken.
Force of Will was legit. The resource gain was tied to your Ruler, (basically a commander from EDH) SO, you would have to decide when to stop using them to gain more mana, and when to flip them into battle themselves.
Star Wars Unlimited has a nice system where any card can be played as a resource once per turn. The colour constraints come in during deck building, too, so it doesnt lose flavour. Plus theres the Smuggle mechanic where you can play cards from your resources for an extra cost and then place a new resource down in its spot. It works well with the game's system and is part of why Ive been enjoying it so much
My issue with SWU is the draw 2 per turn. I get that it's supposed to help you resource a card essentially for free each turn, but when facing aggro they just cap at 4-5 ink and essentially will never run out of gas because of the inherent draw 2 per turn.
no one has mentioned it but Flesh and Bloods resource system is easily the best in the tcg space. having cards have 2 uses opens up so much design space whilst not limiting them to being either a dead extra resource or an unplayable card. the draconic, light and mystic talents all prioritising one card colour makes their heroes play super differently (e.g dromai wanting to pitch reds which are the most resource inefficient to fuel her dragons or the mystics making blue cards ,which are typically underpowered to accommodate for their better resource generation, power cards) adds another layer to the game and tonnes of interesting decision points. if anyone is interested in playing FaB I'd honestly say that the resource system is my favourite game feature
While I do think the FaB's cost system is awesome and initial heroes are great & work interactively against each other (guardian, assasin, warrior, brute etc.), I feel like their design direction is not for me. Initial classes are very fun, but having to play rune counters against wizards' weird gameplay, stall fatigue being a relevant wincon, the overtuned heroes from newer sets and Illusions in their entirety are just very unfun for me. It is still a great game tho, just not my tcg.
@boraaksitozgun9912 I mean yeah there's a lot to debate on concerning the meta but the core resource system is what I'm talking about. plus on your point about arcane barrier protection I actually think that's a really cool part of the game, pitching cards to defend rather than blocking with them means you keep them for later which gives you more agency in how you choose to fight wizards, do you pitch your blues and try to play a hand of reds or do your other cards have higher costs that you'd rather keep the blue for your turn? plus wizard cards tend to be weaker numbers wise in order to make up for the unique way of defending against them (runeblade is still busted tho lol) also, assassin wasn't an initial class, they're the most recent class introduced to cc and are literally designed to be disruptive and play a different game outside of pure numbers/value
@ethn_chey yeah sorry wrong about assassin thing. Again, not saying game is bad at all, far from it. It is very cream of the crop stuff when it comes to TCGs. I just don't like interacting with the magic stuff, and illusions feel very match up based (stomps or you stomp them) for me. Again nothing that takes away from the game, just experiences of some noob. Hope anyone who enjoys it has a good time and will play it anyway.
@boraaksitozgun9912 yeah that's totally fair! glad you enjoy the game, it only gets better the more you play :) also, as an illusionist player the best tip I can give to beat them if you're having trouble is to go as wide as possible with multiple attacks with go again per turn. I get them feeling super polarising tho, it kinda feels the same way when you're playing as the illusionist lol
Another thing I like about Pokemon's energy is that it often telegraphs your future plays. That sounds like a bad thing, but it means you can react to your opponent mid-play despite being unable to perform actions on their turn. It's why I don't mind that you can't play at instant speed like Magic and Yugioh. As for my favorite resource system, it's Elestrals hands-down. Saying it's just "life is your resource" really undersells the depth in the spirit system. Like Magic and Pokemon, the different colors mean you have to find optimal ratios in both your main deck and spirit deck, and choosing whether or not you run a really strong off-color staple is a lot trickier of a decision. Because you lose spirits when you take damage, and most staples can use any color, you have to keep in mind your future plays when choosing which color spirits to burn. And "Heal 3" is the best card in the game because it is also both ramp and mana fixing. But skilled players can predict your future plays based on what you choose to spend and what you choose to get back. You can also cast your elestrals with the wrong spirit(s) at the cost of turning them into a vanilla, but sometimes you want that since certain cards check what color spirit is under the elestral and not what color the elestral is. And because spirits exist on the board under your runes, moving them between cards on the board is a major mechanic instead of an occasional effect like Pokemon. You can siphon spirits from your elestrals to pay for your runes. Many elestrals have effects when they receive spirits or effects when you move spirits. There's a neat combo this allows you to do with a rune that moves a spirit, any elestral with a receive effect, and any other card on field with a spirit. You can siphon the spirit off the receive elestral to pay the cost for Altar, use the effect to move another spirit to the receive elestral, and the receive effect will trigger again, but the game only checks if the elestral has the proper spirits under the card at resolution so it doesn't die. So you get 2 effects for the price of 1 and without reaching into your spirit deck. Game is sick.
The fun thing with YuGiOh is that, while it doesn’t have an overarching cost like most other card games, it compensates by having various cards use just about anything and everything as it’s own personal cost (and also that even THESE costs can chain into other effects.) Tributing/Discarding/Banishing or sending to the GY for cost is pretty common, but there’s also paying LP, shuffling cards back into your deck, needing _specific_ cards in whatever position to get your effects off, etc… … After a moment of thought, I think YuGiOh might just emulate the craziness of its anime and manga A LOT more closely than many other real world games can with THEIR media spinoffs. Edit: Mom, Dad, please stop fighting. It’s just a children’s card game (that should have been rebranded as a teenager’s card game by now TBH).
While that is true, it is also true that every card game has the possibility to do it too, while keeping their energh system as a possibility for limiting extremely powerful cards. But i do (agree) think that the main problem with yu gi oh is not neccesarily its cost system, but how little konami innovates with the costs Edit: Realized after writing the comment that the agree is wrongly placed, but now that i'm heard, i may aswell explain what i mean. I think yu gi oh would be a lot funnier if you could add costs that aren't related to throwing things to other zones (which lately is debatable if it is even a punishment for the card) and add costs like "you can't play this card until turn three" or "during your next turn you can't draw a card during your draw phase", but the closest there was when i last checked yu gi oh were effect like you can only play certain type or archetype for the rest of the turn which can be worked around
@@ButFirstHeLitItOnFire While I agree that these costs do lead to interesting gameplay and designs, they also lead to a lot of card text bloat and memory issues when you have to remember what you've played and what summoning locks you are under. Still, I do admit that the incredibly open design space has led to a lot of interesting archetypes.
that has came to be yugioh's core flaw. in other games its easy to make balance cards are theres a simple way to power scale a card and when it can be used while yugioh has to very carefully design cards that other games would balance in a minute.
I actually think that one of the biggest aspects that I dislike in the energy system compared to mana is the fact that energy can only be attached to one pokemon at a time. Unlike in magic, every turn you're powering individual pieces instead of your whole board, which means that if you lose a pokemon, you have to start building resources again. It never feels like I'm building to something. Instead, it feels like I'm forced to play voltron more often than not.
that cuts both ways though, because it can also serve as a strategic target. in mtg, if you get rid of a bunch of land that's just... it. except for obvious exceptions, getting rid of those lands affects a lot of things you can do (if your deck has a few white staples, but is primarily blue, plains disappearing isn't the end of the world) but with energy you've gotta think ahead; is attaching worth it? is REMOVING energy worth it? i think they've both got their pros and cons!
In the "new" pokemon tcg-lite app there is not much energy acceleration and because of that it makes the once-per-turn limitation more impactful and you often don't have a clear answer to where you should allocate your energy to. It's more interesting right now. Modern pokemon though? I agree. Indeed it can feel weird. Decks like Lugia V or Baxcalibur often mean that after a bit of setup energy becomes an afterthought. And as an opponent, you have to deal with both the big beatstick as well as thwart the energy engine all at the same time.
to be fair, i think that's kinda the Whole Point of pokemon. the win condition, resource system, and even things like format mechanics (ex, EX, GX, V, ex again, etc) are designed around making individual pokemon on your board more important than your 0/1 for 0 Crookshank Kobolds. And when the company based its brand image around "these creatures are your friends," there's an incentive to build the game to make you Want to keep your friends around.
That's exactly the feeling I got when I first learned how to play Pokémon a year or two ago. I really disliked it especially when it came to the thought that when defeated, it was essentially an armageddon due to the voltron feeling.
I like the system from legends of runeterra I think it's really nice to bank mana you didn't spend to have a boost on your next turn, with the rule that it can only be used for spells
@@AlessioTheHero the ability to bank spell mana did help smooth out early turns. However it felt like a patch on top of hearthstone's system that didn't really do anything new. I think it would have felt more unique if there were more cards that interacted with spell mana in interesting ways.
Spell mana was the worst game design in runeterra. This mechanic alone forced the game to ever only be burn/aggro, as every removal spell had tò be balanced around "spell mana" mechanics, thus being horrible, and made the aggro plays completely unstoppable, as you could Always have up tò 3 extra Manas to protect your stuff. And of course, protection spells have tò be cheap, othersise nobody would ever consider them.
@@lucasalarcon3230 Agree. In MTG, I mostly play control deck like blue, blue/black, Bolas,...I win if the game play longer, but I MUST build my deck and think my play around surviving early. Because the opponent will most likely try to kill me before I do my things (or else they lose). Aggro will always be the cheapest and easiest way to win a game in a CCG, because the less your opponent play, the less they can harm your strategy.
Gwent has an interesting cost system in that a card's cost isn't relevant to playing the card. Instead, the card's cost is used when making your deck. Cards have a provision cost between 4 and 15. A deck needs at least 25 cards, and you can only have a certain number of provisions. Usually 150. So, you can make a deck of all 6 cost cards that have average power. Or you can make a deck with a mix of higher cost, more powerful cards, and lower cost less powerful cards. This is how the game is balanced.
@@alexrivera5747 this seems like more of a deck building restriction than a resource system like the video is about. I do like the system though, Netrunner has something similar where out-of-faction cards have an import cost to add them to your deck.
And it died, not saying that's the reason but it could be one of many. I played Gwent for a long time but the game was just not as entertaining as other tcgs after a while
Pokemon TCG Pocket's system is pretty interesting. They borrowed a bit from Hearthstone by giving you a guaranteed Energy each turn of a randomized type from a predetermined pool. It helped solve the mana screw/flood issue, but now you have the issue of multi-type decks not being able to get the right Energy type. It's a big problem for Dragonite decks right now.
I enjoy the game but rn the mana system is really messy. Misty is a great example of how example a single mana difference in the first couple turns snowballs the entire game
I run Dragonite and tbh it feels pretty fair, it makes you consider energy placement more carefully and adds some extra drawback to its 200/turn. Allows other lines to shine sometimes (Tentacruel my beloved!)
Personally I think guaranteed energy is gross. It makes some strats and lists that shouldn't be viable, too powerful. And doesn't help too many other decks that were well built and had no problem with energy to begin with. In general one thing Pokemon has going for it is No/Less Power Creep, which is totally ruining magic. Yes there is some. But way way less, and I don't think they do it for the mere money. Which Wizards definitely and crassly does; it's their whole business model now. All that said, of all the card games, I like Pokemon energy system overall, best of the all. I don't see it as a problem that you can't spam/ramp energy as abusively as we want. Not everything should be max degenerate. 😅 I do think Pokemon has a problem with certain Types and energy mechanics being super boring to play against. Viable but basically too dumb and too easy to be interesting. I hate the "oops I lost all my energy oh big surprise wow look, I got it ALL back, yet again" every turn decks. Boring archetype. So is item hate or ability hate. Oh well. I say this as somebody who has played thousands of non-meta or intentionally anti-anti-meta decks, just for the fun of it. I don't mind losing half the time. For me what's fun is being able to beat the "best" meta deck with a weird list they don't bother adapting too because it's older cards, or not tournament viable. It's just for fun. (I played a lot Marshadow GX toolbox but not the typical lists; and Zygardes.)
Lorcana seems to have to most flexible resource system with the inkwell. Being able to turn almost any card into resource if you don’t need it at the moment is very intuitive and interesting for gameplay.
The way Lorcana manages its resource system is really what got me into the game in the first place; I would love to see the game show up in Soda's videos
Honestly yeah shout out to Lorcana. At first I was kinda bummed that there weren't new ways to ink or play with ink types, but then it grew on me since you make hard compelling decisions for *what* to ink, the risk of how many uninkables to place in deck (or how many), and it's easy to process, so my partners easily picked it up as a first card game. Probably good for kids too
One Piece lets you use "mana" or "Don!!" in order to both summon characters and also make your attacks stronger. You can also pitch cards from your hand to boost defense on your opponent's turn. Each card is partially balanced based on how much you can boost if you pitch them from your hand, so a super broken card can have 0 "counter" while a niche weaker card can give 2000 counter, and a balanced card can give 1000 counter. And unlike in pokemon, you draw when you take damage instead of drawing when you kill something, which makes SO much more sense. Opponents actually have to think because every time they hit your life, they are also giving you more potential counter. The One Piece tcg might have a few problems, but it is one of the most well-balanced and fun card games I've played.
I think the OP Don system is the best there is. Being able to use don towards power, getting a guaranteed 2 per turn, starting with 1 or 2 on the first turn, being able to ramp or remove Don throughout the game… it’s all really well done and creates an immense depth of play.
Not to mention that it solves a problem the other systems don't usually solve: the first player advantage. The first player starts with 1 Don!, so it has advantage in this turn because it has 1 resource more than the opponent. Then the second player starts with 2 Don!, so it also has advantage in their turn since they have 1 more resource. It might be still beneficial to be the first, but the resource system works in a fair way
This is why I'm obsessed with the the One Piece Card Game. In most games, mana is just used to play cards and that's it. But Don!! adds so much more depth to the game than any other system I've seen. "Should I use all my Don!! to play this card, or would it be better to use it to boost my attackers out of counter range? Do I boost them a little bit to force them to discard more counters, or a lot to guarantee taking a life? Should I even take a life right now, giving them an extra card in hand???" It adds so many options each game where even matches against the same deck feel unique because of all the little choices you can make while not being overwhelming. It also makes the game have an insanely high skill ceiling, like I'm sure a good player with an all vanilla deck could beat an average player on a meta deck. The game is so good and there is always more to learn and improve at yet it's fun even when losing (except when playing vs Lucci I HATE Lucci)
Keyforge doesn't really have a resource system, but you're still limited in what cards you can play and/or use. Each deck is 36 cards, 12 from each house, and at the start of each turn you call one of the three houses, which means you can only play or use cards from that house, so you often have to choose between using the creatures you have on the board or playing cards from your hand to cycle through your deck. Cards that let you circumvent this rule (Captain Val Jericho, Helper Bot, Exhume, etc.) tend to be very powerful, as they not only add efficiency, but can give access to combos that would otherwise be impossible.
What I like about KeyForge, being limited only by what cards you can play or use and (usually) having a fresh hand of 6 cards every turn, is that it gives you options on sequencing your turn and lot of decision space for the player (i.e. should I play this card first or this other card or use this creature?). Compared to some games with mana systems where turns can be pretty straightforward, i.e. play my 3 drop on my 3rd turn, play my 4 drop on my 4th turn. I guess one other limiting factor in KeyForge is "rule of six" where you can only play or use cards of the same name 6 times each turn, which (mostly) prevents infinite loops and does put a limit on what you can do on a turn
Resources in yugioh are the very same resources of other card games, but the ones people usually don't think about that much because they take them for granted. Cards themselves are always treated as a resource and card advantage in general is super important in every game, but in yugioh cards are basically your ONLY resource. Discard a card. Tribute a monster. Banish a light and a dark. This monster requires two level 6 monsters to make. Shuffle 3 monsters with different NAMES (this specifically is pretty unique to yugioh I think thanks to archetypes and how once per turn effects are designed) So yeah, yugioh may apparently not have a resource system on the surface, but in reality it's just a different approach to card games.
the way i see it is that many other tcgs (following mtg) employs a hard resource system while yugioh goes for a soft resource system instead similarly to the concept of a hard and soft magic system in fantasy fiction a hard resource/magic system is strict on how it works and dictate everything about how its governance and structure functions together and is essentially something that scales vertically because of increasing cost but a soft resource/magic system plays it loose where the structure and governing dont necessarily depend on each other and scales horizontally instead because the cost can be everything and anything to the point it can even inverts itself
I can encourage you to check out the resource-system of the Flesh And Blood TCG. It's the one thing that really won me over and it does things really different than any other tcgs Ive played yet. How you use the resources determines what cards you see in which order later in the game
@Always.Smarter It's so much easier seeing it visualized in a video or picture, but the gist is, that every card has a cost and a so called pitch value. If a card costs two resources to play, you have to "pitch" one or more cards from hand that pitch for that value. Most of times a card is available in three different pitch values from one to three. The one that pitches for usually trades its pitch value for playing power. Ex: "Head Jab" with 1 pitch value attacks for 3 damage, but "Head Jab" with 3 pitch value (that can pay for expensive cards by itself) only attacks for 1 damage. At the end of your turn all pitched cards go under your deck, and you draw at the end of your turn until you have 4 cards in hand. This means you will see your pitched cards later in the game, since you cycle through your deck relatively fast, compared to ther tcgs. This resource system has at least two things that I like a lot: You virtually never end up with dead hands ever. Deciding which cards you pitch opens up a lot of strategies. If you pitch only your three value cards, you will be explosive in the beginning, but once you cycle through your deck, you will draw a lot of weaker cards. You could also decide to pitch a lot of your strong cards, that pay for less resources and run your opponent out of steam. So when you go into the second cycle you can overwhelm them with a lot of force Hope that helps!
@Always.Smarter It's so much easier seeing it visualized in a video or picture, but the gist is, that every card has a cost and a so called pitch value. If a card costs two resources to play, you have to "pitch" one or more cards from hand that pitch for that value. Most of times a card is available in three different pitch values from one to three. The card that pitches for a lot of resources usually trades its pitch value for playing power. Ex: "Head Jab" with 1 pitch value attacks for 3 damage, but "Head Jab" with 3 pitch value (that can pay for expensive cards by itself) only attacks for 1 damage. At the end of your turn all pitched cards go under your deck, and you draw at the end of your turn until you have 4 cards in hand. This means you will see your pitched cards later in the game, since you cycle through your deck relatively fast, compared to ther tcgs. This resource system has at least two things that I like a lot: You virtually never end up with dead hands ever. Deciding which cards you pitch opens up a lot of strategies. If you pitch only your three value cards, you will be explosive in the beginning, since its very easy for you to pay for the cost of carfs, but once you cycle through your deck, you will draw a lot of weaker cards. You could also decide to pitch a lot of your strong cards, that pay for less resources and run your opponent out of steam. So when you go into the second cycle you can overwhelm them with a lot of force Hope that helps!
@Always.Smarter It's so much easier seeing it visualized in a video or picture, but the gist is, that every card has a cost and a so called pitch value. If a card costs two resources to play, you have to "pitch" one or more cards from hand that pitch for that value. Most of times a card is available in three different pitch values from one to three. The card that pitches for a lot of resources usually trades its pitch value for playing power. Ex: "Head Jab" with 1 pitch value attacks for 3 damage, but "Head Jab" with 3 pitch value (that can pay for expensive cards by itself) only attacks for 1 damage. At the end of your turn all pitched cards go under your deck, and you draw at the end of your turn until you have 4 cards in hand. This means you will see your pitched cards later in the game, since you cycle through your deck relatively fast, compared to ther tcgs. This resource system has at least two things that I like a lot: You virtually never end up with dead hands ever. Deciding which cards you pitch opens up a lot of strategies. If you pitch only your three value cards, you will be explosive in the beginning, since it is very easy for you to pay for resources, but once you cycle through your deck, you will draw a lot of weaker cards. You could also decide to pitch a lot of your strong cards, that pay for less resources and run your opponent out of steam. So when you go into the second cycle you can overwhelm them with a lot of force Hope that helps!
@Always.Smarter It's so much easier seeing it visualized in a video or picture, but the gist is, that every card has a cost and a so called pitch value. If a card costs two resources to play, you have to "pitch" one or more cards from hand that pitch for that value. Most of times a card is available in three different pitch values from one to three. The card that pitches for a lot of resources usually trades its pitch value for playing power. Ex: "Head Jab" with 1 pitch value attacks for 3 damage, but "Head Jab" with 3 pitch value (that can pay for expensive cards by itself) only attacks for 1 damage. At the end of your turn all pitched cards go under your deck, and you draw at the end of your turn until you have 4 cards in hand. This means you will see your pitched cards later in the game, since you cycle through your deck relatively fast, compared to ther tcgs. This resource system has at least two things that I like a lot: You virtually never end up with dead hands ever. Deciding which cards you pitch opens up a lot of strategies. If you pitch only your three value cards, you will be explosive in the beginning, since it is very easy for you to pay for resources, but once you cycle through your deck, you will draw a lot of weaker cards. You could also decide to pitch a lot of your strong cards, that pay for less resources and run your opponent out of steam. So when you go into the second cycle you can overwhelm them with a lot of force Hope that helps!
Yeah IDK if this game was popular anywhere outside of Poland but me and my homie are still playing it sometimes. Maybe its nostalgia or something but IDK just something about this game feels so good and mana system is also great.
Duel Masters is my favorite resource and life system and it's not even close. Lorcana is doing something similar with "Ink" that's pretty nice. Imagine Duel Masters but some of the cards can't be put into the cost area, and those cards tend to be more powerful.
I like the system in FE Cipher. There is only one type of card being your units. Once per turn you can set one to a special area to basically act as a land of the color of the card. It's simple but it works pretty well and then there's some effects that will flip those cards face down where theyre still usable and can be tapped but like it's a way to limot certain powerful abilities as you can only flip them once.
18:08 Netrunner mentioned. Netrunner really has multiple resource systems. One certainly is the number of actions (clicks) but money (credits) to play cards is much more obvious as a resource system that doesn't feel like a classic resource system at all. In some damage-centric matchups cards in hand act as a pseudo-resource as well.
@@joeysung311 Oh its actually best with a friend if none of you had any exposure before. Atm there are 2 versions. NSG designs new cards and keeps the game alive via in-person tournaments. Reboot, which I am playing on my channel, plays mostly the original cards, has imo much better balance and design philosophy, but is played pretty much online-only.
Legends of Runeterra is such a surprisingly solid game. The mana is similar to Hearthstone but also has an overflow system that allows players of any archetype to cheat forward on the next turn by holding back before. This is also useful because of how each player's turn is meshed with the other, which is something I've never seen in any other card game.
Keyforge (designed by Richard Garfield) has no resource system, but the restriction is that you can only play and activate one of the three factions in your deck each turn. It's a brilliant design idea which leads to lots of interesting decisions during the course of the game.
Vampire: the Eternal Struggle. You start with thirty points in your Pool. It's your life points AND it's the resource you use to put your minions into play AND once you move pool to those cards, it's their life points AND a resource they can spend on actions. The vampires you bring out can take an action on their turn to hunt and recover spent/lost points, and there are means of taking points back from your minions to add to your pool, but overall it gets depleted turn after turn.
You’re doing great. These videos are all very interesting. You have really good insights. Totally deserved rapid growth. Keep it up. Maybe you could talk about the usage of different zones in each game. Graveyard, Exile/Banish, etc. For example, Yugioh is basically played entirely in the graveyard. Pokémon kinda does it too. Magic has a little bit of graveyard recursion but it’s not required. Etc.
Weiss Schwartz has a system in which whenever you attack, you reveal the top card of your library (with potential effects triggering from that) and place it face down in the "stock", and the stock is essentially a gauge for how much resource you have to spend. It doesn't empty between turns or anything, so you can either try to build up stock by attacking often (even attacks where your unit loses are sometimes worth it since it builds resource), or with effects that let you stock up in other ways. Since the zone is face-down, you cant shuffle it, and you use cards like a stack (last stocked card is first to be used) there's a mini-game of remembering what cards are in it and how much you need to spend in order to get potential key cards back into play rather than having them be locked away. Since managing your deck and grave are key parts of the game, a game that has a relatively high amount of random chance becomes much more skill based since you're always trying to manipulate the off-board cards. When your deck empties, you simply shuffle your grave back in and take one point of damage, so by locking away less important cards in the stock and keeping key pieces in your new deck you can effectively increase the "density" of good draws (which is very important for reasons I can't get into in this already too long comment). Finally, it incentivizes active play and attacking, meaning it always pushes the game towards ending and preventing stalling.
The original wow TCG had an incredible resource system. It worked like magic but you could play any card face down to act as a resource. Some cards had bonuses if used as a resource which added some fun deck building and decision making.
Came here to say this. You never outright condemn a card as "mana" when reserving to memory as you recollect it all at the start of your next turn. Choosing which cards you do reserve provides another vector of strategy too, and splashier cards costing more reserve limits how many you can drop within one turn. Then all the cards that interact with the size of your memory, elements of cards in memory, balancing card draw through drawing into memory rather than straight to hand... It's all really great design. ❤
@@OnlyLiarGameFan You also add your cards played as mana back to hand every turn in Duel Masters? Haven't played but in gameplay I've seen I haven't seen players do that.
I like the Fire Emblem Cipher system. It works very similarly to MTG's mana, but there aren't land cards in Cipher, there are only "creature" cards, and you can once per turn play any creature as a land. It also has a unique cost for some effects I haven't seen used elsewhere, where you turn your land face down, which makes it a colorless land.
LoR is similar to Hearthstone, players get +1 mana crystall at the beginning of each round, 10 maximum. The difference is, at the end of the round up to 3 unused mana is stored as spell mana. Spell mana remains untill it is used, it can only be used to play spells and spells will use spell mana in the first place. There are also specific ways how you can interact with mana. Ramp was historically weak, cards like Catalyst of Aeons, Cold Resistance, Faces of the Old Ones or Wyrding Stones were just to expensive and provided too little. Currently ramp is the strongest thing you can do in Freljord, becausr the region was basically re-imagined as a ramp region, getting cards like Winter's Touch, Wild Mysticism and sigil of the storm mechanic. Shurima is known for ability to sacrifice mana for some powerfull effects. Rite of Negation is the most infamous "...or destroy your managem" card in the game. Other, like Rite of Calling or Rite of the Arcane seen mediocre success. Some, like Rite of Dominance or Dune Swallower rarely seen play.
There's also a refund mechanic with certain archetypes (namely Sett and Jack) And a lot of cards discount themselves or other cards, like Whispered Words, Sunken Temple, or MrFuckGameDesign, also known as Elder Dragon.
Vanguard also has 2 resource systems one tied to how much life you've lost and the other usually to archetypes and generator who make the resource. Recently a new resource was added that it based on turns or cards specifically to speed it up.
I loved old Vanguard but bounced back when they remade it. I loved the mechanic of counter blast, it was simple, elegant, and gave the losing person more comeback opportunities. Could you please say what's the name of the last mechanic you mentioned? I'd check it out on the wiki.
@furryfox12 the last mechanic added is energy. You get 3 per turn starting on turn 2 (so player 1 gets nothing on turn 1 and then 2 gets 3) and can get a max of 10. Regardless off deck you can always spend 7 to draw a card. There are cards that make energy much like cards that soul charge and there are cards that spend energy. For example because of how vanguard tends to ramp up when you are on your first and second grade 3 turns you usually have a stock of energy to use already a lot of decks that run 1 energy card don't even have to run anything that makes it, they just have to make sure they don't play that card too many times in a row.
Gwent has unique resource system called Provision. In Gwent you can play any card at any time (but only 1 per turn), but provision is a cost you have to pay to put a card in your deck during deckbuilding. But it's not that simple. The basic provision ammount is 150 +you will get bonus provision depending on leader's ability you choose. The cheapest cards are 4 provision, the most expensive - 14 (considering basic design philosophy before gwentfinity). Your deck has to include at least 25 cards (but can include more) and at least 13 units. It is a fun concept and makes deckbulding really exciting, but on the other hand makes the game almost impossible to balance. 4-6 provision cards are in a "bronze zone", they are mostly statsticks. Card that cost more are usually the effect cards, that are played for something unique they have to offer. There is no objective way to say that for example Knickers should be an 8 provision card, or that Vilgeforz should be a 9 provision card. You basically can't set standarts for cards like this and compare them.
It sounds like a mechanic that's great for casuals though. Canadian highlander in mtg (and one can argue normal commander to some extent) has a very similar points system, and it seems to work fine thanks to the social aspect
Big fan of "Force of Will"s Mana Stone system. Basically, you have a secondary deck of Mana Stones (Like Lands) that you can top-deck a resource card off of each turn by tapping your "Ruler". It purs control of when you get more resources into your hands while also keeping some Luck based twists because there "Non-Basic" and Duel Colour Mana Stones in the randomized deck as well as creating a cost for Mana Stone generation (If you generate a Mana Stone, you can't use your Ruler that turn.).
Great video, I would also say that Yu-Gi-Oh's mana system is effectively combo based, in that you need to plan to have your combo interrupted at any point, if you don't and you can't do anything else with a weak board state, you just lose to your opponent's combo. Equally you have to hit your opponent's combo at just the right place to stop them dead, if you counter something that their deck does a lot then it doesn't matter, they'll have a back up in place. I like the new Digimon TCG's memory system; each player has "memory" up to a max of 10 and they can spend that on playing cards until it hits zero or below and goes into their opponent's memory pool (which is then the amount they start their turn with (minimum 3 memory)) so you can play that big boss at the end of your turn if you want but then your opponent gets more room to do stuff on their turn, or you can use up all your turn's memory on it and leave them with only that basic amount but that was your entire turn so you kinda lose it on that. Lorcana's ink system is also cool, but really forces you to know your deck going in as it can be really difficult to decide in the early turns what to ink and lose forever.
I like the onepiece system on don. It has a double use I've never played with before in anything else. I would love to see a video with that included next time. Keep up the good work!
Check out Mytos y Leyendas, it’s a Chilean card game where your life total is the cards in your deck. Damage dealt to you is done by milling cards. The resource system is similar to magics lands and are called the gold reserve however there are no color restrictions. What is interesting about it is that many gold function like magic’s enchantments, in that they provide an added passive or activated ability. I’m not sure if it is still in print, but I played it constantly as a child.
Every card game in the world: "I play 1 land/energy/mana and I pass my turn to you" "I play 1 land/energy/mana and I pass my turn to you" Yugioh players: "nice board dude, okay dark ruler no more? Battle phase? evenly match? CL2 droplet sending evenly match?"
@@jmurray1110 no, droplet only goes to the GY after the chain is fully resolved. Therefore it is still only 1 card that your opponent will have to banish. What you are thinking of is if your opponent destroys your Evenly with a card like mst
Lorcana has a pretty good mana system as well. Certain cards can be put into the inkwell to be used as mana but they're not just blanks like lands are in Magic meaning you can build a deck with a ton of mana producing cards that aren't just dead draws at certain points in the game. Might be one of the better mana systems as you're giving up the ability to play a card from your hand to turn it into a resource to be able to play other cards instead. You hardly ever get screwed and you can really never flood cause once you reach a certain point, you don't have to play cards to the inkwell anymore.
I got so sick of mana flood and mana screw in MTG I considered making a game mode where you put your lands in a separate deck and choose which to draw from. And I did make some land/creature cards, before they actually released some. Mine came in as lands, but could "Awaken" as kaiju-style creatures though, by returning lands to your hand.
I love the legends of runeterra's manna system. Because of how how the system works, manna often feels asymmetrical but not unfair. Its also consistent and you can save up to three manna per turn for spells. To me it feels like the most fair manna system that can still be manipulated by cards in a balanced way
Final Fantasy TCG is the best. It's similar to MTG, accept there is a limit to the number of 'lands' that can be played at a time and any type of card in hand can be also be discarded for 'mana'.
One resource system that I think deserves a mention is the Vs System. The way it worked was it was an 'any card as a resource' system, but it had the twist that the cards you used for a resource could still potentially be used if they were plot twists, locations or reservists, to get around some of the feels-bad of other any card as a resource systems, where you want to play your cards, not just use half of them as resources (also didn't hurt that it was made in the post yugioh TCG boom, so the similarities to trap cards worked in its favor). There are however downsides: because it's an any card as a resource system, as well as some of the peculiarities of combat, curving out became kind of mandatory, essentially shifting screw/flood to not getting a good curve, though there were some decks that overwhelmed with numbers, so cared less about curving out. Additionally the designers were IMO far too meager in what they would allow plot twists and locations to do, since they were effectively like lands and spells at the same time, but this made it just feel like your combat tricks were never quite strong enough and your continuous effects were too situational. On the whole it's a system I wish more games would experiment with (though the combat system I feel is one that can be done away with; give me MTG combat over it any day)
15:45 You can use EACH of Ash' effects once per turn. Cards that restrict players by making them able to activate one of their effect per turn do exist, and it's a different and harsher restriction (example: Arianna the Labrynth Servant).
For me Vanguard has a very interesting resource system, one of its main resources is the damage it takes, meaning that the most damage you take, the most you can do
Legends of Runeterra had the best mana system for digital card games. An iteration on Hearthstones system, keeping it simple while reducing it's drawbacks of playing on curve and acrually promoting interactive gameplay with spell mana
I really liked Legends of Runeterra's addition of spell mana onto Hearthstone's mana system. Hearthstone tends to favor decks that can 'curve out' well and efficiently spend all the mana you have each turn, and you can fall behind if you missed an early turn. Hearthstone's Coin helped the 2nd player with this a bit, allowing you to say, play a 3 cost card on turn 2, then a 3 cost card on turn 3. LoR's spell mana allowed you to store up to 3 excess mana to be used only on spell cards, which makes it so you aren't punished as harshly for missing a turn. Control decks will want to always have this spell mana reserve full to be able to react to their opponent's plays, and there's even an archetype focused around 6 cost spells, so those decks would want to pass Round 1 and 2 to do a big play on Round 3 with 6 total mana for spells.
it’s a left-field pick but star wars unlimited. every card can be “resourced” or played face down in your resource pool. every time you draw cards, you draw 2 and can choose to resource one of them to increase your mana pool. it makes mana an impactful decision every turn with consequences for every action. you’re constantly thinking “these are both so vital to my strategy but i have to resource one to play this other card” and it’s really exciting to play. there are cards that have the keyword “smuggle” which means they can be played from the resource zone for a higher cost, essentially giving you two hands
this is very quickly becoming one of my favorite channels, absolutely love your content and presentation, and you explain things kinda how i try to explain stuff to my friends who don't play the kind of games i like, so your videos really resonate with me even though i know next to nothing about TCGs. thanks for your content and i hope you keep making these videos! :D
The old Lord of the Rings TCG by Decipher had an interesting system. Your deck had 2 parts, free peoples and shadow. You put your shadow cards against the opponent free peoples and vice versa. When you played a free peoples card, the “cost” went into the twilight pool. So if a card cost 4 you added 4 twilight. And then shadow cards would be paid for with that twilight. So you had to balance because if you played a big turn on your fellowship phase then your opponent has a lot of resources on the shadow phase.
Another strength with the mana system in MTG is that it allows you to understand what you and your opponent are capable of at any moment. You're not forced to sit there and spectate your opponent's turn like in Hearthstone, and you're not just waiting for some hand trap/spell BS like in Yugioh. Your opponent has 2 mana and they only have 2 mana of work they can do, which just deepens the play and counterplay that each person has. Like you're about to drop your win con, but you notice that your opponent has 3 blue mana sitting up so you drop something less important first and play around the information you have.
I really like running Simian Spirit Guide and Elvish Spirit Guide (very bad creatures with the ability to exile them from your hand for 1 mana at any time) so I can goofily go, "JOKES ON YOU I HAD MANA"
How is playing around a counterspell different than playing around handtraps? If your opponent leaves 3 mana open in magic and you think about the spells they could play that is the exact same as thinking about handtraps in yugioh, as there is also just a finite number of different ones.
@ If your opponent has a hand trap there’s no communication of that other than cards in hand and archetype. In Magic, they specifically have to be playing blue with blue mana open to counter They have to be playing red/green for instant buffa They have to be playing black/white for res effects. Also, especially in the first few turns, leaving mana open is almost always an intentional act. Whether or not your opponent has a hand trap or quickspell is just “hey, they have it or they dont.”
I really enjoy Exodus TCGs energy system, having two separate decks like how PTCGP has an energy reserve makes it much nicer play pattern wise, no “Manascrew” just pure deck building
I'm working on a game with health as the resource. To preface this description, if I say something is like something from another game Assume that it is just to get you in the headspace, not exact. So to start your deck, you have up to 3 leader cards. Your deck can only have cards of the associated leader type. So, for instance, if it was magic, the gathering you would have 3 commanders, and you could only have cards of their creature types. Say vampires, zombies, and werewolves. Each leader gives you more health to start the game with. So base 1+x+y+z. It is always a number between 0-2. So 1+2+1+0=4 starting health. Your health can be used in one of two ways. Exhaust which is a temporary loss that you gain back at the start of your next turn. Sacrifice. Which is a permanent loss but you still gain one health, extra every turn. It's kind of like tapping versus sacrificing land in magic.
@dudono1744 yeah but with this it's designed to be. From the start. Meaning 1 health win is still a win is a lot different because 1 health is your screwed
My favourite resource system is probably from Cardfight Vanguard. There all your cards are essentially free, but to activate their effects you need to spend some of resources. What are resources? Two main resources are either "Soul", which accumulates throughout the game or "Counter", which is damage you received throughout the game. Both of those resources are one use only, which means you have only limited amount of abilities you can use throughout the game and puts a lot of emphasis on refilling your resources through special effects.
I think Magic managed to get it right early on the existence of CCGs, and it has evolved well since. It and spell speed are what continue to keep it as the king of card games.
Magic has been a flop for a very long time now. Mark Rosewater has been ruining the game, and WotC/hasbro has been accelerating it. There's also a reason Richard Garfield never used his lands system again for any of his other card games, it's honestly pretty bad.
@@steveng6721 lmao imagine getting an anime-themed Llanowar Elves for 200+ USD. I know I wouldn't, but Hasbro being Hasbro, they saw that players are gullible anyway (Remember that 1 of 1 One Ring horsesh💩t that happened not too long ago?)
I would like to highlight Lorcana here! There's two bands that a Lorcana card fits into. Inkable and non-Inkable. Most cards are Inkable which allows the player to place that card face down into the "Inkwell" (mana once per turn. Essentially 90% of the cards in each set can also be a "land" (from MTG). Once its in the inkwell you can't take it back out unless stated otherwise, same goes for uninkable cards in where you can't put them into your inkwell unless an effect allows you to. During a turn, players use their inkwells to play cards up the amount of ink they have. Again similar to the land system a player with 5 ink could play one big 5 cost card or 5 cost 1 cards and anything inbetween. The deck building restriction comes from the fact that if you put too many uninkables in your deck you wont be able to play and also when making your deck you choose 2 out of the 6 card pools to choose from denoted as "ink types", to play with. The ink types are: Amethyst, Ruby, Emerald, Sapphire, Amber and Steel. For example I can play Amber and Steel cards but my deck becomes illegal if I also play Ruby cards. Each card has a border highlighting which inktype it belongs to. As a long time magic player (10 years) I have always been frustrated from losing games due to mana screw/flood it is what lets magic down as a game. Lorcana fixes it and makes it better.
I like the flavor of the different mana types in MTG. I have experimented with different ways to mitigate mana screw/flood, but they all have their downsides as well. I have just come to accept that some games will be lost from too much or too few mana. One idea that I liked was to keep your mana in a separate pile and you could choose which part of your library to draw from. Both were considered your library. However, that breaks many mill and graveyard effects and it is no fun to separate your cards after each game.
Good points! I have to agree, that Pokemon's energy system is the best of the four main games mentioned in the video, since it has more flexibility than magic's lands, and does not limit your plays nearly as much a mana in MTG and Hearthstone. The more card games I play, however, the less I like MTG's and Pokemon's land/energy system, and one-per-turn mana systems like these and Hearthstone. Land screw and flood are a part of that, but I also think it feels terrible to have a significant portion of your deck that only is there to fulfill your land for turn. MTG and Pokemon have tried to fix this with land/energy cards that have additional effects, which does somewhat solve the problem, but those cards can often feel like a compromise where you run a bad land to make your deck less likely to get screw'd or flooded. Another issue with one-per-turn mana systems (mostly in MTG and Hearthstone) that was somewhat touched on in the video, is that, in the early game, most cards in your hand are completely unplayable, leading to few interesting decisions being made in the early turns of the game. MTG has tried to design around this issue with a variety of alternate costs on cards, but just because they can design around it doesn't mean it's a good mechanic. From my experience, there are many games that pace themselves quite well without the need for a one-per-turn mana system, or specialized land/energy cards in the main deck. These games often use the escalation of the board state, as more cards come into play, to pace the game. They use other resources to limit the players' actions on a turn, without requiring land/energy cards to bloat the deck, or limiting players' plays in the early game. Some Examples: Digimon's memory system allows players to play almost any card on turn 1, but at the cost of giving your opponent more resources to use on their turn. This can lead to interesting gameplay where players are trying to spend the minimum amount of memory on their turn until a player decides to make a big play at the risk of the opponent's counterattack. Netrunner (as mentioned in the video) gives each player a set amount of actions of their turn, the amount of which does not change throughout the game, so that even early turns have meaningful decisions on what cards you play and what other actions you take. The game does have a separate resource system, Credits, which are spent to play cards, but credits persist between turns and can be gained or spent without any one-per-turn limitations. Grand Archive's reserve system temporarily spends other cards in hand to pay for card costs, allowing you to play almost anything in your hand on the first turn, effectively treating your hand as your mana pool. This is kept in check by the game's limitations on card draw, and other mechanics that limit what cards you can play early in the game, or even weakening certain cards until the correct conditions are met later in the game. This allows players to play almost any card in their hand, even on the first turn, but uses other mechanics to modulate the flow of the game.
IMO Duel Masters had the best resource system. It was basically like Magic, except there's no dedicated Land cards, but you can play any card upside-down as a land analogue that can tap for mana of the card's colors. So your whole deck is playable cards and you'll never get mana flooded or mana screwed (except maybe by color restrictions). Also, the only casting requirement was that you spend at least one mana of the same color as any card you're trying to play. In MtG terms, every card in Duel Masters has a single colored mana pip of its color, but the rest of the cost is entirely generic. There are even other TCG/CCG that use similar "every card can be used as resource": the Naruto card game worked similarly, where you could charge any card to your Chakra zone to spend on jutsu.
I like the variation on that where you have automatic uncolored mana and can pitch a card to play another card of that color. also there's a game I played which had an interesting double deck as am answer to mana flood, which was basically the mtg land system, but with a land and spell deck, allowing you to chose between drawing mana and drawing spells. another interesting take on mana is faeria, where the game has a hex board and you get uncolored mana by default, you can get more uncolored mana by controlling a zone where there is mana, and you get colors by literally placing lands, and you can chose between placing a single colored land or 2 uncolored lands. an additional restriction is that colored cards can only be placed on their land color. your cards need to be able to physically hit the opponent, so aggro decks who want to rush have to use 2x uncolored while control decks can usually afford to place colored lands, which gives them access to more powerful cards, or they can go to the mana generation which is on the side to get extra mana.
The mana system of Magic is almost perfect. It has the right pieces that allow for a tempo vs value dynamic, it has the effect of the game leading to a climactic finish, game and deckbuilding decisions acting as both signaling and hard choices, color restrictions affect which types of effects you are allowed to have and when, etc. There is so much that it does right and somehow it did all that on the first try. BUT people really, *really* hate mana screw and mana flood even though a majority of the time it is due to other deckbuilding errors and those types of losses occur rarely. HOWEVER, the emotionality of that rare event is also very high so it sticks. In order for mana to have true meaningful impact on deckbuilding and gameplay then at some point during the either one or both of those stages of gameplay you need to be making decisions about when you want mana, how much you want, what types, etc. Hearthstone fails here in a big way and every deck when they are truly optimized become very homogenous in strategic depth. People don't quite get it if they have never spent the time to *truly* understand Magic's mana system. The best system exists somewhere in between Sorcery, Lorcana, World of Warcraft TCG, and Duelmasters/Kaijudo. These systems solve flood and/or screw in different ways and get you to making the other type of meaningful game decisions without sacrificing the cost of mana itself which creates the true relationship between tempo and value. That being said, there is something very important to understand, and this one may be very difficult: multiple layers of variance create consistency with the caveat that outliers are absolutely extreme. Removing layers of variance actually INCREASES the effects of luck because you flatten the bell curve BUT it reduces the effect of the extremes. See: rolling two dice vs rolling one die. The same exists here with mana and non-mana cards. What this means is: Hearthstone is very luck dependent even though mana is free, because there is no bell curve of variability of mana vs non-mana, and you only draw non-mana. Therefore tempo/curving out is the most important thing in Hearthstone (especially in its first 4 years of release). The other 4 games mentioned have it WAY better because the role of every card in your deck as sideboard, win con, removal, support, etc change their value by matchup and determine which are best used as mana. Lorcana kind of forces this by making certain cards unable to be played as a resource (which I don't like) but has the upside of signaling to new players during deckbuilding what they should focus on in gameplay (they're forced to). There's also the nice benefit that if you can play nearly any card in your deck as mana then you don't need a sideboard in your game. In this case technically your sideboard is already in your deck: it is the cards you usually play as mana but make situational sacrifices for when you otherwise need them.
I love Magic the Gathering but the mana system is complete garbage, needing to have half the deck dedicated to mana even in singleton formats is bad design, specially when you are only guaranteed one draw per turn.
@@tiagodoresalmeida That's why I mentioned the other 4 games that had better design solutions to this problem. The mechanic of using cards in your deck as a resource is good, but the strict limitation is not. The extremes of variance are too much for most people's taste and there is less skill expression than compared to say the World of Warcraft TCG. Just because it has a drawback to its design, that doesn't mean that the whole design is flawed. This is hyperbole.
I have a hard time believing adding layers of randomness makes the game less luck dependent (even though i understand for the example of multiple dice rolls). If we take a simple example where i make an attack that does 100 damage, which can crit for 200 damage: Does adding another dice roll that says the attack can miss and do zero damage reduces the effect of luck? It certainly doesn't feel so. Maybe it would better work if it halves the damage instead of zeroing it but idk
The best thing about energy in pokemon is depending on the deck they do not have the same role Depending in your energy acceleration method they may be played from your hand once, from your deck thanks to a card, from your discard pile thanks to a card, from your hand as much as you want... Every deck manages the ressources in a very different way I would say the way energy is managed is what makes pokemon fun to play and what creates so many different deck archetypes. In the past energy was tough to manage but now the current meta is amazing when it comes to energy usage
The Lord of the Rings TCG: while playing as Free Peoples, you have a blank check and can play whatever cards you want, but their cost goes into the Twilight pool. Your opponent playing Shadow then pays for their cards *out* of the Twilight pool, meaning you are always playing a game of risk-reward. (Both players play both sides; they are shuffled together into a single draw deck and then you alternate turns on each side).
Real answer? Duel Masters, but also shout outs to • My Little Pony (like duel masters, but you also have a second pool of energy tokens to purchase effects such as movement or card draw) • Lorcana (*most* cards can be turned facedown into what are essentially lands, so there's a good mix of hard choices and versatility. But there are also Songs, which are special actions where you have the option to tap characters to perform actions instead of spending resource. Really cool) • Digimon (Play until you are in the negatives, and then your opponent's pool is equal to the negative you ended your turn in. Real push and pull. This *does* mean there's no ramp, but you get card draw and discount whenever you digivolve, so a volatile ramp up is a still a strong component of play)
Wixoss is one I enjoy. It cribs off duel masters in that any card is a resource. You can store one a turn but you also gain them when your creatures die or you lose life. It isn’t needed for creatures, but for spells and your deck’s ace cards. As such, it functions as a comeback mechanic where taking losses early gives you resources to play your ace cards, and there is this strategy behind not attacking blindly.
Legends of Runeterra has probably the smoothest mana system I've played so far. May not be a huge game right now, but the man system is really good. Like HS mana, but you can bank up to three unspent mana. This mana can only be spent on spells. May not sound like much at first, but this is coupled with a game that has high interaction and a staggered turn system. That spell mana allows you to aim for say a solid turn four drop and have two mana open to protect it with interaction. Or be ready to interact with the opponent's stuff. Makes the game really engaging and you don't end up with the classic hearthstone early game awkwardness where its like I guess I just can't use all my mana perfectly so fuck me. The whole mechanic just feels really well polished, and beautiful in its simplicity. And turns are staggered - meaning that one player does an action (playing a creature, casting a slow speed spell, or attacking if they are the player who can attack that turn) and then the other player does an action. If you pass, and the opponent also passes, the turn ends. So sometimes people will pass early to see what the other player plays, knowing that they probably want to play something. But sometimes you just want to pass back in order to make them burn mana. And having two different types of mana means you can interact with them differently. Spells that increase your regular mana are not common, more of a classic ramp. But you can also get cards that give you spell mana or have effects that take place depending on gaining or spending spell mana. There's one deck (or more idk, but one that I know of) that specifically wants to cast absolutely nothing on turn one and two in order to build up its full three spell mana immediately.
@@connorjensen9699 I was so disappointed when they ended PVP. The game was so solid. But Riot can’t milk $500 skins out of the game so why bother supporting it right?
@@Catbeans99 100%. And like they barely tried any monetization. I get that it's initial strategy was to be very F2P friendly since that was a really prominent sore spot from HS, but there still does need to be some compelling way to pay and frankly they really didn't try very hard to find a good balance.
@ They very well could have the free cards and just sell alt arts like skins in league. Cotton tail teemo plays the same as Teemo. No advantage. It wasn’t some huge mystery of how to monetize, Riot just didn’t want to for some reason. Same thing with Wild Rift, they promised console release soon after the mobile release but have now seemingly cancelled it because there isn’t enough interest despite there being posts on forums asking daily where the console port is. They have got to be one of the most out of touch devs around. If it’s not League or Valorant, they just don’t care. I have zero faith in the upcoming fighting game.
Having tried all, YuGiOh's system is easily the most fun to play with. However, the winner for best system instead has to go to both Legends of Runeterra and Digimon. Much better designed systems than all games covered in the video.
I've been meaning to write up a whole thing on Yu-Gi-Oh's resource system (which it does have, but it's not the kind of resource system most card games have, which is why people bounce off of it so much I think). A lot of people say the "resource system" is the normal summon, but that's not really comparable (but the normal summon _is_ a resource you have access to). To put it very simply, it's your cards that are resources, but not in the way that Duel Masters or Lorcana does it where you literally put your cards face down as resources. Being able to go into your deck to extend your resources is a big part of the game, being able to use your graveyard as a resource is a part of the game, allotting space in your deck to hand traps that can interact with your opponent on their first turn and respond to their disruptions on your first turn is a part of the game. They're all just resources that you always have access to so long as you draw them and can pay their costs, whether it be discarding cards (which may actually turn them into resources) or locking yourself out of other routes. At the end of the video you slip a bit into the Yugiboomer mentality of "the game is too fast now therefore it's bad", which I think is kinda bad form. I know it has been mentioned before, but Digimon is my favorite resource system in card games. I have been playing card games for years and years and years, and almost every card game either uses "resources as cards" (such as lands in Magic or energy in Pokemon) or "cards as resource" (generally any game where you play cards face down as a resource). Digimon is literally one of the only games I've played since I was like, 12 where they did something genuinely new and unique. People often idolize the "back and forth" of a card game and bemoan games where one player "doesn't get to play". Well, Digimon is founded upon a literal back and forth, because part of your turn is figuring out how deep you want to go and how many resources you want to give to your opponent, and how many resources you can squeeze out of what your opponent gave you. Yeah, it sucks to be choked to 1 memory, but I've seen decks make plays out of 1 energy that a deck stuck on one or two lands in Magic could never _dream_ of doing. It's truly something to behold and I think it's just the absolute best I've ever seen. And yes, I know it's used in Chrono Clash or whatever, but I didn't play that shit, I play Digimon, so step off!
Aside from the normal summons, you don't describe a unique resource system for Yu-Gi-Oh. Cards in hand, cards in deck, and cards in discard are resources that M:tG, Hearthstone, Star Wars, and pretty much every other system also has access to. More useful would've been mentioning the extra decks that can be used to summon monsters or the limitation on how many cards of certain types can be in play (unlike Magic and Lorcana, similar to Pokémon and Harry Potter).
One that i liked before they bombed the entire meta was force of will. It's practically like magic the gathering but intead of putting the lands in your deck, you put them in a side deck of pure mana cards that you taped your commander to play a card from your lands. This guaranteed you never missed a land drop unless you chose to use your commander for battle. Unfortunately the gane died when the creators thought it was a good idea to print a commander with a free negate every turn among two other effects while all the other commanders only had one or two max.
I don’t know if it’s the best but I definitely think that one of the most interesting mana systems is Elestrals where you have a twenty card deck of mana that is also used as your life.
Lands are absolutely not a worthy tradeoff and have been one of magic's biggest flaws they've tried solving for years. Pretty much all card game designers after some time realized that internal deck resources were an awful way to approach it and opted for tokens or resource trackers, or something digital like HS mana crystals. Things like cycling, dual sided lands, land abilities, so many gimmicks were made to work around it. Not to mention it throttles card game design as everything has to curtain to this limitation. Magic is one of oldest systems out there and it suffers greatly for a lot of problem modern card games have solved. I feel you need to rethink and research game design a little because your case for it is severely undercooked.
I'd say my favorite energy system remains World of Warcraft TCG's resource system: You can put ANY card from your hand face-down on the table as resource. In addition you have Quest-cards that are put face-UP on the table as resource that both provide resources and have one-time use activated effects and get flipped face-down once that one-use effect has been used. This beauty of this system is that you'll never get mana-screwed like in MTG and mana-flood is also much less of a concern since even if your hand is flooded with Quests each of them provides some useful one-use effect - from graveyard recursion to card advantage IIRC. This ALSO means you can include more heavily targeted stuff in your deck for the current metagame since even if a card ends up being worthless in a specific matchup you can just use it as a resource instead of it being purely dead card. It obviously does have the downside that since you don't have any colors it is harder to make cards different: there's a huge difference between a spell in MTG costing RRR or R2 for example. The former often has a more powerful effect since it is harder to cast outside mono-red, while the latter is generally more likely to be weaker put more easy to include in multi-color deck. Edit: I also like Legend of Five Rings LCG's resource system. It is by far the most tactical one by far I've played with. In L5R you have two resources: fate and honor. You get 7 fate every turn to spend on your cards. Unused fate is retained in your pool, so you can save up for a big turn or to play cards on your opponent's turn. Your starting honor depends on your "Stronghold"-card. You also have two decks: dynasty deck and conflict deck. The former (mostly) consists of characters you play (roughly equivalent to MTG creatures) while the latter (mostly) consists of events, attachments and characters (think instants, auras/equipment and creatures from MTG). Fate is the primary resource used to buy things. For events and attachments it works like in any other game: you pay the price, you get the effect. For characters, however, it is different. In addition to paying the price of the character, you can choose to put any number of additional fate on the character. This essentially gives the character extra duration in play, since at the end of the round any characters with no fate on them are discarded from play, after which any characters with fate lose one fate. This creates a very interesting pattern of needing to figure out whether you want to buy several characters now but lose them at the end of turn, or to invest on fewer characters that stick around for multiple turns. This is furthered by the fact that during dynasty phase - where you buy characters from your dynasty deck in turns - the first one to pass is awarded one extra fate, so focusing on one or two characters that stick around can also be an economical decision. Honor on the other hand is both a resource and win/loss condition. Amassing 21 honor wins you the game, while dropping to 0 honor loses you the game. One of the central mechanics of the game also has you bidding honor (by choosing number between 1 and 5) with the player making the lower bid being awarded the difference in honor by the player who chose the higher number. The most notable example of this is the draw phase: instead of the more typical "draw X card(s)" or "each player draws to hand size" kind of effects, in L5R during the draw phase each player makes their bid and draws cards cards equal to their bid. Obviously drawing more cards is, generally speaking, a very powerful effect, but if you are at 4 honor bidding 5 in draw phase will instantly lose you the game if your opponent bids 1. Combined with the other effects that affect honor this creates a very interesting dynamic, where squeezing your opponent's honor pool effectively also ends up squeezing their primary source of card advantage.
The problem with pokemon's energy system is that a knockout is also a one-sided land destruction effect. This is incredibly snowbally and disincentivizes spending multiple turns on one card. Shadowfist's mana system is what makes it so well designed for multiplayer. You can attack your opponents' lands. Each land has its own hp and when it's reduced to zero, the attacking player can either take it for themselves or gain a large burst of mana. This is even more snowbally than pokemon, but that's exactly the point. In shadowfist it's possible to win even against 2-3 other players if you have a large enough lead, so you're encouraged to commit to the board.
magic the gathering nailed it with the land system because of a simple factor: you NEED inconvenience in your games. The varience of relying on land drops to hit to cast bigger spells is one of the reasons why MtG was able to establish itself as the leading card game outside of pokemon, which gets a lot of its sales from non-players in the first place.
MtG is the leader because it's the first major CCG with tons of synergies and mechanics to explore. It has a broad range of themes which broadens the appeal. It was the pioneer in CCGs and it was its lead to lose. The inconvenience is absolutely already there in all CCGs with your draw luck. You don't need more. It's an extremely bad feeling to get flooded or screwed and it's flawed. Not surprising given how old MTG is, it has a mechanic that wouldn't have been designed today (CCGs made in the last 10 years don't have that flaw). Lands being crucial plays to even being able to do anything is why lands got powercrept so hard that they often do a lot more than tap for 1 mana.
@@catzblu999 fully disagree. I started CCGs with Pokémon and yu-gi-oh. The fact you can get mana flooded or screwed IS AN UPSIDE of the system, not a flaw. If it’s happening to you consistently, you have built a bad deck. If it happens once in a while, you need to get better at mulligans. If it happens rarely, you’ve built a balanced deck and when it does happen is just poor luck. Yeah, it can sometimes feel bad when against all odds you get flooded or screwed even with a good hand and mulligan, but that feels infinitely less bad than turn 1-2 combos in yugioh. There is a reason despite what you view as a “flawed” system MtG has retained its popularity despite “better” systems being made.
Maybe in 2005 this would've been relevant but the only reason Magic IS still second is nostalgia and Commander+fanservice crossovers. The system is flawed and until Hearthstone became the first post-wow product, it was the actual second or first most relevant card game. Too bad it's attached to Blizzard. There are way too many outside factors to popularity, and almost nobody gets the first time right, so it's just marketing strats what keeps them afloat. People forget that powercreep is an obligatory thing due to companies having to profit to actually exist, unless you just kill your game in 4 years or less, and we keep forgetting this concept permeates the entire landscape of tabletop games: real world capitalism is the core thing in which you have to design around.
@ there are more newer players than there are old players, so nostalgia is not a major factor. Commander, last I checked, is still magic that uses the same system, lands and all, and if new players did not vibe with it they would not play. There’s a reason magics playerbase still keeps growing despite virtually no mainstream marketing, and it’s because the game systems themselves are good.
I really like the mana systems in the tcgs by bandai, such as OPTCG's Don!. It's a kinda like hearthstones system where you get the same amount of mana each turn, however here it is 2 (unless you go first then it's 1) with a cap of 10. What makes it unique is that you can either choose to spend your Don! to play cards regularly or attack them to one of your characters to increase their power for the turn. These games also have a pretty unique system for handling life which I won't go into here but I can really recommend anyone interested in some unique ideas to check it out.
My two favorite mana systems come from Elestrals and the Lord of the Rings TCG Elestrals: Your 20 "spirits" go in a separate spirit deck that you can access at any time, so they're like one-time mana from MTG without being screwed or flooded by them. They're also your life total, so you can combo off super early, but you're likely to be put on the backfoot if your board gets dismantled because you put so many spirits into making it. What's more, they have a mechanic called "Nexus" where you can move spirits between permanents to trigger additional effects. Very fun and very balanced, most games end up being quite close. LOTR TCG: Both players have a good half of their deck and a shadow half of their deck, and they regularly alternate between which they use. The cards that the light side player plays generate mana, which the shadow player subsequently uses during their phase to pay for their cards. So the person who's on the good side for the turn can combo off and allow their opponent to do the same, or they can play a more choke focused turn where they don't play many cards and give their opponent limited options.
I am a life long MTG player, having also played all of these other games, and I can say with certainty that Hearthstone has the best mana system. When I draw a card at the beginning of turn, there is no worse feeling than drawing a blank with a land.
Yugioh does have a resource system. You get 1 Normal summon. You get 1 draw a turn. You get max 15 extra deck cards. You start your hand with 4-5 cards and use other cards in play as resources for bigger boss cards from your extradeck. Most cards have a "Once per turn" clause, meaning once the effect is spent, you can't use it again.
@@thuliumtm3165 Yeah, but MTG has soul ring, and Hearthstone have cards that make other cards cost 0 or you get more mana crystals. The difference of each game is in resource scaling speed. For yugioh, more options/cards in play=more resources
So happy you mentioned Netrunner, best card game ever. Economy that persists across turns + a huge variety of cards that allow you to make money in conditional ways + limited actions to spend that money each turn + being able to spend 1 action for 1 credit even with no cards to prevent you from getting screwed. It's just so buttery smooth.
My card game fruit monsters has the best, its like magic the gathering but you have 1 deck for resources and 1 deck for the rest of the cards. you draw 2 cards per turn from either deck of your choice.
There was a card game named Force of Will that was similar, but it ended up dying pretty quickly. I'm not positive why, except that most people just played Magic instead
A bit nitpicky, but pokemon energy determines the strength of an attack. Not the quantity of attacks allowed. You only get 1 attack in pokemon no matter what. 0:20
I sir, would like to introduce you to the One Piece TCG. The DON!!! System is one that makes tempo play very important in a game with no hand limit. Both players have a 10 Don deck. The player that goes first get 1 don and from there on both players draw 2 don (to a designated resource area, they don't go to hand) similar to MTG, Don is tapped to pay for your cards but Don also have a secondary use of giving characters an extra 1K attack power on your turn by attaching Don to them. The game's purple decks have a habit of playing with their DON, with cards and leader effects that either allow you to ramp, or put dons back in the deck for massive effects.
Gonna put a different name in the ring and say the Final Fantasy TCG's Mana system is my favourite. Almost every card can be discarded for 2 Mana of it's Element, but there are also Backup cards you can play for a more per permanent resource, being able to tap them for 1 mana per turn, or be used for alternative effects. You also draw 2 cards per turn, other than First, though, so discarding cards constantly for cost feels better than it would at 1 draw.
It hilarious to me that he doesn't even understand that there is a resource limitation in Yugioh, but the game has gotten so terrible and power crept that he doesn't even know it exists. You can only normal summon 1 monster per turn. That's it. You might not know it since any deck in Yugioh in the past 20 years will summon 527 monsters a turn, but that it the resource you're supposed to manage.
I think the monsters themselves are more of a resource than the pointless normal summon restriction because you have to send monsters to the graveyard for most types of special summons, while the normal summon isn't even restrictive considering that you can special summon a theoretical infinite amount of times.
@@OnlyLiarGameFan You're trying to retroactively decide what the resource management system is after the game has completely changed. The game of yugioh as it was designed is that the resources you're limited on is normal summons. Back when the game was only a couple years old you could easily see this. Tribute summons and double tributes were hard to put onto the field and required multiple turns and actual tributes to use, making you weigh the options of spamming more things on your board or sacrificing for the stronger monsters and special summons were exactly as their name implied, special. You used to have to burn another card, like Polymerization or a ritual summon spell, just to be able to perform special summons. Again, just because the game has been power crept into oblivion and you can now summon 395 things on turn 1 doesn't change what the resource system is in the game. It just means that half the cards now completely ignore said system because they've been designed to be ridiculously powerful.
@@crazysquriel Normal summons being more important back in the day doesn't make monsters not more of a resource than the normal summon. I still think the game was designed for monsters as resources with the several (tribute, fusion, ritual) alternative summoning methods requiring the player to put the monsters on the field into the graveyard for a (theoretically, but a lot of the times, not really) stronger monster. In DM Era YGO, I'd say both the normal summon and monster are relatively close in terms of importance, with monsters being a bit more so. But modern YGO just overshadowing the normal summon, while monsters are even more important resources than ever before.
@@OnlyLiarGameFan It literally does though. They were no more of a resource than creatures in MTG or Pokemon in Pokemon. Would it not fundamentally change those games if you were only allowed one per turn? It quite literally is the resource limitation. You're just biased by modern YGO.
You should look into Elestrals, I've been getting into it recently and I love the resource system, having it be the same thing as your health pool is very interesting and adds such a complex and interesting layer to deck building and literally every play you make
My personal favorite has to be Digimon’s “memory” system.
For those who don’t know, in Digimon theres the memory gauge that goes from 10 to -10. Anytime you play a card that card’s play cost to subtracted from the memory, but the big difference maker is that you’re allowed to go negative. If you only have 1 memory and play a card that cost 3, you’ll just go to -2.
But the once you go negative, the cards currently activating will resolve and your turn immediately ends. Your opponent will start with the memory you went into the negative. So in the example above, you went -2, so your opponent will start with 2.
It creates a fun back and forward game of chicken. You can ball out, but then you’r opponent can ball out for no penalty, or you can play safe and try to choke your opponent out, but you’ll also be short handed.
If you're at -8, can you play a 3 cost card ? (you get to -8 cause your opponent keeps passing)
@ if the player passes their turn while they have any memory, it automatically sets them to -3.
Its a originally from a system called Chrono Clash.
That system actually sounds really unique for both players
Big fan of "Force of Will"s Mana Stone system. Basically, you have a secondary deck of Mana Stones (Like Lands) that you can top-deck a resource card off of each turn by tapping your "Ruler". It purs control of when you get more resources into your hands while also keeping some Luck based twists because there "Non-Basic" and Duel Colour Mana Stones in the randomized deck as well as creating a cost for Mana Stone generation (If you generate a Mana Stone, you can't use your Ruler that turn.).
I think the closest thing Yugioh has to a resource system is the normal summon and that probably should have been mentioned
And technically the Pendulum Summon. But the most tangible resource nowadays is your Deck/Extra Deck, running out of cards in grind game is pretty common.
true
I think even more interesting for Yugioh is, that the cards themselves are becoming the resources. There is a reason why a draw 2 effect card is completely fine in magic but banned for the longest time in Yugioh. As when the cards themselves are the resources, card advantage becomes super powerful.
Hard once per turns matter infinitely more than your normal summon. Like you could normal summon something like SE Ash 3 times and it wouldn’t even matter because only the 1st one will have an effect. Yugioh is very good at establishing resource loops that let you repeat certain combos turn after turn, but a hard once per turn is what forces the combo to eventually stop. Even looking at banned cards, a lot of them end up banned because they lack a hard once per turn. Like pre-errata Firewall Dragon was just infinite material for burn FTKs and now that it has a hard once per turn it’s just an okay end board piece in Cyberse piles, which ends up being like a tier 2/rogue strategy. Unlike in other mana-based card games where you can use a card as many times as you have copies of it and can pay the cost, which is how you get infinite mana loops in games like Magic.
@@jayfeather9063 "cards themselves are becoming the resources". as opposed to magic or pokemon where after you resolve a card it just goes back into your hand and is not discarded I guess
Digimon mana system is not only very lore accurate, but it also creates a very strategic dynamic of PASSING mana for the opponent to use. Possibly the best system in card game yet.
This. Decks actually have ramp times without forced clinkiness of wincon pieces + lands. Just Scry tutors + wincon pieces. The problem of choking to 1 Memory becomes non existant in early-midgame with "Set to 3 Memory" tamers or options like the Memory Boost/Trainings or Inheritables that gain Memory to keep turn. The borrowed Shield system from Duel Masters make the game so defensively sound. Brilliant game.
I’ve only played digimon once but I thought the memory system was super cool and unique
I actually hate the Digimon system. I don’t like the feeling of forcing balance through cost. It takes away most of the design space for investing purely in economy (at least in a way that’s not arbitrary)
Balance is boring imho. I like how green in magic create consistent mana advantages, and how red creates sporadic mana advantages. It gives us another way to make games more dynamic.
The pendulum style mana system for Digimon specifically turned me off from the game.
@BS-gk2cb I would disagree greatly, because they have worked around it in several ways that have created dynamic deck concepts that really pushes the way the game works. As the most basic example, look up fanglongmon, the deva-sovergin deck. It just slaps a body down for 7 mem, it draws you a card, and then slots another body in the breeding zone. While this is a high cost, it is mitigated in several ways. You are setting up 2 bodies for one price, and it an an eminent ace deck. Meaning that you can go into large lol 6 bodies as interrupts.
The best energy systems for me were either Duel Masters, which allowed you to play any card in your deck as a mana resource, which in turn led to some interesting resource management or Force of Will, which used an extra deck for your mana, which let you play without worrying about getting screwed/flooded while also not being completely broken.
Let’s go team Duel Masters. XD
Force of Will was legit. The resource gain was tied to your Ruler, (basically a commander from EDH) SO, you would have to decide when to stop using them to gain more mana, and when to flip them into battle themselves.
Disney Lorcana has essentially the same system and it's awesome
@@justinmott5239 Slightly more strategic, given that some cards cannot be used for mana.
Duel masters was the only TCG I played as a kid
Star Wars Unlimited has a nice system where any card can be played as a resource once per turn. The colour constraints come in during deck building, too, so it doesnt lose flavour.
Plus theres the Smuggle mechanic where you can play cards from your resources for an extra cost and then place a new resource down in its spot.
It works well with the game's system and is part of why Ive been enjoying it so much
A complete ripoff of Dragon Ball Super tcg then.
My issue with SWU is the draw 2 per turn. I get that it's supposed to help you resource a card essentially for free each turn, but when facing aggro they just cap at 4-5 ink and essentially will never run out of gas because of the inherent draw 2 per turn.
no one has mentioned it but Flesh and Bloods resource system is easily the best in the tcg space. having cards have 2 uses opens up so much design space whilst not limiting them to being either a dead extra resource or an unplayable card. the draconic, light and mystic talents all prioritising one card colour makes their heroes play super differently (e.g dromai wanting to pitch reds which are the most resource inefficient to fuel her dragons or the mystics making blue cards ,which are typically underpowered to accommodate for their better resource generation, power cards) adds another layer to the game and tonnes of interesting decision points. if anyone is interested in playing FaB I'd honestly say that the resource system is my favourite game feature
Agreed
While I do think the FaB's cost system is awesome and initial heroes are great & work interactively against each other (guardian, assasin, warrior, brute etc.), I feel like their design direction is not for me. Initial classes are very fun, but having to play rune counters against wizards' weird gameplay, stall fatigue being a relevant wincon, the overtuned heroes from newer sets and Illusions in their entirety are just very unfun for me. It is still a great game tho, just not my tcg.
@boraaksitozgun9912 I mean yeah there's a lot to debate on concerning the meta but the core resource system is what I'm talking about. plus on your point about arcane barrier protection I actually think that's a really cool part of the game, pitching cards to defend rather than blocking with them means you keep them for later which gives you more agency in how you choose to fight wizards, do you pitch your blues and try to play a hand of reds or do your other cards have higher costs that you'd rather keep the blue for your turn? plus wizard cards tend to be weaker numbers wise in order to make up for the unique way of defending against them (runeblade is still busted tho lol) also, assassin wasn't an initial class, they're the most recent class introduced to cc and are literally designed to be disruptive and play a different game outside of pure numbers/value
@ethn_chey yeah sorry wrong about assassin thing. Again, not saying game is bad at all, far from it. It is very cream of the crop stuff when it comes to TCGs. I just don't like interacting with the magic stuff, and illusions feel very match up based (stomps or you stomp them) for me. Again nothing that takes away from the game, just experiences of some noob. Hope anyone who enjoys it has a good time and will play it anyway.
@boraaksitozgun9912 yeah that's totally fair! glad you enjoy the game, it only gets better the more you play :) also, as an illusionist player the best tip I can give to beat them if you're having trouble is to go as wide as possible with multiple attacks with go again per turn. I get them feeling super polarising tho, it kinda feels the same way when you're playing as the illusionist lol
Another thing I like about Pokemon's energy is that it often telegraphs your future plays. That sounds like a bad thing, but it means you can react to your opponent mid-play despite being unable to perform actions on their turn. It's why I don't mind that you can't play at instant speed like Magic and Yugioh.
As for my favorite resource system, it's Elestrals hands-down. Saying it's just "life is your resource" really undersells the depth in the spirit system.
Like Magic and Pokemon, the different colors mean you have to find optimal ratios in both your main deck and spirit deck, and choosing whether or not you run a really strong off-color staple is a lot trickier of a decision.
Because you lose spirits when you take damage, and most staples can use any color, you have to keep in mind your future plays when choosing which color spirits to burn. And "Heal 3" is the best card in the game because it is also both ramp and mana fixing. But skilled players can predict your future plays based on what you choose to spend and what you choose to get back. You can also cast your elestrals with the wrong spirit(s) at the cost of turning them into a vanilla, but sometimes you want that since certain cards check what color spirit is under the elestral and not what color the elestral is.
And because spirits exist on the board under your runes, moving them between cards on the board is a major mechanic instead of an occasional effect like Pokemon. You can siphon spirits from your elestrals to pay for your runes. Many elestrals have effects when they receive spirits or effects when you move spirits.
There's a neat combo this allows you to do with a rune that moves a spirit, any elestral with a receive effect, and any other card on field with a spirit. You can siphon the spirit off the receive elestral to pay the cost for Altar, use the effect to move another spirit to the receive elestral, and the receive effect will trigger again, but the game only checks if the elestral has the proper spirits under the card at resolution so it doesn't die. So you get 2 effects for the price of 1 and without reaching into your spirit deck.
Game is sick.
The fun thing with YuGiOh is that, while it doesn’t have an overarching cost like most other card games, it compensates by having various cards use just about anything and everything as it’s own personal cost (and also that even THESE costs can chain into other effects.)
Tributing/Discarding/Banishing or sending to the GY for cost is pretty common, but there’s also paying LP, shuffling cards back into your deck, needing _specific_ cards in whatever position to get your effects off, etc…
…
After a moment of thought, I think YuGiOh might just emulate the craziness of its anime and manga A LOT more closely than many other real world games can with THEIR media spinoffs.
Edit: Mom, Dad, please stop fighting. It’s just a children’s card game (that should have been rebranded as a teenager’s card game by now TBH).
Also love in yugioh that those costs can be turned into benefits
While that is true, it is also true that every card game has the possibility to do it too, while keeping their energh system as a possibility for limiting extremely powerful cards. But i do (agree) think that the main problem with yu gi oh is not neccesarily its cost system, but how little konami innovates with the costs
Edit: Realized after writing the comment that the agree is wrongly placed, but now that i'm heard, i may aswell explain what i mean. I think yu gi oh would be a lot funnier if you could add costs that aren't related to throwing things to other zones (which lately is debatable if it is even a punishment for the card) and add costs like "you can't play this card until turn three" or "during your next turn you can't draw a card during your draw phase", but the closest there was when i last checked yu gi oh were effect like you can only play certain type or archetype for the rest of the turn which can be worked around
Bro you’re just coping. YGO is a terrible card game
@@ButFirstHeLitItOnFire While I agree that these costs do lead to interesting gameplay and designs, they also lead to a lot of card text bloat and memory issues when you have to remember what you've played and what summoning locks you are under. Still, I do admit that the incredibly open design space has led to a lot of interesting archetypes.
that has came to be yugioh's core flaw. in other games its easy to make balance cards are theres a simple way to power scale a card and when it can be used while yugioh has to very carefully design cards that other games would balance in a minute.
I actually think that one of the biggest aspects that I dislike in the energy system compared to mana is the fact that energy can only be attached to one pokemon at a time. Unlike in magic, every turn you're powering individual pieces instead of your whole board, which means that if you lose a pokemon, you have to start building resources again. It never feels like I'm building to something. Instead, it feels like I'm forced to play voltron more often than not.
that cuts both ways though, because it can also serve as a strategic target. in mtg, if you get rid of a bunch of land that's just... it. except for obvious exceptions, getting rid of those lands affects a lot of things you can do (if your deck has a few white staples, but is primarily blue, plains disappearing isn't the end of the world) but with energy you've gotta think ahead; is attaching worth it? is REMOVING energy worth it?
i think they've both got their pros and cons!
In the "new" pokemon tcg-lite app there is not much energy acceleration and because of that it makes the once-per-turn limitation more impactful and you often don't have a clear answer to where you should allocate your energy to. It's more interesting right now.
Modern pokemon though? I agree. Indeed it can feel weird. Decks like Lugia V or Baxcalibur often mean that after a bit of setup energy becomes an afterthought. And as an opponent, you have to deal with both the big beatstick as well as thwart the energy engine all at the same time.
to be fair, i think that's kinda the Whole Point of pokemon. the win condition, resource system, and even things like format mechanics (ex, EX, GX, V, ex again, etc) are designed around making individual pokemon on your board more important than your 0/1 for 0 Crookshank Kobolds. And when the company based its brand image around "these creatures are your friends," there's an incentive to build the game to make you Want to keep your friends around.
@@Magmagan Moltress Ex, Misty, Gardevoir might wanna talk to you
That's exactly the feeling I got when I first learned how to play Pokémon a year or two ago. I really disliked it especially when it came to the thought that when defeated, it was essentially an armageddon due to the voltron feeling.
I like the system from legends of runeterra
I think it's really nice to bank mana you didn't spend to have a boost on your next turn, with the rule that it can only be used for spells
@@AlessioTheHero the ability to bank spell mana did help smooth out early turns. However it felt like a patch on top of hearthstone's system that didn't really do anything new. I think it would have felt more unique if there were more cards that interacted with spell mana in interesting ways.
Spell mana was the worst game design in runeterra.
This mechanic alone forced the game to ever only be burn/aggro, as every removal spell had tò be balanced around "spell mana" mechanics, thus being horrible, and made the aggro plays completely unstoppable, as you could Always have up tò 3 extra Manas to protect your stuff. And of course, protection spells have tò be cheap, othersise nobody would ever consider them.
@@francescolofaro8258aggro wasn't unstopable but faster will always rise in any game because winning fast is always better
@@lucasalarcon3230 Agree. In MTG, I mostly play control deck like blue, blue/black, Bolas,...I win if the game play longer, but I MUST build my deck and think my play around surviving early. Because the opponent will most likely try to kill me before I do my things (or else they lose).
Aggro will always be the cheapest and easiest way to win a game in a CCG, because the less your opponent play, the less they can harm your strategy.
@@francescolofaro8258 I assume you played during the Azir/Irelia aggro meta, LoR has historically had a mid-range meta.
Bringing up netrunner made me so happy. It needs to be talked about more
Gwent has an interesting cost system in that a card's cost isn't relevant to playing the card. Instead, the card's cost is used when making your deck.
Cards have a provision cost between 4 and 15. A deck needs at least 25 cards, and you can only have a certain number of provisions. Usually 150. So, you can make a deck of all 6 cost cards that have average power. Or you can make a deck with a mix of higher cost, more powerful cards, and lower cost less powerful cards. This is how the game is balanced.
@@alexrivera5747 this seems like more of a deck building restriction than a resource system like the video is about. I do like the system though, Netrunner has something similar where out-of-faction cards have an import cost to add them to your deck.
Is that the good gwent or the crap new gwent no one recognizes?
And it died, not saying that's the reason but it could be one of many. I played Gwent for a long time but the game was just not as entertaining as other tcgs after a while
@@IHeliosI The new Gwent IS the good Gwent
Pokemon TCG Pocket's system is pretty interesting. They borrowed a bit from Hearthstone by giving you a guaranteed Energy each turn of a randomized type from a predetermined pool. It helped solve the mana screw/flood issue, but now you have the issue of multi-type decks not being able to get the right Energy type. It's a big problem for Dragonite decks right now.
I enjoy the game but rn the mana system is really messy. Misty is a great example of how example a single mana difference in the first couple turns snowballs the entire game
I run Dragonite and tbh it feels pretty fair, it makes you consider energy placement more carefully and adds some extra drawback to its 200/turn. Allows other lines to shine sometimes (Tentacruel my beloved!)
Personally I think guaranteed energy is gross. It makes some strats and lists that shouldn't be viable, too powerful. And doesn't help too many other decks that were well built and had no problem with energy to begin with. In general one thing Pokemon has going for it is No/Less Power Creep, which is totally ruining magic. Yes there is some. But way way less, and I don't think they do it for the mere money. Which Wizards definitely and crassly does; it's their whole business model now.
All that said, of all the card games, I like Pokemon energy system overall, best of the all. I don't see it as a problem that you can't spam/ramp energy as abusively as we want. Not everything should be max degenerate. 😅
I do think Pokemon has a problem with certain Types and energy mechanics being super boring to play against. Viable but basically too dumb and too easy to be interesting. I hate the "oops I lost all my energy oh big surprise wow look, I got it ALL back, yet again" every turn decks. Boring archetype. So is item hate or ability hate. Oh well.
I say this as somebody who has played thousands of non-meta or intentionally anti-anti-meta decks, just for the fun of it. I don't mind losing half the time. For me what's fun is being able to beat the "best" meta deck with a weird list they don't bother adapting too because it's older cards, or not tournament viable. It's just for fun. (I played a lot Marshadow GX toolbox but not the typical lists; and Zygardes.)
If you win the coin flip to have first turn, you are automatically at a disadvantage. It’s a terrible system.
@@irtnycyeah auto energy makes starmie ex a near-guaranteed 90 damage output turn 2 every single game.... Ridiculously not fun lol
Lorcana seems to have to most flexible resource system with the inkwell. Being able to turn almost any card into resource if you don’t need it at the moment is very intuitive and interesting for gameplay.
YESSS I wish he would include Lorcana in his videos especially since you can sing some cards to play them for free.
The way Lorcana manages its resource system is really what got me into the game in the first place; I would love to see the game show up in Soda's videos
Dragon ball did the same thing
Do you know duel masters? To say how it is different from that, as I don't know Lorcana yet. Will research anyway.
Honestly yeah shout out to Lorcana. At first I was kinda bummed that there weren't new ways to ink or play with ink types, but then it grew on me since you make hard compelling decisions for *what* to ink, the risk of how many uninkables to place in deck (or how many), and it's easy to process, so my partners easily picked it up as a first card game. Probably good for kids too
One Piece lets you use "mana" or "Don!!" in order to both summon characters and also make your attacks stronger. You can also pitch cards from your hand to boost defense on your opponent's turn. Each card is partially balanced based on how much you can boost if you pitch them from your hand, so a super broken card can have 0 "counter" while a niche weaker card can give 2000 counter, and a balanced card can give 1000 counter. And unlike in pokemon, you draw when you take damage instead of drawing when you kill something, which makes SO much more sense. Opponents actually have to think because every time they hit your life, they are also giving you more potential counter.
The One Piece tcg might have a few problems, but it is one of the most well-balanced and fun card games I've played.
I think the OP Don system is the best there is. Being able to use don towards power, getting a guaranteed 2 per turn, starting with 1 or 2 on the first turn, being able to ramp or remove Don throughout the game… it’s all really well done and creates an immense depth of play.
Not to mention that it solves a problem the other systems don't usually solve: the first player advantage.
The first player starts with 1 Don!, so it has advantage in this turn because it has 1 resource more than the opponent. Then the second player starts with 2 Don!, so it also has advantage in their turn since they have 1 more resource. It might be still beneficial to be the first, but the resource system works in a fair way
This is why I'm obsessed with the the One Piece Card Game. In most games, mana is just used to play cards and that's it. But Don!! adds so much more depth to the game than any other system I've seen. "Should I use all my Don!! to play this card, or would it be better to use it to boost my attackers out of counter range? Do I boost them a little bit to force them to discard more counters, or a lot to guarantee taking a life? Should I even take a life right now, giving them an extra card in hand???"
It adds so many options each game where even matches against the same deck feel unique because of all the little choices you can make while not being overwhelming. It also makes the game have an insanely high skill ceiling, like I'm sure a good player with an all vanilla deck could beat an average player on a meta deck. The game is so good and there is always more to learn and improve at yet it's fun even when losing (except when playing vs Lucci I HATE Lucci)
Absolutely agree. One Piece to me is like a martial arts fight in card game form, which fits the theme of the property so well
Keyforge doesn't really have a resource system, but you're still limited in what cards you can play and/or use. Each deck is 36 cards, 12 from each house, and at the start of each turn you call one of the three houses, which means you can only play or use cards from that house, so you often have to choose between using the creatures you have on the board or playing cards from your hand to cycle through your deck. Cards that let you circumvent this rule (Captain Val Jericho, Helper Bot, Exhume, etc.) tend to be very powerful, as they not only add efficiency, but can give access to combos that would otherwise be impossible.
What I like about KeyForge, being limited only by what cards you can play or use and (usually) having a fresh hand of 6 cards every turn, is that it gives you options on sequencing your turn and lot of decision space for the player (i.e. should I play this card first or this other card or use this creature?). Compared to some games with mana systems where turns can be pretty straightforward, i.e. play my 3 drop on my 3rd turn, play my 4 drop on my 4th turn.
I guess one other limiting factor in KeyForge is "rule of six" where you can only play or use cards of the same name 6 times each turn, which (mostly) prevents infinite loops and does put a limit on what you can do on a turn
Yeah, Keyforge's system is pretty neat.
Keyforge is such a brilliantly designed game but it's also insane to actually play lol
Resources in yugioh are the very same resources of other card games, but the ones people usually don't think about that much because they take them for granted.
Cards themselves are always treated as a resource and card advantage in general is super important in every game, but in yugioh cards are basically your ONLY resource.
Discard a card. Tribute a monster. Banish a light and a dark. This monster requires two level 6 monsters to make. Shuffle 3 monsters with different NAMES (this specifically is pretty unique to yugioh I think thanks to archetypes and how once per turn effects are designed)
So yeah, yugioh may apparently not have a resource system on the surface, but in reality it's just a different approach to card games.
the way i see it is that many other tcgs (following mtg) employs a hard resource system while yugioh goes for a soft resource system instead similarly to the concept of a hard and soft magic system in fantasy fiction
a hard resource/magic system is strict on how it works and dictate everything about how its governance and structure functions together and is essentially something that scales vertically because of increasing cost but a soft resource/magic system plays it loose where the structure and governing dont necessarily depend on each other and scales horizontally instead because the cost can be everything and anything to the point it can even inverts itself
I can encourage you to check out the resource-system of the Flesh And Blood TCG. It's the one thing that really won me over and it does things really different than any other tcgs Ive played yet.
How you use the resources determines what cards you see in which order later in the game
you could have just explained it instead of telling someone to do their own research...
@Always.Smarter It's so much easier seeing it visualized in a video or picture, but the gist is, that every card has a cost and a so called pitch value.
If a card costs two resources to play, you have to "pitch" one or more cards from hand that pitch for that value.
Most of times a card is available in three different pitch values from one to three. The one that pitches for usually trades its pitch value for playing power.
Ex: "Head Jab" with 1 pitch value attacks for 3 damage, but "Head Jab" with 3 pitch value (that can pay for expensive cards by itself) only attacks for 1 damage.
At the end of your turn all pitched cards go under your deck, and you draw at the end of your turn until you have 4 cards in hand. This means you will see your pitched cards later in the game, since you cycle through your deck relatively fast, compared to ther tcgs.
This resource system has at least two things that I like a lot: You virtually never end up with dead hands ever. Deciding which cards you pitch opens up a lot of strategies.
If you pitch only your three value cards, you will be explosive in the beginning, but once you cycle through your deck, you will draw a lot of weaker cards.
You could also decide to pitch a lot of your strong cards, that pay for less resources and run your opponent out of steam. So when you go into the second cycle you can overwhelm them with a lot of force
Hope that helps!
@Always.Smarter It's so much easier seeing it visualized in a video or picture, but the gist is, that every card has a cost and a so called pitch value.
If a card costs two resources to play, you have to "pitch" one or more cards from hand that pitch for that value.
Most of times a card is available in three different pitch values from one to three. The card that pitches for a lot of resources usually trades its pitch value for playing power.
Ex: "Head Jab" with 1 pitch value attacks for 3 damage, but "Head Jab" with 3 pitch value (that can pay for expensive cards by itself) only attacks for 1 damage.
At the end of your turn all pitched cards go under your deck, and you draw at the end of your turn until you have 4 cards in hand. This means you will see your pitched cards later in the game, since you cycle through your deck relatively fast, compared to ther tcgs.
This resource system has at least two things that I like a lot: You virtually never end up with dead hands ever. Deciding which cards you pitch opens up a lot of strategies.
If you pitch only your three value cards, you will be explosive in the beginning, since its very easy for you to pay for the cost of carfs, but once you cycle through your deck, you will draw a lot of weaker cards.
You could also decide to pitch a lot of your strong cards, that pay for less resources and run your opponent out of steam. So when you go into the second cycle you can overwhelm them with a lot of force
Hope that helps!
@Always.Smarter It's so much easier seeing it visualized in a video or picture, but the gist is, that every card has a cost and a so called pitch value.
If a card costs two resources to play, you have to "pitch" one or more cards from hand that pitch for that value.
Most of times a card is available in three different pitch values from one to three. The card that pitches for a lot of resources usually trades its pitch value for playing power.
Ex: "Head Jab" with 1 pitch value attacks for 3 damage, but "Head Jab" with 3 pitch value (that can pay for expensive cards by itself) only attacks for 1 damage.
At the end of your turn all pitched cards go under your deck, and you draw at the end of your turn until you have 4 cards in hand. This means you will see your pitched cards later in the game, since you cycle through your deck relatively fast, compared to ther tcgs.
This resource system has at least two things that I like a lot: You virtually never end up with dead hands ever. Deciding which cards you pitch opens up a lot of strategies.
If you pitch only your three value cards, you will be explosive in the beginning, since it is very easy for you to pay for resources, but once you cycle through your deck, you will draw a lot of weaker cards.
You could also decide to pitch a lot of your strong cards, that pay for less resources and run your opponent out of steam. So when you go into the second cycle you can overwhelm them with a lot of force
Hope that helps!
@Always.Smarter It's so much easier seeing it visualized in a video or picture, but the gist is, that every card has a cost and a so called pitch value.
If a card costs two resources to play, you have to "pitch" one or more cards from hand that pitch for that value.
Most of times a card is available in three different pitch values from one to three. The card that pitches for a lot of resources usually trades its pitch value for playing power.
Ex: "Head Jab" with 1 pitch value attacks for 3 damage, but "Head Jab" with 3 pitch value (that can pay for expensive cards by itself) only attacks for 1 damage.
At the end of your turn all pitched cards go under your deck, and you draw at the end of your turn until you have 4 cards in hand. This means you will see your pitched cards later in the game, since you cycle through your deck relatively fast, compared to ther tcgs.
This resource system has at least two things that I like a lot: You virtually never end up with dead hands ever. Deciding which cards you pitch opens up a lot of strategies.
If you pitch only your three value cards, you will be explosive in the beginning, since it is very easy for you to pay for resources, but once you cycle through your deck, you will draw a lot of weaker cards.
You could also decide to pitch a lot of your strong cards, that pay for less resources and run your opponent out of steam. So when you go into the second cycle you can overwhelm them with a lot of force
Hope that helps!
Flesh and Blood has an interesting and flexible system like the genius duel master system.
@@navebucketdude right? im so surprised there was no mention of it whatsoever.
The real answer is Duel Masters. Had by far the best mana system in any card game.
Absolutely. Understandable why MTG never pivoted towards this system but it's still a shame considering both are WoTC
Yeah IDK if this game was popular anywhere outside of Poland but me and my homie are still playing it sometimes. Maybe its nostalgia or something but IDK just something about this game feels so good and mana system is also great.
also corrected pokemon prize system to prevent snowbaling
Duel Masters is my favorite resource and life system and it's not even close. Lorcana is doing something similar with "Ink" that's pretty nice. Imagine Duel Masters but some of the cards can't be put into the cost area, and those cards tend to be more powerful.
@@lodos3761Still a top 10 card game in Japan, although competition is becoming increasingly stiff.
Cool idea! There are now other popular card games you could explore like the ink mechanic in Lorcana or the Don! Mechanic in One-Piece
I like the system in FE Cipher. There is only one type of card being your units. Once per turn you can set one to a special area to basically act as a land of the color of the card. It's simple but it works pretty well and then there's some effects that will flip those cards face down where theyre still usable and can be tapped but like it's a way to limot certain powerful abilities as you can only flip them once.
18:08 Netrunner mentioned. Netrunner really has multiple resource systems. One certainly is the number of actions (clicks) but money (credits) to play cards is much more obvious as a resource system that doesn't feel like a classic resource system at all. In some damage-centric matchups cards in hand act as a pseudo-resource as well.
@@GobLynnModeNetrunner never played netrunner, is it a good experience to learn & play online with a friend?
@@joeysung311 Oh its actually best with a friend if none of you had any exposure before. Atm there are 2 versions. NSG designs new cards and keeps the game alive via in-person tournaments. Reboot, which I am playing on my channel, plays mostly the original cards, has imo much better balance and design philosophy, but is played pretty much online-only.
Legends of Runeterra is such a surprisingly solid game. The mana is similar to Hearthstone but also has an overflow system that allows players of any archetype to cheat forward on the next turn by holding back before. This is also useful because of how each player's turn is meshed with the other, which is something I've never seen in any other card game.
Keyforge (designed by Richard Garfield) has no resource system, but the restriction is that you can only play and activate one of the three factions in your deck each turn.
It's a brilliant design idea which leads to lots of interesting decisions during the course of the game.
Vampire: the Eternal Struggle. You start with thirty points in your Pool. It's your life points AND it's the resource you use to put your minions into play AND once you move pool to those cards, it's their life points AND a resource they can spend on actions. The vampires you bring out can take an action on their turn to hunt and recover spent/lost points, and there are means of taking points back from your minions to add to your pool, but overall it gets depleted turn after turn.
Originally known as Jyhad.
The name was changed ....for obvious reasons.
You’re doing great. These videos are all very interesting. You have really good insights. Totally deserved rapid growth. Keep it up. Maybe you could talk about the usage of different zones in each game. Graveyard, Exile/Banish, etc. For example, Yugioh is basically played entirely in the graveyard. Pokémon kinda does it too. Magic has a little bit of graveyard recursion but it’s not required. Etc.
Oh good idea thanks!
Weiss Schwartz has a system in which whenever you attack, you reveal the top card of your library (with potential effects triggering from that) and place it face down in the "stock", and the stock is essentially a gauge for how much resource you have to spend. It doesn't empty between turns or anything, so you can either try to build up stock by attacking often (even attacks where your unit loses are sometimes worth it since it builds resource), or with effects that let you stock up in other ways. Since the zone is face-down, you cant shuffle it, and you use cards like a stack (last stocked card is first to be used) there's a mini-game of remembering what cards are in it and how much you need to spend in order to get potential key cards back into play rather than having them be locked away. Since managing your deck and grave are key parts of the game, a game that has a relatively high amount of random chance becomes much more skill based since you're always trying to manipulate the off-board cards. When your deck empties, you simply shuffle your grave back in and take one point of damage, so by locking away less important cards in the stock and keeping key pieces in your new deck you can effectively increase the "density" of good draws (which is very important for reasons I can't get into in this already too long comment). Finally, it incentivizes active play and attacking, meaning it always pushes the game towards ending and preventing stalling.
Sees a video about mana system: good
Sees Yu-Gi-Oh: visible confusion
The original wow TCG had an incredible resource system. It worked like magic but you could play any card face down to act as a resource. Some cards had bonuses if used as a resource which added some fun deck building and decision making.
Grand Archive has the best resource system. Each card in your hand acts as mana so you have to rest them to activate effects. Good risk/reward system.
Came here to say this. You never outright condemn a card as "mana" when reserving to memory as you recollect it all at the start of your next turn.
Choosing which cards you do reserve provides another vector of strategy too, and splashier cards costing more reserve limits how many you can drop within one turn. Then all the cards that interact with the size of your memory, elements of cards in memory, balancing card draw through drawing into memory rather than straight to hand... It's all really great design. ❤
Sounds like what Duel Masters had
@@xenobladIt's literally just Duel Masters.
@@OnlyLiarGameFan You also add your cards played as mana back to hand every turn in Duel Masters? Haven't played but in gameplay I've seen I haven't seen players do that.
I like the Fire Emblem Cipher system. It works very similarly to MTG's mana, but there aren't land cards in Cipher, there are only "creature" cards, and you can once per turn play any creature as a land.
It also has a unique cost for some effects I haven't seen used elsewhere, where you turn your land face down, which makes it a colorless land.
LoR is similar to Hearthstone, players get +1 mana crystall at the beginning of each round, 10 maximum. The difference is, at the end of the round up to 3 unused mana is stored as spell mana. Spell mana remains untill it is used, it can only be used to play spells and spells will use spell mana in the first place.
There are also specific ways how you can interact with mana.
Ramp was historically weak, cards like Catalyst of Aeons, Cold Resistance, Faces of the Old Ones or Wyrding Stones were just to expensive and provided too little. Currently ramp is the strongest thing you can do in Freljord, becausr the region was basically re-imagined as a ramp region, getting cards like Winter's Touch, Wild Mysticism and sigil of the storm mechanic.
Shurima is known for ability to sacrifice mana for some powerfull effects.
Rite of Negation is the most infamous "...or destroy your managem" card in the game. Other, like Rite of Calling or Rite of the Arcane seen mediocre success. Some, like Rite of Dominance or Dune Swallower rarely seen play.
There's also a refund mechanic with certain archetypes (namely Sett and Jack)
And a lot of cards discount themselves or other cards, like Whispered Words, Sunken Temple, or MrFuckGameDesign, also known as Elder Dragon.
Vanguard also has 2 resource systems one tied to how much life you've lost and the other usually to archetypes and generator who make the resource. Recently a new resource was added that it based on turns or cards specifically to speed it up.
I loved old Vanguard but bounced back when they remade it. I loved the mechanic of counter blast, it was simple, elegant, and gave the losing person more comeback opportunities.
Could you please say what's the name of the last mechanic you mentioned? I'd check it out on the wiki.
@furryfox12 the last mechanic added is energy. You get 3 per turn starting on turn 2 (so player 1 gets nothing on turn 1 and then 2 gets 3) and can get a max of 10. Regardless off deck you can always spend 7 to draw a card. There are cards that make energy much like cards that soul charge and there are cards that spend energy. For example because of how vanguard tends to ramp up when you are on your first and second grade 3 turns you usually have a stock of energy to use already a lot of decks that run 1 energy card don't even have to run anything that makes it, they just have to make sure they don't play that card too many times in a row.
Gwent has unique resource system called Provision. In Gwent you can play any card at any time (but only 1 per turn), but provision is a cost you have to pay to put a card in your deck during deckbuilding. But it's not that simple. The basic provision ammount is 150 +you will get bonus provision depending on leader's ability you choose. The cheapest cards are 4 provision, the most expensive - 14 (considering basic design philosophy before gwentfinity). Your deck has to include at least 25 cards (but can include more) and at least 13 units. It is a fun concept and makes deckbulding really exciting, but on the other hand makes the game almost impossible to balance. 4-6 provision cards are in a "bronze zone", they are mostly statsticks. Card that cost more are usually the effect cards, that are played for something unique they have to offer. There is no objective way to say that for example Knickers should be an 8 provision card, or that Vilgeforz should be a 9 provision card. You basically can't set standarts for cards like this and compare them.
It sounds like a mechanic that's great for casuals though. Canadian highlander in mtg (and one can argue normal commander to some extent) has a very similar points system, and it seems to work fine thanks to the social aspect
Big fan of "Force of Will"s Mana Stone system. Basically, you have a secondary deck of Mana Stones (Like Lands) that you can top-deck a resource card off of each turn by tapping your "Ruler". It purs control of when you get more resources into your hands while also keeping some Luck based twists because there "Non-Basic" and Duel Colour Mana Stones in the randomized deck as well as creating a cost for Mana Stone generation (If you generate a Mana Stone, you can't use your Ruler that turn.).
Great video, I would also say that Yu-Gi-Oh's mana system is effectively combo based, in that you need to plan to have your combo interrupted at any point, if you don't and you can't do anything else with a weak board state, you just lose to your opponent's combo. Equally you have to hit your opponent's combo at just the right place to stop them dead, if you counter something that their deck does a lot then it doesn't matter, they'll have a back up in place.
I like the new Digimon TCG's memory system; each player has "memory" up to a max of 10 and they can spend that on playing cards until it hits zero or below and goes into their opponent's memory pool (which is then the amount they start their turn with (minimum 3 memory)) so you can play that big boss at the end of your turn if you want but then your opponent gets more room to do stuff on their turn, or you can use up all your turn's memory on it and leave them with only that basic amount but that was your entire turn so you kinda lose it on that.
Lorcana's ink system is also cool, but really forces you to know your deck going in as it can be really difficult to decide in the early turns what to ink and lose forever.
I like the onepiece system on don. It has a double use I've never played with before in anything else. I would love to see a video with that included next time. Keep up the good work!
Check out Mytos y Leyendas, it’s a Chilean card game where your life total is the cards in your deck. Damage dealt to you is done by milling cards. The resource system is similar to magics lands and are called the gold reserve however there are no color restrictions. What is interesting about it is that many gold function like magic’s enchantments, in that they provide an added passive or activated ability. I’m not sure if it is still in print, but I played it constantly as a child.
Every card game in the world: "I play 1 land/energy/mana and I pass my turn to you"
"I play 1 land/energy/mana and I pass my turn to you"
Yugioh players: "nice board dude, okay dark ruler no more? Battle phase? evenly match? CL2 droplet sending evenly match?"
sending evenly with droplet wouldn't do anything though
@@Bi-Ceratopsmight matter if the reborn a negate from the GY, like summoning dies irae using the link 3
@@Bi-Ceratops would it not I know banishing evenly will make it so your opponent can’t keep any cards do the rules change if you destroy it yourself
@@jmurray1110 no, droplet only goes to the GY after the chain is fully resolved. Therefore it is still only 1 card that your opponent will have to banish. What you are thinking of is if your opponent destroys your Evenly with a card like mst
@@Bi-Ceratops forgot about droplet going to the graveyard
Yeah those my experience was evil loungyong
Lorcana has a pretty good mana system as well. Certain cards can be put into the inkwell to be used as mana but they're not just blanks like lands are in Magic meaning you can build a deck with a ton of mana producing cards that aren't just dead draws at certain points in the game. Might be one of the better mana systems as you're giving up the ability to play a card from your hand to turn it into a resource to be able to play other cards instead. You hardly ever get screwed and you can really never flood cause once you reach a certain point, you don't have to play cards to the inkwell anymore.
I got so sick of mana flood and mana screw in MTG I considered making a game mode where you put your lands in a separate deck and choose which to draw from.
And I did make some land/creature cards, before they actually released some. Mine came in as lands, but could "Awaken" as kaiju-style creatures though, by returning lands to your hand.
I love the legends of runeterra's manna system. Because of how how the system works, manna often feels asymmetrical but not unfair. Its also consistent and you can save up to three manna per turn for spells. To me it feels like the most fair manna system that can still be manipulated by cards in a balanced way
Final Fantasy TCG is the best. It's similar to MTG, accept there is a limit to the number of 'lands' that can be played at a time and any type of card in hand can be also be discarded for 'mana'.
One resource system that I think deserves a mention is the Vs System. The way it worked was it was an 'any card as a resource' system, but it had the twist that the cards you used for a resource could still potentially be used if they were plot twists, locations or reservists, to get around some of the feels-bad of other any card as a resource systems, where you want to play your cards, not just use half of them as resources (also didn't hurt that it was made in the post yugioh TCG boom, so the similarities to trap cards worked in its favor). There are however downsides: because it's an any card as a resource system, as well as some of the peculiarities of combat, curving out became kind of mandatory, essentially shifting screw/flood to not getting a good curve, though there were some decks that overwhelmed with numbers, so cared less about curving out. Additionally the designers were IMO far too meager in what they would allow plot twists and locations to do, since they were effectively like lands and spells at the same time, but this made it just feel like your combat tricks were never quite strong enough and your continuous effects were too situational. On the whole it's a system I wish more games would experiment with (though the combat system I feel is one that can be done away with; give me MTG combat over it any day)
15:45 You can use EACH of Ash' effects once per turn. Cards that restrict players by making them able to activate one of their effect per turn do exist, and it's a different and harsher restriction (example: Arianna the Labrynth Servant).
For me Vanguard has a very interesting resource system, one of its main resources is the damage it takes, meaning that the most damage you take, the most you can do
Grand Archive’s system of being able to treat any card in your hand as energy is probably one of the best
Legends of Runeterra had the best mana system for digital card games. An iteration on Hearthstones system, keeping it simple while reducing it's drawbacks of playing on curve and acrually promoting interactive gameplay with spell mana
I really liked Legends of Runeterra's addition of spell mana onto Hearthstone's mana system. Hearthstone tends to favor decks that can 'curve out' well and efficiently spend all the mana you have each turn, and you can fall behind if you missed an early turn. Hearthstone's Coin helped the 2nd player with this a bit, allowing you to say, play a 3 cost card on turn 2, then a 3 cost card on turn 3.
LoR's spell mana allowed you to store up to 3 excess mana to be used only on spell cards, which makes it so you aren't punished as harshly for missing a turn. Control decks will want to always have this spell mana reserve full to be able to react to their opponent's plays, and there's even an archetype focused around 6 cost spells, so those decks would want to pass Round 1 and 2 to do a big play on Round 3 with 6 total mana for spells.
HS hasn't been curvestone for many years. It's all about mana cheating (playing cards way outside their designed curve) and OTK combos.
it’s a left-field pick but star wars unlimited. every card can be “resourced” or played face down in your resource pool. every time you draw cards, you draw 2 and can choose to resource one of them to increase your mana pool. it makes mana an impactful decision every turn with consequences for every action. you’re constantly thinking “these are both so vital to my strategy but i have to resource one to play this other card” and it’s really exciting to play. there are cards that have the keyword “smuggle” which means they can be played from the resource zone for a higher cost, essentially giving you two hands
this is very quickly becoming one of my favorite channels, absolutely love your content and presentation, and you explain things kinda how i try to explain stuff to my friends who don't play the kind of games i like, so your videos really resonate with me even though i know next to nothing about TCGs. thanks for your content and i hope you keep making these videos! :D
The old Lord of the Rings TCG by Decipher had an interesting system. Your deck had 2 parts, free peoples and shadow. You put your shadow cards against the opponent free peoples and vice versa. When you played a free peoples card, the “cost” went into the twilight pool. So if a card cost 4 you added 4 twilight. And then shadow cards would be paid for with that twilight. So you had to balance because if you played a big turn on your fellowship phase then your opponent has a lot of resources on the shadow phase.
Another strength with the mana system in MTG is that it allows you to understand what you and your opponent are capable of at any moment. You're not forced to sit there and spectate your opponent's turn like in Hearthstone, and you're not just waiting for some hand trap/spell BS like in Yugioh. Your opponent has 2 mana and they only have 2 mana of work they can do, which just deepens the play and counterplay that each person has.
Like you're about to drop your win con, but you notice that your opponent has 3 blue mana sitting up so you drop something less important first and play around the information you have.
I really like running Simian Spirit Guide and Elvish Spirit Guide (very bad creatures with the ability to exile them from your hand for 1 mana at any time) so I can goofily go, "JOKES ON YOU I HAD MANA"
How is playing around a counterspell different than playing around handtraps? If your opponent leaves 3 mana open in magic and you think about the spells they could play that is the exact same as thinking about handtraps in yugioh, as there is also just a finite number of different ones.
@ If your opponent has a hand trap there’s no communication of that other than cards in hand and archetype.
In Magic, they specifically have to be playing blue with blue mana open to counter
They have to be playing red/green for instant buffa
They have to be playing black/white for res effects.
Also, especially in the first few turns, leaving mana open is almost always an intentional act.
Whether or not your opponent has a hand trap or quickspell is just “hey, they have it or they dont.”
I really enjoy Exodus TCGs energy system, having two separate decks like how PTCGP has an energy reserve makes it much nicer play pattern wise, no “Manascrew” just pure deck building
I'm working on a game with health as the resource. To preface this description, if I say something is like something from another game Assume that it is just to get you in the headspace, not exact.
So to start your deck, you have up to 3 leader cards.
Your deck can only have cards of the associated leader type. So, for instance, if it was magic, the gathering you would have 3 commanders, and you could only have cards of their creature types. Say vampires, zombies, and werewolves.
Each leader gives you more health to start the game with. So base 1+x+y+z. It is always a number between 0-2. So 1+2+1+0=4 starting health.
Your health can be used in one of two ways.
Exhaust which is a temporary loss that you gain back at the start of your next turn.
Sacrifice. Which is a permanent loss but you still gain one health, extra every turn. It's kind of like tapping versus sacrificing land in magic.
Health usually ends up being a resource anyway
@dudono1744 yeah but with this it's designed to be. From the start. Meaning 1 health win is still a win is a lot different because 1 health is your screwed
My favourite resource system is probably from Cardfight Vanguard.
There all your cards are essentially free, but to activate their effects you need to spend some of resources. What are resources? Two main resources are either "Soul", which accumulates throughout the game or "Counter", which is damage you received throughout the game. Both of those resources are one use only, which means you have only limited amount of abilities you can use throughout the game and puts a lot of emphasis on refilling your resources through special effects.
I think Magic managed to get it right early on the existence of CCGs, and it has evolved well since. It and spell speed are what continue to keep it as the king of card games.
Magic has been a flop for a very long time now. Mark Rosewater has been ruining the game, and WotC/hasbro has been accelerating it. There's also a reason Richard Garfield never used his lands system again for any of his other card games, it's honestly pretty bad.
@@steveng6721 lmao imagine getting an anime-themed Llanowar Elves for 200+ USD. I know I wouldn't, but Hasbro being Hasbro, they saw that players are gullible anyway (Remember that 1 of 1 One Ring horsesh💩t that happened not too long ago?)
MtG has been utter dog shit for years.
@@musashishinmen4286 I mean the greedy practices as far as reprints and although arts, yeah, those are awful. I won't defend those.
@@steveng6721given Maro has been head designer for 20 years, he must be pretty bad at ruining magic if it has taken him this long.
I would like to highlight Lorcana here!
There's two bands that a Lorcana card fits into. Inkable and non-Inkable. Most cards are Inkable which allows the player to place that card face down into the "Inkwell" (mana once per turn. Essentially 90% of the cards in each set can also be a "land" (from MTG). Once its in the inkwell you can't take it back out unless stated otherwise, same goes for uninkable cards in where you can't put them into your inkwell unless an effect allows you to.
During a turn, players use their inkwells to play cards up the amount of ink they have. Again similar to the land system a player with 5 ink could play one big 5 cost card or 5 cost 1 cards and anything inbetween.
The deck building restriction comes from the fact that if you put too many uninkables in your deck you wont be able to play and also when making your deck you choose 2 out of the 6 card pools to choose from denoted as "ink types", to play with. The ink types are: Amethyst, Ruby, Emerald, Sapphire, Amber and Steel. For example I can play Amber and Steel cards but my deck becomes illegal if I also play Ruby cards. Each card has a border highlighting which inktype it belongs to.
As a long time magic player (10 years) I have always been frustrated from losing games due to mana screw/flood it is what lets magic down as a game. Lorcana fixes it and makes it better.
You NEED to try out Elestrals, was missing in this video and from my 20 minutes here I think you'd like it!
I like the flavor of the different mana types in MTG. I have experimented with different ways to mitigate mana screw/flood, but they all have their downsides as well. I have just come to accept that some games will be lost from too much or too few mana.
One idea that I liked was to keep your mana in a separate pile and you could choose which part of your library to draw from. Both were considered your library. However, that breaks many mill and graveyard effects and it is no fun to separate your cards after each game.
Good points! I have to agree, that Pokemon's energy system is the best of the four main games mentioned in the video, since it has more flexibility than magic's lands, and does not limit your plays nearly as much a mana in MTG and Hearthstone.
The more card games I play, however, the less I like MTG's and Pokemon's land/energy system, and one-per-turn mana systems like these and Hearthstone. Land screw and flood are a part of that, but I also think it feels terrible to have a significant portion of your deck that only is there to fulfill your land for turn. MTG and Pokemon have tried to fix this with land/energy cards that have additional effects, which does somewhat solve the problem, but those cards can often feel like a compromise where you run a bad land to make your deck less likely to get screw'd or flooded. Another issue with one-per-turn mana systems (mostly in MTG and Hearthstone) that was somewhat touched on in the video, is that, in the early game, most cards in your hand are completely unplayable, leading to few interesting decisions being made in the early turns of the game. MTG has tried to design around this issue with a variety of alternate costs on cards, but just because they can design around it doesn't mean it's a good mechanic.
From my experience, there are many games that pace themselves quite well without the need for a one-per-turn mana system, or specialized land/energy cards in the main deck. These games often use the escalation of the board state, as more cards come into play, to pace the game. They use other resources to limit the players' actions on a turn, without requiring land/energy cards to bloat the deck, or limiting players' plays in the early game.
Some Examples:
Digimon's memory system allows players to play almost any card on turn 1, but at the cost of giving your opponent more resources to use on their turn. This can lead to interesting gameplay where players are trying to spend the minimum amount of memory on their turn until a player decides to make a big play at the risk of the opponent's counterattack.
Netrunner (as mentioned in the video) gives each player a set amount of actions of their turn, the amount of which does not change throughout the game, so that even early turns have meaningful decisions on what cards you play and what other actions you take. The game does have a separate resource system, Credits, which are spent to play cards, but credits persist between turns and can be gained or spent without any one-per-turn limitations.
Grand Archive's reserve system temporarily spends other cards in hand to pay for card costs, allowing you to play almost anything in your hand on the first turn, effectively treating your hand as your mana pool. This is kept in check by the game's limitations on card draw, and other mechanics that limit what cards you can play early in the game, or even weakening certain cards until the correct conditions are met later in the game. This allows players to play almost any card in their hand, even on the first turn, but uses other mechanics to modulate the flow of the game.
This has quickly become one of my favourite TCG channels. I love the comparisons between games
IMO Duel Masters had the best resource system.
It was basically like Magic, except there's no dedicated Land cards, but you can play any card upside-down as a land analogue that can tap for mana of the card's colors.
So your whole deck is playable cards and you'll never get mana flooded or mana screwed (except maybe by color restrictions).
Also, the only casting requirement was that you spend at least one mana of the same color as any card you're trying to play. In MtG terms, every card in Duel Masters has a single colored mana pip of its color, but the rest of the cost is entirely generic.
There are even other TCG/CCG that use similar "every card can be used as resource": the Naruto card game worked similarly, where you could charge any card to your Chakra zone to spend on jutsu.
I like the variation on that where you have automatic uncolored mana and can pitch a card to play another card of that color.
also there's a game I played which had an interesting double deck as am answer to mana flood, which was basically the mtg land system, but with a land and spell deck, allowing you to chose between drawing mana and drawing spells.
another interesting take on mana is faeria, where the game has a hex board and you get uncolored mana by default, you can get more uncolored mana by controlling a zone where there is mana, and you get colors by literally placing lands, and you can chose between placing a single colored land or 2 uncolored lands. an additional restriction is that colored cards can only be placed on their land color.
your cards need to be able to physically hit the opponent, so aggro decks who want to rush have to use 2x uncolored while control decks can usually afford to place colored lands, which gives them access to more powerful cards, or they can go to the mana generation which is on the side to get extra mana.
This is one of my favorite channels. Listening to someone talk about card games is this way is so fun
The mana system of Magic is almost perfect. It has the right pieces that allow for a tempo vs value dynamic, it has the effect of the game leading to a climactic finish, game and deckbuilding decisions acting as both signaling and hard choices, color restrictions affect which types of effects you are allowed to have and when, etc. There is so much that it does right and somehow it did all that on the first try. BUT people really, *really* hate mana screw and mana flood even though a majority of the time it is due to other deckbuilding errors and those types of losses occur rarely. HOWEVER, the emotionality of that rare event is also very high so it sticks.
In order for mana to have true meaningful impact on deckbuilding and gameplay then at some point during the either one or both of those stages of gameplay you need to be making decisions about when you want mana, how much you want, what types, etc. Hearthstone fails here in a big way and every deck when they are truly optimized become very homogenous in strategic depth. People don't quite get it if they have never spent the time to *truly* understand Magic's mana system.
The best system exists somewhere in between Sorcery, Lorcana, World of Warcraft TCG, and Duelmasters/Kaijudo. These systems solve flood and/or screw in different ways and get you to making the other type of meaningful game decisions without sacrificing the cost of mana itself which creates the true relationship between tempo and value.
That being said, there is something very important to understand, and this one may be very difficult: multiple layers of variance create consistency with the caveat that outliers are absolutely extreme. Removing layers of variance actually INCREASES the effects of luck because you flatten the bell curve BUT it reduces the effect of the extremes. See: rolling two dice vs rolling one die. The same exists here with mana and non-mana cards.
What this means is: Hearthstone is very luck dependent even though mana is free, because there is no bell curve of variability of mana vs non-mana, and you only draw non-mana. Therefore tempo/curving out is the most important thing in Hearthstone (especially in its first 4 years of release).
The other 4 games mentioned have it WAY better because the role of every card in your deck as sideboard, win con, removal, support, etc change their value by matchup and determine which are best used as mana. Lorcana kind of forces this by making certain cards unable to be played as a resource (which I don't like) but has the upside of signaling to new players during deckbuilding what they should focus on in gameplay (they're forced to).
There's also the nice benefit that if you can play nearly any card in your deck as mana then you don't need a sideboard in your game. In this case technically your sideboard is already in your deck: it is the cards you usually play as mana but make situational sacrifices for when you otherwise need them.
Must be satire Magic has one of the most garbage mana systems ive ever seen imagine going neg 1 whenever you wanna play a card OMEGALUL 💀💀💀
I love Magic the Gathering but the mana system is complete garbage, needing to have half the deck dedicated to mana even in singleton formats is bad design, specially when you are only guaranteed one draw per turn.
@@tiagodoresalmeida That's why I mentioned the other 4 games that had better design solutions to this problem. The mechanic of using cards in your deck as a resource is good, but the strict limitation is not. The extremes of variance are too much for most people's taste and there is less skill expression than compared to say the World of Warcraft TCG. Just because it has a drawback to its design, that doesn't mean that the whole design is flawed. This is hyperbole.
@@SStrikeFury Imagine playing card games and understanding them so little that you make a comment like this lol.
I have a hard time believing adding layers of randomness makes the game less luck dependent (even though i understand for the example of multiple dice rolls).
If we take a simple example where i make an attack that does 100 damage, which can crit for 200 damage: Does adding another dice roll that says the attack can miss and do zero damage reduces the effect of luck? It certainly doesn't feel so. Maybe it would better work if it halves the damage instead of zeroing it but idk
The best thing about energy in pokemon is depending on the deck they do not have the same role
Depending in your energy acceleration method they may be played from your hand once, from your deck thanks to a card, from your discard pile thanks to a card, from your hand as much as you want... Every deck manages the ressources in a very different way
I would say the way energy is managed is what makes pokemon fun to play and what creates so many different deck archetypes. In the past energy was tough to manage but now the current meta is amazing when it comes to energy usage
I haven’t watched the video yet, but imo it’s digimon by a fair bit (from a YGO player)
The Lord of the Rings TCG: while playing as Free Peoples, you have a blank check and can play whatever cards you want, but their cost goes into the Twilight pool. Your opponent playing Shadow then pays for their cards *out* of the Twilight pool, meaning you are always playing a game of risk-reward. (Both players play both sides; they are shuffled together into a single draw deck and then you alternate turns on each side).
You should look into Flesh and Blood!! They have a very interesting resource system and also in general a really cool card game system!!
I really enjoy Epic's "all-or-nothing" system with the 1 gold/turn setup
Real answer? Duel Masters, but also shout outs to
• My Little Pony (like duel masters, but you also have a second pool of energy tokens to purchase effects such as movement or card draw)
• Lorcana (*most* cards can be turned facedown into what are essentially lands, so there's a good mix of hard choices and versatility. But there are also Songs, which are special actions where you have the option to tap characters to perform actions instead of spending resource. Really cool)
• Digimon (Play until you are in the negatives, and then your opponent's pool is equal to the negative you ended your turn in. Real push and pull. This *does* mean there's no ramp, but you get card draw and discount whenever you digivolve, so a volatile ramp up is a still a strong component of play)
Wixoss is one I enjoy. It cribs off duel masters in that any card is a resource. You can store one a turn but you also gain them when your creatures die or you lose life. It isn’t needed for creatures, but for spells and your deck’s ace cards. As such, it functions as a comeback mechanic where taking losses early gives you resources to play your ace cards, and there is this strategy behind not attacking blindly.
Legends of Runeterra has probably the smoothest mana system I've played so far.
May not be a huge game right now, but the man system is really good. Like HS mana, but you can bank up to three unspent mana. This mana can only be spent on spells. May not sound like much at first, but this is coupled with a game that has high interaction and a staggered turn system. That spell mana allows you to aim for say a solid turn four drop and have two mana open to protect it with interaction. Or be ready to interact with the opponent's stuff. Makes the game really engaging and you don't end up with the classic hearthstone early game awkwardness where its like I guess I just can't use all my mana perfectly so fuck me. The whole mechanic just feels really well polished, and beautiful in its simplicity.
And turns are staggered - meaning that one player does an action (playing a creature, casting a slow speed spell, or attacking if they are the player who can attack that turn) and then the other player does an action. If you pass, and the opponent also passes, the turn ends. So sometimes people will pass early to see what the other player plays, knowing that they probably want to play something. But sometimes you just want to pass back in order to make them burn mana.
And having two different types of mana means you can interact with them differently. Spells that increase your regular mana are not common, more of a classic ramp. But you can also get cards that give you spell mana or have effects that take place depending on gaining or spending spell mana. There's one deck (or more idk, but one that I know of) that specifically wants to cast absolutely nothing on turn one and two in order to build up its full three spell mana immediately.
Too bad Riot killed LOR because Riot can’t help but be the shittiest developer they can be.
@@Catbeans99 incredible game, zero advertising. No clue WTF they were thinking.
@@connorjensen9699 I was so disappointed when they ended PVP. The game was so solid. But Riot can’t milk $500 skins out of the game so why bother supporting it right?
@@Catbeans99 100%. And like they barely tried any monetization. I get that it's initial strategy was to be very F2P friendly since that was a really prominent sore spot from HS, but there still does need to be some compelling way to pay and frankly they really didn't try very hard to find a good balance.
@ They very well could have the free cards and just sell alt arts like skins in league. Cotton tail teemo plays the same as Teemo. No advantage. It wasn’t some huge mystery of how to monetize, Riot just didn’t want to for some reason.
Same thing with Wild Rift, they promised console release soon after the mobile release but have now seemingly cancelled it because there isn’t enough interest despite there being posts on forums asking daily where the console port is. They have got to be one of the most out of touch devs around. If it’s not League or Valorant, they just don’t care. I have zero faith in the upcoming fighting game.
Your channel is really underated, because the quality of the videos is really good on these types of card games.
Hope you the best.
Having tried all, YuGiOh's system is easily the most fun to play with. However, the winner for best system instead has to go to both Legends of Runeterra and Digimon. Much better designed systems than all games covered in the video.
I've been meaning to write up a whole thing on Yu-Gi-Oh's resource system (which it does have, but it's not the kind of resource system most card games have, which is why people bounce off of it so much I think). A lot of people say the "resource system" is the normal summon, but that's not really comparable (but the normal summon _is_ a resource you have access to). To put it very simply, it's your cards that are resources, but not in the way that Duel Masters or Lorcana does it where you literally put your cards face down as resources. Being able to go into your deck to extend your resources is a big part of the game, being able to use your graveyard as a resource is a part of the game, allotting space in your deck to hand traps that can interact with your opponent on their first turn and respond to their disruptions on your first turn is a part of the game. They're all just resources that you always have access to so long as you draw them and can pay their costs, whether it be discarding cards (which may actually turn them into resources) or locking yourself out of other routes. At the end of the video you slip a bit into the Yugiboomer mentality of "the game is too fast now therefore it's bad", which I think is kinda bad form.
I know it has been mentioned before, but Digimon is my favorite resource system in card games. I have been playing card games for years and years and years, and almost every card game either uses "resources as cards" (such as lands in Magic or energy in Pokemon) or "cards as resource" (generally any game where you play cards face down as a resource). Digimon is literally one of the only games I've played since I was like, 12 where they did something genuinely new and unique. People often idolize the "back and forth" of a card game and bemoan games where one player "doesn't get to play". Well, Digimon is founded upon a literal back and forth, because part of your turn is figuring out how deep you want to go and how many resources you want to give to your opponent, and how many resources you can squeeze out of what your opponent gave you. Yeah, it sucks to be choked to 1 memory, but I've seen decks make plays out of 1 energy that a deck stuck on one or two lands in Magic could never _dream_ of doing. It's truly something to behold and I think it's just the absolute best I've ever seen. And yes, I know it's used in Chrono Clash or whatever, but I didn't play that shit, I play Digimon, so step off!
Aside from the normal summons, you don't describe a unique resource system for Yu-Gi-Oh. Cards in hand, cards in deck, and cards in discard are resources that M:tG, Hearthstone, Star Wars, and pretty much every other system also has access to.
More useful would've been mentioning the extra decks that can be used to summon monsters or the limitation on how many cards of certain types can be in play (unlike Magic and Lorcana, similar to Pokémon and Harry Potter).
One that i liked before they bombed the entire meta was force of will. It's practically like magic the gathering but intead of putting the lands in your deck, you put them in a side deck of pure mana cards that you taped your commander to play a card from your lands. This guaranteed you never missed a land drop unless you chose to use your commander for battle. Unfortunately the gane died when the creators thought it was a good idea to print a commander with a free negate every turn among two other effects while all the other commanders only had one or two max.
I don’t know if it’s the best but I definitely think that one of the most interesting mana systems is Elestrals where you have a twenty card deck of mana that is also used as your life.
Lands are absolutely not a worthy tradeoff and have been one of magic's biggest flaws they've tried solving for years.
Pretty much all card game designers after some time realized that internal deck resources were an awful way to approach it and opted for tokens or resource trackers, or something digital like HS mana crystals.
Things like cycling, dual sided lands, land abilities, so many gimmicks were made to work around it. Not to mention it throttles card game design as everything has to curtain to this limitation.
Magic is one of oldest systems out there and it suffers greatly for a lot of problem modern card games have solved. I feel you need to rethink and research game design a little because your case for it is severely undercooked.
Nah, land system is pretty much the only great thing about mtg.
I'd say my favorite energy system remains World of Warcraft TCG's resource system: You can put ANY card from your hand face-down on the table as resource. In addition you have Quest-cards that are put face-UP on the table as resource that both provide resources and have one-time use activated effects and get flipped face-down once that one-use effect has been used.
This beauty of this system is that you'll never get mana-screwed like in MTG and mana-flood is also much less of a concern since even if your hand is flooded with Quests each of them provides some useful one-use effect - from graveyard recursion to card advantage IIRC. This ALSO means you can include more heavily targeted stuff in your deck for the current metagame since even if a card ends up being worthless in a specific matchup you can just use it as a resource instead of it being purely dead card.
It obviously does have the downside that since you don't have any colors it is harder to make cards different: there's a huge difference between a spell in MTG costing RRR or R2 for example. The former often has a more powerful effect since it is harder to cast outside mono-red, while the latter is generally more likely to be weaker put more easy to include in multi-color deck.
Edit: I also like Legend of Five Rings LCG's resource system. It is by far the most tactical one by far I've played with.
In L5R you have two resources: fate and honor. You get 7 fate every turn to spend on your cards. Unused fate is retained in your pool, so you can save up for a big turn or to play cards on your opponent's turn. Your starting honor depends on your "Stronghold"-card. You also have two decks: dynasty deck and conflict deck. The former (mostly) consists of characters you play (roughly equivalent to MTG creatures) while the latter (mostly) consists of events, attachments and characters (think instants, auras/equipment and creatures from MTG).
Fate is the primary resource used to buy things. For events and attachments it works like in any other game: you pay the price, you get the effect. For characters, however, it is different. In addition to paying the price of the character, you can choose to put any number of additional fate on the character. This essentially gives the character extra duration in play, since at the end of the round any characters with no fate on them are discarded from play, after which any characters with fate lose one fate. This creates a very interesting pattern of needing to figure out whether you want to buy several characters now but lose them at the end of turn, or to invest on fewer characters that stick around for multiple turns. This is furthered by the fact that during dynasty phase - where you buy characters from your dynasty deck in turns - the first one to pass is awarded one extra fate, so focusing on one or two characters that stick around can also be an economical decision.
Honor on the other hand is both a resource and win/loss condition. Amassing 21 honor wins you the game, while dropping to 0 honor loses you the game. One of the central mechanics of the game also has you bidding honor (by choosing number between 1 and 5) with the player making the lower bid being awarded the difference in honor by the player who chose the higher number. The most notable example of this is the draw phase: instead of the more typical "draw X card(s)" or "each player draws to hand size" kind of effects, in L5R during the draw phase each player makes their bid and draws cards cards equal to their bid. Obviously drawing more cards is, generally speaking, a very powerful effect, but if you are at 4 honor bidding 5 in draw phase will instantly lose you the game if your opponent bids 1. Combined with the other effects that affect honor this creates a very interesting dynamic, where squeezing your opponent's honor pool effectively also ends up squeezing their primary source of card advantage.
I loved playing L5R back in the explosion of TCGs.
The problem with pokemon's energy system is that a knockout is also a one-sided land destruction effect. This is incredibly snowbally and disincentivizes spending multiple turns on one card.
Shadowfist's mana system is what makes it so well designed for multiplayer. You can attack your opponents' lands. Each land has its own hp and when it's reduced to zero, the attacking player can either take it for themselves or gain a large burst of mana. This is even more snowbally than pokemon, but that's exactly the point. In shadowfist it's possible to win even against 2-3 other players if you have a large enough lead, so you're encouraged to commit to the board.
Your pace and breathing got so much better! I used to listen to you on slower speeds but now its good
magic the gathering nailed it with the land system because of a simple factor: you NEED inconvenience in your games. The varience of relying on land drops to hit to cast bigger spells is one of the reasons why MtG was able to establish itself as the leading card game outside of pokemon, which gets a lot of its sales from non-players in the first place.
MtG is the leader because it's the first major CCG with tons of synergies and mechanics to explore. It has a broad range of themes which broadens the appeal. It was the pioneer in CCGs and it was its lead to lose. The inconvenience is absolutely already there in all CCGs with your draw luck. You don't need more. It's an extremely bad feeling to get flooded or screwed and it's flawed. Not surprising given how old MTG is, it has a mechanic that wouldn't have been designed today (CCGs made in the last 10 years don't have that flaw).
Lands being crucial plays to even being able to do anything is why lands got powercrept so hard that they often do a lot more than tap for 1 mana.
The facts that lands in magic can actually do things other than tap for man is extremely unique.
@@catzblu999 fully disagree. I started CCGs with Pokémon and yu-gi-oh. The fact you can get mana flooded or screwed IS AN UPSIDE of the system, not a flaw. If it’s happening to you consistently, you have built a bad deck. If it happens once in a while, you need to get better at mulligans. If it happens rarely, you’ve built a balanced deck and when it does happen is just poor luck.
Yeah, it can sometimes feel bad when against all odds you get flooded or screwed even with a good hand and mulligan, but that feels infinitely less bad than turn 1-2 combos in yugioh.
There is a reason despite what you view as a “flawed” system MtG has retained its popularity despite “better” systems being made.
Maybe in 2005 this would've been relevant but the only reason Magic IS still second is nostalgia and Commander+fanservice crossovers.
The system is flawed and until Hearthstone became the first post-wow product, it was the actual second or first most relevant card game. Too bad it's attached to Blizzard.
There are way too many outside factors to popularity, and almost nobody gets the first time right, so it's just marketing strats what keeps them afloat.
People forget that powercreep is an obligatory thing due to companies having to profit to actually exist, unless you just kill your game in 4 years or less, and we keep forgetting this concept permeates the entire landscape of tabletop games: real world capitalism is the core thing in which you have to design around.
@ there are more newer players than there are old players, so nostalgia is not a major factor. Commander, last I checked, is still magic that uses the same system, lands and all, and if new players did not vibe with it they would not play. There’s a reason magics playerbase still keeps growing despite virtually no mainstream marketing, and it’s because the game systems themselves are good.
I really like the mana systems in the tcgs by bandai, such as OPTCG's Don!. It's a kinda like hearthstones system where you get the same amount of mana each turn, however here it is 2 (unless you go first then it's 1) with a cap of 10. What makes it unique is that you can either choose to spend your Don! to play cards regularly or attack them to one of your characters to increase their power for the turn. These games also have a pretty unique system for handling life which I won't go into here but I can really recommend anyone interested in some unique ideas to check it out.
The real answer is Digimon, no doubt about that
Said literally no on ever
@@bradcallahan3546 You talk as if I was joking. Did I studder bitch?
@@bradcallahan3546 lmao hating.
My two favorite mana systems come from Elestrals and the Lord of the Rings TCG
Elestrals: Your 20 "spirits" go in a separate spirit deck that you can access at any time, so they're like one-time mana from MTG without being screwed or flooded by them. They're also your life total, so you can combo off super early, but you're likely to be put on the backfoot if your board gets dismantled because you put so many spirits into making it. What's more, they have a mechanic called "Nexus" where you can move spirits between permanents to trigger additional effects. Very fun and very balanced, most games end up being quite close.
LOTR TCG: Both players have a good half of their deck and a shadow half of their deck, and they regularly alternate between which they use. The cards that the light side player plays generate mana, which the shadow player subsequently uses during their phase to pay for their cards. So the person who's on the good side for the turn can combo off and allow their opponent to do the same, or they can play a more choke focused turn where they don't play many cards and give their opponent limited options.
Digimon has one of the best mana systems in a card game ever
I am a life long MTG player, having also played all of these other games, and I can say with certainty that Hearthstone has the best mana system.
When I draw a card at the beginning of turn, there is no worse feeling than drawing a blank with a land.
I like magic but damm i hate lands so much its always a game of no lands or too much lands
There is also Flesh and Blood's pitch system. where each card has a "pitch value" in turn one can use that value to play cards from their hand.
Yugioh does have a resource system.
You get 1 Normal summon.
You get 1 draw a turn.
You get max 15 extra deck cards.
You start your hand with 4-5 cards and use other cards in play as resources for bigger boss cards from your extradeck.
Most cards have a "Once per turn" clause, meaning once the effect is spent, you can't use it again.
The worst system because your 1 summon makes a chain reaction and brings 5 other monster and you win one turn 2
@@thuliumtm3165 Yeah, but MTG has soul ring, and Hearthstone have cards that make other cards cost 0 or you get more mana crystals.
The difference of each game is in resource scaling speed.
For yugioh, more options/cards in play=more resources
So happy you mentioned Netrunner, best card game ever. Economy that persists across turns + a huge variety of cards that allow you to make money in conditional ways + limited actions to spend that money each turn + being able to spend 1 action for 1 credit even with no cards to prevent you from getting screwed. It's just so buttery smooth.
My card game fruit monsters has the best, its like magic the gathering but you have 1 deck for resources and 1 deck for the rest of the cards. you draw 2 cards per turn from either deck of your choice.
There was a card game named Force of Will that was similar, but it ended up dying pretty quickly. I'm not positive why, except that most people just played Magic instead
@@charmandenator5686 damn
@@charmandenator5686force of will looked like a better magic but died because no support
A bit nitpicky, but pokemon energy determines the strength of an attack. Not the quantity of attacks allowed. You only get 1 attack in pokemon no matter what. 0:20
yugioh has the best resource system. there is none, your only limit is your ability to read the fine print.
WoW Let me just play my whole deck and kill you in one turn. Very fun. Much balance.
@@thuliumtm3165hand traps homie
I sir, would like to introduce you to the One Piece TCG. The DON!!! System is one that makes tempo play very important in a game with no hand limit.
Both players have a 10 Don deck. The player that goes first get 1 don and from there on both players draw 2 don (to a designated resource area, they don't go to hand) similar to MTG, Don is tapped to pay for your cards but Don also have a secondary use of giving characters an extra 1K attack power on your turn by attaching Don to them.
The game's purple decks have a habit of playing with their DON, with cards and leader effects that either allow you to ramp, or put dons back in the deck for massive effects.
The best option is just to put the card down without paying
This is objectively one of the worst systems, since it gives one less axis to balance cards. But it does force more creative design.
Gonna put a different name in the ring and say the Final Fantasy TCG's Mana system is my favourite. Almost every card can be discarded for 2 Mana of it's Element, but there are also Backup cards you can play for a more per permanent resource, being able to tap them for 1 mana per turn, or be used for alternative effects. You also draw 2 cards per turn, other than First, though, so discarding cards constantly for cost feels better than it would at 1 draw.
It hilarious to me that he doesn't even understand that there is a resource limitation in Yugioh, but the game has gotten so terrible and power crept that he doesn't even know it exists. You can only normal summon 1 monster per turn. That's it. You might not know it since any deck in Yugioh in the past 20 years will summon 527 monsters a turn, but that it the resource you're supposed to manage.
I think the monsters themselves are more of a resource than the pointless normal summon restriction because you have to send monsters to the graveyard for most types of special summons, while the normal summon isn't even restrictive considering that you can special summon a theoretical infinite amount of times.
@@OnlyLiarGameFan You're trying to retroactively decide what the resource management system is after the game has completely changed. The game of yugioh as it was designed is that the resources you're limited on is normal summons. Back when the game was only a couple years old you could easily see this. Tribute summons and double tributes were hard to put onto the field and required multiple turns and actual tributes to use, making you weigh the options of spamming more things on your board or sacrificing for the stronger monsters and special summons were exactly as their name implied, special. You used to have to burn another card, like Polymerization or a ritual summon spell, just to be able to perform special summons. Again, just because the game has been power crept into oblivion and you can now summon 395 things on turn 1 doesn't change what the resource system is in the game. It just means that half the cards now completely ignore said system because they've been designed to be ridiculously powerful.
@@crazysquriel Normal summons being more important back in the day doesn't make monsters not more of a resource than the normal summon. I still think the game was designed for monsters as resources with the several (tribute, fusion, ritual) alternative summoning methods requiring the player to put the monsters on the field into the graveyard for a (theoretically, but a lot of the times, not really) stronger monster. In DM Era YGO, I'd say both the normal summon and monster are relatively close in terms of importance, with monsters being a bit more so. But modern YGO just overshadowing the normal summon, while monsters are even more important resources than ever before.
@@OnlyLiarGameFan It literally does though. They were no more of a resource than creatures in MTG or Pokemon in Pokemon. Would it not fundamentally change those games if you were only allowed one per turn? It quite literally is the resource limitation. You're just biased by modern YGO.
You had monster reborn, fmute of summoning dragons and mosters that searched and summoned shit back in the Day. Stop the cap @@crazysquriel
You should look into Elestrals, I've been getting into it recently and I love the resource system, having it be the same thing as your health pool is very interesting and adds such a complex and interesting layer to deck building and literally every play you make