I've wanted to revisit the game for a while! When I saw it had a kickstarter that was nearly wrapped up, I figured this was about the best time possible to pull out my old cards.
The health as rescourse mechanic is a very neat idea, though I'd go with a planeswalker like design for the avatar. It creates more interesting decisions.
Magi generally have just 1 ability. Making it closer to a planeswalker would definitely work, but one thing I'm learning from playing around with the wizard hacking game we came up with on stream is that if your using a planeswalker as a resource system, ultimates are really bad design because they just eat all your resources - so either you're just using the ultimate and not playing other cards, or playing other cards and generally ignoring the ultimate. Having multiple options to tick up can be really nice, but it's also nice to just keep it to one ability and just focus on that - it's generally easier to balance and easier to build a deck around.
@@tcgacademia ultimates are an invention of spectacle rather then substance. It's not necessary for a walker to have one despite mtg walkers mostly have them. Why do you think they are necessary for walkers?
@@admiralcasperr Definitely not necessary, but the standard MTG formula for walkers is plus, minus, ult. I think the only one that really works on a leader-type card is plus, especially if you're tying it to your resource mechanic. This is just based on my own attempts to make walker-style leaders work, but it was more limiting than I expected. I think it can still work, though!
I've never played Magination, but honestly, for a pre-yugioh and -pokemon tcg this game seems well ahead of the curve in terms of how it designed its card effects. Yugioh especially (but also Pokemon) was pretty tedious too for a long while before it startet to develop design thresholds and cards that actually fit the turn structure better, and along the way they iterated on the core rules of the game too, sometimes even major things like first turn draw and initiative on summon (besides faciliatating new summoning mechanics each season). If I played yugioh today, but with the cards at release without knowing what the game ended up becoming over the years, I'd call it a bad game too. I feel like, if you streamlined the turn structure such that you combined the summoning phase with the second PRS phase, made turn draw at the start of a turn, and maybe even adjusted other things based on playtesting, you'd actually have a competent card game which is impressive for a game that old. I definitely agree with you on your attrition point, it's definitely the one aspect that would require the deepest systematic change to address.
Yeah, I was kind of struggling how to express it in the video, but the effects are well designed and well templated. I haven't played a ton of games from this era (although there are a ton), so I'm not sure if this was an exception or fairly common, but Magic had a huge lead on Yugioh and Pokemon in design, templating, and overall game balance, and Magi-nation was definitely closer to Magic on that scale.
As a fanboy, streamlining the game like you say would ruin the game. Combining the summoning phase with the PRS phase is opening the door for infinite combos and effects being much more powerful than intended. For example, a creature with a power to damage every creature on the field is both strong and has a big downside of hitting yourself. But if you could summon that creature, use it power and then summon more creatures, you nearly eliminated the downside of a very strong ability. The more I play the game, the more I see the brilliance of the turn structure because so many powers and effects when combine could break the game, but doesn't due to summoning is its own step. As for whether drawing should be at the beginning or end of the turn, I do like it at the end of the turn because it give me time to plan my next turn since I can't do much on my opponents turn. That said, there is at least some hand discarding abilities in the game which makes me very worried about it being at the end.
I agree with the other comments about the life as a resource economy seems fairly limiting here, and it's probably causing a lot more problems than it fixes. I think it's just generally not good to have damage also remove the thing you need to... do stuff, indeed a lot of games explicitly try to balance things so the player doing worse gets more powerful, so they can try to make a comeback (though of course still suffering from the fact that they're closer to losing than their opponent). With separate resource systems you can design these things separately - health being tied to your lose/win conditions and affected by other players and hard to replenish, but maybe with extra benefits at low health, while some other resource being renewable and less affected by other players but also mostly only indirectly affecting game state. This also allows for your other resource to be used for ramping up to more powerful late game effects while not also being inherently linked to your win condition. And it allows for players and decks to do a lot of damage to only part of an opponents' resources, which also allows for decks or cards that take advantage of that by leveraging other resources more or defending against that damage specifically. It's a similar kind of strategy and counterplay you get by mana colour systems, but built into a more fundamental concept of the game. For my favoured example of what you can achieve when you put in a bunch of resource systems (if in a very nonstandard game), just look at netrunner, which I could sit here writing about all day (and almost did, you're almost inspiring me to make my own videos about this stuff) which has win/lose condition resources in agenda points and cards in the runner's hand, a mostly fixed resource representing how many actions you can do in a turn in clicks, and a renewable and ramping resource in credits. And like two other important special resources used only by some archetypes of decks - tags are mainly used by a specific corp faction to let them attack your credit pile, while bad publicity is a sort of intentional self sacrifice by another specific corp faction for some short term effect that gives runners hard to remove renewable credits. The combinations between these are endless and gives so much design space to play around in, both for the designers and the players. Indeed, since this is a game with asymmetric roles, each side uses the resources differently, despite them having the same resources, which naturally leads to different strategic considerations for both players, and even more interestingly leads to natural power imbalances in different phases of the game, mainly because the corp's main win condition relies on clicks that are available throughout the entire game but needs some turns to get set up (which is why the corp only has 3 clicks while the runner has 4) while the runner relies more on credits and cards which ramp up in the late game and which you have some of right at the beginning of the game. And of course there's the practically headline feature of the contents and size of your hand and deck and discard pile being sometimes accessible to the other player (especially for the runner who can practically look at the corp's stuff at will if they get past the defences) which turns that information into a resource in of itself that is very well used by the game. Other side stories: Draw at the end of the turn seems perfectly fine for me especially being familiar with board games/standard playing card games, where this is common, because that way you can actually strategise while the other player is doing their turn and save time when it comes to your turn - it's a win win! Heck, even scrabble does this! The play creatures step being after the attack step reminds me a lot of 18XX games (which are not, as the name might imply, super sexy hentai games, but somewhat dry board games about questionably legal stock market manipulation and 1800s train companies, with every single game in the genre using a different year between 1800 and 1899, hence the name) where your companies can only buy new train cards after you use your trains to run routes and gain money. Obviously it's less of a problem there in terms of restrictiveness because the trains are only used to run those routes (separated into confusingly named eras of increasingly better trains, better ones which you can only buy when you've bought out the previous era's trains) with no special effects or spell synergies or whatever.... but they do actually have a second effect, in that the first card bought of some eras will "rust" all the trains on the table of the oldest era remaining (usually about two eras back), rust being a euphemism for completely discarding without compensation. If you've got particularly aggressive opponents, you can enjoy the pains of buying an expensive train that you know is the last of that era, only for the other players to quickly buy out a bunch of more expensive and better trains of the next two eras, thus rusting all your trains including your previously shiny new one, and leaving you with very little money left to your name and a literal legal obligation to buy a much more expensive train out of pocket, lest you bankrupt yourself and instantly end the game. It's a ruthless game.
Energy is an interesting idea, if only because it's very much become a standard that those concepts are best kept separated. It's kind of neat seeing a game designed around that concept, even if it mostly just reinforces why other games don't do it. Netrunner is a fantastic game, and really, really interesting from a design standpoint. I definitely want to do a proper full video on it in the future. Apart from muscle memory, I think the biggest issue I had with drawing at end of turn is that you have to pay a lot of attention to what your opponent is doing on their turn, so there's not really any spare time to strategize. So you're not really gaining anything, and you're also making the start of your next turn less exciting. And yeah - I haven't played it, but 18XX does sound ruthless. Also interesting! Another game to add to my pile of 'want to play someday.'
@@tcgacademia True enough about trying, I can't really fault it for that. In many ways what Netrunner did was somewhat similar - it looked at some existing concepts that people took for granted, like symmetric roles and your hand/deck/discard being mostly hidden, and then saw what happened if you poked around with that. At least, that's my guess, I don't know what goes on in Richard Garfield's head. I think it's fair to say it's often a good idea to think about your assumptions, in games as in real life, even if a lot of the time they come out to "so that's why we do it that way!" You make a good point with drawing at the end of a turn... The considerations are probably different for most ccgs because there isn't comparatively much downtime between turns compared to many board games which have 3 or more other players whose turns you have to wait through, and less complicated card interactions directly against other players. 18XX is really an entire genre of games that are all sort of based around the general baseline of the original 1829 and 1830 - these aren't standard games and it isn't a mega franchise of games (though the creators/publishers of the original games certainly made other 18xx games), these couple of games are just really well designed and inspired an entire niche community making their own varieties of the game with their own systems. If it wasn't for 18xx(dot)games (youtube doesn't like urls) making nearly all of them playable online with a very nice interface, it'd be impossible to play like half of them without a lot of pnp work. The system/rules themselves are famously hard to understand when you first start playing (I think it's actually fairly intuitive after that initial hump), but the thing that always fascinated me with the games is that, despite the complexity, they're so... elegant. Unlike with card games or most other games, the vast majority of 18XX games have absolutely no randomisation at all, no hidden information, very few card or player specific effects, and there's no simultaneous turn resolution like in diplomacy making every turn a massive mind game and political slugging match (and friendship destroyer). And yet it still feels like a very "fuzzy" game, where you're strategising based mainly on feelings and probabilities and positions of different players rather than planning out multiple turns in advance, because just the range of things that the other players could decide to do and how they interfere can bring in a similar level of chaos as you get when you don't know exactly what cards an opponent has or what you're going to draw next turn. And that's only possible because pretty much all the various aspects of the system aren't just balanced but complement each other in many different ways. For an example: The situation I mentioned in the original comment is most common with the so called "Poison 4T" in a couple of 18xx games, ie the last train of the 4 Era. Not buying that train might punt the problem a couple of companies later, at which point people will have the funds to buy both the last 4T and the first 5T at the same time so no one has to worry so much about rusting. Or perhaps you think you can buy it and get away with it because the other players won't buy enough trains to rust your train (either because they're spending money on other stuff and/or are at train limit for that company), and having an extra train now will let you get more of an edge next turn. Or perhaps something else - say for example, this specific company has some shares owned by another player, and you happen to go before that player in the next stock round, after buying the train you can sell all your shares in order to get a bunch of money for yourself, decrease the value of the other player's shares, and force them to handle the fallout from a possible near future rusting of their 4T, which you might be able to do a whole lot more quickly if you can use that money to invest a new company. Though you probably want to check if you really want to give them that territory for them to play around with, they probably wouldn't have bought the shares if they didn't think they could handle such a stock dump. There's a lot of depth here! And ruthlessness, especially with 1830, some of the other ones are a bit mellower.
amazing analysis, as someone that just know about the game, the pacing is really not an obvious issue at first glance. The unorthodox turn structure, the attrition type flow, and the magi-and starting hand giving me vibes of the game is really aimed for people that already familiar with tcg/tabletop stuff which can intimidate wider group of people. But as I notice some cool aspect like starting cards, and the resource system, as well as dynamic creature strength, it's such a nice time capsule to get inspiration/references from.
That's something I really like about looking back at this tcg - it tried a lot of things and not all of them worked perfectly, but there's a ton of interesting ideas that can be really inspiring.
Elestrals is a more recent game (Made by aDrive) that utilizes some sort of life as resource mechanic, this time though it’s a separate deck of individual cards that represent that resource. Perhaps it’s worth reviewing?
Understanding now how MagiNation works, to me it feels like a predecessor to Battle Spirits. They have an emergy system of cores(the blue crystals) that you can feely move around your cards similarly to this energy, and you had to keep some energy on your monsters to keep them alive. I doubt it's intentional, but it does feel like a more properly realised system of this freely transefable resource, improving on MagiNation in every way
It feels like a lot of counter systems start with it as a way to track persistent HP - and it still feels like magi-nation is rooted there, despite evolving a fair bit. Battle Spirits feels much more like it focused on counters as resources from the start, which is why I think it works so well.
I'm sorry but... that visual design is just awful. It's so amateur early 2000's flash game made by one dude feeling. Magic wasn't incredible in it's visual design, but things were readable and clear.
I see Magi Nation as two eurogame engines competing to be able to generate more energy than the other, while being able to disrupt pieces of the other. Mages with high initial energy and low energize rate are better at rush, mages with high energize rates are better at control. Combat erodes both players equally (1 energy for 1 energy), unless combat abilities say otherwise. While this could be said of any CCG, in MN is very easy to spot, as you are seeing the numbers of your engine in the shape of energy amounts. Most creature abilities offer you a +1 energy advantage on each trigger, you just have to trigger them as much as possible to keep your engine growing. Eventually one deck will overwhelm the other and force the next magi to appear. The trick is that the perfect engine can usually be tailored to work for only one mage. For example, if you have a mage that grants a bonus for all your Hyrens, in any other game you would want to include as many Hyrens as possible, but in MN, you can't include too many because they might not sinergize with your other 2 Magi. Arranging a deck that can work well with all your 3 magi gets challenging.
Yeah - the deck building is a really interesting aspect of the game that I keep coming back to. It's a really interesting puzzle to get everything together to work with all 3 of your Magi. Energy exchange is also a neat aspect to build around. It really feels like I should like this game more than I do.
Great video. Have never played this game before, but it certainly has a unique flair. Some things are especially interesting to me, like the attacking before playing creatures or the art style. On the intangible aspect: Maybe you mean depth? It seems that there are a LOT of deck building options in this game which for me correlates with depth. Since you have 3 leaders essentially, you can have the same deck play vastly different depending on your leader order (effect-based interaction). At least to me this feels like it. On the tapping creatures aspect: Kohdok has mentioned it in a video, but cards that track themselves are really preferrable in my opinion (by flipping/turning/moving to location), because it lowers the mental load when playing. Since creatures in DuelMasters-alikes only attack once per turn, tapping is a great way to show that they have already attacked. In YUGIOH creatures can also attack once per turn (I think?), but that doesn't show, so when a creature attacks and then a long chain of card effects plays off, you might forget that that creature already attacked and by accident break the rules. I think that this is not a good design approach. Here, I would maybe introduce a new field, like Attack Zone or so. All in all, I find the game really interesting, but more in "I want to study its design approaches" rather than in a "I really want to play it with my friends" kind of way.
Depth is a good way to put it. And yeah, I think the 'no tapping' thing is more a relic of an era when people were still cautious about WotC's patent on 'tapping'. It's an interesting design note, but yeah, turning things sideways is a standard for a good reason.
Magi-Nation is the only card game I got into that I never drop due to lack of interest from me and is still the only one I'm willing to throw money at. I never did play it as much as I wanted since I was the only person in my friend group to invest in it, except for one friend whom buy into the game the same time as me, but gave up on it. Still I have a complete main set and a handful of cards from the expansions as I never really saw any of the expansions at my local store. As a big fan I will try to restrain my urge to rage defend my favorite game. I'm not sure why you have pacing problems with the game. Games does take a little longer than Magic at the time (the only other card game I have a lot of experience with) but isn't THAT much longer and I've played Magic games that last longer than most of my Magi-Nation games. I will admit having to update the energy levels on the cards does slow the game down. However there is no instant like cards in the main set and I don't think they added many in the expansions. That means your opponent mostly can't do anything on your turn. For me, not having to worry about my opponent interrupting me nor me pausing after every action to give my opponent a chance to react immensely speeds up the game, compared to anyone playing blue in Magic. Plus drawing cards at the end helps with planning my next turn which again speeds up play. I have never consider energy to equal life. You're not wrong but I think it definitely colors how people see the game. While mechanically the same, saying you gain mana every turn but if you run out of mana you are defeated and you regenative hps every turn but you have to spend life to activate abilities FEEL vastly different.
I'm curious what a more tuned deck would look like. As I mentioned in the video, it's definitely possible that a lot of the issues I had with the game go away once you start using more tuned decks - for example, with more removal. I'm a big fan of no instants, for exactly the reason you said. I'm less sold on the benefits of drawing at EOT, since generally you know what your own cards do, it's trying to line them up against what the opponent is doing that takes more effort, and you can't really start doing that until the opponent passes their turn anyway. I put this in another comment, but calling it 'energy' is a great move for the game - even as a kid, I never had any issues moving it off my Magi to play things. There's absolutely no issues there, feeling-wise. I do think it's awkward in other ways, mechanically - such as the tension between wanting to build resources, but remove life over time.
Now I have the music from the GBC game stuck in my head. What a cool game that was probably super poorly balanced-I somehow never beat it in spite of spending hundreds of hours on the game.
I only ever played this game with starter decks and the cards I got from the literal handful of boosters I came across. After the third set starters I never saw this game on shelves again and assumed it died. I played a few games with friends and still have my cards (though they're scattered because I'm using them as backing printed cards) but never got into the weeds. Also apparently I played it wrong and thought that magi order was random. I should really go through the old booklets and see if I can figure out why I thought that. I agree that the style comes together and works here. I can see how the systems of life=mana=power is awkward and maybe even bad but with no real experience... I d'know. Underneath was the coolest, and I wish I had played when there were desert people and cactus friends.
I actually had to double check to make sure I got magi order right in the video! You do set the order, but there is a section right after it talks about selecting your magi where it tells you to shuffle your main deck - the flow of the rules there is a bit weird, so it seems like a pretty reasonable mistake. And yeah, I also loved the aesthetic of the Underneath - they were definitely my favourite.
The problem with this game seems to be the lack of interaction between player turns magic as a slow pace but in return it has a lot of options for player interactions between turns
It does have a small number of cards with 'instant-speed' timing, but not many, which can make watching the opponent do their thing on their turn a bit boring. Although Duel Masters manages just fine without instant speed effects, so I'm not sure that's the biggest culprit here.
Happy to see this obscure game getting more attention from you. Also, another video idea I had was about Putting too many eggs into one basket, Or in other words, putting too many flavor ideas into a single set, I think this is one of the more overlooked reasons why gate ruler failed. One of its first sets combines like 3 flavor profiles when they could've just had 1 deck for each. If you really want a deck with all 3 flavors, you know you can just combine them right?
I've got a few more obscure games I want to pull out at some point (my 100K celebration is 100% going to be the Austin Powers TCG). I think it can be really good having a wide range of flavours to draw from, but I think it's also really important to make sure they all feel connected. Magi nation actually does this well, I feel - the small artist pool helps, and you can see different varieties of the same creature pop up in different regions. Gate Ruler felt all over the place, but I didn't really get much of a sense of connection between all the pieces. Magic proved that TCGs can be really good tools for world-building, but a lot of modern tcgs are designed by tcg players, and it feels like there's a focus on mechanics first and foremost. If you have another tie-in, like an anime series or pre-existing property, you can skimp a bit (Vanguard and Yugioh also have a 'throw everything at the wall' aesthetic), but for original games, I think world building is really important. I wasn't quite sure if I'd have enough to say to fill a video on discussing flavour in card games, but now that I've basically fired off an entire paragraph about it, that may actually be a really good video topic. Thanks for another great suggestion!
Jyhad used life as the main resource. And that’s from the mid-90s. Richard Garfield, Wizards Of The Coast, White Wolf. Eventually those mechanics became the Conspiracy sets in Magic while the Jyhad game itself was taken over by White Wolf and rebranded as Vampire: The Eternal Struggle.
Yeah, there's surprisingly a lot of different leader cards, so I'm not shocked to hear that some of them ended up much stronger than the others. I've also heard issues with balancing the Core faction.
I've heard good things about Chaotic! It's been on my radar for a while, although I also have a ton of other games already on my list. It is the kind of game I really like diving into for this channel, though, so I'm 100% sure I'll get to it eventually!
I think the drawing at the end of turn needing to be gotten used to comes specifically from TCG experience - most non TCGs I play with card drawing have you draw at the end of your turn (the benefits of this are basically that it allows you to plan what you're going to do on your turn while the other players are taking their turn, unless something extremely surprising happens, thus speeding up gameplay) On paper I like the idea of having life and resources be the same pool due to the tension that should create in play, but as you say that does mean that the game is caught between two needs of the resource - Keep giving it to players because that's how they play the game vs having it drain over time because that progresses the game towards a conclusion.
I definitely agree there are reasons to put the draw at the end of turn. While part of the awkwardness is definitely just from playing a ton of other TCGs that draw at start of turn, I also think the idea of 'planning your next turn' works as well as it theoretically should. Part of that is that you're spending most of your opponent's turn paying attention to what they're doing, rather than trying to plan your own turn - after all, your own turn could change quite a bit depending on what the opponent plays. Getting a random gacha from your deck is also just exciting, but having to let your opponent do their stuff before you can use that gacha card tickles the lizard brain a little less.
I got the GBA game with the strategy guide when I was younger and was obsessed with it. I used to turn my booster pack wrappers in for animite to get webstore goodies. Shit went hard. Still waiting for the spiritual successor.
Yeah, I remember collecting animite! I didn't have a computer that connected to the internet at the time, so I never got to trade them in for anything, but it was still fun.
Yeah, that's kinda the issue with systems where Life is the primary/only resource. It just means that games end prematurely and players that are behind fall even further behind due to having even fewer resources to work with. It's an all-around bad time. The constant life gain is a band-aid fix at best. As you mentioned, there's no resource ramp in the game because giving players more and more life each turn would cause the game to degenerate and never end, which makes it a non-option. Imagine how much cleaner this game would/could be if the leaders just had independent life values, or even if they just like got sunk as soon as they took a single direct attack.
I found Keyforge to be a really interesting comparison, because combat works somewhat similarly - so this attritional style of combat where persistent damage is dealt to both attacker and defender isn't a problem in and of itself. It shows why it's a good idea to decouple life and resources - they're game mechanics that are fundamentally trying to accomplish different things. It would be interesting if they split them in Magi Nation, but even then, Luck and Logic has me somewhat wary of any game system that ties creatures too closely to its life system. It would be interesting to have a game where you had slightly more Magi, and treated them more like a variation of a shield system, though. Do you commit to an attack to try and force through damage, or do you leave your opponent on a leader with an effect you're not overly worried about so you can build your board? An interesting idea, at least!
Saying once you behind, you keep falling further behind is just wrong in most cases. What they failed to mention is that once your Magi is defeated, you reveal your next Magi at the beginning of your turn. You are completely invincible until you can act again. Getting a new Magi with full energy and get to energize is a huge powerboost. That's why you want to be careful of when you defeat a magi because if you use too many resources defeating them, you are leaving yourself open to have your own magi defeat on your opponent next turn. That also why sometimes it is better to off yourself when your opponent has control of the field, but won't finish you because they are not really for your next magi. And no, I don't think the game would be cleaner if the magi had independent life value. It would make the game needlessly more complicated requiring players to keep track of 2 different constantly change resources on the same character and fundementally change the nature of the game from "better manipulating your energy than your opponent, which includes knowing when to hold energy on your magi and when to pour all of it into your creatures" to "snipe the enemy mage". Having Magi get defeated after taking a single attack is an even worst idea. You have to remove all abilities that allow creatures to ignore defenders and attack Magi directly as that would be autowins. It is just unneeded cause in most cases, magi are on the verge of defeat if the enemy can attack them directly.
Pretty unlikely - I'm generally restricting myself to physical tcgs, and even then, there's so many out there that I don't think I'll ever get around to playing them all!
You’re trading being mana starved or flooded for trying to maximize energy efficiency. Which I think allows you to get to your playable cards faster as well as more dynamic use of energy on the field. It does lead to long games at times though like you said. Good intro video and analysis. There’s still an active discord community.
This seems like a very interesting game to analyze, and your video really explains everything very well. Here's some thoughts: 1) I'm normally skeptical of life resource systems, but I never expected one to heal you every turn by default. I guess this makes it feel less bad to spend your "life", but, yes, the game is pushing to two directions. 2) The overabundance of die needed here seem like a problem. I wonder if a game like this could work with smaller numbers and cards representing the stats. It probably would be one of those "shuffle back your graveyard when your deck is empty" kind of games. 3) I really like the combat. I find that Hearthstone-like combat puts a lot of emphasis on "trading up". That is, if you have two 3/3s and they have a 6/6, it's too dangerous to keep theirs alive, because as soon as you miss lethal damage on it (because you ignored it earlier) you'll be behind in damage extremely fast. Here, you can shrink a card, giving you value in the race even if you don't completely remove it. 4) Having essentially three leaders that come out one after one is really cool, but it really needed to be in a game that doesn't heal you. At the very least, it would fit excellent in a TCG based on King of Fighters. :)
Thanks! 1) Calling it 'energy' is actually quite clever - I never really felt a temptation to keep it on my Magi, so that part of the system actually works well. Definitely a risk with a system like this, though! 2) Feels like a Fantasy Flight game with all the dice - it does get pretty excessive. Although sometimes pushing dice around can be its own kind of fun. 3) Yeah, the combat is surprisingly really good. It was kind of an interesting experience replaying the game and going 'wait, isn't this what Keyforge ended up doing?' 4) The three leaders is a really interesting mechanic, but yeah, for this game specifically it honestly feels like 1 may have been better.
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god i adore the art and aesthetic of magi nation...
WOAAAAAHHH MAGINATION TALK???
The one game that got me into card games
I've wanted to revisit the game for a while! When I saw it had a kickstarter that was nearly wrapped up, I figured this was about the best time possible to pull out my old cards.
The health as rescourse mechanic is a very neat idea, though I'd go with a planeswalker like design for the avatar. It creates more interesting decisions.
Magi generally have just 1 ability. Making it closer to a planeswalker would definitely work, but one thing I'm learning from playing around with the wizard hacking game we came up with on stream is that if your using a planeswalker as a resource system, ultimates are really bad design because they just eat all your resources - so either you're just using the ultimate and not playing other cards, or playing other cards and generally ignoring the ultimate. Having multiple options to tick up can be really nice, but it's also nice to just keep it to one ability and just focus on that - it's generally easier to balance and easier to build a deck around.
@@tcgacademia ultimates are an invention of spectacle rather then substance. It's not necessary for a walker to have one despite mtg walkers mostly have them. Why do you think they are necessary for walkers?
@@admiralcasperr Definitely not necessary, but the standard MTG formula for walkers is plus, minus, ult. I think the only one that really works on a leader-type card is plus, especially if you're tying it to your resource mechanic. This is just based on my own attempts to make walker-style leaders work, but it was more limiting than I expected. I think it can still work, though!
I've never played Magination, but honestly, for a pre-yugioh and -pokemon tcg this game seems well ahead of the curve in terms of how it designed its card effects. Yugioh especially (but also Pokemon) was pretty tedious too for a long while before it startet to develop design thresholds and cards that actually fit the turn structure better, and along the way they iterated on the core rules of the game too, sometimes even major things like first turn draw and initiative on summon (besides faciliatating new summoning mechanics each season). If I played yugioh today, but with the cards at release without knowing what the game ended up becoming over the years, I'd call it a bad game too. I feel like, if you streamlined the turn structure such that you combined the summoning phase with the second PRS phase, made turn draw at the start of a turn, and maybe even adjusted other things based on playtesting, you'd actually have a competent card game which is impressive for a game that old. I definitely agree with you on your attrition point, it's definitely the one aspect that would require the deepest systematic change to address.
Yeah, I was kind of struggling how to express it in the video, but the effects are well designed and well templated. I haven't played a ton of games from this era (although there are a ton), so I'm not sure if this was an exception or fairly common, but Magic had a huge lead on Yugioh and Pokemon in design, templating, and overall game balance, and Magi-nation was definitely closer to Magic on that scale.
As a fanboy, streamlining the game like you say would ruin the game. Combining the summoning phase with the PRS phase is opening the door for infinite combos and effects being much more powerful than intended. For example, a creature with a power to damage every creature on the field is both strong and has a big downside of hitting yourself. But if you could summon that creature, use it power and then summon more creatures, you nearly eliminated the downside of a very strong ability. The more I play the game, the more I see the brilliance of the turn structure because so many powers and effects when combine could break the game, but doesn't due to summoning is its own step.
As for whether drawing should be at the beginning or end of the turn, I do like it at the end of the turn because it give me time to plan my next turn since I can't do much on my opponents turn. That said, there is at least some hand discarding abilities in the game which makes me very worried about it being at the end.
I agree with the other comments about the life as a resource economy seems fairly limiting here, and it's probably causing a lot more problems than it fixes. I think it's just generally not good to have damage also remove the thing you need to... do stuff, indeed a lot of games explicitly try to balance things so the player doing worse gets more powerful, so they can try to make a comeback (though of course still suffering from the fact that they're closer to losing than their opponent). With separate resource systems you can design these things separately - health being tied to your lose/win conditions and affected by other players and hard to replenish, but maybe with extra benefits at low health, while some other resource being renewable and less affected by other players but also mostly only indirectly affecting game state. This also allows for your other resource to be used for ramping up to more powerful late game effects while not also being inherently linked to your win condition. And it allows for players and decks to do a lot of damage to only part of an opponents' resources, which also allows for decks or cards that take advantage of that by leveraging other resources more or defending against that damage specifically. It's a similar kind of strategy and counterplay you get by mana colour systems, but built into a more fundamental concept of the game.
For my favoured example of what you can achieve when you put in a bunch of resource systems (if in a very nonstandard game), just look at netrunner, which I could sit here writing about all day (and almost did, you're almost inspiring me to make my own videos about this stuff) which has win/lose condition resources in agenda points and cards in the runner's hand, a mostly fixed resource representing how many actions you can do in a turn in clicks, and a renewable and ramping resource in credits. And like two other important special resources used only by some archetypes of decks - tags are mainly used by a specific corp faction to let them attack your credit pile, while bad publicity is a sort of intentional self sacrifice by another specific corp faction for some short term effect that gives runners hard to remove renewable credits. The combinations between these are endless and gives so much design space to play around in, both for the designers and the players. Indeed, since this is a game with asymmetric roles, each side uses the resources differently, despite them having the same resources, which naturally leads to different strategic considerations for both players, and even more interestingly leads to natural power imbalances in different phases of the game, mainly because the corp's main win condition relies on clicks that are available throughout the entire game but needs some turns to get set up (which is why the corp only has 3 clicks while the runner has 4) while the runner relies more on credits and cards which ramp up in the late game and which you have some of right at the beginning of the game. And of course there's the practically headline feature of the contents and size of your hand and deck and discard pile being sometimes accessible to the other player (especially for the runner who can practically look at the corp's stuff at will if they get past the defences) which turns that information into a resource in of itself that is very well used by the game.
Other side stories:
Draw at the end of the turn seems perfectly fine for me especially being familiar with board games/standard playing card games, where this is common, because that way you can actually strategise while the other player is doing their turn and save time when it comes to your turn - it's a win win! Heck, even scrabble does this!
The play creatures step being after the attack step reminds me a lot of 18XX games (which are not, as the name might imply, super sexy hentai games, but somewhat dry board games about questionably legal stock market manipulation and 1800s train companies, with every single game in the genre using a different year between 1800 and 1899, hence the name) where your companies can only buy new train cards after you use your trains to run routes and gain money.
Obviously it's less of a problem there in terms of restrictiveness because the trains are only used to run those routes (separated into confusingly named eras of increasingly better trains, better ones which you can only buy when you've bought out the previous era's trains) with no special effects or spell synergies or whatever.... but they do actually have a second effect, in that the first card bought of some eras will "rust" all the trains on the table of the oldest era remaining (usually about two eras back), rust being a euphemism for completely discarding without compensation. If you've got particularly aggressive opponents, you can enjoy the pains of buying an expensive train that you know is the last of that era, only for the other players to quickly buy out a bunch of more expensive and better trains of the next two eras, thus rusting all your trains including your previously shiny new one, and leaving you with very little money left to your name and a literal legal obligation to buy a much more expensive train out of pocket, lest you bankrupt yourself and instantly end the game. It's a ruthless game.
Energy is an interesting idea, if only because it's very much become a standard that those concepts are best kept separated. It's kind of neat seeing a game designed around that concept, even if it mostly just reinforces why other games don't do it.
Netrunner is a fantastic game, and really, really interesting from a design standpoint. I definitely want to do a proper full video on it in the future.
Apart from muscle memory, I think the biggest issue I had with drawing at end of turn is that you have to pay a lot of attention to what your opponent is doing on their turn, so there's not really any spare time to strategize. So you're not really gaining anything, and you're also making the start of your next turn less exciting.
And yeah - I haven't played it, but 18XX does sound ruthless. Also interesting! Another game to add to my pile of 'want to play someday.'
@@tcgacademia True enough about trying, I can't really fault it for that. In many ways what Netrunner did was somewhat similar - it looked at some existing concepts that people took for granted, like symmetric roles and your hand/deck/discard being mostly hidden, and then saw what happened if you poked around with that. At least, that's my guess, I don't know what goes on in Richard Garfield's head. I think it's fair to say it's often a good idea to think about your assumptions, in games as in real life, even if a lot of the time they come out to "so that's why we do it that way!"
You make a good point with drawing at the end of a turn... The considerations are probably different for most ccgs because there isn't comparatively much downtime between turns compared to many board games which have 3 or more other players whose turns you have to wait through, and less complicated card interactions directly against other players.
18XX is really an entire genre of games that are all sort of based around the general baseline of the original 1829 and 1830 - these aren't standard games and it isn't a mega franchise of games (though the creators/publishers of the original games certainly made other 18xx games), these couple of games are just really well designed and inspired an entire niche community making their own varieties of the game with their own systems. If it wasn't for 18xx(dot)games (youtube doesn't like urls) making nearly all of them playable online with a very nice interface, it'd be impossible to play like half of them without a lot of pnp work.
The system/rules themselves are famously hard to understand when you first start playing (I think it's actually fairly intuitive after that initial hump), but the thing that always fascinated me with the games is that, despite the complexity, they're so... elegant. Unlike with card games or most other games, the vast majority of 18XX games have absolutely no randomisation at all, no hidden information, very few card or player specific effects, and there's no simultaneous turn resolution like in diplomacy making every turn a massive mind game and political slugging match (and friendship destroyer). And yet it still feels like a very "fuzzy" game, where you're strategising based mainly on feelings and probabilities and positions of different players rather than planning out multiple turns in advance, because just the range of things that the other players could decide to do and how they interfere can bring in a similar level of chaos as you get when you don't know exactly what cards an opponent has or what you're going to draw next turn. And that's only possible because pretty much all the various aspects of the system aren't just balanced but complement each other in many different ways.
For an example: The situation I mentioned in the original comment is most common with the so called "Poison 4T" in a couple of 18xx games, ie the last train of the 4 Era. Not buying that train might punt the problem a couple of companies later, at which point people will have the funds to buy both the last 4T and the first 5T at the same time so no one has to worry so much about rusting. Or perhaps you think you can buy it and get away with it because the other players won't buy enough trains to rust your train (either because they're spending money on other stuff and/or are at train limit for that company), and having an extra train now will let you get more of an edge next turn. Or perhaps something else - say for example, this specific company has some shares owned by another player, and you happen to go before that player in the next stock round, after buying the train you can sell all your shares in order to get a bunch of money for yourself, decrease the value of the other player's shares, and force them to handle the fallout from a possible near future rusting of their 4T, which you might be able to do a whole lot more quickly if you can use that money to invest a new company. Though you probably want to check if you really want to give them that territory for them to play around with, they probably wouldn't have bought the shares if they didn't think they could handle such a stock dump. There's a lot of depth here! And ruthlessness, especially with 1830, some of the other ones are a bit mellower.
amazing analysis, as someone that just know about the game, the pacing is really not an obvious issue at first glance. The unorthodox turn structure, the attrition type flow, and the magi-and starting hand giving me vibes of the game is really aimed for people that already familiar with tcg/tabletop stuff which can intimidate wider group of people. But as I notice some cool aspect like starting cards, and the resource system, as well as dynamic creature strength, it's such a nice time capsule to get inspiration/references from.
That's something I really like about looking back at this tcg - it tried a lot of things and not all of them worked perfectly, but there's a ton of interesting ideas that can be really inspiring.
This guy doin the spike point all over the place
Elestrals is a more recent game (Made by aDrive) that utilizes some sort of life as resource mechanic, this time though it’s a separate deck of individual cards that represent that resource. Perhaps it’s worth reviewing?
Another one to keep an eye on - although at this point the list of tcgs I want to try and review is already really long.
@@tcgacademia I bet it is. So many old tcgs alone to go through, let alone new ones coming out
Understanding now how MagiNation works, to me it feels like a predecessor to Battle Spirits. They have an emergy system of cores(the blue crystals) that you can feely move around your cards similarly to this energy, and you had to keep some energy on your monsters to keep them alive. I doubt it's intentional, but it does feel like a more properly realised system of this freely transefable resource, improving on MagiNation in every way
It feels like a lot of counter systems start with it as a way to track persistent HP - and it still feels like magi-nation is rooted there, despite evolving a fair bit. Battle Spirits feels much more like it focused on counters as resources from the start, which is why I think it works so well.
I followed your channel anticipating a video on this, thanks!
I'm sorry but... that visual design is just awful. It's so amateur early 2000's flash game made by one dude feeling. Magic wasn't incredible in it's visual design, but things were readable and clear.
Knowing what a "Weebo" is before a "Weeaboo" made more than one faux pas.
I see Magi Nation as two eurogame engines competing to be able to generate more energy than the other, while being able to disrupt pieces of the other. Mages with high initial energy and low energize rate are better at rush, mages with high energize rates are better at control. Combat erodes both players equally (1 energy for 1 energy), unless combat abilities say otherwise.
While this could be said of any CCG, in MN is very easy to spot, as you are seeing the numbers of your engine in the shape of energy amounts. Most creature abilities offer you a +1 energy advantage on each trigger, you just have to trigger them as much as possible to keep your engine growing.
Eventually one deck will overwhelm the other and force the next magi to appear. The trick is that the perfect engine can usually be tailored to work for only one mage. For example, if you have a mage that grants a bonus for all your Hyrens, in any other game you would want to include as many Hyrens as possible, but in MN, you can't include too many because they might not sinergize with your other 2 Magi. Arranging a deck that can work well with all your 3 magi gets challenging.
Yeah - the deck building is a really interesting aspect of the game that I keep coming back to. It's a really interesting puzzle to get everything together to work with all 3 of your Magi. Energy exchange is also a neat aspect to build around. It really feels like I should like this game more than I do.
Make a video about print and play Tcgs
Great video. Have never played this game before, but it certainly has a unique flair.
Some things are especially interesting to me, like the attacking before playing creatures or the art style.
On the intangible aspect: Maybe you mean depth?
It seems that there are a LOT of deck building options in this game which for me correlates with depth.
Since you have 3 leaders essentially, you can have the same deck play vastly different depending on your leader order (effect-based interaction). At least to me this feels like it.
On the tapping creatures aspect: Kohdok has mentioned it in a video, but cards that track themselves are really preferrable in my opinion (by flipping/turning/moving to location), because it lowers the mental load when playing.
Since creatures in DuelMasters-alikes only attack once per turn, tapping is a great way to show that they have already attacked.
In YUGIOH creatures can also attack once per turn (I think?), but that doesn't show, so when a creature attacks and then a long chain of card effects plays off, you might forget that that creature already attacked and by accident break the rules. I think that this is not a good design approach. Here, I would maybe introduce a new field, like Attack Zone or so.
All in all, I find the game really interesting, but more in "I want to study its design approaches" rather than in a "I really want to play it with my friends" kind of way.
Depth is a good way to put it. And yeah, I think the 'no tapping' thing is more a relic of an era when people were still cautious about WotC's patent on 'tapping'. It's an interesting design note, but yeah, turning things sideways is a standard for a good reason.
Magi-Nation is the only card game I got into that I never drop due to lack of interest from me and is still the only one I'm willing to throw money at. I never did play it as much as I wanted since I was the only person in my friend group to invest in it, except for one friend whom buy into the game the same time as me, but gave up on it. Still I have a complete main set and a handful of cards from the expansions as I never really saw any of the expansions at my local store. As a big fan I will try to restrain my urge to rage defend my favorite game.
I'm not sure why you have pacing problems with the game. Games does take a little longer than Magic at the time (the only other card game I have a lot of experience with) but isn't THAT much longer and I've played Magic games that last longer than most of my Magi-Nation games. I will admit having to update the energy levels on the cards does slow the game down. However there is no instant like cards in the main set and I don't think they added many in the expansions. That means your opponent mostly can't do anything on your turn. For me, not having to worry about my opponent interrupting me nor me pausing after every action to give my opponent a chance to react immensely speeds up the game, compared to anyone playing blue in Magic. Plus drawing cards at the end helps with planning my next turn which again speeds up play.
I have never consider energy to equal life. You're not wrong but I think it definitely colors how people see the game. While mechanically the same, saying you gain mana every turn but if you run out of mana you are defeated and you regenative hps every turn but you have to spend life to activate abilities FEEL vastly different.
I'm curious what a more tuned deck would look like. As I mentioned in the video, it's definitely possible that a lot of the issues I had with the game go away once you start using more tuned decks - for example, with more removal. I'm a big fan of no instants, for exactly the reason you said. I'm less sold on the benefits of drawing at EOT, since generally you know what your own cards do, it's trying to line them up against what the opponent is doing that takes more effort, and you can't really start doing that until the opponent passes their turn anyway.
I put this in another comment, but calling it 'energy' is a great move for the game - even as a kid, I never had any issues moving it off my Magi to play things. There's absolutely no issues there, feeling-wise. I do think it's awkward in other ways, mechanically - such as the tension between wanting to build resources, but remove life over time.
Now I have the music from the GBC game stuck in my head.
What a cool game that was probably super poorly balanced-I somehow never beat it in spite of spending hundreds of hours on the game.
I never played the GBC game, but the main reason I got into the TCG ages ago was because of a friend who did play the GBC game and really liked it.
I only ever played this game with starter decks and the cards I got from the literal handful of boosters I came across. After the third set starters I never saw this game on shelves again and assumed it died. I played a few games with friends and still have my cards (though they're scattered because I'm using them as backing printed cards) but never got into the weeds. Also apparently I played it wrong and thought that magi order was random. I should really go through the old booklets and see if I can figure out why I thought that.
I agree that the style comes together and works here. I can see how the systems of life=mana=power is awkward and maybe even bad but with no real experience... I d'know. Underneath was the coolest, and I wish I had played when there were desert people and cactus friends.
I actually had to double check to make sure I got magi order right in the video! You do set the order, but there is a section right after it talks about selecting your magi where it tells you to shuffle your main deck - the flow of the rules there is a bit weird, so it seems like a pretty reasonable mistake. And yeah, I also loved the aesthetic of the Underneath - they were definitely my favourite.
The problem with this game seems to be the lack of interaction between player turns magic as a slow pace but in return it has a lot of options for player interactions between turns
It does have a small number of cards with 'instant-speed' timing, but not many, which can make watching the opponent do their thing on their turn a bit boring. Although Duel Masters manages just fine without instant speed effects, so I'm not sure that's the biggest culprit here.
Happy to see this obscure game getting more attention from you.
Also, another video idea I had was about Putting too many eggs into one basket, Or in other words, putting too many flavor ideas into a single set, I think this is one of the more overlooked reasons why gate ruler failed. One of its first sets combines like 3 flavor profiles when they could've just had 1 deck for each. If you really want a deck with all 3 flavors, you know you can just combine them right?
I've got a few more obscure games I want to pull out at some point (my 100K celebration is 100% going to be the Austin Powers TCG). I think it can be really good having a wide range of flavours to draw from, but I think it's also really important to make sure they all feel connected. Magi nation actually does this well, I feel - the small artist pool helps, and you can see different varieties of the same creature pop up in different regions. Gate Ruler felt all over the place, but I didn't really get much of a sense of connection between all the pieces. Magic proved that TCGs can be really good tools for world-building, but a lot of modern tcgs are designed by tcg players, and it feels like there's a focus on mechanics first and foremost. If you have another tie-in, like an anime series or pre-existing property, you can skimp a bit (Vanguard and Yugioh also have a 'throw everything at the wall' aesthetic), but for original games, I think world building is really important. I wasn't quite sure if I'd have enough to say to fill a video on discussing flavour in card games, but now that I've basically fired off an entire paragraph about it, that may actually be a really good video topic. Thanks for another great suggestion!
Jyhad used life as the main resource. And that’s from the mid-90s. Richard Garfield, Wizards Of The Coast, White Wolf. Eventually those mechanics became the Conspiracy sets in Magic while the Jyhad game itself was taken over by White Wolf and rebranded as Vampire: The Eternal Struggle.
YEAH WOO MAGI NATION LETS GO...
I almost forgot about this game.
Could you check out Grand archive TCG 🙂
It's on my list! Although the list is admittedly quite long at this point.
I remember one of the red leader being broken.
Yeah, there's surprisingly a lot of different leader cards, so I'm not shocked to hear that some of them ended up much stronger than the others. I've also heard issues with balancing the Core faction.
I recently discovered a mildly obscure 2000s game called Chaotic. If you ever want another game spotlight type video, I'd personally live it.
I've heard good things about Chaotic! It's been on my radar for a while, although I also have a ton of other games already on my list. It is the kind of game I really like diving into for this channel, though, so I'm 100% sure I'll get to it eventually!
I think the drawing at the end of turn needing to be gotten used to comes specifically from TCG experience - most non TCGs I play with card drawing have you draw at the end of your turn (the benefits of this are basically that it allows you to plan what you're going to do on your turn while the other players are taking their turn, unless something extremely surprising happens, thus speeding up gameplay)
On paper I like the idea of having life and resources be the same pool due to the tension that should create in play, but as you say that does mean that the game is caught between two needs of the resource - Keep giving it to players because that's how they play the game vs having it drain over time because that progresses the game towards a conclusion.
I definitely agree there are reasons to put the draw at the end of turn. While part of the awkwardness is definitely just from playing a ton of other TCGs that draw at start of turn, I also think the idea of 'planning your next turn' works as well as it theoretically should. Part of that is that you're spending most of your opponent's turn paying attention to what they're doing, rather than trying to plan your own turn - after all, your own turn could change quite a bit depending on what the opponent plays. Getting a random gacha from your deck is also just exciting, but having to let your opponent do their stuff before you can use that gacha card tickles the lizard brain a little less.
I got the GBA game with the strategy guide when I was younger and was obsessed with it. I used to turn my booster pack wrappers in for animite to get webstore goodies. Shit went hard. Still waiting for the spiritual successor.
Yeah, I remember collecting animite! I didn't have a computer that connected to the internet at the time, so I never got to trade them in for anything, but it was still fun.
Yeah, that's kinda the issue with systems where Life is the primary/only resource. It just means that games end prematurely and players that are behind fall even further behind due to having even fewer resources to work with. It's an all-around bad time. The constant life gain is a band-aid fix at best. As you mentioned, there's no resource ramp in the game because giving players more and more life each turn would cause the game to degenerate and never end, which makes it a non-option. Imagine how much cleaner this game would/could be if the leaders just had independent life values, or even if they just like got sunk as soon as they took a single direct attack.
I found Keyforge to be a really interesting comparison, because combat works somewhat similarly - so this attritional style of combat where persistent damage is dealt to both attacker and defender isn't a problem in and of itself. It shows why it's a good idea to decouple life and resources - they're game mechanics that are fundamentally trying to accomplish different things. It would be interesting if they split them in Magi Nation, but even then, Luck and Logic has me somewhat wary of any game system that ties creatures too closely to its life system. It would be interesting to have a game where you had slightly more Magi, and treated them more like a variation of a shield system, though. Do you commit to an attack to try and force through damage, or do you leave your opponent on a leader with an effect you're not overly worried about so you can build your board? An interesting idea, at least!
Saying once you behind, you keep falling further behind is just wrong in most cases. What they failed to mention is that once your Magi is defeated, you reveal your next Magi at the beginning of your turn. You are completely invincible until you can act again. Getting a new Magi with full energy and get to energize is a huge powerboost. That's why you want to be careful of when you defeat a magi because if you use too many resources defeating them, you are leaving yourself open to have your own magi defeat on your opponent next turn. That also why sometimes it is better to off yourself when your opponent has control of the field, but won't finish you because they are not really for your next magi.
And no, I don't think the game would be cleaner if the magi had independent life value. It would make the game needlessly more complicated requiring players to keep track of 2 different constantly change resources on the same character and fundementally change the nature of the game from "better manipulating your energy than your opponent, which includes knowing when to hold energy on your magi and when to pour all of it into your creatures" to "snipe the enemy mage". Having Magi get defeated after taking a single attack is an even worst idea. You have to remove all abilities that allow creatures to ignore defenders and attack Magi directly as that would be autowins. It is just unneeded cause in most cases, magi are on the verge of defeat if the enemy can attack them directly.
since you mentioned magi nation gbc game could you talk about snk vs capcom card fighter and trade and battle card hero?
Pretty unlikely - I'm generally restricting myself to physical tcgs, and even then, there's so many out there that I don't think I'll ever get around to playing them all!
Underated game! I never really got to play with more than the starter deck, but it looked like it had a lot of potential.
I do wonder what the gameplay is like with more dedicated constructed decks rather than just starters, but it is a really neat system!
Let's see if it can make a comeback, since the Kickstarter was a huge success.
It is nice seeing the game is getting another chance!
You’re trading being mana starved or flooded for trying to maximize energy efficiency. Which I think allows you to get to your playable cards faster as well as more dynamic use of energy on the field. It does lead to long games at times though like you said. Good intro video and analysis.
There’s still an active discord community.
No way! Are you a psychic?
Nope, just noticed the game had a kickstarter and figured this would be a good time.
This seems like a very interesting game to analyze, and your video really explains everything very well.
Here's some thoughts:
1) I'm normally skeptical of life resource systems, but I never expected one to heal you every turn by default. I guess this makes it feel less bad to spend your "life", but, yes, the game is pushing to two directions.
2) The overabundance of die needed here seem like a problem. I wonder if a game like this could work with smaller numbers and cards representing the stats. It probably would be one of those "shuffle back your graveyard when your deck is empty" kind of games.
3) I really like the combat. I find that Hearthstone-like combat puts a lot of emphasis on "trading up". That is, if you have two 3/3s and they have a 6/6, it's too dangerous to keep theirs alive, because as soon as you miss lethal damage on it (because you ignored it earlier) you'll be behind in damage extremely fast. Here, you can shrink a card, giving you value in the race even if you don't completely remove it.
4) Having essentially three leaders that come out one after one is really cool, but it really needed to be in a game that doesn't heal you. At the very least, it would fit excellent in a TCG based on King of Fighters. :)
Thanks!
1) Calling it 'energy' is actually quite clever - I never really felt a temptation to keep it on my Magi, so that part of the system actually works well. Definitely a risk with a system like this, though!
2) Feels like a Fantasy Flight game with all the dice - it does get pretty excessive. Although sometimes pushing dice around can be its own kind of fun.
3) Yeah, the combat is surprisingly really good. It was kind of an interesting experience replaying the game and going 'wait, isn't this what Keyforge ended up doing?'
4) The three leaders is a really interesting mechanic, but yeah, for this game specifically it honestly feels like 1 may have been better.
@@tcgacademia I agree that not calling it "life" helps psychologically to not feel bad about spending it. It's quite clever indeed.