I am a software developer by day, game designer, RU-vidr, and Game Show Host by night. I write articles and make videos on all sorts of different gaming topics, including design, history, strategy and theories.
Absolutely fantastic video. You conveyed several complex design problems in a concise, well paced, easy to digest format. Your points were very easy to understand. Thanks for this - God bless!!
The queens problem assumes balance between each choice will be lackluster or straight up terrible, and the suggested solution still doesnt fix the original problem-- an ecosystem where one choice is much better than the others. In a subset solution, if there is poor balance on one card, decks will still gravitate to that one card, but now the other colors are left in the dust and you've worsened the problem, same for pokemon, and if the balance is worse enough the rps turns into rock, paper, worse rock The solution to the queens problem in super chess specifically is a cost system or other limitation like limited queens per setup, both of which have been applied in tcgs
Easy way to balance: the weak cards are necessary stepping stones for the strong cards. Strong YGO monsters require tributes. Strong Pokemon cards need to be evolved. Strong spell/trainer cards require discards. Etc. Just like a capitalist society requires a working class and a bourgeoisie, so do card games require weak cards that are easy to play and strong cards that are difficult to play. One is not "better" than the other; they depend upon each other in an interrelationship like predator and prey.
While watching this, I imagined a modern format where you can only put X cards of a certain rarity into your deck, like 4 mythics, 8 rares, 16 uncommons max, commons as much as you want - is this already a thing? If not, could it be?
Yugioh has designed around the queen's problem since GOAT format, though they did it slowly. Firstly by making archetypes synergistic with only themselves. So unless the boss monster was designed to be generically used, it was essentially only playable in that archetype. And even the generic ones you wouldn't stuff multiples of it in there because of limited extra deck space. The current method still revolves around archetypes, but the archetypes are looser and tend to only restrict you to type, attribute, summoning mechanic, etc. Allowing for more flexibility without everything just being a "good things" pile deck like it was in the early-mid 2000s.
I'd like to point out that sometimes things being broken can be fun. Certainly you don't want to allow people to win without giving their opponent a chance, but you also don't want to design a game where players feel constrained and unable to enjoy the game. If everything is super restrictive, then it doesn't take much for a card to become disastrously overpowered.
Nice video, but it seems way to MTG-centric. It probably should've been called something like "How to make an Epic Magic: The Gathering set". News flash - NOT ALL TCGS HAVE COLOR/RESOURCE MECHANICS AND DRAFT FORMATS!!!
Full agree that perfect balance isn't even desirable. True perfect balance means uniformity. Imagine a deck of 52 but every single card is the Ace of Spades. Pretty useless for playing. That said, I despise thoughtlessly broken cards ruining games. I tilted out of MTG thanks to trash like Scute Swarm and various auto-win decks that don't let you play the FKin game. Get that garbage outta here.
@@vonakakkola Perfect balance (Thanos meme goes here) would require ZERO difference between all the options, simultaneously removing the options. There will never be a fun game that has 100% "balance" -- with balance here representing "every option is equally viable." A game in which every option is equally viable without any differentiation between the options is not interesting nor worth playing, and I would argue that in the process of making more options and interesting decisions to choose from, the game will inevitably have some options be superior to others at least a majority of the time.
@@danielpayne1597 that's not what balance mean, if a character is characterized by speed and another character is characterized by raw power, they can be both balanced withouth having the same skill, but what you said is that they would become both speed based or raw power based which is not true and the fact that ususally unbalancing happen, doesn't mean it's a good thing
@@vonakakkola There are different definitions for game balance. My statement is a commentary on a particular viewpoint. I similarly prefer to treat proper game balance as a curation of generating options while making sure most options are viable (as equally as possible) and also fun. Just like if you play a fighting game and some moves are 1-frame OHKOs while others are 20-frame gimpy hits, the only true options are the 1-frame OHKOs. Gotta avoid that kind of thing.
DAMN IT!! I wished i seen this when it dropped. I'm a mathematician not even the best one but any thing involving numbers can be balanced. There are no card games that bring unique mechanics that regular chess hasn't all ready done.
Hi, I am trying to design a TCG that could separate the collectors market from the players' market. At the same time, I wish to offer players a way to get the cards they need directly from the primary market. I wish to take out as much "lucky" factor as possible from the players' experience as the main source of income for the company comes from another transaction style that offers other experiences to the players. Do you think going against the golden rule of the TCG striving to sell packs and packs and maintaining speculators in the game is a mistake? Or I will find enough true players to sustain a small business focused on culture, tourism and tcg? ¡Great content btw! "Edit": any though or advise will be welcomed as I am far from perfection.😅
I feel like having the luck factor is quite important since that's a major part of making the game to have repeatability, Also I would suggest starting out digitally 1st perhaps and see how that works out ,it will certainly give you an idea on what you are working with!
One thing I'm surprised more games don't do is scale copy limitations based on rarity. Like in MTG they still kinda fall into that same problem where cards are balanced by how hard they are to get a hold of. A Deck composed of mostly Rares and Mythic Rares is probably going to beat a deck with only Commons 90% of the time. And the only thing stopping a player from filling a deck with rare cards is money. They did introduce the card limits in general to help balance this out, so that by having only a max of 4 of any one card at a time you can never fully rely on being able to draw a specific mythic rare card in a deck that has at least 60 cards. But that still doesn't solve the overall problem of just filling your deck with tons of different rare cards. I would think that a better idea would be to impose Limits based on the card rarity so that the rarity is itself a balancing mechanic. So for example you could have up to 4 of any Common Card, 3 Uncommons, 2 Rares, and 1 Mythic Rare. Now suddenly there's actually a reason to focus a deck around Commons and Uncommons. Like yeah you could still technically fill a deck with nothing but Rare and Mythic Rare cards with the only thing stopping you being your wallet and your ability to find them, but it would probably be a bad idea. Now a Deck that consists of only Rares and Mythic Rares would be a lot less consistent. In a 60 card deck with 25 lands. You would need something like 15 unique Mythic Rares and 10 unique Rares in order to fill it out. Compared to a deck with Commons and Uncommons which might only need 10-15 unique cards in total. This means that a common-filled deck is going to play a lot more consistently than a Rare-filled deck. Which can be a huge advantage, even though the Rare cards are objectively more powerful.
basically, the reason they don't do that is that balancing by consistency isn't very good for a healthy competive game. That's why mtg doesn't do partial bans like yugioh does. (in yugioh, every good deck has 8 million ways to search out any cards, so removing copies doesn't really affect consistency as much as it does how hard a deck is to shut down). Nowadays, for magic at least, rarity is mostly only important in the limited formats where the lack of ability to 100% choose what's in your deck means that you are primarily going to use commons/uncommons.
There were also a lot of "Single conical horn" designs: Rhyhorn, Rhydon, Nidoran M. Nidorino, Nidoking/Nidoqueen, Dragonair, Dragonite, Weedle, Lapras. There's also a lot of "Generic kaiju bodies" like Nidoqueen/king, Rhyhorn, Magmar, Kangaskhan of which there are more examples on second generation too, Tyranitar comes to mind.
Ah this is the reason why I stop playing TCGs. No TCG is balanced. There will always be cards that just too useful not to use in decks. There will also be cards that wont ever see play because there are better alternatives. Bans, errata, and restriction lists are infuriating on the wallet (I paid for these cards, so I should be allowed to use them). Errata, and clarifications in general are a pain to need to keep in mind, and having to print out a tome to refer to is extra tedious. 13:14 I disagree. Strongly disagree. It's a money scheme to fill tcgs with garbage. There is no other resaon for it but money. Fill a TCG with enough cards to get players to buy more of them. That is the primary goal there. I feel it is a waste of resources to have bad cards in any card game. I also highly desire balanced games. It is mostly to make the game accessible to anyone, not just those with money to throw at a hobby. It is also so any deck could beat any other deck based on skill more than randomness.
@@mujigant35 My wallet is certainly happy. To say I've completely quit the scene would be a lie. I have at least one reviving TCG around that nobody locally collects which provides me with the greatest power to control what decks to make iso they are roughly equal in terms of strategy without being samey. Proxies are the best considering I can edit them before print so they reflect all changes/errata that was done to them. Tabletop Simulator is also a great boon for playing against people not local, which also grants access to all cards. I've actually been looking into TCGs and CCGs no longer in retail print. There's about 4 so far that have caught my interest, and non of these are being played locally in any broadcast way. Deck building all for myself to enjoy!
Yu-Gi-Oh's actually designed a lot of its newer cards and mechanics around anti-synergies and restrictions. It's frustrating going to bat for that game in the discourse because we're simultaneously the "play all the good cards, no variety" game and the "this card is so specific, opening packs feels bad because I can't use these cards" game. We're in a sort of design renaissance of softer restrictions with things medium-splashable, but for a long time it was conventional to just follow every xenophobic archetype restriction printed on your main engine pieces and basically play mono-color in a game that has more than 5 colors.
Most good yugioh cards are archetype locked there are some generic cards mostly in the extra deck but competitive yugioh decks aren’t just the same good cards haphazardly thrown together
Personally, I would put it smack in the middle and have it be a jack of all trades color that gets a boost if you control a card of the color that normally has said effect or boosting the effects of cards of a certain color; with a theme of compromise, adaptation, and encouragement that doesn't like to work alone. I'm not sure what creatures would work well with it other than shapshifters, maybe scarecrows.
I don't think the point you make, about bad cards being good for draft is valid. Look at cubes. People design these cubes intentionally, to ONLY contain good cards. And they are incredibly fun to draft, because suddenly you are faced with wondering which of these good cards you want to play. I think your point is the equavalent of limiting options during a game. Or showing the solution or a hint if the player dosen't find it after a certain time. You might just wanna help the player not being stuck, but in reality, your taking the players option away, to be stuck and really using their brain to solve a difficult problem. Giving a player ONLY good cards will increase their creativity, because they don't HAVE to pick the one obviously good card in the pack, and thats now the only way they can play. They have more options and can therefor explore more what they actually want to play.
I think there was a misunderstanding. I wasn’t trying to say that drafts need bad cards - I was just saying that cards have different values depending on format. Some cards might not be good in constructed but are good in draft, while some constructed cards are bad in draft because they require building around.
I like Sorcery's take on this, where not only is there a colored resource system like magic, but the rarity determines how many copies can be put in a deck. 4 copies at common down to 1 for the rarest
Yugioh solution to this wasn't the ban list, the ban list is it's solution to not having set rotation, it's self-dependant archetype system is it's modern andwer to the queen problem
over a decade later and this game continues to be a fucking banger that said i was insanely curious how tf the rigging of this game works, so great video! thank you!
You’re 100% right about the yugioh problem but it’s affecting the extra deck with how generic those cards are more than the main one these days because the game took to making archetype cards that work within archetypes. (Al this also led to a good majority of those banned cards coming off the list because they aren’t searchable lol)
The dark magician has always been bad The main monsters a garnet from DM era to now he has had no relevance Blue eyes had 1 YCS and that’s exclusively due to Konami forcing it through a generous support release time
The reason why some games have color and cost restriction was precisely to ensure that people cannot have access to all the power cards without putting in effort. In MtG these days though, there are too many color fixers that color pie restriction is almost nonexistent.
