How To Solve the Queen's Problem - TCG Design Academy 

Do you have any questions about Trading Card Game design that you want me to address in future entries in the series? Also, what Pokemon should I redesign in my next video, and what would you like to see changed?

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.

Good episode! Looking forward to more. To early MtG's defense, it's designer Richard Garfield has spoken about this in interviews before. It being the first TCG, his rationale was that only very few players would pay more than a standard board game in total for magic. Maybe a grand total of $60-$80 over the games lifespan. The modern internet was also not really a thing yet, so the idea of 'meta' decks wasn't really an issue, player info about cards was very very sparse. Someone (I believe it was his publisher?) brought up this very concern, what if the game grew so popular that players would chase down such cards. He responded that it'd be a good problem to have, and they could cross that bridge in the unlikely event they came to it. Fucking hysterical looking back, but I think it's a fair point in context. I doubt anyone would have guessed MtG becoming the giant runaway success it was.

Super chess could be balance if we established that the value of the resulting board can´t exceed the value of the "normal" one. So, 39 points to allocate. Maybe even adding special "inflation" for backrow pieces starting in the front and vice versa.

The queens problem in complexity theory is to put N queens on an N times N sized chess-board without a single one attacking the other. This is simple enough for small board sizes, but becomes very very hard with bigger boards. Since the video started with chess, I thought it would be about balancing with a similar setup. How to have N cards in a space of all possible decks, where neither card dominates the others.

Yeah in the original anime of Yugioh the whole balance was essentially based around rarity early on with certain cards being intentionally op but only a handful of them existing on the whole planet (heck the toons weren't even available to anyone but Pegasus). Its kinda funny to see how the TCG had to go through some big changes in its card design to get around these initial design flaws.

It's interesting how modern yugiho solved the problem: Cards are not powerfull enough in a vacum to be worth putting in a deck. Often times almost your entire deck will be built with the idea that each card will need to ahve sinergy with your other cards, so each of they multiply the power of each other, thus a card that is insanely powerful in a deck is almost worthless in another cause it does not multiply that decks power. A simple example in my last match, my oponent is playing a deck called mathmech, their most powerful card is easily mathmech circular, insane combo card. but if it somehow ended in my control, playing a different deck it is essentialy a blank card with no effect.

The video Game Yu-Gi-Oh! The Duelist Of The Roses had an interesting way of tackling the Queens Problem. They used a "Deck Cost" system where every card had its own individual value and the total combined value was your Deck Cost. The more powerful the card the higher the value and the game only let you fight characters with Deck Cost equal or lower than your own. This meant you couldn't fight a weak opponent with a deck stuffed with Blue-Eyes White Dragons whether you wanted to or not.

This was definitely one of the challenges I faced when developing Land Of The Fallen. My solution was to limit each card to 1 copy per deck, as well as create rules to prevent people from abusing the most powerful cards.

Wow these videos are so well made and helpful, thanks for posting! You deserve way more subs/views

I highly appreciate this video, I was in such a rut with rule making that when I saw this I just had to fix a ton of stuff and now the game rules look and feel more natural. I think it might be great to give this series more videos like this, ones explaining major problems and how to fix them through the design process, I'm new to your channel and if you haven't already, you may want to do demos of you yourself building a card game.

Good thing this is the first time I’ve seen this video, now I don’t have to wait for more content since this video is a year old 😂 I subscribed so I will be checking out this series 🤘

2:37 This flooded my brain with childhood memories of hating the Pokémon TCG’s Charazard. I now feel very vindicated for my hatred, despite having too many friends who said I was just jealous.

*Thanks for putting this together!*

Great video! Keep up the good work. Couldn't help but notice there were a couple of Throne of Glass books in the background 👀 have you read the whole series by chance?

Thank you for doing this series! Some good brain food

Subbed. As an amateur card game designer, I'm always looking for more insight from a veteran of the genre. Great stuff dude.

Super enjoyable episode. Your tgc theory is a very interesting topic for me. Whats you opinion on Marvel Champions drawing and resource system? For me its simply the best in existence haha

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!!

awesome. stoked I found your channel. been looking for a "spiritual successor" to kohdok since he started slowing down with uploads.

I'd like an episode on card layout, what makes for a good layout and a bad one.

Great video! Keep up the good work.

Great vid, lots of good points.

fantastic analysis

Me trying to play ancient gears and getting OTK’d bye literal desserts

So what happens if im playing the super chess and decide to use 16 kings? Do i lose if just one of them gets checkmated or do all of them have to be at the same time?

Finally a game design guide, need this!

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

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.

surprised you glossed over card frequency limits. magic currently has a 4-copy limit for everything that's not a basic land. but imagine how much more diverse decks (and thus matches) would be if it were a 3-copy limit. once the strongest cards are included, players are forced to start making decisions about how to fill out the rest of the deck. (this was actually wizards' solution to the queen problem, as prior to the first official tournament rules being published, decks had a 40-card minimum and no per-card copy limit.) in a similar vein, wizards sometimes will designate a particularly strong card as 'restricted', allowing a 1-copy limit for those cards in the relevant format (currently only vintage). this helps limit how much average impact those cards provide, while still allowing the card to exist. this is actually how the queen is balanced in chess, as you only start with one, which is fewer than all the other non-king pieces. (this might actually be a decent use of rarity, eg. cards with mtg's 'mythic rare' could be a broad restricted list, and allow for relatively more powerful playing pieces but with an inherent restriction on their usage from the moment they're printed - a category of queens, in other words.)

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)

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

I didn't know that's the name of this problem! The core of the CCG I'm designing tackles this first and foremost while attempting to maximize freedom of deckbuilding

OK well I like your video I feel like you are forgetting other factors that can help limit this problem (factors that Yu-Gi-Oh has used) example making cards specifically designed to support types or attribute, for example you aren’t going to see reinforcements of the Army played in a deck primarily focused on beast warriors, or fairies, despite the card being arguably broken enough to be limited to one, and that’s because it’s specifically designed for warrior like decks, this prevents the amount of mixable attributes players could have, you can also do archetypes where cards are name lock two other cards , this unlike The examples you have provided insurance please have to bend over backwards in order to make cards that aren’t supposed to go to each other go to each other, and you can control how name lock cards become, Finally while this is a problem I think you’re forgetting the part where this can also help, universal staples while dangerous can help so long as they are not the end all be all, for example I think dark ruler no more is a good example of this as well technically every beck can play it, not everyone does, mainly because it makes it so you can’t Deal damage to your opponent, this means if you’re playing a deck designed to kill your opponent as fast as possible the card is actually slowing down your strategy even if it makes your opponents field temporary useless, another example being heavily poison it has a broken scale to protect back row but there are plenty of decks that don’t play back row to maximize their special summoning potential, meaning even though there is nothing stopping them from playing the card they can’t optimize it so they play something else You can also go with body fights option in having so much Queens that you physically cannot fit all of them in your deck and have to pick between them depending which one is best suited for your play style,

right there rarity you made my point becuase I had a 5 color old school magic deck half was from the banhammer list. but it's so much free fast mana and half the deck was obscenely rare. but it was so fun. wrath of God force of will and so on.

Rarity works if you impose a limit based on rarity. Just a little something to add.

queen is good but a pawn can be promoted to anything, it can even be promoted to queen, the strongest piece in the game

Well now hold on, that's not necessarily why Yugioh's card design is a problem. The entire reason I enjoy Yugioh is because of the amount of freedom it gives during deck building, and the game balances this out by being a very archetype driven game in modern Yugioh and by either creating new archetypes or printing new support for older archetypes in order to shift the meta. The problem in this, though, comes from the amount of generic support that also exists, but again, that's why we have the banlist in order to further regulate the meta if necessary since powercreep is such an issue in this game (although the powercreep tends to get a bit more overblown than people are willing to admit, the only archetypes which come to mind that are just inherently broken and deserve to have multiple pieces on the banlist are stuff like Zoodiacs and the upcoming Tearalaments). I will admit though that while this all sounds fine conceptually, Konami (especially here in the TCG) will use the banlist sometimes in order to push new product. It's understandable, they're a company at the end of the day and the game doesn't have set rotation, but it can get pretty annoying sometimes when a problem card is fucking the meta (like Scythe) and Konami lets it stay around a while longer simply because its getting reprinted in another product. This segways somewhat into the other issue: card prices. The reason why the game is so expensive as it is is mainly because Yugioh (the TCG) doesn't make cards accessible enough. In the OCG, Konami will often print super rare copies of meta staple cards along side the higher rarity variants. This isn't very common anymore in the TCG. For example, a card like Forbidden Droplet has never been printed below ultra rare because its a meta staple and Konami knows its competitive player base is willing to shill out that much money. By comparison, cards like Solemn Strike, Infinite Impermanence, etc. have received lower rarity prints in the last year and have been able to drop down in price. The only cards that really tend to hold their value are meta staples that can or must see play in any deck such as Ash Blossom, Pot of Prosperity, Accesscode Talker, the aforementioned Forbidden Droplet, etc.

I appreciate that you're trying to communicate (through spinning) the rock-paper-scissors relationship of the different deck types (5:01), but spinning the graphic just makes it harder to read; I had to pause the video and go back. Your audience shouldn't have to put in extra effort to understand you.

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.

I think for the Yugioh tho it works for a casual player not buying online. Buying sets in order of release. Gradually building a new decks more powerful. And that is a cool feeling. Cards costs and finding a good one currently or trade is cool too. I think you aren't supposed to hold on good cards. You are supposed to sell or trade. But where it fails is when it gets competitive and online and bulk shopping. The game isn't nessarily built for fair strategy. And this gets really obvious when one turn the first player played 30 cards and OTK the opponent. So how you play the game or buy also changes it

4:33 Hearthstone also has other simple system: you can only put in 2 cards of a kind in a deck (or 1 in case of legendaries)

Awesome, I'm checking more of this series out, because I have started making and then scrapped 3 iterations of a card game, because I just A don't really know what I want/how I want it to play, B don't want it to be a near carbon-copy clone of games I already know with different art and C... struggle to balance things in the initial concept. Sure sure, playtesting and then adjusting can fix that, but if the balance is TOO out of whack from the get go, it gets hard and even more work to balance it all. I feel like oftentimes I just put an effect on a card just to put an effect on a card. And... that is probably the wrong approach. I have 0 real world experience with this, it is just a hobby for now that I want to get into more, but basically I was playing a game with a robust character creator and I ended up making like 70 characters... then I thought: hey, I love card games, it would be cool if I could make one out of this (just a private game for myself of course, I am not going to plagiarize anything from the game I make the characters in and like anybody would be interested in my characters, I'm not that delusional xD ). So I made screenshots and card borders etc and so basically I have the cards... without proper effects and what not because I keep erasing all of that and starting over xD It is probably good practise for if I ever want to do the real thing, just like how I keep coming up with board game and tabletop RPG concepts and other stuff (I am also a writer so my tabletop RPG concepts are based on the world I build myself). But I felt like I needed some guidance as I'm just shooting in the dark. So a series like this is definitely appreciated :D :D

Would love to hear your oppinion of FleshandBlood, especially related to this videos topic they seem to have listened but lets see ^^

Great video

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.

Great video and super accurate yugioh was clearly not designed with the queens problem in mind

I know this video came out 2 years ago, but I do wanna say a few things about Yugioh and the Queen's problem. Yugioh does regularly ban very powerful staple cards, but the video does kinda frame it as if that is the only thing that Yugioh did. Not saying that was intentional, I thing it's highly likely that talking about what Yugioh did was cut for time purposes or a feeling that what could be said wouldn't do it justice. Most Yugioh players know that Konami changed a lot about how they design cards to make it so that Yugioh wasn't just the same deck over and over. Now Konami does release staples on a regular basis and they can get really expensive (like triple tac in the video) but that's more of a "Let's make more money by putting this really good card at high rarity and short printing it" which is while related a whole other issuse. Other than that this video is really well made, explaining a really weird thing about trading card games in a very easy to understand way.

How would you go about making a chess variant TCG (or probably OCG for practicality reasons) 1. Everything should go on the board. Most spells should be field spells unless they are one turn effects. 2. Pieces should have costs, summoning restrictions, and abilities. 3. However summoning points are obtained should also be on the board. 4. Have spells that can change the board geometry by adding or subtracting rows. 5. Make it players usually have to decide between an action and a move rather than being about to do both.

Rarity totally does work, but only for games like draft/limited MTG. While you can almost count on seeing at least one particular common, the whole table may not pull a particular mythic. Yu-Gi-Oh also has restrictions these days, but it’s more flexible and ad-hoc using archetype locks and the material requirements on extra-deck monsters.

Point count chess is an actual playable thing. Like, you can definitely let players create their own setup if you impose a cost on the pieces.

4:16 The more colours of cards you have the more difficult it becomes to cast them WotC: SIKE triome fetch shock cast Scion of Draco. Total cost of the 4 cards played: 300$

I have boiled it down to 2 main factors; Identity and Resources. A deck MUST contain certain things and can NOT have more than 1 of another etc. You also need to pay in order for cards to be played, either when they come down or you have to pay for them to stay out. Bigger cards == bigger resource loss == less actions.

6:25 Magics entire monetisation scheme in 12s

The queen in chess a long, long time ago used to have the same movement as the king. That got changed, and the thought process at the time was to speed the game up because games of chess took forever back then. So what if the queen change had never happened? I wonder what analogy would have been used instead. In an alternate universe, a different analogy was used because games of chess were still super slow.

i am making a card game called contagion. i have a solution where each card has a unique limit on the amount you can have in your deck. is this a good idea?

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?

Thanks

I like your moxie

Rarity could work if the rules limit how many cards of any given rarity could be put into a deck.

@5:15 Looks like "Control beats Aggro", which is obviously backwards.

2:16 Hm. Sounds like every TCG ever. There will always be a best card, or best card combo. I think I am pretty sure I understand, and it's something I've known for years from experience. You really can't balance two different things on an equal level. You can try, but it will always fail. Just so you know, this game you "invented" is pretty much Navia Drapt, and it's quite a lot of fun.

What if you just put the amount of copies your aloud to have per deck on the cards?… for example “Queen of Hearts” ✨ ✨❤✨ ✨ ATK/ 100. DEF/ 100. x1. Queen of Hearts Can be played per deck.

could it help decentralice the power? the mana card seem crypto curretcy. that hable to activate scmart contracts ;u..!!

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

Queen is the most fun piece, literally what makes chess fun

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

Every player just chooses the most broken Card/Combo they have aka The Queen.

Complimentary engagement

Funny how Marvel Snap use exactly the methods you mentioned that won't work.

Is it a good option to use randomness(dice, shuffling,...) to solve the queen problem?

Can't stop staring at your glasses

one of the main things I dislike about trading card games is something that, keeping with the theme, I'd call the problem of pawns. say you had super chest with a form of restriction that *worked* at keeping the queens at bay. well now, the pawns have no use. no one uses a single pawn, or maybe a single rook, or bishop. and using them, is now unviable. some card games fix this by allowing pawns to be upgraded or sacrificed. pokemon uses evolution, and magic the gathering has the greens elves that use their magic to provide more mana, and also the reds where sometimes it's just good to overwhelm your opponent with a million angry fire goblins. but then, with the reds there are bigger stronger cards that go unused, because the viable strategy is to not waste time with them. I dislike this, because it makes a lot of strategies unviable, and at worse, it makes everyone use the same decks *again* (albeit with *some* more variety?) because why use anything else. in pokemon there are hundreds of amazing and cool pokemon with unique abilities that makes the game more interesting, which go completely unused in favor of the legendaries and whatever cool new pokemon is being used by literally almost every other deck. in mtg green has really cool mega strong monsters which no one will ever use, because it's not completely optimal. this is partially why I hate professionally playing these games, and much more prefer kitchen table trading card games.

Did this man just say that limiting the amount of available cards a player has, will increase the variety of decks we see? Have you played a single card game on a high level? There is a maximum of 3 decks that players play each meta cycle. And the genius solution to this problem you made up is... a mana cost. Revolutionary. I subscribed.

The only reason some people have pet decks is because art or funny card designs

Great video. Wanted to be comment number 69.

Sometimes a game is made better by some cards or pieces being more powerful than others. Take chess for example. The queen is obviously the most broken piece, but it's ok because both players start the game with one. Another example is Yugioh. Pot of Greed is legal in many old formats of Yugioh, but you being able to get an easy plus one is balanced by the fact that your opponent can do the same. One idea I like is the concept of "Deck Points". Unlike mana, these are not points you spend during the game, but rather points you spend when you build the deck before the game begins. This means that you could spend those points on a spell that lets you draw two, but your opponent could spend the same number of points on a spell that grants equal advantage in some other way, such as by making the opponent discard two cards.

Regarding Yugioh: "The rules didn't have any way of handling it" The rules STILL don't have any way of handling it. Because the game evolved and continues to evolve in a way that every card, specifically the effect monsters, act in a way that either break the basic rules of the game AND OR addenda to said rules just by the fact that their card text says so. Here's to the current tier 0 and many others to come 🥂. I respect Yugioh Rush for not including any searchers/tutor effects and making infinite normal summons as a rule more every passing day.

This series can be All about YGO... its the McDonald's of TCGs 🤣

If you really want to solve this problem, you just need to balance the cards well. That's it. The variants of restrictive deck building you named aren't by any means solutions to this problem. Actually there is a chance this might end up worse. If one atribute has stronger cards then the others, then player either are forced play with that atribute and not one they prefer just to keep up with the meta or all together leave the game. The cost solution makes more sense but let's not forget that the Power Nine exist.

I think this analysis misses some points: Giving a limitation to decks like Hearthstone with or Pokemon with the energy system only MOVES the queens problem a level, to the deck instead of the cards. Now you have a deck that is better than the other ones and how do you prevent everyone playing that deck? The rock paper scissors dynamic between decks is better than having all decks being the same (queens) but creates some frustration because you feel like you lost the moment the match starts. Hearthstone showed this symptoms most of its life and I'm not sure where it is right now since I'm not a millionaire. I think the solution to this problems it's two-folded: True balance and secrecy. True balance means zero powercreep, making all cards playable and so, new strategies with old cards are able to come up. With this ecosystem making the metagame a flow of ever more complex difficult nature to predict, rewarding deck exploration. On the other side, secrecy is why decks are shuffled and face down and hands are private, this hidden objects are what keep the game unpredictable and force players to make suboptimal moves. Hearthstone secrets, Digimon digital card battle rock paper scissors attacks, side decks, trap cards, ETC in hearthstone are interesting examples to have in mind.

You really should have explained the Yugioh segment better. Yugioh, did, and to an extent, still does have the problems mentioned with a lack or restriction on what cards can go into a deck, but it's highly disingenuous to say that the ban list is the only thing they do to try and prevent it. Using your super chess example, if banning was all that was done, just banning the queen wouldn't really make people innovate, it would just make them all play all knights, or all rooks. What Yugioh does instead of focus on 'Archetypes', or high synergy card groupings. For example, instead of having 1 queen, we have a variant of the queen, that can also move like a horse, but only if you have 4 or more horses on your board setup. Then maybe have a pawn variant that lets you bring back a horse when it dies, and ta-da, you now have a 'horse based' chess build, that forces the use of other pieces rather than all queens. This focus on archetypes is great if your designing a game without a resource system, or a very loose system overall, as it allows near infinite deck building, but still guides new players into 'starting points' for their deck without creating a queen problem. Just Remember: Always make your archetype support better than generic support!

Pretty sure Magic wasn't trying to stop the Queen's problems by making all the busted cards rare. Probably just wanted money :P

Only create bad/mediocre cards, got it.

You should not just use the word "TCG", since this apply to every CG, like LCG.

Hearthstone uses a rarity system

All is about money. Just money... The company sale cards by a lot.

Hey I'm view 23000🎉

Sounds like this is a copy of Kohdok’s channel

Ok... but how we solve it ?

which is why Yugioh is broken

A simple way is to limit duplicate cards. Only one of each card within a deck. Eventually every deck is going to be cookie cutter. Unless factors outside a player's control are introduced. Players are going to choose cards that place them in best possible chance of winning. The downside is that player's losing agency may not find it desirable to play. Each and every card for a TCG should have some reason to be useful. Even in nitch cases where a player has to pick other less desirable cards. In order to optimize their deck. This will reinforce only cards with acceptable outcomes to be added. Thus, less total cards created to be sold.

Cool video, but your idea that only letting players use a subset of cards is good is way off imo. Especially the rock paper scissors thing makes it fun "because of built in checks and balances". Rock paper scissors is not fun. Building a card game based around RPS will not make a fun game. It removes skill from the game, and makes it almost entirely luck based. Pretty much everything else you said is correct though.

4 demonic tutors muahahah

Interesting video but fundamentally wrong. Your problem here is of balance, not of game design. If players were allowed to use any combination of units except for king and queen limited to one each, it would indeed create a better and more diverse game (the pawn would get completely left out but whatever). Saying that it's bad for a game to give freedom because you are making balance mistakes makes no sense. Learn to balance your game well, then give all the freedom it can get. The more freedom it has the more fun and diverse it is, so long as it stays balanced.

...difficult to design. C'mon I keep seeing this type of video nobody mentions how every tcg ignores its established rules and then get suprised they get a tier 0 format. Stick to the rules you made.

I mean, this is a pretty basic concept. I thought there was gonna be clever takes on it.

its almost impossible to stop. you would have to make your TCG with set values for the highest power that you will NEVER go over, and balance everything else to said value through word math.