LIFEDECKING!! The Seven Deadly Sins of TCG Design Part 2 

One substantial difference between lifedecking and milling is that when you're lifedecking and lost cards you want to play, you blame the game, and the game becomes unfun. When you're being milled by someone, you blame the opponent, and that makes the game more fun because now you want to go stomp them into the dirt. And you CAN.

I'm just imagining this in yugioh. "So you're saying that, instead of taking damage, I send cards from the deck to the graveyard?" "... Yes..." "So I banish my three Mezuki..."

I think Yu-Gi-Oh and Magic both hold the key to making lifedecking viable: recursion. Plenty of decks in both games are more than happy to self Mill because they know their cards are just as valuable, if not more so, in the grave as in the hand. I could see a game where lifedecking works precisely because every card has the same value hitting the grave as hitting the hand. Maybe spells or creatures could be played from the grave for a steeper price. Perhaps cards would have a unique effect upon going to the grave from the deck. So long as most cards do something to maintain their value.

"Discard as a resource" would also solve the lifedecking problem. Temporary triggers that are random and only serve to stop the attack are bad. Being able to shout "Jokes on you I can cast my big dumb dragon thing from the discard for HALF PRICE!" is priceless.

Yugioh players: "yeah, I already make 1/4th of my deck nigh unusable with a single card because it's a +1 in card economy"

The entire time you were talking about bakugan's flip cards I was thinking "that sounds like a shitty version of Duel Masters/Kaijudo shield triggers" Fun fact: that entire mechanic was built to make Anime Moments happen. Both in play and literally, the manga artist asked them to ensure he could have massive turn arounds for drama.

"Players want to play their cards" Garnets: allow us to introduce ourselves

Life Decking works well with the game Weiss/Schwarz though. The key: The horizontal cards cards are playable from the hand, always stop the milling damage. When you loose enough cards via damage, you cycle those cards back and get to play stronger cards. The whole game is built around the idea of recycling your deck over and over, keeping the good cards and loosing bad ones. I don't know if the meta currently holds up, but it was really fun to play a couple years ago.

In Latinamerica, we have a sinner called "Mitos y Leyendas" that, surprisingly, lasted from 2000 to 2010, was revived on 2014, and is still going on. It's not as popular on the competitive scene, but on it first 2 or 3 years after arriving to my country, Mexico, I saw it selling as much, maybe even more, than Magic and Pokémon, since it costed only half, and was promoted as a didactic game that taught childrens about myths, legends, and actual history from different cultures around the world. Being a broke nerdy middleschooler, I also fell victim to the allure of cheap TCG, and so did half of my classmates. We never liked the lifedecking rule, but there were some cards that relied heavily on it, so we made a homebrew rule that allowed each player to chose before the duel to either discard from your deck, or lose imaginary life points.

I remember there was “Ben 10: Alien Force” card game that had an odd twist on life decking. Basically when you do damage, your opponent puts that number of cards in their hands not in their discard pile. This means by doing damage you are giving your opponent more resources.

Having played Magic for... a while (Alara gang represent), I don't know if I'd call Mill effects "Deprived of resources" any more than taking damage to the face makes it harder to, like, pay life for things. Cards in deck are a completely different beast from cards in hand. Not to defend some of the terrible systems we see in this video, but I don't think Life Decking is as cardinal a sin as it might appear. The big problem is that reducing the resources you have to work with (Life and Deck as separate resources become LifeDeck, one resource) which reduces variation in win-cons, and if you introduce discard pile interactions there's a very fine line to walk between "watching the cards you need to win go down the tube" and "the discard pile is just a second hand." If damaging your opponent becomes a guaranteed boon to them, especially in a system as large and granular as 40 cards in deck instead of the 5 card shields of Duel Monsters, it makes aggro really, really bad. There's potential there to wind up with a system where the only winning play is on-hit-ko, all day every day, lest you risk giving your opponents the resources to completely turn the tide on you. I feel like a good way to thread this needle is to split the discard zone into the "Damaged cards go here" zone and a "Played cards go here" zone, and never, ever, EVER allow a player to pull cards from that second pile. That way you can have cards that pull from the first pile, making it an accumulating resource potentially, but you don't have the threat of infinite recursion on your hands. Something like the "flip in graveyard" mechanic from that one game you mentioned. That way lifedecking isn't just depriving you of (theoretical) resources, but it also isn't just a second hand where actually hitting someone in a close fight is actively punished.

Cardfight Vanguard did the life deck mechanic and innovated upon it really well. When you take damage flip over the top card and put it in the damage zone. Whoever reaches six damage first loses. 1.) Trigger checks. Grade 0 cards have special triggers attached to them. When you do a drive check (when attacking with Vanguard) or a damage check and you flip over a trigger you get a bonus effect and extra power. 2.) Cost. Some cards use Counter Blast as cost to activate an ability. What this means is that they flip over a card in the damage zone face-down as cost. A card with CB 2 as cost flips two cards and due to the 6 damage nature of the game, means that usage of abilities that use CB must be done carefully or you’ll have no more cards for CB later on. There are also cards that Counter Charge which flip the face-downs back face-up but those are rarer. 3.) Special abilities. Namely Limit Break. Some cards have a Limit Break ability. A card with LB 4 means that you can’t activate the ability until you reach 4 damage. This allows for some extra spice and strategy in the later part of the match. There are other things to potentially talk about but these are the main points that I feel Vanguard did well regarding the life deck system

Seeing someone praise Duel Masters as such has brought a tear of joy in my eye. That's the game that really introduced me to card games, and the shield system, along with their mana system, is still one of the best thing in CCG in my opinion. They've even made their way into modern, digital CCGs, with The Elder Scrolls: Legends using something similar to their shield with their runes, and Mythgard having a similar way of generating mana, although the cards are reshuffled into the deck as opposed to being in a special mana zone.

*Lightsworns/Burning abyss/Dark worlds/Banish players* LAUGS IN 90% OF THEIR DECK BEING IN GY

Meanwhile in Yugioh...some cards WANT to be sent there. Hell, that's Lightsworn's gimmick. Then again, YGO also had GY refresh cards. Also in YGO, cards you DON'T want to be in your hands aka Garnets.

Mitos y Leyendas, using both life decking and deck milling at the same time: "im going to do a pro gamer move"

I really enjoyed Duel Masters, tbh.

Mitos y Leyendas made it work because they had cards that triggered on going to the graveyard from the deck, cards that could be played from the graveyard, cards that got empowered by your graveyard size or activated abilities when cards went to the graveyard and eventually a full on dredge suicide aggro deck. It was rather neat.

Lifedecking isn't a bad concept. The problem is simply how it's being handled: once your deck is gone, you're gone. If Lifedecking was tied to using your deck as a resource for effect costs, then a system could be put in place to either grant a majority of cards additional effects when they get kicked from deck to discard, or universal rules to gain benefits from, like erasing generic costs for discarded cards to quickly use in a pinch or something like that. It's why I liked the apporach from Luck & Logic. It's not really Lifedecking at all, but whenever you run out of deck, you can reshuffle your discard, and then have to remove the top card, and you lose when you have three removed deck cards, or in other words, if you've restocked your deck three times. Such a system can turn deck milling and Lifedecking into a very strong mechanic (which Luck & Logic didn't do, sadly), and with enough flexibility for card usage, it would keep the game at a strong pace where almost every turn has the opportunity to flip the table.

Here in Chile there is a very popular TCG called Myths & Legends (known as MyL), where it's life its the Deck's size, it has a resource system of energy cards to pay costs know as "Gold", you start always with 1 Gold card. And for the most, it really happens that you take damage, you lose a card you may be waiting for, that you depended on drawing to actually have a chance. And it becomes a real Snowball effect. Whoever gets their best card first wins, rarely a chance to comeback. If your Gold cards get sent to discard, can't play them, so you can't play cards so you are stuck with the same field then you lose. In the reboot, and near the end of it's 1st iteration, they actually realized they could make use of this by making cards do something in the discard pile, pay their cost to be played, or something else to bring them back. It was actually worse. If your card didnt do something on the discard pile it was near useless, they needed to make the cards go to a banish pile after being used there but the game it's still nuts and broken and awful. They defend it because nostalgia + the game itself its kinda cheap in comparison to the rest, but it's still a flaw design that its unremovable of the game, as it was designed to work that way.

"Players want to play their cards".. YGO Mystic Mine/Anti-Meta players: *haha.. their turn go bye-bye*

Fire Emblem Cipher adds another layer to this. In the game you have a main character. When that character would take damage, you can discard copies of the card to avoid the damage. Sometimes you let yourself get hit to gain cards, sometimes you dodge powerful effects. A good part of the game is designed around this mechanic. It creates very intense and fun moments! I don't know how popular the game is in the card game world, but I half expected it to be mentioned!

The Zatch Bell card game might be an interesting look at this mechanic. You play with a set, ordered deck. Every time you play a spell, to deal damage or block incoming damage, you pay cards from your deck. Whenever you're damaged, you lose cards. When you have no cards left, you lose the game. So the game teaches players to use their deck as a resource, and allows the players to plan and strategies how to get the most out of their cards.

Bakugan could simply make flip+action cards similar to the dual or fuse cards from MTG or pendulum from Yu-Gi-Oh. Simply have both card types in a single resource.

One downside, which I don't recall if you mentioned, is that being able to know your opponent's life total quickly is quite important, since a lot of choices can ride on what that number is. If decks aren't very small, then forcing players to manually count every time can be annoying and tedious. In addition, in games like Magic, it can be very telling if you ask your opponent what life total they're at (if you're the aggro deck, it could indicate to your opponent that you think you have lethal, which could make them play more protectively than they would otherwise), so the tried and true "pen and paper" is an excellent option since it allows each player to know each other's life totals *literally at a glance*, and subtly enough that they can check without giving the game away.

I really like the idea of lifedecking in some games. I think the Decipher Star Wars card Game did a great job of both using the deck in an interesting way. It's also a good example of restrictive deck building with light and dark side cards being unmixable. It was a bit more work in tournaments because you had to bring two decks, but I think that made for more skill testing game play. Power creep was certainly a problem though...

The funny thing is that life decking is more of a pain in the ass to keep track of than standard life totals. If you're not constantly keeping track after every card draw and hit, the only other option is to count exactly how many cards you have left in the deck. That's probably a factor in why a lot of people don't like them as well. All the examples you provided that were considered "good" examples had easy to keep track of systems (ie you only have 5 or 6 cards representing your life).

Weiss Schwartz have a pretty good/fun way to deal with cards, I suggest looking up the rules and maybe try it

As an avid Yugioh player who likes zombies. I feel personally attacked.

I really liked the way Zatch Bell did lifedecking. Since your book order is completely set, you end up setting up your deck with lifedecking in mind. Paired with only gaining MP by turning pages and the matches become a quick succession of interesting and fun decisions as you have to adjust your strategy on the fly and determine if flipping a page is worth the risk. Also, the Bakugan flip cards could honestly be solved by a mechanic where you used cards in your hand as a resource, shuffling them back in the deck when used as such. It would create more decisionmaking as you need to determine which cards you are going to play and which you are going to put back in the deck and allow you to return flip cards to the deck if drawn.

I've been watching MTG content for ages and now YT decides to recommend me this channel? Well better late than never I guess.

WHY is this only being done in 2020?! Like, seriously, such a comprehensive breakdown of principles of card game design could have, and should have, been done YEARS ago in this format! Thank you Kohdok so very much for doing this.

I mean, the Decipher Star Wars/Star Trek games used Life Decking, and they were both good and the former was almost as popular as MtG until they lost the license.

I've been working on my own game where the players deck functions as their life, and I had never considered some of the points you brought up. You've really given me something to think about and I'm excited to see what else you have to say. Keep up the amazing work!

I think the best way to fix Bakugan's problem is that if flip effects were extra effects on some cards. Say there's a generic draw 2 card, but if it's milled, it does something else instead.

Raw Deal was the WWE TCG in the late 90s/early 2000s. They did life decking well.

There's just something amazing about 6:08 you put me into a 2-minute laughing fit. Whew! Anyway, I've only seen a handful of your videos but love your content. Keep up the great work.

You have no idea how happy it makes me to hear someone bring up Duel Masters nowadays :)))

Counterpoint: Android - Netrunner pulls this off perfectly.

The old DBZ/GT card game used lifedecking but [eventually] implemented a mechanic called "endurance X", it was an optional trigger that gave you the option of exiling the card to prevent the next X damage. It also had what later would be called "Recover X" that allowed you to move the top X discards to the bottom of your deck. Used together they let you weigh the chance of recovering and using the damaged card vs leaving the next X cards on top of your deck A few personalities [commanders] and masteries [cards that reward you for playing mono-colored decks] even allowed you to draw cards from your discard pile or discard a card to restore a discarded card to your hand

Why doesn't he like Vanguard? They actually do this concept quite well.

The main life deck issue *I* disliked was the fact that "One of/Fun ofs" were *HEAVILY Discouraged* by design.

I rarely comment on videos, but you know what? You made me stop and think about the design of a game I'm creating in which life-decking is a core component, and usually I'm a very stubborn goat. Very well laid-out video, thanks! :)

A Lifedeck game you should check out is WWE Raw Deal. The flip cards can also be played from hand. They not only stop the bleeding but end their turn. It's discard pile interaction is diverse and worth playing. Depending on who you're playing the damage you take becomes a resource, and recovering cards picks what is put back in your deck. It's worth taking a look at.

Haven't seen it mentioned but Mitos y Legendas, a Chilean game running to this day in South America -in between a brief hiatus caused by its publishing company shutting down- is based on life decking: instead of having life points, your deck is your life. It is/was fairly popular in its country (and continent) of origin, to the point of having a similarly sized playerbase to Pokemon TCG and Yugi back in the day

It is so interesting how you can see early choices in card games have huge rammifications down the line. Lifedecking intrinsically ties life to remaining cards, but that also means that getting cards back into your deck is auto healing, and drawing resources from your deck to play with becomes entangled with damage. So if you want to design around healing, now you have to worry about that where that healing comes from. You could allow players to draw on a 'side deck', potentially allowing players to adept their deck during gameplay, but it is always more complicated to design for than a simple counter. Any TCG has to make choicces about what it does and doesn't focus on, but conflating life with cards in deck just doesn't net you any interesting design space compared to milling as a potential strategy in a game that has a health pool. It feels so obvious to me that you would not want this in your game that I'm curious what the design philosophies were that did guide designers towards putting this in their game. I suppose clear/tangible damage is one, but that feels so weak to me.

So when i first saw this video, me and a friend had just sat down to design our own card game as an ongoing hobby. As an attempt to prove you wrong, and just because i could, we deliberately chose a lifedecking system, but Duel masters lessons (a favourite game of my childhood and one we still play time to time) have been learnt. when you take damage, you look at the damage you took, add cards from them to your hand up to your hand limit, and bin the rest. almost always, "that card you need" you find, and you make some kind of small comeback. We also included "Abrupt", which is just shield trigger- cards played straight from the deck as they're revealed as part of damage. Our game still needs some ironing out in terms of balancing and design, but so far everyone who has played it has enjoyed it, and few of those people are the type to be polite for the sake of it.

Glad you mentioned Duel masters and how its mechanic paved way for my all time favourite TCG Force of Will

Why is vanguard the game that shall not be named?

Just realized how Kohdok's and Mark Rosewater's voices sound very similar.

I've been watching your videos for over 2 hours straight and taking notes. This is gold, thank you. I am designing a card game and just got a really cool idea for a unique "comeback mechanic similar to the "taking damage=resources" thing. Keep it up, for sure earned a sub from me.

The Heck did Vanguard do to you? Also good points

Pokémon: Draw 3 cards Yu-Gi-Oh: Banish 10 cards from the top of deck, draw 2 - classed as meta staple

2:25 : nobody tell him about Gem-Knight Garnet

I, as a Yugioh, MTG and (obviously) DM player, will die on that hill that DM's shield mechanic (as well as its mana system) is the best and most well designed mechanic in any card game invented by man!

Another spectacular video, thanks for making my Sunday better!

See, when I saw this, I assumed that it said “Seven Deadly Sins, TCG”, and I got really excited Still cool though

Weiss Schwarz is an interesting game to look at when considering how it avoids the pitfalls. It predates Vanguard, but it very clear that Vanguard is an attempt to make WS a much faster game, and in my opinion WS ends up with the better design decisions. In WS you shuffle you cards back into your deck when you deck out and take 1 damage. Damage is taken as cards from the top of your deck. Every 7 damage you level up and remove 6 of the cards from damage and move the last to a level zone to indicate how instances of 7 damage you have taken. You will shuffle your discard pile into your deck a few times each game and there are cards that cancel damage when they are revealed off damage, but they do stuff when you play them.

I came across this channel today and I have to say I love your videos, as a card game fan I find them very interesting to listen to. Thank you for these well researched videos 😍

When the whole game is designed around lifedecking, it very much works. Like, Blood Card is a slay-the-spire-alike, but it's gritty and a bit punishing. In game design and art. So match made in heaven :)

I'mma be real, I actually really like exactly 1 lifedecking system: the Zach Bell card game, where you arrange your deck instead of shuffling it and whenever you lose cards you also get two of the mana needed to cast more cards, so, for example, you get punched in the face for 4 damage, you now have 10 extra mana for whatever cards are now availible to you.

Card game players:I want to play my cards! Yugioh players:I want to... Opponent:ash... imper...veiler..

This video is especially interesting because i never heard of life decking. I also love that you are including many card games in those videos and not only your favorite 2.

You absolutely won me over with the fitting use of Ace Attorney Investigations music. Such an underrated game.

I love that MTG has a whole archetype devoted to this, it's called dredge. and let me tell you nothing is better and casting a turn 1 griselbrand in legacy.

Myths & Legends lasted over a decade with this system, falling to hubris and trying to redo the whole game.

at this point I am starting to really appreciate Pokémon's life system a lot more now

really love your TCG videos and this series in particular - thanks!

Oooohh good old Mitos y Leyendas, fun game but so unbalanced and with card texts so badly written. Many have already told in the comments about how it is a life decking game at how sucessful it was despite it, but my favorite part about that part of the game was how they tried to fix it. At the begining of the game's lifespan, when you took damage it went to the graveyard, and with time, more and more cards started to interact with the graveyard, allowing them to be played from there. At some point it got so common that it seemed that the graveyard was a part of your hand. Gold cards (your resources), creatures and every other type of card could be played from there. During this process, the game designers decided that they needed a new zone where the cards could not come back from, and called it the exile. Being able to exile a card was a huge deal, but then some cards started to interact with it and the floodgates were open again. Many cards could either come back into play from the exile or move to the graveyard, so with the exile lost its purpose. What did the game designers do to fix this problem? Make another zone! This time they just said that cards could be removed from the game and this time for real they could not come back. This lasted a few years until the game got rebooted and finally canceled. Now, the game started around 2000-2001, and the exile zone was implemented around 2003-04. The whole remove from game showed up around 07-08 and the game died in 2010 I think. During this time the cards got severe powercreep and suffered a bunch of changes that with time killed the playerbase. During the peak of its popularity Mitos y Leyendas was even released in english in the US (I still have some english decks that I bought when the company that made the game was clearing its inventory) and german, but clearly wasn't as popular as it was in its country of origin, Chile, and Mexico.

I still play Duel Masters!

The idea of giving you cards as your life total goes down was also something used in elder scrolls legends. Which I thought was a pretty cool system

This is the first time I learned of you. Absolutely stellar video. Can't wait to see more.

How does Vanguard's damage system not fall into your main point of losing access to cards you want to play? Very confused in it being grouped in with the shield games.

kohdok: Mark Rosewater might be qualified to talk about cardgames you guys Me: looks at The current State of standard

I really liked Panini DBZ which uses Lifedecking as a main win condition. A ton of cards have Endurance X where the card stops you from getting hit for X damage for the attack it would be put into the graveyard on (so if you take 5 damage, on your 3rd card it has endurance 3 you would stop taking damage there with 1 of the damage reduction from endurance being wasted). There are a ton of cards and strategies that interact with the graveyard and Rejuvenation is everywhere (where you put the card from your graveyard back into the life deck). Finally there are a few other win conditions, including Dragon Balls which can't go to the graveyard unless an equivalent ball is on the field (so they are never really gone as a win condition).

Recently Shadowverse added a Fusion mechanics which allows you to just feed cards to another card, which is often used for decks with a lot of cycle mechanics and/or that card comes with a cycle mechanics of itself. I've always loved the cards that allows me control of my deck and actually use the deck as opposed to just "You probably wouldn't touch the other half of your deck unless something went terribly wrong," situation that it was before. Discarding cards, especially key ones, because your hand is full also feels bad so it's been great for me. I've always liked the Artifact Portal and Spellboost Rune playstyle so having parts of those decks' playstyle available to other classes just makes it really fun for me.

"You don't play cards you don't want to use" Gem-Knight Garnet:

Cardfight Vanguard uses life decking and its just fine XD

I thought about it more and I think I understand why bakugan went with life decking as a mechanic. The primary purpose all seems to come back to their value of spectacle and creating a game that’s fun to watch being a huge priority. Life decking creates a clear visual representation of one’s life total which makes it easy to follow, just like the other physical life resource discussed in the video, but to a grander scale. It then takes one of the most engaging suspense aspects of vanguard and amplifies it. The lower probability of hitting that needed trigger somewhat lowers the anticipation (by comparison) behind it as there is less of an expectation. Where as with bakugan each card milled gets more suspenseful, with big attacks it is less a question of if but when the flip will appear and each result has a big impact every damage dealt is an important resource (and seeing those blows to a strategy is definitely enjoyable/engaging to watch from an audience perspective) and being able to stop a hard attack early can be critical as they are now far from another team attack or had used valuable resources to get a larger attack in. See the cage matches at the conventions the most hype moments are counting down the cards from large attacks or the audience in shock as a pact of darkness is flipped on the first card of a massive team attack. Is this necessarily the best design for gameplay enjoyment probably not, but it is a weakness they took and spectacle was likely a reason they took it. Furthermore there are two other strategic elements that I think they wanted that fed into this system or was gained by this system. Firstly, I think they really wanted a secondary stat that could be manipulated. (and really you can only add so much critical to a card when they only have 6+ possible life cards) this stat could be messed around with to balance some bakugan or to make other bakugan even more enticing. I feel they especially wanted it for alternative win con cards which while _might_ be a bit uninteractive, it is once again enjoyable to watch upset battles turned around by a Mac/MOC. They could have also just had it were critical = something like damage divided by 5 rounded up to the nearest whole number and have only 8 shield cards/damage (and honestly I’d be done to have a format like that) but it would have lost the previously mentioned spectacle. Lastly Flip cards shouldn’t be looked at as a comeback mechanic the are a probability tool where a player will need to gauge the chances of them stopping the attack of that nature and whether or not to expend their energy. There’s an entire strategy behind know when to cut one’s losses, getting certain flips online, saving energy till after the damage phase to play certain cards... etc and by contrast when attacking you can make plays to avoid flips by using specific cores, recollecting which factions bypass their flips, using frost strike... etc. It’s less of a randomizing antisnowball mechanic and more of a tactical one to be worked around. This isn’t to say it isn’t a mechanic with its own share of problems, (it definitely does,) just looking into the potential strengths and reasoning behind those systems. (I really doubt the high damage came from flip cards and not the other way around. Had it been the case of flip cards not being played at all, I feel like they would have just made them better either with comeback capabilities or lower costs)

The rosewater gdc talk is *so* good, even if you have 0 interest in designing your own game I highly recommend it

What is your deal why do you hate Vanguard so much

Even though it doesn't have it, I could point to Yu-Gi-Oh as something that *could* make a lifedecking approach work. Mainly because of strategies that Lightsworn, or Lightsworn Zombies, or Lightsworn Infernoids, or That Grass Looks Greener - decks that function by throwing their own cards from the deck to the graveyard, and then use the graveyard as a resource. A "second hand" I've often heard it described as on the Pojo forums. And I'd say the easiest fix to the "Flip" cards would be: make cards that have a Flip effect, but also a normal effect. Again, comparing to Yu-Gi-Oh, cards like Galaxy Cyclone, Breakthrough Skill, and Lost Wind succeeded in self-mill decks because they were useful in the discard, but if you drew them, it potentially gave you two uses. And then Mischief of the Yokai and similar cards didn't have an identical effect in the discard, but still had something.

As someone who is currently designing their own home made card game, this video helps me out.

The WWE card game Raw Deal actually did this pretty well surprisingly.

I feel like life decking makes for a more serious and competitive game because you are punished for losing life, making you think about how to better counter or overpower your opponent, and when your best cards aren’t available, it makes you get creative and work with what you have

I'm from Chile, and i used to play (Before the PowerCreep attacked and damaged very severely the game) "Mitos y Leyendas" (Myths and Legends), a game with historic and mythological references. And that game uses LifeDecking... and uses none of the above mentioned sistems... But OH BOY it Homosexually and Heterosexually abuses three things, shuffling cards in to the deck, draw power and the Exhume mechanic. The first one is obvious, but damn, i could shuffle a QUARTER OF MY DECK EVERY TURN once i got my Hero deck up and running. And the Exhume mechanic allows you to play certain cards from your discard pile, and if it is an Talisman (The equivalent of a sorcery in Magic) it banishes itself, but it remains indefinitely in the board if it is an Ally (Creature). And finally... you could draw almost all of your deck with the right set up... and believe me, it was somewhat easy. The game has one type of resource to pay, gold, and cards are somewhat cheap, most of them not exceeding 4 gold. So you can see explosive comebacks if your opponent's deck is an Exhume deck, or your damage could be ABSOLUTELY IRRELEVANT if he can just take his discard pile and suffle it back. It was an awesome game.

I really like the how the digimon card game uses its security system, since every single card has a use in the security stack

back when it was popular, my friends and i would play the DBZ card game. one friend had a namekian deck that had so much regen potential that he'd get every bit of damage he recieved back into the deck at every turn

As a Star Wars CCG vet, can confirm most of his points haha

Did you actually change the backs of your Cardfight!! Vanguard cards to say Cardfight!! Voldemort instead?

I once agreed with this, but no longer do. There's functionally no difference between lifedecking and having a normal life system, except that it punishes drawing a bit more. If you simply discard cards face-down, and if you want you can make them discarded from the bottom of your deck, you can remove the problem of players seeing the cards that were discarded and being sad they can't use them. Discarding from bottom of deck also means that if you have cards that do interact with face-down cards in discard pile, they can reassure themselves they'll never get to play it anyways since it was at the bottom of their deck. If your card game has very few search cards, then lifedecking really isn't very different from normal life mechanics, so I wouldn't bother trying to change it up, but the main benefit of punishing draw might be worth it to make card draw not a purely good thing. This can make some cards in hand useless if you have 2 cards left in deck when a card in your hand let's you draw 3, but it also creates interesting moments. Do I draw the last 2 cards in my deck and try to get a win this turn since my opponent only has 1 card left, or do I try to stall out my opponent even though my hand is, defensive-wise, really weak. This is already common in games with a singular card that can mill you until you have few cards left in deck, such as Maokai or The Watcher from LoR who mills you until you have 4 cards left in deck, which I do find interesting, and lifedecking will make these scenarios more common.

One of the best tcgs I have ever played uses life decking. I'm surprised it wasn't mentioned, or maybe you never got a chance to play it. The panini dragonball z tcg. Some attacks would deal damage in life cards. For life card damage you would flip cards from your life deck into your graveyard. Cards could have an endurance number on them. If one of those is flipped, you have the option to exile the card with endurance and that would absorb that number of life cards of damage. Eg, you are hit with 5 life cards of damage. The second card you flip has endurance 3. You can exile that card and not have to take the next 3 damage. You can also interact with your discard pile. And as part of playing, any turn you don't enter combat, you put the top card of your discard pile at the bottom of your deck

Why do you dislike Vanguard?

I mean bakugan did made life deck more interesting and nobody knows if they make a card or bakugan that can say put the card that's in the gy or discard pile goes to your hand or back to your deck and they might just make a flip card that can be used for your hand like like hand traps I know it might be over power but if they do it right then its coming better then most life decks

I quite enjoy the life decking system in Weiss Schwarz. The cards that go to damage or get milled into the waiting room always come back, and there are quite a few cards that allow you to manipulate where cards are. It also uses horizontal cards called "climaxes" that have the dual purpose of canceling damage from incoming attacks when flipped, and giving you access to temporary buffs and powerful "climax combo" effects when played from hand that can do any number of very fun things.

The Naruto CCG actually had a pretty neat version of lifedecking. An attack directly to the player earns 1 battle reward if

Every game : milling your deck is bad Me an intellectual: laughing in my light sworn deck

Does he not like vanguard lol

Fftcg uses its damage zone quite well with its EX Burst mechanic, which when you take damage from an attacking forward, you put the top card of your deck into the damage zone. Victory is achieved when your opponent reaches 7 damage, but there are various ex bursts that can be utilised that could help turn the tide of battle. Some that deal with opposing monsters, some that can either give you or deprive your opponent of resources. Additionally, these cards with ex bursts can also be played. I've had games where defeat was all but inevitable, but got that 1 extra resource that allowed me to pull it back at the last moment.

Bakugan's flip cards probably could work if they had another, weaker effect if they're played from your hand.