TCG Design - Why is 5 colours so common? 

not to mention with 5 colors you get imperfect symmetry across the colors which makes each one feel unique, while an even number of colors will often result in each color having a direct opposite, which makes the 5 color option feel more interesting and expansive than 2-3 mirrors

Something that coulda been brought up is how MtG uses a color wheel where adjacent colors share in identity and tend to mix more easily. Like big creatures in red/green, counter and removal from spells in blue/black... 3 means you can't have opposites and at 6+ you start running out of core mechanics for factions to focus on or share. Source: my bong, but I find 6 color games often have a "big creatures" faction and a redundant "big creatures but worse somehow" faction, often ending up as the "a bunch of parasitic archetypes that don't mix in the color they're attached to" faction.

Saying white and black while showing yellow and purple messed me up 😂

Legends of Runeterra has 11 regions but you can only mix up 2 at a time while building your deck, based on which champions you want. Exceptions to this are double region cards which can be considered of one of the two regions and Runeterran champions. If you include a Runeterran champion in your deck it will give some unique deckbuilding rules (ex. including any 6+ cost from any region), but you will have only one of the other regions to choose from, since Runeterra still counts as a region. I think this is a great use of factions.

I like the approach that digimon took. There are 7 colors: 6 main and 1 support, but the identities are more tied to the different archetype families while the color just helps to tie it together and limit the deckbuilding space. You can even have the same archetype in different colors like wargreymon decks being built either with a red or black base. And then you have multicolored archetypes like hunters or xrosswars or full white decks when white is supposed to be more of a support/tech color. You have the flexibility of using archetypes as factions therefore not being strictly tied to a closed set of identities, but at the same time the colors help bring cohesion and player expression while at the same time it helps limit access to certain cards that could become problematic if every deck gained access to them.

As a vtuber and card game enjoyer seeing selen out of nowhere caught me offguard lmfao Love the video, btw! Card game design is always exciting to me so I'm a big fan

Really, if you have a question about tcg design, its because mtg did it.

It's worth pointing out that there was a time where even MtG analyzed including purple as a 6th color, generating opposite pairs which they liked: Green vs Purple, Blue vs red, Black vs white. There was enough reasons to consider it on flavor, but they ditched the idea because creating it would require removing things from other colors and giving them to purple. That and supply/logistic issues (you would need to print "City", purple land type cards and balance it enough to make it appealing) made them ditch the idea. Funny enough they did end up exploring a different space years later: Colorless. It did create interesting mechanics that interacted with zones that other colors don't usually touch, but balancing it became an issue. It's still a thing but used kinda rarely and as a sort of "you can do things other colors do but WAY less efficiently".

Kards WW2 currently has 9 factions.But player can choose only two factions in deck ( first faction must be one of main 5, and the other 4 can be as supporting factions). Theoretically, you can have three factions if card has keyword "Exile".

Mathemagics funfact : The total number of color combinations is equal to (2^X)-1, where X is your number of Colors. Now i can drift away in peace. Merry Christmas everyone !

Guilty of using red/purple/blue/green/yellow here 🤚 I loved your numbers explanation. It really helps visualize how quickly combinations grow. I will have to say there's a certain beauty with not having a predefined number of factions. Legends of Runeterra and I think Fire Emblem have factions and you use at most 2 in a deck, but they felt they could add more every now and then. (One Piece and Digimon also did this, but all 6 colors were planned from the start)

I think Yu-Gi-Oh tried to do a six color system with the attributes (Light, Dark, Earth, Water, Wind, and Fire), but the field and equip spells supporting them were so mid that no one cared 😂

Cool breakdown. I like finding TCGs with... interesting color choices. Like Aquarian Age having the red faction as the defensive, counter-magic color. Or the original DBZ game having red AND orange, and two greens. Also, love those old guild girls.

Working on a card game we designed an 8 color system but restricted each color to only play with one of 2 preset allies bringing to deck combos to 24 (25 if you include just playing neutral cards) as the color you start with matters quite a bit.

Another factor of the common colors is they are pretty universal in what they do across different games, because just seeing the color gives across the idea of what said color's playstyle is going to be. Such as Red being a very angry and aggressive color are the most aggro-based decks, while black is often associated with death so black decks play from their discard pile.

The digimon tcg (whos lead designer was deul masters) started with 5 main colors, but went up to 6. It has a 7th but thats specifically for special cards generally.

My favorite game, VS. System, and UDE's redesigned VS System 2PCG used named factions. The redesigned 2PCG basically made the factions irrelevant. But the teams were and are very important in Classic VS. It ended up being well over 30+ unique factions, each would have their own playstyles. It's similar to Yugioh archtypes.

Just found your channel and your content is amazing! Great work

Your videos are awesome, concise, educational and well put together!

4:44 one simply can't escape the rabbit hole.

Kind of fascinating, that MtG, as the first TCG, picked the aperantly best faction system right out of the gate. I mean, they did a lot wrong in the beginning, but this is a constant that works really really well. (Although you could argue, that Artifacts added some sort of 6ed colour to magic)

I like these theory vids. Been thinking of making something myself.

Great video and real helpful TCG knowledge! The game I’m working on uses 4 suits, 5 “colors” and 4/5 “traits” I hope I haven’t bitten off more than I can chew 😂

I most say I love yugioh's arch type way a lot more. Despite it being over done now, and too little early on

Really interesting video! I'm curious to know what factors can affect how many colours/factions a game should have. For example, if you have more design space, should you have more factions in order to properly split mechanics apart? How do the systems for mixing and matching factions affect that number?

I'm working on a deck construction game (ECG style) and used 3 factions. But that's mainly because I'm trying to make it a super-affordable ECG with small sets, and 3 factions is about all I can support unless I increase the set size (which would go against my main design goal).

Kamen Rider Build detected. Felt so happy seeing that out of nowhere

I'm currently making a TCG and I chose to design my cards with almost these exact five colors without even knowing😂 They just looked the best to me.

My faction system is kinda weird, there are 4 colors, but each one is only the primary aspect of 2 other sub factions, the game technically only have 4 colors of red, green, blue, and pearl, but inside the same color there are 2 others for more lore reasons (red is yellow + orange, blue is dark blue + cyan, green is light green + brown, and pearl is purple + white), I has been thinking a while if make it based on 4 or 8 colors (the big ones or the small ones), and thinking that you can make decks only of *up to* 3 colors I still think is too many variants to manage, I still wonder what's the answer, but this video help me see things a little more clear.

It also has ties to Chaos Magick (albeit 5 instead of 7 colors).

In Yu-Gi-Oh you have 6 "colors". There you have Wind (which is printed green) and Earth (which is printed black) and they both correspond to the green color in magic, I guess. But then again, the element in Yu-Gi-Oh doesn't really matter. Before it got archetypes it literally hardly mattered. And since it got archetypes they hardly matter compared to the much more important archetypes and summoning mechanics.

Interesting insight, have a sub!

(At 5m7s) How the fudge is the left shirt "red" when it is more orange? And the right looks normal red and not "dark red" since the more red would be crimson.

I'm at the beginning stage of thinking about maybe taking a crack at design, and I'm definitely bookmarking your videos and channel as valuable resources in that regard. One of the things that led me to this path was playing Epic Card Game and recognizing as a "rush to the good parts" Magic-like game. The thing I like least about it was its four faction/color system, specifically one being "Good" and one being "Evil". While Magic seems to tend towards White Good Black Bad more than it should imo, I think they work really hard to push back against that association often enough that I give them a B for effort. But having an even number as a color/faction system makes this kind of association too easy for my own personal design tastes. So in my initial brainstorm document I'm penciling in five colors for a good amount of complexity, or three if I want to focus less on that aspect. To try not to copy Magic's color wheel too directly, I'm penciling researching the Wuxing, the Chinese elements system, which seems more directional than Magic's ally/enemy combos.

Funny thing. I made two card games. One with and one without a color wheel. Odd thing is I felt more restraint from the colors even if I could break them into subsection on my game.

Magic and Duel Masters both have colorless factions which are colors from a gameplay perspective. The vast, vast majority of TCGs have 6+.

I’m making one based loosely off the Fossil Fighters games (without using any of it’s names or branding) which has 5 as well with Blue, Red, Yellow, Green, and White

What I'm designing kind of has a dynamic number of colors, in that there are some resources that almost everything is gonna need and will be produced by staple cards while others are more archerype-specific and often more powerful and difficult to produce.

Please do a video on Sorcery: Contested Realm and its grid system. It feels so basic yet innovative. I am having more fun than I have in years with card game.

I just found this channel and I love how it speaks my language: card games and otaku memes

Also with 5 colors you can balance the game like a game of rock, paper, scissors, spock where each color is strong against 2 and weak against the other 2. You can't get this effect on even numbers and general one color will be better than the others. If you use too many colors it gets harder to find a solution to balance the game and often it gets harder to make new cards as what each color does gets blurry.

Yup, even we designed a card game with the primary four colors.

I've honestly wanted to make an 8 colored game at some point. The way I thought of making it work was either having a commander type system, and or a resource side deck you can draw from. I still and struggling with making the game work though since I suck at making rules for it. More of a card design and not game rules guy >.>

I feel like you could have gone deeper on the kinds of effects or strategies that you would normaly want to apply to especific colours It would come back to your point about having too many colours risking having some of them being too gimmicky. I feel like the natural continuation of that point is to explore which abilities and effects aren't too gimmicky to have their own colours, but rather complement the game by having it

Anyone have a count on Yugioh factions (archetypes)? Are we in the triple digits yet?

5 Allows for an advantaged colour a disadvantaged colour and two neutral colours. It's a nice symmetry if that's your design space. If not 4 and 6 become more appealing.

5:26 Tofu

Without making a huge essay here, and I mean all of this in the most respectable way possible, but I consider the color pie to be similar to suits (spades, hearts, cloves, diamonds) found in playing cards. Noone suggests that Poker and Blackjack are copies of each other despite using the exact same cards/elements. For this reason, I think it is harsh to say that games are "trying to copy" Magic by using the color pie. It is just a commonly adapted element of TCG/CCG design. Its okay that these games borrow a design element of that game, but that doesn't make them copies for utilizing the color pie.

I think in recent years we've seen quite a few successful card games that use 6 Colors. Usually they'll have restrictions on total number of colors you can include in a deck. Final Fantasy TCG, Digimon, Lorcana, and the soon to be released Star Wars Unlimited. Legend of the 5 Rings was also pretty successful and that had 7-9 Factions usually. Lord of the Rings TCG from Decipher ran like 10 Factions. So I'm not sure its such a hard and fast rule.

btw the upcoming-to-the-west TCG, Union Arena, also has 5 colors.

YuGiOh, with all of it's archetypes... I'd say it'd be something like a 300 color color wheel. In Duel Master, back in High School, I always used decks consisting of 2 elements (1 with Fire and Light; or another with Dark and Nature) but I did that because I was going full on budget with my deck building. I simply didn't spend on them to have access to enough cards to build a proper mono element deck. Hence, why I always lost to 2 others, who spent a fortune on their decks. 1 of them being a really gosh darn expensive Armored Dragon deck, that just goes into Bajula as soon as it can, to prevent their opponents from having enough mana to retaliate properly, while the other guy having similarl strong decks of all 5 elements. I could sometimes beat his water or nature decks, depending on th eluck of his draws, but never his dark or light ones. He didn't really use hi sfire deck much, so there's that. But his fire deck was on par with the other guy's fire deck when they tried going up against one another using those, so I'd say that'd have wrecked me hard as well. Simply having a 5 color system however is not all the restrictions Duel Masters had. Beside elements, there were also card types, which thankfully, were all within their 1 element. (I played mostly before dual element cards were released) Meaning that even if many types of decks within an element had similar playstyles, the different types might have goneabout them differently. Let's say Fire as an example. There are Armored Wyverns which I really liked, but the good ones are costly to put on the field. (~ 6-8 mana each) But Humans, are cheap. While Armored Wyverns were really good in lte game beatdowns, Humans could potentially finish the match before we even got there, depending on what our opponent had. There were also Armored Dragons, who were in a similar situation to Armored Wyverns, but also had some decent low cost monsters to get by until they can put their high cost beatsticks on the field. Or if we go for light, when we associate with Blockers, the first type that comes to our mind are probably Guardians. Which is all well and good, but the best blocker I'veever seen in the game, was actually of a different type. Kuukai, Finder of Karma, was a Mecha Thunder. Which were usually more of a tech card in light decks. Also, there was 1 more card, that wasn't technically a blocker, but had a similar effect, with even higher numbers, and forcing out a really similar situation as Kuukai's effect: Bodacius Giant. Even if it only blocks the first attack. And it's a Nature card. I'd say, that having more than 2 elements in a deck never really worked out for anyone I played with, bu there are some advantages and disadvantages to both mono and dual element decks. Mono element advantages: You will most likely have the cards to play whatever tactic you're going for pretty easily, as your entire deck only has cards for that tactic. (If built right) Mono element disadvantage: Your deck will undeniably have a bunch of weaknesses, that are hard to get around, that could have been solved with including anothr element that's strong in that field. For example, Fire and Nature have no blockers (Bodacius Giant being the 1 card who can kind of block in nature doesn't count, technically not a blocker) meaning their deffenses are not that strong against simple beatdowns based on the number of monsters. You can force them into attacking your weak monsters once you've attacked with them, rather than your shields, to buy time with the weak ones, until you can get your big boys out. Alternatively, Darkness only has a handful of blockers, and they usually are either costly (compared to their strength, being the slayer blockers) or have a detrimental effect (for example: dies after 1 fight, regardless of how strong the enemy monster was) On the other hand, Light has a ton of blockers, and Water has a decent amount too. Another big difference is the ease of which different elements can get rid of monsters. Dark decks had a rather easy time doing this. To a certain extent, so did fire and nature, but for Light and Water, you really needed some specific cards to pull it off. (Diamond Cutter for example, was the biggest beatdown card for light decks) My reasons behind building my decks as mentioned above, was Fire being really goodat attachnig, while Light beingreall good at deffending, making it a solid combination; while for the other deck, Dark is really good at getting rid of stuff, but is costly. On the other hand, Nature provides a ton of mana, making it viable. I just paired elements that could help with whatever their biggest weaknesses were, within my just about nonexistent budget that i spent on the game.

As someone who is building a 6 colour card game in spare time I can say that even 6 is already creeping up on unmanageable. You're not only gonna have the magic's 4 colour cards problem, but also a 5 colour cards problem, as the big spicy rainbow cards are gonna be 6 colours. For those who arent in the know, the 4 colour problem is the problem of designing a compelling and mechanically sound 4 colour card, and then also putting it into a coherent draftable set. In Magic, there are exactly 2 cards for each 4c combination except blackless which has 3 (with 1 being bullshit).

Re: games without a faction system have a tendency to fall into one deck metas? I think this is more a function of making cards too compatible / generalist overall than strictly whether there is a faction system.

using vanguard to depict a card game that has too many different play styles because of the different clans might not be the best. while that most certainly applies to 2 of the formats, vanguard still has a standard format, which uses 6 main nations (Dragon Empire, Dark States, Keter Sanctuary, Brandt Gate, Stoicheia, and Lyrical Monasterio), plus some nationless cards that are either solid in any deck, or can use any of the 6 main nations for support. however, despite this, there are different decks that can be built from those 6 nations that use some of the key characteristics of those nations, and put their own spins on them

Not a TCG but Something I like about Eternal CG is the influence system. Basically, power cards (Eternals Lands) also have factions, and whenever you gain resource with one you generally gain influence in the corresponding faction. Cards have influence requirements on top of their cost, but your influence never decreases (with a few exceptions). This allows for some interesting balancing measures for 1 and even 0 drops, it allows 1 and 2 color decks to have some strong combos and synergies, and it helps to balance multifaction and neutral cards. The downsides are that if you're not getting Mana Screwed, there's a good chance you'll get influence screwed. And also it's a bit blatant that some factions and combinations are better than others. You could argue that Neutral cards are the 6th faction, but pretty much all neutral cards are worse versions of factioned cards, to compensate for the fact that they can work in any deck.

The sudden Selen surprised me

2:41 are those from a real game? Or are they just a made up example? Kamen Rider, Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, and Certain Magical Index seems like an odd combo, so it’s got me curious.

Some notable games that don’t follow this: LOTR TCG (uses cultures and you can mix up as many as you want); SWCCG (pretty much just Light vs Dark); Shadow Era (7 classes, 2 factions and no colors).

I could applaud but my hand was busy giving like!

well, digimon has 6 main color and one support color, while lorcana has 6 colors

Android: Netrunner (RIP) had 7 factions, divided into 4 corps and 3 runner classes, having two different sides allowed all 7 colors to be distinct without the combinatorial explosion of having 7 factions straight up.

what if someone is going for a "softer" approach to factions, like YGO attributes?

As someone trying to design a game with 12 "factions" (really 10, two of them are generic), going above 6 factions makes individual designs extremely difficult. I'm trying to make each of the 6 main elements alternate between slow and fast play styles alternatively: Fire is fast →Forest is slow → Wind is fast → Earth is slow → Thunder is fast → Water is slow → (we're back to Fire)... The hard part is holding back from putting an element of elemental RPS into the game because if I do, Mu and Divine cards (both "non-factions), especially the former because of their generic costs are just going to be the best due to no risk of blowouts. So the game would go into a "generic goodstuff pile is the best deck" situation.

5 is also important for asymmetry without direct opposition. White and Black are not opposites in a five colour system, and can be complimentary in their mechanics. Four and six colour systems come with an inherent sense of opposition between colours far apart, and when they lack that opposition it can feel meaningless to arrange them in any fashion.

In the early days of Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG there were 20 types, and if you want to run multiple types you could, which is why generic beatdown/stall was widely popular (until Magical Scientist FTK happened, but I digress), and six attributes, spell cards and trap cards, so realistically you had 28 factions to build a deck with, but generic beatdown was usually the go to meta option, due to how weak burn decks that weren't FTKs and chain burn, and stall burn keeps getting weaker with each new set released (unless you aren't playing back row hate in which case you're in for a bad time), archetypes just increase this number over time and Konami basically added generic 4 types as of writing this, making the number of generic factions 32. Stall decks also got weaker over time unless you're playing Crooked Cook Exodia Stall and your opponent had no way of inflicting damage out side of piercing and burn, which is usually the case for a lot of decks, unless you're playing a mill deck. Speaking of Mill decks, those decks got power-crept in oblivion thanks to the Forbidden/Limited list. Basically Konami hates stall decks that aren't battle focused or OTK focused (unless said stall deck causes players to not buy product then Konami hit with the ban hammer), and will only touch FTKs if it's consistent enough turn one to be a tier 0 deck, that forces every other deck to be unable to compete due to how slow every other deck is, which at this point Konami might as well print an entire FTK archetype that is consistent enough where the effect reads "If this effect resolves; you win the duel" because that's basically and clearly what competitive players want.

Dunno how you said 'white' when the colour shown is clearly yellow, and black when it's clearly purple. Also, as an example of a tcg with colours but not 5, Mythgard has 6 colours (blue, Yellow, Red, Green, Orange, Purple).

1:12 source?

rock paper scissors plus the mutual destruction 2

Vanguard literally had no use for nations until after they retconed the deck building system. People used to buy just common and play a deck called grade 1 rush to play aggro, dropping your whole hand and getting as many attacks in turn one asap. Eventually the made it nation locked because some clans had no support so you couldn’t fill a deck. Then eventually they went completely towards clans. The nations or colours don’t even have overlap in their mechanics with their clans outside of clones of the original clans. The closest theme for early sanctuary clans would probably be nepotism, insuring your vanguard can find something to ride it. Or dark zones soul manipulation, however other nations were equal or better at exploiting the soul, like magallagic, dragon empire, and sanctuary. Sanctuary had like six teir one decks in the first edition that relied on soul manipulation or just inadvertently created a big soul stack.

I'm starting to shy away from the restriction that you need X colour of RCC in order to play Y card, like white mana can only be used on cards that have the sun symbol. Imagine this, still my game but a big change: There can only be 12 RCC in your pool. You start out with 1. Every turn you gain 1, exhausted RCC go back to normal at the beginning of your turn. Your cards aren't the resource, instead, count the resources using a D12, or 2 D6s. There are 7 colours in my game, the whole rainbow, the 8th being White Light, the combination of those colours, but this only serves as identity, like Yugioh and their attributes. Every card is a one cost, however, you can only play cards that have a number/level that is equal to or less than the number of RCC in your pool, example: you have a LvL 3, 4, and 5 in your hand, you got the RCC count to 4, you can only use the LvL 3 and 4 cards in your hand, by using 1 RCC for each, you are left with 2, if you have LvL 4 or below cards in your hand after this, you can use them too, this may sound confusing, but looking back at my game that you know, it should make sense. This way things are simplified, and your Dice get to do more than sit around and be the deciding factor of who goes first. However, I might not include that, and instead the only change is that you aren't restricted by colour, that means your deck can have the whole rainbow and play, and instead of dice, you pitch a card to the RCC, and behold, MTG in disguise but you're aren't restricted by colour. Another however as I'm typing this, I only listed 2 possible outcomes of my game, but I looked at the first one and thought of something weird and unique: By using the dice or pitch a card RCC design. You can only play cards that have a LvL that is equal to or below the current UnExausted Cards/Dice RCC in your pool, using the first example but a twist: LvL 3, 4, and 5 card is in your hand. 4 RCC in your pool. You use one RCC to play the 3. But you cannot play the 4 or 5 because your RCC count is now at 3. How are these 3? Which one's more Fun to be in the game? The Dice. The MTG clone. The weird mechanic I made just now. And/or having colour restrictions but I can't use the dice?

I know it’s not a TCG but is a CCG, but it’s amusing to note that legends of runeterra has what is basically a 10(+) color system, but you can only pick one or two. And even with that only one of the “colors” really fails to have its own unique identity.

Me that is using 6 elements: fire, water, wind, earth, light and dark.

meanwhile, pokemon players:

I thought build divide had only 4 colors. Red, blue, black and white Also the game I'm making does things a little different with the 7 colors i have.

Since I love the Seven Sins, my HTCG has 7 colors 😅🎉😊

aha, just a reminder : Magic is actual a 6-color game, you simply forgot the artifacts, which are colorless, but still a ´color´ more than 5 !!

Is it always 5? Fantasy-related makes sense due to the 4 virtual alignments in D&D plus Neutral. But Pokemon doesn't have 5 colors and that's a top 3 game. Weiss has 4 colors... Legend Of The 5 Rings, a very early successful TCG is more like Pokemon in terms of colors. Star Wars Decipher is 2 color.

I feel like you could have gone deeper into this topic.

Pokemon started with 7 - although it's changed over time.

I always thought it was 5 for different reasons… For starters, 1 faction is the same as no factions, and factions are important otherwise there would be “The Best Deck™️” and the game becomes stale like early yugioh. Then 2 factions is also not good because there’s no real dynamic between the 2 factions, one beats the other and vice versa. So the simplest is 3 factions establishing a rock-paper-scissors dynamic. That style of dynamic, where some factions have an advantage over other factions, but can get countered by another, creates an interesting system, but R/P/S is not interesting, so we need more than just 3. If we go with 4, or any even number really, then we lose out on some of the structure of the checks and balances. What should the dynamic be between opposite corners of the square? We can establish an A>B>C>D>A system but A vs C and B vs D have either neutral interaction which is not interesting or they have undefined behavior which can’t be balanced without it being neutral. 6 factions is the only other unique even color choice because you can break it down into 2 cycles of 3 that somehow also form a 6 cycle but you’d still have issues about opposite corners. So if it can’t be even then it has to be odd, and it has to be more than 3. So our options are 5, 7, or way too many factions for a stable and lasting system to keep designing cards for. 7 is a little too complex so designing for it might be difficult, it’s easier to choose the simpler option which is 5, and you get some benefits from it. In 5 colors, you can establish opposite factions without needing to make an exact opposite version. In Magic’s system, the things that white does are the opposites of things red and black do, but not just red or just black. And things that red and black have in common are things white does the opposite of. White has life gain, red has damage and black has life loss. Neither red nor black is the exact opposite of white, but they were positioned on the opposite side of the pentagon and can be designed as a pair to be the opposite of white. Some goes for any faction. The pair of factions on the opposite side of the pentagon form a sort of negative faction from the opposite single faction. You get the opposites dynamic that even numbered faction systems have while still avoiding any 2 single factions being opposites and having a neutral dynamic. If black was the exact opposite of white then a black deck vs a white deck would just be them counteracting each other. White gains life, black drains it. Black destroys one creature, white puts out many creatures. White has many creatures so black destroys all creatures. Black reanimates creatures so white exiles them, etc. Exact opposites would just be going back and forth having hard counters to all of the pros of playing that faction. In magic’s case, white has enchantments which black can’t destroy easily, and black has discard effects while white can’t draw easily. As they are not perfect opposites, there are facets of their design which the other faction doesn’t oppose. So 5 colors or factions has the structure of 3’s Rock/Paper/Scissors dynamic, the “opposite faction” capability of even numbered factions, and the complexity of having more than 3, but not so much complexity as 7. 5 has all the best parts of the other options without the worst parts. As for the specific 5 colors, I saw it as the traditional RGB colors for fire, water, and grass like pokémon, having a R/P/S dynamic, and then black and white as a light and dark dynamic, arranged in a way such that effects that you would naturally attribute to each color thanks to color theory were opposite to effects that were opposite, and adjacent to effects that were similar…

After play MtG for 30 years, I switched to Grand Archieve. No land cards. You chose a chanpion an combine with 3 elements. Today there as 8 champions, 4 with 2 level 3 variants; 3 basic elements.

Digimon with 7 and Elestrals with a planned 8:

It's simple really, rock paper scissors lizards spock.

RGB my ass. Yu-Gi-Oh sigma colouring Orange, Pink, Turquoise Purple, Navy blue

No one: [Enters Lorcana]

Animate wall lol

MTG technically has a 6th colour in colourless.

Legend of the Five Rings had originally seven clans, became eight when Shadowlands Horde fans whined loud enough (Spider Clan)

Really wish this had gone more in depth...

MTG now kinda has 6 colors or maybe you can call it 5 1/2 colors !? Although the name is called “colorless” you need to be able to produce nonbasic mana to cast spells like “spatial Contortion”. I’m doing my best to make a card game and I’d like to do 7 colors but like you said it’s an enormous combination of decks. Thanks for the tip on the color orange as that might’ve been one of the colors but you make a great argument there seeing as it’s close to red. I’m doing my best to make it like a super light orange and very dark red for contrast.

I'm sorry that this comment has nothing to do with your video. I actually tried to comment on your other video (design log 4) but it just wasn't showing up so I'm trying to get the message across here. I - like many others here - am a fan of your game. I'm sure you would love for your game to be played by us and make you some well-deserved money. If art costs are prohibiting you from doing that, I would urge you to drop 10-20 dollars on AI art and get good-looking cards, then try to crowdfund it. Although there is still a lot of AI hate, WONDRLND uses AI art and has been funded. So have a couple of other small campaigns. I think as time goes on, people will come around. And finally, I'm willing to bet that players - me being one - would prioritise having a good game to play on weekends. It's just a huge bummer that this may be as far as it goes. I'd love for you to be able to take your work all the way to the finish line.

Digimon stays winning with 127 possible color combinations.

False facts there is a tcg with 6 Colors lol

Honestly. You didn’t actually say anything of significance in this video. No actual reason other than the obvious “you have more combinations”.

What card game is that build card from at 2:41