RESOURCE CARDS! (Playing Around #1) Seven Deadly TCG Sins
Kohdok
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That’s right, a new series on card design! Rather than looking at bad designs or exploring important design milestones, “Playing Around” seeks to explore the ups, downs, advantages, and disadvantages of common game design elements.
Resource Cards: Love em or hate em? Deck filler or Draft Compensators? Completely pointless or the very thing the game revolves around? Opinions on their use and different approaches to resources are as old as the genre itself, but is there more than meets the eye to such systems?
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26.02.2023
Serious question, but what are your true feelings on YuGiOh? Im new to your channel and was binging your videos (which im loving BTW) but every time YGO comes up it seems to be in a negative connotation.
I totally understand why youd not like it from a design perspective. but im wondering what your honest opinion on the game as a whole is?
What game is 10:26¿
Damn, I thought I was being spoiled when I saw the Naruto CCG getting a mention, but Neopets too?! Well, I'm glad SOMEONE still remembers it…because the current site owners sure don't. @_@
I have been brainstorming a card game that has a sort of hybrid mana and resource card system, where you would effectively have a base pool of mana that can be increased as the game goes up using special cards.
(Edited for added clarity)
breaking news, man was struck with chair after sharing hyperfixation
😅😂
BUDDYFIGHT MENTIONED!!!!!
The absolute disscontempt in his voice when he said yugioh😭
12:14 ah yes, like my italian grandma used to say all the time,
Trust me.
Personally, I much prefer sacrifice as a currency over crappy MTG Lands.
Feels more like a strategy game than having to rely on a specific hand just to play cards.
Ive been watching your channel for a while and while watching ive been making my game. I do take what you say into consideration when making my game and I will say the resource system is by far one of the most annoying things to get down since aside from the win condition it is the second most important thing to all card/board games. And because of that, I have ecpermented with many types of resource systems but I have finally came up with a way make the resource system work. Although I havnt tested it in theroy it should work, and I like it. My game is a skirmish war game built with card game mechanics.
I think you forgot of a few reviews of games. (Then again if you do card game reviews then I can hear the humor.)
Ayo bro, I'm making a card game and I started development almost a year ago. I'd love to show you what I have so far, there a place to pm?
Nice to see Buddyfight in a video
"Dump all their power cards all at once.." I'm looking at you Red Alert from Deciphers Star Trek
The yugioh video is inevitable; one day you'll have to dive into the nitty gritty of modern yugioh
Dear god, that outro with the spiderman 2 pizza music was nerve racking, I didn't think kohdok was going to finish in time.
What do you mean by Yu-Gi-Oh having ways around the 1 normal summon so much that it doesn't matter? Extra Normal Summon effects are insanely rare (basically no archetype has them other than dedicated no special summon decks like Floo) and excedingly powerful (like with Brilliant Fusion into Seraphinite)
Almost every meta deck uses their normal summon as a starting point for their combos and disrupting the normal summon often changes the direction of the entire turn. I really really wonder what you meant by this?
I'm excited to watch every episode you upload of this new series, your Seven Deadly Sins series helped me adjust my own card game. I love your vids keep it up!
this channel is very cool
Yes! This is the kind of analysis I need!
About the Hearthstone mana system being used physically, I was going to mention you could just have a mana deck and you draw a card of each each turn, but apparently there is a card game that does this?
(Also I really love how Legends of Runeterra lets you save mana in order to cast spells later, but it's probably not feasible at all on paper.)
I always love how every Yu-Gi-Oh hater's entire justification for hating even having to utter the word "Yu-Gi-Oh" is essentially just "game too fast. Me not keep up."
Y'all do realize that the lack of a resource system and the ability to just play the damn game from the second you draw your opening hand is the very reason we're Yu-Gi-Oh players, right?
Every other game is just too slow. Magic in particular is just downright boring by comparison.
I'd like to hear your opinions on the Don deck mechanics one day. You definitely have a source of expertise when it comes to game mechanics so it'd be nice to hear what your thoughts are about it. I haven't played the game too much but i do enjoy the gameplay if only at a casual level.
It's staggering to see the amount of new game designers trying to "solve" the resource card problem as their first game.
Idea: Any card as resource + charge and draw. BUT, you also have the option of just blindly playing the top card of your deck as a resource, except without drawing (since doing this wouldn't decrease your hand size). So if you have something in hand that you'd like to replace, you can drop it as a land/energy and draw a new card, but if you really like your whole hand, or you're facing decision paralysis, you can just play something off the top and see what happens. The main downside of pulling resources off the top would be that you don't necessarily know what type/element/faction of resource you're getting if you're playing a multi-faction deck, but that seems like a relatively minor issue, especially in the mid-to-late game.
Wow. This is a cool new series. It can give a lot of nuances. I look forward to more episodes. Resource cards are a good example. Land cards are very traditional and reliable for MTG. However it is also one of the most criticized part of the game. So it is worthy of discussion. I am glad Kohdok made a whole video about this. I didn't know there were two factors, dedicated and sturdy. I wonder if going in between can help. I played around with resources in my own game design. So I have my ideas.
There is dedicated vs any. I know how frustrating it can be to have a third of a MTG deck be taken up by land. It puts limits on deck building. Oh well. At least the sideboard helps. Developing any card as resource can help. However in the video, I learn that there is a downside. It is difficult to pick which card to use as resource. I did figure out one way to have a middle ground. There are definitely specialized cards used for resource. However they provide some kind of other benefit. I was experimenting with it. There are different kinds resources for different attributes, and they have different colors. They not only provide energy but they also provide passive strengths that the attribute has. It can be things like increasing or decreasing damage under certain circumstances. The video got to special resource cards. That does remind me of what I was doing. So my aim was to make all resource cards work like special resource cards. Now I think there may be a better way to do this. Just have every resource card have two options. The main option is to tap them as normal resources. They can tap later during the opponent's turn. This is good for instants like counter spells and battle tricks. Alternatively the resource card can be tapped to have a small but beneficial effect on its own. It is like the special hero abilities in Hearthstone. They are good for dumping excess mana crystals during a turn. The resource cards can take the place of low level spells that would cost one mana anyway. Oh my gosh! I just figured out how this would work in MTG. It is brilliant! Here is how it goes. Tapping a forest gives a +1/+1 boost to any creature. Tapping a mountain deals 2 damage to any target. Tapping a swamp gives a -1/-1 weakening to any creature. Tapping an island makes the user scry. Tapping a plains heals the user by 2. This would free up the deck from low level spells. Save the early game for the cheap and weak creatures. I wonder if there can be a rule that taping two islands lets the player draw a card. I hope that is fair.
The last part was a little bit fast (where you mentioned different ressource systems), so I have a question: What games do exist where the cards itself generate a ressource (like tokens, coins or dice on the card) on every of your turns they stay on the field that can be used to play special effects of the cards itself or have to be paid for specific cards like evolutions?
Isn’t Pokémon energy a resource?
You hating on yugioh
the memory gauge from Digimon / Chrono Clash system or the way WoW TCG did it (basically every card can be played face down as resource and special cards are put face up for special effects)
Mistake though: Dinosaur King has some kind of "scaling Resource" since the level of the Dino you are "summoning" is based on the turn your in (turn 3 = up to level 3 dinos)
Considering what was the meta last format, there's never been a better time to argue in favor of resource cards in yugioh
Duel masters is genius because it’s resource system wouldn’t work without the shield mechanic literally separating the board.
1:13 HOW DARE YOU! You are showing all five lands out of WUBRG order! HOW DARE YOU!!
The single Snow-Covered land isn't AS triggering but still wrong!
2:27 ARUGH!
11:48 Man, I miss V:TES. I managed to get TWO games in real life for it and used to play on-line a bunch but both dried up. Though technically the on-line games didn't "dry up" instead it was more that lots of people stopped playing and the ones who stayed only ever ran the same decks.. ..
Thanks for the video Kohdok, other than the grave sin of showing all five Basic Lands out of WUBRG order. TWICE!
Ok, i feel a little attacked. What do i need to do to get my game playtested
I just noticed Timeless river in the background 😂
I don't think that Yugioh's problem in its game flow was the lack of resource cards, for most of the game's life span it was one where the card flow was pretty stable which was how things were kept reasonable. Cards like Pot of Duality which was just one excavate of the top 3 cards were staples, and the illustrious +1 is so powerful in that game that people are willing to banish a quarter of their deck for it even today. Or people who are so allured by the +1 of a card like Ra Sphere Mode they might choose to main deck it even if a Kaiju is more consistent. The game had decks that could be described as "glass cannons" where they could smack an absurd board on turn 1 but if they got hit by a powerful card like Lightning Storm they'd pretty much need to scoop because they simply didn't have the resources. It was one where the resource in question was just that most cards don't have any form of inherent protection so if you committed too much to a board, you could get punished for overextension.
As mentioned in the video, the cards in hand were themselves a resource system that was used, the PROBLEM was that over the years there came too many cards that refresh the hand, field, or GY. It's like if a card game that used a resource system had monsters that said when they enter play you can gain a resource and when they leave play you can also gain a resource such that playing the card it first pays for itself and also if your opponent gets rid of it then it isn't even a loss because it also replaces itself.
Kohdok can you made a video about tcg packaging
2:06 Looking at you Yu-Gi-Oh matches that take 1-2 turns to win
A common refrain is that resource cards create non-games, but the fact is card games have variance. Non-games happen in just about any card game. Bricking is universal, and developers manage this reality through rulesets, while players manage this via deck construction. You can brick in yugioh and you can brick in magic and you can brick in digimon and you can brick in hearthstone, all you and the devs can do is minimize it.
Kohdok, would you believe that the Playing Around logo uses my favorite shape and my two favorite colors? I just thought that was weird.
Redakai, despite its many flaws, had its incrementing resource system copied by Hearthstone. I always thought that was kinda funny.
I've been looking forward to this series. I appreciate the philosophy of there being no bad mechanic as long as it serves the goal of the game (granted the goal contains a positive experience). I think it's a good point that while designated resource cards offer some potential downsides, they are also an avenue of design space which is lost when they're done away with. It's a decision for the game designer to make based on what they'd like to accomplish.
Conceptually I like lands. The problem is they're not exciting or fun when you pull a rare land, they're just things you "need" if you want to play competitively, so having to shell out for a full playset of four cards that just make your deck function is boring and greedy.
Ngl I do love the resource mechanic the World of Warcraft TCG implemented.
I've been thinking of an idea for a resource mechanic. It's a volatile resource, that you can acquire by taking damage, or by directly paying life. In playtest I find it keeps the game moving at a fast clip since every action puts either you or your opponent closer to losing, but I'm not sure how other players would feel about it. I;m worried it would make people hesitant to actually play their cards.
One topic I think would be very interesting to cover would actually be the namesake, errata text. How different games handle it and what they tend to change or avoid changing, and even some of the discussion could be about whether to use errata text or to use bannings.
There isn't an inherent problem with dedicated resource cards, but there are two significant problems with the presence of dedicated resource cards that should have been explained in greater detail: mana screw and mana flood.
Mana screw occurs when you don't draw enough resource cards to adequately play the game, creating a non-game where one player plays a single-player game while the other doesn't get to play at all. The difference between mana screw and other forms of being unable to play cards in your hand is that mana screw can happen in any deck regardless of its composition, whereas most other forms of being unable to play your cards (such as having expensive cards you don't have the mana to play yet or having spells that need a target that currently doesn't exist on the board) are a direct consequence of how the deck is composed. One is a byproduct of core game mechanics, while the other is a byproduct of player choices, and that changes how the experience is perceived.
Mana flood occurs when you draw too many resource cards that you can't use over several turns. This causes an issue in the later stages of the game, where the game will either slow down to a crawl or will end in an unsatisfying manner as one player wins because the other player just didn't draw anything. The difference between mana flood and just plain old topdecking useless cards is that you don't get to make decisions with the resource cards you draw, but could make decisions with the non-resource cards you draw.
Both of these problems mitigate the skill expression that card games provide while also creating the two single worst experiences in card games. This is from someone that will forever vouch for Eternal, one of the best digital-only hidden gems of a CCG that uses dedicated resource cards and my main CCG at this point.
By contrast, cards that double as resources are probably so popular because you don't have those experiences of mana flood and mana screw because you will never have resource cards you can't use and never be unable to gain resources if you have cards in your hand. Mythgard also had an interesting take on the idea in that using cards as a resource put them back into your deck so you could play them again later on, at the expense of being unable to use them as a resource later on, so in a digital format there's very little reason not to use cards as a resource when you can get the benefits of both dedicated resource systems and cards as resource systems without any of their drawbacks.
What games use Charge and Draw ?
7:20 I dunno, all the stuff described here doesn't seem like it's limited to dedicated resource cards. I don't see why any resource card games couldn't also have a lot of these things, cards that have better function than usual resource generation. Sure, that means taking up more space on the card to explain them/have the proper symbology, but it's absolutely doable. I wouldn't call this an advantage dedicated resource card games have over any resource card games.
And as a random nobody on the internet with very limited experience with card games, my opinion is clearly as valuable as someone for who this is a profession!