Things that suck about Collectable Card Games...

[edmonddantes]

Choose which of these you think is the worst aspect (or, if you think of one I didn't list, name it):

A) The complete randomness of everything--even the primary means of distribution, booster packs, are an unknown until you take them home and open them (yeah you can buy cards directly but that's more expensive)

B) The need to have an encyclopedic knowledge of what all is available to be competitive

C) Those times when you're fecked just because you drew a bad hand or aren't getting the cards you need, to the point where "searcher" cards that dig specific ones out of your deck are practically a must--which makes you wonder why there's a random element at all.

D) Those times the duel comes to a screeching halt because both players are confused about a nuance or aspect regarding a card effect that isn't clear, so you end up having to look up rulings on the internet (and half the time it turns out the specific question that came up was never answered)

E) Having to deal with terminology and wondering what it means (like what, exactly, is the difference between being "destroyed and sent to the graveyard" versus merely being "sent to the graveyard?" -- this example probably gives away exactly what game inspired this post) In casual play its not so bad but apparently at higher levels people really nitpick this stuff.

[moran]

Regarding D, you're lucky to have the internet as a source. In the beginning all you had was the tiny guide that came with starter decks or maybe an issue of Inquest that may or may not cover that.

[Maciej Miszczyk]

F) the fact that they're usually more or less pay to win

[silentstorm]

G) the fact that the most played CCGS are years old with good cards from all ages of the games, it is really hard to get into older games like Magic The Gathering and Yu-Gi-Oh, due to both being old and having gone through many rule changes and additions to the games like Planeswalkers or Pendulum Summons that just make the games increasingly hard and more expensive to get into, explains why Hearthstone(which is already getting into the same problem) and other games like Hex are becoming more popular.

Hell, Hex from what i have heard is just mostly an Magic The Gathering clone, which already started with all the types of cards and there are much less cards you need to know about, making it much easier to get into.

[The Great Klaid]

I was wondering why I woke up 14 hours ago in a dead sweat.

A lot of that is pretty right though. But Magic's fixed a lot of it. Except for A and B. For example G is pretty easily solved by Magic's Standard Format. Which only uses two years worth of cards. And the pay to win has gotten a lot better. Last season they reprinted Searcher lands alongside special lands that could be searched for instead of your Five Basic lands. And everybody uses the Searcher lands. Even the formats that can use every card printed. And a deck without them just loses to one with them. It was pretty irritating. Which is also why for the most part they've gotten rid of searchers. To the point of outside of the lands there are none in the inbetween format, Modern. Which is all of the cards from 2003 onward, when they changed the frames. At least not really. Some are practically, but there's usually a heavy cost attached to it.

But all that said, if you have an encyclopedic knowledge of what's competitive you can play pretty cheaply if you want to. Enough nights at the local store come down to me, the owner, and another kid in the top bunch. The former two playing weird decks that popped into their head. Usually I'm getting quite a bit of help from the owner. Because I can play any deck well enough, but I'm pretty awful at building them. And the third one just shows up rifles through the free box and fights in the finals. He once told me he gained a lot of respect for me because I always just stuff him down in the same events he just facerolls, back when I was new.

But good CCG's I feel that money is a crutch for skill and experience. And they don't even really help. Because the most expensive cards in Magic tend to be utility. Like Lands or Mana generation. Although it's not to say you don't have some flavor of the week cases. www.mtggoldfish.com/price/Magic+Origins/Jace+Vryns+Prodigy#paper, that little shit's price graph will show you. He's a useful card, but he's not great.

Of course this is to say nothing of bad CCG's like Yugioh. Or flawed ones like the new DBZ or even the old DBZ. Because Yugioh has a bad problem with picking the best archetype and then everyone plays that. And even a rogue deck has a hell of a time beating whatever's big at the time. Because having 40 cards that all say "This will break the rules of the game". This is garbage when you build decks that are value. Which are cards that get the most bang for their buck. Usually with some synergy thrown in. But, I mean being able to reliably play a huge beatstick is nothing compared to whatever the fuck that one deck I played at that tournament, yes one. And no it's not specific. Everytime I go to a tournament It's always one deck I play against all night, and it always does the same damn thing. Something about, well because you have cards in your hand these all get to jump in and out of my deck in a certain order and then I wipe the field and swing lethal.

[silentstorm]

I did not even know there was a new DBZ card game, as for Yu-Gi-Oh, it kinda feels like only fans of the anime or people who pick it for being popular play the game.

Seriously, that game and Pokemon TCG are not exactly well regarded, though Pokemon has the heavy reliance on coin tosses to thank for that.

Honestly, it seems the CCG community goes mostly for Magic, Netrunner and Hearthstone with everything else being less popular and not as well regarded as the first two, particularly Yu-Gi-Oh and other anime card games...though Vanguard is suprisingly popular.

Also, there are tons of CCGS, only recently i found out about UFS, Universal Fighting System, a card game revolving about characters from fighting games like Street Fighter, King Of Fighters, Soul Calibur and Darkstalkers fighting each other, but it was not very popular(i certainly never heard about it despite the characters and franchises it used) and the game seems to have quietly died, shame, because it is sincerely the SNK VS Capcom CCG just with more fighting game characters from other companies(and other games, it also had Mega Man and Warhammer characters) and that should have made it one of the most popular card games ever.

[edmonddantes]

My cousin recently got back into Yu-Gi-Oh due to nostalgia and brought me with him. I kinda like the game, but its badly designed as all hell (altho, let's be honest... part of the problem is that Kazuki Takahashi is a good storyteller, but an awful game designer. Seriously half the games he comes up with in the Yu-Gi-Oh manga--which wasn't originally strictly about card games--work for story purposes but are practically unplayable in real life. The poster child for this is Dungeon Dice Monsters).

Recently I tried out a program called DevPro, which is basically YGO dueling online. It's got neat advantages such as allowing you to just use any card that has ever been printed for the game, which a lot of people use to test deck ideas and builds before they buy real cards. I fell head-over-heels in love with a card called Earthbound Immortal Chacu Challhua and have basically been trying to find deck builds that let me get it out faster and more reliably.

If there's one thing I've learned though, its that YGO has changed in recent years. Used to be you could expect a duel to last at least 10 turns and passing your first turn was not immediately fatal. Nowadays though, it seems like the core strategy of the game is building a deck that consistently and reliably gets One Turn Kills, especially First Turn Kills. I learned this the hard way when I thought it was still safe to put a Man-Eater Bug and a Mirror Force face down then end my turn....

Ironically almost nobody uses pendulum summons, probably because its already easy to get a full field of monsters without them--just about every duel I'm ever in begins with the opponent somehow being able to swarm the field and then use Xyz summons to get something broken out.  I love pendulums though.  Currently they're a major part of my DevPro deck.

The weird thing is that even as I recognize that Magic the Gathering is better designed and suffers from none of Yu-Gi-Oh's problems, I also somehow find it less fun to play. In fact, when I first discovered Magic (during the era of 4th-5th Edition, Mirage, and Ice Age), I cared more about just collecting the cards, looking at the art and reading the text, and had never built a deck. Then later on around 8th-9th Edition I tried to play the game but quickly got bored. And these days I really don't care for the design of the cards. I would love, I think, to collect older cards and just keep them in card binders like I do with my 4th-5th Edition era cards. They're just so great to look at and feel nostalgic for.

One game I wish I had played more was Ani-Mayhem, possibly the first ever anime CCG. The weird thing is it actually played more like a tabletop RPG, and could actually be played Solitaire. Unfortunately I either lost or sold my massive collection, but as this isn't a particularly valuable game I might be able to get them back secondhand.

EDIT:  I love the various Yu-Gi-Oh anime though.  5Ds is probably my favorite with its surprisingly enthralling premise (dystopic future, monsters sealed in the Nazca lines, people with mysterious magical birthmarks... and card games on motorcycles!), followed by Yu-Gi-Oh Duel Monsters.  Arc-V (the current show) is so far actually pretty fun.  I also get a kick out of "Season Zero," the anime from back when Toei owned the rights rather than TV Tokyo and NAS, and also an era before the card game dominated everything.   There's just something gleeful about watching this insecure kid's evil split personality blatantly cheat at magical games to ruin people's lives and drive them insane.  It's kind of odd to see that then see the rather mellow guy he developed into.... similar I guess to how people familiar with Tim Burton's or Christopher Nolan's Batman feel when they see Adam West's version, except in reverse.

[The Great Klaid]

Aug 30, 2016 19:18:29 GMT -5 silentstorm said:

I did not even know there was a new DBZ card game, as for Yu-Gi-Oh, it kinda feels like only fans of the anime or people who pick it for being popular play the game.

Seriously, that game and Pokemon TCG are not exactly well regarded, though Pokemon has the heavy reliance on coin tosses to thank for that.

Honestly, it seems the CCG community goes mostly for Magic, Netrunner and Hearthstone with everything else being less popular and not as well regarded as the first two, particularly Yu-Gi-Oh and other anime card games...though Vanguard is suprisingly popular.

Also, there are tons of CCGS, only recently i found out about UFS, Universal Fighting System, a card game revolving about characters from fighting games like Street Fighter, King Of Fighters, Soul Calibur and Darkstalkers fighting each other, but it was not very popular(i certainly never heard about it despite the characters and franchises it used) and the game seems to have quietly died, shame, because it is sincerely the SNK VS Capcom CCG just with more fighting game characters from other companies(and other games, it also had Mega Man and Warhammer characters) and that should have made it one of the most popular card games ever.

The new DBZ was pretty fun. But, to play it at a competitive level you NEEDED a few cards. Or you'd just lose to any player who was using them. My card shop was pretty big on it for awhile. And it's finally what tipped my hand into playing Magic for realsies. Because at that point my D&D group that played there had become part of the regular clientele. And they're pretty cool people. A bunch of try hards by our own admission. And to my owner's chagrin. Because we are all capable of playing in state Tournies. And that means new players have a very hard time getting into our shop. You have to be willing to get good or just not have much fun.

I'd kind of like Pokemon once in awhile if it weren't for the coin flips. Although the game is pretty two dimensional. But that's just the failing of the basic set up. And my favorite thing of Magic, is that any card is perfectly playable at any point in the game. I mean that's not 100% true. But, I'm not sure how to phrase it. Because Magic's flavor is that every card is a wizard's spell, that keeps the game so much more open. Where Pokemon is a game about battling creatures that you have to draw from your deck. And Yugioh is really hard to play with out monsters. Magic can have decks without creatures. Magic can have decks that have nothing but land and creatures. There are so many ways to win the game. It's really why it's my favorite CCG.

Got off topic there. My point was going to be that CCG's have a hard time getting going, because they are an investment. And you have to have a player base. Because when you build good decks in a game, and play against other decks, a majority of the time Deck A vs Deck B is going to be a pretty similar game you know? And unlike say a Miniature war game, you can't set up the field different or come up with scenarios. And people are going to invest in the game with a player base. Which is gonna be Magic or Yugioh a lot of times. Which is also getting into how tabletop games are dying, and when people join the hobby, but I've babbled long enough I think.

[silentstorm]

I thought tabletop games were becoming more and more popular, what with Kickstarter tabletop projects being more funded than regular video games and the fact that more people are finding out games that are not made by Hasbro, it really seems to be getting popular.

Though not so much in the place where i live, an small place so small there is not any shop dedicated to just games, either video or tabletop, and where i have never seen anyone play something that is not made from Hasbro or something like chess and checkers, and no, the internet did not help, i sincerely found zero groups or people willing to play board games in my area even on the internet.

Shame because a lot of tabletop games look really fun, but i am stuck with the games that have a digital version with online capabilities.

On an unrelated note, are any of the MTG games good for online multiplayer?

[JoeQ]

Aug 31, 2016 4:37:21 GMT -5 silentstorm said:

On an unrelated note, are any of the MTG games good for online multiplayer?

The newest Magic Duels on Steam and current gen consoles is probably your best bet. It came out in a very glitchy state (surprise!), but is more or less fixed now. It has comprehensive tutorials and single player campaigns to ease you into the game and also a pretty fair free-to-play model for unlocking new cards.

Your other option is MTG Online, but I wouldn't recommend it for casual players. The client is CRAP and you pretty much have to spend real money to play it.

[The Great Klaid]

Aug 31, 2016 4:37:21 GMT -5 silentstorm said:

I thought tabletop games were becoming more and more popular, what with Kickstarter tabletop projects being more funded than regular video games and the fact that more people are finding out games that are not made by Hasbro, it really seems to be getting popular.

Though not so much in the place where i live, an small place so small there is not any shop dedicated to just games, either video or tabletop, and where i have never seen anyone play something that is not made from Hasbro or something like chess and checkers, and no, the internet did not help, i sincerely found zero groups or people willing to play board games in my area even on the internet.

Shame because a lot of tabletop games look really fun, but i am stuck with the games that have a digital version with online capabilities.

On an unrelated note, are any of the MTG games good for online multiplayer?

Like I said it's gonna talk a lot of explaining. The long story is it seems like we get a lot of flashes in the pan. But nothing like your D&D's and your Warhammers. And that means you don't have quite the same events you did. Like GW doesn't do regular 40K stuff anymore. I mean the numbers might prove me wrong. More money might be spent on the hobby. But it's not this unifying thing like it used to be. And I feel that's not why it's as popular as it used to be.

Also, board games don't count as a hobby. I'm an asshole I know. But, few board games get played more than a couple of times. You plunk down $30-50 on one play once or twice and then forget about it. Prove me wrong.

[silentstorm]

Aug 31, 2016 13:17:00 GMT -5 The Great Klaid said:

Aug 31, 2016 4:37:21 GMT -5 silentstorm said:

I thought tabletop games were becoming more and more popular, what with Kickstarter tabletop projects being more funded than regular video games and the fact that more people are finding out games that are not made by Hasbro, it really seems to be getting popular.

Though not so much in the place where i live, an small place so small there is not any shop dedicated to just games, either video or tabletop, and where i have never seen anyone play something that is not made from Hasbro or something like chess and checkers, and no, the internet did not help, i sincerely found zero groups or people willing to play board games in my area even on the internet.

Shame because a lot of tabletop games look really fun, but i am stuck with the games that have a digital version with online capabilities.

On an unrelated note, are any of the MTG games good for online multiplayer?

Like I said it's gonna talk a lot of explaining. The long story is it seems like we get a lot of flashes in the pan. But nothing like your D&D's and your Warhammers. And that means you don't have quite the same events you did. Like GW doesn't do regular 40K stuff anymore. I mean the numbers might prove me wrong. More money might be spent on the hobby. But it's not this unifying thing like it used to be. And I feel that's not why it's as popular as it used to be.

Also, board games don't count as a hobby. I'm an asshole I know. But, few board games get played more than a couple of times. You plunk down $30-50 on one play once or twice and then forget about it. Prove me wrong.

I dunno, i just hear many people saying that tabletop gaming is on the rise, with more and more people being attracted to the new games being made by hearing about them through the internet or friends, the fact that nerdy stuff is becoming more and more normal, the fact that is a social event that does not require looking at a screen and that sites like lifehacks have made articles talking about the benefits of board games(not even kidding, i have heard of people starting to play board games just because lifehacks said they were good for you) have made people start to play them.

But i guess that with the sheer number of games being released all the time, and the difficulty for a group of people to get together in their free time makes it hard for people to play many of them, so the playing once or twice may be what happens.

I still wish i could play them where i live, which is a small place that used to(and still does to some extent) live through agriculture without much contact with other villages and towns, though i do admit that in the last generations with increased contact, nerdy stuff became prevalent and i know fans of video games, anime, comics but not board games, that is the one thing people here do not seem to care about.

I only see checkers, dominoes, chess, Sueca and Poker here, with the occasional Monopoly, Uno or Trivia Pursuit in some party and that's about it, i remember playing Battleship once but that was one time.

So yeah, unlike some people here, i haven't even played D&D in real life, or any kind of tabletop rpg really, nor things like Catan and Ticket To Ride in real life, and as for CCG games it is dead, there used to be people playing Pokemon TCG and Yu-Gi-Oh, and by people i mean kids in the height of those franchise's popularity, but i haven't seen anyone play it in ages, and i only remember one store selling Magic The Gathering packs, and i distinctly remember it because it was the only time i saw them here and they stopped selling it very fast, probably because i have never met or seen anyone where i live who has ever played Magic.

...I know i was trying to talk about how board games are becoming more popular, which according to the internet seems to be true, but i can see why people do not believe that, i certainly haven't played anything that is not classic already, and the only way i played anything more modern is because of digital adaptations.

[The Great Klaid]

Well I know it's not on the rise, because D&D is the easiest game to get into, and no one that's ever actually played it doesn't like it. So as long as we have any medium not understanding how to play D&D, I'm looking at you Stranger Things, than D&D hasn't been rising in popularity.

That said D&D is very easy to get into. You can buy 3rd Edition core books on Amazon for fucking nothing. $10 as of the writing of this, plus shipping. As well as some dice. And thousands of hours of entertainment. If you have a group of friends that you think would be down for it. I say go for it. It's a hobby gateway drug. And to keep it on topic. Magic was created by Wizards as something for people to play while waiting for games of D&D at events and cons.

[Deleted]

Aug 31, 2016 13:17:00 GMT -5 The Great Klaid said:

Also, board games don't count as a hobby. I'm an asshole I know. But, few board games get played more than a couple of times. You plunk down $30-50 on one play once or twice and then forget about it. Prove me wrong.

A lot of people are part of "board game clubs" in the way that they used to have PnP groups, or CTCG competitions. It's basically a way for nerds, and especially dads, to get out of the house and meet new people these days.

[The Great Klaid]

Aug 31, 2016 16:07:34 GMT -5 @jasonx said:

Aug 31, 2016 13:17:00 GMT -5 The Great Klaid said:

Also, board games don't count as a hobby. I'm an asshole I know. But, few board games get played more than a couple of times. You plunk down $30-50 on one play once or twice and then forget about it. Prove me wrong.

A lot of people are part of "board game clubs" in the way that they used to have PnP groups, or CTCG competitions. It's basically a way for nerds, and especially dads, to get out of the house and meet new people these days.

You took that as a challenge, and I concede good sir. But they don't paint their own pieces and hence I still don't have to respect them.