Baseline Cards - TCG Theory
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- čas přidán 24. 02. 2024
- Games release a lot of boring, unimpressive cards - how many 2/2s for 2 do we really need? Turns out these cards accomplish a few different things, and even if games don't need them, there's still reasons they keep popping up, beyond just padding our booster sets.
(I'm basically just using the second paragraph of the description as a stealth blog at this point.) I bought tickets to visit Tokyo! This is completely unrelated to the video, but it's something I've wanted to do for a long time, and I'm really excited to be able to check out Japanese card shops, and all the other wonderful weeb pilgrimage sites. If anyone has any suggestions, feel free to add them in the comments here as well! - Hry
Another weird part of Cost is the card itself. Playing a card from hand and redeeming it for a one type effect makes the card itself part of the cost, where repeatedly activating the effect over the course of the game from a card in play can feel like a better deal.
Cards are weird and fun
A really good point! Using baseline cards can help a lot when figuring out how much you should pay for an effect as its own card, and how much to pay for it when it's stapled to a creature. Depending on the game, these numbers can be quite different, or very similar.
*looks at Yugioh*
Yeah, putting a Hard Once Per Turn target removal spell on a big creature is great.
In Yugioh we have a card called "Baronne de Fluer"
It is: A limited Counterspell, Murder, and Reaniate-effect in one card.
"[1] Once per turn: You can target 1 card on the field; destroy it.
[2] Once while face-up on the field, when a card or effect is activated (Quick Effect): You can negate the activation, and if you do, destroy that card. You can only use the previous effect of "Baronne de Fleur" once per turn.
[3] Once per turn, during the Standby Phase: You can target 1 Level 9 or lower monster in your GY; return this card to the Extra Deck, and if you do, Special Summon that monster."
Mind you this is on a 7.5 Power/6 Toughness body that most decks can make turn 1.
@@wickederebus Yugioh very much seems like the card game equivalent of "We've hit the point where we should clearly stop, but let's keep going and see what happens." It's crazy, but also fascinating in its craziness.
@tcgacademia4272 The funny thing is, we seem to have hit a point of being past the "toxic" power creep and are now in almost a golden age of good card design.
We had Tearlaments, a deck like MTG's Dredge, but on crack. Shuffle back to deck effects, a negate that lingers so long as the negated card is on the field, self-mill for up to 20 cards in a turn, and shuffling your own cards back to make bigger "Companions"
Then we had the toxic Kashtira deck. An "all cards sent to GY are Exiled" on a 3000/3000 body (equivalent to a 7.5/7.5 in MTG), along with a mandatory Chain Link 1 absorption effect to put an exiled card under it every time a card is exiled. And a "detach 3 attacked materials" effect to exile face down any target card. And yes, this did trigger the absord/suck effect.
Both those decks have taken major hits on our banlist.
And then we have Snake-Eye. A deck that just keeps making more materials to make more of our "Companions" from the Extra Deck.
But the Snake-Eye deck does not floodgate players. It may be head and shoulders above every other deck, but it wins via larger stats and better recursion
@@wickederebus My typical reaction when seeing a YGO card: "I'm not reading that, let's hope it does nothing."
This is helpful, and it helps reign in complexity in limited formats, with players having heuristics for knowing what an opponent can do with their resources.
Definitely - although it's interesting MTG hasn't printed proper vanillas into their sets in quite a while. They seem to be keeping french vanillas (with one keyword) as simple as they get, but it's still really useful to have these less-complex cards, especially when you need to pick a card from a pack in roughly 1 minute.
"Colossal Dreadmaw is majestic" same same
pomu jumpscare on "cheating the system" 💀
Didn't even think of that - mostly just put that in since I had a ton of green screen Pomu and Selen pngs, and I had no idea what I was supposed to do with them now. The timing worked well, though!
Ngl I wasn’t expecting to see vtubers on a tcg design video
I first noticed this design heuristic when i explored cfvanguard when it released. The vanilla units were the baseline, and the power would decrease by a certain amount depending on the strength of the ability. Or the power would increase if the unit had a demerit, like being unable to block or needing to discard card to attack. This was also very evident when i revisited Duel Masters
Vanguard is definitely a game that has to be very careful with its power numbers because of how its life system works (similar to One Piece, actually - it's neat seeing the systems OP borrowed from Vanguard, since it's not as obvious as the borrowed mechanics from DM). But yeah, some games take these baselines very seriously, and some, like MTG, treat them as more of a power floor - like, you can have Grizzly Bears, or you can have a card with the same costs and stats that actually has an effect.
Wake up babe, new tcgAcademia video just dropped.
This is a good tool for players like you said, but it's also a great tool for designers! Before you start tweaking your super complicated rares, try to playtest with very basic stuff and get a feel for what the numbers should be. This baseline will help you immensely when making new designs.
Right now, my system is to have a grid with columns labeled: terrible, bad, okay, good, top. Then I have different costs in each row, and I fill the cells with acceptable stats. The idea is that each column that has a worse baseline can add a more powerful effect.
In Magic, here's what my 2-cost columns would look like, and how big of an effect I get for that statline:
• Top - 3/3 (Kalonian Tusker)
Bingo. This is how games should be designed. It's a shame to see effects made without taking the cards power into account.
The dream would be having the 3/3 vanilla worth playing in certain decks so it won't automatically be glossed over for not having effect text.
Yeah, it can definitely be rewarding if you get a good standard power level for each cost. Makes it easier if you need to get other designers on board as well!
You could also have a column beyond top for cards with a more powerful statline than usual (4/3, 3/4), but at the cost of a negative effect. That way, you could have an even wider range of statlines and effects while still keeping the game balanced.
@@PragmaticAntithesis Yes, although those are very hard to balance when you're just starting with your curve.
@@fernandobanda5734 True, especially if there are ways of working around the negative effect.
Great video, I would be interested in a practical example, like in your Mirror World game.
Maybe you could go over that game and explain your thought process when designing Power and Effects and giving them the appropriate costs.
P.S.
I suggest you try Okonomyaki. It's hand-down my favorite Japanese dish. And also try the Japanese beer WITH your food.
Food and beer/sake complement each other quite nicely.
And while you're at it and stay longer than a few days, rent a bike and check out the surrounding areas. Japan's rural areas really do look like the scenery from the Ghibli movies.
Have fun!
Good call on using examples from Mirror World! It would have been a really good idea to use those examples in this video - might be worth it to make a part two to show a more practical view of how I use them.
Also, thanks for the recommendations! I may end up swinging down to Osaka for a few days, and I hear they're the home of okonomiyaki - 100% something worth having on my list! Great call with the bike rental as well - it's something I somehow keep forgetting to research properly whenever I go on a trip, and on the last day I end up discovering it's actually a great way to get around. Probably good to get ahead of the curve and plan for it before I get there!
I could write so much about base line card draw, but I will try to limit myself:
Patrick Chapin wrote in one of his books that "draw a card" is worth 2 generic mana. This is why divination is interesting. You get two cards for 2 generic mana and a colorless mana, but also at the cost of a card from your hand. it fits perfectly in that sweet spot of being "right." It isn't bad, it just isn't as good as better cards.
Meanwhile, black has Sign in Blood & Night's Whisper for two mana and two life. Yes, one s double black and the other is 1B, but you get the point. These cards reduce a single mana at the cost of 2 life, which also signals to the player the flavor/theme of black magic.
The sign in blood / night's whisper example is really good! It takes the baseline and offers an exchange of the resources needed to play it. So if you know about Divination, it's exciting and maybe worth a bit of damage to get the effect for 1 less mana. Also interesting that 2 life = 1 mana is also the same rate for phyrexian mana.
I just had to share this video cause I thought you did a awesome job man 👌
I like the vtuber references, especially the cute catfox.
Foxfriend is cute!
Your analysis is really good but it raises a question. When designing a game with attributes is it really fair to use a divination equivalent (draw in blue) as a baseline to compare other attributes ability to draw?
Wouldnt it be more fitting to compare say colorless draw or removal to other effects as the baseline?
Or in this video are you suggesting that some "best in attribute" game effects can and should be used as a baseline
That's a good point! I actually thought of something similar right when I was hitting upload on the video (and I was too lazy to unpost, re-edit, and reupload). Baseline cards are also really handy for showing players colour identities. Giving blue the "Draw 2 cards" card and red the "Deal damage" card gives players a quick and easy way to identify what each colour's gameplan looks like.
You know that it'll be a good day when our brother (tcgAcademia) uploaded a new video
when I heard "how much mana does it cost to draw 2 cards?" my mind immediately went to pot of greed and ancestral recall (then I remembered that ancestral recall draws 3)
It's definitely dependent on the format, for sure! I played a lot of draft and standard when Divination was being printed like crazy, so it's an example that sticks out to me, but there's a lot of other examples you could name as well!
Imo, lightning bolt is more of a baseline than shock depending on the format for that type of card
Yep, that's an important point! The baseline changes from format to format - this is one reason games can (kind of) get away with printing so many of these. New standard format? Better print a bunch more baseline cards! Definitely possible to go overboard, but the baseline definitely does change depending on what you're looking at.
It feels like weiss can have up to 80% of cards in a set be like this, be very similar or the exact same (like a brainstormer of which there are some kinds, like upon a climax mill draw/search 1 discard 1/search 1, 1/0 vanilla in a trial deck, a 1/0 1k backup that also gives a little more power, searching the top of your deck with a climax combo, bond cards, cards that deal with higher level opponent characters) and/or have a generic quantifyable effect like power boosting or getting power from a condition (usually related to mills or characters on your stage)
That probably comes from the most popular format pretty much separating all sets from each other, which is totally fair, but I'm still amazed at how many boring cards in sets there are
Weiss is really interesting for how it divides deck by series. In theory, it could make balancing really difficult, but since so many cards are functionally the same, it makes balance a lot easier. If people are mostly buying for the waifus (or husbandos), then making sure the game is functional is more important than making sure the gameplay is super-flashy and unique.
@@tcgacademia That is very much true, it's probably what they have to do to maintain all the franchises people are interested in. Especially since new products for a series is only ever a thing if a new release for that series comes out afaik
I found making an excel doc with formulas helps. Keep track of a Benefits points vs Downside points (with cost being a downside)
I've never had much luck with this, since there's so many things that can nudge a cost one way or the other, but if you get a good formula, this can absolutely be a great help with keeping card design on an even power level!
@@tcgacademia It helps that I do coding for a living. So I'm used to working with variables. Basically, I have a sub-table of THINGS and a benefit score. So maybe I assume drawing is 2 benefits. Then, when I make the other cards that draw, I have it look at the draw variable. Down the line, if I change my mind on the benefit of drawing, I can just change that and my tables all update
Granted, this is no substitute for actual playtesting.
Hey, Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh literally made me not illiterate. Text walls aren't entirely bad for children...
Another W
Aside from drawing, damage, and fighter strength, what do you think are some good baselines to figure out early in the design process. Obviously, it depends on the type of game, but are there any generic ones?
Really good question, and I might even do a full video on it later - definitely saving this comment as reference! Off the top of my head for generic ones: unit destruction, power boosting/decreasing, graveyard recursion (to hand and to field), resource ramp, life gain, and discard.
@@tcgacademia For sure. Those are some good general ones already, and it would be awesome to hear about your analysis on those things.
Keep up the great work BTW
I suppose another thing to consider is how things multiply if you increase the benefit. For instance, should drawing two cards be worth twice as much to draw 1 card? Or, how much better is 2 damage vs 3 damage? What about something that targets 1 card vs multiple ones.
Granted, at that point it probably leaves the “generic” space and becomes dependent on the type of game
@@blstuff Definitely also important, and probably will come up in the second batch of playtest cards. Especially since the first wave of baseline cards might not all make it into the first few sets - too many generic effects is its own problem!
one question one statement:
Statement: i am attempting making my own tcg and your videos are super helpful with your knolage of meny cardgames and concepts i forgot about.
Question: how meny tcgs have you played???
Thanks! For the question... probably around 20? I counted 17 off hand, but I'm sure I'm forgetting one or two. There's definitely still a lot of TCGs out there I want to try!
Immediately realized I'd forgotten Netrunner. So +1!
I think that a magic card drawing 2 and dealing 2 for 3 mana would be fine, normally in magic you wanna draw 3 for 3 and draw 2 for 2, divination is the baseline yes but at least in MTG you never play baseline cards outside of limited, you wanna play a stronger card with a downside that your deck gets to mostly ignore, rather than a weaker card with no downside. So draw 2/deal 2 for 3 in MTG would be playing a weak card (divination) to get the upside of playing another weak card (shock) for free, which would maybe make the whole package worth it (but even then, it might be too mixed in its goals to be good, if all you want is to deal 2 then the 3 mana cost sucks, and even if you do want the draw 2, if you don't care about the deal 2 part than you'd still rather play a 2mana spell instead , you'd probably want to be playing some kind of control deck to consistently get value from both effects to make the 3 cost worth it)
Yeah, if you wanted it to be actually viable in standard or similar, you'd probably just cost it at 3, than make it a rare if it ends up a little too good relative to other card draw.
Stupid memes aside, yugioh cards are pretty easy to understand and the reason the card text is supposedly long is because most of the yugioh card text are activation/summon conditions, restrictions and occasionally an alternative activation/summon conditions to prevent them from being abused in degenerated ftks. To give an example, compare the current effect of the catapult turtle with its pre-nerf version.
They're understandable - PSCT helps a lot - but their formatting is still abysmal. Most games have figured out "Activate this ability only once per turn" can be easily shorthanded to (1/turn), or for yugioh, (1/turn 🔒) for hard once per turns. Even the OCG has drastically helped readability by dividing effects by numbers in circles - still have no idea why that was never tried for the tcg.
@@tcgacademia My personal theory is that the people in charge of Yugioh TCG are a bunch of assholes who hate people who buy their overpriced products. There are many reasons why I think this first, as I said, Yugioh TCG sells its products at a reseller price, such as the 25th Anniversary Ultimate Kaiba Set briefcase, which in Japan was sold at a price of 300 dollars while in the West it is sold for 500 dollars, another example. It would be that yugioh tcg takes months, years or even decades to release cards and products in America and Europe, as one of the best products that Konami has released is the Number Complete File Piece of Memories which contained the reprint of all the numbers prior to lighning overdrive booster set in ultra rare except for the false numbers (141 cards), the release number c1000, ci1000 cards and its spell that summoned them and the reprint of the 3 illegal cards where Yuma appears, the protagonist of Yugioh Zexal, a card binder with the image of the door of destiny and a replica of the Yuma pendant, all this at a price of 200 dollars which never arrived in America or Europe, another example would be the banlist, while in ocg if one or more cards get out of control yugioh ocg They ban them as quickly as possible in yugioh tcg they ban any related card that is not a problem or that can remotely be used with the problem cards while the cards that are the problem are left free. I would give more examples but this would be longer.
Yugioh cost for two cards are hard once per turn and permanent exile or banish facedown( i meant it, youre not going to get them during the game) of the top 10 of your deck or your extra deck, and still sees play.
Something I don't see too many games doing, but that I think is something they should try (lord knows I am) is to have these baseline cards also be the "core" of archetypes you want to support. A 2/2 bear with no abilities is absolutely good for new players to get used to creature interaction, but it becomes wildly less exciting as soon as you get used to the rules and learn some cards and realize that for the same mount of mana, you can have an Orcish Bowmaster, which is just better even if it has worse printed stats. So, as not to make these baseline cards completely useless, I think it's reasonable to make those cards be a vehicle for some archetype. Perhaps Grizzly Bears is boring and does far less than a Bowmaster, but if Bear tribal is a thing in your game then perhaps Grizzly Bears still has a home as a decent early game play that scales into the late game with your lords and other Bear-centric utility and support (see Ayula and the more recent Duskana, for example).
I think Yu-Gi-Oh does this the best from the games I can think of. There, you have the iconic Anime cards like Blue-Eyes White Dragon, Red-Eyes B. Dragon, Dark Magician, Black Lustre Soldier and so on, which are all boring vanillas. However, they get support in the form of archetypes that help you summon them, use them as extra deck material and other miscellaneous utility that help them remain playable (although perhaps not meta viable) in the modern iteration of the game.
One Piece tcg and Wixoss have also done a decent job with this, up to a point. NOt so much as the core of the archetype, but their vanilla cards are still sometimes useful when a deck just need a trait bot (card with a specific subtype). I don't love seeing useless cards in packs, so even if it's only a corner case in a specific deck, I'm glad when games are built in such a way that these cards end up useful.
Sorry for the unrelated comment, but I have no idea how to search if you've done a video on this.
What would you call a mechanic where instead of "decking out" you just shuffle your discarded cards back into your deck?
Are you aware of any TCG that does this?
The most common term I've seen is 'refresh' - that's used by Weiss Schwarz, Wixoss. and probably a few others I've forgotten. I haven't really talked about it yet, but I'm currently working on a deck size video that mentions it a bit.
@@tcgacademia I'd be interested to see how people feel about this mechanic in general as I like coming up with custom formats to play MTG with my friends. I'm not sure if there are some major pitfalls or secondary mechanics that must be added to make it feel good that have already been figured out.
I'll definitely look into Weiss Schwarz and Wixross. Thanks!
How could you not say lightning bolt? How could you possibly go with shock instead
As much as I love bolting things, Shock is the more common baseline. Every set seems to have a 1-mana deal 2, but lightning bolt is pretty much the only bolt.
Wait...this guys voice sounds like magic aid for some reason. Maybe just me
Haven't heard that comparison yet!
Overcosted...
lol, yugioh is fun and simple game for kids… u joking right ? 👀
That was absolutely, veritably and completely, 100% a joke. Teaching modern yugioh to kids sounds like some kind of personal hell XD
@@tcgacademia Well modern modern yugioh would techincaly be rush duels so.....
@@peterattilaradivojevics5645 Only if you live in Japan XD Seriously, though, it would be nice to get an EN release.