Gale

I'm working on a card game, and this card game features Leader/Captain/Commander/Commander/Hero cards. Players pick one of these cards per deck and it grants them several abilities. These cards also dictate how much MP (this game's resource) the player has. Players get 3-5 MP (depending on their Leader Card), and normal cards cost between 1-3 Mana. At the beginning of a turn, the Turn Player refills to Full MP so they can play their cards.
What I'm wondering is:

Should players start the game at full MP and just be limited on the first turn; or should they start the game at 1MP, and gain one further MP per turn (thus leading to Low-MP Leaders hitting maximum strength 2 turns earlier than 5 MP ones.

The main reason I wonder this is because 3MP Leaders and 5MP Leaders would already be balanced around having more-or-less resources than each other (3 MP Leaders gain stronger abilities to balance their lack of resources, 5 MP Leaders would have a detrimental ability to counterbalance more cards per turn, and 4 MP Leaders would be the standard with average abilities and no real downsides).

Okay, this one has been stirring in my brain for a LONG time at this point: But I really want to make an RPG any of these features.
NOTE: Some of these are super contradictory. The reason is that I don't want all these ideas in the same RPG, but I want all of them to exist in one form or another.

• Small Stats and Small Level Cap
  → No Stats above 50 (besides HP), Level Cap is 20.
• Turn Based Roguelite
  → Like an infinitely replayable SMT or Etrian Odyssey, but without Levels and without Story.
• PvP RPG
  → Somebody's gotta make something to challenge Competitive Pokemon, I mean Come ON!
• Multiplicative Stat Modifiers
  → For some reason, I really like the idea of "Instead of a +25 to a given stat, I want a 1.2x, 1.5x, or 2x", and I don't know why.
• Multiplicative Defense Stat
  → Imagine a Defense Stat that can be as low as 1 as high as 99; and when you get hit it just multiplies the opponent's outgoing attack by your defense stat as a percentage.
  → Like, your opponent hits you with 200 Attack versus your 33 Defense. Instead of you taking 167 (200 minus 33), you take 134 Damage (200x{1-0.33}) ► (200x0.67) ► (134). It's super complicated, but it seems kinda funny in a nerdy sort of way.
• Characters = Skills, Class = Stats
  → I want a game where characters have their own unique offensive skill lists that are detached from their classes, but their classes give multipliers to their current stats (and possibly Passive Skills, but that may be a bit much). This means that classes can take your characters from one role to another just by altering their stat spread.
  → An example is a Magic Character with a Healing Skill. Typically a character like this would be a healer, a frail character who must stay on the back line so they take reduced damage, but gains a passive boost to their healing abilities. However, you could change their class to a bulkier role. This way, at the cost of Healing Efficiency, they can be a front-line tank who is capable of attracting aggro and healing themselves. Not only that, but because they are a magical attacker, they don't have their outgoing damage reduced by being on the back line, and they can hit opponents for more damage.

So I'm working on a TCG engine right now, and the fundamental idea is this:

You're an Onmyoji, a Shinto Priest who wanders the land purifying cursed spirits. To this end, you combat these dark spirits with Shikigami: Spirit beasts who protect you and help defeat evil and darkness by your side.

It's a Pokemon-Alike TCG with a heavy basis on Eastern Mythology and Japanese Folklore. It's got an Any-Card-as-Resource system where every Shikigami/Monster you have has an "Essense" value at the bottom. By placing a monster under another monster upside-down, that top monster is able to pay for attacks. This is meant to be a mixture of Pokemon's Base Set Era and the Diamond and Pearl Era, where there's a mixture of Big Basics (There's no evolution in this game), and Attack/Option Boosting cards.

Now, my main problems here are:

• What should I call the Units?
  • I currently want to name my creatures "Shikigami", like the spirits that real Onmyoji summon in order to cleanse local shrines. However, I'm unsure if players will be okay using the name or whether they just want them to be called "Spirits" or "Monsters".
• How should I implement the Color System?
  • I have a five-element system already lined up. Based on the concept of Wu Xing, the elements are: Water, Wood, Fire, Earth, and Metal.
  • In Chinese Medicine, these primary elements make a harmonious cycle where every element interacts with another element.
    • For example, Water feeds Wood, defeats Fire, is defeated by Earth, and is eaten by Metal. However, I don't know how to implement this into my game.
  • On one hand, I could make it so the stronger attackers need energy from the element that feeds them (like a Fire Attacker needing Wood Energy to attack), but I'm not sure if I want to implement a hard Weakness/Resistance system into this game like pokemon.
    • Pokemon is able to handle this because they always had more than five elements in the game, and that some pokemon have different weaknesses than cards of the same type (Some Water Pokemon are weak to grass, while others are weak to lightning).
  • If I implement this system poorly, this could mean that every deck is hard-countered by another, and that matchups could be too one-sided to be fun.

These issues that I bring up lead me to the title of this post: How deep should my Aesthetics be? Or in other words: Should the aesthetics of the game overpower Gameplay? I can't tell if these are real problems, or if I'm overthinking things.

Hey, would y'all care if I started just posting about Card Game Development? I'm just in the earliest stages of them, but I'm kinda working on two separate engines for TCGs, and I wanted to share progress of them and maybe ask y'all questions about them. The problem is, I'm not sure if CoHost is the place to do that, and I'm DEFINITELY not sure how many of my followers actually care about that stuff.

Okay, so long as I remember to do so, I'll start posting my Card Game Development Ideas on this account. Hopefully I talk about this often enough to facilitate a big post like this, and hopefully I remember to log in here every once in a while.