because it’s 3 am and I can’t sleep and I have to indulge my special interest despite me being absolute horseshit at gaming
Thus She Spoke The First Law, To Be Inscribed Unto A Link Of Chain:
A trading card game should be measured up to these pillars:
-
The game should have one or a small number of overarching abstractions (eg. flavor) that provide a thoroughline for learning, both in the initial rules acquisition and by making a game state as readable as possible both at a glance and over time.
-
The game should be playable in a collection of different modes and play styles. While the game can encourage some of these over others, and metagames naturally form around the favored, it should still strive to allow for a variety of them to be viable ways to be at least competitive, including the ability for off-the-cuff or marginal builds to perform at least somewhat satisfactorily.
-
The game should be built so that no single match is ever lost solely over deckbuilding or solely over in-game decisions. Game structure should allow good deckbuilding to provide a buffer against bad decisions, and for play performance to make a difference between players using the same suboptimal build.
- As a corollary, a good game minimizes situations where the game is lost before turn one begins, by either preventing snowball mechanics or by implementing reset points that prevent snowballing from determining an entire game.
-
While advanced play may rely on intangibles that do not lend themselves to an easy read, the game should nonetheless be built so that a large variety of players may trace issues that lead to a loss to their proximate cause.
-
Wizards has it right: the game should, in fact, be F.I.R.E. (Fun, Inviting, Replayable and Exciting).
Thus She Spoke The Second Law, To Be Worn Unto Heavy Cuffs To Still One’s Hands:
Left to its own devices, given a game designed for a plurality of play styles, combo will nonetheless devour any ruleset over time until it is the dominant play style. A game is only as good as it can reduce its own combo threshold.
Over time, the increase in game piece variety and simple power creep conspire to allow more and more “rules breakage” in the form of game-ending combos whose deck construction cost lowers as the game expands. A good game will actively provide tools and mechanisms to counterbalance this so that other styles remain viable.
The ‘combo threshold’ of a game is the point in the metagame where it is unwise to play any other strategy than combo; games that have passed their combo threshold are functionally dead, in that they now actively push away players whose self-expression and ability to have fun are attached to a sustained game.
This doesn’t mean combo is by itself a bad play style; it does in fact reward a specific type of player that derives their pleasure from the understanding and manipulation of rulesets and their mastery of it as a means of creative expression. But unless that is the only target of the design, it should not be the only kind of player who can find success at the table.
Tools to move a game away from a combo threshold can be:
-
Increasing the deckbuilding cost of a combo so that a combo deck may find itself heavily disadvantaged when facing at least some other play styles, for example by structuring diverse effects so that synergistic elements of a combo require their own separate support (eg. in Magic: are of different colors or require incompatible costs).
-
Decreasing the reliability of the combo, by introducing answers or by building in guardrails that prevent easy access to all the pieces (like limits on the number of copies of the same card in a deck).
-
Understanding which effects undermine basic elements of the game that prevent immediate exploitation and limiting their frequency or incidence (by costing them appropriately, for example).