The Tricky Business of Designing a Trading Card Game

I mentioned earlier that I was called to head up a team that is designing and playtesting a trading card game. It’s been in development for a few years, and I was there as a part of that process, almost from the start. But apparently when I stepped away from developing and testing the game in order to finish up my college degree, the project as a whole went on hiatus.

It wasn’t total radio silence, though. There was a guy who was trying to redesign the game from scratch, essentially taking us from 90% completion back to 10%. The resulting silence was deafening. It seemed to demoralize the team who had already spent countless hours playtesting and balancing the original rules. And those playtesters had just left the con excited about having a game “with legs” only a few days before.

A con? Yes. We held a con for this card game, and by the time the con had concluded, it was clear we had a hit on our hands. We examined the top level of gameplay, and found that our two factions could hold their own against each other in a balanced way. High fives abounded, and of course I had a list of hundreds of different things that needed to be tweaked and changed … as is usual when I walk away from these sorts of things. But I completed that list over the next few days and updated the cards, both graphically and otherwise, only to find out the entire card game was getting redesigned again. Ouch!

When I came back to the project nearly half-a-year later, all I saw was scorched Earth. The effect of the demoralization was pretty bad, and it was easy to see how a project can fall into what’s called Development Hell.

I had little choice but to rally the troops, or all that work and the success at the con would be for naught. One motivational speech later, the team was once again firing on all engines, passionate about playtesting, offering ideas, and rebalancing. We’re aiming to be ready in time for a second con in about a month or so, and we want the game to go gold so it can be featured with an associated book launch (not mine).

Designing a trading card game is a tricky business. It’s kind of the ultimate test for an editor, because every line written on every card must be short and snappy, and it must communicate what it does in a 100% unambiguous way.

Visualization is also a major challenge. Not only must the cards look cool, but they must communicate information in a simple, non-confusing, and uncluttered way. For better or worse, my card design is the design we’re moving forward with … for now. Whether or not they decide to hire a new graphic designer or go with me remains to be seen, but if it does end up being me, I’ve received templates from the original game’s creator … which means I’d pretty much have to redesign the cards and re-vector the icons and other various pieces of card art all over again. The design we have now is already pretty slick, but it could always be better. The competition is steep.

(We also have a motivated artist working to give us more original pieces of art for the cards that still need it, and we have printing and selling logistics figured out, for the most part. In the end, it’ll all come down to funding.)

Balancing is a tricky business as well. One must evaluate each card to determine its value, and consider whether it has “broken” synergy with any cards in the game (including itself). One must also determine whether or not the card is too powerful for its card type or rarity. Many games get around this with a ‘curve’, usually designed around some kind of mana system or similar type of energy. The idea is that, as the game continues on, the likelihood that a player will have more energy to play stronger cards increases, upping the ramp.

Our game instead uses the number of cards drawn and the goal itself as the curve. There are a number of targets to destroy, each with an incremental number of hit points. The flow of the game is governed by the player’s ability to reach the amount of damage needed to destroy these targets, which will cost them a fair number of cards to achieve. Each time one of these targets is destroyed, it fills the opponents’ hands with more cards, giving the opponents potentially more answers to counter what you wish to do next.

Normally, there is a cost/value ratio that one can go by when evaluating cards. But this game is essentially costless. It has no mana ramp. There are no energy cards. You can plop down an endgame card on round 1, if you wish. So I had to devise what defines a lower level card, what defines a higher level card, and balance these against the curve of targets that need to be destroyed (Sorry about my vagueness. I don’t want to reveal what cardgame I’m working on, so I’m avoiding the terminology printed on the actual cards.)

The “cost”, therefore, is essentially how many cards it takes from your own hand in order to achieve successful strikes against the opponents’ targets. If you save up for one big alpha strike, for instance, you may find that an opponent grew powerful in the interim and is able to alpha strike you instead. So it’s in the player’s best interest to keep constant pressure on their opponent(s).

It is difficult to assign numerical powerlevels to cards. Especially if they have unique text on them; “Special powers” are extremely difficult to quantify. But one can gauge powerlevels through relativity. By comparing a card to other cards of a similar power level, one can probably tell which card is relatively better, and which card is relatively worse. But even that worse card may have better synergy in certain decks or with certain strategies, thus all the cards present in a well-designed set should be useful in some way.

You have a problem with your card design if one card is ‘strictly better’ than another similar card in the same set. If the two cards do the same thing, but one is simply a better version (maybe it can deal more damage, has higher armor, etc.), then no one would play the weaker card over it. That’s a design problem.

Since the game I’m working on has no mana curve, it has to essentially “bribe” players to include lower level cards in their decks through synergy, flexibility, and game mechanics. For example, you can only have one higher level card (of the same name) in play at a time, whereas you can swarm the field with three lower level cards of the same name. Lower level cards also tend to reap more rewards in theme decks, and wear a wider range of equipment.

The lack of a mana curve also means that there’s a constant rise and fall in power between players. Games tend to be more “swingy” in a fun, frenetic, anime kind of way. One player can make an explosive play that seems to wipe the other player’s board, only for the other player to discover they can retaliate with a similar strike the very next turn (should they be crafty enough to survive the onslaught).

All this has to be balanced with the universe that the cards come from. The IP holder wants his universe portrayed as accurately as possible. If the fans want and expect a specific card to be “cool”, then yes, we have to give that card a little more power, and balance the entire game against that power.

This card game project is turning out to be a fun experience, but it’s consuming quite a bit of my time. Even if the card game ends up not selling well, it was already worth it because we’ve had a blast playtesting the game and playing it with our friends. It’s also given me the experience I’d need to create cardgames for my own IPs one day. One can dream.