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Open Deck

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Tue, 08/21/2018 - 16:15
WillRoss1
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Joined: 08/04/2018

One of the central tenants of my TCG is having a "hand-less", open deck format where all cards are accessible for the entire game. The idea is that your deck functions more as a spell book and you memorize spells That are available to cast the following turn (think D&D). In addition, cast spells return to your deck after their cooldown, allowing for reuse (but may be removed from the game via effects and abilities).

Randomness comes during casting via dice rolls instead of through unpredictable card draws. Number of dice, available memorization slots etc increase over the course of the game.

What ramifications do you see with this? Any potential issues I should look at addressing? Any thought and feedback would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!

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Tue, 08/21/2018 - 16:25
#1
Jay103
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WillRoss1 wrote:One of the

WillRoss1 wrote:
One of the central tenants of my TCG is having a "hand-less", open deck format where all cards are accessible for the entire game. The idea is that your deck functions more as a spell book and you memorize spells That are available to cast the following turn (think D&D). In addition, cast spells return to your deck after their cooldown, allowing for reuse (but may be removed from the game via effects and abilities).

Randomness comes during casting via dice rolls instead of through unpredictable card draws. Number of dice, available memorization slots etc increase over the course of the game.

What ramifications do you see with this? Any potential issues I should look at addressing? Any thought and feedback would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!


(1) You probably need a big table to play on.
(2) Strategy is hard because there's so much to look at.
(3) Strategy is also fairly straightforward (as in chess), because there's no hidden information.

I realize that die rolls add a probabilistic factor to strategizing, but still.

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Tue, 08/21/2018 - 23:41
#2
questccg
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Joined: 04/16/2011
Xeko the endangered animals TCG

Xeko follows a similar strategy in that you have a hand but you play cards on the table by interconnecting colors on the edges of each card. This allows players to build an "eco-system" of various endangered animals from around the world.

Cards can also enter into a "turf" war and this is like "combat".

The basic idea is that you are "building" this eco-system with your cards and I believe you score points for each card left on the table in addition to the remaining cards in your deck once a victory is achieved.

In any case, the philosophy is sort of similar in that you play all cards into the play area on the table and this too takes up a rather large amount of space and requires larger tables to play on.

Cheers!

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Wed, 08/22/2018 - 15:25
#3
McTeddy
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Joined: 11/19/2012
I see open open deck/hand

I see open open deck/hand play often enough and have a project that uses it. It's definitely a mechanic that works.

The big point-of-interest I'd offer is that "Open Deck" makes it sound like you'll have alot of cards. Even with 10-12 cards it's easy hard to fan out the cards to read them and can lead to real analysis paralysis.

The other issue is that the lack of randomization will exponentially boost any imbalances.

You'll need alot of playtesting to ensure that there aren't extremely dominate strategies that players must follow, because unlike normal card games... it can and will happen EVERY game. The players have full control over their actions.

The final thing I'd say is be careful on the way that you handle your "Recharge Timer". You can make it fiddly if you have too many cards being tracked in a way that takes mindless effort.

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Wed, 08/22/2018 - 15:38
#4
Fertessa
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Joined: 07/18/2018
Your idea reminds me alot of

Your idea reminds me alot of a show called Zatchbell, where people controlled fighters, and could attack using spells in a book. The thing was, they were able to look through the book, but they could only access more powerful spells after they used the weaker ones a certain amount of times.

I only mention it because maybe you could use the number of attacks to limit access to certain cards. As someone else mentioned, allowing players to have access to everything could greatly increase game downtime, because they will need time to process all of their options. While it would be interesting to know everything in your arsenal, I think it will be burdensome without limits.

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Fri, 08/31/2018 - 12:53
#5
Nicklypuff
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Joined: 08/30/2018
Speaking of Zatchbell there

Speaking of Zatch Bell, there was actually a card game for it where people put their decks in a book. Here’s a link that has the rules to the game if you want to see how they did that sort of thing. http://zatchbell.wikia.com/wiki/Zatch_Bell!_The_Card_Battle

Something I’d keep in mind is how much memory work you want your players to have to do. There are definitely games where you could have players remember 100 cards and the players definitely would, but at the same time if you focused on 10-20 cards, I think more players would be interested and then richness and depth can be focused more on how thinks interact, combos, etc. Ultimately you’d have to find the best fit for the number of cards for the game to know what is too much and was is too limited.

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Fri, 08/31/2018 - 23:59
#6
mwlgames
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Joined: 08/12/2017
Mage Wars Arena

Mage Wars Arena uses cards in a spell book. The cards are used to summon a minion, cast spells, or enchantments. For balance, there is a point value on each card and your spell book's total value cannot exceed a certain number. I want to say there was something like 20 cards in the suggested spell books.

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