Rarity in CCGs
Posted by Rob Herman at May 7th, 2006
I’ve played two collectible card games in my day: Legend of the Five Rings (L5R) and Magic. I enjoyed them both at the time, although I don’t play either one actively any more; and predictably, I’ve toyed with the idea of developing one.
The CCG market has some issues that ordinary board games don’t. The games are much more potentially lucrative (hundreds or thousands of dollars per player, as opposed to $20 or $40). But you need a critical mass of players to get anyone interested, and the extreme expense means that people typically play only one CCG, whereas a board gamer might own dozens of board games. They’re also more difficult to share with non-players. As a result, the CCG market is a very tight one, and I have much less hope of having a CCG of my design see production some day than an ordinary board game.
Pretty much every CCG has the concept of rarity: some cards are easier to come across than others. The standard system is something like 10 common cards, 4 uncommons, and 1 rare in a pack of 15. (There are about the same number of cards of each rarity.) Back at the dawn of Magic, when it was the only CCG out there, they thought it would be OK to use rarity to balance cards: if a card were hard to get, it would be fine if it were more powerful, because a player would only have access to one or two. Right? It was a happy revelation for the industry that people were willing to spend hundreds of dollars to get those powerful cards.
Modern CCG designers have to strike a balance. On the one hand, they want to make to get people excited about opening booster packs with the possibility of good cards; and they want people to buy lots of packs, in the search for the good cards. On the other hand, they don’t want to be seen as trying to squeeze money from the players, and they don’t want their game to be thought of as one that you have to blow a lot of money for to do well. If you can build a decent deck with no rares or only a couple, that can draw players who would otherwise be anxious about a large investment.
(L5R tried a flat rarity system at one point. Nobody bought it; I got unsold boosters from a flat-rarity expansion as a random promotion years later. My theory is that there was nothing to look forward to opening the packs.)
In my ideal world, here’s how I’d like rarity to work:
- Common cards are staples and utility cards. Every deck needs some, but they have no particular synergy with anything. You’ll want to have a box of them lying around, though, because when you want to build a new deck you’ll need to include a bunch of them no matter what.
- Uncommon cards add the distinctiveness to a deck. They have flavorful mechanics that you make work together in a useful way to build a good deck. Ideally, I would like be able to look at the list of only the uncommons in a deck and get a good idea of the way that deck is supposed to work.
- Rare cards are those that work only with very specific strategies or that you only need one of in a deck. The danger (depending on your point of view) is that if the rare cards contribute to a very powerful specific strategy, they suddenly become very in-demand. My favorite rare cards are L5R’s Uniques, which you can only have one of in a deck. They get played, so you see them in many decks, but because there’s only one per deck, you don’t necessarily see them every game. Therefore, like in the old days of Magic, it’s still neat when they hit the table.
I think a flat rarity system could work, if the cards have variants. The same cards are evenly distributed, with commons being plain text on flimsy newsprint. That’s a bitch to shuffle. The uncommons can be the same cards on something soft and absorbent, yet tough and long-lasting; something like Bounty paper towels would work. Rares could be solid-gold pop-up book holograms (I think Fleer owns a machine that’ll stamp those). Anways, if you recall, WotC tried something similar to Uniques with their Legends expansion, where Legends themselves were a unique card type that represented a specific character; this only allowed one per deck of each card. Unfortunately, all the Legends sucked, not to mention that I believe they were all gold cards, essentially requiring you to be playing a rainbow deck. There were a few certain cards they tried this with later down the road (I think the expansion was Weathervane, or Apocalypse, or something), creature cards with a specific character name on them that only allowed one in play at a time (since they were creatures, however, four could be in a deck). Not quite the same.
The CCG Doomtown also tried several ways to address the rarity issue. First it limited you to three copies on any single card. Second, about half the cards were unique in that only one card with the same name (including different versions with the same name) in play or boothill (the place where cards went when the were shot , burned, or otherwise destoryed). Third the game’s major mechanic involved making poker hands. Each card had a rank and value from a deck of cards in one corner. If you ever revealed a poker hand with two cards with the same rank and value you were cheatin’ and whole worlds of hurt could be be brought down upon you. Since identical cards had the same value (except for a couple of misprints), they increased the odds of cheatin’. Most decks I saw only had one of most of the cards except for the action cards and even then the game allowed you to cycle through (and reuse) cards pretty fast that I preferred a variety. The game saw print for about three years and I could afford to saty pretty competitive (except for the stupid promo cards) on a very limited budget. Also it only once reduced the number of legal cards in tournamnet formats and suffered very little of the power creep that made me despise the Urza cycle in Magic.
Having different rarities helps sells cards. It is an unfortunate. inescapable fact that cost me over a thousand dollars in Magic cards (sober since 1997). It also provides no game balance whatsoever. Those have the money and the will to spend on cardboard crack have a better pool from which to draw cards. Losing to a deck that cost several hundred dollars to put together is not much fun for me anymore. If I ever were to start a new CCG it would have to have a good mechanic, a good story, and not require me to spend a ton of money collect mutiples of rare cards to be truly competitive.