Deck Cloggers can serve many roles in gameplay. Sometimes you can put junk in an opponent's deck to slow them down. A powerful effect may have the drawback of giving its user deck cloggers. Single-player games can use deck cloggers to increase the difficulty. Finally, Changing Gameplay Priorities can turn a previously useful card into junk. This is common in Deckbuilding Games, where you often want to get rid of your starting cards eventually.
Compare Manipulating the Opponent's Deck. Not to be confused with Junk Rare, Scrappy Weapon and Promotional Powerless Piece of Garbage — while they suck, they're not designed to clog up your deck and only do that if you for whatever reason choose to run them.
Note that this trope is specifically for cards that clog up decks (or deck analogues).
Examples:
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Board Games
- Abandon All Artichokes is all about removing the ten Artichoke cards that have no effect and make up your starting deck. The helpful vegetable cards you get from the Garden Row help you get rid of them, and if you draw a hand consisting entirely of non-artichokes, you win the game.
- After The Virus adds zombie cards to the player's action deck each time the deck is shuffled, the number of which increases on each shuffle. These zombies need to be eliminated or evaded to avoid taking damage.
- Clank! A Deck-Building Adventure starts each player off with 2 Stumble cards, which do nothing but give said player Clank! when drawn.
- Colt Express: Being shot by another player adds a bullet card to your deck, which is a dead draw if drawn on a future turn, and takes one of your actions to discard.
- Dominion has quite a few cards that can be undesirable. Getting rid of the junk clogging up your deck is an important part of most games, and it's often useful to give your opponents junk. Specific undesirable cards include:
- Many attack cards give out Curse cards, which have no effect (thus shutting down a draw) and give -1 Victory Point each. A few cards also curse their user as a drawback.
- The Dark Ages Expansion Pack introduces Ruins, which aim to be more interesting penalty cards by consisting of five possible Action cards with very weak effects. Two attack cards give each other players a Ruins, and one card gives its user Ruins as a drawback.
- The starting Coppers, while vital for your first few buys, quickly become outclassed and worth getting rid of. A few attack cards specifically give opponents Coppers, and several cards can potentially saddle others with Coppers.
- The three starting Estates are almost always junk, as they have no immediate effect on the game when drawn, and their mere 1 point does not make up for how many draws they shut down. At least they cost 2, which is relevant for cards that can replace a card with a better one. No junking attack specifically gives out Estates, but there are some ways to force them on opponents.
- Harry Potter Hogwarts Battle adds detention cards in one of the expansion packs, and one of the creatures keeps adding them to the deck.
- Heat:Pedal to the Metal: Taking reckless actions such as shifting two gears in a turn or taking a corner too fast requires adding heat cards to the discard pile which will clog your hand on future turns when the discard pile is shuffled and becomes your new draw pile, only being removed when the player can perform cooling. Adding too many heat cards can lead to complications like not being able to boost, spinning out when taking a corner, or missing a turn and being forced into 1st gear because you can't play enough cards from your hand. To a lesser degree, there are stress cards which also clog the hand but may still be played for moving a random distance, but they cannot be removed from the deck.
- Lockwood's Asylum has monster cards, which are immediatly played into the current room to cause problems for the current player. As these are negative cards, players purchasing them place then in the discard pile of the player to the left.
- Living Forest is a Deckbuilding Game with the twist that you can keep drawing resource-providing Guardian Animals until you decide to stop or "bust" by reaching a net three solitary animals. This ties into the penalty Fire Varan cards. If you don't have enough water to protect yourself from the fire at the end of a turn, you'll get Fire Varans added to your deck. They provide zero resources and count against your limit of three solitary animals. Luckily, using a fragment on one will permanently remove it from your deck (while doing it on a Guardian Animal will merely discard it).
- The Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earth has a deck-building element in that each player has a personal deck of cards which they draw from to prepare special abilities at the start of each turn and to attempt ability checks during the turns. While most cards in a player's deck have some beneficial effect in a specific context, each player starts with one useless card that has no effect whatsoever, meaning that it is always a bad draw, regardless of context. More of these deck cloggers can be added to the deck during play to represent lasting negative effects on the character, rendering them weaker overall.
- In Lost Ruins of Arnak, Fear is a bad card that mostly serves to clog up your deck. It has no effect, its travel value is only a single boot (the worst of any card), and it's worth -1 point if you still have it in your deck at the end of the game. You start with two of them in your deck, and can gain more as a penalty for leaving an archeologist on a site with an undefeated guardians on it, or sometimes even if you defeat the Guardian. Fear cards will probably be your first targets when you get the chance to exile cards.
- Nemesis gives an action deck of 10 cards, which may receive contamination cards from enemy attacks to pad the deck. At the end game, if any of them are revealed to be infected, they also serve as a chance to kill the character.
- In the push-your-luck game The Quacks of Quedlinburg, you draw ingredients from your bag to gain points and various effects. However, the white ingredients are cherry bombs. Other than filling the pot by one field (which all ingredients do), they only serve to bring your pot closer to exploding.
- Sanctuary Saga has squabble and grudge cards obtained from some events. Squabbles are removed once encountered, while grudge cards remain in the deck. Squbble cards are also obtained if a player recruits from outside their own guild.
- Twilight Struggle has cards dealt to each player from a shared deck, each may be played for operation points, for the event, or for the space race. The events on each card may either be for oneself or the opponent, and if it's the opponent, playing the card for operation points also activates the event. As such, the drawn cards are junk depending on which players receives them, and the game involves trying to manipulate when the opponent gains the benefit.
Collectible Card Games
- Magic: The Gathering:
- There are two major categories of cards: lands and spells. Lands generate mana, which you need to cast your spells. You hope to draw a good balance of them — if you get too many of one category, extras won't be useful, and only serve to waste draws. At worst you end up mana screwed (you have plenty of spells, but not enough mana to cast much) or flooded (you have plenty of mana, but lack spells to use it for). The game's creators argue that this is a feature, not a bug, as it means a beginner can get an occasional win against a stronger opponent who was screwed/flooded. With that said, they don't want the game to be outright unplayable for the screwed/flooded player either.
- The game has several Luck Manipulation Mechanics, e.g. scry letting you manipulate the top cards of your deck, to keep you from drawing cards you don't need at that point in the game.
- Some Manipulating the Opponent's Deck effects, such as the Fateseal mechanic
, aim to make the opponent draw cards that won't help them much. Cards that return stuff to the top of an opponent's deck also disrupt the opponent's next draw.
- While the normal, black-border rules don't allow you to put undesired cards into your opponent's deck, some supplementary cards feature such mechanics:
- The Self-Parody set Unhinged introduces Letter Bomb, which shuffles itself into an opponent's deck. It not only shuts down a draw, but deals 19.5 damage when someone is unfortunate enough to draw it. Since the starting life total is 20 and Letter Bomb is too expensive to be cast early, this will probably kill them immediately.
- The playtest card Gunk Slug shuffles three Gunk cards into an opponent's deck. All you can do with one of them is pay 4 to discard it and draw a new card.
- The Self-Parody set Unhinged introduces Letter Bomb
- Yu-Gi-Oh!:
- Parasite Paracide can shuffle itself into your opponent's deck, and when they draw it, they're forced to summon it and take 1000 damage.
- "Garnet" is a Fan Nickname for cards which enable powerful combos but are useless if they end up in your hand at the wrong time. This name comes from Gem-Knight Garnet, a card from a popular archetype which had easy access to Fusion Monsters... via a Spell which discards the component monsters directly from the Deck and cannot use monsters from the hand at all.
- Parasite Paracide
Video Games
- 100% Orange Juice!: Some Gift Cards are specifically designed to waste space on a player's deck with no benefits whatsoever:
- The card "Unlucky Charm" causes players to gradually lose a small amount of stars every turn. While they can use it to send it to another player at random, doing so will cost more stars than what they lose if they have just kept it (if the cost of the card doesn't exceed the player's current star amount), so reckless usage of the card can turn it into a very damaging star sink. The only way to get rid of the card is to discard it if the player's hand becomes too full.
- The playable Store Manager has a Hyper Card called "Banned for Life", which works on this principle. Using the card itself will just send it over to another player at random, and if a player discards the card, it'll discard their entire deck along with it. Discarding the card is the only way to permanently get rid of it but at the cost of erasing whatever advantageous cards a player might have.
- Astrea: Six-Sided Oracles:
- The starter dice are generally worse than the dice you pick up during the game, which means they diminish your average dice quality. You'll probably pick those when you get the chance to remove dice from your deck (the game has no "bad dice permanetntly added your deck", though at least one event can leave you with unwanted dice).
- Hex dice are temporarily added to your deck during combat by enemies or as a drawback on your own effects. Most of their faces have bad effects like dealing Corruption, giving you fewer draws the next turn, or even creating more Hex dice, and even their "good" faces tend to do nothing except destroy the Hex die itself. Moonie has some effects that synergize with Hex dice, however.
- Dawncaster: Corruption cards are cards that either give you a small Status Buff for a price (typically an HP cost or taking a compensating debuff) or just purely negative cards that give you a negative Status Effect. The former are almost always playable while the latter aren't, however they will remove themselves from your deck once the turn they are drawn has passed.
- Griftlands: There are several Status Effects that manifest in gameplay as deck clogging cards. For example, when you drink alcohol or eat food to restore your resolve and health respectively, you get a Tipsy status card and a Bloated status card. Some status cards can't be played, but will exhaust after the turn they show up in your hand during a Negotiation or Combat. Others however cost energy to play and will not be removed from your deck until they are played. Tipsy and Bloated cost 1 and 2 energy to play, for example, though you can get rid of them by going to sleep at the end of the entire day.
- Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft:
- Weasel Tunneler and Bad Luck Albatross add weak 1/1 minions to the opponent's deck, leading to wasted draws. Impbalming instantly destroys a minion (and is cheaper than other similar cards), but shuffles 3 1/1 Worthless Imps into your own deck.
- Some cards are shuffled into the deck and deal damage to the player who draws them. Bomb and Mine can be added to the opponent's deck to make them reluctant to draw more cards, Ancient Curse is shuffled into your own deck as a downside to playing the Ancient Shade, and Corrupted Blood is added to both decks at the same time by Hakkar the Soulflayer.
- Excavated Evil deals 3 damage to all minions, then shuffles itself into the opponent's deck - assuming the opponent is playing an aggro deck with lots of cheap minions, it'll be a dead draw if it gets drawn again, since they'll be reluctant to wipe their own board and place it back under your control.
- I Was a Teenage Exocolonist:
- Delusion cards are the only cards worth negative points, and while they can be used strategically to gain straight or flush bonuses since they're Literal Wild Cards, they deduct from your total score during card challenges. Accumulating too many also has a negative consequence on the narrative, since this means that Sol is being considered "delusional" by the others for telling them about their visions. As a result, Instance forces Sol to take medication for their "psychosis", wiping all their Past-Life Memories, and thus the choices that can only be made after the first run.
- As you gain higher-valued cards later on, your early game cards eventually become junk, making it hard or impossible to get the target score if you're unlucky to draw them. Since your Empathy must be at least 33 in order to delete them anytime for 50 Kudos each, and relaxing makes you choose only between two random cards to deletenote , you must think carefully about the choices that give you cards.
- Legends of Runeterra: The Pesky Specter is a Shadow Isles card that, when it dies, creates 2 copies of itself and placed in the opponent's deck. Since it is an Ephemeral, it will inevitably create cards that clutter the opponent's deck and stack on top of more useful cards. On the other hand, since the opponent receives those cards, they can do the same thing to you.
- Luck be a Landlord is a deckbuilding game where the "cards" are symbols in a slot machine that give you money when they show up. Some symbols are put into your symbol "deck" to make it worse, which is particularly harmful since many synergies rely on adjacency bonuses, and the "junk" symbols take up slots that could have gone to something synergistic. It's even rougher on higher floors, where removal gets rarer. Examples of symbols that tend to clog up your "deck" include:
- Floor 5 introduces the Dud symbol, which is used to make the game harder on higher floors. It provides no coins, can't be removed by normal means, and the only ways to destroy it manually are unreliable and have a high risk of collateral damage. It does have the decency to eventually destroy itself, but that takes 33 spins. And while floor 5 only gives you a single Dud at the start of the game, later floors give you more, and even keep refreshing your Dud "supply" throughout the game.
- Two Hexes have a high base value of 3 coins, but downsides that can fill your "deck" with junk:
- The Hex of Midas sometimes generates coins symbols, which have a base value of 1 and few synergies, so in most builds, they'll just clog up your "deck".
- The Hex of Hoarding sometimes forces you to take one of the three symbols offered after a spin. There's a high chance that none of them synergize well with your build and only serve to make your "deck" worse, and unlike the Hex of Midas, you can't reliably prepare for it because you don't know what you'll get.
- Due to Changing Gameplay Priorities, many of the starting symbols and the ones you pick up early on will eventually become junk. In the early game you'll want a lot of symbols to make sure you'll afford the upcoming rent, but later on, you want to improve your "deck", which means trimming stuff that isn't carrying its weight.
- The Devil's Deal item pays your rent when activated, but then adds 66 additional empty symbols to your deck (6 Duds instead as of the v1.1 update).
- MARVEL SNAP has a few ways to shuffle useless cards into your opponent's hand or deck. One character in particular (Darkhawk) benefits from this, as his power is equal to twice the number of cards in the opponent's deck:
- Rocks are 1-cost, 0-power cards that take up space in the deck, either forced into a player's deck by an opposing Korg or Rockslide, or from locations like Subterranea or Lechuguilla.
- Vibranium is a 1-cost card that gets shuffled into the player's deck in threes when they play a card on Vibranium Mines, but are marginally more useful than Rocks as they also have 4 power and cannot be destroyed.
- Black Widow's ability puts a Widow's Bite into the opponent's hand. It's a -1-power, 0-cost card, but as long as it's in a player's hand, that player can't draw cards, forcing the player to get rid of it ASAP.
- Master Mold's ability puts two Sentinels in the opponent's hand. Sentinels summon another Sentinel to the hand when played, which essentially cuts an opponent's hand size for their own cards by 2.
- Inverted examples from Mega Man Battle Network:
- The first three games have the Add feature where you can sacrifice Battlechips that aren't needed to have more chips. The problem comes with waiting for an entire turn without chips and only the Megabuster.
- Mega Man Battle Network 4: Red Sun and Blue Moon has Double Soul where a Battlechip (usually a useless one) is sacrificed so Megaman can access a form from a Navi he has communed with.
- Mega Man Battle Network 6: Cybeast Gregar and Cybeast Falzar: The Dust Cross has the ability, Junk Shute where selected Battlechips can be moved to the bottom of the Folder for new ones to be drawn.
- Monster Train:
- Scourge cards are added to your deck by certain enemy units, and remove themselves from your deck when you Purge them from your deck by playing them or at the end of battle, and most of them deal damage to your Pyre if you end your turn with them in your hand.
- Blight cards are given to you from certain events and unlike Scourge cards, they stay in your deck between battles, and some of them can't be removed at all. One particular event has you hold onto three of Dante's Candles, which are Unpurgeable and deal damage to your Pyre while holding them at end of turn, but later you get to put Dante the Deceptive into your deck, a powerful unit who gains extra attacks per Blight card in your deck.
- In Night of the Full Moon, certain effects can cause your deck to become cluttered with useless Prank cards, which take up space in your deck and may prevent you from drawing a more useful card. Slightly less aggravating are the Freeze cards, which can at least be played at the cost of an action to replace them with a usable card, and rather more useful are the Fear cards, spell equivalent versions of Freeze exclusive to the player's Soul Hunter class, used to clog the enemy's deck if they can't play it, and drain them of their mana instead if they can (compounded with the Soul Hunter's existing Mana Drain abilities).
- Certain moves in Ooblets replace some of the opponent's cards with useless ones.
- Potionomics has the stress system where the player, based on their current stress level, has a chance of drawing stress cards. Stress cards are purely detrimental and can't be played.
- Signs of the Sojourner is a Deckbuilding Game where the success of a conversation depends on how well you play a card matching game with the one you're talking to, and getting too many strikes will end your conversation on a bad note. Fatigue cards, which build up as you travel, have no symbols, and playing them automatically earns you two strikes at most to your conversation. To get rid of them, you have to end the in-game month at Bartow and unpack your things; play with Thunder if you befriended him; or get into a Random Event that removes one of those cards. During a conversation, Reconsider cards discard your current hand to draw new cards, including Fatigue cards, making them useful for temporarily removing them.
- Slay the Spire:
- Curse cards are junk cards that are permanently added to the players deck, usually through random events. In addition to being useless, many have other negative effects. Most can be removed from your deck at shops or random events like any other card.
- Status cards are junk cards placed in your deck by enemies or a card effect. Most are unplayable and many have additional negative effects. Unlike curses, they only stay in your deck for the duration of the fight.
- In the Microsoft Solitaire game that comes as a bundle on any new PC, the higher levels of the game (Master, Grandmaster) can do unpleasant things to trip up the unwary and overconfident. If you pull the desired card from a stack to continue a run — say a Red Queen — you can be sure that the other red queen will emerge almost instantly and will sit there blocking a stack. If you need and get a black seven, the other, un-needed black seven, will pop up and impede progress. You can get three out of four Aces and build the completed stacks with them — then every card you see will be from the fourth suit for which there is no Ace and therefore no obvious way of removing them as solved. Worse, these cards will sit on the ends of runs preventing the player from redeeming the cards for which they have Aces. Effectively, Microsoft Klondyke will deliberately throw lots of deck cloggers at you.
- There are some cards in Stacklands that can't be sold, such as Ancient Goblets, and it's possible to accumulate many of these in one run. Since there is a card limit, which is increased by building Sheds and Warehousesnote , the only way to get rid of these unsellable cards is by using the Dustbin card.
- Wildfrost: Junk on its own have this purpose, especially if you are not playing as Clunkmasters (Who can destroy them with Recycle cards for buffs). However, they still count as a hit with 0 damage, allowing them to scale cards like Tiny Tyko and Shen up without losing health.
