Tools for Balancing Card Games

Hello all. I'm doing a bit of research into ways that different games control how soon you can play powerful cards within said game as research for my own that I'm attempting to develop. Here's what I've got so far from my own experiences but I'm looking for more raw data.

1. Magic uses a mana system. More powerful cards cost more mana to play. Mana ratios are part of deck building.

2. Yugioh uses levels. More powerful cards are higher level and usually require sacrifices to play (level 5-6=1 sacrifice level 7+ require 2, some higher levels require specific sacrifices of more)

3. Pokemon regulates the attacks more than the creatures themselves and uses the game's energy and the retreat cost idea. More powerful attacks cost more energy and if you want to pull the pokemon back you have to discard certain types of energy. Pokemon can't attack without energy and if they can't attack they're mostly just sitting ducks.

4. Warmetal Tyrant uses a timing mechanic that's like super summoning sickness. Cards have health that doesn't regenerate and a clock that ranges from 0-4 typically indicating how many of your turns before they can attack (It ticks down at the start of your turn). More powerful units have longer wait times and while they'll usually have high health they can be brought down before they have a chance to come online.

Those are the 4 ways I know of so far. Does anyone else have other examples of ways games handle the flow of play and encourage you to play a mix of weaker and more powerful cards?

edited 25th Mar '15 8:35:38 AM by windweaver

Solforge's cards level up as you play them, so the next time you draw that card it will be a much more powerful version.

edited 25th Mar '15 8:59:53 AM by MrShine

Thank you for that one. I'd never heard of it.

Also: Found out that Hearthstone uses a set mana system where you always have 10 and can spend any number of that mana to play things during your turn but it recharges at the start of your turn. For my purposes this is a less than ideal set up.

Yugioh's level system nowadays almost means nothin'. The only times it matters is durin' Synchro and Xyz summonin'. Decks today are too fast and have way too many ways to quickly bring monsters out.

I played Yugioh for years so I'm well aware. I included it for the sake of completion since it's one tool I could think of in a list of other tools. Do you have any other tools that you can think of?

I agree re:Hearthstone. I played it for a couple months but I quit because the games all felt so same-y. People knock mana screw in Magic but it leads to a wide variety of interesting game states that Hearthstone lacks. BTW with Hearthstone, not sure if this is what you meant but the cap is 10. It starts at 1 mana on turn 1 and grows by 1 per turn.

edited 25th Mar '15 12:23:08 PM by MrShine

Okay, I didn't understand that part when I was just doing a basic skim thank you. Yes though, that is the kind of thing I'm talking about.

Control effects can be a way to balance powerful and expensive cards with weak and cheap cards. Say you have an effect in Mt G that taps a creature; that effect is going to be more powerful against a player running a few big creatures than against a player running many weak creatures. In turn, this can be balanced by making it harder (or more expensive) to target bigger creatures (like "X: tap a creature with power X or less").

What people don't like about the mana system is that if you draw too much or too little, you're screwed. That's why some games try to improve on it by making it easier to ensure the standard "one more resource every turn", by making every card usable as a resource (giving up the opportunity to use it for anything else) or moving the resources out of the main deck and allowing players to get them at a cost (usually involving something that refreshes every turn).

I find that Magic's mana system is great if you can play it a lot, but really frustrating when you only play infrequently. Like if I was getting together with my play group regularly, a Hearthstone-like system would probably make the games more samey and boring, yeah.

But something like it would honestly be nice for my current situation, where I'll meet with them and play one game where I get mana screwed, one game where I get flooded and one more where I roll over my opponent because he got screwed, and then, welp, "See you in another month!" Instead of being something that makes the games tedious and repetitive, it would become a guarantee that when we shuffle up, we'll actually play a game of Magic, instead of having one or the other player sit on their hands and wait to die.

edited 31st Oct '15 1:05:02 AM by Durazno

The new mulligan rule has helped a lot with reducing the number of non-games, I've found.

It's possible you were including it with the Mana System, but a key part of the Mana System is the oft-cited Color Pie as well, one that's likely worth counting as it's own balancing tool. Even games without a mana system like Magic could theoretically used a version of the Color Pie to put limits on what cards can be played in what deck.

The old Star Wars: CCG for example had cards that were explicitly stated to be either part of the Dark Side or the Light Side. The Pokemon TGC you mentioned above has it's own version where the energy you have to use comes in different colors and you have to have the right energy cards in your deck. The MLP card game has its elements, where you can't play some cards unless you have enough of a given element's power already on the battlefield.

edited 31st Oct '15 10:26:54 AM by TheSpaceJawa

Cardfight Vanguard has something like five different systems for this.

1. Grades. Cards are ranked grade 0 to grade 3 (I think grade fours were introduced sometime after the friend who introduced it to me stopped getting new product). You have a leader creature, the Vanguard, who starts at grade 0 and can, once a turn, have a card of equal or higher grade put on it (meaning that first turn you go up to grade 1, then grade 2, and ideally grade 3 - the mulligan system is selective, letting you only ditch the cards you don't want, but you only get to do that once and you still get grade-screwed occasionally). You can only play cards up to your Vanguard's grade. This means you're encouraged to prioritise grade 1 and 2 cards in order to ensure you can even get up to your grade 3.
2. Factions. There's a laundry list of factions and a lot of powerful cards require a Vanguard of a matching one to do their thing. Some go so far as to require cards of a specific sub-faction (e.g. the Nova Grapplers have a "Beast Deity" sub-faction).
3. Boosting. You get six creatures: your vanguard, two others in the front rank, and three in the rear rank. The ones in the rear rank cannot attack; they can, however, tap to give a bonus to the creature located directly in front of them - if the rear creature is a grade 1 or grade 0. Otherwise they're just an understudy waiting for the creature in front to die.
4. Triggers. When you attack with your vanguard, you reveal the top card of your deck (two, if it's grade 3), and if you take damage, you track that with cards off the top of your library put in a row. Exactly sixteen creatures in your fifty-card deck (this is a mandatory part of deckbuilding) have a bonus effect like drawing you a card or healing some damage taken earlier (as long as your opponent doesn't have more damage than you), as well as providing a stat bonus to a creature you have. The thing is that only grade 0 cards have triggers.
5. Defending. Part of combat is that you can discard cards from your hand to increase the defence of the creature that's being targeted. Each card has a set bonus, and the bonus for most grade 0 cards is twice that of higher cards; grade 1 cards can have special effects such as "perfect guard" (discard that card and one other to perfectly block the attack); and grade 2 cards can be sacrificed to do this from the battlefield.