Wizards of the Coast denies, then confirms, that Magic: The Gathering promo art features AI elements | When will companies learn?::undefined
Wizards of the Coast denies, then confirms, that Magic: The Gathering promo art features AI elements | When will companies learn?::undefined
Pokémon.
They were the original creators of the Pokemon TCG, and when TPC decided they’d start printing the cards without the involvement of WOtC, they responded with some “scorched earth” nonsense. These guys have needed to touch grass for years.
That being said, I’m surprised there’s no open source TCG.
An open tcg would be pretty fun and interesting. I’d definitely give that a go if it existed.
Awhile back, I pushed around the idea of a spaceship TCG based on my experience in EVE Online (speaking of out-of-touch companies), but I never went anywhere with it. The idea of having a command structure like MTCG Commander, and the rest of your deck being built to protect it. The capital would only take damage after all support ships were destroyed, sort of like attacking the player directly in YGO. Using planet cards like energy/mana, like you’re harvesting resources from those planets to built ships for your fleet
That sounds super fun. I’d play that!
That sounds fun. I had a similar idea once, but it was mechs protecting a massive rolling city with its convoy of industrial vehicles. Many of the game mechanics would be enabled by specific vehicles that were vulnerable to attack.
The problem with an open source TCG is that you need a way to balance it, which can be hard with a distributed group of designers not in communication with each other. You definitely couldn’t design something in a paper format; maybe as a computer card game.
I’m sorry, but that’s not true at all.
It’s not hard to balance it if you treat it like open source software. There’s still an owner that controls what is “official”. If you want to suggest changes, you make a pull request, as you would with software development, which either gets denied or approved by the owner of the official project. If you don’t like the direction the official game is going, you can “fork” it, call it a fork of the original if the license requires it, and you are now the owner of that fork, able to make whatever changes you’d like.
Open Source does not, at all, imply a lack of control. Blender is open source, but the Blender Foundation still has very strong control over what ends up in the codebase.
To that end, you can suggest balancing changes to the game project, and the owner of the project can approve or deny it.
As far as a paper or digital game goes, either one works. If someone wanted to print the cards and sleeve them, they can. We did that for proxy cards in Pokemon.
If someone wanted to create a higher-quality card, they could. Distribution might be difficult, but I can absolutely see someone selling a set of these cards on Etsy. That would be a challenge for whoever is interested in doing so.
The same goes for digital. The official project wouldn’t even have its own game, it would leave that to the creativity of the community and whoever is interested in doing that, and those projects could be listed by the project owner.
It is even if you balance in an open source environment. “Closed source” successful games still have to invest substantial funds to playtesting. In an open source system, you are developing in the open. This is going to split the game already into beta and stable. You also probably aren’t going to get individual cards approved since you need to design around the interactions between cards.
So now you have multiple versions of the game floating around with sets of approved cards. Unlike M:tG, these sets are developed to not be compatible and it may be difficult to figure out what sets are legal in the version you are playing.
And you still have the development process, which is hard to fix once you print cardboard.
I’m not talking about foils, but categorically better cards. You are going to have card developers with a vested interest to make sure their cards get played, and that generally means making cards at a higher power level.
I think a lot of what you’re saying is coming from the perspective of a profit motive. That’s certainly one way of looking at it, but I personally wouldn’t start something like this with a profit motive. Personally, the “cool factor” alone would be motivation enough for me, but this would require the game as a whole operating in a way other TCGs do not.
I also was talking about overall card quality, not specifically foils. Other than that, power creep is always going to be a thing, regardless of the motives of the project owner.
But the nice thing about open source is that if you don’t believe it’s a good idea, you don’t have to participate.
But it is a major problem for closed source systems which can be made worse if open source methods are used on cardboard. Is someone going to want to keep playing a game when they buy some boosters but find out that some of the people they play with won’t play with those cards? Even worse, there isn’t a uniform way to define formats?
But no one else is participating either. There are fan made TCG’s, but none of them adopted the open source model. There is one body that designs cards and I don’t see that changing. Even then, the trading or collecting part of that hobby goes away; they become Living Card Games instead without the collectable nature of more traditional distribution systems
If no one’s done it, we don’t know if it’ll actually work, we can just theorize. I don’t see the harm in anyone trying, and I don’t particularly care for defeatism.
This isn’t defeatism, but pointing out potential flaws in a system being developed. If designers can’t address potential fatal flaws, the system won’t progress.
An idea I’ve had for a while would be to have some kind of direct democratic method for designing new sets or cards, and for rebalancing or banning them if need be. I think it would be doable if you could achieve a critical mass of people. The custom magic subs on Reddit could basically form a functional game on their own.
In most existing TCG, artificial scarcity is a meta-mechanic of the game. For many, that’s part of the fun of the “collecting“. It’s fun to collect rare cards because they’re in limited supply.
That said, I think there could be, in theory, an open source way to have artificial scarcity and the fun of collecting. Maybe have a nonprofit that sells official printed cards at cost?
Yeah, I guess it’s actually more accurate to say this would just be a CCG along the lines of Dominion.
I have come across a couple digital CCGs. Not sure if they are any good.
Also, sorry to be a “well actually” guy, but Pokemon TCG was always designed by The Pokemon Company. WotC just licensed the rights to translate the game.