What's the best mobile CCG?

[LansXero]

How much of that attitude is the game community's fault, and how much of it is the game's?

100% the game designer's, although this is more of a 'how do you feel' test than something with a clear correct answer. Still, expecting people to not want to win is self-defeating, people cant be expected to self-police on 'unfun' mechanics because fun is asimetric and also subjective.

[Man_Over_Game]

I'll take a look at those when my time isn't being devoured by the project I'm working on. Two thoughts to leave you on:

1) Is life gain an interactive mechanic? Why or why not?

2) A (paraphrased) conversation I've seen a lot of when people discuss cards:

"That doesn't sound very fun to play against."
"It isn't my job to make sure that my opponent has fun. My job is to win."

How much of that attitude is the game community's fault, and how much of it is the game's?

1: Not in the MTG ruleset, but otherwise it could have been.

It can apply to anything to be almost as equally as useful, and it doesn't cause your opponent to think much differently. If anything, it provides incentive for your opponent to do fewer things, to avoid granting you extra HP. I feel it slows down the game and it doesn't do anything tactically other than make a creature more valuable.

If MTG had a targeted-based attack system, where the opponent can choose to attack a creature, I'd see Lifesteal as an interactive option. Or make it so that Lifesteal only applies when dealing combat damage to creatures. Either one of those changes would have made Lifesteal a better mechanic, I feel. As of right now, it just pushes people to find ways to make their creatures more non-interactive (unblockable, indestructible) than before, and further rewards those decks that already do.


2: Absolutely the game's. What else is a game's culture than the collective opinions of its gameplay? The reality is, it's profitable to make mechanics that are powerful and win. We know this because MTG is the most successful CCG in the world, and its most expensive/valuable cards are the ones that make you win.

For a personal anecdote, my wife and I started getting into Cockatrice, which is a program on PC that is an MTG simulator that comes complete with matchmaking and card database. If you dreamed of playing a particular deck, you can with Cockatrice. I did research for weeks into finding a decent interactive commander deck that was relatively powerful. However, I found that even Hug decks like Zedruu, or a Olero Pillowfort deck, just ended up being effective at crippling your opponent in ways that gave the illusion of "choice". In the end, their effectiveness was all based on denying your opponent from having options, not necessarily making those options less effective. There's a difference there. MTG is so full of synergistic powers that either your combo works, or it doesn't, and there's not a lot of room for "kinda". Although I think the push towards more combat focus will help that.

I don't think the players should ever be at blame. The player's goal of a competitive game is to Win, and anything less than that isn't a competition. If the player is winning in a way that isn't good for the game (for example, Grapeshot combos), it's the responsibility of the developers to fix it. The winning player will only ever think about how clever he is, not about how toxic his playstyle is to everyone else. MTG, at its core, rewards preventing your opponent from playing the game, so why should a player feel bad about doing that well?




After thinking about it for a while, I would have really liked to see a CCG where every powerful synergy was based around stuff like Monarch or the Phantasmal creatures, where high-level games don't get more refined but instead become more chaotic. Gain powerful bonuses off of fragile sources, so high-level players can either invest into their easily-lost bonuses or played it safe with a more generalist approach. Would be a lot of fun to watch.

I think that highlights the big problem I have with MTG: While Power and Indestructibility can be two different things, MTG often pairs them hand-in-hand. I'd like to see the opposite: With power comes fragility. The more powerful the effect, the more easily it can be lost.

[LansXero]

I think that highlights the big problem I have with MTG: While Power and Indestructibility can be two different things, MTG often pairs them hand-in-hand. I'd like to see the opposite: With power comes fragility. The more powerful the effect, the more easily it can be lost.

That... makes no sense. Isnt losing their powerful effect the same crap you've been complaining about of how toxic players dont let others do their things? At its core any risk taking involves the failure a portion of times, so it devolves back at the same. What you actually want is, again, something that goes against people's nature, that is, playing with kid gloves and always stopping short of ruining other people's fun, and at the same time that they stop from ruining yours a proportional amount of times. This goes against your 'powerful effects easily lost' proposal because then everyone who actually cares to win would pack ways to make you easily lose them so its either rocket tag (I get my effect off first, you lose) like YuGiOh, or everyone plays generalist safe builds that just do their own thing like parallel solitaire.

[Man_Over_Game]

Isnt losing their powerful effect the same crap you've been complaining about of how toxic players dont let others do their things?

A little bit different. I'm comfortable with people doing things to actively deny someone a good thing. Counterspells, for instance.

However, I'm of the belief that these kinds of abilities should be temporary, expensive, or otherwise unreliable. For example, I believe Privileged Position is a card that should have never seen print. However, Harm's Way is an excellent method of protecting your stuff. Both are forms of denial, but one is a "Set it and Forget It" effect that works on...well, everything, and the other is a temporary and unreliable piece of protection that can cause something to seriously backfire against your opponent. One's lazy, and the other's fun.

Additionally, my crap is not about protecting your own stuff, but damaging your enemy's. Cause players to focus their actions on their opponent's board states rather than their own, as a way to get players involved with one another.

I actually think MTG's stack system is a gaming marvel, WotC really did themselves a disservice by not honing in more on their Counter effects (and also limiting counters, heck, the stack itself, to 1/5 of the game's colors). Part of that is due to its ability to nullify one's actions with an action of your own. That's the key point there. A current action stops a current problem, not a past action stopping a future problem. The first scenario requires both players to take action and be able to take an action and leaves the opportunity of more action. The second scenario requires action from a single player and the decision-making process ends there, which is why I think that set-it-and-forget-it defensive solutions are bad for games.

At its core any risk taking involves the failure a portion of times, so it devolves back at the same.

Fair, but MTG resolves this by removing risk. "It's not risky if I can't lose". So while it's risky to have your creatures out that give you passive bonuses, you mitigate those risks by having means of nullifying board wipes or removal. What was a 50 worth of loss and a 50 worth of gain now becomes a 10 worth of loss and a 50 worth of gain. The risk of playing something becomes smaller as you find ways of keeping it alive.

I'm encouraging the opposite. "It's totally worth it if I win". Not any less risk, just more reward. So you never can protect your board state, but you can get a lot of value out of it if you're lucky. This would be the equivalent of 50 worth of loss and 250 worth of gain.

What you actually want is, again, something that goes against people's nature, that is, playing with kid gloves and always stopping short of ruining other people's fun, and at the same time that they stop from ruining yours a proportional amount of times. This goes against your 'powerful effects easily lost' proposal because then everyone who actually cares to win would pack ways to make you easily lose them so its either rocket tag (I get my effect off first, you lose) like YuGiOh, or everyone plays generalist safe builds that just do their own thing like parallel solitaire.

There's a few extremes in there, but I don't think a real-life example would be all that extreme at all.

Taking MtG as an example, player generally try to focus on their own playstyle, but they also want to accommodate a random opponent's. So they make sure to throw in a few Lightning Bolts, a few Doom Blades, maybe a Cancel or a Krosan Grip. The best decks generally had a balance of stopping a random opponent's play vs. improving your own. MtG did have a situation where they had decks that were centered entirely around controlling the enemy board state (Blue), and as a result, those decks had major problems generating their own. Coincidentally, Blue vs. Blue made for some exciting and unpredictable gameplay. I think that's a very valid scenario for a pure-control playstyle, where going pure-control ends up limiting your own options.

As for Rocket Tag...I dunno. Slo-mo Rocket Tag sounds like a lot of fun. Anyone ever play Superhot? On a serious note, it'd be hard to see how good/bad something like this could be without a proof of concept. My ideal is something like Jenga, where big plays require big risks, and you can bite off more than you can chew. On top of that, if your opponent manages to outplay you, it can turn into a reversal where you're the one in a bad position. The winning play would boil down to whoever could either get lucky through a winning combo, or attrition their opponent after they gambled too hard. There's not enough interactivity in most card games that I've seen that makes anything really feel all that risky, besides maybe stacking your board too heavy in a board-wipe-heavy game (like MTG Commander).

And as for the generalist builds, I'm not sure why they'd equate to parallel solitaire. Even something like two classic MtG Green Decks have their own playstyles, limited synergies, and yet have multiple player-to-player decisions to make. I think that'd be about the most "Generalist" of a playstyle I could see, and using the Green vs. Green example, it wouldn't be a bad one.

I guess a conceptual MTG equivalent would be to have nothing but varying degrees of Blue/Green decks, with the only Permanent buffs being Auras, and your instant-cast spells are either Bounces, Counters, Shrouds and combat buffs.

[Amechra]

1: Not in the MTG ruleset, but otherwise it could have been.

It can apply to anything to be almost as equally as useful, and it doesn't cause your opponent to think much differently. If anything, it provides incentive for your opponent to do fewer things, to avoid granting you extra HP. I feel it slows down the game and it doesn't do anything tactically other than make a creature more valuable.

If MTG had a targeted-based attack system, where the opponent can choose to attack a creature, I'd see Lifesteal as an interactive option. Or make it so that Lifesteal only applies when dealing combat damage to creatures. Either one of those changes would have made Lifesteal a better mechanic, I feel. As of right now, it just pushes people to find ways to make their creatures more non-interactive (unblockable, indestructible) than before, and further rewards those decks that already do.

Not Lifelink - I'm talking "Target player gains 5 life" or the like. They fill very different niches in the design.

Honestly, the lack of a targeted attack system is what forces you to have unblockable/indestructible creatures. If you didn't have evasive creatures, you'd have a strict hierarchy of token spam > a few big guys > a few small guys

2: Absolutely the game's. What else is a game's culture than the collective opinions of its gameplay? The reality is, it's profitable to make mechanics that are powerful and win. We know this because MTG is the most successful CCG in the world, and its most expensive/valuable cards are the ones that make you win.

For a personal anecdote, my wife and I started getting into Cockatrice, which is a program on PC that is an MTG simulator that comes complete with matchmaking and card database. If you dreamed of playing a particular deck, you can with Cockatrice. I did research for weeks into finding a decent interactive commander deck that was relatively powerful. However, I found that even Hug decks like Zedruu, or a Olero Pillowfort deck, just ended up being effective at crippling your opponent in ways that gave the illusion of "choice". In the end, their effectiveness was all based on denying your opponent from having options, not necessarily making those options less effective. There's a difference there. MTG is so full of synergistic powers that either your combo works, or it doesn't, and there's not a lot of room for "kinda". Although I think the push towards more combat focus will help that.

I don't think the players should ever be at blame. The player's goal of a competitive game is to Win, and anything less than that isn't a competition. If the player is winning in a way that isn't good for the game (for example, Grapeshot combos), it's the responsibility of the developers to fix it. The winning player will only ever think about how clever he is, not about how toxic his playstyle is to everyone else. MTG, at its core, rewards preventing your opponent from playing the game, so why should a player feel bad about doing that well?

Ah, Cockatrice. I've used it as a solitaire program for literal years now (the online stuff doesn't work too well on Linux). It's... different to play a game like MTG as both sides.

The issue with Commander is that doubling starting health heavily nerfs aggro decks (so they need to get off some dumb combo to just compete), and the effect of having a card that you automatically get to tutor over and over pushes the entire format towards combo-based play. Expecting to find a "good" Commander deck that interacts well with opponents is like trying to find a "good" Modern deck that reliably wins on turn 10 - it's just not realistic for the game as she is played.

That being said, I have some suggestions for decks I've enjoyed playing that more-or-less hug your opponent to death. I reliably go back to Generosity Tribal (Generous Patron + Proliferate = boost their creatures and make it work for you) and Mill Forest (ramp everyone, then follow through with Undercity Informer). Neither of them are super good, mind you, but they can be some goofy fun to play with.

[r2d2go]

You could try stuff that isn't technically a cardgame, e.g. auto chess games. You trade a bit of the out-of-game deckbuilding aspect for mid-game deckbuilding but let's be honest, these days either you're playing a meta deck or you're not competing. Unfortunately the only game that lets you know who you're up against is also the one that doesn't let you see their board (hearthstone battlegrounds), but either of those things increases the level of planning around your opponent a lot. And, while occasionally someone will win streak to victory, it's pretty rare, and otherwise actually maintaining a disadvantage is how to win a lot of games.

Really my favorite is TFT, because it has a stronger comeback mechanic, but the mobile's not out until "early 2020".

[Chen]

A little bit different. I'm comfortable with people doing things to actively deny someone a good thing. Counterspells, for instance.

However, I'm of the belief that these kinds of abilities should be temporary, expensive, or otherwise unreliable. For example, I believe Privileged Position is a card that should have never seen print. However, Harm's Way is an excellent method of protecting your stuff. Both are forms of denial, but one is a "Set it and Forget It" effect that works on...well, everything, and the other is a temporary and unreliable piece of protection that can cause something to seriously backfire against your opponent. One's lazy, and the other's fun.

Privileged Position is hardly a broken card and has its own weaknesses (including its 5 mana cost that doesn't actually do anything when you play it). It turns off spot removal (aside from itself) but still leaves a board vulnerable to all sorts of things. I'm not sure why something like that would considered a problem.

I actually think MTG's stack system is a gaming marvel, WotC really did themselves a disservice by not honing in more on their Counter effects (and also limiting counters, heck, the stack itself, to 1/5 of the game's colors). Part of that is due to its ability to nullify one's actions with an action of your own. That's the key point there. A current action stops a current problem, not a past action stopping a future problem. The first scenario requires both players to take action and be able to take an action and leaves the opportunity of more action. The second scenario requires action from a single player and the decision-making process ends there, which is why I think that set-it-and-forget-it defensive solutions are bad for games.

Again I'm confused as to how you distinguish set-it-and-forget defenses vs things like creatures. Or artifacts. I mean any permanent is basically set-and-forget. They all need to dealt with in particular ways.

Fair, but MTG resolves this by removing risk. "It's not risky if I can't lose". So while it's risky to have your creatures out that give you passive bonuses, you mitigate those risks by having means of nullifying board wipes or removal. What was a 50 worth of loss and a 50 worth of gain now becomes a 10 worth of loss and a 50 worth of gain. The risk of playing something becomes smaller as you find ways of keeping it alive.

I'm encouraging the opposite. "It's totally worth it if I win". Not any less risk, just more reward. So you never can protect your board state, but you can get a lot of value out of it if you're lucky. This would be the equivalent of 50 worth of loss and 250 worth of gain.

I'm not clear how 10 worth of loss and 50 worth of gain is any different than 50 worth of loss and 250 worth of gain. That's the same ROI in the end.

I guess a conceptual MTG equivalent would be to have nothing but varying degrees of Blue/Green decks, with the only Permanent buffs being Auras, and your instant-cast spells are either Bounces, Counters, Shrouds and combat buffs.

Seems like this would get stale rather fast. Almost all permanent effects have some way to counter them (or are just game winning in and of themselves) so I'm not sure WHY they are a problem. If your board gets locked down until the person kills you, is it any way different than them sticking a big creature and killing you with it? In both cases you lose if you don't have an answer.

[Man_Over_Game]

Privileged Position is hardly a broken card and has its own weaknesses (including its 5 mana cost that doesn't actually do anything when you play it). It turns off spot removal (aside from itself) but still leaves a board vulnerable to all sorts of things. I'm not sure why something like that would considered a problem.



Again I'm confused as to how you distinguish set-it-and-forget defenses vs things like creatures. Or artifacts. I mean any permanent is basically set-and-forget. They all need to dealt with in particular ways.



I'm not clear how 10 worth of loss and 50 worth of gain is any different than 50 worth of loss and 250 worth of gain. That's the same ROI in the end.



Seems like this would get stale rather fast. Almost all permanent effects have some way to counter them (or are just game winning in and of themselves) so I'm not sure WHY they are a problem. If your board gets locked down until the person kills you, is it any way different than them sticking a big creature and killing you with it? In both cases you lose if you don't have an answer.

The biggest thing I was trying to focus on is "Don't limit options for counterplay". Limit efficiency for counterplay, maybe (for example, targeting my stuff costs you 1 extra mana), but don't provide anything that works as a hard Yes/No form of denial.

Privileged Position works against this by preventing roughly 50% of the means that someone would have to deal with your permanents. Unless they have something that might work around it (such as a board wipe), or they have some means of removing your Enchantment (good luck to Red and Black), you have successfully denied your opponent the option of playing the game.

Most Set-it-and-forget-it defenses provide other forms of full-denial. That is, they make things "impossible" to interact with, instead of just "expensive". Artifacts are much less more interactive than Creatures, due to the number of cards that can impact them. There are fewer board wipes that include Artifacts than Creatures, fewer targeted spells that impact Artifacts than Creatures, fewer ways of forcing someone to sacrifice. In almost every way, Artifacts are harder to remove, and so are harder to play with. If an Opponent has an Artifact, I generally either:

1. Ignore it, as it doesn't matter that much
2. Invest towards removing it
3. Suck it up since I don't have a solution

Of those 3 options, #2 is the only one that promotes interactivity, and is generally so inexpensive/necessary of a choice that it doesn't feel like an investment. Rather, it feels like I'm rewarded for being overprepared for the actions I took before the match, not because of any decision-making during it. Removing that Artifact, and how, never feels like a hard choice in-game. Considering whether to remove a Creature is a much different story, and I believe the difference comes from the fact that creatures have more options for being interacted with.

But beyond that, Creatures are a constant cause of decision-making. Do you sacrifice it? Attack with it? Attack and then buff it? Keep it for defense? Additionally, while they add to your boardstate, they don't inherently synergize with one another. Just because you have two 4/4 creatures doesn't necessarily mean that they keep one another alive. Their lethality increases when blocking, but not their overall durability, and they don't generally limit your opponent's means for interacting with them. Two opponents with a creature boardstate that's balanced has a dozen different questions flying around based on what you believe your opponent is capable of. Two opponents with a balanced artifact/enchantment boardstate might not have a single question if those permanents don't have a temporary action that impacts the opponent (especially true if a card like Privileged Position is in play).

In both cases you lose if you don't have an answer.

Your last line is particularly important, since it brings up a good point. Not having an answer is kinda the thing that I've been griping about.

But there's a difference between running out of answers and never having one. People lose when they don't have an answer in Chess. That does not mean that there were not a series of challenges-to-answers to get there, or that there wouldn't have been a scenario where they could have answered the current dilemma.

I never meant to imply that someone shouldn't lose. I just mean to imply that someone should always have the option to make a difference. Pillowfort decks are the example I used before, since they never say "You Cannot Do That". Rather, they simply say "You Cannot Do That As Well". Denial needs to be on a sliding scale, not a Yes/No question, as this encourages more interactivity and decision-making instead of less.

[LansXero]

With only 60 cards, there is never going to be enough answers to all kinds of things. So you know how it works for the millions that do play Magic and dont run into this issue? Its because of...

The Meta

knowing what your opponents likely play, because of the format, scene, income, etc. helps you make informed choices during deckbuilding and answer the most likely win conditions. This of course keeps changing, and precludes the 'I build with what I like' mindset, but is the common answer: doing your homework, staying active, making changes as needed, adapting and learning.

[Amechra]

With only 60 cards, there is never going to be enough answers to all kinds of things. So you know how it works for the millions that do play Magic and dont run into this issue? Its because of...

The Meta

knowing what your opponents likely play, because of the format, scene, income, etc. helps you make informed choices during deckbuilding and answer the most likely win conditions. This of course keeps changing, and precludes the 'I build with what I like' mindset, but is the common answer: doing your homework, staying active, making changes as needed, adapting and learning.

Ah yes, the borderline-predatory business model CCGs/TCGs are built on.

[Man_Over_Game]

With only 60 cards, there is never going to be enough answers to all kinds of things. So you know how it works for the millions that do play Magic and dont run into this issue? Its because of...

The Meta

knowing what your opponents likely play, because of the format, scene, income, etc. helps you make informed choices during deckbuilding and answer the most likely win conditions. This of course keeps changing, and precludes the 'I build with what I like' mindset, but is the common answer: doing your homework, staying active, making changes as needed, adapting and learning.

To provide the contrary, I believe you've adapted your sense to suit MtG, not that MtG has adapted towards sense.

You see 60 cards as a restriction to having enough answers to all of the endless things you might need to counter. But I see what could have been 60 different answers. The reason 60 answers isn't enough is because MtG has made it normal to need more than 60 different answers, because each answer can only solve 1 problem.

If 1 card could counter 3 problems with varying efficiency, you wouldn't need 60 answers. 60 cards in a deck would be more than enough. You would strategize to eliminate major weaknesses, but specific cards wouldn't hold as much weight. You could play what you wanted, because every deck could work (to a varying degree based on matchup).




But, as Amechra alluded to, that doesn't make profits. Saying "Your old deck doesn't work" is a lot more profitable than saying "Your old deck has new weaknesses, but also new strengths". If any deck had a chance of success against anything else, and it mostly boiled down to how you played in the game, you wouldn't really have much of a reason to buy new cards, would you?



I think an alternative would be possible, following how online games have done it: Purchased content doesn't provide an advantage, but rather a new way of playing. New mechanics to suit new ways of having fun. Any new mechanics don't prevent old mechanics from being applicable, only make them somewhat more-or-less effective. This does end up putting more work on the developer, but most good products do.

An example that comes to mind is Gauge from Borderlands 2. She was a paid DLC that had a lot of popularity. Although she was less effective than, and had a similar goal to, Salvador, her unique mechanics were enough to warrant Gauge's success with the community. It's an imperfect analogy, since BL2 isn't a PvP game, but you catch my drift.




I don't think MtG could ever use that kind of design plan, as it already is locked into a rigid interaction scheme:

• Creatures only are interactive with specific abilities that state it, generally Sorceries and Instants. Creatures can only attack another Creature when the Defender chooses it.
  
  
• Instants and Sorceries can't generally be interacted with, with the exception of very few tap abilities, instant effects, and powerful passive abilities.
  
  
• Artifacts and Enchantments can't be interacted with without specific abilities that state it, generally Sorceries and Instants.
  
  
• Lands cannot be interacted with without specific abilities that state it, generally rare Sorceries.

In fact, the only "General rules" on interaction that I think of are:

• The Player who's turn it is can Attack during his Combat Phase. Creatures with more than 0 power can Attack. If this hits a player, reduce their Life by the creature's Power.
• The Player being attacked can block an attacking Creature with one of his own Creatures.
• A player can interrupt an instance on the stack with a card effect. Instants are the only card type that can inherently do this.

And the rest are all card-dependent, with 6 or so basic card types. That doesn't seem like a good foundation for interactivity.