Hello and welcome to the Casual Chat!

As I was trying to think of a topic to talk about, the newest upcoming Magic: The Gathering set, Aetherdrift, had its first look and lore release and many people we surprised at the amount of depth given to the set.

From the renaming of Kaladesh to Avishkar to the might of BOOSTGOD, there has been a lot of thought given to the setting of the upcoming set. What that means for the mechanics who’s to say this early, but I have seen some people already liking the worldbuilding of it at the very least.

Which is what reminded me of the discourse that surrounded the set of Duskmourn: House of Horror, in which opinions were mixed on the actual setting of the set, but many people enjoyed the limited play of the cards and quite a few of them have made their ways into other formats.

This has brought to my mind the eternal debate of designing a game: top down design or bottom up design, and that is something that I think would be interesting to discuss.

Top Down and Bottom Up?

So let’s begin with defining what each of these terms mean, at least when it comes to how it is used in card games.

Top down design means that the game or set was designed with the world first before many of the actual game mechanics are implemented.

For example, in Magic the set and plane of Innistrad was designed with the idea of making a gothic horror plane in Magic, so the designers took the tropes of gothic horror and translated them into Magic cards.

Flavor comes before the mechanics, but the mechanics are made in service to the flavor of the game or set.

Bottom up design means that the game or set was designed with a mechanical purpose first, with the flavor being attached afterwards.

Using Magic again, Mirrodin and its accompanying block was designed with the theme of artifacts mattering, so a majority of the game play of that period revolved around artifacts.

Mechanics being the goal over flavor, with the flavor being tailored to suit the mechanics of the game to make it more than just text on a piece of cardboard.

High and Mighty

The benefits of developing from a top down perspective is very much achieving a form of audience resonance.

If someone looks at a game and is able to recognize the theme of it from just looking at the art of the box, then that can potentially evolve into someone buying the product.

It eases people into understanding what your game is about and allows you to make getting new players easier.

I would not have gotten into Magic if the Adventures in the Forgotten Realms set had not released and me going “Hey I like Dungeons and Dragons, and I like card games, I’ll buy a box and see if I like it.”

Then I got my favorite creature in Dungeons and Dragons, The Tarrasque, and several recognizable characters, Tiamat and Acererak, that the hooks were in me.

The flavor of Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty is what sold me on buying a lot of it, and it also helped that the set had a ton of strong cards and from then on I was hooked.

This is part of the reason why licensed card games from other properties have done decently well, because they have recognizable IP’s to draw attention.

Lorcana is based off of Disney properties and for that alone it was hard to get the first set for a while. The game is solid enough on its own, but for the first few months of the game’s life, it was hard to get access to the cards because Ravensburger underestimated demand.

With this resonance however there is a cost that can come from it, and that is sometimes people won’t like the flavor of the set or the game.

You can have the best game in the world, if people don’t enjoy a setting or a premise then they will not enjoy the game.

For example, in Japan there is a card game based off of the vtubers of the company Hololive, and while the game looks promising, not everyone is going to be interested in the game because its based off of anime styled vtubers.

There are going to be in jokes and references that people aren’t going to get and while they may be flavorful, they just won’t make sense to some people.

Going to the Magic well again, I wasn’t all that interested in Kaldheim because I’m not too fond of Norse mythology. There are some neat cards in the set, but I am personally not a fan of the flavor.

There are games that are based of of anime or anime like properties that are solid games, but people don’t touch because they are not fans of the anime aesthetic.

It’s also difficult to translate some flavor into mechanics.

Going into Yu-Gi-Oh!, the Egyptian God cards in the show were established to be the most powerful cards in the game with bonkers effects and basically won the game if they were played.

In the actual card game, the Egyptian God cards are middling at the best of times and outright bad most of the time.

There was also a spell card in the series Yu-Gi-Oh! Vrains called Judgement Arrows that was a whole plot device, but within the mechanics of the actual game doesn’t really work.

Designing a game from a primarily flavor perspective can bring eyes to the game, but can just as easily deter people away from the game if done badly.

Low and Crunchy

On the opposite end of the spectrum is developing a game from the bottom up, meaning that the mechanics are driving factor of the game, with flavor being made to tie the game together.

The benefits of this is that the game itself is much more defined on how it plays and is a stronger play experience for it.

Looking at Magic, Zendikar as a set was focusing on what could be done with lands. With that the mechanic of Landfall was made, as well as lands that had more effects than just tap for mana.

In Worldwake, lands that became creatures was a prominent mechanic as well as cards that cared about which lands you had, and multikicker to make use of all the lands you had in play.

Even games that are simple to learn yet difficult to master because of the complexities of the game can be a driving point of a game.

The Pokémon Trading Card Game is rated for ages 6 and up, but from just glancing at what is the current meta of the game, there are some complex interactions that a six year old won’t immediately get, but they can still play their favorite Pokémon and have a good time.

The issue that arises from games that are designed with the mechanics first is that sometimes those mechanics are not that fun to play.

I can acknowledge that Flesh and Blood is a well designed game that has many people who enjoy it. However, for me personally I do not enjoy the way that the game plays.

It operates on an axis that is very interactive and favors people who enjoy games that have heavy counter play, which is a play style that I like in small doses but not as the whole basis of the game.

I don’t want to be playing a card game like chess, where I have to think of more than five or six moves ahead of me, which is why I am not great at playing control decks in many card games.

There can also be games that have mechanics bloat, meaning that there is so much in the game that’s going on that it’s hard to keep up with everything.

Magic suffers from this a bit with its older formats, but that’s because the game has been around for 30 years, mechanics are going to creep up and evolve.

Yu-Gi-Oh! suffers from mechanics bloat immensely when comparing newer cards to older cards.

Discounting the variety of summoning mechanics that were introduced (Pendulum I’m looking at you), there are regular effect monsters that have either multiple effects or effects that only work when specific conditions are met or lock you into specific conditions for a certain duration of time.

While these effects may be locked into specific archetypes so you won’t make as many mistakes, there will still be a lot of mistakes that occur because there are so many things going on, people are bound to forget something has happened.

Yu-Gi-Oh! has the notorious reputation that it has been power creeping the game to a point where it almost seems impenetrable to new players.

Which leads to the last point, mechanics heavy sets can lead to a sizeable power gap for the game.

Magic’s Mirrodin block was centered around artifacts, and it was one of the most powerful blocks in the games history and one of the few points where if Wizards of the Coast didn’t correct its mistakes, the game was in danger of dying.

Skullclamp was a last minute design change into a broken card advantage engine, artifacts were colorless so they slotted in any deck, and the meta was either playing Affinity or playing against Affinity.

Bottom up game design can make for a better overall game, but it can also make the game more complex for new players to enjoy.

Middle Out

One game design method that I don’t think has been discussed as much is something I would like to call middle out design, which is where there is solid core of flavor and mechanics, and the rest of the game evolves from that.

In my opinion, Lorcana appears to be following this direction of game design, but that is from my initial impressions of the game.

You have the solid core of flavor with the Disney properties and the core of mechanics like Songs and Shift, but there is an evolution of mechanics rather than a brand new slew of mechanics added to the pile.

The flavor of each new set dictates the design in so much as which characters get more prominence, and there are still some new mechanics added, but as far as I can tell they are only slight variations of the base mechanics.

Locations are the biggest mechanical change of the game, but they were added in the third set of the game and were made into a core mechanic pretty quickly in subsequent sets.

This is the ideal mix of top down and bottom up design, because both aspects are working in tandem rather than against each other, and I think is an unexplored avenue for new games to explore.

I’m positive that there are games that take this middle out approach that I have yet to see because of the sheer number of games out there, so if you know of any games like that let me know and I would love to take a look at them.

In Conclusion

Designing a game is hard, and there is not one right way to do so. Whatever works best for your game or your design process is going to win out, but don’t be afraid of looking at a different method to make a new game or set.

Magic has been going back and forth in how they design their sets, from top down to bottom up and a mix of both, and they have lasted 30 years.

If you stay stagnant in one design style, that can limit how you make new cards and may eventually drive players away from your game.

Switch things up every so often, but if you can’t for one reason or another, strengthen the core of your game in both flavor and mechanics so that they can be flexible enough as your game goes on to not alienate older and newer players.

Thank you for reading, see you when I see you.

Peace,

From, J.M.Casual