Hello and welcome to the Casual Chat!

Today I would like to talk about a trading card game that has recently come to my attention, one that seems to have been in the works for a bit and has just had their preorders open.

The game is called VCard Trading Card Game, a TCG put together by a number of Vtubers and other content creators offering their likeness, and is done so in partnership with Gamer Supps, a company known for their energy drink powder and shaker cups who frequently collaborates with many of the Vtubers and content creators involved.

I’ll talk about what the game is about, how to play, what I like and don’t like, what can be improved upon, and some concerns for the future.

This is not sponsored in any way by Gamer Supps or any of the affiliated creators involved with the VCard Trading Card Game.

Edit: Just an hour or so before this blog went live, Vtuber Shylily, who is one of the driving forces (and potentially lead?) of the game, began discussing improving the game and showed a road map of the future. The opinions posted here were made prior to what was discussed.

What is the VCard TCG?

VCard TCG, as I said earlier, is based off of playing your favorite Vtubers and other content creators, where the goal is to play the strongest Power Level card each round until you get 5 points.

For those unaware, a Vtuber is a streamer or content creator who instead of showing their faces use a digital avatar as the face of their channel. A Vtuber that you might be aware of is Ironmouse, or you may be familiar with the organization known as Hololive and any of their talents.

The talents for VCard TCG range from being completely independent or are part of a talent agency like Mythic Talent or 3AM Talent that allows their creators to take part of independent ventures (to my understanding at least) or have made some sort of deal allowing the game to use their talent’s likeness.

I should also note that this game is not meant for younger card game players, since a lot of the art errs on the more provocative side of things. No explicit nudity, but there are some cards that I wouldn’t show my friends or coworkers.

How do you play?

In order to play the game, you need a deck that has a minimum of 50 cards, containing a mix of Power Level cards (the talents), Mascots, and Support cards with no more than four copies of each card in the deck.

The Power Level cards are either PL 8, 9, or 10, with PL 8 cards having abilities and PL 9 and 10 cards being stronger and rarer. Each Power Level card has one of five associated types with it, which is stronger or weaker against another type.

Whenever a Power Level card goes up against a type they are stronger against, then that card gets a +2 bonus.

Adding other bonuses are Mascot cards, which either add a flat +1 bonus, a +2 bonus if they match types, or +3 bonus if they match a specific Vtuber. Mascots can also negate and discard an opposing Mascot once per turn if their element is stronger than an opponents.

To shake things up a bit are the Support cards, generic cards that can add bonuses, hinder your opponent, or offer some other advantage to you during your turn.

You start the game with seven cards in hand, each player drawing up to a hand of five cards prior to their draw phase each subsequent round, with an option to mulligan if you have no Power Level cards.

Then both players place a Power Level Card face down and reveal them, with the lowest Power Level going first or in the case of a tie, a game of rock, paper, scissors to figure out who goes first.

The starting player then starts by playing up to one Mascot and one Support card then passing to the next player until either player is unable to play a card or the current Power Level that a player controls is higher for 2 of their own turns.

Once all boosts are settled, the higher Power Level wins and then the next round begins, with the winner of the round scoring one point, with five points being the score to win the game.

The Hard Truths

I want to get to the less than stellar parts of the game first, mostly because they are very glaring.

This game doesn’t feel finished. There are some interesting ideas that are present, but are held up by the fact that the game play was, intentionally from my understanding, made to be very simple.

That’s why many of the Power Level 8 cards have a limited number of abilities spread between them and the higher Power Level cards have no abilities. It helps makes sure that the power level of the game is equal throughout, but doesn’t employ any interesting tactical options that a trading card game ideally would want.

Those options come from the Support cards, those having the most unique abilities, but the problem comes from picking which Support cards are the best and having the shell of which Vtubers you like or which Power Level 8 cards have the best abilities.

This doesn’t lead to a wide variety of deck options, especially when two-thirds of the Power Level cards are vanillas.

There was also the fact that, originally, when a round was finished, the losing player would put the cards they used into a prize pool in which the winner of the game would win all of the prize cards.

This, very swiftly, became an optional rule because Ante mechanics are ALWAYS a bad idea in real life, Magic learned this decades ago. It invites a lot of negative behaviors, creates feel bad moments for people who spent a lot of money on cards, and in some regions could be considered gambling.

Becoming an optional rule was the best decision the game could make, but if that section later on in the game’s life span were to be removed and not even be considered an optional rule, I would not be surprised.

Another aspect that I am not a fan of is the rarity power scaling. I had a whole blog post about Rarities talking about the function of rarities in games, and this is what happens when you turn rarities into purely chase cards.

Functionally, a PL 9 card is worse than a PL 10 card because they are always at a disadvantage and need to play a lot more cards in order to win a round. PL 10 cards are also the rarest cards that are regularly available, meaning that if the game does take off, they will be more expensive to buy.

PL 8 cards at least have an ability so they can help swing things in your favor, so PL 9 cards are in awkward spot of weaker than the rarer PL 10 cards but not as interesting to play as PL 8 cards.

Silver Linings

While I have been critical on the game, there are things that I do like about it.

First and foremost the art of the game is really well done. I can appreciate that the art varies in being provocative to cool to goofy to cute to capture the wide range of personalities that the Vtubers have.

It’s great to see independent creators collaborate in a project like this, and while it isn’t the first Vtuber card game or even the largest, seeing them dip their toe in is nice to see.

The game itself has its flaws, but I can see that if this early version is successful that the cards released in the future can help expand what the game could do. The cards being simple on the offset can help introduce more complicated mechanics slowly over time, which can help in keeping the game’s life span long.

The type weakness is something that the creators could play around with, maybe having a card that change types for the round, which will give them an advantage against another type but potentially lose a bonus from a Mascot.

In order to combat the PL 9 card issue, maybe specific Mascots or Support cards that give a small flat bonus but give only the PL 9 cards an extra bonus or ability while they are in play.

For the Future

My major issue with VCard is that it doesn’t know what it wants to be, a collectible or a game.

It has some game mechanics, but it feels like there are things that are missing and deck building is lacking depth. You can have a first set of a game not have a lot of mechanics, but still have things to make gameplay interesting, we saw that with the release of Lorcana.

I understand wanting to keep a game simple, there is no issue with that, but keeping a game too simple then people will get bored and move on to the next thing.

The collectible aspect seems to be more what this is leaning on, and I didn’t even mention how people have negative feelings on how the game is being distributed. I have my critiques on the distribution method, but I wanted to focus more so on the game itself.

The First Edition boxes have the chance of pulling a 1 of 1 gold signed card of each of the talents, which sold out almost immediately, and the Unlimited printing of the set and other paraphernalia like deck boxes, playmat, sleeves, and binders are taking pre-sales until February 20th, which I’m sure is doing fine.

Which is why I’m confused why a game was attached to it in the first place. They had to have known that the cards would sell, especially with the names associated with the project, why not just sell the cards as a pure collectible with no game attached?

Baseball cards are still a popular collectible and there is no game associated with them, so why not go that route?

Pair that with the fact that the prize card mechanic was the default rule for a short period of time, which is a disincentive for people to play with their cards because they may have spent a lot of money to buy those cards and don’t want to lose them. Sure most people would house rule it to not work that way, but why have the rule in the first place?

There could be somewhere where this is explained, and by all means point me that direction because I want people to succeed in making card games.

What frustrates me is that there are glimmers of a decent game in there. You don’t even need to compromise the vision of the game, just a few tweaks to help make the game better.

If you want to check out the game yourself to form your opinions you can click here, and by all means see if this is a game you’re interested in. As another reminder there is a lot of risque art so if that is not your thing or are at work you have been warned.

Thank you for reading, see you next time!

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual

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