Hello and welcome to the Casual Chat!

Today I wanted to get away from the broad and meta aspects of card games that I’ve been delving into the last couple Casual Chats and talk about some observations of card designs.

While each card game is different in their own variety of ways, there are some common elements between them that help people who do play card games get familiar with a new game fairly quickly.

Even if the overall mechanics of the game are completely different, there are some card types that help people learn a brand new card game easier, and I wanted to talk about those common card types today.

Let’s get started!

Creature and Character Cards

This is one of the more common card types to see in games, even though they have a variety of names depending on the game you play.

Creature, Monster, Summon, Minion and many other names are elements of a card game that stay on the board and either interact with the opponent directly or their Creature cards depending on how the game deals with combat.

This is one of the more direct ways of building a game because having a piece on the battlefield is a direct way for you or your opponents to interact directly with their other cards.

They are also used to define the setting of the game by having them be examples of the beings that happen to exist in the game world and what that game world is like, giving more personality to the game.

Speaking of personalities, Character or Leader cards are an interesting subset of Creature cards because they are important characters in the game world, so much so that they have a proper name and title. Sometimes they are the focus of the game like in Flesh and Blood or the One Piece TCG or are a part of the grander world like in Magic or Digimon.

Character cards, depending on the game, tend to have big flashy effects that show what they do in the story of the game or have a persistent effect in the game that effects the game state in a major way.

Creatures and Character cards are the bread and butter of many card games, and are often the most abundant card type in a game.

Interaction Cards

This is a much more broad series of cards, but they are essentially one time use cards that affect cards in play or help gain you resources.

Think of instants and sorceries in Magic, Items in Pokemon, Spells and Traps in Yu-Gi-Oh!,, Action cards in Lorcana, etc.

While Creatures and Characters are pieces on the board that do things while in play, Interaction cards help players deal with things that Creatures and Characters can’t normally deal with.

Sometimes there are Creatures that can’t be destroyed in combat but they can be removed from the game in other ways or you need a way to protect yourself if you don’t happen to have a Creature in play or your Character is being attacked and needs to be protected.

This is also where, depending on the game, when you can play Interaction cards becomes important, since some games allow Interaction cards to be played on either players turn or only on your turn and sometimes both depending on the game.

Interaction cards can be used to deal with these sorts of situations and are also what defines side boards in games that have them. Sometimes a deck doesn’t normally play answers against a certain match up and needs to in order to gain an advantage in a best of 3 match, Interaction cards are those answers and can be swapped out to deal with certain match ups.

Interaction cards also help players gain necessary resources like card draw or life gain or recursion that is not always available of Creatures or Character cards.

Arena Cards

This is an interesting sunset of cards because a lot of times they function similarly, but what they affect varies.

Arena cards are cards that affect the board in a much more passive way than creatures. Think Enchantments in Magic, Locations in Lorcana, or Field Spells in Yu-Gi-Oh!

Arena cards are an interesting subset of cards because there are cards that only affect your board and sometimes they affect everything in play.

They are buffs or debuffs in the game and what makes them interesting in card games is that normally they are not too game breaking for people to play with, until they are.

Control pieces that actively make it more difficult for an opponent to interact with the game tend to be Arena cards, and those effects tend to be divisive within the space, with some people really liking that play style and other absolutely despising it.

This subset of cards are very interesting in that regard because, in competitive play, Arena cards can often be slow to play and not impactful enough to be useful, unless they can be played early enough and are disruptive enough that they do impact the game.

Arena cards have the most interesting dichotomy of being either slow flashy cards that are great for casual play, or can make a deck oppressive and prevalent that they may need to be banned for how good they are, and very little in between.

Attachment Cards

The last subset of cards that I want to talk about are a group of cards that can play a double role in a game.

Attachment cards are cards that, like their namesake, attach themselves onto objects in the game and have either a positive effect on that game object or a negative effect on that game object.

These effects can range from making a card stronger or weaker, giving a card an ability it didn’t have previously or taking them away, making them more effective in combat to making them useless in combat, or bringing them back to the battlefield at a cost.

Attachment cards are interesting because they fill in some gaps of semi-permanent effects that have an impact on the game, but have the downside of needing to stay on a card in order to maintain its effectiveness.

If you take out the card the Attachment cards is attached to, then both of those cards are removed and you lose out on card advantage. Auras in Magic’s history historically had a difficult time of being played because oftentimes they were seen as an overall net negative to play a card that give a temporary buff, only for one removal spell to take away two or more cards.

Attachment cards, ones that are played often, tend to also allow you to draw cards or provide an additional bonus as well in order to compensate for their downside, and there have been some Attachment cards that have seen some competitive play because of it.

In Conclusion

While all card games play differently, there are some broad connections that they all have that make it easier for players to learn a new game quickly.

I didn’t even touch on some other shared card types because of time, but there are some others that I could talk about in a future Casual Chat.

Until then, thank you for reading, see you all next time!

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual