Hello and welcome back to the Casual Chat!

Since it is the last Friday of the month, we are coming back to the Casual Chat and today I have a topic that I spent a bit of time thinking about and not trying to force out.

Which is relevant because today I wanted to talk about a topic that isn’t too often discussed when talking about card games and that is how big a set should be.

There are some interesting thoughts I’ve had about this topic and should make for an interesting bit of discussion, since I also want your opinions on set size.

Let’s get started!

Opening Salvo

When looking at a brand new card game, especially in modern games, is that the first set tends to be one of the bigger sets of the game.

This is done to entice new players into the game by basically saying, “Hey look, this new game has a ton of cards to play with!”, which is a decent enough marketing technique.

It is also helpful to do this because another aspect of newer games is that unless they are backed by a major company you never know when your next set is going to be coming, so you get a ton of cards into the player bases hands in order for them to have a decent amount to start off with.

There is also the fact that the more cards you have then the more cards you can use to explain the game and its mechanics to the new players of the game.

It is interesting to look at card games throughout the history of card games to compare how big or small sets have become.

This is because when you look at Magic with Alpha, that set had nearly 300 cards, only getting to 300 cards when Beta was released to fill in the couple of missing cards from Alpha as well as some extra basic lands so that they can say they had 300+ cards in the set.

Then you look at Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG with their first sets, Base Set for Pokémon and Legend of Blue-Eyes White Dragon which had 102 cards and 126 cards in their sets.

For Legend of Blue Eyes White Dragon specifically this is interesting because this was for the TCG release of the game, whereas the very first release in Japan for the OCG called Vol. 1, which preceded the TCG by three years, only had a grand total of 40 cards available in that set.

Now this would be an absurdly small number of cards released, if the next set Vol. 2 wasn’t released a month later, and then Vol. 3 released two months after that and this continued until they found a steady release schedule.

Compare this to modern card games, which release in sets of around 200 to 250 for their first sets, which is a nice middle ground of having a decent number of cards for your initial release to get players interested in the game and start their collections, while not being too overwhelming that new players will become intimidated in trying to collect all of them.

Normal Releases

After the first set has been released, the next thing that a game needs to look at is what their normal release size is going to be, and this can be a bit tricky.

It really depends on how often you intend to release your product, because as people have been complaining for a while with Magic, product fatigue is very much a real issue that may have people not become interested in your products for a while.

If you intend to do more than four releases then your sets would benefit from being smaller, between 100 to 175 cards because these sets tend to also err on the smaller side for booster boxes and also tend to be cheaper for people to buy.

If you do four or fewer releases per year then it would be a benefit for the game to have around 200 to 275 cards because the sets tend to be more relevant for longer periods of time in terms of competitive while also being able to be sold for a higher price at higher booster box counts.

Another aspect about regular set releases is consistency in sizes, because there was an interesting bit of data that came about when Magic was releasing sets in Blocks back in the day.

Normally sets at that time would be one big set, and then two smaller sets all set on the same plane in order to develop mechanics and themes that the designers and developers wanted players to play with. There were some breaks in having a two large sets and a small set in some combination or in the case of Lorwyn-Shadowmoor block having two large sets and two small sets.

The issues that came with this were that the smaller sets would not sell as well as the larger sets, and would often not be as well received. This was also the case when Wizards shifted from the three block structure to the two block structure, where there was one large set then followed by one small set.

This also proved problematic, even when they tried adding a Core set in the mix in either configuration until the block model was retired for a several large sets each taking place in a new plane rather than multiple sets on one plane.

There are some positives and negatives about block structure for another time, but what matters is that now Magic sets tend to be around 250 to 290 cards for a set, with some variations in either direction depending on the set size and that has seemed to be doing well for them.

Special Releases

This is an interesting aspect of card games in that sometimes a game wants to release what I like to call a “special set.”

Now this could be done to celebrate a major anniversary for the game, a significant milestone, a different way to play the game, or just some extra cards for a particular format.

The set sizes of these are also very much inconsistent, and this is because it is determined by the occasion. If it is something like an anniversary or rerelease of a set like the Unlimited versions of older Yu-Gi-Oh! sets tend to be the exact same cards as the original set.

Then there are sets like Magic’s Core Sets, which originally acted as a place where cards would be reprinted so a select number of older cards would be chosen, with something like Fourth Edition being almost 400 cards for the set.

We also have sets that provided a different way to play, like the Un-Sets, Conspiracy Sets, Battlebond, etc. from Magic, which are alternate ways to play the game that have a wide variety of sizes in either being small, the same size as a regular set, or just some decks depending on the type of supplementary product.

Of course there are also sets that are designed for a particular format, namely sets like Modern Horizons for Modern, which are made to inject new cards for a format in a way that doesn’t disrupt the Standard rotation.

The reason why special sets are so varied is because normally they don’t have a consistent amount of sales for the sets. Sure some sets like Modern Horizons for Magic and Scarlet and Violet 151 for Pokémon, but some of the other special sets don’t do as well.

Sure they may have their fans, but they are not often expected to be major tent poles of the game and only really as some extra cards for eternal formats or for interesting ways to play the game or the occasional expensive reprint.

In Conclusion

Set sizes are an interesting thing to talk about for games because it isn’t something that you see many people talk about unless it hits one of the major extremes.

Too few cards and people complain that there isn’t enough cards in the set, too many cards and people complain that there is too much and its forcing them to buy more cards.

I think that the best size of a set for a game is really determined by the means that the game makers can make consistently good cards. Some cards will be duds, that is the unfortunate truth of game design, but if there are more cards that people like than dislike then the size of the set shouldn’t matter.

I also say this as someone who has been trying to make several different card games as a solo designer/developer and learning that the more cards you make the more difficult things are.

Even for Magic Project: Omega, making cards can be challenging even though I am using modern Magic design tips and looking at older cards for inspiration, imagine how difficult it is for a brand new game where you are working on untested mechanics and trying to see how it works.

I do think there has been decent progress for one of my many projects, but like with every one of my other projects that one won’t see the light of day for a long time.

Thank you all for reading, see you next month for the next Casual Chat!

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual

Bluesky: @jmcasualnerd.bsky.social

Ko-Fi: ko-fi.com/jmcasual