Hello and welcome to the Casual Chat!

I really mulled over on what I wanted to talk about, so much so that this is coming out later than I would have liked.

However, that inspired me to talk about something that I may have shared at some point. As someone who has enjoyed card games for a majority of my life, I have at several points tried to design my own card games.

Note the plural, I have tried to make multiple card games.

I never really expected them to go anywhere and most of them were to try and see what I can do as a creative exercise, but there was always the faint hope that one would eventually come out to be something functional.

In fact, for those who have followed the blog long enough, may remember that I made my own Magic cards on this very site in a blog series called Magic Project: Omega.

Why do I mention all of this? Well it’s sort of a blog on how making a card game is very hard, especially for a single person, and even larger companies with teams of dozens of people have a hard time making a card game.

Note I am not just talking about the big companies like Wizards of the Coast, Konami, or Creatures Inc., I am talking about smaller teams of people working to make a card game and I wanted to talk about some of the common struggles that I know I have faced, and figure that other people have faced the same issues.

Concept Hell

The first struggle I have always faced is making a concept work, either through mechanics or through the setting of the card game.

For example, I have had several attempts at making an urban fantasy card game. The idea is that using magic is commonplace and sort of ties modern day tropes and settings and ties them with aspects of fantasy in a way that is both amusing and tragic.

The image of an elf in royal regalia riding on public transit has been on my mind as the base of the concept and I think it has potential for something. What I struggle with is tying mechanics to that sort of game without making it seem derivative of Magic.

Another idea I’ve had for a system is to take the commonly used phrase “life as a resource” to its logical point. The resource system of the game is your life total, meaning you can play very powerful cards if you pay a lot of life to play them, which also makes burn decks absurdly powerful and life gain decks become resource generation decks.

I just don’t know what sort of setting to place that system in. It could work for a mech game or for a dark magic game or some other genre I’m not seeing, but the bits just don’t seem to fit like how I would want those sort of games to be.

A lot of it is me being indecisive in that regard, and that’s a personal flaw of mine. I also recognize that these systems and settings probably aren’t unique and may even get stolen by someone, but that’s why I’m fine with airing these ones out.

I do want to keep some of my more original ideas to myself.

Ego aside, attaching a mechanic concept to a setting concept is a lot more difficult than one may guess, but what makes it more difficult is when you do have a mechanic concept and system concept that do work together.

Making Mechanics

Card mechanics are hard, there really isn’t anything much else to it. You have an idea for a mechanic and you think that it would be a good mechanic to try and test out.

What does that mechanic do? How does it interact with the game? Is this mechanic way too broken? Is it way too weak? Is it boring? Is it confusing?

Trying to balance a mechanic before you even playtest the game is always a loosing battle because you don’t know how it would play in your hypothetical scenarios until you just play it.

It’s even worse when trying to see if it can be made into a keyword. Now I did a blog about this a while back, but using keywords is much more difficult than just slapping the words on a card with a bit of reminder text and call it a day.

Keywords need to be somewhat intuitive in what they do as well as fitting in with the flavor of your game, which is another issue.

Flavor and function can be difficult to tie together and while flavor is more flexible to bend to the will of the function, there are only so many words you can use to make sure that your game is in theme while also not being confusing.

Discard is a mechanic that comes often in card games that can mean multiple things depending on the card game. In a lot of them it means to take a card from your hand and put it into the graveyard equivalent of the game. However, there are some games where discard means to remove from the board and put into the graveyard equivalent, and I’ve even seen it be used as a general term to remove cards from somewhere as “discard X cards from hand/in play/top of your deck”.

It also becomes difficult to use some words in order to not sound like another card game. Card games can’t really use the word tap because of its close association with Magic (expired patent notwithstanding) so they use terms like exert, exhaust, expend or other synonyms that mean the same thing.

Let’s say you do have the base mechanics down, you are ready for the hardest part.

Making Cards

This is the part where I struggle the most, and that really is because no matter how large or small I want to design my game, I still need make a large number of unique cards that fit within the base rules and systems I have designed.

I have tried to make several games that have a mechanic that is unique to a particular faction and started working on making cards. Then I try making the cards that work well with that faction or mechanic and get stuck trying to make every card different.

Sure not every card needs to do something, but my personal philosophy of card game design is that every card has a home somewhere, and trying to design every single card in that manner is not ideal if you want to design a bunch of cards by yourself.

Then when I get stuck in trying to make every card unique, I take a break to recharge myself and try to work on something else. Then when I come back to that game I realize I had forgotten where my head space was at when I made some cards, and even looking at the cards I did make doesn’t help clarify things.

Momentum can be easy to maintain, but once you lose creative momentum it becomes really difficult to get back to any sort of momentum you were once at.

Then of course there is the rarity issue, another topic I’ve talked about, and trying to design cards that feel rare and special while also making sure they aren’t broken is pretty hard, but what’s more difficult is designing common cards.

Common cards are the cards that most players will see when they open a booster pack or booster box and if there is a draft component of a game then those are the cards that will get the most use. Common cards need to function in some capacity that gets the mechanics across while also not being too confusing for a new player.

Trying to make a couple of commons is hard, but around one hundred is a challenge to be sure. Even with Magic Project: Omega, I struggled working on commons more than I did on rares.

Mentioning Magic Project: Omega leads on to my next point: art.

Artist Conundrum

I am not an artist in the sense that I can draw, paint, sculpt, model, or design in a visual medium in that regard. Which is why when I was working on Magic Project: Omega I opted to use a blank white background for the “art” of the cards.

I could have use already existing images of Magic cards, but then I wouldn’t want to do that because the art of Magic cards is particular to a card and it can get a bit confusing if a different piece of art was used for a different Magic card.

I could have used stock photos or random pictures online, but I would still want to credit or source every piece of art or random stock photo I found online, plus it wouldn’t really fit with the theme of Magic if there was some pieces of hand drawn art and a random stock photo as a piece of placeholder art for a blog. Personal prototyping sure because I wouldn’t sell those anyway, but not so much for a public blog where I would want to credit as much as possible.

I could have used AI, which at the time when I was working on the set was starting to become more and more prevalent, but I have taken a hard stance against using AI art in terms of using it for anything I post or may even want to sell in the future.

Even for use of prototyping for a game I am hesitant to use AI art because there is always the concern that a piece of AI placeholder art gets shown off when it wasn’t meant to and any game I make that had some amount of good will attached to it immediately goes down the drain.

This does make things difficult for playtesting because having images does help in getting the idea of a card across, even if they are placeholders. I would love nothing more to hire concept artists to help me conceive of a setting to help better get the feel of a game, but I am too broke for that.

Solo Endeavor

This also leads to the major issue of game design in general, and that is that I have a specific set of skills with regards to card game design but I don’t have the skills to do everything on my own.

I can admit that freely enough that I am much better at concepting mechanics, setting, and themes while also being able to set a clear enough vision on how I would like the overall game to be designed and set up on the back end and can even get some basic card designs, but making all of the cards, designing the art to flesh out the setting, and playtesting are things that I struggle with.

I haven’t even had a single playtest for any of my games to see if they are even good or not, and there have been a couple that have gotten close to that stage.

This isn’t me asking for people to work with me on a card game. Card games are notoriously difficult to do successfully in the crowded market that exists, especially when a lot of them are big IP’s that take up a majority of the shelf space that exists.

I would like to have a full fleshed out card game or game one day, and maybe then I’ll ask for help from artists, but until I get to that point I am content in honing my skills making custom games for me and maybe a couple of my friends.

This whole post ended up being more about me venting how hard it is to make a card game, and boy did I have a lot more to vent about than I had initially planned.

In any case, sorry for the late Casual Chat, life does what life does and hopefully the next one isn’t as much of a ramble as this one has turned out to be.

Thank you for reading, see you all next time!

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual