Strategy-focused types: yes or no?

[MLaRF]

(Wow it's been a while since I've posted on here)

So hey guys, I was working on my card game for the 6 zillionth time and I had a little dilemma that arose while writing effects. I was wondering if each type (in the case of my card game, things like fire, water, etc) should focus on a specific strategy, and how much. In general, I can think of 3 ways to go about doing things:

1. Each type sticks rigidly to a strategy.
Though it should be noted that when I say this, I don't necessarily mean all cards in that type have the same general output; one type could be half composed of stat boosters, while the other half of it is made up of people who gain effects from stat boosts or something.
This option provides a great advantage for deckbuilding and such, as when you need a specific card effect (like when you're losing to mill decks and you need a good reviver) you can always just look in one specific type. If you don't have any way to limit what types people use (for example, like how in Yu-Gi-Oh! you can tribute summon a monster with any type or attribute and it doesn't change a thing, as opposed to Magic where you have to pay a specific land type), doing so will promote the use of multi-coloured decks.
General disadvantages of this one is that it doesn't have the advantages of the other two. That can still be a pretty big factor, but it generally doesn't cause too many problems out of its own merits.

2. Each type is guided towards a certain strategy, but very loosely.
This one's a lot like in Magic, where you know that mountain cards will generally focus on being fast and dealing damage, but instead of the whole type it's merely a majority. This is different from some types being guided towards a certain strategy with others being free-run, which I'll go over below.
The main advantage to this one is to improve the abilities of single-coloured decks. Without the restrictions placed on the option above that makes each colour relegated to one strategy, single-coloured decks can now cover strategic weaknesses while still benefiting same-type-of-monster effects and avoiding having to deal with improper resource types.
A major disadvantage that's pretty specific to this one is that starting sets generally won't have more than 200 cards, so if you have more than 6 or so types, you won't be seeing enough cards of any given type to really be able to say that it's guided towards any one strategy. For instance, if a Pokemon set had about 150 cards, 120 of which were actual Pokemon, and among those only 90 were basic Pokemon, you would have 9 different basic Pokemon per type, so a majority in any given type would only be 5 cards. Kind of difficult to say that's a major guiding force in a type.

3. Whatever the frick you feel like.
The main advantage to this is that you're not restricting anything to any guidelines, and things can evolve and fly around wherever. A very likely result would be like Pokemon, where one or two types (Fire and Grass) end up focusing a lot on specific strategies, while everything else just ends up going all over the map. I generally don't like the latter part of that result, because then any given type's value is just determined by a small handful of cards.
The main disadvantage here is exactly that, you can't quite determine where a type is going to go, and with that, you may not be able to see any value in another type that does the exact same thing but not as good. You can avoid this willingly, though, by starting off free-range and then just morphing each type into whatever you want its specialization to be, but you also gotta watch out that you have enough cards in that type with a certain effect to actually make it any different from another type.

So yeah, I was wondering if you guys had any thoughts on how you think it's best to approach type-wide strategies from any given gameplay style. I'm gonna probably finally make the newest version of my card game after I look at the discussion to see if I'm really feelin' any one option over another, but yeah. Hope this gets you to really think about some cool ways you can do things in your own card game!

--MLaRF

[xchokeholdx]

What I usually do is write down a list of general effects that I want certain "faction/color etc" of a game to have, and then cross reference their counterpart into other factions/colors to balance them.

for example:

Orcs are good at dealing damage and discarding cards and playing more cards
Elves are good at healing and drawing cards and doing direct damage
Dwaves are good are returning cards from discard pile and preventing direct damage and preventing player to play more cards.

So in this way, each faction automatically "counters" something another faction is good at, but not totally.

Then I also spice it up even more by adding Priorities. So elves have a lot of cards that Heal, a bit less that draw cards, and a few that do direct damage, BUT their strengths in cards go up, so all of their Heal cards are weak in strength, their draw cards are ok, but the few direct damage cards they have are awesome!

This is mostly how I balance things in my cards games and I think this is working out ok. I hope this helped a bit.

[MLaRF]

@xchokeholdx
I'm... not quite sure if that really answers my question, but you do have some good stuff going on here. You might want to take this up in the discussion about "hate cards," because this seems to be more focused on that kind of thing. What I was really looking at is how much you think each different faction should focus on a specific strategy in any given card game. Like, if I made my own set for the example you gave, it'd be a matter of if Dwarves should focus exclusively on the three strategies given, just have like 60-80% focus on those three strategies, or go wherever I want, whether or not the latter would include making them work well with the previously established overarching strategies.

To start off further discussion, I'll take a little dive into my own card game. It features a single resource that's used for every type of card, so the game naturally lends itself to a general lack of penalty from running multi-typed decks. The first set currently includes about 90 monsters in 9 different types, but some monsters are played on top of others, like evolving pokemon; these evolved cards have stronger versions of the previous card's effects. There are about 30 evolved cards, meaning 60 monster families across 9 types, so there's too little wiggle room to use the second option of the original post, the loose strategies (a majority would mean 4 families per type follow the strategy). This means either each type sticks rigidly to their strategy, or card strategies are made with no type-dependent guidelines, and each of these two remaining options makes full use of the typeless resource. The first option promotes multi-typed decks through the use of small splashes of other-typed cards, because their type's strategies, while not an overarching theme throughout a player's deck, would still be of benefit (such as putting something like waboku in an aggressive yugioh deck). The second one also promotes multi-typed decks, though only on these three conditions: (A) The cards involved in each strategy do not have type-related effects (i.e. do this for each of your fire guys); (B) The strategies given span enough different types to make multi-typing worthwhile; and (C) There are enough cards that do focus on types to make the differentiation between types worthwhile (like, if monsters have effects that don't change based on types, you'd better have some instants that do focus on the different types). After typing out that last part I think I'll go with the first option, since it seems the easiest to keep track of; using the third option has the disadvantage I didn't see before that you need to record how many cards any given strategy gets so that it doesn't overwhelm the card roster.

If you guys'd like to share what's worked best for your games, feel free to talk about it! Maybe you can get some help in a tight spot by thinking about how strictly you want to relegate each type to any given strategy.

[Gargoyle]

Ok, to answer, I think it's necesary to first determine the different ways that 'types' are defined and applied. There are probably more than this and some that haven't been thought of, but here are some summaries of what I've encountered:

1. The existence of Factions(possibly called elements, allignment, nation etc depending on theme) whereby you must choose an affiliation for your deck and thus can only use cards that share this affiliation. There may be neutral cards, but this method is usually on the restrictive end of the scale.
-One way of balancing this out is giving a way of playing cards of other factions by paying an extra cost(eg, Game of Thrones LCG).
-Another is to allow the use of multiple classes in one deck, but one on the field at a time, meaning they must be swapped between in a hybrid deck(Eg, a little - heard of online TCG called Ederon).
-There is also the option of Tiered Factions, where you choose a Faction and a Class/Race; so the Faction will be pretty general but when combined with a class you are given a more defined deck type.
   If you use this system it's a good idea to give a distinct flavour to each faction(eg 'destruction', 'rescources', 'control' etc) or the existence of Factions becomes erroneous and irrelevant. However, they should be able to achieve this theme in a number of ways, and focus on various aspects or concepts that relate to it. If you want to give each faction a bit more definition, then try to give some concession to the different ways people may want to build, by doing something similar to the above examples.

2. The reliance on Coloured rescources(again, may go by different names/themes) to play any given card(eg Magic: The Gathering and Pokemon). This is not 'play whatever you want', it's 'play whatever you want so long as you can fulfil the resource requirements of your cards'. This one is a bit more fluid, yet gives plenty of limitation. The way rescources are generated may vary, affecting how difficult hybrids are to use(eg, Elements allows very easy hybrid decks) and I generally think it's a good idea to keep the cost of a card to one rescource type; I believe hybrid decks should evolve from the creativity of the players, not incentives like dual-colour cards. If certain colour combinations lack the potential of others, then maybe consider dual-colours to even the playing field, but have a look at why some have better cohesion than others and try to think of some simpler ways this could be averted.

3. PLAY WATEVA YOO WANT!    This is obivously the most loose way of doing things, but needn't mean there's no sense of order. Yu-Gi-Oh is probably the most prominent example of this, and it still contains Archetypes, which give no genuine restrictions but are designed to work cohesively.
In all honesty, this isn't a good way to go. It essentially means you have to put a painstaking amount of time into balancing and creating cards in post-production, otherwise certain staples or strategies appear that cause stagnation and some cards/strategies to fall into obscurity.
You're basically shooting yourself in the foot; you could put a little effort into choosing a basic structure for the game itself, but when you don't, the effort you put into creating a balanced game(which you should always be striving for, IMO) far exceeds what some groundwork would take. It allows some great diversity if that's what you want, but you have to be careful about taking this route, and you'll see themes emerge in people's decks anyway so what have you really achieved?

So, if anything, you should always aim for some definite structure, but without telling the player what their strategy should be. How you do this may vary, but as wtih many things, balance is key.

Hope this helps