"Broken" Cards in CCGs

[Anphros]

What are you guys' opinions on cards that can be seen as "broken" in a CCG's metagame? I know that some people think that overpowered cards basically make the metagame and potentially turn the entire game unbalanced and unfun, while others simply jump on the bandwagon and believe that they can make a specific build around that broken card which will trump all of the others.

Personally, I think that the only reason broken cards exist are because the designing companies want to extort money from hardcore players by creating "money decks" that dominate the metagame.

[Tokimo]

Sometimes cards are broken. That's the way things go. Tarmogoyf was not meant to be broken. It was a rare because it was complicated. Planeswalkers in Magic are meant to be very powerful and deliberately rare though. Eldrazi Monument was meant to be powerful. Emrakul was meant to be powerful. Deliberately placing high powered cards at rare and mythic rare is bad (There are of course powerful cards at common and uncommon, path to exile, terminate, lightning bolt, flame slash, etc, but powerhouse commons make up a smaller portion of their rarity than powerhouse mythic rares).

In particular Pathrazer of Ulamog and Ulamog seem divergent in power level. Yes, one is Legendary, but it's also invincible, hits harder, annihilates more, has more toughness, and the same casting cost. Did I mention that it's an invincible creature with annihilator?

So personally, me, I don't like the practice of making the good and essential cards rare and mythic rare. I don't mind if there are cards that are powerful, since you can't make them all balanced.

[HotLimit]

Many times, if the game has the longevity, they'll release cards that counteract 'broken' cards from earlier sets. A good example is in Decipher's Star Wars CCG, where cards from newer sets had one effect that would nullify an older broken card (though not to the extent that the old strategy was no longer viable), and also provide a secondary effect just in case your opponent wasn't using that broken card.

[picks-at-flies]

There's a difference between 'dominating' and 'broken'.  A broken card is one which every deck either needs to have or needs to be able to deal with, or any card which says, "If I play this first and you don't have an answer I'll win".*  Broken cards cripple games, because they limit future creativity and can make games repetitve.

On the other hand, dominating cards are part of a CCG infrastructure.  It took me a long time to realise this (Magic's Wrath of God being my bane for many years), but I now accept that a range of card quality is inevitable.  This means that at any given moment, a certain section of cards will dominate the environment. 

Magic, with its constantly changing environments, begets lots of talk about this.  Modern sets are designed with enough good cards and strategies that while you can talk about 'Jund' decks, they all contain different card combinations.  Sure they all contain Lightning Bolt, but nobody has to build a deck 'to deal with lightning bolt'.  It's all about the package.  I would argue in fact that 'goyf' is not broken simply because in the end it's just a creature and can be killed by Terror as easily as the next.  Even in Legacy, 'goyf becomes just a means to an end, the most efficient creature for many decks chosen because the environment takes the best card available.

The next question is what rarity should the cards be?  The answer is, of course, at all rarities.  People talk about extortion and of course that's a part of it.  CCGs need to make money to survive.  The amount of time invested in a CCG is normally a huge investment, in design, development and promotion, and while not every CCG is Magic that only means the risk is greater.  So part of 'promotion' is encouraging people to buy cards, and that shouldn't be such a shock.  And part of -that- is to make sure they are always excited to open a booster so some of the good cards need to be rare.  And some of them need to be 'splashy rares'.

For powerful cards, modern Magic sets use a very simple criteria:  if the card is 'broken' in the limited environment (i.e. having one in your hand tips the odds of winning dramatically in your favour regardless of your other spells), then it goes at rare.  Basically using rarity to determine how many are available in drafts and sealed decks.  There are other reasons (complicated cards, peculiar cards and themic cards - most legends and planeswalkers).  The only one I have a strong objection to are putting dual lands at rare.  Land bases shouldn't be the most expensive part of your deck.

It's also worth noting how the block structure affects broken and dominating cards.  In Magic, if you don't like the current environment you only have to wait for next year.  It's not quite so true for other formats but it's noticeable that even Legacy has changed quite dramatically every other block for the last 8 years, often due merely to one or two cards in the block.  For games where there is no block structure, broken cards become continual banes around players and designers.  It's one of my dislikes of the original Star Wars CCG, and the 'cancel these broken cards' counters seem really horrible design.  However, if the game works then the list of dominating cards should grow and flux in such a way that there are a wide variety of decks.

* Rage has enough broken cards that you can't pack them all in (and most of them have answers now).  Shadowfist went many stages better and made vast numbers of broken cards.  When almost any card is broken, you stop noticing :p

[BuddhaJ]

The premise of broken cards is that for a playtest group they have to think about constructed formats and draft formats for the cards. It is possible that in a playtest pool that a series of cards just don't piece together in playtest but when its released the blind squirrel finds a few nuts and you have your broken deck i.e. Ravager Affinity in Mirrodin. Card balance revolves around drafting and constructed formats. There is some cards that are designed purely for draft formats and are not viable for constructed. Then there is constructed format cards that don't work too well in draft. The good thing about having your card game electronic based is that you can run playtesting up to the day of the release. When you are doing the printing of cards if you have a set release date you have to accomodate for advertising and deadlines. If its a deadline even though the card is broken it goes to the print. In MTG they used to give out errata on the cards before the prerelease tournaments.

At least this is what I learned in my time doing playtesting for fullmetal alchemist and 24.

[tomaszavenger]

Sometimes cards are broken. That's the way things go. Tarmogoyf was not meant to be broken. It was a rare because it was complicated. Planeswalkers in Magic are meant to be very powerful and deliberately rare though. Eldrazi Monument was meant to be powerful. Emrakul was meant to be powerful. Deliberately placing high powered cards at rare and mythic rare is bad (There are of course powerful cards at common and uncommon, path to exile, terminate, lightning bolt, flame slash, etc, but powerhouse commons make up a smaller portion of their rarity than powerhouse mythic rares).

In particular Pathrazer of Ulamog and Ulamog seem divergent in power level. Yes, one is Legendary, but it's also invincible, hits harder, annihilates more, has more toughness, and the same casting cost. Did I mention that it's an invincible creature with annihilator?

So personally, me, I don't like the practice of making the good and essential cards rare and mythic rare. I don't mind if there are cards that are powerful, since you can't make them all balanced.

In all my personal CCGs I've made cards balanced, usually by having a marker for special rules for those cards (kinda like limits, but it also prevented use in a special deck, etc). Powerful cards should be weak in a certain respect, and should have an obvious weakness to target.

I prefer LCGs in that respect for the money aspect. Powerful cards being used as an extortion method is clearly designed for the weaker players.

[lsaduym]

I'm pretty happy with magic at the moment. When I played Extended I used to really hate some cards that I thought were broken. I HATED the Umi Jitte. I thought that was just far too powerful, and same goes Extirpate. The thing that bugs me about extirpate is that it just kills interesting decks. Sure it's better to have a well rounded deck that can do lots of things, but shouldn't there be the freedom to make quirky decks that just try to get off one big combo or play one huge creature or something? Having a 1 mana card that removes ALL cards of any type in an entire deck is just nuts imo.

I also hated Hypergensis and Sword of the Meek in stupid thopter decks, but both of those got outright banned, and all the other stuff I dislike got rotated out of extended! So I pretty much love Ext now.

There is still stuff that is a real pain though. Vengevine and bloodghasts are my personal favourite thing to hate on, but they are fairly easily dealt with. In fact all my new decks have stuff specifically to kill those. The stuff I hate or consider broken, are the things you can't deal with. Things like that stupid extirpate which unless you have a counter, screws you big time. And the jitte, although you could just kill that with an anti arti spell, unless you had one at hand right away, it would just dominate you far too easily.

[Monox D. I-Fly]

For me, broken cards are powerful cards without any drawbacks.