Living Card Game vs Trading Card Game

[uankaink]

Just wondering...
What is the benefit of being living card game and collectible card game...
if u create your own CCG, which expansion mechanics will u choose..??

[Ripplez]

lcgs are roughly prearranged sets where you know what cards youll get, theres little to no randomness in the cards you find when you get them. ccgs are like magic, theres rarity and its used in the boosters and sets you open

its a stupid distinction imo. to create a whole new word that has no bearing on how the game actually plays just annoys me personly. but im weird like that

i never plan on selling cards. if i make a game, its strictly for fun or as a mental exercise (or both). id never sell it commercialy so id always use the internet system of every card available, at all times. the only time rarity would matter there is if i used a draft/sealed format for my game

[aardvark]

I'm not sure which I prefer, if any. Though I gotta admit, it's nice to know if you have a strong preference for one type over another. IRL I know that I'm not even looking in the direction of another ccg (as in collectible  ). One word description, you know it, here it is in all it's glory..... moneysink.

That's the reason that I stopped playing Magic (irl anyways). It would probably have been the same reason for me to stop playing Decipher's Star Wars ccg if it hadn't gone down the crapper first. (Hmmm... maybe I'll look into that again too.)

LCGs on the other hand, those I will look at. Blue Moon is one that I've been wanting to try but the base set is oop right now. Or at least it looks that way. Another one if A Game of Thrones which I had the chance to partially play and liked right away. The mechanics seem fun and straight forward, at least when you have someone to explain 'em to you. Doesn't hurt that it's based on a series of novels as well, that, in my oh so holy, er, humble opinion is always a big plus. At least as long as it's a good read of course.

Those are the only two I've had contact with but I know there's other out there. Mostly by Fantasy Flight Games, they pretty much birthed the whole thing afaik. There's a Call of Cthulu and Warhammer Invasion lcg as well.

The cards in LCGs seem to be in prearranged decks but you still have the freedom to customize it at your whim. If they keep on releasing expansions like they do however the lcg term is gonna be moot anyways.

I read somewhere that mtg actually started off with the same concept as an lcg. A multiplayer card game for up to five players, each using a different color. Can anyone confirm or deny?

[uankaink]

thx for the explanation...but im a lil bit confused about LCGs...

if the LCGs are prearranged deck without randomness, so its also means no rarity in LCGs?

IMHO, a game without randomness (and rarity) will eventually die soon or later... everyone will play the same deck because everyone have the same card.

i also dont have any plan to sell cards.
i come from indonesia (thats why my english is bad ^^) where CCG is quitely popular, but there is only one local CCG in my country, which is Vandaria Wars. So i n my pals have decided to make another card game, but my friend told me to use LCG system instead of CCG.

thats why i ask u all about LCG... i just wanna know the comparative advantage between LCG n CCG

[eloooooooi]

It's all about money. A rich man will always beat a poor one when playing a CCG ("Hey, I have a Black Lotus and you don't, loser!"). LCG brings equal opportunities to all players.

Maybe you think CCGs are cool because they have randomness. Let me tell you, randomness disappears when you can pay money for the cards you need. This leads to rich people having all the cards they want and, of course, the best decks.

In the LCG world every player has the same cards. In order to win he will have to build an effective deck and play it correctly. Drawing one single card (the expensive one) won't give him the game.

[Tokimo]

First I want to point out: Everyone having access to all of the cards doesn't damage your game. Playing Lackey I've found I enjoy magic significantly more with access to all the cards.

There's a variety of reasons I don't like the LCG model (not that I like the traditional CCG model, just that I think the LCG model is a sidegrade).

-Rarity (which I think is one of the CCG prime evils) still exists. If you have five precon decks and three of them have a copy of "Fluffy Red Sweater" but only one of them has a copy of "Sexy Black Dress", you're still going to end up with excess common cards that no one wants.
-Boosters are cheap. If you only sell cards in $20 units, people are going to buy less of them. There are a lot of kids who buy a booster or two every so often, which is just a few dollars at a time. Increase the number of cards they need to buy at once and they'll buy less.
-Singles become more difficult to buy when fewer people are engaging in the singles market. That harms buying just the cards you need to construct a deck, pushing people towards blanket collection.

This is my personal favorite model:

-Sell boosters without rarity. Rarity is evil. Rarity makes commons worthless, and since the booster is filled with commons... Yeah, you're paying $5 for 3 cards, not 15 cards...
-Sell sets. You have a 250 card set? Sell 250 cards, 1 copy of each card in a set.
-Sell singles. I'm not sure how I feel about this, but it seems like the whole singles market is built around the fact that the CCG model is messed up. The singles market is trying to compensate for it. As the CCG maker then, why not take that profit of the singles market and earn it yourself by selling singles? This keeps any one card from going for $50 because you have a simple "buy any card for $1.00 + shipping" system going on.

[aardvark]

IMHO, a game without randomness (and rarity) will eventually die soon or later... everyone will play the same deck because everyone have the same card.

You're kidding right? There are plenty of games that don't require randomness, most of them, of course, are not card games. Some people do prefer strategy/tactics over luck of the draw, the kind of person that plays chess or checkers, for example. Ripplez has a tactical card game in the works as well. Be nice and maybe she'll give us more than a teaser.

Then again, when I think card games strategy/tactics are not the first things that come to mind. Even when someone is playing a control deck or whatnot it still depends on the cards drawn.

LCGs are sort of a blend. The only REAL difference between the two is availability. IRL I can buy something like Blue Moon and the available expansions and still have money left over. Plus, with a limited selection of cards you would have to rely, imo, more on your deck-building skills rather than what super-awesome-expensive card(s) you placed in your deck.



Honestly, when it all boils down, you can ignore the first part of this post and just start here:
think of playing an LCG like playing a game of standard. Standard's limited to the last few sets to come out right? You can't use all of the cards that you would in legacy, etc. And LCGs do come out with expansions so, like standard, you might not necessarily be limited to what's out one year. AGoT has "chapter" packs while Blue Moon has racial expansions, so on, so forth.

-Sell boosters without rarity. Rarity is evil. Rarity makes commons worthless, and since the booster is filled with commons... Yeah, you're paying $5 for 3 cards, not 15 cards...
-Sell sets. You have a 250 card set? Sell 250 cards, 1 copy of each card in a set.
-Sell singles. I'm not sure how I feel about this, but it seems like the whole singles market is built around the fact that the CCG model is messed up. The singles market is trying to compensate for it. As the CCG maker then, why not take that profit of the singles market and earn it yourself by selling singles? This keeps any one card from going for $50 because you have a simple "buy any card for $1.00 + shipping" system going on.

If they did things like that I would not feel bad about laying down a wad of cash for games. Even ones that I could only play once a month or whatevers. I nominate Tokimo for head of marketing of WotC and every other friggin' company that produces moneysinks tcg/ccgs.

[Cyrus]

I agree with pretty much everything you just said Tokimo, but especially the $20 package thing.
The idea of a company selling all singles at a steady price seems interesting to me as well, you might have some sort of revolutionary idea there.
Personally I really like the idea of Print and Play games, that basically encourage putting your card game's cards in front of magic commons in sleeves. What I really want to be able to do but don't have the programming knowledge necessary is to build a program sort of like lackey but designed specifically for my game and make a deck builder program that essentially lets you build the deck and then, if you want to play irl, hit a print button and it'll print all the cards in your deck. This way you could still have irl tournaments and gameplay, but at almost no cost to the creator or the player. The way to market it would be selling the programs (for really cheap, most likely) and whenever someone buys the program they get a player badge and/or number of some sort that is required for tournament play. This way a group of friends could buy the program, print as much as they want with it to play with each other, but if they wanted to play competitively they'd have to buy badges or numbers or whatever.
I dunno if this idea will ever actually happen, but I think it could be really cool

[aardvark]

Good stuff, Cyrus. If you could find a way to pull it off, I think it could work. At least in a reasonable world... ah, damn it.

All in all, that would be a great idea. Maybe you should present it to a company or market it in some way.

[Cyrus]

Maybe you should present it to a company or market it in some way.

I wish I any idea how to go about doing that... damn real life stuff getting in the way of me doing things like this... lol

[aardvark]

You could try boardgamegeek. Some companies have a bit of a presence there. At the least you'd find a link to relevant information to companies that you think you wouldn't mind working with. You could also try looking at a smaller indie setup. Might I suggest someone with programming skills (or at least access to said skills.) 

[Tokimo]

Programming skills are rare and expensive unfortunately (I have them, but a program like Lackey is a massive undertaking, it would probably take me months of full time work to make something that good).

[uankaink]

wow... u guys really got the move...
thx for ur help... its very nice to share with u all

[sneaselx]

Perhaps Trevor could offer a modification of Lackey for a price that would have those capabilities, to sell to people.

[Ripplez]

you can print screen an image, copy it to a paint program, adjust the screen size, print it out and glue it to a pack of cards or a blank card