Card amount in a game

[yudencow]

I figured out how many cards my game will have. It's around 7500. Is that too much?

My game, like wowtcg, has rivaling factions, only there are 3. There are 9 elements which you want to build your deck around 1 or 2 of those.also there are 9 plains like in magic, and each plain acts differently and has its own special keywords and effects.

There are champion cards and special artifacts that begin with the champion in the game for special bonuses.

[Cyrus]

Yes, I believe that is too many for a base set or any game without a fairly decent sized following. In the heyday of ccgs when people really bought and played them a lot (and tried a lot of random ones) games would have maybe 360 cards in their initial release. I feel like that number is reasonable if not a little high for games now-a-days

[yudencow]

Well because of its similar structure to magic the first set will have 470 for a first set in a cycle and 2 following sets of 200. There won't be yearly base sets. I'm planning 9 cycles. I could remove the other 2 sets thus i'm left with 4300~ cards. Should I remove them?

[MLaRF]

I think after the first set, you'll have all the basic cards, so really I'd say each set after the first should be about half as big as the first (barring repeats). I have over 200 in my first set, with 9 separate elements, and there's enough there to make a gigantic amount of decks. I'd say if you start maybe with 300 in the first set and 200 in each after, that would give your game enough variety while still being massively flexible.

[yudencow]

I'm revising to lower the importance of elements to really raise the deck building options. I guess i'll lower the entire basic game to 4300~ cards. Each of the plains will have 470 cards.

[MLaRF]

I actually think what should be done is lowering the amount of attributes (as I'm going to call them), the plains/elements/factions. As we have it, there are 3x9x9 available combinations, or 243. As an example, Yu-Gi-Oh has 21 possible combinations outside of the god cards. The TCG has been running for about 13 years now and has nearly hit 5500 in OCG format, a total of 80 different sets. Now, I'm not trying to appear as if I'm telling you to lower the number of cards, and I'm sorry if it appears that way, I'm just offering a suggestion that I believe would make the game seem less overwhelming.

[yudencow]

I can't. The 3 faction symbolize the morality if you will and the sense of constant struggle. the elements behave like character class and define strategy. The 9 planes define the different parts of the universe, this part is the trickiest, easier to think of it as in american superheor comic books that are different levels of heroes fighting different battles but they unite quite often.

You were right to lower the number. I have few ideas to bring its longevity more without the necessary of loads of cards. Yugioh is a good example to show a bloody mountain of useless cards. I want every card to mean something and with all these attributes it exactly can happen.

[yudencow]

How many cards in a magic metagame of each format are there?

[DavidChaos]

Let's take a look at some things in preexisting card games for examples, shall we?

Outside of the god cards, YuGiOh has at least 60 combinations of type (Warrior, Beast-Warrior, etc.) and attribute (Element, basically).  Only once did they introduce a new type, and that was so that something that didn't have specific coverage before and normally got grouped into something else.  Add to that the special types (Fusion, Synchro, Xyz, Ritual, Spirit, Gemini, Toon, and Tuner), And that's over 240 combinations, not taking into consideration that Tuner could appear on all of those but Xyz, and Toon & Spirit could appear on any of the others!  And consider this; even with 5500 cards on the table, not even all of those 60 initial combinations have been covered.  The closest thing to factions in this game are archetypes, which are cards designed to work together that typically have part of their name in common.

Magic works differently; Factions are not outright defined in gameplay, but the flavor of factions is sometimes still there.  Magic divides creatures by class, which normally indicates race and, on some cards, some form of profession (not likely to find a card that's just a Human anymore, unless it's a token; you're more likely to see a Human Rogue or Human Knight).  Color, Magic's equivalent of element, is dictated by cost.  However, the mechanics and strategy used by the cards are not, by rule, determined by the color of the card.  Yes, there are rules as to the typical behavior of each color, but it is also more loose in what the colors can do; as long as it goes with that color's mindset in some way, it makes sense.

Vanguard keeps things much simpler; it's really only got Faction and Race, and so far, the latter hasn't been used from a gameplay standpoint.  Faction, however, pretty much dictates what's in your deck.

So, here's the questions I have; do faction, plain, and element have an actual affect on gameplay?  If not, then are they created by the mechanics of the game?  If there are rules that regard faction, like in WoW or DBZ, then keep faction.  Plains appear to only have to do with the set/cycle that the cards are released in, so it feels like something that's flavor only.  As far as element, is it just an indicator of strategy, or is there a mechanical reason for, as an example, a Fire character to be Fire?

[yudencow]

The plains don't just define cycles, there are special keywords existing in every cycle to give it a unique feel. Also, there are modes where you can use cards only from that plain.

The element defeine that feel as colors of magic. There are perks for playing cards of the ssame emotion though unecessary.

The factions define the flavor. You can only play cards of that faction.

[yudencow]

Breaking news. Due to the invention of 2 new card types, giving the smaller neutral factions elements and introducing elementalless cards. I increased the number of cards in a cycle from 470 to 765.

This means I can break it down to different sets.I'm thinking 4. The starter will be twice as big than the following 3.

[3XXXDDD]

How many years will these 7500 cards be spread out for release?

[yudencow]

I guess 5-9 years.

[3XXXDDD]

Then you are going about this in the entirely wrong way as well as planning way too ahead into the future. What if Players "break" card interaction and create some powerful combo you've never seen before? Do you still plan on releasing the pre-defined cards with such effects? That might further improve the initial combo? You can play test all the cards you want before hand but that doesn't mean you'll have perfected it, even Wizards understated Jace and had to ban a card for the first time in the long time.

What you should do is plan 6-12 months ahead say with a total set of 200-400 cards for that time period being released in packs of 50-100. Then take the results from the current meta-game about halfway through that period and apply that to your new set of 200-400 cards and create/modify cards to help lower the consistency of the apparently stronger decks and or improve the over-all consistency of the apparently weaker decks.

Keep it light, simple and adaptable. One single broken combo interaction between cards found by the Players in the first set, may make your other 7000 cards completely irrelevant.

[DavidChaos]

I'd agree; no card game is going to design cards that far in advance.  At most, Magic designs sets 1-2 years in advance, and even then they change if something unexpected happens in the metagame. In addition, they will only design a single set or block at a time.

I'm in the process of designing the first set, and I know mechanics I want to use in the next 2-4 sets, and the flavor of the next 8-10 sets.  That being said, I'm designing a few cards for later sets that I happen to come up with as I'm making the initial set, but I'm not designing the whole game 2-4 years down the line.  I'm taking into consideration what I know I will do later, but I am not designing too far ahead if it's not simply an idea that naturally came about.

In other words, don't design the entire game right off the bat if it's fixed length; you will have to take into consideration how players react to this year's game, and use releases in the next year to contend with things that become too dominant.