Greetings! And a question about limiting deck building options.

[CitizenKeen]

Hey campers! Lurker who registered to start contributing, so hello everybody! Excited to be getting into the XCG business.

Question about how to limit deck construction.

Ostensibly, decks must be limited in some way. The question of faction or cost, if you will.

Magic, for example, uses cost as a limiting mechanic. The nature of casting costs narrows the different deckbuilding options. It's fluid, but somewhat restrictive. You can create a very feasible deck that has a 2B (Black) and a 3R (Red) card in it. You can even create a deck with a 4U (Blue) and a WW (white) card in it. You can even create a deck with a 2G (Green), 1B, and RR card in it. However, a deck with a WW, GG, RR, BBB, and 2UU? Not particularly feasible. Not impossible, mind you, but difficult.

Rather than limiting by casting cost, other games limit by faction (A Game of Thrones comes to mind). In AGoT, you can cast any card in your declared faction at cost. You may cast a card outside of your faction, but at an increased price. This increased cost often makes a card less "efficient" for its cost, but may be required for a perfect combo.

I like neither of these ideas.

Or rather, the first doesn't work for a game I'm designing (it's a great concept when you're paying with magic, but when you're hiring mercenaries, money is money - thematically it doesn't make sense to have distinct casting costs), and I actually just don't like the second. (Why can't I show up with a Minbari-Narn deck? Says who?)

Yet I recognize that having the ability to create a deck without limitation is a potential recipe for disaster. Decks will quickly become "the best," or rather, without any limitation on what card you put in your deck, if a great card comes out, it will be added to most decks.

I'm thinking of using some kind of threshold mechanic (commanders can't be played unless you have at least three soldiers, a super-zombie can't be played unless you have at least two cards that provide necromancy, etc.)

How have other designers tackled this problem?

[gwago]

I would toy with costs and thresholds; such as different locales you're hiring the mercenaries from, maybe some mercs won't work with others, or maybe their gear isn't interchangeable (a deck with demolitions will be useless unless you have the right man for the job).

Any other details on flavor we can work with?

[CitizenKeen]

I would toy with costs and thresholds; such as different locales you're hiring the mercenaries from, maybe some mercs won't work with others, or maybe their gear isn't interchangeable (a deck with demolitions will be useless unless you have the right man for the job).

Any other details on flavor we can work with?

Alas, I do not have much in the way of theme. I'm currently developing a prototype deck with a science fiction theme, but I'm in no way married to the idea - once the basics of the mechanics are ironed out, I'm going to sit down and really zen on various possible themes (fantasy, swords and sorcery, pulp noir, whatever).

The game has some basic card types: Creature cards which bring skills to Quest cards in order to solve them, while Alter cards like equipment and enchantments and Exploit cards like spells and political events and Asset cards like organizations and locations; all change the way the game is played. Players attempt to solve Quests by meeting criteria.

My concern about "factions" is that they can be limiting. If the "Skull Mercs" don't work with "Elves," that's a huge limitation if there are only five factions, and almost no limitation if there are 30.

Just curious how other people have dealt with this; not so much looking for a direct solution to my problem.

Thanks!

[Turonik]

For the most part, all games that use "factions" have some sort of "out of faction Penalty". Some being more strict than others. I have no problem with this as I love the idea of just picking one side from a story stand point, and from a flavor stand point a character from faction A shouldn't be as easily played by faction B. Having a penalty doesn't mean that it's impossible to mix factions, it just shouldn't be as easy. If you wish to have 2 factions form an alliance then you could design cards to allow this more easily, examples of this include an outfit card from doomtown and a stronghold from L5R that let you combine 2 factions listed on the mentions cards. VS also had "crossover" cards which let you combine 2 factions together.

thresholds on the other hand could work.  Spoils and Wars made it so you needed a number of icons listed on the card from resource cards. This allowed you to mix factions but made it harder to play cards with a higher number of threshold icons. I'm not a huge fans of these since it's easy to get in a sense "mana screwed" where you can't play cards from your hand, not because you can't afford them but because you don't have the right number of colors in play.

[Wisp]

Warhammer: Invasion had a threshold system where if you couldn't meet the threshold, you could pay extra resources instead.

[Dragoon]

There are several ways to deal with this.
- Out of Faction Penalty: An additional cost or something if you field a card out of your main faction. Only works if you are using faction/Hero cards.
- Threshold: A threshold is reached by having X cards of a certain faction. Again, requires a main faction/hero card to work well.
- Efficiency: My personal favorite. Each card has increased efficiency if it's targetting a card of a single faction. Also, certain cards are better when fighting with cards of the same faction. (Heal 2 damage from target character. Heal 4 damage instead if that character is a Elf).