Great Convergeance CCG

[Ozymandias]

Idea:
The end times are soon approaching, and every dimension is converging on each other, into a new, impressionable world. From each dimension, a nation arises, eking out a place in the world. There is not enough room or resources for all nations to coexist; to survive they must fight. Only one nation may exist on this world, a world they may, then, shape to their own needs. In each Nation, there is a commander, striving to become a god of this new world. You are this commander. It is up to you. The fate of the world, whether it becomes a verdant plain or an arid wasteland, a metropolis or a kingdom of arcane magistrates, a heaven or a hell, is in your control.

Card Types:
The backbone of most decks are the armies: Creatures. Be they Demons, Angels, Mages, Androids, or Knights, they all must fight for their survival. Each card has a Power, Armor and Life rating.
To supplement the armies are Items, Utilities, Interrupts and Locations. Items Have an Armor and Life rating, and their effects last until they are destroyed. Utilities may be played only during the buildup phase, unless stated otherwise, and go immediately to the graveyard on use. Interrupts may be used outside your turn, though usually they have a specific trigger, such as upon an attack, and like Utilities they go directly to the graveyard. Locations are rarer cards, and often have a greater cost, but they effect the entire field, and last until they are destroyed, usually only by specific effects.

A separate "resource deck" contains all the resources necessary to play the other cards. Most resources only pay off the cost to play a specific card, but some rarer ones have additional effects. These special resources are restricted in quantity.

Each non-resource Card has 2 elemental alignments and a cost, in the form of Xe Yu, meaning it must be payed for with X elemental resources, or resources that share an element with one of the card's elements, and Y untyped resources, which may be payed with any resource.

The elements are as such: Dark, Desert, Earth, Elec, Fire, Ice, Light, Magic, Nature, Poison, Sky, Sonic, Steel, Tech, Urban and Water.

Starting set up
Draw 7 cards from the main deck.
Flip over 3 resources.
Cut the deck around the middle; the player with the more expensive card can choose who goes first. If there is a tie in the total cost, and one costs more elemental resources than the other, it counts as being more expensive. If there is a tie, and both have equal elemental resource costs, the cut again, and repeat until a player is chosen.

Turn order:
Draw step:
-Draw one card from the main deck unless your hand contains 8 or more cards.
-Turn over resources until you have one more resource than at the end of the draw step last turn (skip this on first turn)
Set up step:
-Any effects that occur during the set up step occur now.
Buildup phase:
-You may spend any amount of resources to play creatures, items and/or utilities, so long as you have up to 2 resources unspent. When you spend a resource, shuffle it into your resource deck.
-Creatures and Items are played to the field, Utilities, unless stated otherwise immediately go to the graveyard.
Combat Phase:
-Declare (an) Attacker(s): Choose one creature to attack a specific opponent's creature. Multiple attackers may attack together, though you must pay one untyped resource for each creature past one.
-Interrupt: Your opponent may play interrupts at this time, as well as use effects that activate at this time, such as Guard.
-Damage Calculation: Deal the difference between the attacking creature's Power, and the defending creature's Armor to the defending creature's life. If this brings it down to zero life or less, deal this difference to the opponent's life as well.
End step: Any effects that occur during the End step occur now.

Possible Rules Changes:
Deck Size: I playtested it with a 60 card deck and 20 card resource deck, but I might change this
Elements: Some of the elements seem a bit unnecessary or redundant, such as Desert, Sonic, Tech and Urban. Still, my real argument for keeping them is that even with 16 elements, ~25% of all creatures can be played by any one two element deck, which seems rather large, already.
Individual Card Pricing: After a few playtests, I've noticed that it's not very useful to play an expensive Utility, Item or Location, in lieu of a Creature, so I changed around the pricing, but I'm still not sure.

Included in attachment: Ancient Horrors and Guardians of the Great Library (two starter playtest-in-process decks)

[attachment deleted by admin due to age]

[tac-tics]

The theme is interesting, but looking at the basic rules, it looks too similar to Magic. Even inasmuch as you're using Magic terms ("graveyard") and quantities (opening hand of 7 cards with a 60 card deck). There is no problem at all in using Magic as a reference point, but ultimately, you should be trying to make something unique.

Some minor notes:

> Cut the deck around the middle; the player with the more expensive card can choose who goes first. If there is a tie in the total cost, and one costs more elemental resources than the other, it counts as being more expensive. If there is a tie, and both have equal elemental resource costs, the cut again, and repeat until a player is chosen.

Rules like this aren't really necessary in most games. It's better to leave it with "the players decide who goes first" and leave it ambiguous enough so that tournaments can use their own methods to determine this. Basing who goes first on a random card in the deck also tends to favor the person who plays with more expensive cards. Unless there is a good reason for doing so, this is unnecessary.

> -Draw one card from the main deck unless your hand contains 8 or more cards.

If you're only drawing one card a turn. Assuming you will be able to play one or more cards from your hand each turn, you should always be decreasing in handsize. Why is there a restriction on having 8 or more cards in your hand? This rule doesn't seem to serve a purpose.

[Ozymandias]

I do admit that the rules were based on a MTG structure, but I think there are enough rule differences that I think it's unique enough (Resource deck vs Mana in the Main deck, which is a big difference if you've ever had to deal with mana flood or mana screw; No "tapping," so creatures can attack and be attacked on the same turn, and attacks are decided by the attacker. Also, from playtest the whole feel of the game seems different: rather than a semi-battle-of-attrition style, it has a much more offensive feel.) However, If anyone has any suggestions on game mechanics I can implement to make it more unique, without "Being different for the sake of being different," I'm open to it.

For your method of determining the starting player, that's true enough, I suppose, so I'll just leave it to chance (a coin flip or something)

The hand size rule actually has a pretty big importance. I can already see just from preliminary card design that there is a potential for very draw-heavy decks, and for a game where there is a very real possibility that you won't have a card you can afford on a specific, often early, turn, a player with more cards will be more likely to be able to play something than the opponent, and rather than compound that, which could apply some game-breaking applications for draw cards, I chose to cut it down. I could have had it be a discard rule, but I figured against that, since if you happen to have 8+ cards, and you can't play anything, it's almost guarenteed that in a turn or two, you will be able to play something.

[Ozymandias]

[Update: Potential New card type/Mechanic, as well as Card Previews]

First of all Card Previews:

I know that The Ozymandias card is a bit wordy, so I'm cutting it down, perhaps by using a tag like "Unique" to replace the whole long line: "Only one card with the name..." Also, I'm working through what to do with the area at the left side, since for low cost cards, it's incredibly empty.

Second, the New card type/Mechanic: Resource drains. I'm not sure whether to make it a whole new card type, or just a new version on the old types. Essentially, these draining cards represent the fact that the setting is on a mutable world, and the world's resources can be quickly drained in order to unleash strong effects: for example, Destroying all the opponent's creatures, dealing massive damage, Healing huge amounts, Huge Drawing, Huge Forced discarding, ect. The downside to this is the permanent resource reduction: Depending on the strength of the effect, a portion of the resources spent on the payment of the card are deducted from the resources replenished the next turn. For example, on the 4th turn, a player plays a 1e2u Drain 1 card, leaving him/her with 1 resource unspent. Next turn, instead of turning over 4 resources, so that s/he has 5 resourses, s/he only turns over 3, since one was drained. Because of this drain, this player is one turn behind, resource-wise, however the effect is powerful enough that it can overcome this penalty. These cards would be rare anyway, so it's unlikely to be as prevalent as standard cards.

[Dragoon]

1. Your wording is bad. Keep it in layman's terms.
For the mummy king
Unique.
<This> can't attack the turn it comes into play.
Pay 2 resources to put a rebirth counter on <this>. (Limit 1 counter)
When <this> attacks, the defending player discards the top card of his or her deck.
When <this> would be put into a discard pile from play, if it has a rebirth token on it, remove it from the game instead. Return it to play at the beginning of your next turn.

Ceasefire:
Skip the next combat phase.

I find the resource drain interesting. Maybe it should remove the resourcs from the deck forever.