Moe to sexy girls 'color' wheel

[DrPraetor]

Law. You know you want it.

https://stormbringer.fandom.com/wiki/Myshella_of_Law
the themes are - topless girls, riding robots?

Law's symbol is an amber arrow, so I'll be using "A" for their mana symbol.

LAW
Law's two lanes are Nerd Girls and Soldier Girls. Broadly speaking, the Nerd Girls belong to the classes of: Scholar, Artisan, Wizard, and Scientist; while the Soldier Girls belong to the classes of: Guard, Scout, Knight, and Soldier. Law has very few girls that are high-cost creatures, but has access to various war engines and war beasts. The biggest things are the Iron Dragon and the Sky Galleon. You also get Dwarves. Animals are mostly Dogs and Horses (including Pegasi and shit) but also Elephants and particularly lawful bugs: Ants, Bees, and Spiders.

Commons	Cost	Type(s)
Sharpshooter	A	Agent - Dwarf Soldier
Patroller	A	Agent - Human Scout
Barrister	A	Agent - Human Scholar
Cannon	A	Asset - Mechanism
Regulation	A	Flex Rite
Myrmidon	1A	Agent - Human Ant Soldier
Siege Engineer	1A	Agent - Dwarf Scientist
Containment Team	1A	Flex Agent - Dwarf Guard
Golden Destrier	1A	Charm - Horse
Bionics	1A	Charm - Mechanism
Mage	2A	Agent - Human Scientist Wizard
Giant Ants	2A	Agent - Ant
Mobilize	2A	Rite - Scout
Bronze Banners	2A	Asset - Mechanism Guard
Quartz Arrows	2A	Flex Rite
Runesmith	3A	Agent - Dwarf Artisan Wizard
Researcher	3A	Agent - Scientist
Amber Hounds	2AA	Agent - Dog
Ban	3A	Asset
Systematic Destruction	3A	Rite
Ritemaster	4A	Agent - Dwarf Wizard
Fortifications	4A	Asset
Type I Eradicator	4AA	Agent - Mechanism Dragon
Constrain Reality	5A	Rite

and no knights at common? Only one scholar and one scout (could use some middle level cops, being Law and all)? Maybe the giant ants should be uncommon along with the bees and elephants?

This is very tough.

[Username17]

Oh, what was the difference going to be between Rituals and Spells?

Rituals and Spells were going to be Sorceries and Instants before it was noted that Spells could just have or not have the Anytime provision and they didn't need to be separate card types. Similarly, Charms were going to be Enchantments before it was noted that Assets and Upgrades don't need top-level association at all.

In any case, let's talk about that Unobtrusive Servant for the moment. We already know that there's a deck that a 1/1 with Stealth can live in. The MtG equivalent is the 1/1 Hexproof for 1, and that's a creature that has an entire deck archetype named after it: Bogles.

That deck runs on playing cheap creatures that your opponent can't easily interact with and then piling Upgrades on them. It's only good if it can reach critical mass of "Bogles" (cheap creatures that can't be targeted by enemy spells) and powerful upgrades. If there aren't enough of those things the deck doesn't come together and none of the cards in it are good.

This is important when considering the existence of card rarities, because cards that aren't good still serve a purpose when you do card drafts, which in turn pretty much requires packs of cards. And cards like Unobtrusive Servant that are "bad unless and until several more similar cards are printed and an entire deck of this kind can be fielded" are perfectly reasonable in a TCG but just a frustrating waste of time in a Living Card Game.

Cards that don't have a playable deck to live in are fake cards. Draft decks can and will take a lot of the lower end cards from time to time in a TCG. But in an LCG you do not have that justification for "bad" cards. The loss of Draft as a format means that literally every card has to be Constructed playable - which is a pretty high ask.

-Username17

[Chamomile]

I'm not sure why "immense resources" would be needed for a TCG. Seems like it would cost about the same as an LCG. Whether you're selling five expansion decks that each have 100% of the new cards or 50 booster decks that each have 50% of the new cards, you are printing the same number of cards. I guess you have to pay for more wrappers in a TCG, but I doubt that makes a huge difference.

[DrPraetor]

Is anyone still arguing for an LCG instead of a TCG? One thing about an LCG is that it is not likely to have different teams. The alchemy expansion for Dominion introduces a single resource fork and I understand that people hate it? I only play a little dominion.

I like "Charm" for upgrade because it is:
1) Girly
2) Short.
3) Easy to read based on the shape of the word.

#3 is making me concerned about "Agent" and "Asset" because the word shape is similar. "Mono" means approximately "noun" (or "thing") in Japanese, which is weird but at least it's short and visibly distinct? "Other mono cannot"... "on this mono"... no, that doesn't scan, dammit.

Creatures could be called "Asset" and generic non-creature permanents could be called "Edge"? "Edge" is from Shadowrun but it's short and gets the point across.

There are, of course, other ways you can make the unobtrusive servant good. For example, you might have a charm which makes all of your other creatures better, which your opponent would prioritize for removal if it weren't on a Stealth... Actor (Agent? Asset? Waifu?)? Actor... not used in the obvious sense of stagecraft, so it would be confusing. This doesn't resolve your issue in the general sense, or obviate the point that making a big card set for a TCG is much easier than making a big card set for an LCG. I think all of the expansions of Dominion together are about the size of a single magic set.

[deaddmwalking]

The way actual people work, having 'rituals' and 'spells' be different things is almost certainly a good thing. Like, when describing a deck if you say that you use a lot of instants, that tells people that you want to save mana to use on both your turn and your opponent's turn. If you say 'rituals' versus 'anytime rituals' there is going to be confusion because it won't be clear if you didn't specify in the first instance or you meant to include only rituals that don't have the anytime provision.

Like, while the language might be relatively precise in the game state, the ability to talk about it away from the table has merit, too. Try describing an existing Magic deck using the terminology you've outlined and I think you'll find that having different words is helpful. Further, when you build expansions, some of those differences will make describing the effect easier.

For example, if 'charm' is designated as a spell that targets your opponent's creatures and 'buff' is designated as a spell that targets your own creatures, you can use those words instead of 'enchantment that targets a creature you don't control'.

Edit - Replaced a duplicate instance of 'opponent's' with 'your own'.

[angelfromanotherpin]

For sure you could put identity tags on spells. If most Spells have the 'Ritual' tag and most Anytime Spells have the 'Incantation' (or whatever) tag, then you shouldn't ever have to refer to a 'non-Anytime Spell,' which is a pretty clunky phrase. It's basically what MTG did when they gave 'Aura' Enchantments their own identity tag.

[zeruslord]

Is anyone still arguing for an LCG instead of a TCG? One thing about an LCG is that it is not likely to have different teams. The alchemy expansion for Dominion introduces a single resource fork and I understand that people hate it? I only play a little dominion.

Dominion has the issue that the card pool is shared in game, and you're playing with a possibly random subset of one person's box. The resource fork in Alchemy is mostly a problem when you have only one or two cards that need to be purchased with the alchemy resource, so it's not worth the up front investment and you effectively have a smaller set of cards to buy. I think a better comparison for this would be something like Android: Netrunner, where each player is expected to own their own collection of cards and build their deck between games. Introducing new teams is still not a great idea, unless it's done as roughly equivalent to a new block in MTG.

As far as LCG vs TCG more generally, I think the decision there has a lot to do with whether you're trying to sell this or just do it as a design exercise. For rarity to work out in Constructed, you need to be a smashing success - if we take DrPraetor's numbers for three rarities and assume boosters are $10 each with one rare per booster, there's twelve full playsets of each rare for every $100,000 spent. If you assume ten viable Constructed archetypes with no overlap in rares and that half the printed rares get into viable decks, that gets you 60 physical stacks of cards that are top 8 viable. If you have a million dollar kickstarter, and figure that the expensive non-card perks and the discounts for getting cards in bulk roughly cancel, that's 600 top-8 viable decks, and probably significantly fewer players that actually own one. If this comes from Firkin of Roosters LLC instead of getting sold to a company that can get it into stores whether they like it or not, you won't have the kind of scene where cost and rarity isn't a meaningful factor in constructed. I'm not going to say you shouldn't think about that as a design exercise, but the math just doesn't work out for turning a hobby project into a successful TCG without going through an established publisher. LCGs are a totally different design problem, but the number of copies you need to move to make a competitive scene work is so much smaller that it would be a better way to go if you want to sell this on a hobbyist or small-press scale.

[Koumei]

Cards that don't have a playable deck to live in are fake cards. Draft decks can and will take a lot of the lower end cards from time to time in a TCG. But in an LCG you do not have that justification for "bad" cards. The loss of Draft as a format means that literally every card has to be Constructed playable - which is a pretty high ask.

So is Draft just an answer to "Fuck balancing it, that stuff takes work" or is there an actual good reason for a game to be "everyone open fifty lootboxes and hope for the best"? I get that when you sell packs of cards for constructed, you want good (rare) cards and shitty (common) cards to encourage people to buy more (and then you don't like it when people use Virtual Table Top or whatever to effectively play the game with whatever cards they want, without paying you money). But releasing any kind of new "buy booster packs" card game into the market is a hard thing to do, you'd have a much easier time with a "this box contains the entire game" deal.

[OgreBattle]

I've watched a locally published tcg game dwindle down and no longer get support from local gaming stores, I felt a "it's like a board game LCG" approach would've kept it alive better and not compete with Pokemon, Final Fantasy, Magic tcg's.

I've also been playing a lot of different board games, many card based, while I only play one tcg, FF, continuously buying boxes when they come out. I've also failed to convince local gaming stores to pick up new tcg's, but gotten them to pick up boxed set card games that are presented like a light board game.

On drafting, I don't like it all that much for tcg's and I'll juts do it to get rare cards, but I have fun with Dominions.

[Username17]

Cards that don't have a playable deck to live in are fake cards. Draft decks can and will take a lot of the lower end cards from time to time in a TCG. But in an LCG you do not have that justification for "bad" cards. The loss of Draft as a format means that literally every card has to be Constructed playable - which is a pretty high ask.

So is Draft just an answer to "Fuck balancing it, that stuff takes work" or is there an actual good reason for a game to be "everyone open fifty lootboxes and hope for the best"? I get that when you sell packs of cards for constructed, you want good (rare) cards and shitty (common) cards to encourage people to buy more (and then you don't like it when people use Virtual Table Top or whatever to effectively play the game with whatever cards they want, without paying you money). But releasing any kind of new "buy booster packs" card game into the market is a hard thing to do, you'd have a much easier time with a "this box contains the entire game" deal.

Draft is a genuinely fun format that uses and challenges peoples' card evaluation and deckbuilding skills in addition to the raw mechanics of playing the game itself. In many ways, Draft is the last part of TCGs where it genuinely matters that we're playing a TCG at all; because at the tournament level people can and do netdeck and buy singles to complete decks.

If you aren't going to have booster packs that people can draft out of, you might as well just have an asymmetrical deck game where people get ready-made decks. Fuck, if you give everyone all the cards in a lump then people will netdeck and that's pretty much what you're going to end up with anyway. With of course the additional caveat that all the cards you've made that don't go into whatever decks the community has decided are Tier 1 might as well not exist at all.

-Username17

[OgreBattle]

There's 'Cube' in MTG right? Where you have a set of cards that people draft from.

[Koumei]

Draft is a genuinely fun format that

Burns up even more time and forces you to spend more time around cardgame players rather than sorting your stuff out in your own time with your own background music.

If you aren't going to have booster packs that people can draft out of, you might as well just have an asymmetrical deck game where people get ready-made decks. Fuck, if you give everyone all the cards in a lump then people will netdeck and that's pretty much what you're going to end up with anyway. With of course the additional caveat that all the cards you've made that don't go into whatever decks the community has decided are Tier 1 might as well not exist at all.

At that point it's still the designers' fault for making shitty cards nobody takes. Now sure, patching it to fix things is harder than an RPG (itself tricky because everyone needs to know about it and then print shit out to slide into the rulebook), what do they do, release print-out stickers for your cards?

But if it forces the creator to do more work on balance right at the start, that's a good thing. As it is, I'd rather "This game has too many shit cards, so nobody plays it and the game dies and the creators have to go back to the drawing board" to the alternative of "A bunch of people get shitty cards that they 'forget' to include in their actual deck and that's just how it is until the next batch."

[Username17]

But if it forces the creator to do more work on balance right at the start, that's a good thing.

Magic adds a new set every three months, radically changing the card environment. While it has not been the case recently, a year or two ago it was considered extremely normal for the format to be declared "solved" more than a month before new content drops forced people back to the testing grounds.

Any asymmetric competitive game is going to drift towards becoming solved as the amount of play time grows. That's inevitable. And as the format becomes solved, the number of "tier one" deck choices converges. A more balanced format may converge to six or seven "best decks" and a less balanced format might converge to only three or even only one. But converge it will do.

I mean, we can talk about how designers should work harder and balance their games better, but at the end of the day if people have the choice between Tribal Berserkers, Tribal Elves, and Green Goodstuff, people will very likely find that one of those is better than the other two after a few hundred thousand games - at which point either the Human Berserkers, the Elf Warriors, or the second best Berserkers and second best Elves will stop getting played. That is simply going to happen.

People still play suboptimal models in a game like Warhams because the cost to change a squad out for a different more optimal squad is very high. Further, the amount of games of warhams that get played are comparatively low because of the amount of time each game takes and all the setup time and huge areas required and so on. Card games that can be played on a lunch break do not have that level of restriction on either games played or changing deck contents. People will find optimal configurations more quickly and also convert to optimal configurations more quickly.

-Username17

[maglag]

People still play suboptimal models in a game like Warhams because the cost to change a squad out for a different more optimal squad is very high. Further, the amount of games of warhams that get played are comparatively low because of the amount of time each game takes and all the setup time and huge areas required and so on. Card games that can be played on a lunch break do not have that level of restriction on either games played or changing deck contents. People will find optimal configurations more quickly and also convert to optimal configurations more quickly.

-Username17

So what? Cleric/wizard/druid and (insert infinite combo) here have been figured out as the most optical D&D. 3.X configurations long ago yet plenty of people still played other classes or even less optimal cleric/wizard/druid builds.

Similarly plenty of magic players play constructed casual where they plain use less efficient decks because they don't want to sink hundreds of bucks just for their lands or want to try out different strategies.

Even MTG came out with the whole Timmy/Jhonny/Spike player archetypes where only Spike is putting victory as his primary focus, while Timmy and Jhonny are happy to play less optimal stuff as long as they get to pull some big/shiny moves.

And warhammer has plenty of mathhammering and codex tiers and whatnot yet people still play less optimal army compositions just because (also it may take years for your faction to get a new codex so that's plenty of time to figure it sucks).

If anything, if you're that dude that always brings the super competitive build to the table, chances are that soon nobody will want to play with you outside a tournament.

Not everybody plays "victory at any cost". In particular in a competitive game where 1x1 is the standard, for there to be somebody that wins a lot it means there's other people getting defeated over half their games and still enjoying the experience.

[Username17]

So what? Cleric/wizard/druid and (insert infinite combo) here have been figured out as the most optical D&D. 3.X configurations long ago yet plenty of people still played other classes or even less optimal cleric/wizard/druid builds.

D&D is not a competitive game, and comparisons of this sort are less than useless. Similarly, it's OK for some of the Spirits in Spirit Island to be harder to win with because it's a cooperative game and playing a weaker Spirit is equivalent to playing on a harder difficulty. Again, not relevant to a competitive game.

-Username17

[maglag]

So what? Cleric/wizard/druid and (insert infinite combo) here have been figured out as the most optical D&D. 3.X configurations long ago yet plenty of people still played other classes or even less optimal cleric/wizard/druid builds.

D&D is not a competitive game, and comparisons of this sort are less than useless. Similarly, it's OK for some of the Spirits in Spirit Island to be harder to win with because it's a cooperative game and playing a weaker Spirit is equivalent to playing on a harder difficulty. Again, not relevant to a competitive game.

-Username17

If D&D wasn't competitive, then balance wouldn't be a problem, but alas you already wrote plenty of pages complaining how class X is better than Y, and you now trying to claim otherwise means most of the stuff you wrote is useless because if suddenly D&D has zero competition, then there's no reason to care if player A is more efficient than player B.

Meanwhile magic still plenty of magic players playing casual decks and 40k players playing orks/tau that are widely accepted as sucking ass by everybody.

Also Smash game players picking Gandonorf against other players.

Again, in a competition somebody has to win and somebody has to lose, and that means plenty of people can actually enjoy a loss (as long as they got to do something shiny) otherwise everybody that doesn't make it first place in a tournament quits out of disgust and the game dies pretty fast.

[Username17]

If D&D wasn't competitive, then balance wouldn't be a problem

Please stop talking. Just stop. The things you say are wrong and you should be embarrassed.

Balance issues are different for cooperative games than they are for competitive games, and they are more permissive of balance disparities. But that in no way means that balance isn't a problem. Nor does it mean that balance issues are infinitely permissive.

Single player games are probably the most permissive of balance disparities. You aren't challenging anyone but yourself, and you're having fun in whatever way is fun for you. It's totally acceptable to play weak positions that are almost impossible to win with or even straight up cheat so that victory is certain if that's what makes you happy. Multi-player coop is the next most lenient. Players can voluntarily play weak positions to make the game harder and they can give strong positions to players who are new at the game to get them up to speed. Multiplayer competitive is the next-most permissive. While every player is trying to win for themselves, players will also self-regulate and preferentially target stronger positions over weaker positions, which in turn can make a known "bad choice" into a legitimate competitive option if the other players over correct. Mind games!

Two player competitive is the absolute least permissive game structure for balance disparities. Balance differences that would be well within acceptable limits for other styles of game are "degenerate" and "broken" in 2-player competitive games. Look at fucking Chess, where White and Black have literally exactly the same pieces and move options, and people still complain about the winrate of White - and they are right to do so.

-Username17

[Chamomile]

Is anyone still arguing for an LCG instead of a TCG?

I don't think so, but all the rebuttals I've seen so far are purely oriented around mechanics when the original objection was about logistics. That makes sense, because the current discussion is about mechanics and the first hurdle to overcome is to get the project past the point where it's going to die off about two-thirds-ish of the way through getting the mechanics nailed down with no one even attempting a full list of cards for the core set, let alone finalizing one. But it's not like we're paying by the word to make these forum posts, so we may as well also establish right now that, while raising enough money for a TCG through Kickstarter or whatever is definitely a daunting task, an LCG wouldn't really be any easier (unless you insist on constructed play being possible with a physical deck, but the cost-cutting solution of having a digital constructed league alongside a physical draft league can fix that, and isn't a significant increase in price compared to the six-figure price-tag the game would already carry - if you've already got all tens of thousands of dollars of card art ready, I could personally convert that into a TTS DLC for like $500).

[Foxwarrior]

So I've seen like a dozen nice-looking, free to play, Hearthstone (and by extension, MtG) clones lying around on the internet, most of which nobody plays. Is making another incremental clone of MtG useful? Hasn't that market been saturated for years at this point?

[deaddmwalking]

So I've seen like a dozen nice-looking, free to play, Hearthstone (and by extension, MtG) clones lying around on the internet, most of which nobody plays. Is making another incremental clone of MtG useful? Hasn't that market been saturated for years at this point?

Making a new not-Magic is probably not helpful. Even if the game is superior in every way, there are already people who are playing Magic and you can't play a two-player game if you can't find someone else who plays. On the other hand, if you make one that is superior in every way, you might dethrone the king, so why not take a shot?

At this point, nobody has invested their money into making this work, so worst case it is a pointless mental exercise.

[Chamomile]

Magic and Hearthstone are also nice looking. A game cannot set itself apart by looking nice. It needs to have a hook that makes it inherently different from Magic (or Hearthstone). And the first problem with that is that those two games are squatting on the most consistently popular genre for practically anything: Board games, genre fiction, RPGs from tabletop to MMO to single-player CRPGs, mediums dominated by fantasy are easily more common than any other genre, possibly more common than every other genre put together. If you try to set your game apart by being basically identical to Magic, but also sci-fi, you are going to have a bad time.

Cute girls have a strong niche appeal that doesn't overlap with anything that Magic and Hearthstone are doing, so this game isn't automatically damned to look like a Magic also-ran. That's not to say that this is guaranteed lightning in a bottle or even a particularly good idea in terms of marketability, because trying to play in the same sandbox as Magic is a fool's errand and the only way to succeed here is to hope that there's a large enough market for whom any TCG with cute girls is superior to any TCG without. Without a large number of people picking up the game all at once because of its gimmick, there is nobody to play with, and the game is stillborn no matter how much more fun it would hypothetically be to play if a community for it actually existed.

[Foxwarrior]

Actually, doesn't Shadowverse count as a cute girl themed MtG clone?

[OgreBattle]

For the creature word... how about "Talent"? It's what Japanese variety shows call the folks that go on, many of them are cute girls and sometimes they are cute animals.

Actually, doesn't Shadowverse count as a cute girl themed MtG clone?

Yeah, it's mostly tiddyverse with the occasional dragon and bishonen.

Other games to look at

Fate Grand Order

Girls Frontline

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So lands, are they something you play once a turn for free, do some lands have cost?

[GnomeWorks]

Also Smash game players picking Gandonorf against other players.

I regularly smash faces in with the 'dorf, and not just against casual scrubs. You just have to understand his toolkit and its limitations.

[maglag]

Also Smash game players picking Gandonorf against other players.

I regularly smash faces in with the 'dorf, and not just against casual scrubs. You just have to understand his toolkit and its limitations.

Doesn't stop poor old Ganon from bottoming out Smash tier lists. And Smash tier lists are serious business with statistics and tournament win/loss ratios and whatnot. He may not be completely hopeless, but has more than enough limitations to make him struggle to find his way to victory compared to most other options. Aka not efficient.

Yet people like you still play the 'dorf, so thanks for reinforcing my point.