Wizards of the Coast denies, then confirms, that Magic: The Gathering promo art features AI elements | When will companies learn?::undefined
Wizards of the Coast denies, then confirms, that Magic: The Gathering promo art features AI elements | When will companies learn?::undefined
Pokémon.
They were the original creators of the Pokemon TCG, and when TPC decided they’d start printing the cards without the involvement of WOtC, they responded with some “scorched earth” nonsense. These guys have needed to touch grass for years.
That being said, I’m surprised there’s no open source TCG.
An open tcg would be pretty fun and interesting. I’d definitely give that a go if it existed.
Awhile back, I pushed around the idea of a spaceship TCG based on my experience in EVE Online (speaking of out-of-touch companies), but I never went anywhere with it. The idea of having a command structure like MTCG Commander, and the rest of your deck being built to protect it. The capital would only take damage after all support ships were destroyed, sort of like attacking the player directly in YGO. Using planet cards like energy/mana, like you’re harvesting resources from those planets to built ships for your fleet
That sounds fun. I had a similar idea once, but it was mechs protecting a massive rolling city with its convoy of industrial vehicles. Many of the game mechanics would be enabled by specific vehicles that were vulnerable to attack.
That sounds super fun. I’d play that!
The problem with an open source TCG is that you need a way to balance it, which can be hard with a distributed group of designers not in communication with each other. You definitely couldn’t design something in a paper format; maybe as a computer card game.
I’m sorry, but that’s not true at all.
It’s not hard to balance it if you treat it like open source software. There’s still an owner that controls what is “official”. If you want to suggest changes, you make a pull request, as you would with software development, which either gets denied or approved by the owner of the official project. If you don’t like the direction the official game is going, you can “fork” it, call it a fork of the original if the license requires it, and you are now the owner of that fork, able to make whatever changes you’d like.
Open Source does not, at all, imply a lack of control. Blender is open source, but the Blender Foundation still has very strong control over what ends up in the codebase.
To that end, you can suggest balancing changes to the game project, and the owner of the project can approve or deny it.
As far as a paper or digital game goes, either one works. If someone wanted to print the cards and sleeve them, they can. We did that for proxy cards in Pokemon.
If someone wanted to create a higher-quality card, they could. Distribution might be difficult, but I can absolutely see someone selling a set of these cards on Etsy. That would be a challenge for whoever is interested in doing so.
The same goes for digital. The official project wouldn’t even have its own game, it would leave that to the creativity of the community and whoever is interested in doing that, and those projects could be listed by the project owner.
It is even if you balance in an open source environment. “Closed source” successful games still have to invest substantial funds to playtesting. In an open source system, you are developing in the open. This is going to split the game already into beta and stable. You also probably aren’t going to get individual cards approved since you need to design around the interactions between cards.
So now you have multiple versions of the game floating around with sets of approved cards. Unlike M:tG, these sets are developed to not be compatible and it may be difficult to figure out what sets are legal in the version you are playing.
And you still have the development process, which is hard to fix once you print cardboard.
I’m not talking about foils, but categorically better cards. You are going to have card developers with a vested interest to make sure their cards get played, and that generally means making cards at a higher power level.
It’s worth mentioning that while developing in the open is the standard in the git era, it’s not a requirement for open source and for a project that would benefit doing otherwise they could easily just do big releases with the source available and the proper licensing.
That said, I think this is overcomplicating things. You could simply have a nonprofit organizational body who designs in-house just as Wizards does and releases the final product into the public domain or under Creative Commons licenses. Unofficial cards compatible with your game will more or less be the same as they are for Magic: optional modules that are clearly not part of your vision for the game and so playgroups must choose if they want to play the game your organization produces or an expansion to it.
I agree your approach would be the way to handle it and it has been done for some games.
But I would call fan designed games open source. There is a closed organization designing it, even if it is non-profit.
Assuming you meant to type “wouldn’t,” I think you may be a little off on what you think free and open source software entails. It doesn’t imply an open design process or anything of that kind, though it does lend itself well to those workflows. It instead describes what the end user has the freedom to do with what they receive. This is true of both of the philosophically different but practically similar “open source” and “free software” definitions.
In the software world, FOSS developers can, if they want to, design entirely behind closed doors within their own organization and drop a disc with the software, the source code, and licensing guaranteeing you certain freedoms. In the case of adapting that philosophy to a game, I think this would probably be the best approach to avoid the problems of design by committee. The cards could be released freely and included could be project files for card design, art used, etc. to allow people to do whatever they want with em.
I think of it more comparing a game like D&D which would work well under an open source model.
A large part of the appeal to a CCG is the interaction of the different cards together. It is a set of cards to play with, not a series of individual cards. Traditional trading card games, living card games, and deck builders are built on these card interactions. Sometimes it involves designing synergistic mechanics but it can just be creating the environment where different strategies can compete against each other. New cards get added in part to fit well with existing ones. Cases this doesn’t happen is considered to be a failure.
The open source model does not work well with that design goal.
There is going to be an inducement by designers to push for power creep since designing stronger cards will get them played. There may not be enough headroom for a game to deal with the constant increase in power.
You also have the fracturing of different formats. It took a while for Magic to get to the number of formats it had and even then most constructed play defaulted to Standard. How are you going to be able to have a CCG work with hundreds of formats filled with cards that don’t work with each other and can maybe even have homebrew cards that wreck the metagame?
A card game isn’t like an RPG where you can have a base rule set while letting others create potentially clashing supplemental sets and adventures. Hell, we’ve even seen forks like with Pathfinder. There is a reason why RPG’s adopted an open source mindset while card games didn’t.
That already is how Magic is, though. There’s a core base ruleset and cards deemed official by the original organizing body and tons of custom stuff out there that the original body doesn’t treat as part of their product. The organizing body can control power creep and all that within its own ruleset, and most players would likely choose to use that so they don’t end up with 999/999 epic dragon of doom for 2 mana, but they don’t have to. The only real difference in this sense is that the organizing body wouldn’t be a corporation driven by profit and that players would have more legal headroom and proper tools to make custom stuff rather than the current awkward position fan sets land in.
In fact, this would give the organizing body that stands in for Wizards more room to hold back power creep, as they wouldn’t have the constant nagging knowledge that increasing power a little more will net them more money. They would have maximum control over deciding what is best for their version of the game. I imagine we’d end up with a few standardized systems of play like we have now in corporate TCGs, the original organizing body’s version alongside scattered other custom versions for highly opinionated players who want something different.
I think a lot of what you’re saying is coming from the perspective of a profit motive. That’s certainly one way of looking at it, but I personally wouldn’t start something like this with a profit motive. Personally, the “cool factor” alone would be motivation enough for me, but this would require the game as a whole operating in a way other TCGs do not.
I also was talking about overall card quality, not specifically foils. Other than that, power creep is always going to be a thing, regardless of the motives of the project owner.
But the nice thing about open source is that if you don’t believe it’s a good idea, you don’t have to participate.
But it is a major problem for closed source systems which can be made worse if open source methods are used on cardboard. Is someone going to want to keep playing a game when they buy some boosters but find out that some of the people they play with won’t play with those cards? Even worse, there isn’t a uniform way to define formats?
But no one else is participating either. There are fan made TCG’s, but none of them adopted the open source model. There is one body that designs cards and I don’t see that changing. Even then, the trading or collecting part of that hobby goes away; they become Living Card Games instead without the collectable nature of more traditional distribution systems
If no one’s done it, we don’t know if it’ll actually work, we can just theorize. I don’t see the harm in anyone trying, and I don’t particularly care for defeatism.
This isn’t defeatism, but pointing out potential flaws in a system being developed. If designers can’t address potential fatal flaws, the system won’t progress.
Alright, well I can’t be expected to have all the right answers. What do you suggest?
An idea I’ve had for a while would be to have some kind of direct democratic method for designing new sets or cards, and for rebalancing or banning them if need be. I think it would be doable if you could achieve a critical mass of people. The custom magic subs on Reddit could basically form a functional game on their own.
One could use AI for playtesting; see if there’s overpowered cards, or a single dominant strategy.
A quick search finds this finished(?) project for AI playtesting with some fancy documentation. Seems to have been met with a complete lack of interest. Shame, it looks interesting.
I have come across a couple digital CCGs. Not sure if they are any good.
Also, sorry to be a “well actually” guy, but Pokemon TCG was always designed by The Pokemon Company. WotC just licensed the rights to translate the game.
YEAH there it is. I knew it was complicated, just didn’t remember how exactly, I just remember the “scorched earth” weirdness
“In response to losing the license for printing Pokémon cards in 2003, Wizard’s at the time VP, Vince Calouri; launched “Scorched Earth Mode.” In this, Calouri openly threatened Nintendo, telling them that, if they retracted the license, Wizards would flood the market, causing a plummet in product value, and devaluing the product for Nintendo. After the license was indeed lost, Wizards decided to vent the entire supply of a private stocked warehouse in an attempt to make good on their threat. Additionally, former members of Wizards’ playtest staff alleged that, under Scorched Earth Mode, Organized Play had “given up on trying.” This led to many bizarre events occurring, such as officially run Wizards’ “FAT” (Fan Appreciation Tournaments) where entry was the price of 2 packs, but the winners were guaranteed 16 packs as prize. Other times, it meant releasing cards with errors on purpose, to suit the desires of Wizards’ balancing team, such as the Best of Game Hitmonchan.”
In most existing TCG, artificial scarcity is a meta-mechanic of the game. For many, that’s part of the fun of the “collecting“. It’s fun to collect rare cards because they’re in limited supply.
That said, I think there could be, in theory, an open source way to have artificial scarcity and the fun of collecting. Maybe have a nonprofit that sells official printed cards at cost?
Yeah, I guess it’s actually more accurate to say this would just be a CCG along the lines of Dominion.