Ava Jarvis: The Rise and Fall of the Collectible Game, Part II: Life and Death

In Part I, I discussed the unique characteristics of any collectible game, the ones that make the success of any such beast a more difficult matter than for normal games of a nature with more limited distribution.  In Part II, we will run an analysis on the causes of death, and the conditions for survival, in the world of the collectible—red in tooth and claw.

For those of you who have never been seriously entwined with (i.e., spent over $300 on) a collectible game (CG), be prepared for a romp through the lurid and checkered history of the genre.  For those of you who have been where I’ve been, for as long or longer perhaps, this is a retrospective stroll down memory lane and perhaps even a rooting into corners beyond the sets you know.

Vital Signs

First things first—it’s difficult to talk about a quintessential measure of the vitality of great-to-middling CGs.  There is always, for the most obscure yet decently-conceived CG, a hardcore audience that plays it to death, whether online or in fortunate local pockets of fandom.  But to me the CG has not just a vital financial component—the format is pretty much geared to make more profit than a standard game, provided it’s successful—but a strangely temporary component.  Recently we’ve seen many older boardgames republished; not exactly a flood, but still noticeable nontheless.  Even relatively unimpressive, yet solid, games get this treatment.  On the other hand, a CG almost never gets reprinted—they rarely get a second chance once they go out of print, and they are unlikely to ever come back.  Out of a hundred games, I know only of a single instance of resurrection—the extremely fortunate Shadowfist.

The reasons for such permanent death is partly due to the rules below, but also more due to the nature of CGs in general in that they take much more planning and more in printing costs than a normal game—there’s a lot more variety necessary to even get a decent game out.  Once a CG sinks, it’s often too much of an investment to bring it back to life, and given that CGs are copyrighted by the original company, the company—if it’s survived eating the costs—is unlikely to try the same thing again.  Even if the company sank and the copyright effectively passed on, the failure taints the CG to other companies as well, many of whom can ill-risk such a former failed experiment.

Thus one of my stipulations for a CG to be living and in good health is how long it’s been in print.  A perfect bill of health is presented for CGs that are actually still in print; CGs are rarely meant to end, but to continue to generate expansions and new base sets far into the forseeable future.  Ending is failure in a sense in that the CG, no matter how elegant or sound it is, will almost certainly never come back.

Tempus fugit indeed.

Deadly Sins, Living Virtues

I’m not even going to try to shoehorn the items into the original seven deadly sins, or even into seven.  This is an ultimately pragmatic article after all.  But I will list them in terms of importance where I can.  Violating some of these rules is by no means a death sentence, but does indicate that the CG will need to otherwise compensate in its own special way.

Simple Yet Intriguing Mechanics

A successful CG can be simple and intriguing, but it can’t be complex or boring.  The former characteristics are joined at the hip, and are the most vital keys to any game’s survival, CG or not.  Whatever one may think about the strength of CG addiction, not being able to get a starting initial audience means the game is dead on arrival, so universal accessability for playing the thing is important.  After all, it is through playing the game that addiction has a foothold in the door.

Games with poorly thought-out and even more poorly integrated mechanics have died, forgotten and unmourned; these deaths are not unexpected.  Then there are those with mediocre, solid rules that don’t stand out, failing the test of intrigue, and those deaths don’t surprise either.  There are reasons why the Harry Potter Collectible Card Game (CCG) lasted for only three sets, or the even shorter-lived Wizard’s Academy CCG, which only lasted for one.  And these exist during the height of the mystical wizard/witch children’s fantasy craze, which has still not ended as of this writing.

But it is spectacularly unfair when the good and the great bite the dust.  Middle Earth CCG (MeCCG) is practically the poster child for this; the game comes the closest that I’ve ever experienced to an RPG played out in CG terms, with well-themed cards and the hitherto unseen mechanics for exploration, item discovering and monster fighting.  It would be the first CG that had two separate pools of cards, the good ones played only on your turn, and the bad ones played only on your opponent’s turn, as well as the first CG with traveling mechanics and the concept of locations complete with hazard levels—an idea resurrected later in Decipher’s revamped Lord of the Rings TCG as well as the non-collectible Dungeoneer.  And the game incorporated multiple paths to victory, and a scoring schematic that would make Knizia proud.  For all the new ideas in a CG, the game worked smoothly—once you were acclimated.  Yet the depth of detail in the rules prevented this game from getting a very wide audience, which, with gradual audience turnover and the non-Timeless-Theme (see later) resulted in a declining audience.

As a counter-point, let’s look at two of the most successful and, most importantly, alive CGs of today—Magic the Gathering (MtG) and Heroclix.  Both have rulesets that are, relative to the complexity level of some of the newer CGs, ludicrously simple.  There is, for instance, practically no reason why a basic ruleset needs to exist for MtG, as it’s a very short skip to the advanced rules.  And Heroclix has no advanced rules.  Yet they win ultimately because they are so accessible that few people would ever have their patience worn out before starting a game, and their simplicity also allows for the ability to construct or customize a deck with less confusion even through early experience.

Of course, it’s not enough to be simple and elegant.  In fact, it never enough, as we will see shortly…

A Decent Variety of Unit Mix

The entire point of a CG is that every unit breaks the rules (even if only minorly, such as having a different strength or element level or something) in meaningful ways.  Due to this feature, which must be unique across units, one can start to construct all kinds of decks/armies, and take creativity and resulting addiction to new levels, especially when considering blind packaging to distribute that variety.  But uniqueness means little if the variations do not include interesting special powers—it’s easy to get bored when your units feature little difference other than power/strength.  When a decent number of your units have even a little special text, this opens up the ability to create combinations: the play of cards that have good synergy with other cards in play and/or each other, often shortened to the verb/noun “combo”.

An example: if I have a horde of little MtG white critters in front of me, this is fine but not very exciting.  But add a Crusade to boost the strength of a white army up by just one per critter, and you can start to see the possibilities, especially if I have seven attackers and you have just three blockers, and I have more Crusades in my deck.  In MtG, black is second-most notable for its combinations, since you can often sacrifice creatures in play to get more effects, play cards that can stack more resources ("mana") up for use, bring back creatures from the dead to sac again, etc.  Green is no slouch either, with mana manipulation and creature symbiosis, nor blue with the ultimate in deck, hand, and creature manipulation.

Additionally, many CGs feature different factions of one kind or another, each with its own individual strengths, base characteristics, and special powers distribution.  This also serves to add variety and expand possibilities, as well as a way to create dependencies that encourage the need for combos.  If you have to match the resource type for cards in a faction, or pay more for cards in a separate faction, or have factions with abilities that are not found in the others, or all of the above, there is now less of a chance at survival by only playing giant green rampaging wyrms and attacking your opponent with them.  And in a successful faction mix, said factions must be very different from each other, which is why diluting the pool with too many factions (more than seven and definitely more than ten seems to be the borders for death) is not a good idea.

In fact, I am hard-pressed to think of a single popular CG, whether for all time or merely for the time it was alive, that did not feature distinguishable factions (with Netrunner being an extreme case, with just two factions that couldn’t even be played in the same deck); and I can think of a few dead or dying CGs that did not have them, or did not do them well enough—though I like the game, I think ChiZo Rising falls into this category.  With its solid rules and mechanics and ultra-balanced tile mix, one would think it was a winner—but there are far too many factions (12) and, as a result, a particular dilution of interesting tiles to play while keeping in a safe number of tiles for a base set.

Another aspect of diversity in unit types also applies to living long and prospering—you need to offer new variations with every set and expansion, or else people will get bored and not buy your new and risky ventures.  As designers, you may find this much easier with…

Timeless Themes

I think that theme is a very strong component for a CG, almost as important as mechanics, and something a CG can’t live without.  CGs can’t be as abstract as other games—the level of detail necessary to provide variety forces a certain level of concreteness for your units.  If nothing else, the sheer variety is easier to grasp with a model based on some kind of “reality"—even if it does involve goblins and elves.  Even the Hikaru no Go CCG, which for crying out loud is a CG based on Go, needed objectification for its concepts and strategies in the forms of the characters and events from the manga.  (I love Go, but why Go, which itself doesn’t even feature unique pieces like the chess family does, needed a CG is beyond me.)

So you need a theme to tie all these concrete concepts together.  As a result, this theme can strongly flavor both your mechanics and your unit mix.  And given a necessity of surviving for at least several base sets and expansions, your theme must a) be wildly popular, b) withstand flexibility and c) have near-infinite extensibility.  This is why choosing a theme based on a particular TV show or story is not going to result in a long-lived CG.  Restricting your theme to Tolkien’s Middle Earth, the Cthulhu mythos, or even Star Wars may give you a strong and popular game for a while, but only for a while; every expansion beyond the base world requires more and more contortions to keep things “fresh”, despite reusing the same characters and situations repeatedly.  Depending on the TV show or other series you choose, of course, you could be looking at years—but a finite number of years—of life.  Star Trek may have survived longer than Lord of the Rings ever will, as the former has multiple spinoffs and a non-dead mythology, but its days are as dead as the franchise.  And one day, when George R.R. Martin gets around to it, the Ice & Fire saga will end, and so will the Game of Thrones CCG.

As for the strong and living CGs, almost nothing is as flexible as generic fantasy—which is all the theme that Magic the Gathering really has.  Every base set and cycle may be sort of set in “Dominaria”, but there are all kinds of fantasy there—from generic high fantasy, to Asian-influenced settings, to African-styled stories.  Within each set, there are easily understandable factions too—light, dark, chaotic, the magic of nature/earth, the magic of water and air, even technology-based marvels.  All are generic enough for many variations, have the capability to cover any flavor of fantasy you like, and tie themselves down to no permanent story.  Most other types of themes are fads and subgenres—cyberpunk (Netrunner, dead), pirates (7th Sea, dead), vampires (Jyhad, dead).  I think even the Marvel Heroclix will die, despite comic book superheroes having practically been bred for longevity, yet Dungeons & Dragons will persist for a very long time, sharing many of the same characteristics as MtG.

Mind you, a CG can still survive as a subgenre, perhaps even as a not very popular subgenre—but this requires constant renewal and reinforcement of the story.  The reason Legend of the Five Rings (L5R) has persisted while other Alderac CGs have failed is because they devote the most investment in its storyline and development, and it has frequent turnover of its characters to boot, although often it ties them together with very long-lived ancestry.  I am a strong believer that the story tournaments held for L5R, which actually affect the main events of the plot, are a key to its survival via audience hold and dedication, despite being “just” Asian fantasy.  In fact, the theme and self-development of the genre is so strong that it overcomes its weakness of a less accessible ruleset—although the ruleset is much simpler than MeCCG ever was.

First to Market

Legend of the Five Rings has a solid and well-designed ruleset, but as mentioned, lacks a certain level of accessibility and ease of learning curve.  Thus Alderac, the publisher of L5R, created Legend of the Burning Sands, with as strong a sub-genre of Arabic fantasy as Asian fantasy, and with a similar yet simplified ruleset.  But the new CCG died a quick death.  Why?  This is the question we are tasked with thinking about in The Game Inventor’s Handbook.

The cause of death is not the fault of the game (despite, I am sure, some L5R fans insisting that the ruleset was flawed because it wasn’t as complex as the parent game), but rather a function of any market—e.g., first-to-market typically wins.  And CGs are particularly sensitive to market forces.  Surviving as second-to-market, or, gods help the publisher, third-to-market, means the CG must distinguish itself enough to not compete with the original audience, perhaps even capture dual attention from the original audience—and, as LBS shows, theme is not enough of a distinguishing feature: mechanics plays a heavy role.  A second-to-market game, even if it’s a game published by the same company, will have a smaller initial audience than the original game—and if the games are similar enough in mechanics, most likely your new customers will just settle on the game with more history because they can find more people to play it.  One would need to kill the parent game—which will of course create a backlash that the publisher may not financially survive, particularly with the stress of publishing two CGs.

Obviously first-to-market plays out inbetween companies as well—the field is littered with the corpses of CCGs that tried to imitate MtG too closely.  It’s similar to the situation of video tape formats—Beta versus VHS.  VHS had a larger catalog of movies and shows on the format, which was too much too early for Beta, though a better format, to weather.  (I predict a similar fallout for BlueRay versus HD… poor Sony.)

Of course, MtG is a bright and brilliant example of the ultimate first-to-market for CGs.

Do Not Screw Up Distribution

This is an extremely important point that has nothing to do with mechanics, theme, or market forces.  Basically, while a CG needs a particular amount of variety, popularity, and addictiveness combined with blind purchase to survive, there is an inherent contract with the players, first introduced by MtG, but reinforced by the same desire for collection that drives CG success in the first place.  This is that collecting should be fair and even-handed; distribution must be fairly random, and collectibility must be at some level mostly achievable with a small number of booster boxes/cases.  They might be $120 boxes but a number between one and three feels achievable enough.

There must be a sense of value for money, too.  One might be unhappy at paying $55 for less than 30 miniatures (Navia Dratp), but one is rarely unhappy with $80 for 540 cards (Magic the Gathering), with 36 guaranteed rares that will make up at least half of the box cost, nearly all the uncommons in an expansion set, and multiple copies of commons for a good solid deck base.  At least Navia Dratp almost ensures two copies per unit in a case.  You can argue that miniatures cost more production-wise, and that one should be jolly happy to pay less than $2 per miniature, but you try telling that to your customers.  A CG definitely needs to make it up in some other way.

I don’t think I need to mention what happens when a) you accidentally replace 5% of your uncommons with commons, b) accidentally replace all instances of a rare with a common/uncommon, or c) have such large sets, such poor distribution, or so many sets released too soon, that six or more boxes/cases are necessary to get a decent spread of uncommons and non-chaser rares.  Unhappy customers that feel cheated, in a field with so many other choices, will drop the game if conditions don’t improve or aren’t corrected.  Mistakes a) and b) are correctable, at some cost.  (I recall that Call of Cthulhu had problem b) in its initial base set, which was corrected by FFG sending out replacements to everyone who sent in the dud “rares”.) But your customer base’s faith is shaken, which is dangerous in any case.

Mistake c) is much less forgiving, which is what happened with Magi-Nation.  Saturating your market results in this kind of anguished customer-self-driven, unsatisfiable demand, however unreasonable, and people are easily frustrated.  But you can’t correct the problem easily once it happens—it would require killing a base set or set of expansions early, which is even worse.  Waiting out the storm means you lose the “new and shiny” initiative of a regular release cycle, also bad.  This mistake is an instant killer these post-MtG days.

Pay Attention to Your Audience

Are you embarking on an entirely new, non-CG exposed and probably not very Euro-gamery audience, or else a CG-inured audience?  Is your audience one that hates collectibility, or is used to similar games not coming in a collectible format?

I think not qualifying for a “yes” to the first question is what caused the non-growing audience for Call of Cthulhu, even though it was first-to-market over the regular boardgame.  It’s a very solid game, but its collectibility in a small and geeky audience that wasn’t particularly fond of CGs (or else had such fond memories of Mythos that the sub-audience won’t budge) killed it.  Game of Thrones, on the other hand, captures a much larger mainstream audience, and there is nothing like a CG to drag in brand new gamers.  And this is despite the successful Game of Thrones boardgame and corresponding expansions.

Similarly, if you have an established audience of non-CG players, who are used to a game being non-collectible, suddenly releasing the game in collectible format may not be such a successful thing—although perhaps one is aiming at a new audience, and has properly killed off the old and non-collectible versions, which may succeed, although this new audience had better be large enough to sustain through the first one or two printings.  I think this might have been the primary reason of death for Navia Dratp, a collectible game aimed at chess and shogi players used to having a non-collectible version of the game that they are quite happy with.

I see the possibility of turning a once-collectible game non-collectible, as Call of Cthulhu is doing, and even the success of MtG introducing a variety of theme decks per base set and expansion. But going the other way as Wizard Kings—well, there’s always a first time for success.  I’m always glad to add a new case to my knowledge of this quirky area of games.

Conclusion

I think the message is pretty clear—be very careful when publishing a CG.  It may, if you are fortunate and are able to follow most of the rules above, be successful and form a nice money base for expanding into more CGs (Alderac and L5R, or Wizards of the Coast and MtG) or even into “normal” games (Fantasy Flight Games and Game of Thrones).  Otherwise, you may be biting off more than you can chew—a small publisher with a dud CG is likely to last as long as the CG does.

In some future article, when I feel like it—I’ve been restricted by work and illness from writing as much as I’d like—I may write a third article on the “new” collectible games, which for the most part aren’t collectible at all.  It seems the age of the collectible game is past its prime—I don’t see much in the way of overabundent growth of new CGs as the field was in its glory days of the late 80s and early 90s.  Despite a certain frugality that growing older brings me, I miss the format—it’s such a theme-heavy, ever-renewing way to present a game.  I sacrificed a lot of money, and it brought me grief when it comes to organizing my collection, but the variety is generous, and the tournaments and metagame unmatchable.

‘Course, I’m not touching it again with a very long pole.  It’s a little frustrating not to, but I know myself too well.

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Update on Iron Gamer:

I haven’t really felt strong desires.  I think this is partly work and partly being sick.  Of course, right now it looks like there will be serious competition for expansions come April and onwards between BattleLore and Heroscape, with nary a rest between expansions.  I still haven’t yet decided on solid games to pick for the standalone this month, and I think I should.  I was tempted by Through the Ages showing up on Funagain, but ultimately decided that someone else could have it—for now.  I think I really regret this again—it really sounds like a game I would take a shine to, but there’s always The Gathering.  Maybe Ysaphan or Midgard.  I’m hoping to trade for them, but apparently they are too good for people to want to trade away on BGG, so I might just have to buy one or the other.

For other games, I plan to just do some trading.  I got Gheos this way, which was quite a bargain—it’s a lot of easily shared fun, even with non-gamers, which I’m not as sure about the new Ystari or Midgard, which I admit is a stopper for me these days.

On the wayside, I am loving Heroes, which is probably the first TV series I will ever buy a Tivo for, although more likely I’m going to stay with watching the episodes on the NBC site and buying the DVD collections like candy (very slow candy....).  I love Hiro.  If they came out with a Heroes CG… and it had decent rules… maybe....  No, better not.  Better, better not.  This is why I created the Iron Gamer promise.  I hope to say yatta! at the end of the year with a positive score.

My sacrifice,
Ava

© 2007 Ava Jarvis

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Comments:

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if you have an established audience of non-CG players, who are used to a game being non-collectible, suddenly releasing the game in collectible format may not be such a successful thing How do you explain Illuminati: New World Order then? Posted by Doug Orleans on Feb 27, 2007 at 09:16 AM | #

Ava, I’m sure you’re right about Timeless Themes as far as success in the marketplace goes.  But one of the many reasons why Magic never appealed to me was it’s completely bland theme.  As far as I was concerned, its generic fantasy races might as well have been differently colored cards with some stats and powers on them.  I suspect I was never going to be a big CCG player anyway, but despite my exposure to fantasy stalwarts like D&D, there was nothing about Magic that drew me in.  Probably just as well--I now have more money for Eurogames! Posted by Larry Levy on Feb 27, 2007 at 10:16 AM | #

INWO - I was a big fan of the original game, but never bought any of the CG… I thought it wasn’t successful.  (Never saw anyone play it.) As for the age of the collectible game being past its prime, that could be but games like the World of Warcraft CCG is a new contender that is doing very well (with a few new-ish things to bring to the mix.) Posted by Matt J. Carlson on Feb 27, 2007 at 11:08 AM | #

I don’t really know how successful INWO is either, but by Ava’s “how long it’s been in print” measure, I think it’s quite healthy (13 years?).  But I guess there haven’t been any new releases for a while (the upcoming “Bavarian Fire Drill” expansion is for the original Illuminati game, not INWO). Posted by Doug Orleans on Feb 27, 2007 at 11:18 AM | #

Hello Doug, My impression is that INWO is not in print nor was it in print for 13 years.  There were a few printings some years ago, but then the stock never really ran out---which does not qualify for “constantly in print”.  If it did, then MeCCG would still technically be in print, since one can still find factory stock out there, although very rarely. I should probably clarify “in print” as “actively in print”, although I assumed that was a default definition of “in print”. Much as I love MeCCG, and thought that INWO was pretty good and a minor improvement over the original parent game, I can’t think of either CCG as being healthy collectibles in the sense of the terms of this article. Larry, You should probably take a look at L5R then---the various clans are distinct and realized with a more consistent storyline, though there is work involved in making it a multi-generational plot (many, many generations), whereas MtG can just pick up and go somewhere else.  Some MtG sets have been much stronger in concrete theme than others---the Kamigawa cycle that ended a couple sets ago is a favorite of mine.  I think of late story has been taking more of a stand in MtG, and although there was a painful evolution (gods, I really hated the cheesiness of the Tempest cycle) recently it’s gotten better. Posted by Ava Jarvis on Feb 27, 2007 at 06:02 PM | #

Matt, I am curious about the new WoW CCG as well---it sounds pretty successful; people have been calling it “the new Magic”, and it will be interesting to see how well it does.  It is flexible and effectively has a living mythology right now (and a very loose one at that), and it’s mainstream enough that the audience is one that is not anathema to CGs.  And it is practically first to market as well. Still, its life will probably be as long as the creativity of WoW itself, which I don’t know the extensiveness of myself. Posted by Ava Jarvis on Feb 27, 2007 at 06:07 PM | #

L5R, huh?  There are really only two CCGs that have interested me even a little.  The first was the original Decipher Star Trek, which seemed to have great potential and was cool just because it WASN’T a Magic copycat.  But the concept seemed better than the execution.  The other was Netrunner, which I’ve only played once, but which seemed like the best *game* of all the CCG’s I’ve played.  I have little interest in deck building, so the fact that I could have a good time with a preformed Netrunner deck was impressive. I’ve heard a lot about L5R and know that the people who like it REALLY like it.  For a long time, it had the rep as the best multiplayer CCG around, which would also be a plus for me.  But how would you rank it mechanically?  Most of my exposure to Magic was during its early days, but I always thought the game design was pretty pedestrian.  It seemed to need the deckbuilding and collectability factors to be worthwhile.  So the most interesting thing to me would be a CCG that plays well as a game more or less out of the box. Posted by Larry Levy on Feb 27, 2007 at 08:05 PM | #

Hello Larry, How complex should the CCG be?  :) Middle-Earth CCG plays well out of the pre-constructed challenge decks (and reportedly well out of the randomized starters).  L5R (and Alderac CCGs in general) I have been less satisfied with as pertains to starters, although they have enough of the main house cards to be playable (with particular base sets being more or less so).  Out of the starters: each starter is dedicated to a particular faction, and about half of the cards are dedicated to it, which is technically enough; the rest are randomized.  But I don’t think of L5R being as good out of the box as Netrunner. Mechanically, L5R is more complex than Magic is, and the rules are also deeper simply in and of themselves.  L5R feels as satisfying as Netrunner--with more factions.  If only L5R had true preconstructed decks, I would strongly recommend it. Magic’s design feels pedestrian, but as in many games like this, it’s the card mix that really bring the game to life.  When 99% of your rules are on the cards, it’s what happens, so it’s difficult to predict how good a game is merely from the rules when it’s a CCG (or even if it’s just CCG-like, as with Blue Moon, also a simple ruleset, but the cards make the difference).  Magic’s later sets are much better than earlier ones, although quality still varies from set to set. The more memorable CCGs have little resemblance to Magic, and there are a couple dozen, perhaps, of those, so it’s not quite so dismal a picture. Posted by Ava Jarvis on Feb 27, 2007 at 11:32 PM | #

Ava, Phenomenal article!  The only game I really got sucked into was M:TG.  If by your description someone could be “seriously entwined “, then I suppose I was DEADLY serious.  For a while. I’m not familiar with the Shadowfist story.  Given what I know about CCG’s, I can’t imagine something going out then coming back into print.  How did this happen? Also, I’m curious about your opinion of power creep in keeping a CCG alive.  From what I’ve seen, over the years Wizards of the Coast has, in an attempt to keep things “new”, slowly increased the powers of the cards in relation to their playing costs.  This reduces the value of cards from earlier sets and prompts long time players to continually update their collections if they want to keep up. I have also noticed power bleed between colors.  Powers and effects that used to be attributed to only one color have popped up in other colors.  What do these 2 things foretell of M:TG five or ten years from now? Posted by Scott Tepper on Feb 28, 2007 at 12:35 PM | #

Scott, I’m in your boat of being a once serious Magic devotee. I worked in a game store in 1993 when the games first debuted. We ordered a whole two decks! Then we ordered ten Beta decks, and before long we were ordering cases of the stuff. I still kick myself for turning down the chance to buy a Mox Emerald for $20 from some guy in a San Francisco cafe. Even though I’ve been off Magic for years, I still read the design and development columns on the Wizards website. Wizards clearly has a long-term view on how long Magic can last and in my opinion has generally kept power creep under control. Maybe Ava has more hands-on experience of the recent sets, though. Shadowfist is on its third publisher now, having passed from Daedalus Games and Z-Man to Shadowfist Games. Wikipedia give a history of the sets: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadowfist Posted by W. Eric Martin on Feb 28, 2007 at 02:42 PM | #

Scott, Thanks!  Magic is quite the epidemic, isn’t it? Shadowfist is really lucky (and a good game, too, without which there wouldn’t have been the possibility for luck in the first place).  Thanks, Eric, for the wikipedia link---I wasn’t aware that it had moved onto publisher three. As for power creep---it and other methods for making new, shiny things are very important to CG lifespan.  Of course, power creep is not necessary, although the nature of the game environment changes from set to set---it depends on what cards, exactly, are there, and the relationships that can form between them.  The environment gets very complex---which is what generates the enormous metagame and possibilities for deckbuilding, and multiplies headaches for playtesting, which is why MtG was semi-notorious for having “broken” cards in its earlier sets.  (These days, Wizards can afford a small standing army of playtesters, or at least more than many other competitors can offer, so such incidents happen less and less---although great and powerful combos still form, they just aren’t game breaking).  Limiting that environment is not just a desire for creating shorter cycles and encouraging people to buy more---though it is that---but it’s a good thing to have once a CG starts hitting long life. Long-lived CGs work on expiration.  MtG has several formats for its tournaments, but most tournaments are either Type II (Standard), which limits cards to the most recent sets/expansions; or Block, which limits cards to a single block---a block being defined as some base set of 300-some cards with two expansions of 75-100-some cards each, all tied together with a central theme and particular mechanics unique to that “block”.  And L5R is well-known for expiration, as the game environment entirely resets every block (essentially, the most common L5R tournament type is equivalent to the MtG Block format). Eric is right in that Wizards is very good at handling their destiny where Magic is concerned.  I don’t have hands-on experience of the recent sets, but I did play the Kamigawa block for a little while, just to see where the game went after the Urza block.  What I saw was that, while there is a sort of spreading of specific color powers out to the others, the designers are still gearing the game to using multiple colors of mana.  Cards that have “bled” powers either cost more, have more difficult conditions for use, or require more types of mana---the latter of which is still not easy to manage, even with the dual-styled lands introduced in almost every recent set.  So mono-colored decks are really in the lurch now---they often can’t use the better of the bled special effects, so weakness for mono-color still exists.  Magic will be around for ages to come.  It’s been going strong for over twenty years now. Wizards has, thanks to that success, been able to offer constructed decks (which are very good these days) as well as online play with all of the official trimmings of boosters, sets, and supported tournaments.  In particular, going online can give a second life to many CGs---certainly sites like CCG Workshop have brought a community back to multiple dead CCGs---and for a live CCG, this makes it that much stronger. I find it interesting that one of the recent Magic sets was, basically, a retrospective with beefed up new bits.  It was very, very tempting; a great mix of older cards, sometimes cards as old as the game itself (see?  they can come back, in the right block!), along with natural extensions, with new twists, of what had come before.  The maturity of design is really striking now, compared to when the game first started, and with Time Spiral in the present. Gosh, I sound like an MtG commercial, don’t I?  But much as I sometimes hate to admit it, the game obviously has an unstoppable drive that goes beyond mere addiction. Posted by Ava Jarvis on Mar 1, 2007 at 12:50 AM | #

I was also highly tempted by Time Spiral due to its throwbacks to older cards, but I resisted and the urge has passed. Several people in our game group keep talking about doing a booster draft or two, but (luckily?) the talk never leads to actually drafting. I almost don’t want to open that box again… And I’ll note that Magic actually debuted in 1993, so it’s only 14 years old—which is older than a number of its players! Posted by W. Eric Martin on Mar 1, 2007 at 01:05 AM | #

Eric, Hmmm, it feels much longer than that!  But 14 years of being constantly and actively in print with more expansions and sets than anything else out there---that’s years of good living.  And it is true that Magic continues to claim more fans from an early age. I can still see the game going for 30 years and still do quite alright, although obviously my sense of time is a bit warped. Posted by Ava Jarvis on Mar 1, 2007 at 01:41 AM | #

Hmm, 30 years? I wonder how many boosters my Social Security check will buy… Posted by W. Eric Martin on Mar 1, 2007 at 02:03 AM | #

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