not to mention with 5 colors you get imperfect symmetry across the colors which makes each one feel unique, while an even number of colors will often result in each color having a direct opposite, which makes the 5 color option feel more interesting and expansive than 2-3 mirrors
Something that coulda been brought up is how MtG uses a color wheel where adjacent colors share in identity and tend to mix more easily. Like big creatures in red/green, counter and removal from spells in blue/black... 3 means you can't have opposites and at 6+ you start running out of core mechanics for factions to focus on or share. Source: my bong, but I find 6 color games often have a "big creatures" faction and a redundant "big creatures but worse somehow" faction, often ending up as the "a bunch of parasitic archetypes that don't mix in the color they're attached to" faction.
2 enemy and 2 ally colours does allow for some interesting deck design and world-building. A lot of 5 colours don't really use that aspect, so I didn't bring it up, but there's a lot of good reasons MTG's colour wheel is respected so much - it's a really strong piece of design work. And yeah, I've seen 6 colours work well enough, but sometimes it feels like it's just done to be different, and not because there's a good in-game reason.
You perfectly described the dilemma I'm having with my current 6 color system. I've managed to sort five into fairly strong identities, but the sixth keeps veering into "the archetype collection" or as an all-rounder that isn't very conducive to interesting gameplay.
@@drakor98 Any six color games from which you can learn what (not) to do? Digimon comes to mind. The odd one out there's Black, but it does have an slow, defensive playstyle uniting its keyword salad. Speaking of Digimon, it technically has 7 colors counting White, which usually behaves as colorless... but has synergy with itself. Colorless synergy is a historically dangerous path, buuuuuuuut... 🎮🔥
@@drakor98 I hate to say this... but the video is slightly wrong. Magic has 6 'color' factions in terms of design. colorless, while being ruled as not a color, is essentially magic's 6th color... and is basically as you said what happened with your 6th faction. It's a generalized "all-rounder" that isn't as strong as focusing on a specific branch, but can be used to augment the other 5 factions since ith as pieces.
The digimon tcg (whos lead designer was deul masters) started with 5 main colors, but went up to 6. It has a 7th but thats specifically for special cards generally.
It started with 3 colors (red, blue, yellow) with the first 3 starters, introduced a 4th and 5th in the first booster (green and white (although it acts more like colorsless than its own color)) and 2 more (black, purple) in the second booster set. I think it was a good idea to introduce colors in a gradual way, but it was poorly executed and left black scraping for deckbuilding options for a long time.
Legends of Runeterra has 11 regions but you can only mix up 2 at a time while building your deck, based on which champions you want. Exceptions to this are double region cards which can be considered of one of the two regions and Runeterran champions. If you include a Runeterran champion in your deck it will give some unique deckbuilding rules (ex. including any 6+ cost from any region), but you will have only one of the other regions to choose from, since Runeterra still counts as a region. I think this is a great use of factions.
It resembles MTG in so many things, but without the problems of maindecking the mana. I played since its release and got to masters a lot of times and I find it funny and cheap. Art, animations and voice interactions are amazing and are also the things that kept me there for so long. Gameplay wise I love the spell mana system (you gain max 3 mana you didn't spend on the turn as mana only usable for spells) and the high number of combination of strategies and different decks you can build with the region system I explained in the upper comment. People complain about powercreep and balance issues, but those are in every TCG and every now and then we get a really strong archetype that is above everything else (that usually means having something like 65%+ win rate) and balance patches aren't that frequent, except for occasional hotfixes, so that might be a negative point. Edit: forgot to mention the shared turn is something you don't see often in tcgs but creates unique interactions and mind games. Knowing when to pass priority is definitely the most important skill to master in LoR.
It's amazing how with 10 regions plus Runeterran champions, each region still feels unique and flavorful Noxus, Bandle, Bilgewater and PnZ all have direct damage spells, but they all do it in different ways and none of them feel like they step on the toes of the others
It's worth pointing out that there was a time where even MtG analyzed including purple as a 6th color, generating opposite pairs which they liked: Green vs Purple, Blue vs red, Black vs white. There was enough reasons to consider it on flavor, but they ditched the idea because creating it would require removing things from other colors and giving them to purple. That and supply/logistic issues (you would need to print "City", purple land type cards and balance it enough to make it appealing) made them ditch the idea. Funny enough they did end up exploring a different space years later: Colorless. It did create interesting mechanics that interacted with zones that other colors don't usually touch, but balancing it became an issue. It's still a thing but used kinda rarely and as a sort of "you can do things other colors do but WAY less efficiently".
Purple is an interesting sage. I think it's really tempting to create an even number of factions so they can be divided neatly into two sides, but for MTG at least, I think 5 has actually forced them to get more creative in how they split factions.
Kards WW2 currently has 9 factions.But player can choose only two factions in deck ( first faction must be one of main 5, and the other 4 can be as supporting factions). Theoretically, you can have three factions if card has keyword "Exile".
I think Yu-Gi-Oh tried to do a six color system with the attributes (Light, Dark, Earth, Water, Wind, and Fire), but the field and equip spells supporting them were so mid that no one cared 😂
Its like Yugioh has done everything wrong that you can do when you design a tcg, but still is one of the best and most played tcgs xD No color system, no ressource management, power creep, longest banlist, longest turns with most complexity Like they tried to get all points on the "how to design a bad tcg" list xD Dont get me wrong, I still like to play yugi
@@alessandro5456 That's probably my favourite thing about yugioh. They're stuck with an absolute mess of a game, and have to keep finding ways to keep it running.
The thing with Yugioh is that Konami never stuck with what they intended for attributes and types, and decided to focus on archetypes for decades. In that sense the faction system in YGO doesn’t even matter. Hell most of YGO from what I remember was either LIGHT or DARK creatures.
As a vtuber and card game enjoyer seeing selen out of nowhere caught me offguard lmfao Love the video, btw! Card game design is always exciting to me so I'm a big fan
I like the approach that digimon took. There are 7 colors: 6 main and 1 support, but the identities are more tied to the different archetype families while the color just helps to tie it together and limit the deckbuilding space. You can even have the same archetype in different colors like wargreymon decks being built either with a red or black base. And then you have multicolored archetypes like hunters or xrosswars or full white decks when white is supposed to be more of a support/tech color. You have the flexibility of using archetypes as factions therefore not being strictly tied to a closed set of identities, but at the same time the colors help bring cohesion and player expression while at the same time it helps limit access to certain cards that could become problematic if every deck gained access to them.
I’m not that familiar with digimon, and only know the basic mechanics/rules. Wouldn’t the archetype still be tied down by the identity of the color it uses? How does digimon get around that?
@@devdog7409 Not necessarily, while most archetypes are build to take into consideration their color (or colors) that is not always the case. And an archetype can be a jumping point for new mechanics that in the future can be for the whole color or stay tied to the archetype. For example the archetype deck for bloomlordmon uses the suspension mechanic which the green decks tend to use it uses it in a different way (self target of suspension effects) and is built around being able to cheaply play and suspend vegetation/fairy digimon, (specifically at or below 3000DP) and getting a pay out for each one. So while it is a green decks that can take advantage of generically good green cards, its support is of not much use for other green decks. Then you have decks like hunters that while having a majority of purple cards it has nothing to do with the color identity of purple decks in general. Then you have "good stuff" decks that just take good cards in 1 or 2 colors and run with it with no archetype in cohesion. You can have a range of color identity/archetype identity. From "just good purple cards" to "only cards from this archetype", passing from all the in between of archetypal decks with color support
@@karibui494 thanks for the explanation. I was exploring creating my own game and I was planning to just have archetypes because I didn’t see what colors provide but it seems like a mistake because almost every game has a color system. I’m trying to learn tcg game design on my free time and I’m honestly still a little shaky on the reason tbh but this helped me understand a lot better.
Guilty of using red/purple/blue/green/yellow here 🤚 I loved your numbers explanation. It really helps visualize how quickly combinations grow. I will have to say there's a certain beauty with not having a predefined number of factions. Legends of Runeterra and I think Fire Emblem have factions and you use at most 2 in a deck, but they felt they could add more every now and then. (One Piece and Digimon also did this, but all 6 colors were planned from the start)
Yeah, I think OP and Digimon starting with 4 before expanding to 6 was a good way of easing players into 6 colours. Yugioh is another interesting example - technically there are 6 attributes, but since name archetypes are the main faction system, it can be argued they have many dozens. It's definitely interesting, although the worry always is mechanical overlap in these cases. Magic was playing around with adding a 6th colour for a while, but they could never find enough mechanics to make it work.
@@tcgacademia Mechanical overlap is also a very interesting topic. In the old days of Magic, green was THE creature color, white was THE wrath color, red was THE haste color. Each color was independent and had very big gaps so even a two-color deck could have very obvious weaknesses. But modern Magic is taking a different approach. Haste is now also present in green and black, white also cares about creatures but in different ways, more colors have answers to more card types, and colors that were absolutely terrible at something important have at least a passable weaker version (like white's conditional card draw, red's temporary draw or blue having more removal in Limited). This does make decks cover more of the mechanic space but we can still recognize weaknesses and gaps. All this to say, I don't think you need to divide your mechanics into a pie as it was first conceived, as much as you just need the mechanics to make a cohesive identity, even if they are shared among multiple factions. I think this is key to making a game with many more factions, and to improve faction separation in general.
@@tcgacademiaActually, in Yugioh, types are closer to being factions than attributes. Dragons have always been big monster turbo, Machines are all about OTKs, Zombies are using the graveyard a lot and so on. The only constant in attributes is Dark being the best one.
@@fernandobanda5734 Good point! Magic has spent a fair amount of time trying to minimize the weaknesses of each colour (especially important for more restrictive formats like commander) while still keeping the colours distinct. I've always found that one of the more tricky parts of design in games I've worked on.
Another factor of the common colors is they are pretty universal in what they do across different games, because just seeing the color gives across the idea of what said color's playstyle is going to be. Such as Red being a very angry and aggressive color are the most aggro-based decks, while black is often associated with death so black decks play from their discard pile.
That's definitely a useful part of it, too! Especially if you play multiple games already, trying to figure out what purple does can take a bit to wrap your head around. Meanwhile, red=aggro is pretty much instinct for a lot of players at this point, and it lets people get into the game more easily.
My favorite game, VS. System, and UDE's redesigned VS System 2PCG used named factions. The redesigned 2PCG basically made the factions irrelevant. But the teams were and are very important in Classic VS. It ended up being well over 30+ unique factions, each would have their own playstyles. It's similar to Yugioh archtypes.
Mathemagics funfact : The total number of color combinations is equal to (2^X)-1, where X is your number of Colors. Now i can drift away in peace. Merry Christmas everyone !
@@williamvaughn2720 Yes, i was excluding colorless, as it did in the video. If you want to count colorless, which in some games can't be played, you must remove the -1 yup !
And in the case of MTG colorless can be both a joker (like most artifacts) or more like a 6th color (Eldrazi and cards caring for things with or without color).
Cool breakdown. I like finding TCGs with... interesting color choices. Like Aquarian Age having the red faction as the defensive, counter-magic color. Or the original DBZ game having red AND orange, and two greens. Also, love those old guild girls.
Back in the old days where anime and Magic felt like an exciting crossover and not like Hasbro cynically trying to get the weeb audience. And yeah, it's always neat seeing other games play around with their colour systems - although there is a line between doing something different, and doing something just to be different than MTG. I think there's a few 6 colour games out there that could easily have worked as 5 colour games just as well or better, except they wanted to avoid comparisons to Magic.
Around 2008 the chilean tcg Mitos y Leyendas had a massive rework wich implemented colored factions. Red was often coded as "the good guys" and they played a lot like White from MTG. A previous game from the same designers (Humankind) from 2003 (iirc) also incorporated a "defensive/control" Red faction, although they represented an "evil corporation" archetype this time. Both games had Red as the defensive and slow color, but in the historical setting (Mytos y Leyendas) they represented good, while in a cyberpunk setting (Humankind TCG) they were one of the main antagonic forces in the story.
Great video and real helpful TCG knowledge! The game I’m working on uses 4 suits, 5 “colors” and 4/5 “traits” I hope I haven’t bitten off more than I can chew 😂
Kind of depends on how you approach it, but games do need to break into archetypes once you get past the basic colour identities, so I think your system could definitely work! I could definitely see designing the first few cards really tricky, since you're still figuring out what everything does, but once you have it decently figured out, it could actually make later designs easier and more tidy.
Thank you! Especially the concise part - I have a history of under-shooting on essay word counts, so it does mean a lot hearing people appreciate shorter content like this!
@@dudono1744 Rush Duels is designed around this philosophy and it works pretty well, instead of saying "Royal Rebel" they say "Light attribute Fiend Monster" Instead of "Excutie" they say "Level 6 monster with 500 DEF" Instead of "Chair" they say "Dark attribute monster with 0 ATK" This design philosophy allows the designers to be more flexible with the restrictions on powerful cards, Allowing you to splash Cyber Dragon into a Royal Rebel deck, Because Royal Rebel Heavy Metal and Royal Rebel Invasion gain their effect by tributing any level 5 or higher monsters, not just the in-archetype ones.
Working on a card game we designed an 8 color system but restricted each color to only play with one of 2 preset allies bringing to deck combos to 24 (25 if you include just playing neutral cards) as the color you start with matters quite a bit.
I'm working on a deck construction game (ECG style) and used 3 factions. But that's mainly because I'm trying to make it a super-affordable ECG with small sets, and 3 factions is about all I can support unless I increase the set size (which would go against my main design goal).
Kind of fascinating, that MtG, as the first TCG, picked the aperantly best faction system right out of the gate. I mean, they did a lot wrong in the beginning, but this is a constant that works really really well. (Although you could argue, that Artifacts added some sort of 6ed colour to magic)
i think i'm handling 6 factions well tl;dr: separate them by what part of the board they care most for, like deck, discard, hand, etc) i wanted to make a really simple sorta "introductory" tcg, and eventually decided to use playing card iconography and terminology where reasonable so, i made the factions 6 suits (the standard ♦♣♥♠ + black grails and red shields, from James Watson's deck6 design) the rules are heavily based on duel masters, though with Star Wars: unlimited's resource system mixed with EDH's commander system so, my solution to make the 6 suits unique was with what part of the board they're _most focused_ on: diamonds - resource cards clubs - face cards (units) hearts - decks spades - discard piles grails - hands shields - guards and these infer mechanics like MtG black's GY tricks, blue's draw and scry, etc
Nice! I like the suit approach - it lets you do some interesting things such as allying colours or building archetypes that care about opposing colours, both of which let you mix and match suits in different ways. And yeah, 6 definitely works and honestly lately it's almost more common than 5, but 5 was super-common for a long time, so that's where I focused for this video. Might need a follow up for 6 colours, though!
Also with 5 colors you can balance the game like a game of rock, paper, scissors, spock where each color is strong against 2 and weak against the other 2. You can't get this effect on even numbers and general one color will be better than the others. If you use too many colors it gets harder to find a solution to balance the game and often it gets harder to make new cards as what each color does gets blurry.
2 allied colours and 2 enemy colours is a really great design tool that only really works with 5 colours. Every game I've played with 7 colours has felt overstuffed, and 3 is definitely too few.
In Yu-Gi-Oh you have 6 "colors". There you have Wind (which is printed green) and Earth (which is printed black) and they both correspond to the green color in magic, I guess. But then again, the element in Yu-Gi-Oh doesn't really matter. Before it got archetypes it literally hardly mattered. And since it got archetypes they hardly matter compared to the much more important archetypes and summoning mechanics.
@@tcgacademiaThe elemental Attributes are also far from equal, WIND is far and away the worst one, it's so bad that a card that prevented special summons OTHER than WIND got banned because when we finally got a decent Wind deck it could shut down literally any other relevant deck Meanwhile, the 5 equivalent cards for the other attributes are untouched, and the DARK one is considered bad because basic everyone uses DARK decks in most formats
I'm at the beginning stage of thinking about maybe taking a crack at design, and I'm definitely bookmarking your videos and channel as valuable resources in that regard. One of the things that led me to this path was playing Epic Card Game and recognizing as a "rush to the good parts" Magic-like game. The thing I like least about it was its four faction/color system, specifically one being "Good" and one being "Evil". While Magic seems to tend towards White Good Black Bad more than it should imo, I think they work really hard to push back against that association often enough that I give them a B for effort. But having an even number as a color/faction system makes this kind of association too easy for my own personal design tastes. So in my initial brainstorm document I'm penciling in five colors for a good amount of complexity, or three if I want to focus less on that aspect. To try not to copy Magic's color wheel too directly, I'm penciling researching the Wuxing, the Chinese elements system, which seems more directional than Magic's ally/enemy combos.
What's funny is that even based on Wuxing, you could still end up at something close to Magic's 5 colours - if metal fits into white and earth is a darker shade closer to black. But yeah, seems like a good place to start to get a different relationship between colours than Magic, or at least break some of that association. And yeah, it's REALLY tempting to break an even-numbered system into opposing sides, like good and evil, or even fast and slow play styles. Glad you found the video interesting!
I've honestly wanted to make an 8 colored game at some point. The way I thought of making it work was either having a commander type system, and or a resource side deck you can draw from. I still and struggling with making the game work though since I suck at making rules for it. More of a card design and not game rules guy >.>
I think it can work, but it will make design tricky. A lot of tcg standards exist for a reason, but there's also plenty of good reasons to try something different. I think the most important thing is understanding why the standard exists, and making sure that you're aware of that when working on your design to help you avoid problems.
Funny thing. I made two card games. One with and one without a color wheel. Odd thing is I felt more restraint from the colors even if I could break them into subsection on my game.
I’m making one based loosely off the Fossil Fighters games (without using any of it’s names or branding) which has 5 as well with Blue, Red, Yellow, Green, and White
What I'm designing kind of has a dynamic number of colors, in that there are some resources that almost everything is gonna need and will be produced by staple cards while others are more archerype-specific and often more powerful and difficult to produce.
That sounds like a really good way to do it - not exactly the same but Wixoss combined character-limited cards with a five-colour system. So I think 5 colours definitely works as a base, with other systems layered on top.
5 Allows for an advantaged colour a disadvantaged colour and two neutral colours. It's a nice symmetry if that's your design space. If not 4 and 6 become more appealing.
I think in recent years we've seen quite a few successful card games that use 6 Colors. Usually they'll have restrictions on total number of colors you can include in a deck. Final Fantasy TCG, Digimon, Lorcana, and the soon to be released Star Wars Unlimited. Legend of the 5 Rings was also pretty successful and that had 7-9 Factions usually. Lord of the Rings TCG from Decipher ran like 10 Factions. So I'm not sure its such a hard and fast rule.
Not a TCG but Something I like about Eternal CG is the influence system. Basically, power cards (Eternals Lands) also have factions, and whenever you gain resource with one you generally gain influence in the corresponding faction. Cards have influence requirements on top of their cost, but your influence never decreases (with a few exceptions). This allows for some interesting balancing measures for 1 and even 0 drops, it allows 1 and 2 color decks to have some strong combos and synergies, and it helps to balance multifaction and neutral cards. The downsides are that if you're not getting Mana Screwed, there's a good chance you'll get influence screwed. And also it's a bit blatant that some factions and combinations are better than others. You could argue that Neutral cards are the 6th faction, but pretty much all neutral cards are worse versions of factioned cards, to compensate for the fact that they can work in any deck.
I saw a bit of eternal when LSV was streaming it - the influence system is definitely interesting. It still feels a little too attached to MTG's style of resources, but it is one of the more interesting resource systems in digital TCG land.
Really interesting video! I'm curious to know what factors can affect how many colours/factions a game should have. For example, if you have more design space, should you have more factions in order to properly split mechanics apart? How do the systems for mixing and matching factions affect that number?
Like a lot of parts of design, I think there's actually tons of options that work, but it's useful knowing why games seem to pull towards a common number. One thing I didn't mention is pack support - I find it interesting that Vanguard dropped from 20ish factions down to 6 in order to make sure that every booster supported every faction. I do notice 4 colours are more common in games like Weiss Schwarz, which is more limited in how you're able to mix cards in the card pool (your deck can only come from a single anime series). That being said, yugioh somehow completely ignores this and kind of works fine?
oh i too forgot something, there are this no Mana, no color, different ways to play cards, that maybe, we can make some decks out of it too !! So we are at 7-colors ???
(At 5m7s) How the fudge is the left shirt "red" when it is more orange? And the right looks normal red and not "dark red" since the more red would be crimson.
The web store usually makes sense, but I've spent plenty of time in back rooms trying to find orange shirts to put out to the sales floor, only to realize that they were labelled 'red' for some reason. Honestly, it's not any harder than differentiating violet and navy, but for some reason I kept running into the issue with orange. It's probably not a real problem in the general population, but orange and red are still the two colours that are easiest to confuse, so that's probably why orange is used less.
YuGiOh, with all of it's archetypes... I'd say it'd be something like a 300 color color wheel. In Duel Master, back in High School, I always used decks consisting of 2 elements (1 with Fire and Light; or another with Dark and Nature) but I did that because I was going full on budget with my deck building. I simply didn't spend on them to have access to enough cards to build a proper mono element deck. Hence, why I always lost to 2 others, who spent a fortune on their decks. 1 of them being a really gosh darn expensive Armored Dragon deck, that just goes into Bajula as soon as it can, to prevent their opponents from having enough mana to retaliate properly, while the other guy having similarl strong decks of all 5 elements. I could sometimes beat his water or nature decks, depending on th eluck of his draws, but never his dark or light ones. He didn't really use hi sfire deck much, so there's that. But his fire deck was on par with the other guy's fire deck when they tried going up against one another using those, so I'd say that'd have wrecked me hard as well. Simply having a 5 color system however is not all the restrictions Duel Masters had. Beside elements, there were also card types, which thankfully, were all within their 1 element. (I played mostly before dual element cards were released) Meaning that even if many types of decks within an element had similar playstyles, the different types might have goneabout them differently. Let's say Fire as an example. There are Armored Wyverns which I really liked, but the good ones are costly to put on the field. (~ 6-8 mana each) But Humans, are cheap. While Armored Wyverns were really good in lte game beatdowns, Humans could potentially finish the match before we even got there, depending on what our opponent had. There were also Armored Dragons, who were in a similar situation to Armored Wyverns, but also had some decent low cost monsters to get by until they can put their high cost beatsticks on the field. Or if we go for light, when we associate with Blockers, the first type that comes to our mind are probably Guardians. Which is all well and good, but the best blocker I'veever seen in the game, was actually of a different type. Kuukai, Finder of Karma, was a Mecha Thunder. Which were usually more of a tech card in light decks. Also, there was 1 more card, that wasn't technically a blocker, but had a similar effect, with even higher numbers, and forcing out a really similar situation as Kuukai's effect: Bodacius Giant. Even if it only blocks the first attack. And it's a Nature card. I'd say, that having more than 2 elements in a deck never really worked out for anyone I played with, bu there are some advantages and disadvantages to both mono and dual element decks. Mono element advantages: You will most likely have the cards to play whatever tactic you're going for pretty easily, as your entire deck only has cards for that tactic. (If built right) Mono element disadvantage: Your deck will undeniably have a bunch of weaknesses, that are hard to get around, that could have been solved with including anothr element that's strong in that field. For example, Fire and Nature have no blockers (Bodacius Giant being the 1 card who can kind of block in nature doesn't count, technically not a blocker) meaning their deffenses are not that strong against simple beatdowns based on the number of monsters. You can force them into attacking your weak monsters once you've attacked with them, rather than your shields, to buy time with the weak ones, until you can get your big boys out. Alternatively, Darkness only has a handful of blockers, and they usually are either costly (compared to their strength, being the slayer blockers) or have a detrimental effect (for example: dies after 1 fight, regardless of how strong the enemy monster was) On the other hand, Light has a ton of blockers, and Water has a decent amount too. Another big difference is the ease of which different elements can get rid of monsters. Dark decks had a rather easy time doing this. To a certain extent, so did fire and nature, but for Light and Water, you really needed some specific cards to pull it off. (Diamond Cutter for example, was the biggest beatdown card for light decks) My reasons behind building my decks as mentioned above, was Fire being really goodat attachnig, while Light beingreall good at deffending, making it a solid combination; while for the other deck, Dark is really good at getting rid of stuff, but is costly. On the other hand, Nature provides a ton of mana, making it viable. I just paired elements that could help with whatever their biggest weaknesses were, within my just about nonexistent budget that i spent on the game.
4 місяці тому
5:05 welcome to dune 2019 boardgame where almost every faction is a shade of the sand's color. :,D
using vanguard to depict a card game that has too many different play styles because of the different clans might not be the best. while that most certainly applies to 2 of the formats, vanguard still has a standard format, which uses 6 main nations (Dragon Empire, Dark States, Keter Sanctuary, Brandt Gate, Stoicheia, and Lyrical Monasterio), plus some nationless cards that are either solid in any deck, or can use any of the 6 main nations for support. however, despite this, there are different decks that can be built from those 6 nations that use some of the key characteristics of those nations, and put their own spins on them
5 is also important for asymmetry without direct opposition. White and Black are not opposites in a five colour system, and can be complimentary in their mechanics. Four and six colour systems come with an inherent sense of opposition between colours far apart, and when they lack that opposition it can feel meaningless to arrange them in any fashion.
I think 4 and 6 colour systems can work as well, but 5 does fit really well into a colour wheel with allied and enemy pairings. Magic's colour wheel is really one of its best design features - it's really, really good, and gives a ton of dimensions to the faction system - flavourfully and mechanically.
As someone who is building a 6 colour card game in spare time I can say that even 6 is already creeping up on unmanageable. You're not only gonna have the magic's 4 colour cards problem, but also a 5 colour cards problem, as the big spicy rainbow cards are gonna be 6 colours. For those who arent in the know, the 4 colour problem is the problem of designing a compelling and mechanically sound 4 colour card, and then also putting it into a coherent draftable set. In Magic, there are exactly 2 cards for each 4c combination except blackless which has 3 (with 1 being bullshit).
In the early days of Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG there were 20 types, and if you want to run multiple types you could, which is why generic beatdown/stall was widely popular (until Magical Scientist FTK happened, but I digress), and six attributes, spell cards and trap cards, so realistically you had 28 factions to build a deck with, but generic beatdown was usually the go to meta option, due to how weak burn decks that weren't FTKs and chain burn, and stall burn keeps getting weaker with each new set released (unless you aren't playing back row hate in which case you're in for a bad time), archetypes just increase this number over time and Konami basically added generic 4 types as of writing this, making the number of generic factions 32. Stall decks also got weaker over time unless you're playing Crooked Cook Exodia Stall and your opponent had no way of inflicting damage out side of piercing and burn, which is usually the case for a lot of decks, unless you're playing a mill deck. Speaking of Mill decks, those decks got power-crept in oblivion thanks to the Forbidden/Limited list. Basically Konami hates stall decks that aren't battle focused or OTK focused (unless said stall deck causes players to not buy product then Konami hit with the ban hammer), and will only touch FTKs if it's consistent enough turn one to be a tier 0 deck, that forces every other deck to be unable to compete due to how slow every other deck is, which at this point Konami might as well print an entire FTK archetype that is consistent enough where the effect reads "If this effect resolves; you win the duel" because that's basically and clearly what competitive players want.
Please do a video on Sorcery: Contested Realm and its grid system. It feels so basic yet innovative. I am having more fun than I have in years with card game.
Android: Netrunner (RIP) had 7 factions, divided into 4 corps and 3 runner classes, having two different sides allowed all 7 colors to be distinct without the combinatorial explosion of having 7 factions straight up.
Without making a huge essay here, and I mean all of this in the most respectable way possible, but I consider the color pie to be similar to suits (spades, hearts, cloves, diamonds) found in playing cards. Noone suggests that Poker and Blackjack are copies of each other despite using the exact same cards/elements. For this reason, I think it is harsh to say that games are "trying to copy" Magic by using the color pie. It is just a commonly adapted element of TCG/CCG design. Its okay that these games borrow a design element of that game, but that doesn't make them copies for utilizing the color pie.
The question only works for games with dedicated resource card or mtg clone It doesn't work on other card games like Pokemon which resource system is different
One thing that I have noticed is that factions that utilize the five color system tends to nearly identical in their concepts and gameplay gimmicks. White or yellow is almost always robots or holy themed if not both, blue is water and technology, green is always nature and big beasts, red is always fire and emotion with dragons being quite common, and purple or black is always the evil color that likes to play with the graveyard. Perhaps changing the colors would lead to different concepts and thus different gameplay styles?
Some notable games that don’t follow this: LOTR TCG (uses cultures and you can mix up as many as you want); SWCCG (pretty much just Light vs Dark); Shadow Era (7 classes, 2 factions and no colors).
There's actually a ton of games out there that don't use 5 (so the title is a little misleading XD ), but it comes up surprisingly often. Definitely not the only system out there!
I feel like you could have gone deeper on the kinds of effects or strategies that you would normaly want to apply to especific colours It would come back to your point about having too many colours risking having some of them being too gimmicky. I feel like the natural continuation of that point is to explore which abilities and effects aren't too gimmicky to have their own colours, but rather complement the game by having it
As someone trying to design a game with 12 "factions" (really 10, two of them are generic), going above 6 factions makes individual designs extremely difficult. I'm trying to make each of the 6 main elements alternate between slow and fast play styles alternatively: Fire is fast →Forest is slow → Wind is fast → Earth is slow → Thunder is fast → Water is slow → (we're back to Fire)... The hard part is holding back from putting an element of elemental RPS into the game because if I do, Mu and Divine cards (both "non-factions), especially the former because of their generic costs are just going to be the best due to no risk of blowouts. So the game would go into a "generic goodstuff pile is the best deck" situation.
Here's a trick to consider : overlap identities. 10 is the number of 2 color combinations in mtg, and i'm pretty sure each 2 color combination is noticable different from each other.
@@dudono1744 Very good trick. I have played MtG, so I can definitely try that interpretation. There might be issues with the alignment types, but I can try my best at least.
Vanguard literally had no use for nations until after they retconed the deck building system. People used to buy just common and play a deck called grade 1 rush to play aggro, dropping your whole hand and getting as many attacks in turn one asap. Eventually the made it nation locked because some clans had no support so you couldn’t fill a deck. Then eventually they went completely towards clans. The nations or colours don’t even have overlap in their mechanics with their clans outside of clones of the original clans. The closest theme for early sanctuary clans would probably be nepotism, insuring your vanguard can find something to ride it. Or dark zones soul manipulation, however other nations were equal or better at exploiting the soul, like magallagic, dragon empire, and sanctuary. Sanctuary had like six teir one decks in the first edition that relied on soul manipulation or just inadvertently created a big soul stack.
@@tcgacademia I’ve actually picked up dear days on steam since watching this. It seems like D format has fixed everything I had issues with from vanguard. First everyone has access to a guaranteed ride chain. Then deck building is very diverse with themes like grade 3, 2, 1&0 being completely valid decks. Nations share support like trigger, sentinels and power house cards which make having multiple decks cheaper and the starter decks valuable to everyone. Also each nations theme is more well defined and consistent. Grade one rush for example is completely valid in like four archetypes.
@@dittmar104 Nice! I bought a few of the D format starters, but they didn't play as well as the V format starters on their own, and I didn't have a local playgroup, so I ended up not playing much of D. Good to hear it's a fun format.
Re: games without a faction system have a tendency to fall into one deck metas? I think this is more a function of making cards too compatible / generalist overall than strictly whether there is a faction system.
I think it's really difficult to avoid an overwhelming good-stuff deck without factions, so without factions they'll most likely just be added back in later to break up decks, like with yugioh.
I'm starting to shy away from the restriction that you need X colour of RCC in order to play Y card, like white mana can only be used on cards that have the sun symbol. Imagine this, still my game but a big change: There can only be 12 RCC in your pool. You start out with 1. Every turn you gain 1, exhausted RCC go back to normal at the beginning of your turn. Your cards aren't the resource, instead, count the resources using a D12, or 2 D6s. There are 7 colours in my game, the whole rainbow, the 8th being White Light, the combination of those colours, but this only serves as identity, like Yugioh and their attributes. Every card is a one cost, however, you can only play cards that have a number/level that is equal to or less than the number of RCC in your pool, example: you have a LvL 3, 4, and 5 in your hand, you got the RCC count to 4, you can only use the LvL 3 and 4 cards in your hand, by using 1 RCC for each, you are left with 2, if you have LvL 4 or below cards in your hand after this, you can use them too, this may sound confusing, but looking back at my game that you know, it should make sense. This way things are simplified, and your Dice get to do more than sit around and be the deciding factor of who goes first. However, I might not include that, and instead the only change is that you aren't restricted by colour, that means your deck can have the whole rainbow and play, and instead of dice, you pitch a card to the RCC, and behold, MTG in disguise but you're aren't restricted by colour. Another however as I'm typing this, I only listed 2 possible outcomes of my game, but I looked at the first one and thought of something weird and unique: By using the dice or pitch a card RCC design. You can only play cards that have a LvL that is equal to or below the current UnExausted Cards/Dice RCC in your pool, using the first example but a twist: LvL 3, 4, and 5 card is in your hand. 4 RCC in your pool. You use one RCC to play the 3. But you cannot play the 4 or 5 because your RCC count is now at 3. How are these 3? Which one's more Fun to be in the game? The Dice. The MTG clone. The weird mechanic I made just now. And/or having colour restrictions but I can't use the dice?
I think there's a lot of room to use dice in tcg mechanics outside of just tracking life, so that's definitely worth considering. That being said, the last mechanic you mentioned with exhausting cards to play one that costs less actually sounds really good! I like how it encourages a variety of card costs, since each turn you want to cascade downward to play the most cards possible - so you want to have powerful high cost cards but also useful low-cost cards. It sounds like a really promising idea!
@@tcgacademia I like it too, it's unique and strays away from other TCGs, well, except Digimon because they got a caution for using resources too, but mines different, but I do believe this creates a problem, Resource Management Paralyses. Well, no game is perfect in the TCGs, and I'm sure that RCC M Paralyses is in every game with RCC it manage, but mine just sticks out, but it's worth a try, heck it might just be the one. But hey, I'm laughing that it solved my problem with having players only having High cost cards in their deck, sort of. But my question is this, is having a colour code restriction good? Especially for a system like this? Or the other where you don't have to worry about playing a card then you are locked into the lower level? I like the idea of colour code restriction but is it good for MY game? Considering what you already know about my game and if you remember me in your comments. Along with that, is having Symbols instead of Keywords to tell an ability without writing down what it does good too? Inscryption did it, and it got popular, Bakugan did it, yet it's confusing maybe? It's probably how many you make, how easy it is to identify them, and the muscle memory of the players. Granted MTG has keywords that tells you things, like Flying meaning this creature flies, while Symbols show you it has wings to Fly, same thing but tackling different parts in the muscle memory.
@@kagemushashien8394 I much prefer keywords to symbols. I think some symbols like 'tap' that are a used everywhere are fine, but keyword mechanics are best written out. Even in non-expanding board games, I don't love it when they replace all the text with symbols. Just my preference, though, definitely some people feel the opposite! Also, for your game, some kind of colour system is still probably good. You're right that you don't need it to effect gameplay, but even something like 'pick only 2 colours for your deck' will help make decks play differently from one another.
@@tcgacademia Yeah, what I'm saying is that I want a colour system, but it does not restrict creativity like MTG or Pokemon does, but my stomic won't let go on "How does Blue (water) RCC can go into an Orange card (fire)?" And if I do that I won't get the satisfaction of playing more than 1 colour. So I might just pick no colour restrictions but there are still colours, then again how do I deal with this version of power creep, all the powerful cards in all the colours combined, well, I'll just add a new type of banlist, as soon as someone wins with that combination, I'll Restrict those cards (right now this is a placeholder name for this kind of list, the Restraining Order list), you take these cards, and say they cannot be in the same deck, unlike banning them like Yugioh, where you can't play those cards in any other decks, you can play these cards but not when you have another card that cannot be with it, it's like water and oil, granted this only works if there is more than 1 card that's a problem, if it's just one card, either it'll be limited or banned. Also I'm leaning towards the Dice RCC mechanic than the other where every card is a RCC, it's been done a few times. I shall use both symbols and keywords, symbols are for lore and keywords are for cards. Also I just might include everything I said, but in different formats of play, that way, the players choose which version of my game is best, howaboutit?
@@kagemushashien8394 Simultaneous use restrictions are definitely better than banlists, where possible. Not sure if that's enough to work out as a faction system on its own, but it might. Only way to tell is playtesting. Although one thing I do believe is some restrictions actually allow for more creativity, not less. You don't want it to interfere with gameplay too much, though, so it is something that's tricky.
And then ygo has 6(7) attributes, a bunch of types, normal and effect, secondary types (union, flip, etc), 4 extra deck types, different spell types, different trap types, and an archetypal naming system for even more complications lol
I always thought it was 5 for different reasons… For starters, 1 faction is the same as no factions, and factions are important otherwise there would be “The Best Deck™️” and the game becomes stale like early yugioh. Then 2 factions is also not good because there’s no real dynamic between the 2 factions, one beats the other and vice versa. So the simplest is 3 factions establishing a rock-paper-scissors dynamic. That style of dynamic, where some factions have an advantage over other factions, but can get countered by another, creates an interesting system, but R/P/S is not interesting, so we need more than just 3. If we go with 4, or any even number really, then we lose out on some of the structure of the checks and balances. What should the dynamic be between opposite corners of the square? We can establish an A>B>C>D>A system but A vs C and B vs D have either neutral interaction which is not interesting or they have undefined behavior which can’t be balanced without it being neutral. 6 factions is the only other unique even color choice because you can break it down into 2 cycles of 3 that somehow also form a 6 cycle but you’d still have issues about opposite corners. So if it can’t be even then it has to be odd, and it has to be more than 3. So our options are 5, 7, or way too many factions for a stable and lasting system to keep designing cards for. 7 is a little too complex so designing for it might be difficult, it’s easier to choose the simpler option which is 5, and you get some benefits from it. In 5 colors, you can establish opposite factions without needing to make an exact opposite version. In Magic’s system, the things that white does are the opposites of things red and black do, but not just red or just black. And things that red and black have in common are things white does the opposite of. White has life gain, red has damage and black has life loss. Neither red nor black is the exact opposite of white, but they were positioned on the opposite side of the pentagon and can be designed as a pair to be the opposite of white. Some goes for any faction. The pair of factions on the opposite side of the pentagon form a sort of negative faction from the opposite single faction. You get the opposites dynamic that even numbered faction systems have while still avoiding any 2 single factions being opposites and having a neutral dynamic. If black was the exact opposite of white then a black deck vs a white deck would just be them counteracting each other. White gains life, black drains it. Black destroys one creature, white puts out many creatures. White has many creatures so black destroys all creatures. Black reanimates creatures so white exiles them, etc. Exact opposites would just be going back and forth having hard counters to all of the pros of playing that faction. In magic’s case, white has enchantments which black can’t destroy easily, and black has discard effects while white can’t draw easily. As they are not perfect opposites, there are facets of their design which the other faction doesn’t oppose. So 5 colors or factions has the structure of 3’s Rock/Paper/Scissors dynamic, the “opposite faction” capability of even numbered factions, and the complexity of having more than 3, but not so much complexity as 7. 5 has all the best parts of the other options without the worst parts. As for the specific 5 colors, I saw it as the traditional RGB colors for fire, water, and grass like pokémon, having a R/P/S dynamic, and then black and white as a light and dark dynamic, arranged in a way such that effects that you would naturally attribute to each color thanks to color theory were opposite to effects that were opposite, and adjacent to effects that were similar…
Yeah, every 7 colour game I've tried has felt a bit overstuffed. 5 giving 2 enemy colours and 2 ally colours is another reason it's a really good number for a colour system. I don't think it's necessarily a strict RPS thing, though, since black always beating red, for example, would just start to get old pretty quickly. But being able to contrast each colour against two others is really good, and definitely another factor nudging games towards 5.
Uhhhhhhhhh... well shoot. That was a mistake. I think there's definitely reasons to go for 7 colours (like how Casters Chronicles tied them to the 7 Deadly Sins). I think pretty much any design decision can be justified, as long as the designer knows the risks and is able to design around them.
@@tcgacademia howdy btw, still a big fan. Can you recommend me some ZX decks? I was going to pick up the cards for some to try out, figured you probably know better then me!
@@jeremymore451 Unfortunately, ZX was a game I kind of struggled to find starter decks for. I ended up grabbing a starter and structure deck, which was pretty unbalanced and definitely not ideal.
Kind of, but actually no. You can have different archetypes without really having true factions (cards that draw cards and cards that reward you for drawing extra cards, for example), but even these end up acting like soft factions. So while you can avoid hard factions, you still end up with soft factions and you're still in a position where if you mess up the balance at all you still just end up with a good stuff deck at the end of it. So while you can make a game with archetypes rather than factions, it's a lot easier and safer to build in factions from the start.
@@tcgacademia i mean, it's correct when it refers to macrofactions. And about ygo, attributes only have some field spells and equips going for them, but each monster type originally had its own shtick, like Warriors being good at fielding numbers, zombies playing with the graveyard (before it became the norm), Machines playing around OTK (allegedly lol) and Dinosaurs having either big monsters that require tributes or very tiny monsters that don't. GX era started expanding on types before realizing archetypes would've become the norm.
@@mistery8363 Yugioh is honestly kind of weird about factions - the game is really stubborn about all cards having one type, and there's only 20-ish factions. Instead of using name archetypes, it would make way more sense if they just added more types, or let monsters have more than one type.
After play MtG for 30 years, I switched to Grand Archieve. No land cards. You chose a chanpion an combine with 3 elements. Today there as 8 champions, 4 with 2 level 3 variants; 3 basic elements.
I've taken a look at Grand Archive in the past - it looks like it's doing some interesting things! I wonder if they'll add in another element or two down the road, or if 3 combined with unique champions is enough variety that it's not necessary.
2:41 are those from a real game? Or are they just a made up example? Kamen Rider, Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, and Certain Magical Index seems like an odd combo, so it’s got me curious.
That was a game I made - I talk about it briefly in the Essential Elements conclusion video. Basically just art of things I like XD For the game itself, while I was working on it I figured out pretty quickly that 3 colours just did not feel like enough. I haven't played or heard of a real tcg that actually only uses 3 colours, so I just used that.
I know it’s not a TCG but is a CCG, but it’s amusing to note that legends of runeterra has what is basically a 10(+) color system, but you can only pick one or two. And even with that only one of the “colors” really fails to have its own unique identity.
Interesting! I don't think 4-6 colours is really locked in, but if you're adding more it does require some extra planning to make sure you have a good division of mechanics between different colours.
@@tcgacademia check it out. i think the game is some 3 years old and it introduced some important changes to the genre. at least from an historic point of view it has relevance.
Seven is a really tempting number. I think it's harder to do well than 5 or 6, but being a bit trickier is definitely not a reason to avoid it - especially when it has such strong flavour. _Flavour_ is very important for that kind of TCG.
Is it always 5? Fantasy-related makes sense due to the 4 virtual alignments in D&D plus Neutral. But Pokemon doesn't have 5 colors and that's a top 3 game. Weiss has 4 colors... Legend Of The 5 Rings, a very early successful TCG is more like Pokemon in terms of colors. Star Wars Decipher is 2 color.
Dunno how you said 'white' when the colour shown is clearly yellow, and black when it's clearly purple. Also, as an example of a tcg with colours but not 5, Mythgard has 6 colours (blue, Yellow, Red, Green, Orange, Purple).
Yes and no - the design history is actually pretty interesting. There were apparently talks for a while about including a 6th colour -purple- but there wasn't enough design space for it, since any new mechanics they could think of were already shoved into one of the other colours. But they figured they had enough design space to make 'colourless' kind work like a distinct colour. So it's kind of a 6th colour, but also not really.
@@tcgacademia True. I also believe that originally most colourless cards were equipment, with the point being that they could go anywhere because they were ambiguous. Since then they have refined the colourless identity into something more of an anti-colour with the Eldrazi and the likes. Moreover, I think in terms of design a good idea is to not only have the coloured factions but to also include "colourless" cards as mercenaries or general items. That way they are able to be accommodated into any deck at the cost of not always gaining benefits from colour synergy.
@@drewhalcro6082 It's kind of interesting, and maybe worth a video in the future - some games have colourless and it works really naturally for them, but some games don't have anything colourless and it also works for them.
@@tcgacademia I look forward to it (assuming there is enough material there to make a video). It would also be very interesting to see how other systems implement colour/colourless. Is colourless a colour? And why is the answer yes?
@tcgacademia4272 And honestly, making a new color also helps developers to design new attributes and mechanics for the game. For example, Duel Masters utilizes the colorness mana to construct zero civilization like Zenith, Oracles, and Jokers with each of them unique playstyle
MTG now kinda has 6 colors or maybe you can call it 5 1/2 colors !? Although the name is called “colorless” you need to be able to produce nonbasic mana to cast spells like “spatial Contortion”. I’m doing my best to make a card game and I’d like to do 7 colors but like you said it’s an enormous combination of decks. Thanks for the tip on the color orange as that might’ve been one of the colors but you make a great argument there seeing as it’s close to red. I’m doing my best to make it like a super light orange and very dark red for contrast.
My faction system is kinda weird, there are 4 colors, but each one is only the primary aspect of 2 other sub factions, the game technically only have 4 colors of red, green, blue, and pearl, but inside the same color there are 2 others for more lore reasons (red is yellow + orange, blue is dark blue + cyan, green is light green + brown, and pearl is purple + white), I has been thinking a while if make it based on 4 or 8 colors (the big ones or the small ones), and thinking that you can make decks only of *up to* 3 colors I still think is too many variants to manage, I still wonder what's the answer, but this video help me see things a little more clear.
not to mention with 5 colors you get imperfect symmetry across the colors which makes each one feel unique, while an even number of colors will often result in each color having a direct opposite, which makes the 5 color option feel more interesting and expansive than 2-3 mirrors
Something that coulda been brought up is how MtG uses a color wheel where adjacent colors share in identity and tend to mix more easily. Like big creatures in red/green, counter and removal from spells in blue/black... 3 means you can't have opposites and at 6+ you start running out of core mechanics for factions to focus on or share.
Source: my bong, but I find 6 color games often have a "big creatures" faction and a redundant "big creatures but worse somehow" faction, often ending up as the "a bunch of parasitic archetypes that don't mix in the color they're attached to" faction.
2 enemy and 2 ally colours does allow for some interesting deck design and world-building. A lot of 5 colours don't really use that aspect, so I didn't bring it up, but there's a lot of good reasons MTG's colour wheel is respected so much - it's a really strong piece of design work. And yeah, I've seen 6 colours work well enough, but sometimes it feels like it's just done to be different, and not because there's a good in-game reason.
You perfectly described the dilemma I'm having with my current 6 color system. I've managed to sort five into fairly strong identities, but the sixth keeps veering into "the archetype collection" or as an all-rounder that isn't very conducive to interesting gameplay.
@@drakor98 Any six color games from which you can learn what (not) to do? Digimon comes to mind. The odd one out there's Black, but it does have an slow, defensive playstyle uniting its keyword salad.
Speaking of Digimon, it technically has 7 colors counting White, which usually behaves as colorless... but has synergy with itself. Colorless synergy is a historically dangerous path, buuuuuuuut... 🎮🔥
@@drakor98 I hate to say this... but the video is slightly wrong. Magic has 6 'color' factions in terms of design. colorless, while being ruled as not a color, is essentially magic's 6th color... and is basically as you said what happened with your 6th faction. It's a generalized "all-rounder" that isn't as strong as focusing on a specific branch, but can be used to augment the other 5 factions since ith as pieces.
I shall break the wheel
-Daenerys targaryen
The digimon tcg (whos lead designer was deul masters) started with 5 main colors, but went up to 6. It has a 7th but thats specifically for special cards generally.
It started with 3 colors (red, blue, yellow) with the first 3 starters, introduced a 4th and 5th in the first booster (green and white (although it acts more like colorsless than its own color)) and 2 more (black, purple) in the second booster set. I think it was a good idea to introduce colors in a gradual way, but it was poorly executed and left black scraping for deckbuilding options for a long time.
Legends of Runeterra has 11 regions but you can only mix up 2 at a time while building your deck, based on which champions you want.
Exceptions to this are double region cards which can be considered of one of the two regions and Runeterran champions. If you include a Runeterran champion in your deck it will give some unique deckbuilding rules (ex. including any 6+ cost from any region), but you will have only one of the other regions to choose from, since Runeterra still counts as a region.
I think this is a great use of factions.
what do you think of LOR as a whole?
It resembles MTG in so many things, but without the problems of maindecking the mana.
I played since its release and got to masters a lot of times and I find it funny and cheap.
Art, animations and voice interactions are amazing and are also the things that kept me there for so long.
Gameplay wise I love the spell mana system (you gain max 3 mana you didn't spend on the turn as mana only usable for spells) and the high number of combination of strategies and different decks you can build with the region system I explained in the upper comment.
People complain about powercreep and balance issues, but those are in every TCG and every now and then we get a really strong archetype that is above everything else (that usually means having something like 65%+ win rate) and balance patches aren't that frequent, except for occasional hotfixes, so that might be a negative point.
Edit: forgot to mention the shared turn is something you don't see often in tcgs but creates unique interactions and mind games.
Knowing when to pass priority is definitely the most important skill to master in LoR.
You can also play _no_ Champions, if you're feeling either rebellious or poor.
It's amazing how with 10 regions plus Runeterran champions, each region still feels unique and flavorful
Noxus, Bandle, Bilgewater and PnZ all have direct damage spells, but they all do it in different ways and none of them feel like they step on the toes of the others
Saying white and black while showing yellow and purple messed me up 😂
i hope you will recover
Blame Duel Masters
@@dragonmaster613 Duel Masters uses civilizations, not colors. Force of Will also represents Dark with purple and Light with yellow.
@@BloodwyrmWildheart I was merely stating that Duel Masters made Yellow/Purple popular. While other games did have them, more people saw DM's example.
@@dragonmaster613 Duel Masters couldn't have made purple popular as the Darkness civilization was represented with gray. Now you're just trolling me.
Really, if you have a question about tcg design, its because mtg did it.
It's worth pointing out that there was a time where even MtG analyzed including purple as a 6th color, generating opposite pairs which they liked: Green vs Purple, Blue vs red, Black vs white. There was enough reasons to consider it on flavor, but they ditched the idea because creating it would require removing things from other colors and giving them to purple. That and supply/logistic issues (you would need to print "City", purple land type cards and balance it enough to make it appealing) made them ditch the idea.
Funny enough they did end up exploring a different space years later: Colorless. It did create interesting mechanics that interacted with zones that other colors don't usually touch, but balancing it became an issue. It's still a thing but used kinda rarely and as a sort of "you can do things other colors do but WAY less efficiently".
Purple is an interesting sage. I think it's really tempting to create an even number of factions so they can be divided neatly into two sides, but for MTG at least, I think 5 has actually forced them to get more creative in how they split factions.
Kards WW2 currently has 9 factions.But player can choose only two factions in deck ( first faction must be one of main 5, and the other 4 can be as supporting factions).
Theoretically, you can have three factions if card has keyword "Exile".
That's a neat way of doing it! Having two tiers of factions sounds like it could definitely make deciding which ones to use a little easier.
I think Yu-Gi-Oh tried to do a six color system with the attributes (Light, Dark, Earth, Water, Wind, and Fire), but the field and equip spells supporting them were so mid that no one cared 😂
Its like Yugioh has done everything wrong that you can do when you design a tcg, but still is one of the best and most played tcgs xD
No color system, no ressource management, power creep, longest banlist, longest turns with most complexity
Like they tried to get all points on the "how to design a bad tcg" list xD
Dont get me wrong, I still like to play yugi
@@alessandro5456 That's probably my favourite thing about yugioh. They're stuck with an absolute mess of a game, and have to keep finding ways to keep it running.
Yep, definitely got that feeling out of early yugioh. Like, it was supposed to be a thing, but it was so poorly supported no one cared XD
Technically there's a 7th attribute "divine" I say technically as it's basically just the three god cards (Slifer, Obelisk and Ra)
The thing with Yugioh is that Konami never stuck with what they intended for attributes and types, and decided to focus on archetypes for decades. In that sense the faction system in YGO doesn’t even matter. Hell most of YGO from what I remember was either LIGHT or DARK creatures.
As a vtuber and card game enjoyer seeing selen out of nowhere caught me offguard lmfao
Love the video, btw! Card game design is always exciting to me so I'm a big fan
Thanks! Glad you enjoyed the video, and also the the random Selen.
I like the approach that digimon took. There are 7 colors: 6 main and 1 support, but the identities are more tied to the different archetype families while the color just helps to tie it together and limit the deckbuilding space. You can even have the same archetype in different colors like wargreymon decks being built either with a red or black base.
And then you have multicolored archetypes like hunters or xrosswars or full white decks when white is supposed to be more of a support/tech color.
You have the flexibility of using archetypes as factions therefore not being strictly tied to a closed set of identities, but at the same time the colors help bring cohesion and player expression while at the same time it helps limit access to certain cards that could become problematic if every deck gained access to them.
I’m not that familiar with digimon, and only know the basic mechanics/rules. Wouldn’t the archetype still be tied down by the identity of the color it uses? How does digimon get around that?
@@devdog7409 Not necessarily, while most archetypes are build to take into consideration their color (or colors) that is not always the case. And an archetype can be a jumping point for new mechanics that in the future can be for the whole color or stay tied to the archetype. For example the archetype deck for bloomlordmon uses the suspension mechanic which the green decks tend to use it uses it in a different way (self target of suspension effects) and is built around being able to cheaply play and suspend vegetation/fairy digimon, (specifically at or below 3000DP) and getting a pay out for each one. So while it is a green decks that can take advantage of generically good green cards, its support is of not much use for other green decks. Then you have decks like hunters that while having a majority of purple cards it has nothing to do with the color identity of purple decks in general. Then you have "good stuff" decks that just take good cards in 1 or 2 colors and run with it with no archetype in cohesion.
You can have a range of color identity/archetype identity. From "just good purple cards" to "only cards from this archetype", passing from all the in between of archetypal decks with color support
@@karibui494 thanks for the explanation. I was exploring creating my own game and I was planning to just have archetypes because I didn’t see what colors provide but it seems like a mistake because almost every game has a color system. I’m trying to learn tcg game design on my free time and I’m honestly still a little shaky on the reason tbh but this helped me understand a lot better.
Guilty of using red/purple/blue/green/yellow here 🤚
I loved your numbers explanation. It really helps visualize how quickly combinations grow.
I will have to say there's a certain beauty with not having a predefined number of factions. Legends of Runeterra and I think Fire Emblem have factions and you use at most 2 in a deck, but they felt they could add more every now and then. (One Piece and Digimon also did this, but all 6 colors were planned from the start)
Yeah, I think OP and Digimon starting with 4 before expanding to 6 was a good way of easing players into 6 colours. Yugioh is another interesting example - technically there are 6 attributes, but since name archetypes are the main faction system, it can be argued they have many dozens. It's definitely interesting, although the worry always is mechanical overlap in these cases. Magic was playing around with adding a 6th colour for a while, but they could never find enough mechanics to make it work.
@@tcgacademia Mechanical overlap is also a very interesting topic. In the old days of Magic, green was THE creature color, white was THE wrath color, red was THE haste color. Each color was independent and had very big gaps so even a two-color deck could have very obvious weaknesses.
But modern Magic is taking a different approach. Haste is now also present in green and black, white also cares about creatures but in different ways, more colors have answers to more card types, and colors that were absolutely terrible at something important have at least a passable weaker version (like white's conditional card draw, red's temporary draw or blue having more removal in Limited). This does make decks cover more of the mechanic space but we can still recognize weaknesses and gaps.
All this to say, I don't think you need to divide your mechanics into a pie as it was first conceived, as much as you just need the mechanics to make a cohesive identity, even if they are shared among multiple factions. I think this is key to making a game with many more factions, and to improve faction separation in general.
@@tcgacademiaActually, in Yugioh, types are closer to being factions than attributes. Dragons have always been big monster turbo, Machines are all about OTKs, Zombies are using the graveyard a lot and so on. The only constant in attributes is Dark being the best one.
@@fernandobanda5734 Good point! Magic has spent a fair amount of time trying to minimize the weaknesses of each colour (especially important for more restrictive formats like commander) while still keeping the colours distinct. I've always found that one of the more tricky parts of design in games I've worked on.
Another factor of the common colors is they are pretty universal in what they do across different games, because just seeing the color gives across the idea of what said color's playstyle is going to be. Such as Red being a very angry and aggressive color are the most aggro-based decks, while black is often associated with death so black decks play from their discard pile.
That's definitely a useful part of it, too! Especially if you play multiple games already, trying to figure out what purple does can take a bit to wrap your head around. Meanwhile, red=aggro is pretty much instinct for a lot of players at this point, and it lets people get into the game more easily.
My favorite game, VS. System, and UDE's redesigned VS System 2PCG used named factions. The redesigned 2PCG basically made the factions irrelevant. But the teams were and are very important in Classic VS. It ended up being well over 30+ unique factions, each would have their own playstyles.
It's similar to Yugioh archtypes.
Mathemagics funfact :
The total number of color combinations is equal to (2^X)-1, where X is your number of Colors.
Now i can drift away in peace. Merry Christmas everyone !
No it is two to the x unless you exclude the no color cobination.
@@williamvaughn2720 Yes, i was excluding colorless, as it did in the video.
If you want to count colorless, which in some games can't be played, you must remove the -1 yup !
And in the case of MTG colorless can be both a joker (like most artifacts) or more like a 6th color (Eldrazi and cards caring for things with or without color).
Cool breakdown.
I like finding TCGs with... interesting color choices. Like Aquarian Age having the red faction as the defensive, counter-magic color. Or the original DBZ game having red AND orange, and two greens.
Also, love those old guild girls.
Back in the old days where anime and Magic felt like an exciting crossover and not like Hasbro cynically trying to get the weeb audience. And yeah, it's always neat seeing other games play around with their colour systems - although there is a line between doing something different, and doing something just to be different than MTG. I think there's a few 6 colour games out there that could easily have worked as 5 colour games just as well or better, except they wanted to avoid comparisons to Magic.
Around 2008 the chilean tcg Mitos y Leyendas had a massive rework wich implemented colored factions. Red was often coded as "the good guys" and they played a lot like White from MTG.
A previous game from the same designers (Humankind) from 2003 (iirc) also incorporated a "defensive/control" Red faction, although they represented an "evil corporation" archetype this time.
Both games had Red as the defensive and slow color, but in the historical setting (Mytos y Leyendas) they represented good, while in a cyberpunk setting (Humankind TCG) they were one of the main antagonic forces in the story.
Great video and real helpful TCG knowledge!
The game I’m working on uses 4 suits, 5 “colors” and 4/5 “traits” I hope I haven’t bitten off more than I can chew 😂
Kind of depends on how you approach it, but games do need to break into archetypes once you get past the basic colour identities, so I think your system could definitely work! I could definitely see designing the first few cards really tricky, since you're still figuring out what everything does, but once you have it decently figured out, it could actually make later designs easier and more tidy.
Your videos are awesome, concise, educational and well put together!
Thank you! Especially the concise part - I have a history of under-shooting on essay word counts, so it does mean a lot hearing people appreciate shorter content like this!
I most say I love yugioh's arch type way a lot more. Despite it being over done now, and too little early on
What are your thought on archetypes like Spright that support a wide array of cards outside of the archetype ?
@@dudono1744 Rush Duels is designed around this philosophy and it works pretty well,
instead of saying "Royal Rebel" they say "Light attribute Fiend Monster"
Instead of "Excutie" they say "Level 6 monster with 500 DEF"
Instead of "Chair" they say "Dark attribute monster with 0 ATK"
This design philosophy allows the designers to be more flexible with the restrictions on powerful cards,
Allowing you to splash Cyber Dragon into a Royal Rebel deck,
Because Royal Rebel Heavy Metal and Royal Rebel Invasion gain their effect by tributing any level 5 or higher monsters, not just the in-archetype ones.
Working on a card game we designed an 8 color system but restricted each color to only play with one of 2 preset allies bringing to deck combos to 24 (25 if you include just playing neutral cards) as the color you start with matters quite a bit.
4:44 one simply can't escape the rabbit hole.
Truth
I'm working on a deck construction game (ECG style) and used 3 factions.
But that's mainly because I'm trying to make it a super-affordable ECG with small sets, and 3 factions is about all I can support unless I increase the set size (which would go against my main design goal).
For a smaller game, I think 3 factions is definitely a reasonable decision!
Kind of fascinating, that MtG, as the first TCG, picked the aperantly best faction system right out of the gate. I mean, they did a lot wrong in the beginning, but this is a constant that works really really well. (Although you could argue, that Artifacts added some sort of 6ed colour to magic)
meanwhile, pokemon players:
I would watch a video on PokeTCG colors
i think i'm handling 6 factions well
tl;dr: separate them by what part of the board they care most for, like deck, discard, hand, etc)
i wanted to make a really simple sorta "introductory" tcg, and eventually decided to use playing card iconography and terminology where reasonable
so, i made the factions 6 suits (the standard ♦♣♥♠ + black grails and red shields, from James Watson's deck6 design)
the rules are heavily based on duel masters, though with Star Wars: unlimited's resource system mixed with EDH's commander system
so, my solution to make the 6 suits unique was with what part of the board they're _most focused_ on:
diamonds - resource cards
clubs - face cards (units)
hearts - decks
spades - discard piles
grails - hands
shields - guards
and these infer mechanics like MtG black's GY tricks, blue's draw and scry, etc
Nice! I like the suit approach - it lets you do some interesting things such as allying colours or building archetypes that care about opposing colours, both of which let you mix and match suits in different ways. And yeah, 6 definitely works and honestly lately it's almost more common than 5, but 5 was super-common for a long time, so that's where I focused for this video. Might need a follow up for 6 colours, though!
Kamen Rider Build detected.
Felt so happy seeing that out of nowhere
Always happy seeing people appreciate the random kamen riders I sprinkle in to some of these videos!
@@tcgacademia what can I say
He's amazing, he's the best, he's a genius
Just found your channel and your content is amazing!
Great work
Thanks! Also, fantastic user name!
Also with 5 colors you can balance the game like a game of rock, paper, scissors, spock where each color is strong against 2 and weak against the other 2. You can't get this effect on even numbers and general one color will be better than the others. If you use too many colors it gets harder to find a solution to balance the game and often it gets harder to make new cards as what each color does gets blurry.
2 allied colours and 2 enemy colours is a really great design tool that only really works with 5 colours. Every game I've played with 7 colours has felt overstuffed, and 3 is definitely too few.
In Yu-Gi-Oh you have 6 "colors". There you have Wind (which is printed green) and Earth (which is printed black) and they both correspond to the green color in magic, I guess. But then again, the element in Yu-Gi-Oh doesn't really matter. Before it got archetypes it literally hardly mattered. And since it got archetypes they hardly matter compared to the much more important archetypes and summoning mechanics.
"Yugioh has types but they barely matter" is one of those things that I both love and hate about the game XD
@@tcgacademia Well, there are Dragon, Plant, Reptile, Earth Machine and Zombie decks that are playable.
@@tcgacademiaThe elemental Attributes are also far from equal, WIND is far and away the worst one, it's so bad that a card that prevented special summons OTHER than WIND got banned because when we finally got a decent Wind deck it could shut down literally any other relevant deck
Meanwhile, the 5 equivalent cards for the other attributes are untouched, and the DARK one is considered bad because basic everyone uses DARK decks in most formats
I'm at the beginning stage of thinking about maybe taking a crack at design, and I'm definitely bookmarking your videos and channel as valuable resources in that regard.
One of the things that led me to this path was playing Epic Card Game and recognizing as a "rush to the good parts" Magic-like game. The thing I like least about it was its four faction/color system, specifically one being "Good" and one being "Evil". While Magic seems to tend towards White Good Black Bad more than it should imo, I think they work really hard to push back against that association often enough that I give them a B for effort.
But having an even number as a color/faction system makes this kind of association too easy for my own personal design tastes. So in my initial brainstorm document I'm penciling in five colors for a good amount of complexity, or three if I want to focus less on that aspect. To try not to copy Magic's color wheel too directly, I'm penciling researching the Wuxing, the Chinese elements system, which seems more directional than Magic's ally/enemy combos.
What's funny is that even based on Wuxing, you could still end up at something close to Magic's 5 colours - if metal fits into white and earth is a darker shade closer to black. But yeah, seems like a good place to start to get a different relationship between colours than Magic, or at least break some of that association. And yeah, it's REALLY tempting to break an even-numbered system into opposing sides, like good and evil, or even fast and slow play styles. Glad you found the video interesting!
I've honestly wanted to make an 8 colored game at some point. The way I thought of making it work was either having a commander type system, and or a resource side deck you can draw from. I still and struggling with making the game work though since I suck at making rules for it. More of a card design and not game rules guy >.>
I think it can work, but it will make design tricky. A lot of tcg standards exist for a reason, but there's also plenty of good reasons to try something different. I think the most important thing is understanding why the standard exists, and making sure that you're aware of that when working on your design to help you avoid problems.
I'm currently making a TCG and I chose to design my cards with almost these exact five colors without even knowing😂
They just looked the best to me.
Funny thing. I made two card games. One with and one without a color wheel. Odd thing is I felt more restraint from the colors even if I could break them into subsection on my game.
I’m making one based loosely off the Fossil Fighters games (without using any of it’s names or branding) which has 5 as well with Blue, Red, Yellow, Green, and White
What I'm designing kind of has a dynamic number of colors, in that there are some resources that almost everything is gonna need and will be produced by staple cards while others are more archerype-specific and often more powerful and difficult to produce.
That sounds like a really good way to do it - not exactly the same but Wixoss combined character-limited cards with a five-colour system. So I think 5 colours definitely works as a base, with other systems layered on top.
I just found this channel and I love how it speaks my language: card games and otaku memes
Always glad to find people who appreciate both! It's not an ultra rare combination, but it's not always common, either.
Yup, even we designed a card game with the primary four colors.
5 Allows for an advantaged colour a disadvantaged colour and two neutral colours. It's a nice symmetry if that's your design space. If not 4 and 6 become more appealing.
I think in recent years we've seen quite a few successful card games that use 6 Colors. Usually they'll have restrictions on total number of colors you can include in a deck. Final Fantasy TCG, Digimon, Lorcana, and the soon to be released Star Wars Unlimited. Legend of the 5 Rings was also pretty successful and that had 7-9 Factions usually. Lord of the Rings TCG from Decipher ran like 10 Factions. So I'm not sure its such a hard and fast rule.
Not a TCG but Something I like about Eternal CG is the influence system. Basically, power cards (Eternals Lands) also have factions, and whenever you gain resource with one you generally gain influence in the corresponding faction. Cards have influence requirements on top of their cost, but your influence never decreases (with a few exceptions). This allows for some interesting balancing measures for 1 and even 0 drops, it allows 1 and 2 color decks to have some strong combos and synergies, and it helps to balance multifaction and neutral cards.
The downsides are that if you're not getting Mana Screwed, there's a good chance you'll get influence screwed. And also it's a bit blatant that some factions and combinations are better than others. You could argue that Neutral cards are the 6th faction, but pretty much all neutral cards are worse versions of factioned cards, to compensate for the fact that they can work in any deck.
I saw a bit of eternal when LSV was streaming it - the influence system is definitely interesting. It still feels a little too attached to MTG's style of resources, but it is one of the more interesting resource systems in digital TCG land.
Really interesting video!
I'm curious to know what factors can affect how many colours/factions a game should have. For example, if you have more design space, should you have more factions in order to properly split mechanics apart? How do the systems for mixing and matching factions affect that number?
Like a lot of parts of design, I think there's actually tons of options that work, but it's useful knowing why games seem to pull towards a common number. One thing I didn't mention is pack support - I find it interesting that Vanguard dropped from 20ish factions down to 6 in order to make sure that every booster supported every faction. I do notice 4 colours are more common in games like Weiss Schwarz, which is more limited in how you're able to mix cards in the card pool (your deck can only come from a single anime series). That being said, yugioh somehow completely ignores this and kind of works fine?
aha, just a reminder : Magic is actual a 6-color game, you simply forgot the artifacts, which are colorless, but still a ´color´ more than 5 !!
oh i too forgot something, there are this no Mana, no color, different ways to play cards, that maybe, we can make some decks out of it too !! So we are at 7-colors ???
(At 5m7s)
How the fudge is the left shirt "red" when it is more orange? And the right looks normal red and not "dark red" since the more red would be crimson.
The web store usually makes sense, but I've spent plenty of time in back rooms trying to find orange shirts to put out to the sales floor, only to realize that they were labelled 'red' for some reason. Honestly, it's not any harder than differentiating violet and navy, but for some reason I kept running into the issue with orange. It's probably not a real problem in the general population, but orange and red are still the two colours that are easiest to confuse, so that's probably why orange is used less.
Do you think the archetype system without colors is better or worst then with? Please list pros and cons for both if you can.
It also has ties to Chaos Magick (albeit 5 instead of 7 colors).
YuGiOh, with all of it's archetypes... I'd say it'd be something like a 300 color color wheel.
In Duel Master, back in High School, I always used decks consisting of 2 elements (1 with Fire and Light; or another with Dark and Nature) but I did that because I was going full on budget with my deck building. I simply didn't spend on them to have access to enough cards to build a proper mono element deck. Hence, why I always lost to 2 others, who spent a fortune on their decks. 1 of them being a really gosh darn expensive Armored Dragon deck, that just goes into Bajula as soon as it can, to prevent their opponents from having enough mana to retaliate properly, while the other guy having similarl strong decks of all 5 elements. I could sometimes beat his water or nature decks, depending on th eluck of his draws, but never his dark or light ones. He didn't really use hi sfire deck much, so there's that. But his fire deck was on par with the other guy's fire deck when they tried going up against one another using those, so I'd say that'd have wrecked me hard as well.
Simply having a 5 color system however is not all the restrictions Duel Masters had. Beside elements, there were also card types, which thankfully, were all within their 1 element. (I played mostly before dual element cards were released)
Meaning that even if many types of decks within an element had similar playstyles, the different types might have goneabout them differently. Let's say Fire as an example. There are Armored Wyverns which I really liked, but the good ones are costly to put on the field. (~ 6-8 mana each) But Humans, are cheap. While Armored Wyverns were really good in lte game beatdowns, Humans could potentially finish the match before we even got there, depending on what our opponent had. There were also Armored Dragons, who were in a similar situation to Armored Wyverns, but also had some decent low cost monsters to get by until they can put their high cost beatsticks on the field. Or if we go for light, when we associate with Blockers, the first type that comes to our mind are probably Guardians. Which is all well and good, but the best blocker I'veever seen in the game, was actually of a different type. Kuukai, Finder of Karma, was a Mecha Thunder. Which were usually more of a tech card in light decks. Also, there was 1 more card, that wasn't technically a blocker, but had a similar effect, with even higher numbers, and forcing out a really similar situation as Kuukai's effect: Bodacius Giant. Even if it only blocks the first attack. And it's a Nature card.
I'd say, that having more than 2 elements in a deck never really worked out for anyone I played with, bu there are some advantages and disadvantages to both mono and dual element decks.
Mono element advantages: You will most likely have the cards to play whatever tactic you're going for pretty easily, as your entire deck only has cards for that tactic. (If built right)
Mono element disadvantage: Your deck will undeniably have a bunch of weaknesses, that are hard to get around, that could have been solved with including anothr element that's strong in that field. For example, Fire and Nature have no blockers (Bodacius Giant being the 1 card who can kind of block in nature doesn't count, technically not a blocker) meaning their deffenses are not that strong against simple beatdowns based on the number of monsters. You can force them into attacking your weak monsters once you've attacked with them, rather than your shields, to buy time with the weak ones, until you can get your big boys out. Alternatively, Darkness only has a handful of blockers, and they usually are either costly (compared to their strength, being the slayer blockers) or have a detrimental effect (for example: dies after 1 fight, regardless of how strong the enemy monster was) On the other hand, Light has a ton of blockers, and Water has a decent amount too. Another big difference is the ease of which different elements can get rid of monsters. Dark decks had a rather easy time doing this. To a certain extent, so did fire and nature, but for Light and Water, you really needed some specific cards to pull it off. (Diamond Cutter for example, was the biggest beatdown card for light decks)
My reasons behind building my decks as mentioned above, was Fire being really goodat attachnig, while Light beingreall good at deffending, making it a solid combination; while for the other deck, Dark is really good at getting rid of stuff, but is costly. On the other hand, Nature provides a ton of mana, making it viable. I just paired elements that could help with whatever their biggest weaknesses were, within my just about nonexistent budget that i spent on the game.
5:05 welcome to dune 2019 boardgame where almost every faction is a shade of the sand's color. :,D
using vanguard to depict a card game that has too many different play styles because of the different clans might not be the best. while that most certainly applies to 2 of the formats, vanguard still has a standard format, which uses 6 main nations (Dragon Empire, Dark States, Keter Sanctuary, Brandt Gate, Stoicheia, and Lyrical Monasterio), plus some nationless cards that are either solid in any deck, or can use any of the 6 main nations for support. however, despite this, there are different decks that can be built from those 6 nations that use some of the key characteristics of those nations, and put their own spins on them
Good point. I basically only played Vanguard during V format, so that definitely shaped how I think about the game.
5 is also important for asymmetry without direct opposition. White and Black are not opposites in a five colour system, and can be complimentary in their mechanics.
Four and six colour systems come with an inherent sense of opposition between colours far apart, and when they lack that opposition it can feel meaningless to arrange them in any fashion.
I think 4 and 6 colour systems can work as well, but 5 does fit really well into a colour wheel with allied and enemy pairings. Magic's colour wheel is really one of its best design features - it's really, really good, and gives a ton of dimensions to the faction system - flavourfully and mechanically.
As someone who is building a 6 colour card game in spare time I can say that even 6 is already creeping up on unmanageable. You're not only gonna have the magic's 4 colour cards problem, but also a 5 colour cards problem, as the big spicy rainbow cards are gonna be 6 colours.
For those who arent in the know, the 4 colour problem is the problem of designing a compelling and mechanically sound 4 colour card, and then also putting it into a coherent draftable set. In Magic, there are exactly 2 cards for each 4c combination except blackless which has 3 (with 1 being bullshit).
Did not expect to see Pekora and Selen here lol
In the early days of Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG there were 20 types, and if you want to run multiple types you could, which is why generic beatdown/stall was widely popular (until Magical Scientist FTK happened, but I digress), and six attributes, spell cards and trap cards, so realistically you had 28 factions to build a deck with, but generic beatdown was usually the go to meta option, due to how weak burn decks that weren't FTKs and chain burn, and stall burn keeps getting weaker with each new set released (unless you aren't playing back row hate in which case you're in for a bad time), archetypes just increase this number over time and Konami basically added generic 4 types as of writing this, making the number of generic factions 32.
Stall decks also got weaker over time unless you're playing Crooked Cook Exodia Stall and your opponent had no way of inflicting damage out side of piercing and burn, which is usually the case for a lot of decks, unless you're playing a mill deck.
Speaking of Mill decks, those decks got power-crept in oblivion thanks to the Forbidden/Limited list.
Basically Konami hates stall decks that aren't battle focused or OTK focused (unless said stall deck causes players to not buy product then Konami hit with the ban hammer), and will only touch FTKs if it's consistent enough turn one to be a tier 0 deck, that forces every other deck to be unable to compete due to how slow every other deck is, which at this point Konami might as well print an entire FTK archetype that is consistent enough where the effect reads "If this effect resolves; you win the duel" because that's basically and clearly what competitive players want.
Well, Konami recently released a FTK deck with a field spell basically reading "you win"
I like these theory vids. Been thinking of making something myself.
If you do, let me know - I'd love to check it out!
Def an inspiration to get mine going
Please do a video on Sorcery: Contested Realm and its grid system. It feels so basic yet innovative. I am having more fun than I have in years with card game.
Sorcery looks really good, definitely interested in checking it out at some point!
Android: Netrunner (RIP) had 7 factions, divided into 4 corps and 3 runner classes, having two different sides allowed all 7 colors to be distinct without the combinatorial explosion of having 7 factions straight up.
Yeah, Netrunner is a really neat game, and I do really like how they handled their factions.
btw the upcoming-to-the-west TCG, Union Arena, also has 5 colors.
Still blows my mind that Bandai is adding another TCG to the EN market. They've been doing a good job with them so far, though.
Without making a huge essay here, and I mean all of this in the most respectable way possible, but I consider the color pie to be similar to suits (spades, hearts, cloves, diamonds) found in playing cards. Noone suggests that Poker and Blackjack are copies of each other despite using the exact same cards/elements.
For this reason, I think it is harsh to say that games are "trying to copy" Magic by using the color pie. It is just a commonly adapted element of TCG/CCG design. Its okay that these games borrow a design element of that game, but that doesn't make them copies for utilizing the color pie.
The question only works for games with dedicated resource card or mtg clone
It doesn't work on other card games like Pokemon which resource system is different
One thing that I have noticed is that factions that utilize the five color system tends to nearly identical in their concepts and gameplay gimmicks. White or yellow is almost always robots or holy themed if not both, blue is water and technology, green is always nature and big beasts, red is always fire and emotion with dragons being quite common, and purple or black is always the evil color that likes to play with the graveyard. Perhaps changing the colors would lead to different concepts and thus different gameplay styles?
RGB my ass. Yu-Gi-Oh sigma colouring Orange, Pink, Turquoise Purple, Navy blue
Anyone have a count on Yugioh factions (archetypes)? Are we in the triple digits yet?
Some notable games that don’t follow this: LOTR TCG (uses cultures and you can mix up as many as you want); SWCCG (pretty much just Light vs Dark); Shadow Era (7 classes, 2 factions and no colors).
There's actually a ton of games out there that don't use 5 (so the title is a little misleading XD ), but it comes up surprisingly often. Definitely not the only system out there!
Interesting insight, have a sub!
Thanks!
I feel like you could have gone deeper on the kinds of effects or strategies that you would normaly want to apply to especific colours
It would come back to your point about having too many colours risking having some of them being too gimmicky. I feel like the natural continuation of that point is to explore which abilities and effects aren't too gimmicky to have their own colours, but rather complement the game by having it
As someone trying to design a game with 12 "factions" (really 10, two of them are generic), going above 6 factions makes individual designs extremely difficult. I'm trying to make each of the 6 main elements alternate between slow and fast play styles alternatively: Fire is fast →Forest is slow → Wind is fast → Earth is slow → Thunder is fast → Water is slow → (we're back to Fire)... The hard part is holding back from putting an element of elemental RPS into the game because if I do, Mu and Divine cards (both "non-factions), especially the former because of their generic costs are just going to be the best due to no risk of blowouts. So the game would go into a "generic goodstuff pile is the best deck" situation.
Here's a trick to consider : overlap identities. 10 is the number of 2 color combinations in mtg, and i'm pretty sure each 2 color combination is noticable different from each other.
@@dudono1744 Very good trick. I have played MtG, so I can definitely try that interpretation.
There might be issues with the alignment types, but I can try my best at least.
Vanguard literally had no use for nations until after they retconed the deck building system. People used to buy just common and play a deck called grade 1 rush to play aggro, dropping your whole hand and getting as many attacks in turn one asap. Eventually the made it nation locked because some clans had no support so you couldn’t fill a deck. Then eventually they went completely towards clans. The nations or colours don’t even have overlap in their mechanics with their clans outside of clones of the original clans. The closest theme for early sanctuary clans would probably be nepotism, insuring your vanguard can find something to ride it. Or dark zones soul manipulation, however other nations were equal or better at exploiting the soul, like magallagic, dragon empire, and sanctuary. Sanctuary had like six teir one decks in the first edition that relied on soul manipulation or just inadvertently created a big soul stack.
Grade 1 rush is some interesting history! I mostly played Vanguard during V format, so that definitely shaped how I think of the game!
@@tcgacademia I’ve actually picked up dear days on steam since watching this. It seems like D format has fixed everything I had issues with from vanguard. First everyone has access to a guaranteed ride chain. Then deck building is very diverse with themes like grade 3, 2, 1&0 being completely valid decks. Nations share support like trigger, sentinels and power house cards which make having multiple decks cheaper and the starter decks valuable to everyone. Also each nations theme is more well defined and consistent. Grade one rush for example is completely valid in like four archetypes.
@@dittmar104 Nice! I bought a few of the D format starters, but they didn't play as well as the V format starters on their own, and I didn't have a local playgroup, so I ended up not playing much of D. Good to hear it's a fun format.
Re: games without a faction system have a tendency to fall into one deck metas? I think this is more a function of making cards too compatible / generalist overall than strictly whether there is a faction system.
I think it's really difficult to avoid an overwhelming good-stuff deck without factions, so without factions they'll most likely just be added back in later to break up decks, like with yugioh.
I'm starting to shy away from the restriction that you need X colour of RCC in order to play Y card, like white mana can only be used on cards that have the sun symbol.
Imagine this, still my game but a big change:
There can only be 12 RCC in your pool.
You start out with 1. Every turn you gain 1, exhausted RCC go back to normal at the beginning of your turn.
Your cards aren't the resource, instead, count the resources using a D12, or 2 D6s.
There are 7 colours in my game, the whole rainbow, the 8th being White Light, the combination of those colours, but this only serves as identity, like Yugioh and their attributes.
Every card is a one cost, however, you can only play cards that have a number/level that is equal to or less than the number of RCC in your pool, example: you have a LvL 3, 4, and 5 in your hand, you got the RCC count to 4, you can only use the LvL 3 and 4 cards in your hand, by using 1 RCC for each, you are left with 2, if you have LvL 4 or below cards in your hand after this, you can use them too, this may sound confusing, but looking back at my game that you know, it should make sense.
This way things are simplified, and your Dice get to do more than sit around and be the deciding factor of who goes first.
However, I might not include that, and instead the only change is that you aren't restricted by colour, that means your deck can have the whole rainbow and play, and instead of dice, you pitch a card to the RCC, and behold, MTG in disguise but you're aren't restricted by colour.
Another however as I'm typing this, I only listed 2 possible outcomes of my game, but I looked at the first one and thought of something weird and unique:
By using the dice or pitch a card RCC design.
You can only play cards that have a LvL that is equal to or below the current UnExausted Cards/Dice RCC in your pool, using the first example but a twist:
LvL 3, 4, and 5 card is in your hand.
4 RCC in your pool.
You use one RCC to play the 3.
But you cannot play the 4 or 5 because your RCC count is now at 3.
How are these 3? Which one's more Fun to be in the game?
The Dice.
The MTG clone.
The weird mechanic I made just now.
And/or having colour restrictions but I can't use the dice?
I think there's a lot of room to use dice in tcg mechanics outside of just tracking life, so that's definitely worth considering. That being said, the last mechanic you mentioned with exhausting cards to play one that costs less actually sounds really good! I like how it encourages a variety of card costs, since each turn you want to cascade downward to play the most cards possible - so you want to have powerful high cost cards but also useful low-cost cards. It sounds like a really promising idea!
@@tcgacademia I like it too, it's unique and strays away from other TCGs, well, except Digimon because they got a caution for using resources too, but mines different, but I do believe this creates a problem, Resource Management Paralyses.
Well, no game is perfect in the TCGs, and I'm sure that RCC M Paralyses is in every game with RCC it manage, but mine just sticks out, but it's worth a try, heck it might just be the one.
But hey, I'm laughing that it solved my problem with having players only having High cost cards in their deck, sort of.
But my question is this, is having a colour code restriction good? Especially for a system like this? Or the other where you don't have to worry about playing a card then you are locked into the lower level? I like the idea of colour code restriction but is it good for MY game? Considering what you already know about my game and if you remember me in your comments.
Along with that, is having Symbols instead of Keywords to tell an ability without writing down what it does good too? Inscryption did it, and it got popular, Bakugan did it, yet it's confusing maybe? It's probably how many you make, how easy it is to identify them, and the muscle memory of the players. Granted MTG has keywords that tells you things, like Flying meaning this creature flies, while Symbols show you it has wings to Fly, same thing but tackling different parts in the muscle memory.
@@kagemushashien8394 I much prefer keywords to symbols. I think some symbols like 'tap' that are a used everywhere are fine, but keyword mechanics are best written out. Even in non-expanding board games, I don't love it when they replace all the text with symbols. Just my preference, though, definitely some people feel the opposite!
Also, for your game, some kind of colour system is still probably good. You're right that you don't need it to effect gameplay, but even something like 'pick only 2 colours for your deck' will help make decks play differently from one another.
@@tcgacademia Yeah, what I'm saying is that I want a colour system, but it does not restrict creativity like MTG or Pokemon does, but my stomic won't let go on "How does Blue (water) RCC can go into an Orange card (fire)?"
And if I do that I won't get the satisfaction of playing more than 1 colour. So I might just pick no colour restrictions but there are still colours, then again how do I deal with this version of power creep, all the powerful cards in all the colours combined, well, I'll just add a new type of banlist, as soon as someone wins with that combination, I'll Restrict those cards (right now this is a placeholder name for this kind of list, the Restraining Order list), you take these cards, and say they cannot be in the same deck, unlike banning them like Yugioh, where you can't play those cards in any other decks, you can play these cards but not when you have another card that cannot be with it, it's like water and oil, granted this only works if there is more than 1 card that's a problem, if it's just one card, either it'll be limited or banned.
Also I'm leaning towards the Dice RCC mechanic than the other where every card is a RCC, it's been done a few times.
I shall use both symbols and keywords, symbols are for lore and keywords are for cards.
Also I just might include everything I said, but in different formats of play, that way, the players choose which version of my game is best, howaboutit?
@@kagemushashien8394 Simultaneous use restrictions are definitely better than banlists, where possible. Not sure if that's enough to work out as a faction system on its own, but it might. Only way to tell is playtesting. Although one thing I do believe is some restrictions actually allow for more creativity, not less. You don't want it to interfere with gameplay too much, though, so it is something that's tricky.
Magic and Duel Masters both have colorless factions which are colors from a gameplay perspective. The vast, vast majority of TCGs have 6+.
And then ygo has 6(7) attributes, a bunch of types, normal and effect, secondary types (union, flip, etc), 4 extra deck types, different spell types, different trap types, and an archetypal naming system for even more complications lol
I always thought it was 5 for different reasons…
For starters, 1 faction is the same as no factions, and factions are important otherwise there would be “The Best Deck™️” and the game becomes stale like early yugioh. Then 2 factions is also not good because there’s no real dynamic between the 2 factions, one beats the other and vice versa. So the simplest is 3 factions establishing a rock-paper-scissors dynamic. That style of dynamic, where some factions have an advantage over other factions, but can get countered by another, creates an interesting system, but R/P/S is not interesting, so we need more than just 3. If we go with 4, or any even number really, then we lose out on some of the structure of the checks and balances. What should the dynamic be between opposite corners of the square? We can establish an A>B>C>D>A system but A vs C and B vs D have either neutral interaction which is not interesting or they have undefined behavior which can’t be balanced without it being neutral. 6 factions is the only other unique even color choice because you can break it down into 2 cycles of 3 that somehow also form a 6 cycle but you’d still have issues about opposite corners. So if it can’t be even then it has to be odd, and it has to be more than 3. So our options are 5, 7, or way too many factions for a stable and lasting system to keep designing cards for. 7 is a little too complex so designing for it might be difficult, it’s easier to choose the simpler option which is 5, and you get some benefits from it. In 5 colors, you can establish opposite factions without needing to make an exact opposite version. In Magic’s system, the things that white does are the opposites of things red and black do, but not just red or just black. And things that red and black have in common are things white does the opposite of. White has life gain, red has damage and black has life loss. Neither red nor black is the exact opposite of white, but they were positioned on the opposite side of the pentagon and can be designed as a pair to be the opposite of white. Some goes for any faction. The pair of factions on the opposite side of the pentagon form a sort of negative faction from the opposite single faction. You get the opposites dynamic that even numbered faction systems have while still avoiding any 2 single factions being opposites and having a neutral dynamic. If black was the exact opposite of white then a black deck vs a white deck would just be them counteracting each other. White gains life, black drains it. Black destroys one creature, white puts out many creatures. White has many creatures so black destroys all creatures. Black reanimates creatures so white exiles them, etc. Exact opposites would just be going back and forth having hard counters to all of the pros of playing that faction. In magic’s case, white has enchantments which black can’t destroy easily, and black has discard effects while white can’t draw easily. As they are not perfect opposites, there are facets of their design which the other faction doesn’t oppose. So 5 colors or factions has the structure of 3’s Rock/Paper/Scissors dynamic, the “opposite faction” capability of even numbered factions, and the complexity of having more than 3, but not so much complexity as 7. 5 has all the best parts of the other options without the worst parts.
As for the specific 5 colors, I saw it as the traditional RGB colors for fire, water, and grass like pokémon, having a R/P/S dynamic, and then black and white as a light and dark dynamic, arranged in a way such that effects that you would naturally attribute to each color thanks to color theory were opposite to effects that were opposite, and adjacent to effects that were similar…
Yeah, every 7 colour game I've tried has felt a bit overstuffed. 5 giving 2 enemy colours and 2 ally colours is another reason it's a really good number for a colour system. I don't think it's necessarily a strict RPS thing, though, since black always beating red, for example, would just start to get old pretty quickly. But being able to contrast each colour against two others is really good, and definitely another factor nudging games towards 5.
5:26 Tofu
😉
I thought build divide had only 4 colors. Red, blue, black and white
Also the game I'm making does things a little different with the 7 colors i have.
Wouldn't it be overwhelming to try and build with all the colors though?
Granted you probably just shouldn't...
Uhhhhhhhhh... well shoot. That was a mistake. I think there's definitely reasons to go for 7 colours (like how Casters Chronicles tied them to the 7 Deadly Sins). I think pretty much any design decision can be justified, as long as the designer knows the risks and is able to design around them.
Thanks to the chart you made, I'm confident I know what I'm doing.
@@tcgacademia howdy btw, still a big fan.
Can you recommend me some ZX decks? I was going to pick up the cards for some to try out, figured you probably know better then me!
@@jeremymore451 Unfortunately, ZX was a game I kind of struggled to find starter decks for. I ended up grabbing a starter and structure deck, which was pretty unbalanced and definitely not ideal.
The sudden Selen surprised me
I have so many screenshots of different expressions from her 2.0 brush-ups, and it was kind of depressing thinking about them just collecting dust.
I could applaud but my hand was busy giving like!
Is there a way to make a game with no factions that isn't just goodstuff piles
Kind of, but actually no. You can have different archetypes without really having true factions (cards that draw cards and cards that reward you for drawing extra cards, for example), but even these end up acting like soft factions. So while you can avoid hard factions, you still end up with soft factions and you're still in a position where if you mess up the balance at all you still just end up with a good stuff deck at the end of it. So while you can make a game with archetypes rather than factions, it's a lot easier and safer to build in factions from the start.
what if someone is going for a "softer" approach to factions, like YGO attributes?
There's a ton of options out there, definitely. Colour systems are common, but 'Always 5' is a bit clickbaity.
@@tcgacademia i mean, it's correct when it refers to macrofactions.
And about ygo, attributes only have some field spells and equips going for them, but each monster type originally had its own shtick, like Warriors being good at fielding numbers, zombies playing with the graveyard (before it became the norm), Machines playing around OTK (allegedly lol) and Dinosaurs having either big monsters that require tributes or very tiny monsters that don't. GX era started expanding on types before realizing archetypes would've become the norm.
@@mistery8363 Yugioh is honestly kind of weird about factions - the game is really stubborn about all cards having one type, and there's only 20-ish factions. Instead of using name archetypes, it would make way more sense if they just added more types, or let monsters have more than one type.
@@tcgacademia they did add a couple types, with psychic, wyrm, cyberse and illusion (roughly in that order haha)
Ashlynn Throughway
rock paper scissors plus the mutual destruction 2
After play MtG for 30 years, I switched to Grand Archieve. No land cards. You chose a chanpion an combine with 3 elements. Today there as 8 champions, 4 with 2 level 3 variants; 3 basic elements.
I've taken a look at Grand Archive in the past - it looks like it's doing some interesting things! I wonder if they'll add in another element or two down the road, or if 3 combined with unique champions is enough variety that it's not necessary.
2:41 are those from a real game? Or are they just a made up example? Kamen Rider, Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, and Certain Magical Index seems like an odd combo, so it’s got me curious.
That was a game I made - I talk about it briefly in the Essential Elements conclusion video. Basically just art of things I like XD For the game itself, while I was working on it I figured out pretty quickly that 3 colours just did not feel like enough. I haven't played or heard of a real tcg that actually only uses 3 colours, so I just used that.
@@tcgacademia neat
Pokemon started with 7 - although it's changed over time.
Now I think is weird that pokemon has 8 colours
well, digimon has 6 main color and one support color, while lorcana has 6 colors
I know it’s not a TCG but is a CCG, but it’s amusing to note that legends of runeterra has what is basically a 10(+) color system, but you can only pick one or two. And even with that only one of the “colors” really fails to have its own unique identity.
Interesting! I don't think 4-6 colours is really locked in, but if you're adding more it does require some extra planning to make sure you have a good division of mechanics between different colours.
@@tcgacademia you dont know LOR??
@@goncaloferreira6429 I've heard bits and pieces of it, but I haven't actually played it. Only Riot game I've actually played is Teamfight Tactics.
@@tcgacademia check it out. i think the game is some 3 years old and it introduced some important changes to the genre. at least from an historic point of view it has relevance.
Since I love the Seven Sins, my HTCG has 7 colors 😅🎉😊
Seven is a really tempting number. I think it's harder to do well than 5 or 6, but being a bit trickier is definitely not a reason to avoid it - especially when it has such strong flavour. _Flavour_ is very important for that kind of TCG.
Is it always 5? Fantasy-related makes sense due to the 4 virtual alignments in D&D plus Neutral. But Pokemon doesn't have 5 colors and that's a top 3 game. Weiss has 4 colors... Legend Of The 5 Rings, a very early successful TCG is more like Pokemon in terms of colors. Star Wars Decipher is 2 color.
Dunno how you said 'white' when the colour shown is clearly yellow, and black when it's clearly purple. Also, as an example of a tcg with colours but not 5, Mythgard has 6 colours (blue, Yellow, Red, Green, Orange, Purple).
1:12 source?
It's simple really, rock paper scissors lizards spock.
Rock paper scissors lizards spock is a Magic clone, confirmed. XD
Digimon with 7 and Elestrals with a planned 8:
Me that is using 6 elements: fire, water, wind, earth, light and dark.
Effertz Hills
Legend of the Five Rings had originally seven clans, became eight when Shadowlands Horde fans whined loud enough (Spider Clan)
Adah Burgs
MTG technically has a 6th colour in colourless.
Yes and no - the design history is actually pretty interesting. There were apparently talks for a while about including a 6th colour -purple- but there wasn't enough design space for it, since any new mechanics they could think of were already shoved into one of the other colours. But they figured they had enough design space to make 'colourless' kind work like a distinct colour. So it's kind of a 6th colour, but also not really.
@@tcgacademia True. I also believe that originally most colourless cards were equipment, with the point being that they could go anywhere because they were ambiguous. Since then they have refined the colourless identity into something more of an anti-colour with the Eldrazi and the likes.
Moreover, I think in terms of design a good idea is to not only have the coloured factions but to also include "colourless" cards as mercenaries or general items. That way they are able to be accommodated into any deck at the cost of not always gaining benefits from colour synergy.
@@drewhalcro6082 It's kind of interesting, and maybe worth a video in the future - some games have colourless and it works really naturally for them, but some games don't have anything colourless and it also works for them.
@@tcgacademia I look forward to it (assuming there is enough material there to make a video). It would also be very interesting to see how other systems implement colour/colourless.
Is colourless a colour? And why is the answer yes?
@tcgacademia4272 And honestly, making a new color also helps developers to design new attributes and mechanics for the game.
For example, Duel Masters utilizes the colorness mana to construct zero civilization like Zenith, Oracles, and Jokers with each of them unique playstyle
MTG now kinda has 6 colors or maybe you can call it 5 1/2 colors !?
Although the name is called “colorless” you need to be able to produce nonbasic mana to cast spells like “spatial Contortion”.
I’m doing my best to make a card game and I’d like to do 7 colors but like you said it’s an enormous combination of decks.
Thanks for the tip on the color orange as that might’ve been one of the colors but you make a great argument there seeing as it’s close to red. I’m doing my best to make it like a super light orange and very dark red for contrast.
If you do more, some colors or combinations will get neglected.
My faction system is kinda weird, there are 4 colors, but each one is only the primary aspect of 2 other sub factions, the game technically only have 4 colors of red, green, blue, and pearl, but inside the same color there are 2 others for more lore reasons (red is yellow + orange, blue is dark blue + cyan, green is light green + brown, and pearl is purple + white), I has been thinking a while if make it based on 4 or 8 colors (the big ones or the small ones), and thinking that you can make decks only of *up to* 3 colors I still think is too many variants to manage, I still wonder what's the answer, but this video help me see things a little more clear.
Digimon stays winning with 127 possible color combinations.
It's a lot to think about when you're trying to figure out what style of deck you want to play!