Board Game Design Day: Balancing Mechanics for Your Card Game's Unique Power Curve
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- Опубліковано 28 вер 2024
- In this 2018 GDC talk, The Pokemon Company's Dylan Mayo sets some base truths and examines the curves of some of the biggest games in the CCG space, including Magic: The Gathering, The Pokemon Trading Card Game, Hearthstone, The Spoils, and Clash Royale.
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Yu Gi Oh is too broken to even be a part of this discussion
Lol k
I thought he was gonna mention Yu Gi Oh when they were talking about power inflation
Even Clash Royale was mentioned lol
Yeah Yu-Gi-Oh must be incredibly hard to balance
Lol i played around 2016, even then not being super meta I had some OP decks that has gross combos.
Id love to see a documentary that showed the steps they took to make the game. ive started before but get overwhelmed. im not sure how much to flesh out before beginning to tes
Creating the fundamental aspects of the core system is most critical piece. The fine details can be added following that. Once you have a CG that you and your people can continually play through in its most basic form and it holds up to play (and is somewhat fun, even in that raw form) then perhaps consider to test more formally and add further details as testing indicates.
"Board Game Design Day: Balancing Mechanics for Your Card Game's Unique Power Curve" is an inappropriate title for this video. There is no discussion of underlying design principles that determine why particular mechanics are included in a game preferentially to others. Rather, this is a narrowly focused presentation of a few variations of mana systems in a few card games, omitting mention of many card games with fundamentally different mechanics - Yugioh, Thea the Awakening, and Prismata to name a few.
It's not a bad video for someone that knows nothing about the card game genre, but for a "Game Developers Conference", I really have to question both the presentation and its title. If your boss sent you to watch a video to say company representatives had researched a topic, this gets the job done; the title sounds nice, a lot of high profile game names are dropped. If your boss sent you to watch a video so you could actually get things done - what about card combinations, tempo, actual calculations with actual numbers, and so forth? If you were making a game that involved cards, if you'd done any serious research into some of the major popular card games, some of which are mentioned in this video, this presentation would contain nothing of value.
If there's no section that presents specific comparisons with specific numbers for a number of different situations, and no section that discusses a number of different alternative mechanics, stating a presentation is applicable to "your game" is overselling. If this presentation were titled something like "Presentation of Some Basic Aspects of Mana Systems in Hearthstone, Magic the Gathering, and Pokemon Card Games", I would consider it appropriate.
Agreed. The title is fairly misleading
I agree, im a yugioh player and this was off for me because yugioh doesnt use a resource system and its power creep and power curve is ungraphibale because its all over the place. A monsters power and value in yugioh rarely factors its stats. The archetype its from, attribute, type, level/rank/link rating, effects overall, and overall support r wat generally determine a monsters power in yugioh. The ATK and DEF of a monster is the last thing that determines how good a monster is, and by a longshot too.
@@baileydombroskie3046
You're right. I mean some things are universal. Like you shouldn't make a card that's another card but better. Even trying to copy it but with some flaw is just waiting for power creep.
Like in Yugioh an example of this would be Pot Of Greed. I mean Konami isn't really a good example of how to balance anything but it's a good example of too good in too generic of a way for Yugioh. Now imagine because laziness, wanting more card advantage, whatever reason they make a Pot Of Greed that draws 3 cards, but costs you 3000 lifepoints.
Which is literally just Ancient Leaf but with higher numbers. Newbies wouldn't play it. But pros would knowing how valuable more cards. Because what's any amount of lifepoints to "you win" and really it's all about getting to that point.
And it would be better than Ancient Leaf because it increases the odds of triggering "you win".
And I'm not saying Yugioh is a bad game. I play Yugioh and it's clear there's easier ways to balance it at least in it's own meta bubble in comparison to say Magic that needs 1000 formats. Not only cause Magic has SO MANY cards, but because resource management isn't balancing, it's slow. Slow doesn't mean balanced. Sometimes getting Mana screwed isn't balanced. That has literally nothing to do with well designed cards or interactions and is just dumb luck or inconvenient circumstances. Hell if MTG used levels like Yugioh that'd be something to see considering so many of their cards rely on activated Mana effects, what would the game state be without them? And a lot of the modern non-creature spells are underpowered versions of what was first printed much like Yugioh's spell/traps anyway. Yugioh the manga was actually inspired by Magic the gathering. At least the part about playing duel monsters.
But really when you take away the Mana, Magic is just slow crap is what I'm saying. Like if you ignored it and treated it like Yugioh with levels normal/special summoning and tap was essentially a soft once per turn ability you'd see Mana is just a bandaid pretending to be doing anything.
And hearthstone is even worse because half the time the Mana costs don't even reflect the standard. Blizzard has openly stated they designed the starter cards bad on purpose aka screw you if you're a beginner or a casual. If they love whales so much they should be forced to go out to sea by gun point and get eaten by Moby Dick
@@ultraatari9298 i liked ur comment and u made some really good points. Around 2 or so years ago back when i was a senior in highschool a couple of my classmates and 1 of the teachers were heavily into mtg and for years i was already big into yugioh and had been into pokemon heavily when i was much younger. So j decided 1 day to come by the 1 teachers classroom and have him teach me mtg. I came by i think 3 times and by the second time i had completely learnt and memorized the rules that the teacher dkd go over with me, which i beleive was not all the rules becuz some of the rules were unessary to learn at the beginning with those rulings never coming up anyways. I personally found mtg to be boring and too slow for my tastes. I didnt like the fact that my actions were limited by a resource system that was also unreliable half the time. I like playing big combo decks that take an eternity to do full combo, so u shud understand my boredom. Also the veriety of interactions that can happen and how they cud resolve r very limited, making everything very sweet and simple. While yugioh has been designed that can create dozens more unique situations and interactions.
@@baileydombroskie3046 your teacher sounds like a timmy
That tie tho
crazy to think that mana cost in magic is more like a float while hearthstone is like an integer
There are cases where some things you might not expect can happen when you combine effects.
Take these two pieces in a chess-like game:
The Gnu: moves like a knight (2,1) or a camel (3,1).
The Princess: moves like a knight (2,1), or a bishop (1,1 slider).
If you just guessed, you might say that the first piece is worth about 5.5 pawns, and the second maybe 6.5 pawns, based on their components.
However, this isn't the case in reality. The Gnu is indeed worth about that amount, but the Princess is absolutely murderous and worth about 8 points. Maybe even a bit more than that. It's close to a queen in strength and arguably a bit more flexible than one.
The reasons for this are not fully understood, but we do know that it is experimentally correct for human and engine play.
The other tool Pokemon has is energy. You can make a pretty beefy basic Pokemon but if it's main attack costs 4 differently colored energies to use, it's not going to immediately have the option to attack for full force.
The mana curve in Project Phoenix is... Odd, to say the least.
You naturally acrue mana similar to Hearthstone, with up to 10 natural mana generation. You can accelerate that process at any time by discarding 2 cards for 1 mana, which you can still use to replenish 1 mana when you've capped out- and any unspent mana is turned to overflow, with a max of 10 as well.
Because cards can be converted directly into mana, you need to be bribed to play anything in the early game at all, but you also need to be rewarded for saving up and waiting, so the curve is more of a wave.
In playtesting, games are really fast, typically ending around turn ten, but with both players already having had ten mana for a few turns.
I enjoy it, but the warping of the power curve is a definite challenge.
That's not a bad conference, but the power curve used is the opposite of what is really used in Hearthstone: small cards are actually better than big cards. The formula at 6:00 "Expansive card has to be better than cards " is totally false in Hearthstone. Using your example, 2x crocilisks 2/3 is more valuable than a yeti 4/5.
And that is because of the card advantage notion. When you play two different cards, you have a card less in your hand and deck for the rest of the party.
Very confused at how such a fact is eluded.
Exactly! His formula is valid at the end of the curve, not at the beginning. The reason is that the real cost of crocilisk is not 2 mana, it's 2 mana + 1 card. So the yeti is 4 mana + 1 card which is less than twice teh cost of a crocilisk, and so has to be weaker than double croc. The higher you go in the curve, the more the opportunity cost weights on this, until it becomes more important factor. Diminishing returns also have to be considered, a 100/100 for 10 mana would be worse than a 50/50 for 9 mana.
@@@Coeurebene1 nice post, got it in one.
@@Coeurebene1 I feel like that can depend on other factors too, how valuable is a card in your hand? how do higher and lower amounts of mana/resource scale their worth? How easy is it to reach those amounts?
I think there can easily be situations where having an extra card might be a downside, or where higher resource costs get high enough that it effectively costs more effort than a simple addition of its costs would suggest.
Same in magic. There's a lot to consider. A 2 drop is likely put in play for a lot longer, impacting the game longer. You also have to consider how it interacts with your opponents cards (spells). If your lower costing card removes their higher costing card, then you're up on the mana exchange and you're lower costing card was more valuable. And the flip side, how you're opponent interacts with your cards: if they remove your 2 drop instead of your 7 because they're afraid of the engine that your 2 drop enables then that 2 cost card is more powerful.
Maybe you're confused because you're referring to a different aspect of card strength?
It's precisely because cheaper cards have that inherent strength(which you described) that higher cost cards need better stat-and-effect-power to mana-and-card-advantage ratio to compensate(which was presented in the conference)
I wonder why that crucial difference was eluded, but knowing it happened makes your confusion make sense
a very good talk!
Great talk!
And then theres yugioh where it has a power curve that exists covering this entire grid as well as far beyond the atmosphere. U have cards like foolish burial that r theoretically bad cards but is semi-limited for a reason. Then u have cards like lightning storm that r super powerful on paper that r in practice just reasonably powerful, not op.
Yeah... you have no idea what yugioh is
@@mockingb1rd403 yugioh is my main tcg. Wat r u talking about? I don’t even play any other tcgs cuz I’m most invested into yugioh. Even tho I’m not as good as the best players out there. I’m sure I cud be as good if I had the time to and put in the time to get that good. But even then I don’t play meta. I play wat decks I live which r often rogue decks and for fun decks with weird gimmicks.
@@baileydombroskie3046 mhm... didnt ask
Yugioh got completely off the rails a decade ago. Zero balancing.
Am I tripping or did this guy say "enbies" in 2018?
I swear I've heard a couple of the voices of the people who were asking questions, before, but I can't pinpoint who they are.
He's obviously not such a good pokemon player, you'd be silly to put 1 lower evolution pokemon for every 1 higher evolution pokemon in a deck. You want to be able to evolve your pokemon and have a high chance of doing so, so for every 1 higher evolution pokemon, you'd need 2 lower ones. But I was 15 back then, i'm not sure how the game is now- I did won all my friends consistently until no one played with me anymore though.
He did mentioned that; to play the Stage 1 or 2 Pokémons, you had to have the basics as well, and that’s how the game is balanced, you can’t play your Stage 1 or 2 immediately, you had to evolve it first, and the basics takes valuable space in your deck.
I am going to bet the guy that has played TCGs longer than most of us have been alive and has worked for the Pokemon TCG for 10 years does know his pokemon very well.
He was using a scenario to demonstrate how the power curve in pokemon is less connected to turn number than in other TCGs, he was simplifying because the majority of his audience isn't going to know how pokemon works
@@chameleonedm Well it doesn't take a master mind to figure that out. I'm thinking he didn't want to go into what's essentially a not-so-good feature of the game. Ideally you want to do cool things and become powerful, but in order to do so you'd have to first draw 10 eevee's and diglett's.
@@Auxius. Lol dont come here say "dudes bad at pokemon" then claim "oh nah doesnt take a mastermind to work out what he was saying"
You're right though, it is really obvious what he was saying. You missed it trying to be a smartass though
@@chameleonedm The not-mastermind bit was about the ratio of evolved to non-evolved pokemon, not what he's telling. I don't care too much either way. And you're right I just wanted to brag about my childhood's full psychic/neutral deck that was absolutely decimating all my buddies decks :-D
YuGiOh laughing at the conner.
💡
Lol dr boom better than loatheb
If you are told to mature and stop playing games, tell them that kids do not play with toys and board games. They only use screens. So tell them to stop being childish for using screens and mature and play board games.
Wait wait wait... a guy that works for the Pokemon tcg is lecturing on power curb?
Anyone else misses the days when 200hp was the maximum and only was seen on a Wailord?
Pfft, yeah. Obviously in order to learn enough about a subject to speak as an expert you must never make a single mistake ever because you can't learn from mistakes, it's just not possible.
Honestly it is probably one of the more balanced card games out there. Not to say there isn't a meta. Of course there will be. but as he said Pokemon is about paying costs LATER
It's entire premise is either offering more prize cards for big monsters now, wasting deck space and inconsistencies for evolutions, or just taking chances depending on weakness/resistance ratios and coinflips. Yes I think over time (the 20+ years it's been out) there has been power creep. But by comparison the game itself is just more linear and easy to pickup.
You'd have more chances of going to Walmart and buying a starter deck of Pokemon and doing fine with it than you would just picking up a random MTG commander deck and going to play Commander at FNM, or downloading Hearthstone and opening a few free boosters and making a deck than going on ranked play.
He specifically talked about this, the reason HP values went up is so there was more granularity for damage values to avoid situations where the smallest unit is 1 (10) and the next unit is twice as big.
@@Ffancrzy That’s power creep though. All the cards from my childhood are absolutely unplayable. Plus each year they need to make cards with higher and higher numbers to impact the game creating even more power creep.
@@insertnamehere1089 I know what youre saying. The main difference is the ratio of hp to attack damage stayed about the same. They just wanted more freedom to tweak things.
Pokemon also relies on rotation much like magic so the power creep doesnt impact the experience as much
Well, I didn't rly like this talk. The idea of his speech: here we have some kind of mana system, so one card is stronger because we typed such text in it, now look at MTG, they have more flexible mana system, so they're good
Clearly you didn't get much out of that.
Nowhere does the he says which is better
Wow dude...
i wish this talk covered more depth on how to balance the values. A lot of information about different games was given but not so much about how to balance
Bring on more content on board games! =)
Loved Magi-Nation! What an unexpected treat!
👍 Definitely didn’t expect Magi Nation to be the first thing that popped up. Great to see. Wish he would have used it more in the examples.
This sounded like an intro to "what is a mana curve" and then it just ended before getting to the title of the talk?
A maximum of one mana every turn, in Magic? Green says hi!
Of course! That's what the rules say. Also in Yu-Gi-Oh you only can summon 1 monster per turn, but in card games the text of the card changes everything.
@@nemesiswarrior5315 correct
Hearthstone copied green to druid. He talked more generally
Yeah I'm understand this video is about "Board Game Design Day: Balancing Mechanics for Your MANA/ENERGY BASE Card Game's Unique Power Curve" so Yu-Gi-Oh! not include it.
Wow. That was a great talk. It helps me learn about power curve. I am glad to try hearthstone, even though I quit soon afterward. It is enough to help me follow along. Maybe I ought to try out even more games just to see what is out there. For a long time I have been a Pokemon and WOW fan. Then I begame a MTG fan last year. There are more games worth trying.
Good stuff! I'm designing my own ccg right now and it is really tricky to do well. Even something like how you generate mana is crucial.
I wish you luck! Working on one to be a minigame/achievement system in my game(s).
I'm designing one too, I'm making it like Yu-Gi-Oh, i wanna distribute between my friends and also allow them to design thier own cards, this summer is gonna be awesome
@@miqerman That's gonna be awesome! Let us know how it goes!
@@rmt3589 sure!
@@rmt3589 hey i made some concepts, i made some spells and traps, made a couple of monsters, I'm going to hand make all the cards and every card is going to be unique and different from other cards of that type
Having 2 cards and one of them being better in every situation is a way to make collecting new cards desirable but also can push away players who don't want to grind for new cards or and don't want to pay to unlock these faster. Alternatively all cards could be situationally good but that reduces pay-to-win potential. Games where you can pay to get more cards / equipment of any sort have an incentive to make the game pay to win but in such way that it isn't obvious to most players. I quit hearthstone when I realized people who spend more time in the game or more money have cards that are better in all situations but take a lot of loot boxes to get.
Johnson Melissa Taylor Barbara Gonzalez Patricia
Maybe if we all scream rally reallty loud the game will balance itself
Vanilla cards are bad mmmmkay
Did my man just say Annoy-O-Tron was a top tier 2 cost card?
Sure it’s sticky but it’s not that good
23:00 is that Geoff Engelstein?
Sounds like him
I jumped to the comment section to see if anyone noticed as well. It's totally Geoff and that is awesome that I was not the only one who noticed :)
Great talk!
Mana cost in pokemon is evolution not the cost of abilities? This has to be an oversimplification of mana costs. Not to mention in Hearthstone the example of Northshire Cleric is SO much better of ratio that something like Dr. Boom. Can you imagine a 1 mana 1/3 with an ability meaning a 7 drop would have to be a 14/14 with a better ability? The fact is that having a 7/7 means it can takeout 7 1/3s so it is stronger with less over curve power.
Riley Shaw Yeah I’m surprised he didn’t mention how, in Pokemon, those stronger Basic cards require more Energy to use their attacks. So that’s where the trade off is in terms of cost.
What he’s trying to say is, in Pokémon, the best mons is always 1-2 turns away, because of the evolution mechanic. It’s not exactly the cost to attack in Pokémon, rather the “cost” to play a Stage 2 Pokémon from your hand.
For the Hearthstone one, Dr Boom is just the poster child of undercosted OP cards. A 7/7 that summons 2 1/1 is already pretty good, but it’s crazy bonkers when those 1/1 can also explode upon death, dealing more damage than a normal 1/1. Northshire Cleric is good stat-wise, but Dr Boom cost-to-power ratio was just through the roof. When he said in the beginning where Dr Boom is staple in any deck for 2 years, he’s not kidding, it’s that good.
good info
Can you make a video clip to better explain why pot of greed is sooooo broken compared to the more balanced draw system in pokemon.
I think it has a lot to do with the potential for 2 cards to carry the game in yugioh as well as the fact that drawing power is a less common mechanic in yugioh. Pokemon takes the idea of "if drawing is super powerful and overly available, then it works." Kind of like DOTA 2. If everything is broken, then its balanced.
I'm not super familiar with Pokemon, but I believe there's a limit to the number of support cards you can play in a turn, so there's an action cost to playing them. You can't just play four Cynthias in a turn and draw your whole deck. In Yu-Gi-Oh, for Spell Cards like Pot of Greed at least, there is no action economy. You can play any number of Spell Cards in a turn as long as you can pay the costs on the card, so you can draw your whole deck if you get enough Pots of Greed or Graceful Charities. It's why cards like Into the Void or Upstart Goblin are on the restricted list while Jar of Greed isn't- as a Trap Card, it has an inherent restriction on how it can be activated, namely that it has to be Set for a turn first.
Because Yugioh has far less limitations as opposed to other card games. In Pokemon you have to evolve your pokemon which means you need to wait out turns to upgrade. In other games you have a mana system which limits your plays. In yugioh you can win on one turn much more often. You can drop your entire hand and fill your field with strong monsters. You just can't do that in some other popular card games. Thats why just drawing two more cards in addition to your normal draw is super strong in a game like Yugioh.
Pot of Greed is a card you play for free to get more cards you can probably play for free
Magic has cards that draw tons of cards but they actually take resources to use and time to set that up
Pokemon can play cards for free, but typically draw cards are only once per turn, a restriction, but when they print Pokemon that draw cards for playing they, they typically make things very fast and unbalanced
On top of that, Yugioh doesn't have a rotation so it's just a free for all with every card, so free resources that just give you more free resources to give you more free resources, and so on, it's extremely unbalanced, making the ban on Pot of Greed absolutely necessary
@@Matthew-Fair yugioh should restart and make a game when pot of greed is ok.
TL;DR
make sure P2W stuff is ahead of the curve
Fucking knew that half these comments would be "Erhm, ackshually that isn't how X card game works specifically"
Yes, you genius, he was simply showing how depending on how your game is built the power curve will end up being different and that a game designer needs to understand how to look at their own games power curve
This was not a talk about how to build good decks in Hearthstone/Pokemon/MtG, it was a talk about their cost bases and resulting power levels
Dunno why i should care about these card names and by some extent levels... those means nothing to me... so doesnt explain much, doesnt even provide a pathway to solutions since talking some specific random game stuff.
???? He mentions the card names so you know what he is referring to. You know, how humans tend to identify things when they are communicating? The talk is about precisely what it is billed to be about. ???????
color pips in MTG are typically more about color pie than they are about power level. Green often lets you play an additional land that turn. Those cards will likely have two green pips. Black has `destroy target creature`, those will typically cost 2+ black pips. Blue has counter spell, typically 2 blue pips. The weaker versions of these abilities may not. `target opponent sacrifices a creature they control of their choice` would be one black pip. `counter creature spell` one blue pip. You have to be fairly devoted to that color in your deck to reap the benefits of the real strength of that color. If you want to do 4 damage to any creature, you can throw in a couple red cards in your deck. Wanna do direct damage to the player, you'll likely be playing double red and thus will be pretty devoted to red at that point. Anyways, pips are less about the power of the card, more about the color identity.
I disagree with you. Color pips in MTG are power level adjusters first and foremost. Many of green's card that play an additional land only require 1 green pip, while black has many kill creature spells that need only 1 black pip. The color identity comes from the frequency of the effect in that specific color. The "a opponent sacrifice a creature" card often only needs 1 black mana, but that effect is nearly non-existent outside of black while showing up in nearly every set in some fashion showing how "black" effect is.
In contrast, polymorph is a blue card with the effect of flipping the top cards of your library to play the first creature you see. However the "polymorph" effect is considering tertiary in blue meaning that is very rare. The recent magic sets reflect this as the only cards printed with this effect have been red.
That is a fair point. MTG does have a more complex mana system than Hearthstone does. So it is a mix of things. MTG has a power curve. So more expensive cards are more powerful. There is a color pie aspect to it as well. Green is good for ramp and large creatures. Red is good for aggro and burn spells. Black is good for health drain and graveyard. Blue is good for control and card draw. White is good for healing and tokens. There are also more subtle things going on. Mixing more colors is more difficult to do, but it does allow for playing certain powerful cards. Having cards with more specific colors in mana cost are harder to mix together, but they are more powerful. It is all going together at once.
In this discussion, the color pips are merely mentioned as for how a card’s cost in Magic is different than in Hearthstone. In Hearthstone, there are no colored mana, all mana is the same, meanwhile, in Magic, some cards require one pips while some other needs two or more. Basically, the pips gives much more granularity to how Magic can cost it’s cards compared to Hearthstone, because in Magic, two 3-converted mana cards can basically have different mana costs based on how many colored pips there are on the card’s mana cost, on Hearthstone however, every 3 mana cost cards have the same 3 mana cost to cast it.
Objectively this was concise and full of information. However, virtually all of this could be learned firsthand just by learning to play Hearthstone and/or Magic in the same amount of time.
There are more systems out there to learn from, than just repeating the two everyone already knows.