Hey all! My friend and I are making a card game and don't have quite enough time to test it very consistently. It's a card game similar to MtG and Hearthstone, with the difference of there being no minions or creatures. If you want to try it out, or maybe even just look it over, I'll try my best to watch this topic and share the Google Docs that it's on with anyone who wants it. Thanks!

Can you explain the rules and provide a first draft of cards, or is it meant to be confidential?

Of course! It works similarly to Hearthstone in the way that you automatically gain Mana, which you use to play cards. Play passes back and forth from one player to the next, casting spells back and forth in an attempt to lower the enemy's Health total to zero (0). There are five (5) different types of cards that all have slightly different effects, such as: Spells, Traps, Books, Gates, and Machines. Spells are your very basic cards, you play them, their effects play out, and then you discard them. Traps are like spells, but they're proactive, and secretive, only enacting their effects after your opponent does a specific thing. Books are long term commitments whose effects last for four (4) turns after you play them, with the first three turns benefiting you, and the last turn possibly devastating you. Gates are powerful artifacts with game-changing passive abilities. Machines are the only thing that could be considered a creature or minion. They have low-value abilities that can be used once per turn by sacrificing another resource in the game: Sparks. Sparks are gained through playing certain cards, which still cost Mana, that give you Sparks. Examples of each type of card follows. Spell: Fireball (4 Mana) (Deal 7 damage). Trap: Mirror Trap (3 Mana) (When your opponent casts a spell, cast it on both players, then discard this card). Book: Book of Flames (9 Mana) (Turn 1, deal 8 damage Turn 2, deal 12 damage Turn 3, deal 16 damage Turn 4, discard your hand, draw 3 cards). Gate: Waygate (15 Mana) (After you take a turn, take a second turn). Machine: B4NG (2 Mana) (Deal 2 damage).

If you have other questions, just ask!

The cards:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1GUuf3g_oGGKIj5jlX3d-0nCq-kVIGQ47T4LCgqPA08Y/edit?usp=sharing

The rules:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1D19kEr-dZVWpq5Zqp7EnnqcSeF7z-lrTjxnroKah0Uo/edit?usp=sharing

Let me know if the links don't work.

• Interacting with gates, machines, books and traps should be the core of the game, but it seems too simple and difficult to be interesting.
• Traps seem to be the only way to react to the opponent playing cards: it seems very limited.
• Playing up to four cards per turn seems a very arbitrary and inelegant limitation. Card copy limits are also too complex, and numbers like two cards, three mana and two sparks per turn are also meaningless. Most numbers should be 1 or consistent (e.g. either 4 copies of any card, or maybe 3 due to the small deck size, or only 1, not different limits by type).
• What's the purpose of a third resource type (sparks)?
  Random idea: to make them work differently from mana, sparks could accumulate separately for each machine (somewhat like charge counters in Magic) and every turn there might be a “machine phase” in which up to one machine is activated (paying spark activation costs from its own pool, as many times as desired) and the others earn 1 spark each. There would be different spark costs, cards that give extra sparks, spark loss as machine damage, etc.

Can you explain what different deck types should be possible, and what cards would be strong or weak against them? Is there enough strategic depth in deckbuilding?

Theoretically, you would be able to build a deck based around any type of card or almost any strategy that you want. Obviously, the game needs some work, and that's what I wanted help with. Sparks are what you use to activate your Machines, you spend two (2) Sparks to activate a Machine, and each Machine can be activated once per turn. In theory, Gate destruction cards and Book destruction cards (Sabotage, Ravage) would help you out in limiting the power of your opponent's Gates and Books, but I wanted to be sure not to make too many cards that do those kinds of things so that you can still play those cards and not feel like it's impossible to benefit from those cards. There is supposed to be a consistent limit for each type of card, but all of it is subject to change if anyone feels like it should be different. I didn't want Traps to be super annoying, which is why there isn't a lot of different kinds of them. Do you have any recommendations as to what should change?

Different deck types are a good starting point. In good games, different deckbuilding strategies are clear:

• The aggro-control spectrum and the “mana curve” in Magic are a direct consequence of card costs, something that can be learned the hard way one dead card at a time.
• Drawing and fetching cards to put together some combo is an obvious approach in any game that offers combos and ways to draw and fetch cards.
• Some games offer conflicting obvious strategies and straightforward ways to pursue them, like Dominion forcing a choice between different ways to buy valuable cards: stacking discounts and extra buys, drawing enough extra treasure cards consistently, buying high value treasure cards in the hope of drawing them, eliminating worthless cards to leave treasures. Attempting more than one, maybe two, of the above usually results in an inconsistent and ineffective deck.

Your cards appear too simple to offer more than the boring optimization of balancing offensive cards to deal damage, healing cards to get out of tight spots, and disruptive cards to slow down the opponent. There are no genuinely different ways to deal damage, heal and disrupt the opponent.

By comparison, Magic has

• alternative victory conditions that don't involve damage
• direct damage, bypassing and complementing creatures
• evasive creatures that deal damage despite the opponent having a good defense
• exceptionally high power creatures, to punish a defenseless opponent quickly
• creatures that are very good at defense, to gain time
• big creatures, to grind down the opponent's creatures in combat until they are the only ones left standing
• varied and abundant means to remove and disable creatures
• exceptionally resilient creatures
• varied and abundant combat tricks

Something in your game clearly has to become more complex if you want this level of strategical depth.

What would you recommend we add? More cards like “Gate to Ahn'kiat”? Things that are just different? Just more diversity in the things that cards do?

@mastreKILO Diverse cards are impossible without a space of potential card differences.

For example, permanents in Magic differ by name, color identity, mana cost and converted mana cost; combinations of types, subtypes and supertypes; power, toughness, starting loyalty; and an arbitrary and modifiable set of static, activated and triggered abilities that have a dazzling variety of costs and effects (because they can reference any attribute of any object in any zone). Then there are counters, damage and and temporary changes to add state.

Compare your machines: they have a name, a mana cost, exactly one activated ability with a spark cost (which you want to fix at 2!), a state consisting only of whether they have been used this turn, and that's it.

You have only come up with 6 machines because there is nothing else for them to do besides damage, healing, giving mana, drawing, and playing extra cards. Other effects would have to cost more or less than 2 sparks, but even with disparate costs the variety would remain very limited.