The Impact Factor

Perspectives: Collectible Card Games

Special Feature

My good friend Charles Fliss posted a piece on his blog talking about Hearthstone, Magic: The Gathering, the nature of collectible card games (CCGs) being pay-to-win, and reminiscing about his (our) nerdy time together in high school. Please do yourselves a favor and check out his post!

I could not let any Hearthstone talk go without some thoughts of my own, though. Perspectives will be a feature here on The Impact Factor in which I reflect upon something particularly meaningful, whether it is a blog post from an old friend or a particularly important piece of video game news. I intend these to be brief pieces offering my two cents on the topic at hand.  By the nature of their subjects, Perspectives should pop up every once in a while. No set schedule on these!

Anyway, back to thinking about Charles’s post. Charles makes a compelling argument as to why, at their core, all CCGs are pay-to-win. In short, competitive play demands a deck that is full of powerful cards. To obtain said cards, money is usually required. In Hearthstone, some of the most impactful and important cards to have in your deck are of the “legendary” rarity. Cards like Dr. Boom, Ragnaros the Firelord, and Sylvanas Windrunner see play in a large number of competitive ranked play decks. User-compiled statistics show that, on average, you will get 1 legendary card every 22 packs you open. Without factoring in Arena games, you can make 100 gold (the price of a pack) about every two days. As you can see, it can take a long time to even have the chance to open these powerful cards. This is where money usually comes in—players spend money to open more packs, to have a better chance at opening these metagame defining cards.

The triumvirate of powerful legendaries in Hearthstone. Currently.

Charles does a great job at explaining the pay-to-win element of Magic: The Gathering, too. Something to consider with Magic is just how insanely expensive it can get. During a time when I still played Magic competitively, some “must have” cards exceeded $60 for a single copy. I’m looking at you, Jace the Mind Sculptor. When you consider that some of the best competitive decks ran four copies of a card, and decks are comprised of 60 total cards, you can see how your monetary investment can exponentially climb if you intend to compete against the best of the best.

 

More like Jace, the Wallet Sculptor, amiright?

You don’t have to have the best decks to have fun with a CCG, a point my friend covers quite thoroughly. I never had the best cards in Magic, and still had a blast playing. I started playing the game when I was about six or seven years old, and played very seriously in high school. Still, due to how expensive it was to make the best decks, I would always try to create decks that worked for me and worked for my limited collection. And that never stopped me from playing. Morning, day or night my friends and I would play Magic. We would whip out our decks to get a game or two in before our first class of the day (a grueling 7:20am start), during lunch time, and for hours after school. We spent so many Friday nights over at my house drafting cards, opening packs, and just generally being fully immersed in the world of Magic. I still think about somehow getting the group of us back together to play—though now we are scattered across the US (and world), so it has been tough trying to work out the logistics. Playing Magic with my friends meant so much to me and helped to shape who I am and how I think about games.

My favorite Magic card.

These two were the ones that won me the most games, though.

Now in graduate school, I get my card game fix in other ways. As you all know, I play the heck out of Hearthstone. Its Magic-like gameplay combined with excellent game design decisions all around had me enraptured from the beginning. It was my game of the year for 2014. I have talked at length about it, though, so I’ll spare you more jibjab. Another cool, and unexpected way, I have fulfilled my need for card games is through non-collectible and “living” card games. The past half decade plus has been an explosive renaissance for designer board games and, with that, came a slew of card-based titles. One of my favorites has been Dominion. Created by Donald Vaccarino, Dominion is a deck-building board game in which you compete against your opponents to draft powerful cards to grow your kingdom (which is represented by your deck). The great thing about Dominion is that every card you’ll ever need to play the game is included in the box. By the nature of card games, and the randomness Charles spoke about, every game is different, and gives many of the same feelings evoked by “pay-to-win” card games like Magic or Hearthstone. Many of these non-collectable card-based board games move into a space known as “living” card games (LCGs). LCGs expand their total card pool, much like CCGs, but go about it very different. New cards are packaged as known quantities, i.e., when you buy the expansion you know every single card that is included in the box / pack. A great example of an LCG is Call of Cthulhu, a highly regarded non-collectible card game that has now received nine expansions to the core game. LCGs keep the gameplay experience fresh by steadily infusing new cards into the mix, but avoid some of the “pay-to-win” frustrations present in CCGs when you do not get the cards you want.

For anyone interested in card games of any sort, now is a great time to be alive. You have excellent physical CCGs like Magic, and digital CCGs like Hearthstone. Card-based board games like Dominion and Call of Cthulhu offer alternatives to traditional CCGs, and offer dynamic non-collectable & LCG experiences. I want to thank Charles for his great blog post, which got me thinking about card games this morning.