Card Games: Are You Living or Collecting?

We’d like to thank Daniel Hallinan (@Kharrak) for this contribution! As a board game (and LCG) junkie, there is no better person to tell you all about the “struggle”, deep from the trenches of the Card Game Clashes.

The Collectible Card Game, or CCG for short, has been around for just over two decades. We’ve seen it in throwaway trading cards for sports or TV shows, all the way to the monolithic card games like Pokemon or Magic: The Gathering. However, there’s a new format for card games on the rise, and while it’s not necessarily threatening to overtake CCG’s, it’s definitely anchoring itself as a strong variation on the formula. This format is the Living Card game, or LCG, and recently this new approach has put out some pretty damned stellar games.

The Living Card Game has been combined with very popular IP’s and almost all to some form of acclaim.

LCG’s were introduced primarily to combat the financial fatigue that often accompanies the blind buy and randomness inherent to the CCG model. Fantasy Flight thought it up when they found that people were resistant to a CCG’s they wanted to release, no matter how well designed they were.  Customers were already investing heavily into mainstream CCG’s, were already financially fatigued due to the quantity of boosters they bought hunting for cards they wanted, and were unwilling to start another CCG that would do the same.

As such, the driving force behind LCG’s design is the idea that there is no randomness, entirely removing the blind buy. Every expansion has a specific set of cards, with a full set of copies for each card. This means that there’s no randomness in what one gets in a pack, what’s in each pack is fully known, and that one will only ever need to buy each expansion once. Every standard expansion also includes new cards for every faction, all linked to that cycle’s specific theme.

As for release schedules, the standard pattern from Fantasy Flight Games has been in the form of release cycles. Each cycle contains six expansions released over as many months. Once that’s concluded, there are two or three months before the next cycle starts, during which a “deluxe” expansion may be released. These deluxe expansions are a much larger collection of cards revolving around one or two factions, or a specific theme failing that. Additionally, deluxe expansions are always relevant, and are never cycled out.

Netrunner has currently just finished its 4th cycle of 6 Data Packs of Cards, with 4 deluxe expansions released as well.

In recent months, we’ve seen other companies release their own LCG’s, such as AEG’s Doomtown and Plaid Hat Games’ Ashes, though the term itself is solely owned by Fantasy Flight Games. While they can’t officially call themselves LCG’s, they all follow the similar design approach: avoiding blind buy, with a stronger focus on balancing and long lasting relevance for cards they release.

This approach to card games results in several boons, though several are immediately obvious. Most pressing is the lack of card hunting – rather than buying several booster packs in hopes of getting one or two of the cards you’re looking for, you pay a set price to get exactly the cards you’re looking for. Even better, all the expansion packs have QR codes on the back which allow you to scan and see all the cards contained within. Depending on how much one dives into CCG’s, LCG’s are also lighter on the wallet. Considering one is generally buying a single pack a month for around R230, it equates to just under four Magic: The Gathering booster packs both in price (the booster packs being R60 each) and quantity of cards. Deluxe expansions, containing 165 cards, tend to float around the R450 to R500 price range.

The other result of LCG’s is how it affects more casual players as well as balancing. In the casual sense, it’s inclusive to new players who, when playing with someone who’s been keeping up with expansions, have access to the entire library of cards ever released, across all factions. It also allows people to split a core set, each calling shotgun on certain factions found within.

Booster packs for CCG are double edged daggers of excitement – thrill of the rare coupled with abject disappointment.

The lack of card rarity also means card design avoids any balance relating to this rarity, or at least avoids restricting card inclusion in deck construction based on card rarity. This results in a card pool which has higher design quality across the board, with very few cards that are considered worthless or subpar. Even then, most of these cards tend to be uplifted in the context of new cards, and it’s not rare to discover that cards initially thought poor or useless were in fact a fix for a powerful card released much later, injected earlier to allow players to be aware of it.

A fantastic example of how well most LCG’s are designed is Netrunner, where many of the most popular cards at the moment are still from the core set, released three years ago.

It’s not all high praises, as the direction that the design powering LCG’s powers towards results in some quirks that do bother some people. The first comes with the rarity that LCG’s remove. Without rarity, there’s no gamblers high when opening new expansions. This may sound minor, but that high is actually a massive cornerstone of the CCG hobby. By extension, by removing card rarity and random buy, you also completely remove any secondary market that surrounds purchasing single cards. This has two effects: Firstly, LCG cards have absolutely no collector’s value, and there’s no profit to finding cards others are hunting for. Secondly, if there’s only a single card you want from an expansion, you’re likely going to be forced to buy that entire expansion to get it.

There is something to an upside of this, however. LCG’s avoid the situation where one player quickly creates an impossibly powerful deck, purely because they have the finances to buy all of the powerful cards. There’s no “pay to be competitive” issue.

Want to build a House Stark deck in Game of Thrones 2nd Edition? You’ll need 3 cores as there is only 1 of many character cards in the core set…

Then there’s the core set problem. Core sets serve two purposes, providing a platform that introduces the game, and a platform that jump starts a new player’s foray into that game. These two purposes conflict with each other, however. A core set that serves as a good starting point wants to provide a full set of each card it contains, to allow full access when deck building. A core set that serves to introduce players to what the game promises wants to provide as many different cards as possible, which then means you get less of each card to make up for it. The end result is a core set that mostly cards of which there are only one or two copies, which encourages players to buy multiple cores to get a full set of each card. This often results in players splitting additional core sets and divvying up copies of cards they need.

And finally the largest issue for LCGs is the intimidation new players feel when looking to get into an LCG that’s been running for a few years. This is where CCG’s have it easy – no matter how old the CCG is, if it’s still running a new player can pick up some starter decks and several booster packs and get started. The relatively short lifespan of cards, and the random nature of how they are received, allows for a more happy-go-lucky approach.  LCG’s, on the other hand, tend to encourage new players to collect most of what was released before due to how much of the card pool remains valid for a long time. This is a problem that naturally grows the longer an LCG is out, and can potentially throttle the income of new blood into a hobby. Furthermore, it can be a bit more daunting for players to get back into an LCG if they’ve not bought content for it in a while.

CCG’s have always filled game shops and game halls at conventions with players.

Overall, ones desire to invest in an LCG is largely affected by why they enjoy CCG’s. If you’re the type of person who enjoys opening up booster packs to see what you find, if you enjoy the relative ease of getting into (and out of) the hobby, you may be frustrated with the LCG model. On the other hand, if you’re more interested in the game itself and tend to sidestep blind buy altogether, you may find LCG’s a really enjoyable alternative!

If you’ve got an interesting story to share or a point of view you think people shouldnt ignore, drop us a mail at cardboardquest @ gmail.com with the concept and writing sample and you too could find a plot of land in the Cardboard Quest Kingdom!