What are you favorite combat systems in TCGs/CCGs, especially

Duel Masters had a pretty great combat dynamic.

Limiting blocking was pretty weird, and some colors not getting blockers was pretty stupid,
but choosing between attacking your oppoennt or killing their attackers always felt meaningful.

Creatures can attack any other creature, but that attack can be dodged by the target or blocked by another creature. Blocking and dodging require tapping.

>>51173520
>>51172987
I understand why people like systems where creatures cannot be attacked outright, but I'm also afraid it makes the game too removal-dependent, since a powerful passive effect requires immediate response.

>>51173577
>I understand why people like systems where creatures cannot be attacked outright,
And again, take a look at Duel Masters. Only tapped creatures can be attacked.

Two interesting consequences of this:
• creatures with "important" effects often don't contribute beats, final swing notwithstanding
• "tap target creature" effects work like soft removal against weak utility

>>51172838
Personally, I always liked DBZ combat- it's more back and forth in terms of turn structure.
A takes an action.
B can respond
B takes an action.
A can respond.

Are you the guy in some card game thread on /v/ a few weeks ago that I answered with a big post on why direct combat sucks shit? Your game was about hackers or something.
>>51173577
If powerful passive effects are too powerful you can limit them, it's more interesting if passive effects are all weak but can slowly morph how the game plays over the course of the match rather than if they have to basically win you the game if they don't give you any immediate impact or are slapped onto a sizeable body like in hearthstone.

Another thing you can do is make weak passive effects able to work from cover while making powerful passive effects only work if your dude is vulnerable. Like if you had the duel masters combat system, an effect like "you gain 5% of your starting life back each turn" can obviously work without putting your dude into the fray, but a powerful effect like "double your life total each turn" could have the additional clause "as long as this card is tapped". You still need a fast response, but dudes function as a response, and a really big vanilla creature would also require a fast response lest you start bleeding really fast.

There was also one game where creatures had speeds and they couldn't be attacked by anything with less speed than themselves.

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>>51172838
Designing card games is actually pretty fun, and is great for learning how to develop games. I tried (twice) to make a card game with /m/.

The first I was not super heavily involved in creating the rules, and it had a very strange combat system that you targeted opposing units to attack, and damage persisted between turns. The closest tcg equivalent I think was probably Magination. It was atrocious. Games were long, tedious grinds, and because we combined summoning sickness with targeted attacks, it was nearly impossible to recover from a losing position, but it also took a damn long time to kill someone because the 'correct' attacks were always on the units your opponent played. And people kept confusing how combat worked.

When I tried (again, unsuccessfully) to reboot the game, I revamped the resource and card flow systems, but for combat I basically copied mtg's system, minus tapping to attack. People were able to grok how it worked very quickly, and were able to explore the differences from a familiar starting point. However, while there was steady card creation contributions, the game died because very few people actually played it. I'm not sure if it was the interface (lacky), the lack of serious tcg players in /m/, or the game system itself (although I am still quite fond of the system).

My experiences are:
a) mtg's system, between defender choosing blocks and units being unable to defend after attack, is practically custom built to create ground stalls.
b) you don't want to get too far from what people are familiar with. Attacking is the most complex aspect of any card games, and the more streamlined and intuitive you can make it, the better. This leads into
c) know your audience. What kind of games have they been most exposed to? Try to adapt something from that game to fit into the combat system. For example, if they know poker, maybe have a single attack combining different cards.

At the word limit, so hopefully something here helps.

What kind of uni projects let you make games anyway?

>>51180401
I'm not in uni and I'm designing my own games

I wouldn't pick TRADING/COLLECTIBLE card game structure, but maybe it's literally required of him.


Show me a card game that's balanced but modular and DOESN'T require me to buy ten teen thousand expansion packs

I love the DBZ card game to death, even if it's a VERY different game than MTG.

Most of the stuff you have in hand is Attacks and Blocks. At the start of your turn, you draw 3 cards. At the end of your turn, you discard down to a single card. Thus, if you don't use cards they are going to be lost.

If you choose to go into battle with another player, they draw 3 cards.

This creates an interesting dynamic. Defenders have more cards (Generally) and one card they KNOW is good. However, attackers get to choose to not attack meaning that you'll rarely go into battle with a bad hand. Attack generally has an advantage over defence but it's not certain.

Blocks stop attacks 1:1 (Generally) and have no cost (Generally) while attacks more commonly have a cost (Especially energy attacks). As a result, there is a lot of psychology about WHEN to throw out your biggest attack. It's no use throwing out a 8 life card hit first if he stops it with a block. On the other hand, you can bait him into thinking you have a bigger card later in hand when you are running mostly blocks and the attack will slip through.

On that topic: You don't have a normal life score for the DBZ card game. Damage you take is taken in the form of cards right off the top of your deck. This means that people are constantly running down over the course of the game so stalling just means you are both getting closer to losing from being too exhausted to fight.

Except against Namekians. Fucking Namekians.

>>51175719
Yeah, that was probably me, but I might have left the thread before you've posted, since I don't remember your response.

I like the idea that passive effects are stronger when the card is vulnerable, but at the same time you can just have an activated ability with "T" as a cost, so the creature becomes vulnerable when you activate it.

>>51180401
Compare and contrast UI design between a desktop app and a phone app on an example.

>>51180545
I was actually thinking about using the deck as a life counter, because my game starts to have too much counters anyway.

>>51180545
>Namekians
That doesn't make sense though. It's the androids that never get tired. Namekians just have regeneration, which is limited.

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>>51185614

Well, your life deck is a combination of 'Tired' and 'Actual injuries'. Namakians get generation based on the latter.

The Androids represent it in a different way.

This is android 18s base form. That ability she has there is staggeringly powerful because 99% of physical cards are AT (Attack table. Comparing respective power levels. Generally resulting in 1-3 for the base damage) + X. Where X can be as much as +5 very easily.

So the androids (Mostly 18 but all of them to some degree) are staggeringly good at passively no-selling attacks as they are that tough. 18 gets tougher and tougher as her level rises (Getting to 'if your power level is over 1, your opponents attacks can't be modified), 16 can take both hero and villian cards and do a lot of deck searching for them. 19 steals your opponents power levels and drains them into his own.

17...runs people the fuck over with his van. It allows him to remove ally cards from the game (And bring them back if they are an android ally so he can put all his friends in the van and then bring them back out later)

>>51185775

I am not remotely kidding about the Van btw.

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>>51185813

And I forgot my damn image.

What problems are there with having everything being instant (including combat actions)?

I've never liked having a mixture of instant and non-instant actions because it makes some decks more interactive than others, and no instants like hearth stone isn't interactive all.