Muscling into the CCG market

You can't. Hasbro has time, money and mindshare on their side and they are actively interested in keeping it that way. As one individual you cannot bring enough of those resources yourself to bear against that. Bring too little, and you get ignored to death, bring enough to present a credible threat and the beast will move to crush you.

Go digital. Hearthstone etc.

>>52674425
I don't think Hasbro has actually ever crushed a credible threat to MtG, what with the few credible threats still existing and all.

Getting a card game going would take a lot. Magic, YGO, and Pokemon occupy a lot of if not all of the available CCG space in America (and the West). Being different is half correct, being a LCG is all wrong, but it's mostly money I think.

First, LCGs. They're not CCGs, they're board games. I think they were the right idea, since you made one monetary investment and only had to buy expansions, but they didn't do what CCGs did. There was no customization. No changing meta. No opening a pack and getting that one rare card to use/sell. And no constant money stream into the company making them. Those last two are important. Magic prints new material so people can waste money on boosters, either because they like opening packs or they like reselling cards. This supports Wizards/Hasbro, and the second hand market. LCGs are board games, and have the same problem with retention.
>buy a LCG instead of that CCG
>you only buy it once
>no wasting money
Yeah, for that one game. Like any other board game, it competes with the other games you and your friends have, and keep buying more of.

As far as being different... I do think that's important. You have to be different enough to not just be Magic in some way, but familiarity helps. I think rather than being different, you have to be good. Magic has a core set of rules that are specific enough to deal with hundreds of different situations, but broad enough to teach (life, attack, basic stack mechanics), so each set can have its own mechanics independent from another set and still work with them. Decide what kind of game feel you want, and then workshop mechanics that contribute to that feel and allow the game to function mechanically.

But mostly, you're fighting money and finance. CCG players already dump a lot of money into their game(s). You have a market of people who have spend hundreds if not thousands of dollars on a game that will outlast yours statistically, and has proven its staying power [cont.]

>>52674597
the staying power of YGO and Pokemon doesn't come from the card game or the mechanics though - it's entirely from the anime/games.

>>52675252

This. For smaller games, the LCG model is the way to go.

>>52675252
against competitors and its own low points. You have to be
>A good game that works
>Different enough from Magic in some way
>Close enough to established card games
>Able to regularly put out content
>Able to market to your intended audience successfully

A story would help with investment. Magic hooks people in with characters and plots. L5R and Magi Nation had stories that were affected by tournament results. People tend to invest in ideas, characters, and ideologies almost as much as they get invested in money spent.

Japan puts out a lot of CCGs. Of the dozen I could name, none of them would work in the West because they all use anime art. That's just a fact. I'd wager that even if the art was tasteful, not pedo, and of a high quality, your potential market would be decimated by the fact that it's a "weeb game".

Likewise, being "different" from Magic isn't but is the answer. Force of Will was basically weeb Magic, but with the land problem solved and with a commander/avatar/figurehead piloting each deck. That game... didn't immediately fail in the West, and complaints I heard were centered around balancing issues and product space on shelves.

>>52675327
Yeah, I agree. If you want to make a game with cards and aren't hellbent on that CCG experience/market, make a LCG. Or a deckbuilder.

>>52675327
If you are content to just be a one-off game that'll drop off the face of the earth after a while, because LCGs don't relly grow

>>52675537

A small but reliable success is better than a big old failure, as far as I'm concerned. It's impossible to break into the CCG market, and unless people are already invested in a game they're loathe to buy boosters. Settling for a limited run of a boxed card game, perhaps with a couple of expansions, is a more realistic thing to aim for.

>>52675419
I think the way to do it would be the release model of a game like Ascension with the customization of an LCG.

I wouldn't even know where to start if I wanted to buy into Netrunner right now, for example. There are apparently something like five or six cycles of six packs plus deluxe expansions and core sets that are all legal. It's a clusterfuck that defeats the whole purpose of a stand alone LCG.

Ascension meanwhile consistently delivers expansions that are entirely functional as stand alone games that just happen to be backwards compatible with all their other products. Unfortunately, though, it's still basically just a deckbuilder and there's only so much staying power there.

If you had a combination of the two, however, you'd be releasing an annual product that would work as an entry point for new players and as part of a rotating format, but it would all be backwards compatible so you could support a legacy format too.

You still wouldn't 'muscle in' on MtG and it's 20+ years of development, but you'd have a product that could eventually grow into a viable competitor.