Mana Systems

>>54785814

Resource generation in card games is tricky. One option I like which has turned up in a few games is that any card can be used as a 'Land' equivalent, placed face down or upside down or some such.

Discarding cards is also an option, or milling cards from the deck. Having a 'pool' of face down cards that you use for resources would be interesting, since you could also manipulate it, add to it or take cards out of it as a general mechanic in the game.

There are also games which don't really use resource systems. Epic, the small box MtG-alike, just has each player able to cast any number of Silver spells and one Gold spell every turn. That is the extent of the resource mechanic in that game. It works surprisingly well.

>>54785857

What was that manga about card games? I like the idea of defeated monsters givning you a resource you can use. I havn't kept up with it but I recall one chapter where this was used with a card that used the soul crystals to activate it's abilities to devestating affect

"I pay half my life points to summon"
"I use 2 soul gems to nuke your creature and deal it's attack to you in HP damage"
"I summon it back to your field"
"I nuke it again and deal it's attack to you in HP damage"

>>54785814
Duel Masters has my favorite mana system. Each turn, after the draw phase and before the main phase, you have the mana phase, where you can play any card from your hand as mana. Cards tap for their own color, and any multicolor mana card enters play tapped. 5 color cards provide no mana. Cards don't have mana weight, you just pay 1 mana of each color, and a total of other mana to reach the cost. Ramp usually involves placing more cards from the hand into mana, or milling into your mana zone. A form of removal is turning creatures into mana.

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I've been homebrewing my own game for a while now. Essentially, you start each turn with 4 mana produced by your character, plus 1 for each creature you have in play. Each mana produced matches the elemental type of the creature that produced it.
>>54785857
Do you have any examples of games that use the discard-for-mana system? I toyed with the idea for a while, but it seemed to make card draw excessively important.

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Which do you prefer, /tg/: colored (MTG or Pokemon) or uncolored mana?

>>54786345
Colored mana, but with Force of Will's/Duel Masters's methods of consistancy or Elements's stockpiling rules.

>>54786405
Agreed: colored mana is a good way to establish multiple play styles/color identities. Plus, I've never liked diluting my deck with land cards, so FoW's second mana stone deck makes me happy.

>>54786529
Yeah. I personally like how Duel Masters rebalanced the colors (Light is "lifegain", blockers, and spell synergies; Water is card draw, bouncing, and evasive attackers; Dark is self-sacrificing aggro and standard kill spells, discard spells, and mill spells; Fire is fast, efficient attackers (sometimes wkth drawbacks) and removal with limited targets (small creatures only, blockers only, etc.); and Nature is slow, bulky creatures and mana manipulation)

>>54786529
Speaking of diluting decks, did anyone ever play an online card game called Legacy of heroes? I remember that one of the deck archetypes involved shuffling copies of detrimental cards from outside the game into your enemy's deck.

MTG, no troll.

Obviously screw/flood are problems, but only in the context of a given environment. You can look at modern burn where if you draw 5+ lands you just lose the game and ya that's problems, or some limited formats where fixing is bad and getting stuck on 2 is game over and ya that's bad. You also have standard formats like when khans/new zendikar were legal when you had fetches and fetchable duals and tapped trilands and the mana was good enough that the question was how much did you want to slow yourself down to get good mana, and with cards like flip-jace and charms it was very consistent to have a functional draw. You can also look at legacy, where brainstorm+fetchlands makes for an incredibly consistent mana situation, where you can comfortably play 4 colors in a midrange deck as long as you're okay with leaving yourself open to wasteland.

Basically, I don't think there's anything inherently bad about MTG's mana system so long as it is implemented properly and it's particularity is accounted for, and it opens up an unbelievable depth of gameplay and deckbuilding that every other resource system that tries to "fix" it only ends up simplifying and dumbing down.

>>54787076
Isn't that like, ver-batim magic's color pie identities? That doesn't seem like rebalancing so much as re-using

>>54787786
>starts by admitting the resource system sucks and how
>fixing it is just dumbing it down

You are why we can't have nice things. You, the battered, stockholm syndromed idiot, who has to feel smug and superior about his choice of hobby to everyone else, so he invents ways to think about the faults of his game in a way to feed his ego.

My system is that any card can be played as normal or as a resource, and playing a card either way consumes one "action point". Each player gets three action points per turn by default. Instead of producing consumable energy once per turn, resources reduce the energy cost of cards by 1 each, and playing a card whose energy cost has gone negative will cause you to gain consumable energy points that persist between turns. Cards that have been turned into resources can also be played as their normal form but for a greater energy cost.

>>54787836
They split up blue's role a bit (spell synergy to white, mill purely in black), refocused white to not have weenies or token swarm and be the defense color, replaced red's burn spells with low-cost limited-scope killspells, and balanced a lot of effects around the highly nonstandard life system. Self-mill is mostly red.

The game was inspired by Magic, but made to fix some of its glaring flaws (like lands existing, and how powerful artifacts are as a card type).

.Hack//Enemy had a good resource system. Cards in play were 'spotted' for their element, or card type, and it allowed other cards to be played. With a single card play a turn, it had a fluid sort of turn to turn style to it.

>>54785814
There was a Megaman NT Warrior card game that did something rather fascinating. Cards would have different shapes/colors or character sigils on them, and having any in play acted as unlimited material, so instead of a resource management it was like a resource threshold.

See also: Zatch Bell's card game, wherein the game is unique because your deck is stacked and you gain MP by milling/turning pages, with the end of your "book" being game over.