LogFAQs > #932481095

WhiskeyDisk posted...

I've got to be honest. I've...never understood the entire TCG thing. I can deal with luck based factors, I have no issues with dice or gambling. I also have no problem with known boards with known pieces and known rules.

All that being said, TCGs always seemed to me like playing chess, except pulling the pieces out of a bag like Scrabble, but everyone gets to bring their own bag, which itself is a PTW/gacha in building the bag you bring.

Kind of. But that's the appeal - different players get to play in different ways. Someone who wants to play with a massive army of giant creatures (sort of in the Yu-Gi-Oh! mold) and someone who mostly wants to play fast burn/hand denial (the way I used to play) can both enjoy the game. Without that flexibility, I probably never would have gotten into it - I definitely never got into any of the other games that came out around that same period where they came with two pre-made decks, one for each player (ie, I have a Star Wars box set where one player played as the Rebels/Light Side and the other player played Imperials/Dark Side, and you just took both decks out of the same box and played without buying any extra cards).

Personally, I started out with a deck that was mostly smaller creatures, healing, and some minor direct damage (white/black), but eventually gravitated to an extremely creature-light, powerful damage spell-heavy deck that only healed by stealing life from the opponent and mostly just tried to murder them as quickly as possible (red/black). I also had a blue/black Millstone deck that existed solely to make the opponent discard all their cards, preventing them from actually doing anything until they lose by running out of cards (I called it my "No Fun" deck). At the moment, my main decks are a white/red deck that balances healing with spell attacks (still almost no creatures, only spells), and a white/black vampire deck I made that is built around a combo that causes infinite damage to everyone at the table who isn't me.

It also depends on who you play with, and how you play. I almost always play in games with 4-6 players, who are playing casually, using the old rules from the 90s (when we all learned how to play), and none of us play in tournaments (where everyone is way too serious and there's a huge pay-to-win factor involved in getting competitive decks). If I was playing in hardcore 1-on-1 professional circuit circles, I'd be playing very different decks (and not actually having any fun).

In my group, you could easily buy a single pre-made deck for $20-30 or so and be somewhat competitive (and a few boosters/individual card purchases would make you very competitive). There isn't a huge financial investment unless you want it to be. Conversely, there are people who probably spend hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars every year to get new cards, as the tournament scene only allows cards from the last block or two (ie, the last couple years).

Though my personal favorite CCG of all time was Legend of the Five Rings. Because that was a game where they would literally take the results of various tournaments and RPG sessions at conventions, and would integrate those results into the overarching plot of the story. So if Lion decks were beating Dragon decks in tournaments, then in the story the Lion would start to press into Dragon territory. If players were playing a lot of tainted cards in Crane decks, then in the plot the Crane were being corrupted by the Shadowlands. And so on. To the point where some players would literally play non-competitive decks or sub-optimal builds solely to attempt to influence the overall metaplot.

L5R actually built to a final tournament, where the deck the winner was playing would determine who became Emperor in-universe. The developers actually wrote an ending to the story for every clan, and put them in envelopes, which they then tore up when the last player with a deck from that clan was eliminated from the tournament (at GenCon). It was an incredibly huge deal, with an incredibly invested player-base, at a time when that sort of thing was almost completely unheard of:

http://www.alderac.com/2019/12/16/the-day-of-thunder-part-1-the-history-of-aeg-11
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family