Poll of the Day > man i had no idea how easy the quistis card is to get in ff8

(+) Yeah! (+)

i guess after disc 1 one of her groupies just plays it? I figured i'd have to do more than that.

looking it up a lot of these cards are easy to get. i never really bothered with the card game after the rules change, but maybe ill stick with it this time

If it weren't for the pain in the ass rules that change for like, no reason that card game would've been much better.
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Well, the card game would be ridiculously easy if they had no rules and it was basic the whole game. kind of like tic tac toe except instead of always tying you should always win. But I am not really complaining because its still fun even if easy.

The card game is actually the easiest way to break your characters. A lot of people talk about junctioning breaking the game, play the card game enough and you can break the game without ever needing to junction magic.
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I just kind of dislike the fact that all of these card games in various video games are almost always built around the idea of ante rules and winning/losing cards, because the original rules for Magic: the Gathering revolved around it - in spite of the fact that almost no one on planet Earth actually uses ante rules, and most people kind of hate them.

Magic's huge success led pretty much every CCG that came after to ape their design, and to the proliferation of card games with card collection and unique rules (as opposed to, say, playing something like blackjack or poker with a standard deck), but it also brought some of the negatives of the game with it.


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A lot of them are as simple as that (Zell's mom holds Zell's card, for example.)

The hard part is that later in the game, the rules start changing when you start playing with people from other villages / cities. And those rule changes will screw you over sooo bad
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upon looking up the havoc you can wreak with card modding i didnt realize you could break the game before you even left for dollet.

kinda weird. like im "breaking the game" because I can beat almost anybody with ease even if it takes a few minutes just by drawing stuff and junctioning. But I never really realized you can basically be "level 100" on disc 1 so soon.

I like 9s card game better

square did make a standalone triple triad game for pc recently, iirc
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The only rule that really sucks is random. The rest of the rules can be fun.

argonautweakend posted...

looking it up a lot of these cards are easy to get. i never really bothered with the card game after the rules change, but maybe ill stick with it this time

iirc, the character cards tend to be easy to get whereas some of the GFs were a bit harder.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

I just kind of dislike the fact that all of these card games in various video games are almost always built around the idea of ante rules and winning/losing cards, because the original rules for Magic: the Gathering revolved around it - in spite of the fact that almost no one on planet Earth actually uses ante rules, and most people kind of hate them.

tbh, how else are you going to gate cards in a lot of CCGs? If you have unique cards, it makes sense to play a NPC for them.

The only other thing you usually see -- and it's generally restricted to some dedicated CCG games (YGO, Pokemon, etc) -- is winning gives you currency to buy packs... however that means that the really rare stuff is either ungodly hard to get or annoyingly common, plus you lose out on unique cards.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Magic's huge success led pretty much every CCG that came after to ape their design, and to the proliferation of card games with card collection and unique rules (as opposed to, say, playing something like blackjack or poker with a standard deck), but it also brought some of the negatives of the game with it.

MtG's influence arguably didn't offer much inspiration to a lot of Asian CCGs yet those games also tend to have winning/losing cards. Also I've never liked the tendency to *everything* within a general hobby to the most popular early entry. MtG may have been the first wildly successful CCG, but certainly others had the idea for quite a while. A simple google search shows that back in 1979 people had suggested a similar system and, I would assume, that the ante idea in MtG probably comes from an older source.

likehelly posted...

I like 9s card game better

square did make a standalone triple triad game for pc recently, iirc

Tetra Master's mechanics always seemed a little confusing. I never got that into the game as a result. Plus did they keep doing in-game CCGs after that? Or did it die out there?

As for standalone TT, I remember wasting a lot of time on some of the fan games (and wasting money on Yahoo Auctions/ebay buying the Japanese-exclusive cards)
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Dikitain posted...

The card game is actually the easiest way to break your characters. A lot of people talk about junctioning breaking the game, play the card game enough and you can break the game without ever needing to junction magic.

This. You play your cards right (heh) and you can get OP with very little effort.
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You just game the card game to get cards good for refining items into magic or cards into magic themselves and junction it right?

Or do you mean no magic junctionng at all?

Cause i dont get how without junctioning magic unless im just being dumb

Zeus posted...

tbh, how else are you going to gate cards in a lot of CCGs? If you have unique cards, it makes sense to play a NPC for them.

There's lots of potential ways. Buy cards. Win them in fights. Have them as treasures you have to find. Have actual worked out treasure hunts or puzzles that involve multiple clues to acquire unique rewards. Have some sort of minigame system where you have to learn recipes and gather resources to craft them for yourself. Give the player new cards for winning games without taking old cards away for losing. And so on.

There's probably far more ways I could come up with if I spent more than a minute or two thinking about it, which is the sort of thing I'd probably do if I was planning to integrate any sort of card game into my larger game in the first place. Because if all you're going to do is half-ass things, why bother doing it at all?



Zeus posted...

The only other thing you usually see -- and it's generally restricted to some dedicated CCG games (YGO, Pokemon, etc) -- is winning gives you currency to buy packs... however that means that the really rare stuff is either ungodly hard to get or annoyingly common, plus you lose out on unique cards.

But again, that's just trying to mimic how things work in the real world, in spite of the fact that there's literally no reason why real world limitations or expectations need to apply when you're talking about a fantasy world where people will be flinging fireballs, healing the dead, or swinging 12-foot long swords about 20 minutes after the card game ends.

It's one thing if you're playing a game which is SOLELY built around the game (like Yu-Gi-Oh or Hearthstone), but if you're shoehorning the card game into a larger RPG (like with FFVIII, FFIX, or Gwent in The Witcher), you don't have to make it random distribution via card packs and rarity levels on cards just because that's how it works in the real world. It should be a fun diversion that you can resort to between combats or questing, not an entirely complex system of its own that often winds up being even more annoying than half the boss fights you've been dealing with (see also, the reason why I DON'T play Gwent in the Witcher, Caravan in Fallout: New Vegas, Pazaak in KotOR, and so on).

Doubly so in single player games, where there is absolutely zero reason to pursue deck parity between players or otherwise "balance" gameplay via random distribution. At least in a game like Hearthstone, it's understandable why you would want to maintain a level of randomness to keep a more level playing field (at least in theory) for multiple players.

Why CAN'T I have a deck entirely consisting of all of the most ridiculously rare one-in-a-million cards if the only people I'm playing against are NPCs, and none of the cards themselves actually exist in any way?


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Zeus posted...

MtG's influence arguably didn't offer much inspiration to a lot of Asian CCGs yet those games also tend to have winning/losing cards.

Most Asian CCGs absolutely owe a great deal of inspiration to M:tG. Yes, they may go about mechanics differently (though even there, some of those games don't stray all that far from Magic's resource mechanics), but most of them wouldn't currently exist if Magic hadn't kicked that particular door in when it did.

It's not a coincidence that the Pokemon card game debuted a couple years after Magic did (right at the same time a glut of other imitators flooded the market in the West), and Yu-Gi-Oh as a franchise debuted in the wake of the sudden boom in CCG popularity that Magic spawned.

And yes, a lot of those earlier games latched on to the idea of ante mechanics because they were much more important in early Magic, though they were later phased out for multiple reasons. But by that point, they'd already poisoned the well.



Zeus posted...

Also I've never liked the tendency to *everything* within a general hobby to the most popular early entry. MtG may have been the first wildly successful CCG, but certainly others had the idea for quite a while.

Like it or not, certain things often popularize trends or assumptions even if they didn't innovate them. Often it doesn't even necessarily have to be a virtue of the product itself - if something just happened to present a host of old ideas in precisely the right way at precisely the right time, it can easily spawn a fad through its own success. It's why the entire FPS genre used to be known as "Doom Clones", in spite of Doom not even remotely being the first FPS, nor influencing every FPS that followed, or otherwise being a potent bottleneck that can be used to separate the entire history of the genre into "pre" and "post" halves. Most FPS games today were either influenced by Doom, or influenced by a game that was influenced by Doom, or influenced by a game that was influenced by a game that was influenced by Doom, and so on.

In the same vein, there WERE variants and homebrew RPG systems in the world before D&D, but once D&D became a mainstream success, it effectively had an effect (either positive or negative) on nearly every RPG system designed since. Even RPGs that are radically different from D&D tend to only be that way because they're deliberately trying to avoid the archetypes that D&D established, and are thus still being influenced by it.

The major success of Magic at a time when it was relatively easy for imitators to get their own thinly-veiled clones (or radically different, well-designed alternatives like L5R) into the marketplace to try and grab a piece of the (seemingly massive) pie led to tons of games flooding the market. Many of those wound up sharing a lot of the traits of Magic because it was easy to just rip it off wholesale and change just enough to avoid copyright issues, rather than putting actual thought and effort into designing your own game. And even games that DID try to establish their own identity and rules still wound up picking up some assumptions and ideas from Magic even if it wasn't entirely intentional. Thus, a lot of the archetypes of Magic became default assumptions of the genre that future games just follow without thinking about it.

Magic absolutely did reshape the entire card game market as we knew it at the time. There's a reason why the term CCG even exists, when most card games in the marketplace prior to magic were more self-contained sets and systems (like Steve Jackson's Illuminati game). Magic mostly just took the idea of the self-contained card game and combined it with the collector mechanics of baseball cards, and created an entire new monster.


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Zeus posted...

A simple google search shows that back in 1979 people had suggested a similar system and, I would assume, that the ante idea in MtG probably comes from an older source.

The entire concept of ante wasn't really unique or innovative - it was mostly just a means of mimicking pot mechanics and wagers in normal card games (like poker or blackjack) without having to use actual money (especially because there was at least some intent to market CCGs to children).

In the same way loot box mechanics exist in video games to follow that model, because developers figured out that they can exploit gambling mechanics and make a ton of money while simultaneously avoiding restrictions and regulations that go hand-in-hand with gambling.

Magic didn't invent ante mechanics. But it certainly popularized it in ways that a lot of its early imitators absolutely followed. Magic didn't invent the idea of card packs and cards with different levels of rarity, but it definitely applied it to the idea of card games in ways that created a phenomenal and unrealized revenue model that other companies hungered to exploit for themselves.

And when dozens upon dozens of similar games flooded the market, they tended to establish the idea of what CCGs ARE, which in turn influenced how people modeled those games in a video game.


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Hurr durr why dont you two find a private place to have consensual relations of an intimate nature
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Mead posted...

Hurr durr why dont you two find a private place to have consensual relations of an intimate nature

We actually get together to cuddle-spoon every other week.

It's part of why we can actually disagree about things without immediately having to resort to insults and acting like cocknozzles, unlike some people.


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I dont appreciate the slur many of my ancestors were brave cocknozzles who fought and died for your right to post here
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Mead posted...

I dont appreciate the slur many of my ancestors were brave cocknozzles who fought and died for your right to post here

If you don't like it, why don't you go back to Cocknozzlandia where you belong?


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ParanoidObsessive posted...

Mead posted...

I dont appreciate the slur many of my ancestors were brave cocknozzles who fought and died for your right to post here

If you don't like it, why don't you go back to Cocknozzlandia where you belong?

No way all people there are lazy criminals
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ParanoidObsessive posted...

There's lots of potential ways. Buy cards. Win them in fights. Have them as treasures you have to find. Have actual worked out treasure hunts or puzzles that involve multiple clues to acquire unique rewards. Have some sort of minigame system where you have to learn recipes and gather resources to craft them for yourself. Give the player new cards for winning games without taking old cards away for losing. And so on.

There's probably far more ways I could come up with if I spent more than a minute or two thinking about it, which is the sort of thing I'd probably do if I was planning to integrate any sort of card game into my larger game in the first place. Because if all you're going to do is half-ass things, why bother doing it at all?

CCGs in those kinds of video games are a side mechanic. It's kind of silly to build up cards while doing nothing with that side mechanic. And sure, you could win cards without the possibility of losing cards yourself, but in-universe that seems unfair and breaks the experience. While I don't like the possibility of losing cards, it's less intrusive to the overall experience than those other methods which force you to do non-CCG things to play the CCG. As such, what you've suggested so far is just bad design.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

But again, that's just trying to mimic how things work in the real world, in spite of the fact that there's literally no reason why real world limitations or expectations need to apply when you're talking about a fantasy world where people will be flinging fireballs, healing the dead, or swinging 12-foot long swords about 20 minutes after the card game ends.

I hate that lazy argument because there are *always* some constants within any fantasy tying things to the real world because otherwise the whole thing just becomes jibberish.

Additionally, it's the existence of constants and real-world elements that make the other things seem more special. If you had a game where nobody had horses and everybody just rode dragons, suddenly dragons are just the new horse and you've sucked all the cool out of them. Or, for that matter, if you create a horse substitute that functions exactly like a horse you're usually just wasting time there.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Doubly so in single player games, where there is absolutely zero reason to pursue deck parity between players or otherwise "balance" gameplay via random distribution. At least in a game like Hearthstone, it's understandable why you would want to maintain a level of randomness to keep a more level playing field (at least in theory) for multiple players.

No balance, no fun. If I can win everything easily, what's the point of playing at all?

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Why CAN'T I have a deck entirely consisting of all of the most ridiculously rare one-in-a-million cards if the only people I'm playing against are NPCs, and none of the cards themselves actually exist in any way?

I thought you DIDN'T like the real world? >_> Unique, one-of-kind cards are something that doesn't usually happen in our world but it's kind of a standard for gaming.

Otherwise in-universe if you can easily obtain vastly overpowered cards, the question becomes why doesn't every NPC do the same? It just makes everything lame. However, if I have a deck with uber rares that are one-of-a-kind items which I had to win, it makes sense why I have the good shit and they don't (well, sense other than being "the chosen one" which is a lazy trope)
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ParanoidObsessive posted...

Most Asian CCGs absolutely owe a great deal of inspiration to M:tG. Yes, they may go about mechanics differently (though even there, some of those games don't stray all that far from Magic's resource mechanics), but most of them wouldn't currently exist if Magic hadn't kicked that particular door in when it did.

It's not a coincidence that the Pokemon card game debuted a couple years after Magic did (right at the same time a glut of other imitators flooded the market in the West), and Yu-Gi-Oh as a franchise debuted in the wake of the sudden boom in CCG popularity that Magic spawned.

And yes, a lot of those earlier games latched on to the idea of ante mechanics because they were much more important in early Magic, though they were later phased out for multiple reasons. But by that point, they'd already poisoned the well.

Showing that something is marketable and piggybacking off a trend (consisting of *more* than just MtG) isn't "inspiring" necessarily that thing. And most of the mechanics concerning sales almost directly derive from the long-standing trading card market.

The idea that CCGs would never exist if MtG didn't come along is silly and overly presumptious. In fact, it's entirely possible that another CCG *could* have occupied that same position because much of MtG's success was owed to the fact it was tapping into a then-untouched market. Had a simpler CCG come out years earlier, MtG probably wouldn't have managed to get a foothold at all because its early mechanics were often as confusing as they were awful (ie, banding, interrupts, etc).

ParanoidObsessive posted...

The major success of Magic at a time when it was relatively easy for imitators to get their own thinly-veiled clones (or radically different, well-designed alternatives like L5R) into the marketplace to try and grab a piece of the (seemingly massive) pie led to tons of games flooding the market. Many of those wound up sharing a lot of the traits of Magic because it was easy to just rip it off wholesale and change just enough to avoid copyright issues, rather than putting actual thought and effort into designing your own game. And even games that DID try to establish their own identity and rules still wound up picking up some assumptions and ideas from Magic even if it wasn't entirely intentional. Thus, a lot of the archetypes of Magic became default assumptions of the genre that future games just follow without thinking about it.

How many *actual* clones were there, though? A lot of the stuff running during the 90s didn't really seem that close to MtG. Decipher's SW game, for instance, had some confusing system involving a force pile and had segregated the cards into Light and Dark. Spellfire had some bizarre system where you won by playing kingdoms (which is probably why the thing was on the clearance rack).

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Magic absolutely did reshape the entire card game market as we knew it at the time. There's a reason why the term CCG even exists, when most card games in the marketplace prior to magic were more self-contained sets and systems (like Steve Jackson's Illuminati game). Magic mostly just took the idea of the self-contained card game and combined it with the collector mechanics of baseball cards, and created an entire new monster.

Which was an inevitability.
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ParanoidObsessive posted...

Magic didn't invent ante mechanics. But it certainly popularized it in ways that a lot of its early imitators absolutely followed. Magic didn't invent the idea of card packs and cards with different levels of rarity, but it definitely applied it to the idea of card games in ways that created a phenomenal and unrealized revenue model that other companies hungered to exploit for themselves.

If the claim is that the imitators copied the distribution, that's kind of a weak inspiration and a bit of a stretch to blame everything on MtG. It's certainly not on par with anime having its roots in Disney.

Mead posted...

Hurr durr why dont you two find a private place to have consensual relations of an intimate nature

Why is everything so psycho-sexual with you? And if you're going to insert yourself into a discussion, you could at least contribute to the discussion itself >_>
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oh man, I can't wait for gwent to release
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I always won in FFIX, but after Dollet(?) when the card game changes in VIII it got too hard.
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https://kotaku.com/you-can-now-play-triple-triad-on-your-phone-1725336939
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argonautweakend posted...

You just game the card game to get cards good for refining items into magic or cards into magic themselves and junction it right?

Or do you mean no magic junctionng at all?

Both are viable, but I was specifically talking with no junctioning at all.

The idea is (and I haven't done it in a long time so I don't remember all the details) that when you refine a rare card into items/magic those cards just end up back where you got them from. Since you can refine some cards into stat boost cards (or into items that can be converted into stat boost cards) you can essentially boost all but like one or two of your stats this way to maximum, meaning you don't need to junction to get the same deal.

That is the long way though, as each of those items only boost your stats a little. The short way is to refine cards into magic and junction.
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Bulbasaur posted...

https://kotaku.com/you-can-now-play-triple-triad-on-your-phone-1725336939

5 matches per 30 minutes is kinda ridiculous. Wish they'd just offer a flat rate for the full game instead of buying credits. If they still wanted to monetize, I'd be happy with a flat-rate for the full version with RWT available to people who extra chances at cards.
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