by Trent Hamm
Almost every gamer is familiar on some level with Magic: the Gathering. It's the grandaddy of collectible card games. First published in 1993, it introduced a lot of new concepts to the tabletop gaming world. The sheer idea that you can sit down across from someone and play a game with them where you truly didn't know the contents of the cards they were playing with opened up a whole new world of gaming. Not only that, by having a collectible aspect involved, players were actively encouraged to keep buying more and more and more of the cards to supplement their collections.Not surprisingly, there were fifty competitors for Magic on the market within a few years. All but a few of them died a quick deck. Many of those deaths were deserved, but there were several gems designed, published, and failed in that era.
Why? The big reason was that the flaws of collectiblity came to the surface. Collectible games with randomized packs can be a huge money sink. To build a truly competitive deck that can consistently beat your friends, you have to either buy a lot of packs or pay a card dealer for the single cards that you need. To a certain extent, collectible games are won by the player that invests the most money into the game.
Several years ago, Fantasy Flight Games came up with a strong solution for this problem, which they dubbed Living Card Games. In a Living Card Game, there's a core starter set that provides the basic cards you need to play the game. On top of that, there are expansions that provide known sets of additional cards you can add to your game.
For the most part, LCGs revolve around games in which players assemble decks beforehand, then play against each other in a game of some sort where the players don't know exactly what cards their opponent is playing with.
Thus far, Fantasy Flight has released six games with this model: Call of Cthulhu, Game of Thrones, Warhammer: Invasion, The Lord of the Rings, Android: Netrunner (my written review, my video review), and Star Wars, with rumors of at least one more coming in the fairly near future.
Other games have slowly been adopting this same method, or variations on it. Mage Wars and Summoner Wars both employ modifiable player decks and both have non-collectible expansions that add to one's collection. One can look at Dominion's expansions (and the expansions for other deckbuilding games) as using this method, though in Dominion players aren't actually assembling their own decks of cards before they play. One could argue that role playing games have been doing this for years, with the core rules serving as a core set and scenarios and rules supplements serving as expansions with known quantities of information. Many miniatures games adopt this model as well.
LCGs do several things very well. They take the variable and asymmetric gameplay from the best collectible card games. They do away with the collectibility chase. They provide a very straightforward way for new players to get involved, via the "core" or starter sets, and they make it easy to expand your gameplay in small steps at a very low price.
Criticisms
Now that we've seen the "LCG" model in play with a variety of games, it's worthwhile to step back and take a critical look at the challenges with using such a model.
Expansion Overkill
Currently, Fantasy Flight Games is using a model of releasing small monthly packs to expand their LCGs. In some ways, this is brilliant, as it allows players to explore the game at a slow rate as the game grows, and the expenditures along the way are small. The individual LCG chapter packs cost $10 to $15, which is low enough to qualify as an impulse buy for most gamers, and they each do provide an interesting expansion for the game.
The problem comes in when the game matures a bit. When new players dive into an LCG that's been around for a while, they pick up the starter set, as might be expected. What comes next, though? If packs come out every month, that means there are thirty six expansions out when a player is ready for more. That can feel like an insurmountable wall.
For me, Game of Thrones is the poster child for this problem. Game of Thrones is currently on its ninth cycle of small expansions, with each cycle including six small expansions. That's 54 small expansions. Add on top of that the six larger expansions that the game has seen and you're looking at sixty expansions to catch up.
Now, for a player already into the game, that amount of variability is intoxicating, and it's certainly attractive to me on some level. However, it's intimidating on several levels.
First of all, it's expensive. If you can get each expansion for an average of $12, that's $720 to catch up on all expansions. Now, most players aren't going to do that - they're just going to pick and choose. However, picking and choosing is still quite expensive.
Second, it can turn into a scavenger hunt. Your local game store will almost assuredly not have all of the packs on hand. Your typical online store will be missing some as well, particularly those with in-demand tournament cards. It can be hard to find the packs you want.
Unlevel Playing Field
The "expansion overkill" problem extends to the gameplay as well. Many of the best decks in the more established LCGs draw on cards across expansion cycles. In order to reconstruct the top-tier decks from tournaments, you have to hunt down a wide variety of packs. If you don't do so, you're at a competitive disadvantage in any sort of competitive play.
If this all sounds a lot like a recreation of the CCG problem, you're right. In order to play competitively, you have to invest a lot of money and do a lot of shopping around.
Lack of Organized Play
Thus far, the makers of LCGs have shown limited initiative in terms of getting organized play started up. There is no overarching structure to get people involved in playing LCGs at local stores.
Magic: the Gathering and, to a lesser extent, Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, and World of Warcraft TCG, have seen success thanks in large part to their efforts in terms of organized play.
This does not exclusively refer to tournaments, either. Although tournament play is a big part of the equation with those games, much of the success has come from introductory events such as "Friday Night Magic" and prerelease tournaments.
In those events, the competition level of the game is toned way down to make it as friendly as possible for new players. There are also a lot of desirable small prizes given away, such as unique foil cards and other game tchotchkes.
These events really succeed, though, because they allow players to meet each other, congregate, and form a stronger community. It can be very difficult to find new players of an LCG in your community outside of the game group you already have without the active support of a local game shop. Events such as Friday Night Magic make it very easy for a local shop to provide that sort of community building and player interaction that makes a game thrive.
LCG players have almost no way of meeting up unless they happen to find each other online or their local store is incredibly active in making it happen on their own. This makes it very hard for local communities to thrive, and it is those local communities, where you play against a variety of players and face a variety of challenges, that make customizable games really thrive.
Lack of "Limited" Play
One of the truly clever things that Magic: the Gathering has pulled off is to turn one of the big negatives - randomized packs - into one of its big positives through the growth of sealed and draft formats.
These formats thrive on the randomness of Magic packs, as it turns the contents of those packs into a skill-testing adventure. You have to be able to properly evaluate the cards in the pack and make selections out of that very limited card set.
Sealed and draft are both competitive environments that require very little investment for players to get involved with. For the cost of three booster packs (roughly $10), players can have an evening of fun and still end up with the cards themselves. This drastically increases the value that players can get out of boosters.
LCGs, where the contents of the packs are known, make this type of play extremely difficult and much less rewarding. Without random packs, the format doesn't really work at all.
This can be solved in a way if a player is willing to invest the time to create a "draft cube" for the LCG, in which some number of cards are collected to make a sealed or drafting environment, but it requires a very large card pool to essentially be devoted to this format (because building and then disassembling a draft cube is a lot of work). Still, this is not an optimal solution by far.
Fixing the Criticisms
How can Fantasy Flight (and other companies) fix these problems?
Improved Game Store and Convention Support
Fantasy Flight and other makers of customizable non-random card games should do everything they can to help local game stores build communities for their LCGs.
The first step in that process would be to roll out an organized series of game nights, akin to "Friday Night Magic," where players can meet up at a certain time at local stores to meet other players and play games. As an additional incentive to draw players into the store, the game manufacturers should provide kits that include giveaways that will encourage players to show up.
For example, if Fantasy Flight wanted to build up Android: Netrunner, they could provide local game stores with a new foiled or holographic promo card each month to give away at their game nights, starting (perhaps) with the identity cards from the core set. Each player that shows up and participates in a match on "LCG Thursdays" (or whatever it is) gets one of these nifty promo cards.
A second step would be to organize league play or tournaments at the local level. Again, the company could offer prize support to the local store to encourage players to participate, and the players would reward the store with patronage and the company with increased purchases. Tournament or league prizes could include things like entry into larger tournaments run by FFG, rare promotional cards (again, not new in terms of gameplay, but rare in terms of design, such as foil identity cards), or credit at the local store.
A third step would be to offer unique play opportunities at the store level. Provide stores with "tournament packs" that enable limited-style play and encourage the stores to run tournaments and events using these packs. You could essentially give stores a pre-made "draft cube" and have them use it in store-run events, providing players a unique play style that draws them into the stores.
Fantasy Flight is taking small steps in this direction, but they could go much further without a significant increase in cost. You only need a single liasion or two to make this really start moving forward.
"Catch-Up" Sets
To make the complication of "catching up" significantly easier on players, Fantasy Flight should offer "catch-up" sets that box up the 360 cards found in a given cycle in a single bare-bones box. They could continue to release the individual packs on a monthly basis, but when they go out of print after several months, release a single "catch-up" pack that encompasses the whole cycle.
This greatly reduces the problem of "catching up" for collectors and players. It makes it much easier for new players who discover the core set a few years into the game to catch up to a complete card set in a relatively short period of time, should they choose to do so.
Established Constructed Deck Formats
One of the big challenges when it comes to "catching up" is that the LCGs each only really have one "format" for constructed gameplay. Essentially, you can use three of any card ever printed (with the exception of any banned or restricted cards).
The problem with this is that it forces new competitive players to buy lots and lots of older cards. This pushes new players away from participating and slowly chokes off the growth of LCGs over time. New players can't just go online, download new deck lists, and quickly build them from cards that are easily available. They have to have hundreds of dollars invested in old packs to do this.
The solution is to champion a rotating format. Major tournaments should only allow cards from the core set and the last small handful of expansions. In Fantasy Flight's case, they should just allow cards from the core set, cards from the last large expansion, and cards from the current pack cycle and the previous one.
What does this achieve? It lowers the barrier of entry for new players. It makes it much easier for people who enjoy trying out the best tournament decks, which also pulls them into more involvement with the game. It creates a tournament environment that doesn't stagnate because the card pool shuffles so much.
This doesn't prevent the presence of "classic" tournaments where all cards are allowed. In fact, game manufacturers and organizers should run both types at large conventions such as Gencon. It just reduces the size of the card pool for the primary focus of play.
Conclusion
Customizable card games, whether "living" or collectible, thrive on customization, and customization only thrives in the presence of a healthy and growing community. There are many aspects of how LCGs are manufactured and promoted that not only ignore this aspect of things, but in some ways choke off the ability of such a community to grow.
Game manufacturers should never stop looking at a game through the eyes of a brand new player. What is going to draw a player into, say, Game of Thrones? There are literally several dozen expansions sitting on the shelves, the decks a player might read about online are unbuildable without buying a ton of these expansions, the presence of a local community is very far from a sure thing, and there are few ways for that player to get their feet wet in the game without a close pal willing to dive into the game as well.
Manufacturers can prevent all of these problems with a few simple steps, creating an accessible play environment that will draw in new players and create a thriving environment with lots of happy players (and customers).