SCG4 Update
Sunday, August 12, 2012 at 6:36PM It's been over a year since I said anything about "Sirlin Card Game #4," the customizable but not-collectable game that I've been kicking around for over a decade now. Over the last year it's solidified quite a bit and gotten a lot of polish, too. If you happen to be going to PAX Prime this year, you can find me at the Game Salute booth to maybe get a chance to play it.
I thought I'd share a bit about a design problem that I kind of accidentally stumbled into an answer for. That's how things happen sometimes. First, the things that have explicitly been goals all along:
1) Make a game that would be interesting to play for 10+ years without any new cards being released.
2) No mana-screw.
3) Inject some "characters" into the game.
I won't say much about points 2 or 3. Regarding "no mana-screw," hopefully it doesn't take much explanation to see why you wouldn't want to randomly be locked out of even *playing* in a supposed strategy game. Point 3 is a matter of preference, and I just think it feels better to have characters and personalities to connect with in a game. This one was hard to figure out, but the current implementation really adds to actual gameplay as well as feel, so it worked out well.
It's #1 that's the real big one. If we can't rely on new cards every 3 months, it means the game actually has to hold up past that point on its own merits. If we can't rely on the metagame constantly changing, it means the game itself will need to have enough depth to support years of play at a very high level. In order to make that possible, the codenamed SCG4 gives you access to a much larger set of effects than you'd normally have during a game of any other customizable card game. More than you can use in any single game session, on purpose. And furthermore, much finer control over when you draw those effects. These two things together mean that you have much more *versatility* in how you play any given game. You can pursue pretty different strategies even without changing decks, and you can change which strategy you are pursuing during the course of a game--in response to how your opponent is changing his strategy.
Customizing Out the Fun
So that's all just great, isn't it. But a while ago, I forget how long, maybe a year or year-and-half ago there was a problem in the back of mind with this. The decks I was building for playtests were fun and all, but I was looking for that fun. I generally included about three different sets of strategies in these decks, and that was very good for gameplay. But what if a player who was playing to win built a much more boring and shallow deck? What if someone made a deck with only 1 strategy, but it was 20% more effective than any of my individual 3 strategies would be? We could debate which is actually a smarter idea, but if there is any chance that the more boring and shallow version is more capable of winning, that's going to really suck for the game.
Before going on, we should take a look at the more general problem that exists in all CCGs: unfair matchups are not only common, but often considered a good idea. If you can develop some deck that has really strong matchups vs several decks, but really weak matches vs only a few, you did a great job as a deckbuilder. You might win the tournament even, but you will have possibly played all unfair matchups, one way or another. For a more concrete example, a friend of mine told me about a Magic tournament he entered where he expected the (red) Goblins deck to be *most* of the field. He built a super hate deck directly against Goblins that included 12 maindeck protection from red cards, just for starters. He gave little thought to beating non-Goblins decks, though probably he had a sideboard to help as much as he could against those.
He told a pro player at the event that his deck was almost 10-0 vs goblins. The pro player said uh no it isn't, so they played several games. Eventually, the pro conceded that he didn't see a way that goblins could win at all, ever, vs that deck because it was just so extreme. My friend got 5th, but only due to an unlucky draw at the end. The bracket had: goblins, goblins, goblins, goblins, u/w control, and him, and he happened to face u/w control. He placed high, and he could have won the entire thing. What's most notable here is that 100% of his matches had bad gameplay. In every case, when he sat down to the table, one player or the other had overwhelming advantage.
Losing Before You Even Sit Down at the Table
Let me use the word "gameplay" to mean the part where you sit down at the table and play cards until someone loses. You could say "gameplay" also includes deckbuilding and metagame choices, but let's not, because then I'd just need some other word for when you sit down and play cards. The part where you sit down and play cards--the "gameplay"--really should be as generally fair as we can make it. I don't see it as a virtue that 8-2 or worse matchups are frequent things. It's clearly a bad property when fighting games have lots of highly unfair matchups, and it's something we work hard to fix there, rather than applaud.
But what can you DO about this? (Sideboards barely count as a good answer. They do literally nothing for game 1 of a match.) Deckbuilding is fun and captures the imagination, and that's what we're running up against here: deckbuilding is allowing unfair matchups to exist and to be common, even. If we limit deckbuilding, that sounds less fun. And so I didn't even really try to solve this problem, I just kind of gave up on it. And then something happened. Two ideas looked a lot alike, it was a clue.
When All Decks Really Interact...
In pursing that goal #1 of making the game interesting to play for years and years, we have to care a lot about your interaction with the opponent. You really need a lot more interaction than you get in most CCGs. There just has to be more to it if you're hanging your hat on the depth of gameplay of a single deck giving you YEARS of strategy space to play in. So what about cases where what you're trying to do is so different from what your opponent is trying to do that you hardly interact at all? I have joked amongst playtesters that we "force you to have fun" by making it not really possible to do that. You pretty much have to interact. And if we theorized about this or something, we might think oh that really limits what you can make! You can't make some solitaire thing that has no interaction at all. In actually playing it though, it feels the opposite of limited. Because the general game system has a lot more decisions going on than in other CCGs, "I feel so limited," doesn't come to mind, at least not to me. If anything, you have a wealth of choices and oh by the way, you can't go off in the corner and completely ignore what your opponent is doing.
Another way of putting this is that there's an illusion and reality that are at odds here. If we allow you make solitaire decks, it feels like that's more choice. In reality though, it's allowing choices that hurt the quality of the game overall as an interesting strategy game that can last years. It's like wanting freedom in your country, and saying part of that freedom is to murder people indiscriminately. In that case "more freedom" is a somewhat misleading label.
Limiting Deckbuilding to Create MORE Viable Decks
Back to the whole deckbuilding thing: it's exactly the same there. What if players want "more freedom" to build decks that cause the game to overall have a lot worse strategy? Wait...why are we allowing that? Deckbuilding is fun and exciting, but it has that same illusion, unfortunately. When you have more and more cards and more and more freedom to make anything, the illusion is that you get more and more choices. But what is more common is that you get more and morely likely to degenerate into just a very few choices, or one choice. Just imagine a CCG with 550 cards that you can combine however, and how many tournament viable decks there are going to be in that game. Yomi, a fixed deck game, has 550 cards that compose 10 such decks, but you'd be lucky to have even 4 if it were customizable. And there's just no way those 4 would end up having all 4-6, 5-5, and 6-4 matchups against each other. So you'd have the illusion of way more choice, but actually end up with fewer viable choices, and more unfair matchups plaguing the few choices you have.
So I realized that when I was including three different strategies in these decks, I was really on to something. This evolved to be a more and more central part of the game. Interwoven with the "heroes" you control, and part of the back-and-forth strategy where you and your opponent can each shift around what you're doing as you play. What seemed years ago like a bad limit to place on deckbuilding has now become (accidentally?) one of the best features of all. Yeah there are limits, there are chunks of your deck that have to have certain kinds of things. So how has that turned out? Has it made me and other playtesters sad?
The answer is that it's resulted in so many viable decks that we are overwhelmed. It's possible to make over 815 different decks with all the cards that exist today, and every one of those differs by at least 33% from every other one. And here is the most incredible part of that. I don't know which of those 815 is the least powerful, but whichever one it is, I do know that it's at least as able to win (and probably a lot more able to win) than the worst character in the average fighting game. So when I say this huge number of decks, I'm not talking about useless stuff like "all lands" or "all 1/1 creatures with no way to play them." I mean those are all real decks that can do coherent things and win in the hands of a skilled player. Somehow the "limits" on deckbuilding have produced more decks than we even know what to do with--every one of them playable.
In Closing
The Yomi expansion will be the next game I release, and that's going to be a while, so the game mentioned in this post will be even a while after that. I honestly don't know how I'll pay for the hundreds of thousands of dollars of art such a game needs, but one way or another you will get to play this game. I'm determined to eventually release it because I think it's incredible and I just don't know anything like it. Probably the higher the sales of the Yomi expansion, the sooner I'll be able to finish "SCG4."
Reader Comments (60)
Very excited to play this, Sirlin. I was an MtG player back when and started getting into the tournament scene before I got frustrated with the endless treadmill of new cards and the need to spend hundreds of dollars (plus completely revise all of my strategies and tactics) whenever a new set was released. But I like deckbuilding and the way good matchups work, so I feel in a sense that I've been waiting more than 15 years for this game.
I'll be at PAX Prime -- are you going to be organizing any official play sessions/tournaments, or is it just "Drop by the booth and get a demo?"
Nothing official, just drop by ask for me.
When I said your games were primarily Spike-leaning, I didn't mean that in a bad way. You're not trying to be a mass-market game, so you don't need to appeal to everyone (heck, PtW is the ultimate Spike mantra). Almost every game I've seen without the possibility for mana screw has failed (Duelmasters being the notable exception, and that only relaunched because Hasbro attached a TV show to it :p ), and it'll be interesting to see how you solve it.
I can't really say much about the claims of X number of decks, since I have no idea what the secret ingredient is, other than that 800+ number and that the cards will come in chunks. The problem is that there are still individual cards in those chunks, and they need to be balanced as well as the chunks, because there's still the variation of what you draw (and since you've said they'll be no mana screw, everything has to be playable immediately, which means either everything has a ton of modes based on the turn and/or your opponent's progress, or the power curve is completely flat).
I think the problem I'm seeing with my viewpoint (and can't really get over) is that you generally play fighting games against opponents, but you play tabletop games with other people, even at the highest level--maybe that's just WotC brainwashing me, but there you go. :/
I still see it differently. My games are intended to have wide appeal, it's just that (in my opinion) games that don't take into account players who play them hard to win are just sloppily designed. So it's not that I think Puzzle Strike, or whatever else is only aimed at hardcore spikes. It's just that it doesn't fall apart for them, and non-spikes are not even really affected, they just get a game that doesn't ultimately fall apart.
I'm happy to read about a game that wants to do away with total customization in favor of eliminating solitaire gameplay and false decisions (if you're unfamiliar with the latter term, look at MvC2's character select screen for a good example; so many false choices are present). That's why I stopped playing MTG in favor of fighting games; it was just too much to keep up with, even casually, which was the only way I played!
I can't wait until we can hear more about SCG4. Take care in the mean time, Sirlin! :D
I'm not seeing much of a lean towards Spikes in Sirlin's designs, either. Take Yomi, for example.
Powerful super moves with extra-fancy artwork, being one of the few cards you can search your deck for? That's for Timmy. I think the game also does a really good job at making the characters feel broken, even though they're not; another Timmy feature. As for Johnnies, I suppose fixed decks eliminate that kind of creativity, so it's more of a property of the subgenre, rather than a design choice. It's still possible to choose a character for stylishness, rather than expected winrate, so I guess that could be seen as catering to those people.
I guess the core idea is that Sirlin cares a great deal about flavour - an aspect of the game completely irrelevant from Spike's perspective.
Do you intend to run any local playtests in the Bay Area after PAX? I believe there were some preliminary playtests from last year that I heard about, but I never got the chance to attend.
Kdansky, I think you're overcomplicating it.
We get 3 chunks to a total of over 815 possibilities. 18 choose 3 is 816. So I'm guessing 18 chunks of however many cards Sirlin thinks is appropriate. To be a little more adventurous, I'll guess eac of those chunks represents a hero.
I'm looking forward to having 18 new Sirlin characters. Also, the game sounds innovative and my confidence in Sirlin assures me it will be fun and deep.
I was very skeptical of the "all combinations are viable" at first, but when you made the Marvel analogy it really clicked for me. Looking forward to hearing more about this game. Hopefully sooner rather than later.
Though not customizable, Race For the Galaxy solved the "mana screw" problem by making the resource to play the cards in the your hand, the other cards in your hand. (i.e. to play a cost 4 card, you have to discard 4 other cards). Every card is something useful and also potentially a resource to play something else.
Random deck is viable then? Sweet.
(Random in MTG is... 4-mana artifact creatures are top tier because they go with your lands and beat 1-3 mana creatures. P.S. mulligan aggressively for castable win conditions.)
aldantefax: yes, contact me somehow for more info.
Everyone else: glad you guys are so excited. I am too.
I think what Magic: The Gathering player archetype Sirlin Games caters to is pretty irrelevant. If you like the game, you'll play it, no matter what you're name is.
Why is this whole debate raging in the comments section about the whole "Spike, Timmy, & Johnny" thing? I played MTG for many years and I know what those names mean, but why is it important?
Going off the limited information we have, I'm betting that this game will often be compared to Smash Up.
I'm guessing it will never be compared to that ever, actually.
I am sorry if i sound weird, but i assume this SCG4 game will be closer to Summoner Wars, rather than closer to the Blue Moon card game?
Sirlin, keep doing awesome things so I can keep giving you money and you can make this game.
I'm currently excited about SolForge, which is a digital-only TCG coming out next year from the Ascension guys (yeah yeah random packs/deckbuilding/probable expansions, but it's got cool tactical elements and a central mechanic that I really like), but the concept of a MvC CCG, for lack of a better term, is several orders of magnitude beyond that. I'm working on striking it rich; once I do, I'll let you know.
In Magic, because of mana screw / flood / bad matchups, a new player (new meaning ~20 games played) will still win ~25% of the time against someone with ~1000 games of experience. And the 1K player will win ~25% against a professional.
In Puzzle strike, a 20 game player will win less than 10% against someone with 1000 games. And the 1K player (that would be me) wins about 10% against the top players. The same ratio seems to be true for Yomi (though I'm still at the 20 game level there).
At greater extremes, you have something like Monopoly, where anyone who has played once has a 4-6 matchup against the #1 player in the world, and Chess, where a 1K player will never beat a grandmaster.
Not commenting on what the "right" level of upset victories is, but losing all the time is discouraging to anyone who isn't Playing to Win.
Yeah I'm familiar with the argument of "It's totally great to be locked out of even playing the game at all due to randomly drawing all land / no land." I think that doesn't hold up and is sort of ludicrous though. It's more of an apology of trying to look for a shred of silver lining in a somewhat disastrous state of affairs. Good on MtG for spreading that kind of PR though. Losing at a game you know nothing about against an expert is completely normal and not bad. Play against bots or other new players if it bothers you, just like in any game really.
That's where the problems of the medium come up: a fighting game almost always has bots you can play against, and in recent times you have online play allowing for a much larger playing pool (and thus more people at each level). By comparison a tabletop game generally has a much more limited playing pool of local friends (unless you make the effort to find greater competition). This is where all of Sirlin Games are making strides in making a tabletop game go digital (along with other efforts like Magic Online/Duels of the Planeswalkers, the Ascension iOS app, and now SolForge) and able to bridge the gap. Those digital efforts are truly what allows a new game to survive at a 95+% skill level.