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)
I am a great fan of your game designs, David. I am italian and live in italy, so i won't be at Pax, but i just wanted to say that if you put your new game on kickstarter i'd back it.
Thanks Miki Wolf! I'll have to use kickstarter at some point to cover hundreds of thousands of dollars of art costs. It will be a while though, and the Yomi expansion will be first. Thanks for your support when the time comes. :)
I'm curious, Sirlin, did you ever look into simulating a limited format in order to solve this problem? Matchups in draft tend to be a lot more balanced and require more skill in piloting than constructed. I'm still waiting for a card game to offer a boxed-game experience like MTG's draft that I don't have to spend 15 bucks on every time I play it.
Nope. When you construct a deck, you get to play the best version of that deck and push it in some direction. The analogy would be if you could make a Dhalsim deck or a Zangief deck (they are opposites). Draft is like everyone playing some variation of a bad Ryu deck. Watered down and more similar. Even if it has more skill, I want a "real" solution rather than drafting, which I consider a tacked on solution that has big negatives. Playing some game before the game is unweildy and frankly terrible to me. If a game doesn't have enough strategy to work, then fixing that is much better answer then adding some other game you have to play before the real game.
For years I planned on having a constructed and draft format anyway though, for those who want it. But as the game evolved, there just became no need for a drafting format. It wouldn't even make sense to have anymore. The restrictions on what has to be in a deck don't go well with drafting. And more to the point, you have so much choice in playing the game the normal way, and so much ability to influence the opponent, that you are sort of "always drafting" in some sense. Just without having to play a separate game before the real game and without having to have to participate in the overall watered down nature of limited decks.
Good question though. I hope someday when you play it, you'll not really miss drafting. Or you'll feel like you're doing it anyway in a more integrated way maybe.
I like limited in MtG more than constructed, and even though I like the idea of building a deck as you go and the like, I know deep down it's because I like to get more cards, and because I'm on an even playing field card-availability wise with everyone else (theoretically of course--but if someone has better cards than me it's because of luck, not money). Both of those aren't factors in your game, so limited isn't as important (though you've introduced limited in some of your other games with the Clockwork modes, and those are still interesting).
Yeah true, there are drafting modes in both Flash Duel and Puzzle Strike, though they aren't really the main modes, more like an extra that's there if you want. It's just that in this other new card game, the original reason to want drafting kind of isn't there, and there nature of decks makes it hard to do even if you wanted to. I don't think it will be missed though, like you said you're already on an even playfield and I don't think you have to worry about some lack of skill test going on. ;)
Hi there Sirlin, I am a lurker since the Cranky days and been waiting since forever on your card game. I am really excited it could be here in the next couple of years! Just want to wish you all the best and good luck. Thank you for making a difference in this world, you have always been an inspiration to me. Cheers!
PS. Great article on wanting/liking!
Thanks, CrankyDays! :)
Hey Sirlin, I've got a small question about your upcoming project (which sounds great great great: I'm buying it eyes closed from your description here ^^).
One thing I like in MTG is that, depending on the deck you are playing against, your deck can play out very differently (for example, if your playing control v control is very different than control v aggro). Is this something that is still present in your system ?
Thank you for your great games !
Atulab, yes very much so. By comparison you can hardly change your strategy at all in MtG based on matchups. I think the ability to play differently based on your opponent's deck is an order of magnitude more in my game. You have access to so many more effects than an MtG deck, and more control over when you get those effects in hand, so you can tailor your approach much differently vs deck A than when you fight deck B. This was really a key thing to support of the goal is to be able to play a single deck for years, similar to how people can play Blanka or whoever in Street Fighter for years. Good question, btw.
Are you really sure that limiting deck-building results in more creativity? Using magic as an example. Imagine if all standard decks needed to include 8 enchantments, 8 artifacts, and 8 planeswalkers. The depth of enchantments that are good enough for constructed in the standard card pool isn't very high. Let's say for most decks it degrades down to only a few viable choices. Aren't you just homogenizing most decks by doing this? Then consider the meta implications. All of a sudden every green deck starts running naturalize or ancient grudge, because they're guaranteed to have targets. Also, by forcing the 8/8/8 rule you make decks like mono red agro or all in infect unbuildable. Granted they're not super interactive. However, by removing the possibility of them existing you make most decks into midrange decks which can easily be preyed upon by control decks without worry. Won't forcing these rules stifle the game by limiting archetypes? It doesn't matter if a larger total number of cards end up in competitive decks when all the decks are of the same archetype. The games will still play out in a similar fashion. It seems to me like you're forcing people to use Vanilla and Chocolate in their decks, but disregarding that every player is going to have to include ice cream anyway, so there won't be much in the sense of novelty if a guy shows up with strawberry.
You derided sideboarding because you can't use it game 1. Well why not? You could allow players to look through their opponents deck before the game, and then be allowed to sideboard before game 1. If you're worried about non interactive combo decks like storm or dredge this would also solve it.
If you have a game with matchups as wildly imbalanced as in MtG, you'd do better to apply a bandaid fix than no bandaid fix. So sideboarding to make the terrible problem less terrible is better than doing nothing. If you want to do it game 1...ok great, go ahead. Rather than do that for my game, I changed the way the entire game works on a fundamental level and didn't need sideboarding to begin with.
As a general principle, it should be somewhat obvious that the more and more and more and more choice you give in deckbuilding, the higher the chances that it breaks down into a single degenerate thing. If you place limits in an arbitrary way, such as taking an already finished game design like MtG with already finished cards and then applying the specific limits you suggested, you might end up with more viable decks. You might not. Instead of doing any of that, it's better to design the limits mindfully, such that they create more viable decks. So you know there at least some cards of some types in each deck so that your deck can interact with those types. You definitely lose a certain type of deck, though it's 100% intentional to lose those types, is what I'm saying. I think all you've done is prove that your own idea that specific type of limit applied to the specific game of MTG might not be good. I think that actually says nothing about the general case. It's also completely wrong that placing limits on deckbuilding also limits the archetypes. I don't even know why you'd think that would be a necessary consequence. You can definitely have a fast deck, a late game deck, a control deck, etc with "some limits on deckbuilding."
It's better to discuss it all later after I've written more about this new game's system.
This was the first I heard about SCG4, and it is pretty interesting. I think that these ideas about limitations in customizable games are very important for maintaining a balanced and diverse game. Examples from miniature war games come to mind. There is a lot of customization within an individual force, but the best lists from each faction tend to be well balanced against one another (if it is a good game). Another example is Summoner Wars, from Plaid Hat Games. There each faction is much like picking a character in a fighting game. As opposed to making it totally customizable, having separate factions makes them all a bit more viable (though I'm sure that now some are top tier).
I'll point out that MTG does have limited deckbuilding in a sense -- the 5 colors do create that limit, albeit in a flawed manner as you pointed out. I've often seen that keeping the colors separate is one of the parts of the game they really try to maintain, for if one color could do everything, then only that deck would be playable for those Playing to Win.
That's where factions shine, because those Playing to Win will usually be able to find the best configuration for a given faction, but as long as the factions do not "bleed" too much, you'll still hopefully have as many viable decks as you have factions.
I think the analogy to the team based fighting games is really good at demonstrating what you are talking about, and you should keep that in mind explaining the concept to people.
Cheers!
Hmmm, it is funny how many games I see with this concept recently. Smash Up as already mentioned even if the resulting game isn't similar has pods of that you shuffle together to build decks. And the new upcoming Star Wars Living Card Game by Fantasy Flight has you build 50 card decks in pods of 5 cards.
Looking forward to more information about your game Sirlin.
David,
Been a fan for awhile, love Flash Duel in particular!
I pretty much agree with everything you said here. I am the current Lead Designer on Pox Nora and while the game is too far gone in some respects (especially when it comes to hard counters), recently I've begun to introduce new elements that are somewhat restrictive in nature and focuses on interaction. As a result, since I took over in January, the number of unique cards being played in the top ranks (where the degenerate stuff really comes to a head) has increased by ~20%. So anecdotally, I can definitely confirm that restrictions CAN increase diversity, even if it may seem counter-intuitive at first glance.
One of the questions I like to ask is in general is, "Does this mechanic offer interest (i.e different and viable choices) for the player?" Far too often, for many games which exhibit the problems you describe, the answer is "No." Even in cases where your opponent has the proper counter card in his deck, it simply means he plays it when he draws it. In my design, I try to ensure that my answer is Yes, even if it comes with a but or two ;)
Derek: oh another lead designer, very cool. Yeah so you've used the same kind of approach. It pretty much works in theory and in practice if you know how to execute what kind of restrictions help, and how to make them not feel too arbitrary.
Regarding things countering each other, here's what's the most important thing to keep in mind, at least to me. The more the metagame matters, the less the game matters. And having the game matter not much is kind of ridiculously bad. So if you have Thing X that's powerful and I need Thing Y to counter it, if the real test is "Did I put Thing Y in my deck?" then that leads to bad gameplay. I probably lose terribly if I don't have it in my deck and win too much if I do. Either way the actual GAME is bad even if the metagame call of whether to put the card in was strategic and interesting. So the challenge for designers is to have a game system where you can pretty much always do something about Thing X. Your answer to it might be better or worse depending on your metagame call, but not this extreme die vs. auto-win stuff.
And second, just like you said, think about what decisions are actually involved during gamplay (not during metagame planning). Maybe everyone has the counter to Thing X, it's just that they have to jump through a few hoops to play the counter. Is it worth it? Maybe they jump through the first hoop and the opponent is like "ha ha! I am choosing to not even play Thing X! I have some other plan this time!" and he made you waste time / resources preparing your counter.
This is a big shift in thinking for designers from card games I think, but no shift at all for people from fighting games. It's like a given in fighting games that the gameplay itself should be as fair as possible and require more decisions, while the card game world has been content for a long time with "making a good metagame call" that then trivializes the gameplay.
Sirlin: I think you are underestimating how much fun/value CCG players get from actually building their decks. If you consider deckbuilding a game in itself, then it makes a lot more sense to have "hard counters".
Consider:
In one game you might have a card that lets you destroy any one other card. This card is extremely powerful and comes with no drawbacks. The game has been balanced with this card in mind. The sign of a good player is knowing WHEN to unleash this powerful card, based on his knowledge of which other cards might be worth destroying in his opponent's deck.
In another game you might have a card that lets you destroy any one other card if it's blue (or whatever). This card is extremely powerful when it works, but is useless the rest of the time. The game has been balanced with this card in mind. The sign of a good player is knowing WHETHER to include this powerful card in his deck, based on his assessment of the likelyhood of other players including cards it can counter. When actual gameplay comes around he should more or less fire the card at the first target to present itself.
You say that the more the metagame matters, the less the gameplay matters. I think this is absolutely true, but that it goes both ways. Then it follows that if players spend more time thinking about the game/deckbuilding than actually playing the game, it makes sense to cards be more metagame oriented.
I'm not underestimating how fun deckbuilding is. I know full well how fun it is. And when I sit down and considered all factors, including that one, I decided that it's just really terrible to make a game where you are encouraging unfair matchups as soon as people sit down at the table. If you want to sit down at the table with massive advantage or disadvantage, you could play every CCG ever. That's standard, and a result of making the metagame matter.
I'm going a different way, the kind of thing where you have many asymmetric choices to sit down with, but that all are reasonably fair against each other. Then your choice is can be more about choosing the playstyle you enjoy. Also, tournament matches are a lot better when you eliminate most ways there can even be a 9-1 or 8-2 blowout.
I totally respect that design decision. But I think part of the fun of deckbuilding is to actually be able to win the match before sitting down to play. That's what motivated me to spend hours thinking about MTG decks back in the day (I played around unlimited/revised editions). If I wasn't making a stronger deck, only a different one, I don't think I'd find it as fun. Sure, that meant playing some really stupid matches that I just knew I was going to win, but that was only a very small part of the total time I spent on the game (and sometimes I was of course surprised that my creations didn't work as well as intended).
I realize now, that since your game isn't actually a CCG you shouldn't cater primarily to CCG players. Also, you focus more on tournament matches being interesting which also aligns well with your design decision.
Thanks for your response.
I'm supporting Sirlin on his design decisions, well justified.
Implementation is key, but he has the right ideas.
Business model aside, WotC does a good job with "metagame matters". They also mess it up some times. They rely a lot on externally *changing* the metagame (in this case with new cards), which may be an important ingredient to make "metagame matters" work well.
Sirlin aims for "gameplay matters". He is not dissing other games (I think he praised WotC R&D more than once).
For a game with a different business model, that can last many years with no new cards aiming for gameplay seems to make sense.
Also, just like MtG has a strong gameplay component, I think it is highly likely that this gameplay 1st game will also have a significant metagame component - it just won't be so overwhelming as it can be in MtG, by design. There is some trade-off, Sirlin acknowledged that.
If I had more time I would make a shorter post :)
Ivo.