History SoYouWantTo / MakeACollectibleCardGame

Second, even more important: ''play''. Don't just play your favorite CCG--in fact, put it aside for at least a month. Instead, go to the bookstore or local gaming shop or comic book store and ''try new TabletopGames''. Play ''DungeonsAndDragons'', or watch people doing ''TabletopGame/{{Warhammer 40000}}''. Watch WilWheaton's show WebVideo/{{Tabletop}} on Geek & Sundry. Compare TabletopGame/{{Chess}} to {{Risk}}, {{Monopoly}} with SettlersOfCatan, TabletopGame/{{Munchkin}} with ApplesToApples. If you're going to create a new game, you need to know what pre-existing games are already doing, so that you can avoid the things you don't like and steal the things you do. And you'll have ''fun''--and isn't that the point of gaming?

Second, even more important: ''play''. Don't just play your favorite CCG--in fact, put it aside for at least a month. Instead, go to the bookstore or local gaming shop or comic book store and ''try new TabletopGames''. Play ''DungeonsAndDragons'', or watch people doing ''TabletopGame/{{Warhammer 40000}}''. Watch WilWheaton's show WebVideo/{{Tabletop}} on Geek & Sundry. Compare {{chess}} to {{Risk}}, {{Monopoly}} with SettlersOfCatan, TabletopGame/{{Munchkin}} with ApplesToApples. If you're going to create a new game, you need to know what pre-existing games are already doing, so that you can avoid the things you don't like and steal the things you do. And you'll have ''fun''--and isn't that the point of gaming?

** Choices Vs. Options. First, we acknowledge that we are [[http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/mm/49 ripping off MaRo]], so read the article in his words if you'd prefer. But there is a difference between "Options"--"You can have both A and B"--and Choices--"You can only have A ''or'' B, pick one." ''You want Choices instead of Options.'' Not only should this shape the design of individual cards, but the entire deck-building aspect ''of'' card games is about Choices: there are so many cards available that you simply ''cannot'' create a deck that makes all of them available. FactionCalculus adds to this by further striating the availble strategies, which is another reason why it's good. But the point is this: you want Choices because those provide limitations. And the entire ''heart'' of gaming is about finding ways to overcome limitations. That's why we have MinMaxers; that's why we have {{Munchkin}}s; that's why we have StopHavingFunGuys. Say what you want about their attitudes, but ''they want to overcome the game'', because that's what gaming ''is''. So don't give them Options. Give them Choices. Make it that much harder.

* TradingCardLame. Most [=CCGs=] are adaptations of existing franchises, for reasons that will be discussed in the next section. The only exceptions are ''Magic'', ''LegendOfTheFiveRings'', ''TabletopGame/YuGiOh'' (which itself is, by WordOfGod, a ''Magic'' ripoff) and... Well, that's about it, at least where ''popular'' franchises are concerned. (I mean, have you ''heard'' of MagiNation?) Decipher Inc came up with three ''very'' good adaptations--''[=LotR=]'', ''Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration'' (eventually expanding to all the rest of the franchise save the [[Film/StarTrek 2009 pre-boot]]) and the ''StarWarsCustomizableCardGame''--but not a single one of them is in print today. And nobody needs to talk about ''Pokemon'' cards. The point is that [=CCGs=] are not exempt from TheProblemWithLicensedGames. The ''problem'' is that creating your own Intellectual Property is just as challenging or more so... but again, we'll talk about that further down.

** This is also important from a psychological angle. Simply put, every person who plays the game is going to invest a certain amount of time and money into your product, and they want to feel like that investment wasn't wasted. It's called the SunkCostFallacy and it's definitely something you can exploit to retain players, but only if the game is fun enough to hook them in the first place. (And let's not talk about QualityByPopularVote; it's another thing you want to exploit, but popularity and HypeBacklash go hand in hand because you can't please everybody, even if your game is genuinely, legitimately good.) So it needs to be not just fun, but relatively easy to pick up... ''and'' with enough depth that the player feels like s/he is learning and improving.

Another nice advantage about starting your own Intellectual Property is the ability to avoid CCGImportanceDissonance, something that both the ''[=LotR=]'' CCG and the ''Middle-Earth'' CCG before it fell serious prey to. Not only do you not have to create filler cards out of Extra Of The Week #13, you aren't ''bound'' to that model by the franchise's existing story. Most stories have these things called MainCharacters who appear in almost every instalment of the series; these cards will be--are required by the FanDumb to be--the most powerful cards in the game. If "Third Orc From The Left" is able to take on Frodo and win, fans will scream that the game is ruined... even though the same thing results if you let Frodo hand out {{Curb Stomp Battle}}s (which would not only make him a GameBreaker but is CanonDefilement!). This is where that whole VariablePlayerGoals thing can come in handy. Frodo does not and has never had the combat chops to win a MultiMookMelee[[hottip:*:Fun fact: according to TheOtherWiki, Frodo was a MartialPacifist and never actually killed a sentient creature in his life]], but he is the Ring-bearer and is gifted with some level of IncorruptiblePurePureness. Give him extra resistance to the Ring's temptation mechanic and suddenly he doesn't look so useless.

[[http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Archive.aspx?author=Mark%20Rosewater Mark Rosewater]]. He writes one of the most comprehensive design columns on the Internet; and, since he's one of the lead designers of ''Magic'', much of his advice is tailored to this genre. In particular, his articles "[[http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/mm/174 Ten Things Every Game Needs]]," [[http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/mm/28 Magic Design Seminar: Looking Within]] are so on-point that we could have just copy-pasted them here instead of all the original research we've done. But that would be plagiarism. AndThatsTerrible.

* TradingCardLame. Most [=CCGs=] are adaptations of existing franchises, for reasons that will be discussed in the next section. The only exceptions are ''Magic'', ''LegendOfTheFiveRings'', ''YuGiOh'' (which itself is, by WordOfGod, a ''Magic'' ripoff) and... Well, that's about it, at least where ''popular'' franchises are concerned. (I mean, have you ''heard'' of MagiNation?) Decipher Inc came up with three ''very'' good adaptations--''[=LotR=]'', ''Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration'' (eventually expanding to all the rest of the franchise save the [[Film/StarTrek 2009 pre-boot]]) and the ''StarWarsCustomizableCardGame''--but not a single one of them is in print today. And nobody needs to talk about ''Pokemon'' cards. The point is that [=CCGs=] are not exempt from TheProblemWithLicensedGames. The ''problem'' is that creating your own Intellectual Property is just as challenging or more so... but again, we'll talk about that further down.

Well, really, ''MagicTheGathering''. The only game that ever got close in terms of gameplay was the ''StarWarsCustomizableCardGame''. ''TabletopGame/{{Pokemon}}'' and ''YuGiOh'' have their adherents, but they may not provide the ''gameplay'' inspiration you need.

It's hard to tell a story using cards... but that doesn't mean it's impossible. And, since almost no one has ever tried to do it, this design space is ''ripe'' for mining. If you can come up with a way to incorporate story into gameplay--to construct a narrative ''using'' the cards themselves--you might seriously, seriously be on to something. One obvious solution is to set up combos somehow: Card X can only be played if conditions A, B and C were already fulfilled. This would play into a modified "twilight pool" mechanic, where added points had certain qualities ("SwordOfPlotAdvancement may only be played on an Equipment card that was already played this turn, and if you have killed at least one enemy character this turn"); or maybe Card X needs to be played at the beginning of the turn, which gives the opponent a chance to stop it. The point is, each card becomes a modular piece in a story and can be assembled at will. See also WebVideo/Tabletop's LetsPlay of "[[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0artLwe87I4 Gloom]]" for an example of how the cards can be used to ''inspire'' storytelling: in ''Gloom'', an "event" card is combined with a character and the players get to make up their own explanations for what exactly happened. (Of course, this is totally optional, and the game can easily be played [[StopHavingFunGuys without all this insipid characterization]].)

* ExpansionPack: again, this creates more money for you. But it also keeps your consumers playing. Witness the phenomenon of the "[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solved_game solved game]]" - games in which the correct choices, the ones that ''always'' result in a win or at least a forced draw, have already been identified. While [=CCGs=] are typically a bit too complex to truly "solve," there will always be {{Game Breaker}}s that essentially serve the same purpose: choosing not to play them is suicidal because make it that much easier to win. The first answer is the ObviousRulePatch, where you simply ban that card from (supervised) play... but once one is gone, another takes its place as strategies shift and decks are redesigned, and if you keep banning ''those'' then eventually the game simply isn't as ''fun'' anymore because there are only three cards still legal for play. So the better answer is, Don't just remove the old ones. ''Add new ones.'' And then do the cycle all over again, yeah, but frankly that's your lot in life, now that you've decided to build a CCG: monitoring as many matches as you can and taking statistics on which cards have a higher-than-normal win rate. Have fun.

* CharacterDevelopment: ''SW:CCG'', ''ST:CCG (2E)'', ''[=L5R=]'' and even ''Magic'' have all done this: release multiple versions of a character (a Planeswalker in ''Magic'''s case) which have different skills and are suited for different purposes. Typically the way this is done is to have a rule that you may only have one card of that character's ''name'' in play at a time, but then give each version sort of subtitle ([[http://www.trekcc.org/2e/index.php?cardID=2359 James T. Kirk, Highly-Decorated Captain]] vs [[http://www.trekcc.org/2e/index.php?cardID=27 James T. Kirk, Living Legend]], at complete random). In most games you may replace an in-play version with a different one, possibly at reduced deployment costs, but what happens to the first version (LostForever? Back to hand?) depends from game to game. (Note also in this case that the "one in play at a time" rule is indicated by the dot before the name--''ST:CCG'' allows multiples of RedShirt-level cards.) ''Pokemon'' also built this into play by allowing you to evolve your mons, but that's a different mechanic,

Make sure your rules are neither too stifling nor too open. If you can't do anything creative with the ''cards'', your only option is to increase those cards' PowerLevels until they're OverNineThousand. ''SW:CCG'' was particularly notorious for this; eventually it even overwhelmed the Destiny mechanic because so many important characters became ImmuneToFate in varying degrees. The opposite, rules that are not specific enough, encourages you to just keep developing NewRulesAsThePlotDemands, which is just as bad. ''ST:CCG'' is the banner example here. At the beginning of First Edition, it had [[hottip:eight card types:Mission, Dilemma, Artifact; Personnel, Ship, Equipment; Event, Interrupt]], but each new expansion introduced some new gameplay mechanic, and by the end, it had ''seventeen''. Second Edition launched with only seven card types and remained that way forever; its rulebook is also quite a bit shorter. Complexity Creep is just as dangerous as PowerCreep, and while both are inevitable, you want to keep them to a minimum.

[[http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Archive.aspx?author=Mark%20Rosewater Mark Rosewater]]. He writes one of the most comprehensive design columns on the Internet; and, since he's one of the lead designers of ''Magic'', much of his advice is tailored to this genre. You don't really need much else. In particular, his "[[http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/mm/174 Ten Things Every Game Needs]]" article is so on-point that we could have just copy-pasted it here. But that would be plagiarism. AndThatsTerrible.

* TradingCardLame. Most [=CCGs=] are adaptations of existing franchises, for reasons that will be discussed in the next section. The only exceptions are ''Magic'', ''LegendOfTheFiveRings'', ''YuGiOh'' (which itself is, by WordOfGod, a ''Magic'' ripoff) and... Well, that's about it, at least where ''popular'' franchises are concerned. (I mean, have you ''heard'' of MagiNation?) Decipher Inc came up with three ''very'' good adaptations--''[=LotR=]'', ''Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration'' (eventually expanding to all the rest of the franchise save the [[Film/StarTrek 2009 pre-boot]]) and the ''StarWarsCustomizableCardGame'', but not a single one of them is in print today. And nobody needs to talk about ''Pokemon'' cards. The point is that [=CCGs=] are not exempt from TheProblemWithLicensedGames. The ''problem'' is that creating your own Intellectual Property is just as challenging or more so... but again, we'll talk about that further down.

** This is also important from a psychological angle. Simply put, every person who plays the game is going to invest a certain amount of time and money into your product, and they want to feel like that investment wasn't wasted. It's called the SunkCostFallacy and it's definitely something you can exploit to retain players, but only if the game is fun enough to hook them in the first place. (And let's not talk about QualityByPopularVote; it's another thing you want to exploit, but it segues inevitably into HypeBacklash.) So it needs to be not just fun, but relatively easy to pick up... ''and'' with enough depth that the player feels like s/he is learning and improving.

Another thing that ''Warhammer 40K'' and ''[=L5R=]'' both did was allow the results of tournaments or normal gameplay to determine the ''metaplot''. ''[=WH40K=]'' used to run "global campaigns," providing BackStory and then allowing players to submit the results of matches in support of that back story. GamesWorkshop then tallied all the results they received and eventually declared who had won the Thirteenth Black Crusade ([[spoiler:Abaddon has Cadia, but he's cut off by the Imperial Navy]]). And at one point a Shadowlands player came within a hair of [[TheBadGuyWins taking the world L5R championship]], which would have had very interesting implications for the game's future as the contents of upcoming expansions were of course going to be based on what happened right there at that table. This is not the same as building a story out of each ''individual'' match, but it's something to think on.

Another nice advantage about starting your own Intellectual Property is the ability to avoid CCGImportanceDissonance, something that both the ''[=LotR=]'' CCG and the ''Middle-Earth'' CCG before it fell serious prey to. Not only do you not have to create filler cards out of Extra Of The Week #13, you aren't ''bound'' to that model by the franchise's existing story. Most stories have these things called MainCharacters who appear in almost every instalment of the series; these cards will be--are required by the FanDumb to be--the most powerful cards in the game. If "Third Orc From The Left" is able to take on Frodo and win, those fans will complain that the game is ruined... even though the same thing results if you let Frodo be overpowered (and even though Third Orc From The Left being more powerful than Frodo is arguably supported by canon!). This is where that whole VariablePlayerGoals thing can come in handy. Frodo may not have the combat chops to win a MultiMookMelee, but he is the Ring-bearer and is gifted with some level of IncorruptiblePurePureness. Turn Temptation Checks into a game mechanic and make Frodo good at ''those.''

* ExpansionPack: again, this creates more money for you. But it also keeps your consumers playing. Witness the phenomenon of the "[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solved_game solved game]]" - games in which the correct choices, the ones that ''always'' result in a win or at least a forced draw, have already been identified. While [=CCGs=] are typically a bit too complex to truly "solve," there will always be {{Game Breaker}}s that essentially serve the same purpose: choosing not to play them is suicidal because make it that much easier to win. The first answer is the ObviousRulesPatch, where you simply ban that card from (supervised) play... but once one is gone, another takes its place as strategies shift and decks are redesigned, and if you keep banning ''those'' then eventually the game simply isn't as ''fun'' anymore because all the cool, powerful cards are gone. So the better answer is, Don't just remove the old ones. ''Add new ones.'' And then do the cycle all over again, yeah, but frankly that's your lot in life, now that you've decided to build a CCG: monitoring as many matches as you can and taking statistics on which cards have a higher-than-normal win rate. Have fun.

* Target Demographic. The ''Pokemon'' CCG is so simple it's almost "solved"... but that ''appeals'' to its under-10 audience. The ''Star Wars'' CCG had LoadsAndLoadsOfRules and was NintendoHard, to the point that even experienced ''Magic'' players could get fumbled up. You want your game to have ''depth'', which is difficult to achieve and even more difficult to describe, but it has to do with how its mechanics interact--or, rather, whether they do at all. A game with "depth" is typically described as "Easy to learn, hard to master," and that's the sweet spot you want, but what ''counts'' as "easy to learn hard to master" will change depending on the intelligence level of your players.
* VariablePlayerGoals. As mentioned, you need them. But that means you need to decide what they are. And, unfortunately, the sky's the limit, since [=CCGs=] can take place in any milieu and on any scope, from one-on-one fistfights to games of thrones to saving the galaxy from evil.

* GeoEffects. ''Magic'' and ''Pokemon'' do not feature any sort of terrain; duels just take place in some vacuum somewhere. In comparison, the ''Star Trek'' and ''Star Wars'' card games both involved geography--you had to travel back and forth between different locations to accomplish varous goals. These games, not coincidentally, required ''much'' more physical space to play, and additional to govern movement. Having said that, TropesAreNotBad: additional rules means additional LoopholeAbuse, and let's face it: LoopholeAbuse is one of the foundations of strategy. (TacticalRockPaperScissors consists of nothing but!)

* Some card games require you to have a certain specific card before you can play: ''[=L5R=]'' requires you to have a "Stronghold" card, for instance, representing your chosen Clan. If you're going to do this, then for the love of god, ''make the required card Common.'' Hell, make them ''more''-than-common the way Lands are in ''M:tG'', or print them on the back of the deck box (''[=L5R=]''). This does not preclude you from printing actual-card versions of the card, or from printing more-powerful rare versions; it's simply to say that if one specific card is going to be necessary, then you had ''better'' make it easy for players to get their hands on. The opposite--having ''only'' rare versions of the required card--will reduce your revenue to zero. Don't do it.
* Card Frames: The "card frame" is, if you will, the game's ViewerFriendlyInterface: it organizes the data on the card so that players can easily scan that card and figure out what it does. For example, ''Magic'' always has mana icons in the top right, the card type right under the picture, and a panel describing the card's use occupying the whole bottom half of the card. The point we are trying to make here is not, "You should have a card frame design," though obviously you should; the point we are trying to make is, Consider having ''different'' card frames under different circumstances. In ''Magic'', the differences are usually in color and texture (green cards look like they're made of lizard skin, while red cards are made of sandstone), but you could potentially have completely different card ''layouts'' for different circumstances; ''SW:CCG'' had Location cards that operated in both Portrait orientation (planets) and Landscape orientation (spots ''on'' that planet; Tatooine would a portrait, Mos Eisley a landscape), and neither of them looked anything like their Character cards. This raises the difficulty barrier at entry--The Player has to learn to recognize multiple frames--but speeds gameplay for experts, who can tell even ''more'' quickly what a card does.

So the reason to adapt an existing franchise is also simple: it already ''has'' a story, known characters, emotional connections to and from The Player. If I give you a card for Eric del Scheir ([[OriginalCharacter OC]], don't steal), you see a kid who looks like Music/JustinBieber in the card art, and you know a little bit about his personality (the squealing peasant girls in the background are another indication), but you don't necessarily know anything about his relationship to Lenoia del Scheir, or Corlan, or Grevon, or the peasant girls, or why a TeenIdol is in a game with mages and soldiers and priests, or why he has a claim for the throne. (And the fact that he looks like Bieber may turn you off.) If I give you a card that says "[[StarWars Luke Skywalker]]" on it, though, you have knowledge about him that predates the arrival of the card, and you know what it means if you manage to get Obi-Wan in play alongside him, or what might happen if he has to fight against your opponent's Boba Fett card. Even better, you might be ''excited'' for the chance to pit him against the card of someone he never faced in-person, like [[ThePhantomMenace Darth Maul]] or [[TheForceUnleashed Galen Marek]]. Oh, and as an added bonus, you can [[TeasingCreator withhold popular cards]] for later expansions. Players will whine and gripe and complain... but if you tell them that the long-awaited [[TheThrawnTrilogy Mara Jade]] card is finally seeing release in the next expansion, they ''will'' line up and they ''will'' shell out their money.

It's hard to tell a story using cards... but that doesn't mean it's impossible. And, since almost no one has ever tried to do it, this design space is ''ripe'' for mining. If you can come up with a way to incorporate story into gameplay--to construct a narrative ''using'' the cards themselves--you might seriously, seriously be on to something. One obvious solution is to set up combos somehow: Card X can only be played if conditions A, B and C were already fulfilled. This would play into a modified "twilight pool" mechanic, where added points had certain qualities ("SwordOfPlotAdvancement may only be played on an Equipment card that was already played this turn, and if you have killed at least one enemy character this turn"); or maybe Card X needs to be played at the beginning of the turn, which gives the opponent a chance to stop it. The point is, each card becomes a modular piece in a story and can be assembled at will. See also GeekAndSundry's LetsPlay of the TabletopGame "[[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0artLwe87I4 Gloom]]" for an example of how the cards can be used to ''inspire'' storytelling: in ''Gloom'', an "event" card is combined with a character and the players get to make up their own explanations for what exactly happened. (Of course, this is totally optional, and the game can easily be played [[StopHavingFunGuys without all this insipid characterization]].)

Another thing that ''Warhammer 40K'' and ''[=L5R=]'' both did was allow the results of tournaments or normal gameplay to determine the ''metaplot''. ''[=WH40K=]'' used to run "global campaigns," providing BackStory and then allowing players to submit the results of matches in support of that back story. GamesWorkshop then tallied all the results they received and eventually declared who had won the Thirteenth Black Crusade ([[spoiler:Abaddon has Cadia, but he's cut off by the Imperial Navy]]). And at one point a Shadowlands player came within a hair of [[TheBadGuyWins taking the world L5R championship]], which would have had very interesting implications for the game's future as the contents of upcoming expansions were of course going to be based on what happened right there at that table. This is not quite the same as building a story out of each ''individual'' match, but it's something to think on.

Another nice advantage about starting your own Intellectual Property is the ability to avoid CCGImportanceDissonance, something that both the ''[=LotR=]'' CCG and the ''Middle-Earth'' CCG before it fell serious prey to. Not only do you not have to create filler cards out of Extra Of The Week #13, you aren't ''bound'' to that model by the franchise's existing story. Most stories have these things called MainCharacters who appear in almost every instalment of the series; these cards will be--are required by the FanDumb to be--the most powerful cards in the game. If "Third Orc From The Left" is able to take on Frodo and win, those fans will complain that the game is ruined... even though the same thing results if you let Frodo be overpowered (and even though that particular example is arguably supported by canon!). This is where that whole VariablePlayerGoals thing can come in handy. Frodo may not have the combat chops to win a MultiMookMelee, but he is the Ring-bearer and is gifted with some level of IncorruptiblePurePureness. Turn temptation checks into a game mechanic and make Frodo good at ''those.''

As previously mentioned, you'll want to balance the game's difficulty very carefully. You want it to be easy enough to be accessible, but with enough depth to really suck people in. One of the simplest ways to do this is to make some of the rules only matter in certain situations. For instance, one of the rules of ''Magic'' is that if you ever have to draw a card from your deck, but can't (IE you're out of deck), you lose. Because it takes more than 50 turns to get to this point in the normal course of things, most beginning players can safely ignore this rule. Eventually, however, it'll crop up... and probably in such a surprising fashion ("Wait, I can lose to ''that''? Let me get the instruction manual.") that they'll never forget it, and then later try to design a strategy that allows them to "deck" their opponent as they themselves were decked. Have as many rules as you want... but make as many of them ''optional'' as possible, so that the game can be played very easily using a bare minimum of rules.

Second, even more important: ''play''. Don't just play your favorite CCG--in fact, put it aside for at least a month. Instead, go to the bookstore or local gaming shop or comic book store and ''try new TabletopGames''. Play ''DungeonsAndDragons'', or watch people doing ''Warhammer40K''. Watch WilWheaton's show WebVideo/{{Tabletop}} on Geek & Sundry. Compare {{chess}} to {{Risk}}, {{Monopoly}} with SettlersOfCatan, TabletopGame/{{Munchkin}} with {{Apples To Apples}}. If you're going to create a new game, you need to know what pre-existing games are already doing, so that you can avoid the things you don't like and steal the things you do. And you'll have ''fun''--and isn't that the point of gaming?

So the reason to adapt an existing franchise is also simple: it already ''has'' a story, known characters, emotional connections to and from The Player. If I give you a card for Eric del Scheir ([[OriginalCharacter OC]], don't steal), you see a kid who looks like JustinBieber in the card art, and you know a little bit about his personality (the squealing peasant girls in the background are another indication), but you don't necessarily know anything about his relationship to Lenoia del Scheir, or Corlan, or Grevon, or the peasant girls, or why a TeenIdol is in a game with mages and soldiers and priests, or why he has a claim for the throne. (And the fact that he looks like Bieber may turn you off.) If I give you a card that says "[[StarWars Luke Skywalker]]" on it, though, you have knowledge about him that predates the arrival of the card, and you know what it means if you manage to get Obi-Wan in play alongside him, or what might happen if he has to fight against your opponent's Boba Fett card. Even better, you might be ''excited'' for the chance to pit him against the card of someone he never faced in-person, like [[ThePhantomMenace Darth Maul]] or [[TheForceUnleashed Galen Marek]]. Oh, and as an added bonus, you can [[TeasingCreator withhold popular cards]] for later expansions. Players will whine and gripe and complain... but if you tell them that the long-awaited [[TheThrawnTrilogy Mara Jade]] card is finally seeing release in the next expansion, they ''will'' line up and they ''will'' shell out their money.

If you are going to have VariablePlayerGoals, you absolutely ''must'' have that ever-elusive quality "depth" in the sense that each goal needs to give you the capacity to interfere with a player who is trying to win the game some other way. As an example, the four characters described above (Eric, Grevon, Lenoia, Corlan) are the main characters in a CCG this editor (Tropers/{{slvstrChung}}) was trying to create in which they compete to see which of them will succeed their father on the throne. Each character had their own power base--Grevon from the military, Corlan from wizards, Lenoia from the priesthood, and Eric from the smallfolk--and could leverage their influence to ''steal'' characters another sibling (IE player) had already deployed. In addition to trying to win a Popularity Victory (have supporters with Influence totaling X) or a Last-Man-Standing Victory (shame the opponents into withdrawing), there was also LoopholeAbuse: getting popular doesn't make you king, plunking your arse on the throne does, and politics is simply a means to that end. If you can simply [[CuttingTheKnot sneak your heir into the throne room]]... This would be the "passive," defensive win condition, but it obviously leaves such a player vulnerable: they're busy assembling their StealthBasedMission and can have important supporters poached by the opposition. As such, the business of ''plotting'' an infiltration needs to give that player certain bonuses, which either help protect their most-important followers or weaken the enemy's support, making it easier for you or someone else to knock them out of the race. And that made life difficult for me, the designer. But no matter which goal The Player is pursuing, I knew s/he ''must'' have some ways of competing towards the other ones, if only to defend themselves.

Most card games are not very funny. Why the heck not? ''SW:CCG'' in particular was written and designed with a clear eye towards humor, which players loved; though the real kicker is the card "Barber Pole" from ''ST:CCG'', which said, literally, nothing but "Plays on table." As in, This is a permanent, put it on the table and leave it there. What did it do? ''Nothing''. It was literally useless. And, as such, nobody used it. It was a {{Junk Rare}} of the most blatant nature. But the mere fact that Decipher were willing to waste cardboard on it was a lot of fun.

So the reason to adapt an existing franchise is also simple: it already ''has'' a story, known characters, emotional connections to and from The Player. If I give you a card for Eric del Scheir ([[OriginalCharacter OC]], don't steal), you see a kid who looks like JustinBieber in the card art, and you know a little bit about his personality (the squealing peasant girls in the background are another indication), but you don't necessarily know anything about his relationship to Lenoia del Scheir, or Corlan, or Grevon, or the peasant girls, or why a TeenIdol is in a game with mages and soldiers and priests, or why he has a claim for the throne. (And the fact that he looks like Bieber may turn you off.) If I give you a card that says "[[StarWars Luke Skywalker]]" on it, though, you have knowledge about him that predates the arrival of the card, and you know what it means if you manage to get Obi-Wan in play alongside him, or what might happen if he has to fight against your opponent's Boba Fett card. Even better, you might be ''excited'' for the chance to pit him against the card of someone he never faced in-person, like [[ThePhantomMenace Darth Maul]] or [[TheForceUnleashed Galen Marek]]. Oh, and as an added bonus, you can [[TeasingCreator withhold popular cards]] for later expansions. Players will whine and gripe and complain... but if you tell them that the long-awaited [[TheThrawnTrilogy Mara Jade]] card is finally seeing release in the next expansion, they ''will'' line up and they ''will'' shell out their money. (They did.)

Another nice advantage about starting your own Intellectual Property is the ability to avoid CCGImportanceDissonance. Not only do you not have to create filler cards out of Extra Of The Week #13, you aren't ''bound'' to that model by the franchise's existing story. Most stories have these things called MainCharacters who appear in almost every instalment of the series; these cards will be (are required by fans to be) the most powerful cards in the game. If you make the other faction(s) able to compete, those fans will complain that the game is ruined... even though the same thing results if you let the "good guys" be overpowered.

As previously mentioned, you'll want to balance the game's difficulty very carefully. You want it to be easy enough to be accessible, but with enough depth to really suck people in. One of the simplest ways to do this is to make some of the rules only matter in certain situations. For instance, one of the rules of ''Magic'' is that if you ever have to draw a card from your deck, but can't (IE you're out of deck), you lose. Because it takes more than 50 turns to get to this point in the normal course of things, most beginning players can safely ignore this rule. Eventually, however, it'll crop up... and probably be so surprising ("Wait, I can lose to ''that''? Let me get the instruction manual.") that they'll never forget it. And then try to design a strategy that allows them to "deck" their opponent in this way. Have as many rules as you want... but make as many of them ''optional'' as possible, so that the game can be played very easily using a bare minimum of rules.

Make sure your rules are neither too stifling nor too open. If you can't do anything creative with the ''cards'', your only option is to increase those cards' PowerLevels until they're OverNineThousand. ''SW:CCG'' was particularly notorious for this; eventually it even overwhelmed the Destiny mechanic because so many important characters became ImmuneToFate in varying degrees. The opposite, rules that are not specific enough, encourages you to just keep pasting on new ones, which is just as bad. ''ST:CCG'' is the banner example here. At the beginning of First Edition, it had [[hottip:eight card types:Mission, Dilemma, Artifact; Personnel, Ship, Equipment; Event, Interrupt]], but each new expansion introduced some new gameplay mechanic, and by the end, it had ''seventeen''. Second Edition launched with only seven card types (Artifacts were folded into Equipment) and remained that way forever; its rulebook is also quite a bit shorter. Complexity Creep is just as dangerous as PowerCreep, and while both are inevitable, you want to keep them to a minimum.

So what do we do? Keep the new rules ''on individual cards''. Many ''Magic'' cards actually break the game's rules ("[[IntangibleMan 'Shadow']]? This creature can't be blocked in certain cases?"). And Rule Zero of ''Magic'' is, "If a card ever says it can break the rules, the card is right." But the end result is that the cards ''carry new rules with them''. To aid this, cards meant for beginners will often have reminder text on them, explaining how they break the rules and what that means. ''Magic'' also tends to keep real rule-breakers to rare or at least uncommon, so that new players are less likely to see them and be confused by them. But the point we're trying to make is to leave yourself space for new rules on ''cards'', not in the rulebook. Ideally the rulebook should never have to change from the day of first printing to the day your game is finally canceled. (That's obviously impossible, but less impossible than you think.)

If you are going to have VariablePlayerGoals, you absolutely ''must'' have that ever-elusive quality "depth" in the sense that each goal needs to give you the capacity to interfere with a player who is trying to win the game some other way. As an example, the four characters described above (Eric, Grevon, Lenoia, Corlan) are the main characters in a CCG this editor (Tropers/{{slvstrChung}}) was trying to create in which they compete to see which of them will succeed their father on the throne. Each character had their own power base--Grevon from the military, Corlan from wizards, Lenoia from the priesthood, and Eric from the smallfolk--and could leverage their influence to ''steal'' characters another sibling (IE player) had already deployed. In addition to trying to win a Popularity Victory (have supporters with Influence totaling X) or a Last-Man-Standing Victory (shame the opponents into withdrawing), there was also LoopholeAbuse: getting popular doesn't make you king, plunking your arse on the throne does, and politics is simply a means to that end. If you can simply sneak into the throne room... This would be the "passive," defensive win condition, but it obviously leaves such a player vulnerable: they're busy assembling their StealthBasedMission and can have important supporters poached by the opposition. As such, the business of ''plotting'' an infiltration needs to give that player certain bonuses, which either help protect their most-important followers or weaken the enemy's support, making it easier for you or someone else to knock them out of the race. And that made life difficult for me, the designer. But no matter which goal The Player is pursuing, I knew s/he ''must'' have some ways of competing towards the other ones, if only to defend themselves.

We've talked about the "Living Card Game" idea, which takes the "random" out of RandomlyDrops; the only other major subversion I can think of at this point is that your game doesn't have to be a "paper" game played in person. The Internet is a magical thing. A game that's programmed as an [=iPhone=] app might be really wonderful. Alternately, if you equip every card with a QR code, your players can maintain a paper- and digital card library simultaneously, though obviously this verges on CopyProtection and will irritate some players in that way. This could also build into the aforementioned "storytelling via sequence of card plays" by having global results affect, for example, what cards you can even play. "Players of [X] faction have won #### duels in the last two weeks, and as such cards with [Y] symbol on them are now legal for play." I dunno. But the Internet and smartphones are at your beck and call; consider how you might integrate them into your experience.

Likewise, Wizards have started producing a tie-in ''Magic'' product called "Duels of the Planeswalkers." It's a computerized version of ''Magic''... but it's not a Revenue-Enhancing Device (or at least not solely so), it's actually a ''gateway training product'', giving players a chance to play a dumbed-down, single-player version of ''Magic'', get hooked on it, and emerge into the multiplayer jungle of "paper" ''Magic'' already equipped with (most of) the training and knowledge they need to survive. This is brilliant marketing, and you should look for similar ways to get people involved in your game.

See anything at TradingCardLame. If you can find them. There was a period in TheNineties where game studios were throwing cards at any franchise and seeing what stuck.

And, as mentioned, play games. As many of them as possible. The more overview you have, the better, and the easier it is to steal from ''everybody'' instead of plagiarize from just one game. And remember, stealing from everybody is called "research."

First, be sure to check out SoYouWantTo/WriteAStory for basic advice that holds across ''all'' genres. Then, get look over a rundown of the genre-specific tropes that will help you, hurt you, and guide you on your way.

Second, even more important: ''play''. Don't just play your favorite CCG. In fact, put it aside for at least a month. Instead, go to the bookstore or whatever and ''try new TabletopGames''. Play ''DungeonsAndDragons'', or watch people doing ''Warhammer40K''. Compare {{chess}} to {{Risk}}, {{Monopoly}} with SettlersOfCatan, TabletopGame/{{Munchkin}} with {{Apples To Apples}}. If you're going to create a new game, you need to know what pre-existing games are already doing, so that you can avoid the things you don't like and steal the things you do. And besides, you'll have ''fun''--and isn't that the point of gaming?

Another nice advantage about starting your own Intellectual Property is the ability to avoid CCGImportanceDissonance. Not only do you not have to create filler cards out of Extra Of The Week #13, you aren't ''bound'' to that model by the franchise's existing story. Most stories have these things called MainCharacters who appear in almost every instalment of the series; these cards will be (are required by fans to be) the most powerful cards in the game. If you make the other faction(s) able to compete, those fans will complain that the game is RuinedForever... even though the same thing results if you let the "good guys" be overpowered.

* ExpansionPack: again, this creates more money for you. But it also keeps your consumers playing. Witness the phenomenon of the "[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solved_game solved game]]" - games in which the correct choices, the ones that ''always'' result in a win or at least a forced draw, have already been identified. While [=CCGs=] are typically a bit too complex to truly "solve," there will always be {{Game Breaker}}s that essentially serve the same purpose: choosing not to play them is suicidal because make it that much easier to win. Unless you negate those Game Breakers somehow, your game will stagnate and lose customers... and one of the simplest ways to do that is simply to release new ones.

* Collectibility / Customizability / CompetitiveBalance / VariablePlayerGoals. One of the big appeals of this genre is that you can design a deck to pursue a particular victory strategy. What ''that'' means is that there needs to be more than one way to win. Most ''Magic'' duels revolve around getting the opponent from 20 HitPoints to 0, true, but each of the five colors has different philosophies and tries to get there in different ways; and there's always milling or the various GoldenSnitch cards like [[http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=136048 Barren Glory]] or [[http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=109718 Coalition Victory]]. In ''[=LotR=]'' above, you could win by tossing the Ring into the fire ''or'' by preventing anyone else's Fellowship from doing so, leaving yours the last Fellowship standing. And let's not even ''talk'' about ''[=L5R=]'' and its four different ways of winning.

* TradingCardLame. Most [=CCGs=] are adaptations of existing franchises, for reasons that will be discussed in the next section. The only exceptions are ''Magic'', ''LegendOfTheFiveRings'', ''YuGiOh'' (which itself is, by WordOfGod, a ''Magic'' ripoff) and... Well, that's about it, at least where ''popular'' franchises are concerned. (I mean, have you ''heard'' of MagiNation?) Decipher Inc came up with three ''very'' good adaptations--''[=LotR=]'', ''Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration'' (eventually expanding to the rest of the franchise, though not the [[Film/StarTrek 2009 pre-boot]]) and the ''StarWarsCustomizableCardGame'', but not a single one of them is in print today. And nobody needs to talk about ''Pokemon'' cards. The point is that [=CCGs=] are not exempt from TheProblemWithLicensedGames. The ''problem'' is that creating your own Intellectual Property is just as challenging or more so... but again, we'll talk about that further down.
* Number of Players. ''Star Wars'', ''Star Trek'' and ''Pokemon'' can only be played with two players. Period. The rules simply don't accomodate for anything else. While this is the sound of the devs taking the easy way out, the truth is that designing a CCG to support multiplayer (by which we mean, "Three or more players") can get crazy--the cards that say "Target opponent does [X]" become weaker, while the "''All'' opponents do [X]" become insanely powerful; politics and the KingmakerScenario get involved, where you start deciding whether to use the beneficial cards on yourself or on your maybe-allies (assuming you ''have'' beneficial cards that can target anyone's character, and not just yours); and so on and so fifth. See all this chaos? One of the things you should decide on, as early as possible, is what the maximum number of players per match is, because this will inform your design decisions. Choosing to go 2P only will make the game more boring, but also easier to design.

* TradingCardLame. Most [=CCGs=] are adaptations of existing franchises, for reasons that will be discussed in the next section. The only exceptions are ''Magic'', ''LegendOfTheFiveRings'', ''YuGiOh'' (which itself is, by WordOfGod, a ''Magic'' ripoff) and... Well, that's about it, at least where ''popular'' franchises are concerned. (I mean, have you ''heard'' of MagiNation?) Decipher Inc came up with three ''very'' good adaptations--''[=LotR=]'', ''StarTrekTheNextGeneration'' (eventually expanding to the rest of the franchise, though not the [[Film/StarTrek 2009 pre-boot]]) and the ''StarWarsCustomizableCardGame'', but not a single one of them is in print today. And nobody needs to talk about ''Pokemon'' cards. The point is that [=CCGs=] are not exempt from TheProblemWithLicensedGames. The ''problem'' is that creating your own Intellectual Property is just as challenging or more so... but again, we'll talk about that further down.

* CrackIsCheaper. TropesAreNotBad, this one especially. There are two reasons. First off, the more cards the consumers buy, the more you can afford to create follow-up product, thus resulting in more money. Second, the day players start shelling out ridiculous amounts of cash for individual power cards--the day players ''like'' your game so much that they are willing to blow extra money on it--is the day your game has actually succeeded. [=CCG=]s have RevenueEnhancingDevices built into them. If you're not willing to accept that, don't make a CCG.
** BribingYourWayToVictory, ScrewTheRulesIHaveMoney: these are built into the existing Collectible Card Game / Trading Card Game model: because packs contain a completely random assortment of cards, players who spend more money on the game are more likely to have more powerful cards and more-powerful cards. Having said that, Fantasy Flight Games (''[[ASongOfIceAndFire A Cardgame Of Ice and Fire]]'') have pioneered a new distribution method they call a "Living Card Game," where cards are sold in pre-sorted packs and contents are listed on the back of the box. There are ''no'' randomly-assorted packs for sale. According to FFG, this helps you avoid wasting money, and emphasizes skill (both in playing and deckbuilding) over luck.
* ExpansionPack: again, this creates more money for you. But it also keeps your consumers playing. Witness the phenomenon of the "[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solved_game solved game]]" - games in which the correct choices, the ones that ''always'' result in a win or at least a forced draw, have already been identified. While [=CCGs=] are typically a bit too complex to truly "solve," but there will always be {{Game Breaker}}s that essentially serve the same purpose: choosing not to play them is suicidal because they simply provide a higher-than-normal win-rate. Unless you negate those Game Breakers somehow, your game will stagnate and lose customers... and one of the simplest ways to do that is simply to release new ones.
* AwesomeButImpractical. It is important to have deployment limitations, slowing the game down and preventing players from putting really powerful things in play right at the start. Only one card game didn't do so: the original version of the ''Star Trek'' card game. It was a disaster. Under normal circumstances you could only play one Ship or Character per turn, meaning that some RedShirt was worth the same as the ''[[CoolStarship Enterprise]]'' herself; and the Event card "Red Alert," which let you play any number of cards per turn, became a GameBreaker of ludicrous proportion. The second edition of the game put a resource system into play, which was a lot more sensible.

** FactionCalculus. One of the fun things about a CCG is building out a strategy which (you hope) will win you the game, and then testing it against someone else's. But people also bond with their favorite factions, philosophies and characters. Having factions also builds into your [[MoneyDearBoy profit margins]], because every time player opens a new pack, at least 50% of the cards in it are useless to his current deck. (Unless you've gone with the LCG model.) ''You want more than one side.''

* Number of Players. ''Star Wars'', ''Star Trek'' and ''Pokemon'' can only be played with two players. Period. The rules simply don't accomodate for anything else. While this is the sound of the devs taking the easy way out, the truth is that designing a CCG to support multiplayer (by which we mean, "Three or more players") can get crazy--certain cards become useless, whilst others become insanely powerful; politics and the KingmakerScenario get involved, blablablah. So one of the things you should decide on as early as possible is what the maximum number of players per match is, because this will inform your design decisions.
* Necessary Materials. Every CCG needs a flat surface to be played upon, but others require more. For instance, ''Magic'' gives each player 20 HitPoints, and while you can track it in your head it's easiest to do so with pen and paper. But what about games that ''require'' more than just the cards?--games that require dice, or a bunch of little counters, or (gasp!) pen and paper? The more materials are necessary, besides your deck of cards, the worse off you are, because the harder it is to play on the sidewalk during your lunch break.

** One critical thing to think about is whether it ought to be possible to have non-violent win conditions. Almost every CCG involves defeating your opponent in direct combat; but some, like ''L5R'' and some of the Golden Snitches in ''Magic'', allow you to simply turtle up, defend, and win by meeting some sort of passive goal.
* GeoEffects. ''Magic'' and ''Pokemon'' do not feature any sort of terrain; duels just take place in some vacuum somewhere. In comparison, the ''Star Trek'' and ''Star Wars'' card games both involved geography--you had to travel back and forth between different locations to accomplish varous goals. These games, not coincidentally, required ''much'' more physical space to play, and LoadsAndLoadsOfRules to govern movement. Having said that, TropesAreNotBad: additional rules means additional LoopholeAbuse, and let's face it: LoopholeAbuse is one of the foundations of strategy. (TacticalRockPaperScissors consists of nothing but!)
* CharacterDevelopment: ''SW:CCG'', ''ST:CCG (2E)'', ''[=L5R=]'' and even ''Magic'' have all started to do this: release multiple versions of a character (a Planeswalker in ''Magic'''s case) which have different skills and are suited for different purposes. Typically the way this is done is to have a rule that you may only have one card of that character's ''name'' in play at a time, but then give each version sort of subtitle ([[http://www.trekcc.org/2e/index.php?cardID=2359 James T. Kirk, Highly-Decorated Captain]] vs [[http://www.trekcc.org/2e/index.php?cardID=27 James T. Kirk, Living Legend]], at complete random). In most games you may replace an in-play version with a different one, possibly at reduced deployment costs, but what happens to the first version (LostForever? Back to hand?) depends from game to game. (Note also in this case that the "one in play at a time" rule is indicated by the dot before the name--''ST:CCG'' allows multiples of RedShirt-level cards.) ''Pokemon'' also built this into play by allowing you to evolve your mons, but that's a different mechanic,

So you want to make a CollectibleCardGame, eh? Well, you're an idiot--good luck. In the public mind, there's only two kinds of [=CCGs=]: super-nerdy kinds that people play because they know they're doomed to [[NerdsAreVirgins never, ever have sex in their lives]] (''MagicTheGathering''), and the stupid ones for kids (everything else). Breaking past this is going to be difficult in the extreme.

It's hard to tell a story using cards... but that doesn't mean it's impossible. And, since almost no one has ever tried to do it, this design space is ''ripe'' for mining. If you can come up with a way to incorporate story into gameplay--to construct a narrative ''using'' the cards themselves--you might seriously, seriously be on to something. One obvious solution is to set up combos somehow: Card X can only be played if conditions A, B and C were already fulfilled. To avoid cheating, perhaps Card X needs to be played at the beginning of the turn, which gives the opponent a chance to stop it. The point is, each card becomes a modular piece in a story and can be assembled at will. See also GeekAndSundry's LetsPlay of the TabletopGame "[[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0artLwe87I4 Gloom]]" for an example of how the cards can be used to ''inspire'' storytelling: in ''Gloom'', an "event" card is combined with a character and the players get to make up their own explanations for what exactly happened. (Of course, this is totally optional, and the game can easily be played [[StopHavingFunGuys without all this insipid storytelling]].)

* AwesomeButImpractical. It is important to have deployment limitations, slowing the game down and preventing players from putting really powerful things in play right at the start. Only one card game didn't do so: the original version of the ''Star Trek'' card game. It was a disaster. Under normal circumstances you could only play one Ship or Character per turn, meaning that some RedShirt was worth the same as the ''[[CoolStarship Enterprise]]'' herself; and the Event card "Red Alert," which let you play any number of cards per turn, became a GameBreaker of ludicrous proportion. The second edition of the game put a cost system into play, which was a lot smarter.
** The cost ''itself'' can be variable. ''Magic'' and ''{{Pokemon}}'' only let you play one new {{Mana}} a turn, which delays powerful attacks for a few turns. However, this built an additional WeaksauceWeakness into the game: if you simply didn't ''have'' Mana to deploy, or your opponent was able to destroy it, you were screwed. ''LegendOfTheFiveRings'' let you play as many "Holding" cards, which provide "Gold" for purchasing other cards, as you wanted, but each Holding ''itself'' costs gold, and furthermore your hand[[hottip:*:Yeah, yeah, Provinces; we're trying not to be too technical here]] is only four cards large. Decipher's ''Film/TheLordOfTheRings'' card game used an innovative "twilight pool" mechanic: playing good-guy cards added points to the pool, and playing bad-guy cards removed them.[[hottip:*:This worked in a multiplayer setting because each player had a personal Fellowship they were trying to win with; the people who weren't taking their turn collectively represented Sauron.]]
** Card maximums. Originally ''Magic'' didn't have a limit on how many of Card [X] you could have in a deck. So people would go in with decks consisting solely of like 20 Swamps and then a ZergRush of [[http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=77 Plague Rats]], which could get out of hand really quickly. Nowadays, ''Magic'' decks can only have 4 or less copies of a single card (sorting by name) unless that card is a basic land, and almost every other CCG out there has ''some'' limitation on multiples in this way. (Some games do it by marking the individual cards themselves if they can't be multiplied; under such circumstances you ''can'' have infinite [This] or infinite [That], but those cards tend to be really, really weak anyhow, and you wouldn't play such a deck except for the lulz.) Quantity limitations also make things AwesomeButImpractical: if you can only have four copies of Card X in a deck, that means you have only a 1-in-15 chance of ''drawing'' it.
* Collectibility / Customizability / CompetitiveBalance / VariablePlayerGoals. One of the big appeals of this genre is that you can design a deck to pursue a particular victory strategy. What ''that'' means is that there needs to be more than one way to win. Most ''Magic'' duels revolve around getting the opponent from 20 HitPoints to 0, true, but each of the five colors has different philosophies and tries to get there in different ways; and there's always milling or the various GoldenSnitch cards like [[http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=136048 Barren Glory]] or [[http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=109718 Coalition Victory]]. In ''[=LotR=]'' above, you could win by reaching the Crack of Mount Doom ''or'' by preventing anyone else's Fellowship from getting there, leaving yours the last one standing. And let's not even ''talk'' about ''[=L5R=]''.

* TradingCardLame. Most [=CCGs=] are adaptations of existing franchises, for reasons that will be discussed in the next section down. The only exceptions are ''Magic'', ''LegendOfTheFiveRings'', ''YuGiOh'' (which itself is, by WordOfGod, a ''Magic'' ripoff) and... Well, that's about it, at least where ''popular'' franchises are concerned. (I mean, have you ''heard'' of MagiNation?) DecipherInc came up with three ''very'' good adaptations--''[=LotR=]'', ''StarTrekTheNextGeneration'' (eventually expanding to the rest of the franchise, though not the [[Film/StarTrek 2009 pre-boot]]) and the ''StarWarsCustomizableCardGame'', but not a single one of them is in print today. And nobody needs to talk about the ''Pokemon'' card game, because it was pretty crappy. The point is that [=CCGs=] are not exempt from TheProblemWithLicensedGames. The alternative is to create your own intellectual property... but again, we'll talk about that further down.
* Number of Players. ''Star Wars'', ''Star Trek'' and ''Pokemon'' can only be played with two players. Period. The rules simply don't accomodate for anything else. While this is the easy way out, the truth is that designing a CCG to support multiplayer (by which we mean, "Three or more players") can get crazy--certain cards become useless, whilst others become insanely powerful; politics and the KingmakerScenario get involved, blablablah. So one of the things you should decide on as early as possible is what the maximum number of players per match is, because this will inform your design decisions.

It's hard to tell a story using cards... but that doesn't mean it's impossible. And, since almost no one has ever tried to do it, this design space is ''ripe'' for mining. If you can come up with a way to incorporate story into gameplay--to construct a narrative ''using'' the cards themselves--you might seriously, seriously be on to something. One obvious solution is to set up combos somehow: Card X can only be played if conditions A, B and C were already fulfilled. To avoid cheating, perhaps Card X needs to be played at the beginning of the turn, which gives the opponent a chance to stop it. The point is, each card becomes a modular piece in a story and can be assembled at will. Another thing that ''Warhammer 40K'' and ''[=L5R=]'' both did was allow the results of tournaments or normal gameplay to determine the ''metaplot'': one player running Imperial Guard would square off against another playing Chaos Marines, and the results would be sent back to GamesWorkshop, who tallied the results of thousands of games worldwide and eventually declared who had actually managed to keep Cadia at the end of the Thirteenth Black Crusade. And at one point a Shadowlands player came within a hair of [[TheBadGuyWins taking the world L5R championship]], which would have had very interesting implications for the game's future as the contents of upcoming expansions were of course going to be based on what happened right there at that table. This is not quite the same as building a story out of each individual match, but it's something to think on.

** This should go without saying, but: if you're going to require players to have a specific character card before they can start a match--Ash Ketchum, f'ex--then for the love of god, ''make that character a Common card.'' Hell, make them more-than-common the way Lands are in ''M:tG''. Obviously you could have a second, Rare version of Ash who is more powerful, but that still makes you a Jerkass Creator, since you're encouraging BribingYourWayToVictory. The only way you could be more blatant about it is to not have the Common version, so that a player ''has'' to buy like $50 worth of cards just to ''start'' playing, much less get good.

So the reason to adapt an existing franchise is also simple: it already ''has'' a story, known characters, emotional connections to and from The Player. If I give you a card for Eric del Scheir ([[OriginalCharacter OC]], don't steal), you see a kid who looks like JustinBieber in the card art, and you know a little bit about his personality (the squealing peasant girls in the background are another indication), but you don't necessarily know anything about his relationship to Lenoia del Scheir, or Corlan, or Grevon, or the peasant girls, or why a TeenIdol is in a game with mages and soldiers and priests, or why he has a claim for the throne. (And the fact that he looks like Bieber may turn you off.) If I give you a card that says "[[StarWars Luke Skywalker]]" on it, though, you have knowledge about him that predates the arrival of the card, and you know what it means if you manage to get Obi-Wan in play alongside him, or what might happen if he has to fight against your opponent's Boba Fett card. Even better, you might be ''excited'' for the chance to pit him against the card of someone he never faced in-person, like [[ThePhantomMenace Darth Maul]] or [[TheThrawnTrilogy Grand Admiral Thrawn]].

It's hard to tell a story using cards... but that doesn't mean it's impossible. And, since almost no one has ever tried to do it, this design space is ''ripe'' for mining. If you can come up with a way to incorporate story into gameplay--to construct a narrative ''using'' the cards themselves--you might seriously, seriously be on to something. One obvious solution is to set up combos somehow: Card X can only be played if conditions A, B and C were already fulfilled. To avoid cheating, perhaps Card X needs to be played at the beginning of the turn, which gives the opponent a chance to stop it. The point is, each card becomes a modular piece in a story and can be assembled at will. Another thing that ''Warhammer 40K'' and ''=[L5R=]'' both did was allow the results of tournaments or normal gameplay to determine the ''metaplot'': one player running Imperial Guard would square off against another playing Chaos Marines, and the results would be sent back to GamesWorkshop, who tallied the results of thousands of games worldwide and eventually declared who had actually managed to keep Cadia at the end of the Thirteenth Black Crusade. And at one point a Shadowlands player came within a hair of [[TheBadGuyWins taking the world L5R championship]], which would have had very interesting implications for the game's future as the contents of upcoming expansions were of course going to be based on what happened right there at that table. This is not quite the same as building a story out of each individual match, but it's something to think on.

* CrackIsCheaper. Believe it or not, you ''want'' this trope. There are two reasons. First off, the more cards the consumers buy, the more you can afford to create follow-up product, thus resulting in more money. Second, the day players start shelling out ridiculous amounts of cash for individual power cards is the day your game has actually succeeded. Capitalism is integrated into the CCG model. If you're not willing to accept that, don't make one.
** BribingYourWayToVictory, ScrewTheRulesIHaveMoney: these are built into the existing Collectible Card Game / Trading Card Game model. Having said that, Fantasy Flight Games (''[[ASongOfIceAndFire A Cardgame Of Ice and Fire]]'') have pioneered a new distribution method they call a "Living Card Game." In the standard ''Magic'' model, you buy a pack of 15 or 60 cards and have absolutely no idea what you'll get. In the LCG model, cards are ''only'' sold in pre-sorted packs and contents are listed on the back of the box, so you can avoid wasting money, and skill (both in playing and deckbuilding) is emphasized over luck. Yes, ''Magic'' dips into this by providing you with pre-built decks, but 1) those are meant to be for beginners, and 2) the LCG model (as such) consists ''solely'' of "beginner" decks.
* ExpansionPack: again, this creates more money for you. But it also keeps your consumers playing. Witness the phenomenon of the "[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solved_game solved game]]" - games in which the correct choices, the ones that ''always'' result in a win or at least a forced draw, have already been identified. [=CCGs=] are typically a bit too complex to solve easily, but there will always be {{Game Breaker}}s that essentially serve the same purpose: playing them is suicidal because they simply provide a higher-than-normal win-rate. Unless you replace those Game Breakers with new ones, your game will stagnate and lose customers.
* AwesomeButImpractical. It is important to have deployment limitations, slowing the game down and preventing players from putting really powerful things in play right at the start. Only one card game didn't do so: the original version of the ''Star Trek'' card game. It was a disaster. Under normal circumstances you could only play one Ship or Character per turn, meaning [[RedShirt Ensign Guisti]] was worth the same as the ''[[CoolStarship Enterprise]]'' herself; and the Event card "Red Alert," which let you play any number of cards per turn, became a GameBreaker of ludicrous proportion. The second edition of the game put a cost system into play, which was a lot smarter.

* TradingCardLame. Most [=CCGs=] are adaptations of existing franchises, for reasons that will be discussed in the next section down. The only exceptions are ''Magic'', ''LegendOfTheFiveRings'', ''YuGiOh'' (which itself is, by WordOfGod, a ''Magic'' ripoff) and... Well, that's about it, at least where ''popular'' franchises are concerned. (I mean, have you ''heard'' of MagiNation?) DecipherInc came up with three ''very'' good adaptations--''[=LotR=]'', ''StarTrekTheNextGeneration'' (eventually expanding to the rest of the franchise, though not the [[Film/StarTrek 2009 pre-boot]]) and the ''StarWarsCustomizableCardGame'', but not a single one of them is in print today. And nobody needs to talk about the ''Pokemon'' card game, because it was pretty crappy. The point is that VideoGameMoviesSuck, and [=CCGs=] built on other franchises tend to have the same problem. The alternative is to create your own intellectual property... but again, we'll talk about that further down.
* Number of Players. ''Star Wars'', ''Star Trek'' and ''Pokemon'' can only be played with two players. Period. The rules simply don't accomodate for anything else. While this is a bit of a cop-out, the truth is that designing a CCG to support multiplayer (by which we mean, "Three or more players") can get crazy--certain cards become useless, whilst others become insanely powerful; politics and the KingmakerScenario get involved, blablablah. So one of the things you should decide on as early as possible is what the maximum number of players per match is, because this will inform your design decisions.

** Something cool ''SW:CCG'' and ''[=L5R=]'' have done is build the dice into their cards. Almost every card has a "Destiny" value (''Star Wars'') or "Focus" value (''[=L5R=]''), and whenever you were in a position that skill, chance and circumstance should help decide the outcome of an event ({{Sword Fight}}s, for example), each player drew the top card of their deck and added the value to whatever totals they were already counting. ''Star Wars'' took this an extra step and made a card's Destiny value roughly ''inverse'' to its PowerLevels. UnderdogsNeverLose in that galaxy far, far away, because TheForce is with them; by enforcing this trope, Decipher not only added flavor but helped newer players (with weaker cards) compete against people who had sunk more money into their decks. ''And'' this adds a LuckManipulationMechanic where, with the right cards, you can "stack your deck" to give yourself favorable Destiny / Focus values.
* Target Demographic. The ''Pokemon'' CCG is so simple it's almost "solved"... but that ''appeals'' to its under-10 audience. The ''Star Wars'' CCG had LoadsAndLoadsOfRules and was NintendoHard, to the point that even experienced ''Magic'' players could get fumbled up. You want your game to have ''depth'', which is difficult to achieve and even more difficult to describe, but it has to do with how its mechanics interact--or, rather, whether they do at all. A game with "depth" is typically described as "Easy to learn, hard to master," and that's the sweet spot you want.

* GeoEffects. ''Magic'' and ''Pokemon'' do not feature any sort of terrain; duels just take place in some vacuum somewhere. In comparison, the ''Star Trek'' and ''Star Wars'' card games both involved geography--you had to travel back and forth between different locations to accomplish varous goals. These games, not coincidentally, required ''much'' more table space to play, and LoadsAndLoadsOfRules to govern movement. Having said that, TropesAreNotBad: additional rules means additional LoopholeAbuse, and let's face it: LoopholeAbuse is one of the foundations of strategy. (TacticalRockPaperScissors consists of nothing but!)
* CharacterDevelopment: ''SW:CCG'', ''ST:CCG (2E)'', ''[=L5R=]'' and even ''Magic'' have all started to do this: release multiple versions of a character (a Planeswalker in ''Magic'''s case) which have different skills and are suited for different purposes. Typically the way this is done is to have a rule that you may only have one card of that character's ''name'' in play at a time, but then give each version sort of subtitle ([[http://www.trekcc.org/2e/index.php?cardID=2359 James T. Kirk, Highly-Decorated Captain]] vs [[http://www.trekcc.org/2e/index.php?cardID=27 James T. Kirk, Living Legend]], at complete random). In most games you may replace an in-play version with a different one, possibly at reduced deployment costs, but what happens to the first version (LostForever? Back to hand?) depends from game to game. (Note also in this case that the "one in play at a time" rule is indicated by the dot before the name--''ST:CCG'' allows multiples of RedShirt-level cards.)

As mentioned, most [=CCGs=] are adaptations of existing franchises. The reason for this is simple: it is quite difficult for a CCG to tell a story. If you decide to print the content on the cards themselves as flavor text, well, there's no guarantee any given player will ''see'' every card in the set, since some of them are rare and he needs to buy--what?--an average of sixty 15-card booster packs to have a chance of getting every rare in the set? If each booster is $3, you've just asked him to spend $180 on a story. Plus, there's not much space on a little piece of cardboard. Alternatively, put the story in a {{Novelization}}... but then don't expect too many people to read it.

So the reason to adapt an existing franchise is also simple: it already ''has'' a story, known characters, emotional connections to and from The Player. If I give you a card for Eric del Scheir ([[OriginalCharacter OC]], don't steal), you see a kid who looks like JustinBieber in the card art, and you know a little bit about his personality (the squealing peasant girls in the background are another indication), but you don't necessarily know anything about his relationship to Lenoia del Scheir, or Corlan, or Grevon, or the peasant girls, or why a TeenIdol is in a game with mages and soldiers and priests, or why he has a claim for the throne. (And the fact that he looks like Bieber may turn you off.) If I give you a card that says "[[StarWars Luke Skywalker]]" on it, though, you have knowledge about him that predates the arrival of the card, and you know what it means if you manage to get Obi-Wan in play alongside him, or what might happen if he has to fight against your opponent's Boba Fett card. Even better, you might be ''excited'' for the chance to match him against the card of someone he never faced in-person, like [[TheCallistaTrilogy Irek Roganda]] or [[TheForceUnleashed Galen Marek]].

Having said that, this design space is obviously ''ripe'' for mining. If you can come up with a way to incorporate story into gameplay--to construct a narrative ''using'' the cards themselves--you might seriously, seriously be on to something. One obvious solution is to set up combos somehow: Card X can only be played if conditions A, B and C were already fulfilled. To avoid cheating, perhaps Card X needs to be played at the beginning of the turn, which gives the opponent a chance to stop it. The point is, each card becomes a modular piece in a story and can be assembled at will. Another thing that ''Warhammer 40K'' and ''=[L5R=]'' both did was allow the results of tournaments or normal gameplay to determine the ''metaplot'': one player running Imperial Guard would square off against another playing Chaos Marines, and the results would be sent back to GamesWorkshop, who tallied the results of thousands of games worldwide and eventually declared who had actually managed to keep Cadia at the end of the Thirteenth Black Crusade. And at one point a Shadowlands player came within a hair of [[TheBadGuyWins taking the world L5R championship]], which would have had very interesting implications for the game's future as the contents of upcoming expansions were of course going to be based on what happened right there at that table. This is not quite the same as building a story out of each individual match, but it's something to think on.

Another helpful weapon in this arena is "flavor," which has to do with how memorable the card's design is and whether it taps into some form of shorthand. In other words? '''''Tropes'''''. TropesAreTools and you should use them ''unabashedly'' in designing individual cards. If I tell you that a card called "[[ShockAndAwe Lightning Bolt]]" does three damage to whatever it hits, that makes perfect sense. Likewise, if I tell you that a monster with "Flying" can't be intercepted by creatures without it, you nod and go with it because of ''course'' a lion can't stop an eagle. Look for this kind of resonance. Use it to communicate concepts and make cards to understand. Be shamelessly {{troperiffic}}, because it will make individual cards easier to understand.

(The real reason slvstrChung abandoned this idea was that he couldn't figure out how to prevent it from turning into a ''trading'' card game--packing up your deck, shaking your opponent's hand, and only ten minutes later realizing you've walked away with five cards that used to belong to him, and that he has three of yours. Even worse, he managed to convert that ultra-rare of yours, and can possibly foul-play his way into keeping it. Yeah, ''this'' is gonna work out well.)

Most card games are not very funny. Why the heck not? ''SW:CCG'' in particular was written and designed with a clear eye towards humor, which players loved; though the real kicker is the card "Barber Pole" from ''ST:CCG'', which said, literally, nothing but "Plays on table." As in, This is a permanent, put it on the table and leave it there. What does it do? [[MathematiciansAnswer No.]] Nobody used it, but the mere fact that it existed was a lot of fun.

** Card maximums. Originally ''Magic'' didn't have a limit on how many of Card [X] you could have in a deck. So people would go in with decks consisting solely of like 20 Swamps and then a ZergRush of [[http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=77 Plague Rats]], which could get out of hand really quickly. Nowadays, ''Magic'' decks can only have 4 or less copies of a single card (sorting by name) unless that card is a basic land, and almost every other CCG out there has ''some'' limitation on multiples in this way. (Some games do it by marking the individual cards themselves if they can't be multiplied; under such circumstances you ''can'' have infinite [This] or infinite [That], but those cards tend to be really, really weak anyhow, and you wouldn't play such a deck except for the lulz.) Quantity limitations also make things AwesomeButImpractical: if you can only have four copies of Card X in a deck, that means you have only a 1-in-15 chance of ''drawing'' it from your deck.
* Collectibility / Customizability / CompetitiveBalance / VariablePlayerGoals. One of the big appeals of this genre is that you can design a deck to pursue a particular victory strategy. What ''that'' means is that there needs to be more than one way to win. Most ''Magic'' duels revolve around getting the opponent from 20 HitPoints to 0, true, but each of the five colors has different philosophies and tries to get there in different ways; and there's always milling or the various GoldenSnitch cards (IE "The Cheese Stands Alone"). In ''[=LotR=]'' above, you could win by reaching the Crack of Mount Doom ''or'' by preventing anyone else's Fellowship from getting there, leaving yours the last one standing. And let's not even ''talk'' about ''[=L5R=]''.

** Something cool ''SW:CCG'' and ''[=L5R=]'' have done is build the dice into their cards. Almost every card has a "Destiny" value (''Star Wars'') or "Focus" value (''[=L5R=]''), and whenever you were in a position that skill, chance and circumstance should help decide the outcome of an event ({{Sword Fight}}s, for example), each player drew the top card of their deck and added the value to whatever totals they were already counting. ''Star Wars'' took this an extra step and made a card's Destiny value roughly ''inverse'' to its PowerLevels. UnderdogsNeverLose in that galaxy far, far away, because TheForce is with them; by enforcing this trope, Decipher not only added flavor but helped newer players (with weaker cards) compete against people who had sunk more money into their decks.

So you want to make a CollectibleCardGame, eh? Well, you're an idiot--good luck. In the public mind, there's only two kinds of CCGs: super-nerdy kinds that people play because they know they're doomed to [[NerdsAreVirgins never, ever have sex in their lives]] (''MagicTheGathering''), and the stupid ones for kids (everything else). Breaking past this is going to be difficult in the extreme.

* ExpansionPack: again, this creates more money for you. But it also keeps your consumers playing. Witness the phenomenon of the "[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solved_game solved game]]" - games in which the correct choices, the ones that ''always'' result in a win or at least a forced draw, have already been identified. CCGs are typically a bit too complex to solve easily, but there will always be {{Game Breaker}}s that essentially serve the same purpose: playing them is suicidal because they simply provide a higher-than-normal win-rate. Unless you replace those Game Breakers with new ones, your game will stagnate and lose customers.

* Collectibility / Customizability / CompetitiveBalance / VariablePlayerGoals. One of the big appeals of this genre is that you can design a deck to pursue a particular victory strategy. What ''that'' means is that there needs to be more than one way to win. Most ''Magic'' duels revolve around getting the opponent from 20 HitPoints to 0, true, but each of the five colors has different philosophies and tries to get there in different ways; and there's always milling or the various GoldenSnitch cards (IE "The Cheese Stands Alone"). In ''[=LotR=]'' above, you could win by reaching the Crack of Mount Doom ''or'' by preventing anyone else's Fellowship from getting there, leaving yours the last one standing. And let's not even ''talk'' about the conditions in ''LegendOfTheFiveRings''.
** FactionCalculus. The ''Star Wars'' CCG doesn't allow {{Mirror Match}}es; every match ''must'' take place between a Darkside player and a Lightside player. It's just about the only exception. Every other card game has at least two factions and allows players to match them up at their own discretion. This also builds into your [[MoneyDearBoy profit margins]], because every time player opens a pack of CCG cards, at least 50% of the cards in it are useless to his current deck. (If you go with an LCG model, though, forget it.) ''You want more than one side.''

* TradingCardLame. Most CCGs are adaptations of existing franchises, for reasons that will be discussed in the next section down. The only exceptions are ''Magic'', ''LegendOfTheFiveRings'', ''YuGiOh'' (which itself is, by WordOfGod, a ''Magic'' ripoff) and... Well, that's about it, at least where ''popular'' franchises are concerned. (I mean, have you ''heard'' of MagiNation?) DecipherInc came up with three ''very'' good adaptations--''[=LotR=]'', ''StarTrekTheNextGeneration'' (eventually expanding to the rest of the franchise, though not the [[Film/StarTrek 2009 pre-boot]]) and the ''StarWarsCustomizableCardGame'', but not a single one of them is in print today. And nobody needs to talk about the ''Pokemon'' card game, because it was pretty crappy. The point is that VideoGameMoviesSuck, and CCGs built on other franchises tend to have the same problem. The alternative is to create your own intellectual property... but again, we'll talk about that further down.
* Number of Players. ''Star Wars'', ''Star Trek'' and ''Pokemon'' can only be played with two players. Period. The rules simply don't accomodate anything else. While this is a bit of a cop-out, the truth is that designing a CCG to support multiplayer (by which we mean, "Three or more players") can get crazy--certain cards become useless, whilst others become insanely powerful; politics and the KingmakerScenario get involved, blablablah. So one of the things you should decide on as early as possible is what the maximum number of players per match is, because this will inform your design decisions.

* VariablePlayerGoals. As mentioned, you need them. But that means you need to decide what they are. And, unfortunately, the sky's the limit, since CCGs can take place in any milieu and on any scope, from one-on-one fistfights to games of thrones to saving the galaxy from evil.

As mentioned, most CCGs are adaptations of existing franchises. The reason for this is very, very simple: it is quite difficult for a CCG to tell a story. If you decide to print the content on the cards themselves as flavor text, well, there's no guarantee any given player will ''see'' every card in the set, since some of them are rare and he needs to buy--what?--an average of sixty 15-card booster packs to have a chance of getting every rare in the set? If each booster is $3, you've just asked him to spend $180 on a story. Plus, there's not much space on a little piece of cardboard. Alternatively, put the story in a {{Novelization}}... but then don't expect too many people to read it.

This is where adaptations come in handy. If I give you a card for Eric del Scheir ([[OriginalCharacter OC]], don't steal), you see a kid who looks like JustinBieber in the card art, and you know a little bit about his personality (the squealing peasant girls in the background are another indication), but you don't necessarily know anything about his relationship to Lenoia del Scheir, or Corlan, or Grevon, or the peasant girls, or why a TeenIdol is in a game with mages and soldiers and priests, or why he has a claim for the throne. If I give you a card that says "Luke Skywalker" on it, though, you have knowledge about him that predates the arrival of the card, and you know what it means if you manage to get Obi-Wan in play alongside him, or what might happen if he has to fight against your opponent's Boba Fett card. Adaptations bring their story ''with'' them, and relieve the players (and creator) the burden of creating one.

As previously mentioned, you'll want to balance the game very carefully. You want it to be easy enough to be accessible, but with enough depth to really suck people in. One of the simplest ways to do this is to make some of the rules only matter in certain situations. For instance, one of the rules of ''Magic'' is that if you ever have to draw a card from your deck, but can't (IE you're out of deck), you lose. Because it takes more than 50 turns to get to this point in the normal course of things, most beginning players can safely ignore this rule. Eventually, however, it'll crop up... and probably be so surprising ("Wait, I can lose to ''that''? Let me get the instruction manual.") that they'll never forget it. And then try to design a strategy that allows them to "deck" their opponent in this way. Have as many rules as you want... but make as many of them ''optional'' as possible, so that the game can be played very easily using a bare minimum of rules.

An key to this situation is that many ''Magic'' cards actually break the game's rules. And Rule Zero of ''Magic'' is, "If a card ever says it can break the rules, the card is right." In other words, the cards carry their rules ''with'' them. To aid this, cards meant for beginners will often have reminder text on them, explaining how they break the rules and what that means. An additional key is the concept of rarity. If fancier, more powerful, more rule-breaking cards are all rare (or at least uncommon), then new players are less likely to see them and be confused by them.

Consider flavor. Flavor is important because it makes the game easier to understand. For instance, if I tell you that a spell called "Lightning Bolt" does three damage to whatever it hits, that makes perfect sense. Likewise, if I tell you that a monster with "Flying" can't be intercepted by creatures without it, you nod and go with it because of ''course'' a lion can't stop an eagle. Look for resonance. Use it to communicate concepts and make cards to understand. Be unabashedly {{troperiffic}}.

Finally, be aware that WizardsOfTheCoast has issued a patent on the idea of turning a card ninety degrees to show that it has somehow been temporarily expended. ''A Cardgame of Thrones'' has gotten around this somehow, possibly because Fantasy Flight Games pays a royalty to Wizards; ''L5R'' uses "bowing" because Wizards used to publish that game. If ''you'' try to put a "tapping" mechanic in your game, Wizards can sue you, and they are a bit more likely to win than you are.

** BribingYourWayToVictory, ScrewTheRulesIHaveMoney: these are built into the existing Collectible Card Game / Trading Card Game model. Having said that, Fantasy Flight Games (''[[ASongOfIceAndFire A Cardgame Of Ice and Fire]]'') have pioneered a new distribution method they call a "Living Card Game." In the standard ''Magic'' model, you buy a pack of 15 or 60 cards and have absolutely no idea what you'll get. In the LCG model, the pack lists what's in it on the back, so you can avoid wasting money, and skill (both in playing and deckbuilding) is emphasized over luck. Yes, ''Magic'' dips into this by providing you with pre-built decks, but 1) those are meant to be for beginners, and 2) the LCG model (as such) consists ''solely'' of "beginner" decks. There is ''no'' randomly-sorted product to be had, and nothing (besides money) (''besides'' money) stopping a player from easily acquiring the cards they need.

** The cost ''itself'' can be variable. ''Magic'' and ''{{Pokemon}}'' only let you play one new {{Mana}} a turn, which delays powerful attacks for a few turns. However, this built an additional WeaksauceWeakness into the game: if you simply didn't ''have'' Mana to deploy, or your opponent was able to destroy it, you were screwed. ''LegendOfTheFiveRings'' let you play as many "Holding" cards, which provide "Gold" for purchasing other cards, as you wanted, but each Holding ''itself'' costs gold, and furthermore your hand[[hottip:*:Yeah, yeah, Provinces; we're trying not to be too technical here]] is only four cards large. Decipher's ''Film/TheLordOfTheRings'' card game used an innovative "twilight pool" mechanic: playing good-guy cards added points to the pool, and playing bad-guy cards removed them.[[hottip:*:This worked in a multiplayer setting because each player had a personal Fellowship they were trying to win with; if it wasn't your turn, you played as Sauron.]]

If you are going to have VariablePlayerGoals, you absolutely ''must'' have that ever-elusive quality "depth" in the sense that each goal needs to give you the capacity to interfere with a player who is trying to win the game some other way. As an example, the four characters described above (Eric, Grevon, Lenoia, Corlan) are the main characters in a CCG this editor (Tropers/{{slvstrChung}}) was trying to create in which they compete to see which of them will succeed their father on the throne. Each character had their own power base--Grevon from the military, Corlan from wizards, Lenoia from the priesthood, and Eric from the smallfolk--and could leverage their influence to ''steal'' characters another sibling (IE player) had already deployed. In addition to trying to win public acclaim, there was also LoopholeAbuse: getting popular doesn't make you king, plunking your arse on the throne does, and getting popular (or shaming your siblings) is simply a means to that end. If one of them could simply sneak into the throne room... This would be the "passive," defensive win condition, but it obviously leaves such a player vulnerable: they're busy assembling their WaveMotionGun and can have important supporters poached by the opponentry. As such, the business of ''plotting'' an infiltration needs to give that player certain bonuses which help protect their followers. Likewise, gaining enough followers and political acclaim needs to materially contribute to inching one's arse closer to the throne. If there's more than one goal, life gets difficult for the designer, because no matter which goal The Player is pursuing, s/he ''must'' have some ways of competing towards the other ones, if only to defend themselves.

(The real reason slvstrChung abandoned this idea was that he couldn't figure out how to prevent it from turning into a ''trading'' card game--packing up your deck, shaking your opponent's hand, and only ten minutes later realizing you've walked away with five cards that used to belong to him, and that he has three of yours. Even worse, he managed to snag that ultra-rare and can possibly foul-play his way into keeping it. Yeah.)

So you want to make a CollectibleCardGame, eh? Well, you're an idiot--good luck. In the public mind, there's only two kinds of CCGs: super-nerdy kinds that people play because they know they're doomed to never, ever have sex (''MagicTheGathering''), and the stupid ones for kids (everything else). Breaking past this is going to be difficult in the extreme.

Having said that, this design space is obviously ''ripe'' for mining. If you can come up with a way to incorporate story into gameplay--to construct a narrative ''using'' the cards themselves--you might seriously, seriously be on to something. The obvious answer is to set up combos somehow: Card X can only be played if conditions A, B and C were already fulfilled. To avoid cheating, perhaps Card X needs to be played at the beginning of the turn, which gives the opponent a chance to stop it. If he doesn't, well...

Consider flavor. Flavor is important because it makes the game easier to understand. For instance, if I tell you that a spell called "Lightning Bolt" does three damage to whatever it hits, that makes perfect sense. Likewise, if I tell you that a monster with "Flying" can't be intercepted by creatures without it, you nod and go with it because of ''course'' a lion can't stop an eagle. Look for resonance. Use it to communicate concepts and make cards to understand. Be unabashedly troperiffic.

Finally, be aware that WizardsOfTheCoast has issued a patent on the idea of turning a card ninety degrees to show that it has somehow been temporarily expended. ''A Cardgame of Thrones'' has gotten around this somehow, possibly because Fantasy Flight Games pays a royalty to Wizards; ''L5R'' uses "bowing" because Wizards used to publish that game. If ''you'' try to put it in your game, Wizards can sue you, and they are a bit more likely to win.

We've talked about the "Living Card Game" idea, which takes the "random" out of RandomlyDrops; the only other major subversion I can think of at this point is that your game doesn't have to be a "paper" game played in person. The Internet is a magical thing. A game that's programmed as an [=iPhone=] app might be really wonderful. Alternately, if you equip every card with a QR code, your players can maintain a paper- and digital card library simultaneously, though obviously this verges on CopyProtection and will irritate some players in that way.

* ExpansionPack: again, this creates more money for you. But it also keeps your consumers playing.
Witness the phenomenon of the "[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solved_game solved game]]" - games in which the correct choices, the ones that ''always'' result in a win or at least a forced draw, have already been identified. CCGs are typically a bit too complex to solve easily, but there will always be {{Game Breaker}} cards that, at least for the moment, are the strongest option and provide a higher-than-normal win-rate. Simply put, unless you replace them with new ones, your game will stagnate and lose customers.