How would you design a TCG that isn’t praying on predatory gambling and investors as it’s core business model while still keeping deck building and experimentation a big part of the game itself? Is a living card game really the best alternative?
>>96560714I cannot think of an alternative better than LCGs.It's possible that the TCG model could've worked in a time before the internet, but it would've needed a huge push of popularity to get it to that point, and there'd still be stratified levels of access.
>>96560714Big box, yearly release. No gambling, it comes with all the cards for that expansion, you can sell any you don't want or buy extras from other people.
>>96560714Is a living card game really the best alternative?LCGs are basically what you get if you remove the aspect of gambling from TGCs, so yes, I guess?
>>96560724This, plus every so often throw in remakes of old cards to synergize with evolving meta and counteract power creep.
As many already said. Just go LCG. Its litterally just a TCG without the gambling. Honestly I don't even get how the answer isn't obvious.Deck building's all still there. So is experimentation. You still get releases by seasons. You can have multiple formats just like with TCG. What else would you want? ITS JUST A TCG WITHOUT GAMBLING. NOTHING LESS. NOTHING MORE.
>>96560714It would all come down to ease of access. You can't get away from the gambling/investor issue without getting rid of packs in general. Bandai games, love or hate them, do a good job of combining the two together with alt arts being expensive and base arts being easy to pull. But at it's core, the bigger boxes are being pulled by investors and not deck builders. The deck builders will always be secondary market because they have specifics they want.Yu-gi-oh does a decent job with their deck builder packs, but the rarity system, game balance, and game itself are so cancerous that no one buys them and you can't make a deck from a single or even two boxes. Which at that point you are stuck with either a half assed deck or a bunch of bulk you don't want.I would probably combine the two together. A low power ceiling game with alt arts and base arts that has product designed to be for deck builders first with investors second. You and a group of friends buy a box at $50 a piece, trade unwanted, extra, and non-tribal cards around and each of you can build a decent deck plus or minus 1-4 cards. Really it would need to be set up where each box gives you either a full playset or 1/3 a playset of each card you need along with alternates and less powerful in slot cards. Then, if you get lucky, you get an alt art worth maybe $30-$50. That way the price doesn't go up on boxes, you have a chance to make your money back, and you get the fun bragging rights over your friends.The main issue is, without investors, the prices start to crash. Yu-gi-oh is having this issue where a lot of their 2024-25 product had no good cards, no chase cards, etc and were all low power or non-meta products more or less. Some of them are $35-$40 a box down from $70-$80.
>>96560714This. What makes TCGs predatory is the randomized FOMO purchases. If the purchase isn't random, and is available indefinitely, you have fixed the problem. In other words, expansions should be sold in prebuilt decks/boxes of some sort that have no variance between themselves and have no expiration date. You could still make your own decks by combining cards from precons you've bought, similarly how people can make their own Lego creations from bricks they got from buying premade sets.The trouble is, there is no financial incentive for any of this. The thing that makes TCGs so immensely profitable is specifically their predatory nature.
>>96561603There's probably still some way to make money on top of that if you make the basic cards readily available but have alternate arts/foils/etc. as something on top of that.Pokemon's TCG manages something close, where it's pretty cheap to build a deck, but costly to bling it out.
>>96560714Kill the secondary market scalpers by offering all cards as print-on-demand for a small, reasonable fee. Literally no one should be buying up pallets of cards just for the chance to price gouge some dumb fuck because a bunch of redditors decided that one card should be worth thousands of dollars.
>>96564552Actually sounds like a good idea if it were proven viable to print by order instead of by big pre-formed sheets and just letting them loose.If you can go straight to the source and get what you want for the Retail, that's nothing but good. People who are willing to sell their second hands have no choice but to let it go for cheaper because you can buy brand new from the factory always. The only folks missing out are scalpers, flippers, and speculative investors and fuck em all.
>>96560714Do I have trustfund or crytpo-kiddie tiers of cash? Fully functional digital client for phone and PC alongside a physical release with a print-on-demand reprint policy. But unless you have a silly amount of start up capital, it just wouldn't be possible
I design my sets to be played as cubes where 8 players draft from the singleton cube, winner gets whatever is leftover (so each set is around 500 cards). Or you return the cards and start another draft, either works. You can get a full set of cards for Constructed by simply buying 4 cubes (or whatever the card limits are). Players are encouraged to make their own cubes from different sets.Popular decks and cubes get reprinted to make sure people don't have to buy tons of cards to get only a handful they need. Some LCGs don't do this and it makes them have higher initial costs than TCGs.
>>96560714Card print on demand shop.
>>96560714Bandit Keith was skinny under his vest?!
>>96560714The best way I see if going about is a semi-hybrid of LCG and TCG: selling sets of one each of factions cards each time new stuff come out, but with random, different rarities of art/holographic treatment inside each set of cards. This would incentivize those looking to collect fancy art cards to buy lots of sets in the hopes of pulling something good (which ups sales for the card makers), while also guaranteeing that the ‘common’ variants of the cards are super cheap on the secondhand market for those looking to get into the game easily.
>>96560714Periodically have scalpers killed in ways that go viral in right places.
