What are the best CCGs?

[Jason Liang]

Jason Liang

What CCG is still alive these days online? YGO Master Link, MTG, Snap, Shadowverse, Runeterra? Anything else?

I play Master Duel, Snap and Tyrant Unleashed. Urban Rivals still going strong, I played quite a bit a few months ago. Estiah is still up, and of course Mtg Arena is still going, although I uninstalled a couple of years ago. There are also f2p web clients Jinteki and Jingoku for Android Netrunner and FFG L5R respectively, as well as VtES on Lackey.

- Master Duel I generally play 4-5 days a month. Very generous with rewards, the more you play, the more gems you get, usually 2 Festivals each month, just play 2 days for about 2 hours and you get most of the rewards. Very easy to get 7k-10k gems a month, which gets 70-100 packs.

- Snap requires doing daily missions. It takes about 7 months to get all the "free" S1-S3 cards, then you are basically just grinding daily for credits that turn into keys, which are like gacha pulls. You get 4 keys a month, which you use to get 3-4 S4/S5 cards, with a little luck. Game is honestly kind of garbage but you can have about 20-30 minutes of fun every day.

- Tyrant Unleashed is mostly played on the weekends, with weekends alternating between guild events and pvp events each other week. Progression is a little slow but steady, a new player can be fairly competitive after about 2 months.

- Urban Rivals is very fun to collect and play. Game is very generous, you will get over a dozen new cards each day, and with probably over 3000 cards now you will be collecting for years and years.

 

[Jason Liang]

So Yugioh Master Duel is celebrating its 2nd Anniversary with a lot of great free rewards and special packs for new players. Also there is a referral bonus, so if anyone does install the game and enters my campaign code, we both get a free really awesome Swordsoul Structure deck that is immediately very competitive. Of course I really want that free deck but I'm also genuinely impressed by how much these rewards make getting into the game accessible.

Anyway, the game is downloadable on steam and my code is 3cfc825b. If you do try the game, I can help you get a good start as well!

 

[Jason Liang]

Somehow, I have all the cards to put together the most absurdly OP deck in Yugioh's history yet~

 

[J1M]

Jason Liang

What CCG is still alive these days online? YGO Master Link, MTG, Snap, Shadowverse, Runeterra? Anything else?

Hearthstone is limping along. That is not an endorsement.

 

[Jason Liang]

 

[InD_ImaginE]

At this point I am just waiting for the new Shadowverse game not to deal with years old games and powercreep

 

[pakoito]

Games coming out of KS are not looking interesting at all. They're mostly creature battlers with little instant speed plays.

I'd rather play MindBug.

 

[SomeGuyWithAnOpinion]

The Red Pill: TCG's aren't good now
The Black Pill: TCG's were never good.

 

[anvi]

I love the potential in MTG, it's mind blowing, almost infinite possibilities. But I hate the lack of balance, the inflation with the cards making them better each year and yet the 20 life always stays the same. I hate the RNG. I hate the way land works. I hate the way people play it and I hate not being able to play 2hg anymore. So for me it's not worth playing, but I will always love the infinite possibility thing. I wish other games could do that somehow. Give the players lots of weird effects and let them combine stuff to create wacky results. I think that's like a holy grail of game design but I want to see it in a better framework.

 

[pakoito]

I love the potential in MTG, it's mind blowing, almost infinite possibilities. But I hate the lack of balance, the inflation with the cards making them better each year and yet the 20 life always stays the same. I hate the RNG. I hate the way land works. I hate the way people play it and I hate not being able to play 2hg anymore. So for me it's not worth playing, but I will always love the infinite possibility thing. I wish other games could do that somehow. Give the players lots of weird effects and let them combine stuff to create wacky results. I think that's like a holy grail of game design but I want to see it in a better framework.

Chasing the dragon too, I see.

 

[SomeGuyWithAnOpinion]

That's the thing though, it doesn't matter how much potential your product has. If it's garbage, it's garbage. Trying to chase the potential is just coping, nothing more.

I'm sure the Star Wars Prequel Series also had a lot of potential.

 

[ind33d]

it's completely insane that there is no real-money magic the gathering online equivalent for yugioh and duel masters

then again anyone who plays one game of duel masters would immediately burn all of his magic cards

 

[Jason Liang]

vtes, 30 and still fabulous!

 

[spectre]

I was rather surprised to see that Android: Netrunner is in fact not dead.
Some other company picked it up and is actively maintaining it, hosts events (even worlds), looks like they also have store kits, GNK and all that shit.
They even took it to themselves to clean up the rules and rebalance the whole thing when it comes to economy and the overall power balance.
There were some hiccups with the first attempts to revive it, the first edition features really crap artwork, but these look to be ironed out, other than some printing issues which mandate opaque sleeving.

https://shop.nullsignal.games/en-eu
Not too keen on the entry cost, and looking at what's being played, doesn't look like there is any overlap in the cardpool between the remaster and what I have back from the 2012.
The rules more or less intact though, looks like it's in line with how the original played, but with more versatility how cards play and much more interactivity.

 

[mastroego]

Wasn't that a fan effort or something like that?

 

[spectre]

Wasn't that a fan effort or something like that?

AFAIR, started like this, as of now it's a registered as non-profit publisher and is looking pretty professional.
Looking over the cards list, not sure what to make of it. For one, they introduced rotation with the coreset being evergreen, but there are quite a few staples missing from it, imo.

 

[mastroego]

weird, non-profit and they sell sets?

 

[spectre]

It's just covering the printing costs, but dunno. From the structure, it looks like they're doing print on demand, with some sellers participating in local distribution and different levels of quality available.
You can just print it yourself from pdfs. Reading the organized play guidelines, it looks like proxies are allowed everywhere.
(also, holy shit, the organized play is pretty fucking pozzed with shit like "don't make fun of trigger warnings" and "preferred pronouns are strongly encouraged" everywhere)

Sadly, the game got touched by the modern day virus. Why the fark are they now listing pronouns for IDs?
https://netrunnerdb.com/en/card/34066
Where are they even getting that information, cause thankfully it doesn't seem to be on the actual cards.
Still, just to be sure I'm not touching any of the novelizations.

But enough of this shit. Mechanically wise, so far I really like the agendas overhaul, the 3/5 now have effects even when stolen by the runner (e.g. new Priority Requisition now rezzes an ice when scored AND stolen).
Credit stealing was nerfed to hell, which is a shame but I reckon that's what had to be done. The economy now looks more delicately balanced
and the cards look fine-tuned almost to a fault, I think they are overcorrecting for possible power creep.
As for the rules cleanup, here's a breakdown:
https://nullsignal.games/players/major-changes/

Deck sizes also got slightly lower, with 40 cards now being the standard for corporations. I think I like this, because it's really close to the sweet spot when it comes to consistency.

There is a rotation now as well as extended and eternal formats. Looks to be that the starter set is evergreen, plus one big expansion and two smaller expansions in the format intended for new players.
This leads to a noticeably smaller card pool, I'd have to see how it works out cause it looks like there also are fewer useless cards in the pool overall, though eternal formats are probably just busted.
There is a ban list which doesn't tell me anything cause it's mostly recent cards.

EDIT: Okay, after some more digging, a lot of the staples like Snare, SanSan, PAD campaign, Femme Fatale, etc. were relegated to the System Update 2021 expansion.
Interestingly, this one appears to rotate, but at least not all of the old cards are useless if I were to jump in.

 

[Beowulf]

The Netrunner continuation is really good and surprisingly active. I play it semi-regularly live with a couple of buddies. But it's not a CCG or TCG or whatever, when you buy boosters with random cards. When you buy a pack of Null Signal Game cards, you have all the cards that are a part of this "cycle". They also have a couple of formats that somewhat ease the pain of getting (or getting back) into the game.
Just keep in mind, that Netrunner also has a really robust online implementation - https://jinteki.net/

 

[spectre]

Well, without splitting hairs over if it's a CCG or not, it's still one of the best card games out there.

Yeah, I knew about jinteki net, though I played it a lot more on octgn back in the day. I consider it the last resort option anyway as it always felt sorta dull to play it like this.
The game needs interaction and banter and the chat window only gets you so far. It's awesome when preping for tourneys, but I don't think I'll be getting back to this anytime soon.

 

[pakoito]

Can anyone please explain why it's so good. I bought the base game from Null Signal, played a couple of games in Jinteki and moved on to something else. Maybe it improves with more sets, but it felt like the variability and piloting skills were not there, and there was a reliance in the mind games of the corporation to make games different.

 

[Beowulf]

I can't really tell why it's good, but I can tell you that I personally was hooked by the totally asymmetric gameplay and good theme integration. But I don't really play other CCG's nor I intent to.
And the asymmetry really works here - the two sides play different games but aim only for the same couple of cards.

 

[spectre]

Can anyone please explain why it's so good. I bought the base game from Null Signal, played a couple of games in Jinteki and moved on to something else. Maybe it improves with more sets, but it felt like the variability and piloting skills were not there, and there was a reliance in the mind games of the corporation to make games different.

If you were playing just System Gateway, I think that's understandable. What you've got is basically the shittier half of the core set from the 2012s release, missing all the fun and interactive cards which were basically staples that fleshed out each faction for the entire next year of play: Inside Job, Forged Activation Orders, Snare, just to name a few.

Also, the IDs are really crappy. I admit, I'm only just giving the starter set a decent look right now, butwWhy not give Jinteki Personal Evolution? Make them feel the pain of stealing. Why give that particular Weyland ID without a suite of advanceable ICE?
Without Biotic Labor in the card pool, you wouldn't even know what fast advance NBN plays like, not to mention other fun stuff like Corporate Troubleshooter into Rototurret or Snare into or Closed Accounts or... you know, that other scorchy thing.
Man, the corpos look really timid in the base set. Unless I'm missing something, tag punishment is really timid with no easy source of 4 meat damage to put the fear of G-D into the runners, iirc it only came out in an even later set?
IMO, I imagine even your Jinteki games were rather dull without Ronin, Snare and Trick of Light which all come in System Update which... I can't really fathom why they chose to make rotatable.
Not to mention, Personal Evolution ID is so much better than whatever they gave in the starter. Heck, even that Karuna thing looks like an overly tuned Neural Katana. Jinteki doesn't let hackeru sama pull out early. Shamefur dispray.

Well, the game is about setting up devious traps and looking for windows of opportunity. It's about the mindgames too, but if the stakes just aren't there because of the stunted cardpool... those will feel meh as well.
That's where you'll see the piloting skill shine - with actual risk management and when both sides actually have the tools to funk each other up.

 

[Jason Liang]

Can anyone please explain why it's so good. I bought the base game from Null Signal, played a couple of games in Jinteki and moved on to something else. Maybe it improves with more sets, but it felt like the variability and piloting skills were not there, and there was a reliance in the mind games of the corporation to make games different.

- The basic gameplay loop is that the Corp bluffs and the Runner calls bluffs. Both roles are fun.
- Games are balanced and feel tightly raced because the game fundamentally limits the number of actions each player can take per turn
- Games have a natural power swing as the Runner is stronger at the start and endgame, while the Corp is strongest in the middle
- The Corp feels very powerful to play as you have perfect board information and you can do terrible things to a tagged runner, but the runner can always find a weakness in the Corp's defense and win on a "Death Star" run
- It's the ccg that best features the fundamental element of card games - hidden information. Indeed, information is the most valuable commodity.
- Of course, you love the game for the cyberpunk theme

The design on the later FFG sets and it seems like System Gateway got away from the essence of Netrunner gameplay.

 

[Jason Liang]

I just found an amazing resource for those with a passion for the history of ccgs. Richard Weld was I think the first historian of ccgs. He played and reviewed as far as I can tell every ccg published after Magic was published up until the early 2000s (2002?). I greatly admired his work, and just found his review page archived on Wayback Machine! ^ ^ https://web.archive.org/web/20060810002728/http://www.rpweld3.com/reviews/ccgreviews.html