What are the best CCGs?

[Gregz]

Eternal did that, as it literally feels like an alternate version of MtG...which is probably why WotC hired the people behind Eternal to do MtG Arena.

Does that mean Eternal is no longer being supported by the core team that built it?

 

[ProphetSword]

Does that mean Eternal is no longer being supported by the core team that built it?

Far as I know, it is still fully supported.

My guess is that Arena is a side project. After all, they probably make all the money from Eternal, but I bet WotC will take a huge piece of the pie on Arena when it finally releases.

You can see more about Eternal at their webpage: https://www.direwolfdigital.com/eternal/
(Which clearly shows they just introduced Expeditions earlier this month and had a World Championship of some kind).

 

[Vagiel]

One more vote for legend of the five rings. Best card game i have ever played and most complex. It's free online so no need stupid microtransactions but you need some practice to learn.

 

[anvi]

I was enjoying Eternal until I came up against Direwood Infiltrator, what a bunch of bullshit. I wanted to see how far I could get with the default deck without modifying it at all. I won all 15 matches of the gauntlet and the first 5 or 6 ranked without losing. Then I got a couple of losses but were GGs. Then I come up against that shit. I didn't attack that turn so I had 2 blockers to be safe, he used something that made it flying, and then stunned my flyer, attacks and now has two 5/5s. Never recovered from that. I hate OP shit, it is the reason MTG is so bad now. Although at least I haven't spent any money yet. I'll see if I can make a deck that can beat shit like that. But cards like that force you down a much more narrow path.

 

[DraQ]

All CCGs are just schemes to free gullible losers of their parents' hard-earned monies.

 

[Gregz]

All CCGs are just schemes to free gullible losers of their parents' hard-earned monies.

It's true, CCGs are completely degenerate.

Sadly I'm still playing Eternal right now.



The only real boost in ability came at the cost of $10 so I could build a halfway decent deck.

 

[spectre]

All CCGs are just schemes to free gullible losers of their parents' hard-earned monies.

So, how much did you spend?

 

[DraQ]

All CCGs are just schemes to free gullible losers of their parents' hard-earned monies.

So, how much did you spend?

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Spoiler

0

Seriously the whole genre of P2W:the games.

 

[spectre]

Not gonna disagree. The moment somebody decided that not everyone gets to play with a full set of aces was fucked up.
Which is why I am finding the LCG model to be much friendlier. The cost to play competitively is always there up front, and you always get the full set.

 

[lobsterfrogman]

A couple more games that (I think) noone mentioned:

Horus Heresy: Legions - HS clone in a WH40K setting
Elder Scrolls: Legends - yet another HS clone, this time in Elder Scrolls setting
Faeria - if you would like a mix of turn based tactics with your CCG (units are placed on a board and move so positioning is more important than in your average cardgame)
Duelyst - see: above
Solitairica - if you ever wanted RPG elements in your solitaire
Hex - I think they already pulled a plug on this one but it was similar to MtG but with a single player campaign on a map - basically a modern-day Shandalar
Age of Sigmar: Champions - unique mechanics: cards have no power and toughness but instead they have numbers on their corners and rotate each turn doing something depending on the number printed on the current corner. There is also no mana or mana costs - instead you have 2 actions per turn and can play any cards you draw. There is also no passive card draw so if you want to draw more cards you must sacrifice action(s). Your deck also contains 4 generals that are put on the battlefield before game starts and they have "quests" printed in their corners (which is a fancy way to say that they check what type of card do you play - if you play the correct type you fulfill the "quest" and rotate the general). If you fulfill all "quests" of a general you trigger one of 4 blessings (some effect that you choose during deckbuilding). If you only played clones of HS and MtG before I recommend trying this game to see what else can be done with the genre.
BattleCon: Online - if you ever wondered how a fighting game turned CCG would look like. You build "moves" by combining cards together and if I recall correctly there is no RNG - the deck is so small it basically forms your hand. The game plays somewhat like a complicated and skill-intensive version of Rock Paper Scissors. Not really my cup of tea but also highly recommend checking if only to see how unorthodox CCG may look like.

 

[anvi]

The moment somebody decided that not everyone gets to play with a full set of aces was fucked up.

This! I love playing Eternal but the fact that you are missing so many 'aces' really sucks, and when I see how much grind is required to 'craft' them, it forced me to move on. Shame. I like that I could play it on my PC and on my phone with the same account. But I'll try some others before I grind it out.

 

[spectre]

Yep, as much as I loved my time in Eternal, crafting those overpowered legendaries was a bother (unless they did some kind of revamp recently). And you really felt the impact when you played vs. similar full-powered decks.
MtGArena feels much more straightforward - the bottleneck for competitive decks is with Rares, which have a fixed rate of acquisition, and if you're really bent on getting specific ones, you just buy the right expansions...
which also gives your wildcards and makes the whole process of building a competitive deck much more smoother when compared to Eternal.

 

[anvi]

Legend of the Five Rings, it is 40 bucks and then you own everything?

 

[Vagiel]

Legend of the Five Rings, it is 40 bucks and then you own everything?

Unfortunately no for starters you need 3 starter boxes so about 70-80 euros. But this way you have all 7 clans and can make all you want. After that pick and chose what expansions you want depending on what you want to make. Good thing is that the expansions cost about 15 euros and have 3 copies of everything.

Ofcourse you can play free online but you need to know the game first since there are no tutorials.

 

[spectre]

Yeah, starter boxes is where LCGs get the most Yiddy. One is only good for casual play and tutorial play, two if you actually want to do some deckbuilding, and you could probably end here and just buy a bunch of expansions instead.
Get three if you want absolutely fucking everything for competitive play.

The coreset cards usually are the staples that gets used for qite a bit in the game's lifetime, until power creep begins to set in.

From what I recall (I didn't play this one competitively), the first cycle of expansions is basically Starter Set+, further fleshing out the core mechanics and adding stuff that didn't fit in the starter.
So, if you get three starters and the entire first cycle, you should get enough cardboard for a balanced metagame for 3-4 people to dick around with.
People usually focus on one or two clans which they like when playing L5R, so it helps if you have dweeb friends to share with.

 

[Vagiel]

It shines when you have friends to buy with since you can realistically divide the cost by 3 if you pick 1 clan each and once in a while proxy a couple of cards.

Honestly I really love this game and buy everything although i play 99% of the time online. It's a testament that a bad player no matter the deck match up cannot win a good player consistently. Player skill plays a huge role here.

 

[anvi]

Speaking of friends, some of the most fun I ever had with CCG was playing 2 Headed Giant in MTG:Online with my buddy. I liked that the health started at 40 so you don't get lame fast wins. Shame they killed that mode and then killed the entire game. :/

 

[thesheeep]

Elder Scrolls: Legends - yet another HS clone, this time in Elder Scrolls setting

I've spent a few hours playing this, just playing through the campaign matches and some Solo Arena.
It's not MtG (nothing is as good and complex, really), but it's still fun and you can definitely build quite a number of interesting decks. And the amount of solo content is something I haven't seen in other similar games.
And a big plus: It doesn't look some cutesy-candy-crush-mobile-crap game like Hearthstone and so many others with an overly colourful palette jumping at your face.

No idea how it will hold up in the long run, but for now I can see myself playing it every now and then for an hour or two.

 

[lobsterfrogman]

Elder Scrolls: Legends - yet another HS clone, this time in Elder Scrolls setting

I've spent a few hours playing this, just playing through the campaign matches and some Solo Arena.
It's not MtG (nothing is as good and complex, really), but it's still fun and you can definitely build quite a number of interesting decks. And the amount of solo content is something I haven't seen in other similar games.
And a big plus: It doesn't look some cutesy-candy-crush-mobile-crap game like Hearthstone and so many others with an overly colourful palette jumping at your face.

No idea how it will hold up in the long run, but for now I can see myself playing it every now and then for an hour or two.

Glad to help you find a game you might like. On the topic of solo-content: I don't know if this is still in the game but if you like puzzles I highly recommend buying the puzzle "adventure". These are some of the best puzzles I have seen in a card game by far. In other games puzzles are usually so easy that you churn through them after thinking for a moment (if you are not a newbie and already understand the rules of the game). While here they were so difficult that I couldn't solve many of them in one siting and had to think about them while not playing, getting that "A-ha!" moment and coming back (well OK, maybe I am just stupid). Solving them on my own felt immensly satisfying.

 

[spectre]

Elder Scrolls: Legends - yet another HS clone, this time in Elder Scrolls setting

I've spent a few hours playing this, just playing through the campaign matches and some Solo Arena.
It's not MtG (nothing is as good and complex, really), but it's still fun and you can definitely build quite a number of interesting decks. And the amount of solo content is something I haven't seen in other similar games.
And a big plus: It doesn't look some cutesy-candy-crush-mobile-crap game like Hearthstone and so many others with an overly colourful palette jumping at your face.

No idea how it will hold up in the long run, but for now I can see myself playing it every now and then for an hour or two.

Glad to help you find a game you might like. On the topic of solo-content: I don't know if this is still in the game but if you like puzzles I highly recommend buying the puzzle "adventure". These are some of the best puzzles I have seen in a card game by far. In other games puzzles are usually so easy that you churn through them after thinking for a moment (if you are not a newbie and already understand the rules of the game). While here they were so difficult that I couldn't solve many of them in one siting and had to think about them while not playing, getting that "A-ha!" moment and coming back (well OK, maybe I am just stupid). Solving them on my own felt immensly satisfying.

This reminds me, Faeria has a pretty satisfying puzzle mode. It's also a pretty neat blend of card and board game with emphasis on board development. It fixes a lot of problems you get with traditional card games - smaller deck sizes with only 3x copies max means there is less variance and you get to got rhough a lot of your deck in a game. Resources are generated every turn, the amount depends on how many critical locations you control in the world, there is no instant speed interaction or counterspells (last time I played). Since all your critters are summoned and move around the in-game world which is dynamically built by players as the game progresses, the strategy can be quite deep. It's got a bit of randomization going on some of the cards, but it's possible to control it to an extent.

I stopped playing it at one point because I went through with all the single player content and managed to build a number of decks, some of them competitive, Unfortunately I hit a brick wall when it comes to progress, and the games started feeling samey.
They also started deploying coop modes last time I played it, they may be fleshed out by now.

 

[lobsterfrogman]

Nice description of Faeria as a game but I don't agree with your stand on puzzles in that game. They were pretty fucking easy - neither boardstates nor your hand were usually very big and conveniently all cards in your hand were required to solve the puzzle, so the whole thing was usually just a case of discovering the order in which to play them. In contrast, in Elder Scrolls: Legends your hand almost always contain some "red herrings" and usually these are cards that on first look seem good at acomplishing your objective while the actual solution requires other cards and thinking "out of the box". Maybe it's a personal thing (everyone's brain works in a slightly different way after all) but for me puzzles in Legends were on a completely different level than in Faeria.

 

[spectre]

Can't really compare because I hever played TES: Legends. The puzzle mode in Faeria wasn't hard, I said it was fun and there was a good bunch of them to waste a few afternoons on. A few had red herrings in them but yeah, it was mostly an extended tutorial (but a good one).

 

[Vagiel]

I hear a lot of people here saying mtg is a complex game. Really? Has it changed so much in the laat 10 years? When i was playing a bit back then it was just a fun deck building (which you could never really do since there were so many power rares you could barely afford one hood deck) and gameplay was so simplistic that i could barely pay attention to it.

 

[spectre]

I hear a lot of people here saying mtg is a complex game. Really? Has it changed so much in the laat 10 years?

A quick Ctrl+F tells me only thesheeep said exactly that. Not sure he qualifies as "a lot of people".
But, since I'm around and I have time on my hands...

First of all, it's official, yep. It is the most complex game out there.
https://www.geek.com/news/magic-the-gathering-is-the-worlds-most-complex-game-study-finds-1787189/
Boom, done.

Jokes aside, since you are asking what's changed in the last 10 years; I'm no expert, friends got me into the game around Masques, which, looking back, was a pretty horrible experience.
Got my feet wet again with Magic Duels, then came back for MTGArena closed beta, and I had my share of fun with it. Despite the netdecking and noobs playing all the same linear, budget decks,
the variety of games and decks I would play felt satisfactory.

Back then, I felt drawn to the Type 1 formats with all the cards, because they felt sufficiently complex for me, by virtue of the vast card pool that is available (even if 99% of the cards are shit, there's still quite a lot of them to pick from).
I never had the money to play it other than online and with proxies.

When it comes to general level complexity of MtG, there's a bit to take in about the game other than just the basic rules: what's the current meta, what are the most important card interactions, how to sideboard against stuff.
Then there's limited play, which is a different animal entirely. And there are other modes to sink your teeth into, like Commander, which should receive more official support.
A lot of the other card games out there aren't as deep, so if you were to use MtG as a yardstick, a lot of the stuff comes short.

Still, when we go down to it, all the cardboard slinging out there is the same - you learn the most important cards and decks, what the opponent is likely to do, and what are the most optimal paths of play.
Sometimes you get a complex boardstate if neither player bothered to bring any board wipes, another time you get an interesting instant-speed interaction, depends on what kind of complexity do you want.
I think current MtG does a pretty decent job with allowing different strategies to coexist. Playing aggressive, playing defensive, assembling a winning combo.
Using cards in various zones as resources, not just the ones in play. Beating the opponent with their own cards. Alternative win conditions. If the cardpool is there, you can do a lot of stuff in MtG.
(And MTGArena is quite handy, as you can get a good bunch of cards without paying a dime. If I were to pay the paper price for all the rare lands and planeswalkers necessary
to build a three-color control deck, I'd probably just say "fuck this").

Now, compared to other games out there, MtG doesn't seem to have as big as a skill gap as other games, say Netrunner. A nublet can pick up a monocolored aggro deck and beat the world champion
in a single, random game (playing best of three matches with a sideboard would possibly equalize it a bit, but the nublet could get extremely lucky and the world champ could, theoretically, get irredeemably mana screwed),
which I wouldn't expect in games like, say, Warhammer Conquest.

Again, comparing to Netrunner, it is a game which relies heavily on bluffing and taking calculated risk, and it a totally different experience and (dare I say, there's a totally different level of complexity in that particular aspect)
than MtG. I guess it all depends on what you're looking for. I know people who simply aren't interested in the type of gameplay offered by MtG.

 

[Vagiel]

So yeah after having a quick look at the current environment what you say seems about right but my problem with mtg is that it is mostly deck building and deckbuilding means money even just to test a strategy ( magic players tend to be a bit edgy and don't react well to proxys) and actually playing the game is very standard and mechanical with rare option for choices and consequences.

I expect the prestigious codex to have more monocled choices when it comes to little pieces of cardboard...