Deck Size in TCG Design

when you're creating a game there is a lot to think about what's your flavor theme how does player interaction work what does the card economy look like what are the card types and what does the field of play look like one question that can get lost in the shuffle a little bit is how many cards should players need to include in their decks speaking personally I tend to leave this to the end of the design process and not put a ton of thought into it however deck size does have a ton of impact on how a game plays out so it's definitely worth putting more thought into a little earlier into the design process than I personally usually do to start with let's just cover a few of the standard ranges you'll run into magic and Pokemon have a deck size of 60 which includes resource cards dual Masters uses a 40 card deck with no resource cards Yu-Gi-Oh and wcross have a deck size of 40 cards with no resource cards but they also have a 10 to 15 card extra deck of cards that are set aside from the main deck and darn shuffled why is shorts has a 50 card deck without a leader card and one piece has a 50 card deck with a leader card in most games this deck size is going to range from 40 to 60 cards less than 40 and you're going to start limiting the variety within each deck meanwhile once you get to more than 60 you're going to start running into issues with shuffling especially once you start adding in card sleeves it's worth remembering that the standard poker deck is 52 cards there's something about the 40 to 60 range that seems to be a sweet spot between Randomness and consistency if you're designing a game for players with smaller hands like children you may want your deck size to fall closer to 40 cards if you need to include a bunch of resource Cards into the deck it might be better to aim for a total that is closer to 60 cards either way you don't want your games to all play out the same but you do want to be able to somewhat predict and plot out your attack and counterattacks B based on what is still available in your deck and what you expect to draw from that deck and what you can expect to find in the opponent's deck so from here we can see that the basic range is 40 to 60 as well as the possibility of including an extra deck of up to 15 cards so if you're looking at this what is going to determine where in this range your game is ultimately going to settle on there are really two big considerations here the first is consistency games that are design designed to be more consistent are generally going to operate on a smaller deck size the more other cards that there are in your deck the less likely you are to draw one specific card card maximums also play into this for example Magic the Gathering has 60 cards with a maximum of four copies of the same card per deck so if you are looking for one specific card when you draw one random card from the deck assuming you're running the maximum number of copies there is a 6.66 6666 percent chance of drawing it Yu-Gi-Oh meanwhile has a 40 card deck size with a limit of three copies of the same card per deck which gives you a slightly higher consistency of a 7.5% chance of drawing one specific card on top of that you of course also have the unshuffled toolbox of your extra deck one Piece and wise shorts aren't all that far off of Yu-Gi-Oh despite different deck sizes and uniqueness limits here a 50 card deck and a four of Maximum gives you 8% shot at hitting one specific card wcross represents perhaps the most extreme example here with a 40 card main deck and a four of Maximum that gives you a 10% chance per draw of hitting a specific card and of course you're drawing two per turn and on top of that you still have the unshuffled extra deck of additional effects to draw from on top of that the second big consideration to be thinking about here is card churn how cards in the deck are being used will also play a role in the deck size the game is going to settle on the main use of cards in a deck in most games is to draw them into your hand so you can use them in gameplay and differences in draw rates are going to affect deck size in different ways magic for example draws one card per turn so there's not really a huge impact in moving from the standard 60 card deck down to the 40 card deck that is used in The Game's draft format the games are going to more or less play out pretty similarly in Flesh and Blood however you draw up to a four card hand each turn meaning you're potentially drawing as many as four cards from your deck every turn of the game this means that cards in the deck are exhausted much more quickly in this case moving from a 60 card deck format to a 40 card deck format requires much more significant adjustments to make the game continue to function in this particular example the life total that players start with is haved in order to make sure that the game continues to function properly card economy isn't the only consideration here for example why is short pulls cards from the deck to track damage which means that the deck is going to run out of cards much more quickly than games that only pull cards from the deck by drawing them likewise there are some games like the original Dragon Ball TCG that uses the deck as a life system even more directly in these types of games a change in deck size is going to quite drastically change how the game plays out it's also worth noting that in Magic the Gathering in Yu-Gi-Oh you are going to lose the game if you deck out meanwhile in games like what cross and devise shorts you just reshuffle your graveyard and take a small hit of damage and continue playing this lets these games get away with substantially smaller deck sizes than they would otherwise need overall well there are some notable outliers such as Magic's Commander format with its massive 99 card Stacks deck sizes are going to fairly reliably fall into the 40 to 60 card range and gameplay considerations in the game's desired level of consistency can nudge a game from one side of this range through to the other speaking personally when I test a game I'll start with a 30 card deck with a three of card rule which is very useful as a test configuration since it requires relatively few cards printed out and gives you a high degree of consistency so you can test mechanics more precisely for General release though this is a bit on the extreme end of consistency among tcgs so it's usually better to fall into that 40 to 60 card range so while you're working on your game if you find that you're falling into a 40 to 60 card deck size don't feel like you've just copied someone's homework much like color factions there's a good reason that 40 to 60 cards is the standard

Channel: tcgAcademia

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Id: Ox8bFgAF6Fk

Length: 6min 43sec (403 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 30 2024