Eye of Judgment Card Creating Easier Than Expected?

[Sqrl]

fkusumot said:

Sqrl said:
As a former avid CCG fan allow me to try my hand at explaining why this is problematic:

At the core a CCG is fun because it produces different outcomes and different scenarios in just about every game played. This is why buying boosters and constantly improving your deck is supposed to be incentivized by simply playing the game. As with any game that has a skill component and a luck component the goal of a player is to minimize the influence of luck through use of skill.

With a CCG skill often presents its biggest impact in the deck construction itself. With widespread information and communities on the internet deck lists are easily attainable and thus the only limiting factor for cardboard CCGs is the availability of the cards. With that barrier removed the last skill aspect remaining is in game skill, which while it can make a big difference often leaves you at the whim of the opening shuffle.

The end result of this situation is that skilled players will quickly boil down the card sets to at most 3 deck types with minor variations in each. The result is that every match you play will boil down to an extremely small subset of scenarios determined by the 3 decks. In other words, very quickly things will either be so repetitive that there is little point in playing again or if you refuse to copy cards in this way you will find yourself losing...often....horribly....

They can always ban cards, limit the number of duplicates in a deck, etc. Availability of cards was never even a factor past the first few months of MTG. I followed the tourament scene for many years at all levels of the game.

Banning the cards, while able to mix things up again, only delays the problem from refestering. MTG proves this quite well as they attempted to clean up the extended and type 1 formats around late Urza block and realised that no matter what they did, the meta gaming going on on the internet was going to keep things locked into a very tight set of decks that would rule the roost.

The result there was they had to convince folks that type 2 becomes the only viable longterm format. Which for those who don't know, in MTG type 2 is basically a format where the core set and the most recent 2 blocks of sets (aka a total of 7 card sets) are tournament legal. In essence telling folks that not only are the cards they payed for a few sets back no longer allowed to be used in most tournaments, but they are going to continue to invalidate old sets as new ones come out. Forcing competitive players to constantly buy new cards.

You are largely correct that availability was only an issue for the first few months in MTG...but only to the extent of dedicated players.  Many people didn't want to constantly spend more money for the game and if it weren't for the initial level playing field to keep them interested its likely many would have stopped altogether before they felt like they were invested enough to continue.