What stops other card games from reaching the popularity of MtG, Yugioh or Pokemon?

Yu-Gi-Oh! has all the problems of japanese TCG mentioned above dialed up to eleven. It's, however, also one of the oldest and most widespread TCGs, giving it extreme staying power. Simply said, people play what people around them are playing, and thanks to cheaper sealed product and extreme spread of counterfeits and of course the Anime way back when made it spread among kids, especially in poorer communities. Hell, I remember fifteen years ago you could get shitty counterfeit cards on the monthly street market around here, in the heart of rural Europe. It was so widespread and easily available, even hungarian and gipsy travelling merchants were selling chinese counterfeits.
That pretty much entrenched the game with the poorer communities and in poorer countries, not to mention countries where it's very hard to even get MtG product. The YGO community of China alone probably dwarfs MtG as a whole, simply because YGO was able to spread their through availability and cheapness.
So, the people playing this game often can't afford playing something else and often don't have the will nor the capacity to have higher standards, so the shitty aspects of the game don't bother them. As long as there are other people around, they'll keep playing it.

MtG keeps existing because there is no real competitor for its niche. In a sense, it's a bit like 40k: Yes, there are other wargames around, but 40k was, for a long time, the only game that was even a nonhistorical platoon sized skirmish game. In the same vein, MtG is now the only western TCG left. Like GW outcompeted the other games back then by producing better games, the competitors of Wizards and MtG were simply ousted by Magic being a better and more accessible game.

Because if they're not waifufag trash, they are mostly pretty obvious ripoffs of the popular ones.

The other games were either worse, less accessible, or plagued by external problems. Jyhad, for example, was a great game, but had vastly lower production values compared to MtG AND was tied to an IP that simply lost traction. World of Warcraft, on the other hand, was a good game, but was terribly mismanged by Upperdeck, Cryptozoic and Blizzard. Blizzard expected the game to overtake MtG by sheer force of the IP alone and when it didn't became an instant smashhit, only payed lipservice to it anymore. It was a decent success by all acounts, but Blizzard was making about a metric billion dollars off WoW at the time, which made the game look a bit pointless. After that WoW started its slow descent into Cataclysm and Pandaria and interest waned, putting the TCG in no better position. It was never really promoted or pushed beyond its initial release, so it never really went anywhere.

I think there really is space for another western TCG, but to pull it off right requires a big investment and some serious skill. When you take a look at LCGs, you see that there's a real interest in more card games. But the rapid appearance and failure of LCGs (FFG or not) show us one thing: These games have no real staying power and the reason, I think, is basic human psychology. It's very easy to get into and start playing a LCG at first glance. Buying every Netrunner product available is cheaper than buying most Legacy and Modern decks by a wide margin and even cheaper than Standard at times. Yet, because it's easy to get into, it's also easy to drop out. You feel a lot less loyalty, a lot less tied to the game, the Sunk Cost Fallacy doesn't stick as hard. The format also runs on a constant stream of smaller releases, obfuscating the "face" of the game and making it less accessible to complete newcomers. The starting boxes offer a good place to start out, sure, but all those little Datapacks just have less prestige than a few big displays.

But, most importantly, people DO value randomness in a twisted way. People value the feeling of buying booster packs and getting random cards. Is it a less pro-consumer than having packs with playsets of every card? Holy shit, yes, cracking packs has that certain feel that draws people in. It's fun for them to buy a pack for three bucks and get junk, because there's also the chance of drawing something "good". Small gambling is fun, that's why people buy scratch tickets.

What a game needs to stick is to look at what MtG does right and copy that and to look at what disgruntles the fans and do the opposite. And that's a lot fucking easier said than done. You really do need good production values: You need a good and distinct artstyle, you need professional looking card templates, you need a decent game and I think you really should go down the road of being a TCG. You also need a story and setting to draw people in, and you need to support events.
However, you should also really play the accessability angle and try to keep the secondary market in check. That's a really precarious balacing act, because you also can't piss off the secondary vendors, since you need them to sell your product and provide venues of play. In short, you need to keep singles prices down while also making the game attractive to sell.
And, most probably most importantly, you need staying power and community interaction. Nothing drives a game more than having evangelists. It's what drove Games Workshop and even Wizards for most of their lifetime: Loyal customers that recruit, advertise and sell for you, so you need to make people feel involved with your company and your game.

All of this would need a considerable amount of cash and talent and I wish I had both around, because I'd fucking love to make a TCG. Well, maybe one day, but till then, theorizing on Veeky Forums will probably be it.

>Japanese TCGs are just shitty.
Wixoss is terrific, fuck you (although it is true that japanese tcgs are terrible at creating long-term development models).

Basically, though, what you're saying just sounds like a much more detailed version of . The market isn't all that large, and mtg, pokemon, and yugioh (with hearthstone online), there's not much room to maneuver for new games, western or japanese. And from what we've seen from new entries that fizzle quickly, you can't just establish a presence, you need a good long period of steady expansion with minimal fuckups in development. A case study for this is FoW. For a while it seemed to be very much on the rise, but from what I gather, the competitive scene stagnated into a few unfun and unbalanced decks, which killed a lot of its momentum. Even if it recovered, rounded out its design, and had a wide open and well balanced meta, that hit to its momentum is still potentially fatal for a new-ish tcg. I think what you said here about how key the sunk-cost fallacy is to the tcg business model is really the core of why the big three are still the big three, as it creates a more reliable player base, which tcgs live and die on.

Chaotic had a strong online community and alot of potential, but it seems it failed because another company took hold of it and did jack shit with it. shit could've been hotter than hearthstone by converting to a pure digital tcg. maybe they are rebooting it but no word on it for a few years.

>Wixoss is terrific, fuck you
I heard good things about Wixoss, yet it always seemed like the big exception. At the same time, I've never heard or seen something about it outside of Veeky Forums.

Yes, a new TCG trying to muscle into the market would definitely start from behind and should never operate on the assumption to become become a smash hit or as big as the Big Three. I still think there's space for a sustainable TCG with potential for growth, a bit like Warmachine or even Infinity and Malifaux just existed for many years, but steadily grew and ate away at the market. They still aren't huge, but they won't just disappear either anymore.

What you said about FoW shows how important it is for a TCG to have several venues to build loyalty. Having lore, books, merchandise and other stuff to latch on to, and also how difficult it is to maintain a good stride. From lurking on FoW threads over the months, it also seemed that the community was disgruntled for quite a while and that's also where failure of communication comes into play.

What I also forgot to mention is the importance of a good online client, especially for tablets and phones. Of the three physical games, only Pokémon has even a decent online client. A new game should definitely look into having a good online presence from the start, with an connection to the physical game. In Pokémon, you get a free pack online for every pack you buy in real life, so that's what I'd look at at the very least.

>good online client
>you get a free pack online for every pack you buy in real life,
Personally, I think that's one of the biggest holes in the market now. Greater integration between a physical tcg and a digital platform is very possible and largely unexploited. Creating a link between the tactile, physicality of cards and the opportunities for play provided by an online client is the best of both worlds, and I think it could go very far in promoting a tcg that does it right (I hadn't heard of that aspect of pokemon, and it sounds pretty brilliant).

I don't know if it's still the case right now, but at least back when I played, you could redeem a code on every physical booster ingame for free stuff.

Until AEG killed it and sold it to FFG, Legend of the Five Rings had a pretty strong following. Their regional tournaments were big enough draws that they'd fill large sections of a con's CCG play space. L5R's strength was from the interactive fiction portion. People would become hardcore partisans for their clan and with storyline prizes at stake in the big tournaments the draw was huge.

I won a regional one year and the prize was for me to choose a character to protect from or succumb to a bad event called the Rain of Blood. These choices led to the creation of extra-tournament prizes called bounties, put up by players to get events they wanted into the story. Fortunately the character I wanted to save had a fairly large bounty on him so I got a great amount of extra prize support, including some cool knickknacks like a wooden deckbox engraved with my clan's logo on it.

That sounds like an amazing idea and should promptly be stolen by any new card game coming up. Nothing gets people more invested than being able to influence the metaplot.

You don't need to be the best, just the first.
MtG was the first TCG. Pokemon was the first TCG with a franchise attached. Yu-Gi-Oh! was the first non-franchise japanese TCG. Mitos y Leyendas was the first TCG in spanish. Hearstone was the first online CCG. That's why nobody has been able to shove them off their niche, or ever will.

And by "first" I don't mean the literal first, but the first to build a community. No matter how good your game is or how well you market it, so long as people don't have an emotional connection to it and instill that emotional connection into their peers, your game wont grow.

>AEG
I still can't forgive them for what they did to doomtown. Fuck them with a cactus

The CCG model didn't really encourage fanning out. I mean, would you rather have good cards for the most popular game or mediocre cards for 3 less popular ones?

This is incidentally why the LCG onslaught is so awesome. It's like we've been set free. We can sell people on Game of Thrones and Netrunner because there's a finite number of sets to buy.

What happened?

Nothing unexpected. The game just got canned after just two years of life.

Trying to look it by the bright side at least AEG finished the first major arc completely unlike doomtown classic.

I'll miss so much the game

>What stops other card games from reaching the popularity of MtG, Yugioh or Pokemon?
they are almost always just MTG clones or hearthstone clones

MTG can't be picked up with a deck of 52 playing cards.

I was sad about this one not being good at all Multiplayer. It was a miss with our group. 2 player is fun though.

Game has some sort of story? What was the differense between classic and new?

Level of marketing. If foreign market - translations.

Besides, outside "traditional" circles playing games, NO card game is truly popular.

I think it's a very difficult type of game to make, and it has to be like a four quadrant movie-- has to hit all the audiences for it so it can be sold in big stores and just nerd stores. You can't just a appeal to a certain play style or genre, and you have to go after the players that play CCG's already (or their younger replacements) uber alles.

Shadowfist is the only good CCG for multiplayer play, and that got taken over and wrecked by 'fans' of the game that took up the mantle after Zman stopped working on it.

I'm surprised MTG is still around frankly, and I'd rather bust out my Revised/Unlimited/Ice Age shit than look at the crap that is out now. Give me clear, powerful cards without a lot of rules text rather than rules puke and chain combos.

Is Pokemon even popular as a card game? I thought people only really collected them.

as new packs are released a new bit of story about Gomorrah's (Doomtown) last events and its townfolks it's shown. even when the card spoilers came with more bits of story giving more depth to characters (mind you Doomtown each "unit" was also a character with a given name and it was very likely it has it's own story to tell).

Classic Doomtown was a bit more "complex"? (I can't tell much about this point since I've never played Classic) while Reloaded was more streamlined but both games shared most of the core ideas like Dudes, Deeds, Poker hands, checking, movement and such.

its actually mildly popular thanks to the online version being actually well done

That is still true. Any pack you open irl has a code for the digital version.

I am surprised that no one else tried to use that gimmick. Though there is a bad side effect, a significant portion of the fanbase turns toxic as hell if anything bad happens to their clan. I have a buddy that worked for AEG for a couple of years and he got see a lot of the dark side of the L5R fanbase. Some was hilarious, like ESL people send shit like "Why for you hate the scorpion big much?" But there was autistic screeching about death threats and the like as well.

It's a good idea, but AEG's implementation was often flawed. Too much corporate meddling and forced directions. They used a completely opaque point system for victories that has been heavily weighed one way or another. Almost always for the benefit of the Spider clan later on, because marketing execs inexplicably decided that the Spider were the biggest draw of the setting. In some of the latest events, the Spider needed something like 1 point for every 4 or 5 that other clans needed for the same level of result.

Not just in the card game either. They had a Winter Court RPG megagame sort of thing, and in that, some of the GMs were biased pretty heavily and the management either never noticed or never cared, since the results were left standing even after being exposed as biased.

The worst excess of meddling was during the Race for the Throne. The Scorpion playerbase got super organized, recruited their traditional ally the Dragon and were running away with it while keep the Dragon in second place even after giving into temptations. Then the last leg was revealed to be a popularity contest worth like 5 times the points of the previous legs and everyone voted for the Dragon because they thought the Dragon's "loser" condition would kill the Spider. AEG lolnope and made the Spider the bestest faction ever and shit all over two player bases hard work.

As a Unicorn player I had no skin in the game for the throne, we were in the running for Shogun with the Lion and Scorpion. The result of the corporate meddling got the Unicorn the Shogunate, but it was a hollow as hell victory. I would have rather seen the "natural" result of a Crimson and Green court (the Scorpion, Dragon, and Mantis holding almost all the positions in the court with outliers like the Lion Shogun and Spider sneaking in as Advisor).

If I remember correctly, they "justified" that by saying that the Spider were not a legitimate target because they weren't a "real clan" at the time, despite the fact that they were a real faction that was fully capable of winning just like everyone else.

Yeah, it was total bullshit. Then the end of Celestial was so fucking bad it made my play group quit the game in disgust.

Cause you fags fucked over the spider at every turn when they first got created so AEG had to step in.

>Make new faction
>Old snobby factions gets buttfurious
>Fuck them over and complain at every turn
>Oh were are all the new players going

>make shitty new faction by fucking an already existing faction and compromising one of the key parts of the setting
>act like everyone wanted it when even its own playerbase didn't because most of them would rather be playing horde
>wonder where all the players went

Spider was decent when it was a hidden subversion attempt. As soon as it came out in the open, it became shit and it only got shittier from there. Tainted Jesus was a mistake.

Spiderfags killed L5R.

Absolute truth.

The LCG model is good, but it's like coffee, whereas Magic is like crack.

Magic is literally gambling. It's fluctuating value and rarity are all because the market is monopolized due to an accessible theme.

It's a fun game, but Standard is literally burning money for the price of admission, and then paying admission.

Maybe they should have listened to what the players actually wanted instead of forcing their snowflake Daigotsu and his band of merry monsters. Fighting against the majority of players is why the game died.

Look at this user; look at him and laugh.

dont play standard then, EDH is is literally the perfect format for people not looking to spend a lot of money and none of the cards rotate out. its like modern but actually fun and you can start with a 50 dollar deck and upgrade it over time

Hearthstone is a mtg clone.

You clearly haven't checked out Kaladesh.
Clear, powerful cards with much less rules text than anything from Ice Age or what have you.

That's a hell of a lot more answer than I was expecting to get in this thread.

>Wixoss is terrific
its a real shame its art means it will never get sold in eng. the game play is amazing, and its very different feeling than other games.

tama best girl

>Loyal customers that recruit, advertise and sell for you, so you need to make people feel involved with your company and your game
I think Wizards is losing a bit of that loyalty. In public Magic appears to still have a frothing loyal following but the people who feel that Wizards has betrayed their love with their anti-consumer practices are seething pretty hard.

If those angry former-players ever get some sort of spotlight, it's going to compound in effect pretty hard. I don't know how they will get that spotlight as all the major news outlets are more or less in Wizards' pocket if not trying to curry favor.

WotC is a retarded company and acts like it wants to die.
Our LGS just lost their WPN status because they don't pay rent.

WPN? Sorry, never heard that term and I´ve been playing mtg for a while.

Well that fucking sucks that your store lost WPN because now they can't get wholesale pricing from Wizards, which is really the only fucking reason why anybody would host FNM and all that other bullshit at a flagrant loss. Any retard who thinks singles sales balance the loss from FNM should be shot or is playing at a massive store with both walk-in and online sales.

But hey, it's obviously your LGS's fault for not marketing the fucking game enough right? Events not firing due to lack of attendance obviously is your LGS not trying hard enough and not fucking Wizards packing every playable card into the Rare and Mythic slot and scalpers making everyone have to play some stupid side-hustle investment game to play the fucking game.

WotC has gone full retard, they don't want anyone to make money with Magic. Not even the big stores since rumor has it SCG has been leaking money all year and CFB was forced to take the money sink GP Mexico City to keep GP Vegas.

Time asymmetry

WPN is basically a wizard associated store. they can hold FNM and get special WPN only stuff like modern masters and shit like that. i hear that being a WPN sore isnt worth it unless you do nothing but push MTG and not much out

Magic has made players treat the store as an antagonist.

Now think about that. Where you play games whether it be football, tennis, bridge, poker, board games, Magic - the field, court, casino, and games store is a home. The workplace is a home; the hobby venue is a home. The home is not there to fuck you.

But look at Magic - it has given players way too many fucking opportunities to hate their store. And it's all on Wizards because they are the regulator. And they are forcing stores to fire at a loss, not setting a fair admission standard ($5 a night and having to provide prize support is not fucking good enough; try running a business off seniors who sit around for three hours and order nothing but coffee), players bitch about a store's singles prices, players order online, players whine when it appears the store breaks MSRP but demands lower than MSRP prices, there's theft, there's conflict over selling cards back to the store because people don't fucking understand stores need to make money and have to buy cards at 30-40% retail.

An user here from Mexico City says Standard can't fire in a city of 17 stores.

I'm at the point I want to see the game die just for the lulz.

Battletech did this back in the day, with convention tournaments deciding the canon of battles in the lore. Btek is an old mans game now though. Hopefully Harebrained's new vidya will pump some new blood back into the scene.

Maybe they should have paid rent.

What are you talking about? Hearthstone has more players than all those games combined.

Oh.... I do...

But they own the place.

Low visibility due to lack of lack of funds for marketing, as well the fact that it's harder to sell people on a new thing than on a thing they already like.

But really, it's mostly lack of marketing.

Heartstone is a video game.

Yeah, so?

Physical card games are a living fossil of entertainment. There is no demand for such games anymore besides few hipster Veeky Forums neckbeards and people who insist living in the past chasing after nostalgia of time when they still had friends. The world moved on, you stood still. That's why you don't see other games "reaching the popularity of MtG".

He obviously means physical card games, dude, try to keep up

Does it have an average lore and hstory over it? I mean, I know there is something, but is it just filling to sell the game or actually interesting enough on itself?

You're the one who should try to keep up. If you don't see digital card games as a natural evolution to tabletop TCGs, you'll be left forever wondering why your silly hobby died off.

Digital card games aren't card games. They're video games. The components could be chits, minis or pieces of shit and the gameplay wouldn't be any different.

That's like saying digital chess isn't a board game.

It isn't. It is a video game.

As per dictionary.com

>>noun
. any of various interactive games played using a specialized electronic gaming device or a computer or mobile device and a television or other display screen, along with a means to control graphic images.
. any of various games played using a microchip-controlled device, as an arcade machine or handheld toy.

That says nothing about board games. A game can be a video game and a board game at the same time. The definitions are not contradictory.

>You're the one who should try to keep up. If you don't see video games as a natural evolution to tabletop RPGs, you'll be left forever wondering why your silly hobby died off.

Did you mean they didn't pay some sort of dues for WPN instead of "rent"?

Maybe if the new wave of digital card games weren't designed for games that last for less than five minutes and let me purchase singles instead of grinding for eons/dropping loads of dosh on packs I'd be more inclined to agree.

You don't have to worry blizzfag, shadowverse will be taking your precious hearthstone place in a year.

Any of you fags want my L5R Spiderclan cards?

Maybe in 50 years when shadowrun is real and a DM can just think his campaign into the game world fully-formed so he and his players can slot themselves into it, this comparison will make sense. Until then, a TTRPG has options that vidya doesn't. Aside from the "I want to go to a LGS and buy specific cards for my deck" and the "I want to pay someone to have my waifu cards edited" options, there isn't really anything from CCGs that can't be reproduced in a low budget tablet app.

>"I want to go to a LGS and buy specific cards for my deck"
nothing stopping them from adding this to that low budget tablet app either except being jews

Online CCGs still miss out on the ability to tweak/make new formats and trade cards.

> a DM can just think his campaign into the game world fully-formed so he and his players can slot themselves into it

You know Neverwinter Nights is nearly 15 years old at this point. We've had that sort of tech a long ass time.

>Mentions Hearthstone
>Mentions Yugioh

Yes a video-game can be a board game. Final Fantasy Tactics and Age of Empires are theoretically board games.
But Heartstone isn't a card game. It's a strategy game with randomized components.

A WotC "inspector" complained that they were having a disparate growth compared to other stores and their own expectatives and accused them of doing something shady like buying from unlicensed distributors or w/e. The owner told the cunt they weren't doing anything wrong, he just didn't need to sink money on rent because he owned the place.

Next monday there weren't supported by the WPN anymore.

Shadowverse is one more waifufag shitfest. Those games will never do better than peak grognard market because unlike Heartstone, Pokemon and Magic, you won't have soccer moms wasting disordinate ammounts of cash to get one more activity on their kids schedule (so that the little fuck lets her slut it up on facebook).

There's nothing preventing them from adding user-customizable formats to those games other than lack of interest by the developers or their target audiences. Hearthstone is a shit game made by like 5 dudes in a basement at blizzard and even it supports more than one format, though only the ones the developers have added themselves. Card trading similarly has no technical barrier, it's just that the current games don't support it for whatever reasons they've cooked up internally they're jews.

Even games like NWN or VtM:R with DM modes that have been around forever have technical limitations on what the DM can actually do in the game simply because the developers can not possibly plan for every possibility. You don't have this problem with a card game, there are only so many possible board/hand/deck/sideboard/graveyard/phallus states and no potential to go outside of this design space.

Save it for 2066 Veeky Forums. Until the day comes when we can sit in some pod that seamlessly uploads our thoughts into an online virtual reality space we are capable of freely manipulating then there will always be a distinct difference between traditional games and digital games.

There are tons of "card" games on Kongregate and other shitty flash sites. Hearthstone is the only "digital" card game that ever saw even moderate success

The anime series is actually really good as well, although it takes the odd stance of basically saying the only winning move is to not play. The flavour of the cards themselves is pretty weak, and mostly filling. The gameplay is really tight, though. I'd assert out of what I've seen or played (mtg, yugioh, pokemon, weiss schwarz, magi nation, force of will, hearthstone, and cardfight vanguard), its gameplay and basic rules are the most polished among them.

No memeing, I believe it's because they don't have an anime on saturday mornings to go with it.
Look at yugioh. The game isn't very balanced. Yet it's been able to keep itself afloat for over a decade and a half simply because yugioh has been airing for a decade and a half. This also means that the popularity is high enough for walmart and other retail stores to carry yugoih products, because kids see them and want to buy them.
Now look at Vanguard. Vanguard too has an anime to go with it, but the anime hasn't been put on that saturday morning slot like Yugioh has. They even dubbed it, but all the episodes are on youtube, not the TV. It never had that popularity boost so it will never reach the front page of youtube when an episode goes up unless it's a recommended channel. Because of this the support never reached the critical mass required for retail stores to stock up on Vanguard products. It's not popular in the states but I've been told Europe loves it for whatever reason. Also they at least had the brains to have google ads pop up for them.
Now look at Force of Will. Force of Will has no show to go with it, the only way you would know of it's existence is if your LGS tried to shill it to you or you saw the tag on tcgplayer.com and got curious.

TL;DR card games need marketing and japs rarely market overseas.

There's probably something about anime tiddies/aesthetics being a deterrent for non-weebs/neckbeards as well.

And somehow more popular.

Thats like when retards say WoW is an everquest clone

Even if it is, once it's more popular, it doesnt matter what you borrowed influence from.

Shakespeare didn't invent the tragic couple, but he created an iteration that became the most popular ever with Romeo and Juliet

Every person who created something great took ideas from everywhere they could, thats why they were great

>“Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from - it’s where you take them to."

To be honest I'm actually happy to hear that Wizards gives enough of a fuck to have people go on the road to see their stores. Because they sure as fuck have not visited my store in over a decade.

Name your store and location. I need third party confirmation of this, namely mine.

>50888677
>Kongregate
Is there literally anything good there?

PTCGO has trading so there literally is no excuse other than jewish tricks

Other TCGs just aren't as good as those three.