Living Card Game Staying Power

LCGs used to be the new hotness and the big solution for card games to get some traction in a heavily dominated market. We've seen many of them come and go by now

>Invasion long gone, Conquest gone the way of the License
>LotR going well but it's practically a boardgame, Cthulhu replaced by cooperative Arkham
>SW and GoT2 circling in a stagnating/downards spiral
>Netrunner heavily down
>Doomtown dead again, Ashes seemingly barely existing at all

At best, they seem to have a very short and violent life cycle with a big splash on release and quickly burning through after a few months or very few years.
So what would you do to give an LCG more staying power and actually keep going after the initial hype? Is there even a way to do this, or is ist just the nature of LCGs to die off after a while?

Non-digital card games will always be inferior to digital.

I think overwhelming releases are maybe part of the problem. Monthly expansions shake up the meta too often and quickly seem overwhelming to beginners and too bothersome to keep up with. So, slower release schedules might help with that.

It might just be a part of the model.

Then again? A 'dead' LCG is still a fully playable game. You've got complete, well rounded card sets that are relatively easily available for anyone who wants to play it, years down the line.

It's not like a CCG, but I don't think it could ever be like a CCG. You trade out that possibility for overwhelming success for a much better chance of a moderate success, since most attempts at physical booster based CCG's are monumental failures.

People expected a cheaper but equally as good experience as mtg, when in fact after a few years of existence the lcgs get overwhelmingly expensive. Even if you play a coop pve one like lotr, it's insane how much it will cost you compared to the replayability you get. Netrunner might be good, but competitive games have a harder time right now.
Also most of the time the gameplay is just disappointing compared to mtg. If I ever need more ccg experience than hearthstone I'll buy some pauper or pauper edh decks. Mtg is just THAT good imho (Even though I havent played it in 10 years).

Why doesn't somebody just make a game like MtG, but without all the fundamental problems of MtG?

You mean like the hundred thousand MtG clones which have died over the years?

A lot of them had better mechanics than MtG, but they lacked the market penetration, momentum and established userbase of MtG.

The core mechanics of MtG aren't great. It's the granddaddy of CCG's, and it's showing its age. It's only a huge amount of design work that keeps it going and enjoyable, but it's also so damn huge that even if it was on the wane it would take years and years to actually die.

It has been tried with WoW, Force of Will, Duel Masters and Kaijudo. They were pretty good games, but each one died for one reason and the other. Always because of external factors like corporate greed, artstyle or plwer creep and not because of problems inherent to the core mechanics though.

Because not everyone can agree on what "the fundamental problems of mtg" are. Various CCGs and LCGs have tried to make "fixed" mtg, but the most they've been able to do is stay afloat. The next problem is, even if they do become successful, they have to deal with magic's massive momentum. It's like WoW in that even though everyone's always trying to dethrone it, it's likely to die on its own before anyone really takes its place.

Mtga problems aren't the core mechanics either. The main flaw is the price for the eternal formats imho, and that relies on corporate greed. But wizards would be stupid to not take the money people throw at them...

>But wizards would be stupid to not take the money people throw at them...
No man the problem is that Wizards AREN'T greedy enough.
Eternal formats are expensive because the dominance of the secondary market and Wizards refusing to print staples at a reasonable rarity.
WotC could make a ton of money if they just started re-printing older sets for draft/weird-standard purposes.

>A lot of them had better mechanics than MtG
Let's get the wizards hate goggle off for a second. Almost of them are shit and deserve to fail.

Problem is, that most games that try to be different are severely lacking in versatility. Most of the te they only pander to competetive players, but casuals also want to play stuff like 5p FFA, 2HG or Archenemy and with most games you just can't do that.

>Mtga problems aren't the core mechanics either.
The reason why MtG is impossible to balance is because of the color system. It's a "soft" barrier for what decks can do, but soft barriers aren't good for development because they aren't sure to prevent unforeseen decks from occurring.

A bunch of them were really good, though. I always thought WoW's and DM's "play whatever as lands" was a great idea with a lot of strategical depth.

Plus the initial colour balance was way, way off, but they can't make radical changes and instead need to slowly adjust things over time.

as a netrunner player, the problem is the competitive scene has been dominated by mostly noninteractive decks for a long time. every year at worlds we see a runner deck that tries to win without breaker try to take down a corp deck that scores agendas out of hand or sets up a practically unavoidable kill combo.

The first and foremost reason on why these things failed is the one thing neckbeards on tg always whines on mtg.
Booster packs. We LOVE gambling. We LOVE having rare shits that no other people have. It's human nature.

Then why do so many neckbeards on tg whines?
Simple. They don't have the rare shits that other people have. It's, again, human nature to envy others.

You don't want perfect balance anyway. You want to prevent oppressive, broken and dominating cards, combos and archetypes. Admittedly?, Wizards has gotten pretty shitty at this, but it wasn't always this way.

You can chalk that up to them really not knowing anything about card games at the time. They roughly valued draw 3 the same as gain 3 live after all.

The frustrating thing is that booster pack models are implicitly less friendly to consumers than LCG things. But it's the gambling thrill which gives them that much higher potential for explosive success.

Unless you have an anime, cartoon or game franchise that massively boosts exposure over several months, being CCG is just not possible I think. The closest we ever came to a new player ever since YGO was WoW, and Blizzard choked it off, presumably because it was succesful, but not succesful enough to bother with when Ou have 16mil subs for your MMO.