Should every card in a TCG be useful in some way?

Should every card in a TCG be useful in some way?
or its okay to have filler cards for a set that pretty much are useless or straight up bad?

>its okay to have filler cards for a set that pretty much are useless or straight up bad?
No
Unless you ask Mark Rosewater.

Ideally, no, but good luck doing that while trying to expand.

On the other hand Richard Garfield managed to put up a game where every card is playable and kept it alive for some two dozen sets.

I don't think it's reasonable to expect every card in a set to be playable in constructed decks. Consistency is key so a typical 60 card deck will only have 10 or so unique cards, not including lands. Even if there's zero overlap between like 5 top decks in a format, that's only 50 cards out of what, a thousand cards in standard?

I say it because I have seeing some times cards being completly wortless in every single aspect so it wont be use even by people that experiment with unuse stuff.

It helps when you don't try to make chase rares.

But yes, a TCG will eventually unbalance itself, just because of release scheduls and sheer number of cards, if nothing else.

I think it's okay to have some that are strictly worse than other cards as long as they aren't 100% useless or entirely impractical. I don't think it should be done excessively, and I prefer that there be cards that are considered worse, but still have a niche or two where they're more useful.

That's true, and the absurdly bad cards they put out bothers me too, mainly because having only a small subset of the cards be worth trying to build with makes it feel like wizards built the deck for you. I definitely think the margin between worst card in the set and best could be thinned a LOT.

Only if they're fluffy, and even then it's not ideal.

>Every game is Magic The Gathering.
It's like the DnD meme for card games.

I assume you're talking about MtG, in which case filler mainly exists to help balance draft
If something is going to be useless it should at least be powerful.

>TCG
This here is the key part. It's impossible for a TCG to have 100% viable cards and be successful with the TCG model. A TCG is dependant upon players buying boosters and lots of them. If you aspire to an 100% viability rate, there's only so many ways to do it:

>Have very small sets
Which is unviable for a TCG because that way people will have all the cards very quickly.

>Have high amounts of reprints
Which is also bad for a TCG, because players will quickly accumulate playsets and full collections AND it kills excitement. Remember Core Sets? Barely anyone was exicted or hyped for those, even though they were very necessary, which is why they tried making them appealing with moneyrares and then killed them off.

>Do lots of functional reprints
Which is both unexciting and unhealthy, because people will run as many functional copies of a good effect as they can.

>Powercreep
See japanese TCGs and their mayfly lifecycle for this.


Chaff exists for simple viability reasons, it's the only way to do sets big enough to be a good product for the company.

Chaff does nothing for limited. The best draft environments have often been high-powered ones, all that shitty cards do is amplify the power of bombs.

name a ccg where this isn't true
No, better yet, name ten. Since you seem so confident in yourself

in a tcg where they pump out new cards every so often, it is impossible to expect every single card to maintain its utility as the time passes by.

If a TCG wanted it so that every single card available had utility, then they would stop making any more new cards and focus purely on balancing the cards that already exist.

Literally every game ever that doesn't 60 cards as a standard deck, 4 to a deck maximum size for most card repeats, or basic lands.

So that's like, everything. L5R, Decipher's Star Wars one, FFG's Game of thrones one, Ophidian 2350, Pokemon, Codename Kids Next Door's TCG, Gundam War Collectible Card Game, the Babylon 5 CCG, Xeko, everything.

You're really stupid, aren't you?

>completely ignore his question and call him stupid

Gee you sure showed him. The thread is obviously primarily talking about Magic, it's in the goddamn OP.

>L5R was a ccg, but discontinued and turned into an lcg
>SW game is dead
>FFG's GoT got fucked and hasn't recovered
>Ophidian 2350, a literally who of games, is marketed as a board game and has some expansion packs
>KND game is long dead
>Xeko is dead
>others

You named 1 CCG, pokemon, which has loads of filler cards. The others aren't CCG or alive. So yes. Waiting on the ten CCGs where there aren't cards that are unplayable. I'm still patiently waiting.
Also, sick ad hominem, bro, really showed me whats what by calling me stupid.

>Challenges me to name a CCG in which this isn't true.
>Ignoring the question.

Hence the comparison to the "Have you tried not playing DnD" meme. Popular!= well designed; and assuming that every game has a design similar to magic for a complaint to be valid, and then defending that because Magic is the biggest game out there, is stupid.

I named 10 games, which is what you asked for, not "ten games that are being played in droves RIGHT THIS SECOND" because we're actually talking about design of a good game, not what's being played at this moment. And yes, the classic CCG model shoots itself in the foot in that regard, because it promotes play of infinite set expansion, which is enormously difficult to balance. That still doesn't mean you need "basic lands", or a default size of 60 cards, or magic style limitations on how many card duplicates you have.

>Should every card in a TCG be useful in some way?

Yes.

>or its okay to have filler cards

No.

MaRo has posted a million blog excuses about how "you gotta have bad cards so you can appreciate the good" and every time I see one of those I want to take a plane ticket over the Atlantic to beat the shit out of him. It's such a blatant, shameless lie that goes against ALL principles of good design. Useless cards should never exist, every single one that exists is a design error.

popular = well-designed

There are non-magic tcgs that people actually play?

Every card should be useful.

Filler cards are a money sink, as is making the most powerful cards the rarest.

But when a card games' business model is making people waste money to play, that's what you get.

This is generally why you buy singles, not packs.

The question you're asking is, should draft packs have shit pulls?

Which?

Much better phrasing and a much more tractable problem.

only common cards should be filler
if you have filler uncommons and rares, you're a fucking asshole and deserve to be raped by a rake

Popular=well marketed.

60 card constructed a shit.

But to answer your question:

A tcg designed to be played in draft/sealed is perfectly reasonable to have cards of varying quality, including some subset of cards that are shit.

And make no mistake, mtg is designed for draft. They want to sell product. Draft sells product, every game (cube notwithstanding) .

underrated post
anything popular with customer is well designed
i left MtG because i was at a point where i could either spend 10-300ish dollars each time a new set came out to update my decks (modern+edh) or just spend a few thousands and jump into vintage/legacy
i decided to just drop out of the game, although my LGSs and game buddies are proxy friendly they only allow a couple of such and you need the originals for any kind of tournaments
while i like the game, so much money for pieces of cardboard not printed by the central bank put me off and i decided to get into other Veeky Forums stuff
still, WotC has made good marketing choice in pushing their own version of the Avengers (and recently realize people don't want them everywhere), premium sealed product, pre-made EDH decks, etc.
people keep buying it, whether they stay or leave after a couple of months, and MtG is making WotC, and Hasbro, money, so all in all is a well designed product, even if its unappealing for some

Not all cards have to be equally good, but if you include 'filler' cards there has to be a good reason for it. Take Hearthstone; Worgen Greaser isn't a very good card but its existence is justified by Arena drafting. It won't come up often but it might just be a better alternative to the other cards. Maybe your deck is creature light, or needs a four-drop, ANY four-drop. Maybe you have a lot of taunts so you can expect your Greaser to hit face once or twice, and hey the alternatives are Sacred Trial and Adaptation so bad is better than garbage for your draft so far.

This is why I liked Kamigawa so much back in the day. The cards weren't really good, but the drafting was amazing as a result. Nobody was breezing through tournaments because they got a mythic rare or loads of removal or a 'bomb' that swung the game around every time. Drafting was all about making the best with slim pickings, and those who understood mana curves and found synergies ended up on top.

As a side note, in a game like Hearthstone where cards are divided up between classes and a universal pool anyone can draw from, it's totally fine for class cards to be strictly better than universal ones. Your class shapes your deck's identity and how you approach certain archetypes. Fiery War Axe is a great card that only Warriors get, and that's fine because it's part of what makes the Warrior class attractive. In a game like MTG, where card access is limited only by mana sources in your deck, it's a lot harder to balance 'strictly better cards'. Additional mana symbols and/or Affinity/Devotion can work as soft limiters but ultimately, anyone with a large enough and flexible enough mana pool can play anything they want.

In contrast, a game like Netrunner (where you get all the cards with no randomness) needs to be exceedingly balanced with its cards so that new ones are neither too powerful nor too weak in comparison to previous sets. In such a game, trash cards are basically taboo.

They DO serve a purpose though. They teach new players to pay attention to the efficiency of a spell. We know a card is bad now because we've played something similar early in our Magic careers and lost because of it. Angel's Mercy is a bad card not simply because it is, but because you are putting mana into an effect that simply delays the outcome rather than changing the outcome. The only way to know that is by playing it or seeing it played. In that way it teaches new players how to spot good/efficient cards and how to strengthen their decks (trim the fat).

see There are arguably better TCG's on the market than MtG but most people will never hear about them because they lack the presence necessary to draw in a sizable crowd.

I mean, the closests games I can recall that can match MtG's might is YGO and the Pokemon TCG, and even then that's mainly because they have the push of a video game publisher who is willing to market the game.

What's a better TCG with better mechanics? I won most of my draft games tonight by my opponent getting manafucked or flooded so I'm sufficiently jaded enough to try something else.

MtG is well-designed to be marketable to wider audiences, this is what i belive meant, in a way the distinction made by becomes implicit
there are games that are better at being games and worse at being products, yes i know that, that is why i dropped MtG, which is a great product but, at least for me, has become a bad game and gaming experience because i am no longer their target audience
Android Netrunner is fun and interesting, but i find it hard to find people to play with
same with Infinity miniatures

Everything being useful is ideal.

>Should every card in a TCG be useful in some way?
Yes
>or its okay to have filler cards for a set that pretty much are useless or straight up bad?
It depends. Plenty of people keep buying MTG so it is OK from a business perspective. Not good from having a decent game perspective however.

Oh boy

Why not have all the cards be efficient?

Bad cards are essential. If every card is good then powercreep begins to start to get people excited for a new set, ironically slowly invalidating the old cards that were good. Japanese TCGs/CCGs are extremely bad at this and end up dying in a year or so due to it.

Magic is actually pretty interesting because the cards have gotten less good over time. Lightning Bolts still the best burn card 25 years later, StP is the best removal 25 years later. Creatures are better now but the creatures everyone claims are pushed (recently the HoU God cycle) are unplayable in Constructed.

Every card being useful leads to either same-y cards because you can only cover so much different ground, or power creep because there are efficient cards that make every card less efficient "useless" by comparison, so in order to make the new cards useful they'd just be strictly outclassing old ones. Lightning Strike isn't a good card compared to Lightning Bolt.