Board Game Design Day: Balancing Mechanics for Your Card Game's Unique Power Curve

In this 2018 GDC talk, The Pokemon Company's Dylan Mayo sets some base truths and examines the curves of some of the biggest games in the CCG space, including Magic: The Gathering, The Pokemon Trading Card Game, Hearthstone, The Spoils, and Clash Royale.

GDC talks cover a range of developmental topics including game design, programming, audio, visual arts, business management, production, online games, and much more. We post a fresh GDC video every day. Subscribe to the channel to stay on top of regular updates, and check out GDC Vault for thousands of more in-depth talks from our archives.

[linorabolini]

i wish this talk covered more depth on how to balance the values. A lot of information about different games was given but not so much about how to balance

[braydenb]

Id love to see a documentary that showed the steps they took to make the game. ive started before but get overwhelmed. im not sure how much to flesh out before beginning to tes

[kaname]

Bring on more content on board games! =)

[SleepDepJoel]

Loved Magi-Nation! What an unexpected treat!

[GnarlyCharlie]

Yu Gi Oh is too broken to even be a part of this discussion

[joakimandersson]

This sounded like an intro to "what is a mana curve" and then it just ended before getting to the title of the talk?

[garrettrains]

Good stuff! I'm designing my own ccg right now and it is really tricky to do well. Even something like how you generate mana is crucial.

[aardvarkpepper]

"Board Game Design Day: Balancing Mechanics for Your Card Game's Unique Power Curve" is an inappropriate title for this video. There is no discussion of underlying design principles that determine why particular mechanics are included in a game preferentially to others. Rather, this is a narrowly focused presentation of a few variations of mana systems in a few card games, omitting mention of many card games with fundamentally different mechanics - Yugioh, Thea the Awakening, and Prismata to name a few.

It's not a bad video for someone that knows nothing about the card game genre, but for a "Game Developers Conference", I really have to question both the presentation and its title. If your boss sent you to watch a video to say company representatives had researched a topic, this gets the job done; the title sounds nice, a lot of high profile game names are dropped. If your boss sent you to watch a video so you could actually get things done - what about card combinations, tempo, actual calculations with actual numbers, and so forth? If you were making a game that involved cards, if you'd done any serious research into some of the major popular card games, some of which are mentioned in this video, this presentation would contain nothing of value.

If there's no section that presents specific comparisons with specific numbers for a number of different situations, and no section that discusses a number of different alternative mechanics, stating a presentation is applicable to "your game" is overselling. If this presentation were titled something like "Presentation of Some Basic Aspects of Mana Systems in Hearthstone, Magic the Gathering, and Pokemon Card Games", I would consider it appropriate.

[c.d.dailey]

Wow. That was a great talk. It helps me learn about power curve. I am glad to try hearthstone, even though I quit soon afterward. It is enough to help me follow along. Maybe I ought to try out even more games just to see what is out there. For a long time I have been a Pokemon and WOW fan. Then I begame a MTG fan last year. There are more games worth trying.

[Statalyzer]

That Warcraft CCG that Hearthstone was based on sounds like it was inspired by San Juan the tabletop card game where you have to sacrifice cards as resources.

[petersmythe]

There are cases where some things you might not expect can happen when you combine effects.

Take these two pieces in a chess-like game:
The Gnu: moves like a knight (2, 1) or a camel (3, 1).
The Princess: moves like a knight (2, 1), or a bishop (1, 1 slider).

If you just guessed, you might say that the first piece is worth about 5.5 pawns, and the second maybe 6.5 pawns, based on their components.

However, this isn't the case in reality. The Gnu is indeed worth about that amount, but the Princess is absolutely murderous and worth about 8 points. Maybe even a bit more than that. It's close to a queen in strength and arguably a bit more flexible than one.

The reasons for this are not fully understood, but we do know that it is experimentally correct for human and engine play.

[andrewsparkes]

A maximum of one mana every turn, in Magic? Green says hi!

[Statalyzer]

You could tell he didnt want to admit a big part of power creep is just to entice you to spend more money to replace stuff you already spent money on previously.

[petersmythe]

The other tool Pokemon has is energy. You can make a pretty beefy basic Pokemon but if it's main attack costs 4 differently colored energies to use, it's not going to immediately have the option to attack for full force.

[unlockablecharacter]

crazy to think that mana cost in magic is more like a float while hearthstone is like an integer

[tminusboom]

The mana curve in Project Phoenix is... Odd, to say the least.

You naturally acrue mana similar to Hearthstone, with up to 10 natural mana generation. You can accelerate that process at any time by discarding 2 cards for 1 mana, which you can still use to replenish 1 mana when you've capped out- and any unspent mana is turned to overflow, with a max of 10 as well.

Because cards can be converted directly into mana, you need to be bribed to play anything in the early game at all, but you also need to be rewarded for saving up and waiting, so the curve is more of a wave.

In playtesting, games are really fast, typically ending around turn ten, but with both players already having had ten mana for a few turns.

I enjoy it, but the warping of the power curve is a definite challenge.

[hommhommhomm]

Having 2 cards and one of them being better in every situation is a way to make collecting new cards desirable but also can push away players who don't want to grind for new cards or and don't want to pay to unlock these faster. Alternatively all cards could be situationally good but that reduces pay-to-win potential. Games where you can pay to get more cards / equipment of any sort have an incentive to make the game pay to win but in such way that it isn't obvious to most players. I quit hearthstone when I realized people who spend more time in the game or more money have cards that are better in all situations but take a lot of loot boxes to get.

[altrivotzck]

I swear I've heard a couple of the voices of the people who were asking questions, before, but I can't pinpoint who they are.

[baileydombroskie]

And then theres yugioh where it has a power curve that exists covering this entire grid as well as far beyond the atmosphere. U have cards like foolish burial that r theoretically bad cards but is semi-limited for a reason. Then u have cards like lightning storm that r super powerful on paper that r in practice just reasonably powerful, not op.

[ActuallyAFungus]

Am I tripping or did this guy say "enbies" in 2018?