As such, I thought it would be fun to look at some of the economies—resource systems—that have developed since Magic: the Gathering appeared 35+ years ago (and cursed us with the shittiest resource system known this universe—and all the universes beyond).
And there have been a number. From simple to complex, static to dynamic, inherent to abstract—the ability to pay and play those sweet-sweet cards has appeared in many iterations in TCG and TCG-esque games. (If you consider yourself a purist of the definition of “TCG”, run the other way. I will discuss TCGs, CCGs, LCGs, ECGS, UCGs, etc., etc. without a fig given to taxonomy.) A variety of systems will be discussed here, and in the closing paragraph I will draw some conclusions—objective conclusions, naturally.
We'll start where it ALL started, Magic: The Gathering, and the hex it placed on the dozens and dozens of TGCs which chose to emulate its “success”.
For those living under a rock, Magic's economy is buried randomly in players' decks. You need to draw Land cards in order to even have an economy. Yes, this results in a game where it often happens players are unable to actually play the game because RNG has dictated their Lands are buried deep in their deck or fill their hand. Not fun. And yet, for reasons that can only be chalked up to cosmic absurdity, many other games decided to emulate this model, including Battletech TCG, Sorcery, Pokemon, Redline, and others. Why?!?! Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on...
The house rule fixing this problem resulted in the next type of resource system.
Here at the bustling offices of Speculiction, we love the game Redline. It's the best TCG mech battler made to date. Except. Except that it decided to copy Magic's lottery—ahem, resource system. Our house rule? Remove all the resource cards from your deck, put them in a separate pile, and once per turn draw one and play it as a resource. Simple. It works. And voila, the game becomes fun. One Piece, Rush of Ikorr, and Riftbound are games which also use separate resource decks, working the same as our house rule for Redline.
Clearly this system is the inspiration for the next step forward in the evolution of TCGs.
What if every card in your hand were a Land? What if you could choose one card per round, turn it face down, and thus create “money”? This is what games like The Spoils, Star Wars Unlimited, Lorcana, Alpha Clash, Summoner Wars, Cyberpunk TCG, Altered, Weiss Schwarz and many others decided should be the spine of their game. It's steady. It's mechanical. It's predictable. It's even. And it's boring. Let's see, round two. I have a handful of low-cost cards and one eight-cost. Guess I resource the 8-drop... It almost makes the dynamism of Magic look... good? No, no. Check that. I'd rather have a drip fed economy than none at all. It's not that fun, but it is fair, and fair is definitely a key piece of competitive fun.
One game that technically fits this category but adds a twist is Grand Archive. In order to pay for a card, the player places the number of cards equal to the cost of the card they want to play face down in their resource zone. At the end of their turn, one of those face down cards is randomly discarded, the rest return to hand. In other words, players play some role in which card is potentially sacrificed. This method is a touch more interesting, but technically still card sacrifice.
But what if we tweaked that formula, evolved it further?
There are games which took the Drip Feed method and modified it, coming up with something innovative: card-dependent sacrifices that actually make the player think. Three great examples are Marvel Champions, Flesh & Blood, and WWF Raw Deal.
In Marvel Champions, players have anywhere from five to seven resources in their hand on any given turn (each card being worth one or two resources of different types). The twist is, each of these cards also has effects that likely want to be played that turn, not to mention some of the effects can be tied to the type of resource printed on the card. Players must do some mental cartwheels to combine and re-combine cost-versus-effect scenarios in order to optimize their cards. Rarely do players encounter the situation Guess I resource the 8-drop. Actual thought is needed. And it can be agonizing—fun, but agonizing.
Same setup but Flesh & Blood makes the puzzle of economy vs. card effects even tighter. So tight, in fact, Flesh & Blood is essentially a game of planned attrition as the player must factor a third variable, damage, into their card play optimization. I know I'll take damage, but how can I minimize that amount while maximizing the effect-per-resource-per-card potential... It's offense, through and through, just how much? Smoke out the ears for that one.
But perhaps the most interesting of this card-dependent type play is the Raw Deal CCG. There are two ways to play cards. First is to discard the specified number of cards from hand, e.g. Discard 2. Simple, each card in hand is a universal resource. Marvel Champions-esque, nothing special. But in order to play certain higher value cards, the player must have successfully played a certain amount of cards with the Fortitude keyword on them, which is the second way. The more cards in play with said keyword allows for playing cards with greater impact. In other words, the player must think about which cards to discard in the context of cards with potential future impact in combination with the deck they know they've built, which cards have been seen, and which combos are possible. Similar but more nuanced than the Drip Feed system.
But what do we need all these restrictions for, these limits on how much players can do? What if we just gave players all their money up front and let them decide what to do? That is the next iteration.
Several TCG and TCG-esque games have detached economy from card sacrifice. Ashes: Rise of the Phoneixborn, for example, uses a pool of ten dice. At the beginning of a round, players roll their dice to create a pool of resources, resources which are then at the beck and call of the player when and how to be spent. While some may find that restricting, it's stars and stripes compared to the Magic player digging for their first Land three rounds into the game.
Vampire the Eternal Struggle goes even further. It gives the player a massive pool of money. In fact, the pool is equal to their vampire's hit points. In fact, it is their hit points. Private Plain is salivating. Yes, the player can blow their wad on the 8-drop in the first round and still have plenty left over. But what is the ROI??? That is the million dollar (?) question. Will that massive investment mean you kill your opponents faster, or just die sooner? Makes the player think twice before blowing their money—ahem, health. Super interesting, that one.
Digimon is another game which gives players all their resources up front but at a cost. Sure, go ahead, play that 8-drop, any time. But you're also giving the other player eight resources of their own to play, and depending where on the tug-of-war board you are, you might even be giving them more than eight. The player who squeezes the most efficiency from this back-and-forth likely wins.
But what if art imitated life? At least for people with a job...
Many games have opted for resource systems which mimic the real world: Do stuff and get paid for it. One of the best examples is Star Wars Destiny. At the beginning of each round, players get two money, from the bank, for free. It's almost socialism. There are several other mechanisms in the game which allow players to increase and decrease the amount of money they have throughout a round, but players know, come next round I'm gettin' two, and then I can... <cue evil laugh> Several other games, including Star Wars: The Card Game, Legend of the Five Rings: The Card Game, Warhammer 40,000: Conquest, EVE: Genesis, Earthborne Rangers, Game of Thrones: The Card Game, Doomtown: Reloaded (with its wonderfully named ghost rock) use variations on this model.
There are a couple big advantages to this system. Rather than having to wait for the resources ramp to give you access to that (proverbial) 8-drop, the 8-drop is available at the beginning of the game. Private Plain thinks having your biggest, baddest cards available from the get-go is more fun than just late game, if at all. Likewise, the salary approach adds additional aspects of gameplay, for example, messing with your opponent's resources, them messing with yours, and you messing with your own. It's a whole other area to introduce card play. Yes, I'm aware Magic et al allows players to disrupt their opponent's Lands, etc. It's just not fun given a player has so few Lands to begin with, not to mention you can only get one per round. Any time messin' happens, it feels bad. In Destiny et al, it feels bad for one second, then you play a card that gives you money, you have money, and you're happy, again. More fun.
The natural evolution of salary is investment. You've earned the money, now you get to choose how to make it grow (or lose it). Enter Android Netrunner.
If Star Wars Destiny, Warhammer 40k: Conquest, et al are push models (i.e. money is pushed on the player each round), then Netrunner is a pull model (i.e. each player decides how their money earns more money). They can spend actions 1:1 to get money now, but they can also choose to invest in cards which guarantee a higher return in the future. It's the classic: A dollar today will get you one-and-a-half dollars tomorrow. Or, you can just spend your dollar today... All in all, players must use these things called brains to decide when to forego an action or effect in the moment for financial reward in the future. Never have we seen a game other than Netrunner for which such a large portion of players' card pools are devoted to different types of future earnings. Did I mention how wonderfully thematic that is in a game involving corporations and urban hackers? Hubworld: Aidalon, the spiritual successor to Netrunner, is shaping up to put a modified spin on the investment model, which will be interesting to see when it finally delivers.
A game with a nice twist on the Wall Street system is Chrono Core. It's a combination of salary and investment. Each round, players receive money equal to their core charge. During a round, players can choose to use their core charge money to attack, i.e. get closer to their won condition. They can also invest in more core charge, i.e. forego pursuing the game's win condition in the moment to have a better chance at achieving it in later rounds. It's still the classic conundrum of when the player wants their ROI, but the difference is that investment permanently increases salary. Not bad.
And then we go off the rails—shark tank pitches, grandma's nest egg, crawl spaces beneath floor boards, and other forms of gettin' money in a TCG.
Social Credit (aka “Momma Always Said Be Careful Who Your Friends Are”)
At least a couple TCGs have resource models built around faction, i.e. your faction determines how much money you get. Technically this is a modification on the salary model, but it is not universal per player. It depend's on the player's faction choice In 7th Sea CCG, for example, it matters who you sail with, certain factions providing more and less dubloons. Another example is Keyforge. In Keyforge you can play as many cards as you want, no cost per se, but each card you play that round must be affiliated with one of the three alien factions in your deck. Momma was right.
In short, TCG and TCG-esque games have played with, toyed with, and tossed around a variety of ways to integrate economy into gameplay. I haven't done a proper survey, but I can't help but feel the center of the bell curve sits around the model used by The Spoils, Lorcana, SWU, Magic, and others—the drip ramp, one resource per round. It's limiting but fair, which is fair enough. Economy is, after all, just one of the three pillars.
It seems obvious, however, that the models which sit off-center of the bell curve—salaries, card-dependent, faction-dependent, investment, the pool, etc.—offer players a richer, more dynamic decision space. Bigger, badder cards in round one, a game within a game, and variable, exciting gameplay—these are the results. One-third is, after all, one third, nothing to sneeze at.
My hope is that once the current resurgence of TCGs dies (and Drip Feed along with it), that we can return to an ether in which designers will have ample opportunity to think about what makes for interesting decision space financially in TCGs and come up with new spins, and potentially new models for paying for cards. There's got to be something new, right? (Hold my beer, says Yu-Gi-Oh.)
*Theme (as expressed through art and effects) and first principles (the overarching framework of rules) are the other two.
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