ITT: TCG/CCGs like Yu-Gi-Oh!/Cardfight! Vanguard/ Kaijudo/ Magic the Gathering/ Pokemon become LCGs

[Just Crouton]

From Fantasy Flight Games, who are currently using this concept with six card games.

 

A Living Card Game® (LCG®) offers an innovative fixed distribution method that breaks away from the traditional Collectible Card Game model. While LCGs still offer the same dynamic, expanding, and constantly evolving game play that makes CCG’s so much fun, they do away with the deterrent of the blind-buy purchase model that has burned out so many players. The end result is an innovative mix that gives you the best of both worlds!

 

The Core Set is the heart of a LCG. Each LCG’s Core Set is a completely self-contained game experience packed with content, including high-quality game pieces and immersive game aides designed to enhance play. Additionally, each Core Set contains multiple decks that provide an exciting and infinitely replayable game experience right out of the box.

 

While the LCG Core Sets provide a fantastic stand alone game experience, those that wish to can expand even further! Monthly installments of expansion packs, each a set of fixed cards, provide ongoing and regular additions to the available card pool. These expansion packs add customization, variety, and an ongoing sense of theme to your experiences with the Core Game, while evolving the play environment in exciting new ways.

 

Since its introduction, the LCG (Living Card Game®) format has come to be immensely successful for FFG, and sales continue their growth rate in both domestic and international markets. Fans around the world have enjoyed augmenting their LCG® core sets with our fixed 60-card monthly packs, and have experienced the strategy of deck building without the financial strain of random card packs. But how does this innovative format work? What can you expect from a Living Card Game®?

• Excellent Value

 

A Core Set provides everything you need for a complete and self-contained game experience, but if you choose to go beyond the Core Set, monthly expansion packs provide fresh content at an easily affordable price. These monthly releases offer enough new content to keep the game immersive and strategic, while remaining accessible and digestible to casual players.

• Constantly Expanding Card Pool

Monthly expansions provide more frequent additions to your card pool, with the potential of new deck types and strategies you can explore in every release. With monthly installments, the game is continuously updated and always feels fresh.

• No Rare Chasing

LCGs® have no rare or promo cards that need to be chased. This ensures that games are determined by a player’s deck building skills and play strategies, rather than who spent the most money in pursuit of hard-to-find ultra rare cards. The fixed format means that every player has equal access to every card needed to build his or her deck.

• Easier to find Opponents

The non-random format makes it simple to play multiple LCGs™ without breaking the bank, dramatically increasing the chance to find opponents that play the same game you do. As each Core Set provides enough for at least two players, friends can begin playing right away.

• Organized Play

Organized play programs are available for all LCGs®. These programs include everything from casual year-round leagues to premiere level tournaments featuring regional, national, and world championship level events.

 

Tl;dr: Basically, booster packs now become fixed, and starter decks become starter sets with 250+ cards and actually matter for entry into the game, and come with several of the best cards to be carried on to future decks.

 

Pros

1. Because the packs are fixed, no obvious trash cards cluttering up in your card boxes.

2. Far less expensive; Yu-Gi-Oh! no longer becomes that game where you blow $1000 online for a deck that gets killed next banlist.

3. Starter/Structure decks actually mean something.

 

Cons

1. Collecting in general isn't as meaningful. This might matter if owning a binder full of Number monsters from buying all those Number Hunters packs makes you feel warm and special inside.

2. Sites like Troll and Toad can't sell singles for anything. But, who cares about their struggle? I can order pizza, Thai, and Chinese tonight cause it's my cheat day.

3. Less garbage cards = Less topics on YCM about garbage cards. Come at me.

 

 

Thoughts?

 

 

[The Hounds Of Anubis]

The problem with this idea seems to stem moreso onto the company that runs the LCG's side. TCG/CCG's major profit has and always will be from sealed product, and the same would have to be so for LCGs. The problem is that because cards have a seriously flat value, and every card is so easy to come across that soon enough they'll just stop being able to sell any sealed product. The only way to entice players into the, then, newer products released would to be to give an incentive. This can be due to a rotating format like the way MtG and the Pokémon TCG work (Notably the latter also has multiple non-rotating formats, although their appeal tends to come from multiple overpowered cards, something which an LCG doesn't seem to really favour) which would at least be very affordable especially when compared to Standard in MtG. The other manner of enticing players into buying new product is power creep, but to keep in spirit of an LCG this would be... well, the opposite. This is, of course, only what I would expect for a company investing in this. They could still possibly just be successful in the long run.

 

Another problem is, simply, people like using the most powerful cards, even if they are expensive. To name some examples, Dark Armed Dragon was a ridiculously expensive card back in its hay-day ($300 worth of expensive, at that) and people still got them because they wanted to win and they wanted to do powerful things while doing so. Yes, it was hard to win without playing Tele-DAD as it was, but there's a serious joy to be had with playing whatever is the most powerful cards. Obviously, Tele-DAD has the issue of everything in the deck just being way, way, way better than almost everything else in the game at the time. So the next example would be one relevant in MtG right now, in Sphinx's Revelation. The card completely defines control decks in standard, but because of the general balance in decks' power in Magic the $30 mythic isn't nearly as overcentralising as it could be, and it makes for an overall richer experience when cast. Watered down versions of cards like this (Again in MtG terms think Divination as the strongest form of card draw in stead) make for a game that becomes stale much quicker. Sorry for anyone that doesn't get the MtG card references, I don't know about (or care about) yugioh shit anymore. (Think of Sphinx's Revelation as animé Card of Sanctity and Divination as Shard of Greed. Obviously mana costs ofset this but it's a good enough basis for comparison.)

 

I will say, however, that a game that rewards deckbuilding a lot more does sound enticing, but it also leads to the inevitable issue of a format just being solved. Eventually, there will only be so many "good" decks.

 

Hopefully, I didn't misunderstand anything in the OP. Also I'm pretty tired so hopefully my ramblings made enough sense.

[Sleepy]

Yeah the problem is on the company's end. Though it would technically be helped by a rotation format. In the way of making tournaments encouraging the block of the newest packs. Very much like MTG. Tournament events and prizes would be an incentive to generate money from the new product, and hopefully without a need of power creep. Although MTG is kind of already that, but they aknowledge they still need card rarities to maintain the game. I'm not sure what could be injected into the model to improve on that aspect.

 

Player-wise, that's pretty much what Yugioh should be. I'm a player that has never really topped at anything, but has a lot of fun with the deck-building part of the game. Which I satisfy by either going after the outclassed junk or by card-making in this forum, because the game itself doesn't provide that experience. They always revert back to a game heavily influenced by pre-build archetypes pretty much exlusively. Each generation of yugioh bring around 1000 new cards to the game total with all it's Booster packs, yet the staple cards can be counted with one's fingers for the S/T slots. 

 

 

Another issue is that often power creep seems to be what changes the way the game feels. Many of the gimmicky filler Zexal cards and moves would have been pretty meaningful back in DM, some even give a competitive edge. Of course that depends on the card designers' skill. I'll trust that the game could be kept fresh without too many jumps or making casual playing pretty pointless and underpowered.