Trading Card Game Mechanics That Get the Job Done

Gavin Wadsworth | October 28, 2024

Ah, trading card games—the original pay-to-win, loot box experience, and doubtless responsible for generations of hoarding habits. But the games are fun, dammit. What a rare intersection of packrat mentality, board games, and intense competition. There's a reason why companies are always pushing out new TCGs with variations on familiar formulas. Everyone wants to be the next Magic: The Gathering and create an empire of paper cards wrapped in plastic sleeves.

I'm by no means a TCG expert, but I've played my fair share—enough to form a few opinions, anyway. And over the years, I've identified some of my favorite game mechanics from these wallet-draining dopamine machines. And because I need some kind of outlet for my love of these games, I'm going to share them with you.

1. Trap Cards

I never got big into Yu-Gi-Oh! as a kid; we were more of a Magic: The Gathering household, and I never had the courage to ask the kids in the middle school hallways if they could teach me how to play. Yes, you read that correctly. I was so socially challenged that I was nervous to talk to the Yu-Gi-Oh! nerds. And to this day, I've never gone on a full deep-dive into the game of dueling monsters. However, on occasions when I've slapped together a deck of shoebox cards borrowed from my wife, or tinkered around with the Duel Links app, I've realized one impressive mechanic that I haven't yet seen in another game (at least, not to this extent).

Many TCGs allow for out-of-turn effects, where you get to interrupt someone else's turn with your own bullshit. This is generally fine, and the out-of-turn interactivity makes the games more engaging throughout the whole experience than, say, Yahtzee. It's dreadfully fun to throw a wrench in your opponent's plans with a well-timed Counterspell, but it's also dreadfully obnoxious to be on the receiving end. It's like when you're having a conversation with someone, but they keep making everything about them.

Yu-Gi-Oh!'s spin on this mechanic is what I'm here to talk about, and that's trap cards, and it's for one simple reason: you have to telegraph your out-of-turn move in advance.

In case you're not familiar with trap cards, they're cards with effects that can trigger on your opponent's turn, but you have to first place the trap card face-down on your side of the field and on your own turn.

It's a relatively small thing, but I love what it adds to the experience. The foreshadowing adds a bit of tension to the board state, and the payoff feels a little more earned than just failing to notice your opponent left a few mana untapped at the end of their turn. But throwing down all your trap cards as soon as you get them isn't necessarily the best strategy, because trap cards on the field can be interacted with more easily than cards in your hand. Most notably, the "Heavy Storm" spell card destroys all spell and trap cards on the field at once. That means you have to be careful with which trap cards you commit to the field, and when.

I'm sure there are plenty of other games that do something similar, but this is the one I'm familiar with, and this is the one I'm talking about. Actually, just feel free to apply that sentiment across the entire blog post.

2. Deck as Health

This next mechanic is one I first encountered in the Harry Potter TCG as a young gamer, and that is the usage of your deck as an indicator of your "health" in the game. In other words, when your deck runs out of cards, you lose the game.

Now, that's not exactly news. Most trading card games include this rule as a kind of "times up" clause to put a hard limit on how long a game can keep going. In Magic: The Gathering, it's considered a common alternate win condition to "mill" your opponent to death by discarding cards from their deck. But the difference with the Harry Potter TCG is that it's the only win condition. There's no health pool, no life counters, no separate vitality gauge. There's just the number of cards remaining in your deck. I find this interesting for several reasons, and I'm saving the best for last, so strap in.

1. No tokens/dice required. It's a small thing, and I acknowledge that it's nitpicky. But being able to just whip out your deck of cards and start playing without having to count out a pile of d6s or purchase a specialized life counter or use a mobile app is just nice. You can gauge how the game is going by comparing the height of each player's deck. Once it gets down to the wire, you might count out exactly how many cards are left, but that's usually when your deck only has 20 or fewer cards left.

2. Forced deck sizes. Gone is the temptation for newbie players to put all their cool cards into one massive deck that needs a cement mixer to shuffle. Because your deck is also your life total, you can't inflate it with cards beyond the limit.

3. Discard pile as a resource. Many card effects across the TCG landscape allow players to pull cards from their discard piles to be used again. Such cards in the Harry Potter TCG are especially common as "healing" cards, which allow you to return discarded cards of your choice back into your deck (with certain exceptions). This actually results in the opposite of a death spiral—a life spiral?—, because the more cards are sent to your discard pile, the more choice you have in which cards to return to your deck, and potentially to your hand. I love these subtle underdog mechanics that help keep each game interesting, and give the losing player a fighting chance (however small). Who knows, you might even be able to optimize the card left in your deck in order to perfectly counter your opponent's strategy!

3. Draw Twice, Resource Once

All right, I'll come clean. Star Wars: Unlimited is—at the time of this writing—my all-time favorite trading card game. When Disney's Lorcana came out, I thought that was going to be my next big thing. But then in March 2024, I signed up to run a few demos and earn a bit of cash, not even knowing it was a TCG at the time. I picked up on the rules almost immediately, and spent the next couple days teaching strangers how to play at three separate store events. And I had a blast.

Anyway, this game does so many things right, and I could go on and on. But I'm singling out my favorite mechanic to share with you today, and that's the "draw twice, resource once" rule.

Without getting into the weeds about how turns and rounds work in Star Wars: Unlimited, I'll just say that where most other games have a draw phase where you get to draw one card, SWU has you draw two cards instead. I know, I know, groundbreaking, isn't it? Then, after drawing two cards, you have the option to turn up to one of them into a resource by flipping it facedown. Resources are persistent cards you can use to pay the costs of other cards by turning them sideways, much like lands in Magic: The Gathering.

So what's the big deal, why is this interesting? The answer has to do with the game's pacing. At the start of the game, you have two resources, and on every subsequent round you can add up to one resource. Most cards have a cost somewhere between 2 and 6 resources. After a certain point in the game, you'll probably have enough resources to play the cards you need from your hand. At this time, you're no longer in a resource deficit, you're in a card deficit. So what do you do? You stop resourcing cards every round. Suddenly you're getting an extra card draw every single round, giving you more options as the game passes its midpoint.

This is an incredible counter to the classic "top-decking" problem you find in other games, where the game's momentum grinds to a halt as you find yourself with nothing to do and hoping to draw something useful one card at a time. And if you're playing MTG, you just know that top-deck card is going to be a land you really don't need.

I've never seen a mechanic regulate a game's pacing as elegantly and effectively as this one. Simply by passing the decision to the player of whether they need an extra card or an extra resource this round, every game feels engaging and worthwhile.

Conclusion

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