Wizards of the Coast denies, then confirms, that Magic: The Gathering promo art features AI elements
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The situation began a couple of days ago when fans accused Wizards of the Coast of using generative AI in promo images for its new Magic: The...

Wizards of the Coast denies, then confirms, that Magic: The Gathering promo art features AI elements | When will companies learn?::undefined

  • HobbitFoot English
    1•1 year ago

    I think of it more comparing a game like D&D which would work well under an open source model.

    A large part of the appeal to a CCG is the interaction of the different cards together. It is a set of cards to play with, not a series of individual cards. Traditional trading card games, living card games, and deck builders are built on these card interactions. Sometimes it involves designing synergistic mechanics but it can just be creating the environment where different strategies can compete against each other. New cards get added in part to fit well with existing ones. Cases this doesn’t happen is considered to be a failure.

    The open source model does not work well with that design goal.

    There is going to be an inducement by designers to push for power creep since designing stronger cards will get them played. There may not be enough headroom for a game to deal with the constant increase in power.

    You also have the fracturing of different formats. It took a while for Magic to get to the number of formats it had and even then most constructed play defaulted to Standard. How are you going to be able to have a CCG work with hundreds of formats filled with cards that don’t work with each other and can maybe even have homebrew cards that wreck the metagame?

    A card game isn’t like an RPG where you can have a base rule set while letting others create potentially clashing supplemental sets and adventures. Hell, we’ve even seen forks like with Pathfinder. There is a reason why RPG’s adopted an open source mindset while card games didn’t.

      • HobbitFoot English
        1•1 year ago

        There are non-profit Living Card Games out there, including the current iteration of Star Wars: Customizable Card Game, but they still package card design together internally.

        And you sidestepped my comment about cohesive card design. It isn’t just designing cards, but the collection of cards together as well. Why separate these two activities?

        And if the open source model could work, I feel like it could have been implemented by now. We’ve seen it implemented in RPG’s and some board games, but why not card games?

          • HobbitFoot English
            1•1 year ago

            I literally gave the name of a non-profit game with my response.

            And I recognized you can create a card game without a for-profit company running the design.

            I feel like you are taking past me because you are conflating tying two design activities together as requiring a profit motive.

              • HobbitFoot English
                1•1 year ago

                And you keep ignoring my statements about the system being more important than the individual parts. A designed system doesn’t get the value from FOSS development that other game systems get.

                  • HobbitFoot English
                    1•1 year ago

                    if you don’t consider games being made as part of the commons as an inherently good thing then we have a philosophical disagreement that goes beyond the scope of this discussion.

                    I defined a type of game being made as part of the commons as being an inherently good thing.

                    You are still talking past my assertion that a deck building card game is defined by the card pool, which is usually designed by a singular group of people.