written by Tyler Bertrand
One of my favorite shows is Breaking Bad. If you haven’t seen it, the premise of the show according to one of the creators was, they‘ll take a typical passive, nice guy (‘Mr Chips’) and turn him into scarface. He begins as a high school chemistry teacher, but gets a cancer diagnosis and handles the existential dread by becoming a drug kingpin. He begins the new career as a small-time dealer but is ruling an empire by the end of the show.
What does this have to do with cards? Like our protagonist in Breaking Bad, problematic card mechanics begin their life with the same model, but as time passes, they too become broken monsters. And like an ambitious cartel boss, they don’t stop until they’ve taken over the entire gaming environment. Have you ever thought of a fun deck idea but then realized “I need a (insert card here) in this deck”? Whenever the entire competitive scene is filtered through dealing with 1 card or combo first, that’s the sign your game might have a broken mechanic. If players are faced with the deckbuilding ultimatum of:
- Do we fall in line and join the new order by playing the card or combo?
- Or do I start a rival faction and try to counter it?
…then, it’s a good chance you’ve been taken over by broken cards. Unlike organized crime though, where it’s rarely a positive thing, why is this bad for card games? Does it really matter what a player wins with and why are former competitive players (like me), always whining about the importance of game balance?
That’s what I want to explain here. Broken cards are terrible for card games and will leave a trail of disgruntled players in their wake, forcing some to quit their favorite game altogether.
Player Agency & Choice
Game balance is a subjective concept and cards are always balanced relative to each other. There is no such thing as a perfectly balanced game and even if there was, there’s zero guarantee you’d want to play that version. Rock, Paper, Scissors (RPS) which I’ll be referring to later is a very balanced game…but I haven’t met too many people that are regular RPS tournament players or organizers. The general rule we follow for balancing is therefore, whatever is the most fun.
Some of my earliest examples of this type of fun came from my first tournaments (at age 13 and I was terrible!), exchanging stories with my brother about the decks we encountered and how one silly concept didn’t work, while others totally crushed us. Some were so creative, we couldn’t fathom coming up with ideas like these next level players. I didn’t know what I was experiencing then, but it wasn’t unique to my brother and I at all. In fact, it’s so common that it’s actually a fundamental reason a lot of us enjoy playing TCGs. Now picture this same experience but instead everyone we played against had one major strategy they were playing. Those conversations would have turned into complaints from frustration, rather than a sense of wonder or interest in how players were thinking.
This is why OGs like me push the idea of deck diversity so hard, because we want every player to have that same experience. It is one of the fundamental ways card games are fun. It’s the challenge of not just coming up with a solution to a problem but the creativity and self expression that come with that solution. I get to make my deck, play my way, and use a series of tricks that I came up with. The more options we provide players, especially in an RPG-ish game like OverPower, the higher the chances they’ll find something that feels like it’s for them.
Broken Cards Break Games
Concepts such as Deck diversity and player choice are the same in that they all refer to the fun we have when customizing our world of TCGs. Broken cards warp this diversity. They crush it so badly that instead of the innovation coming from the entire card pool, the choice becomes to use the broken cards to level the playing field, or try to win an uphill battle using whatever’s left that might counter it. The second option isn’t always viable either, it depends on how broken the game ended up. Everything else becomes irrelevant. There can be innovation with what’s left of the card pool and dedicated players will find some cool ideas, but it’s usually at the cost of a ton of casual interest leaving out of boredom. You can’t really blame the casuals either because imagine if you’re forced to eat hot dogs for every meal and the options you have to make the 500th hot dogs palatable are combos of ketchup and mustard. Only the most dedicated hot dogs lovers will choose to keep going and most of us will bail long before 500.
What Do We Watch For & What Do We Do About It?
Now that I’ve talked about the why, here are some guidelines on what to avoid in the design phase and signs that a card might have issues.
- It Does Too Much…compared to other cards. Cards are balanced relatively amongst each other. If we set a precedent in our designs that an 11 will be the largest attack in our game and it’s a One Per Deck (OPD), giving a character a non-OPD “11, if successful draw 2 cards” would be a hilariously broken card. When most of us think of broken cards and examples, this is the type of design we tend to imagine. Power creep is a valid design tool and the goal is to give players new toys to play with. Good power creep should increase as gradually as possible. When cards like this break a format, it’s usually because the power creep accelerated too quickly and the sudden spike caught the rest of the card pool off guard.
- It’s Too Cheap & Easy To Play…compared to the return on the investment. In general, powerful effects are fine, as long as the player is ‘earning’ them. If a player chose to play with a handicap, they should get a positive benefit from this exchange. Think of it as trading an arm for an extra leg because you need your deck to run faster. Or the idea of a glass canon, trading defense/durability for even more offense. These are all balanced ideas and work. Where this can go awry though, is if the penalty and benefit aren’t of equivalent value. Or if the downside is so niche that it’s not providing any handicap to work around. -Using the same analogy, this would be like trading fingernails for 4 legs in the same race.
Other than a handicap, we can also balance powerful abilities by decreasing the frequency that they work (making it an OPD is an example of this). Similarly, we can force the effects to only trigger when niche characters or weaker cards are played with it. The options for how to balance are only limited by the creativity of the designers. In Overpower specifically, Threat Level can be a decent tool for preventing the stacking of certain effects but only when the interactions you’re trying to prevent, are limited to just a few characters. Otherwise it can limit the characters playability and this in turn can restrict player choice more broadly than is needed to fix the issue. It’s still a good tool, but the goal is to never apply a broad fix to a specific problem. The problem we’re trying to solve is limited player choice, so we don’t want the solution to create another version of the same problem. - Card Type Locks, Flood Gates, Freeze Effects and Oppressive Control. To be clear, locks are not what OverPower players call “lock out” cards, though some lockouts can be viewed as this archetype. A flood gate (which originated as a Yugioh term, I believe) is a card that prevents your opponent from playing a type, or class of card. If the effect shuts off 3 cards in a 60 card deck, then it’s not a Flood Gate, think more like 70% of the same deck. They’re typically a single (or at most 2 card) action, which renders key pieces of a hand unplayable. Or if it’s less broad but specifically targets cards that are key to the player making progress. This is why, out of any card design, these are among the most hated by players. Devourer of Worlds was the most infamous OverPower example. The hate comes not from just losing, but how you lose. Your opponent plays their broken card, you look at your now unplayable hand and are forced to watch them decimate your deck while you might get to play a card or 2. Being forced to watch a smiling opponent take apart your personal creation, piece by piece, while you’re helpless to do anything – is why many players just opt to forfeit and take the quick and painless loss. Now, if that’s not cartel behavior, I don’t know what is.
Here’s a ridiculous Overpower example of this type of mechanic: “Opponent may not play Special cards for the battle and this card is immune to Specials”, what does my opponent counter that with? What makes this example the worst type of failure, is that the only way to stop it is with a Special card, so it blocks its own counter. Believe it or not, there are cards designed like this (Devourer of Worlds, yes Galactus, again this is you). A much better design for this type of effect is to remove the restriction and swap it for a penalty. Your opponent can still play the game, but the card will still have a deterrent effect. So instead of “No special cards may be played…”, we create a venture/damage bonus that could increase each time your opponent plays a Special card. Or another more fair design, is to charge the opponent a couple cards from their Draw Pile for each Special they choose to play. At least these alternatives give us levers to pull and balance with. Your opponent still has agency with these designs and if they manage to eat that first big Venture penalty and still win, now we have a ‘pop off’ moment and a guaranteed story. Which is another fundamental reason we play TCGs, but that’s for a different article. - No Counter In The Card Pool…is related to the last point focusing on card pool diversity. For every mechanic, you want a counter and in most cases, even the counter should have a counter. This always leads to game design being compared to rock, paper scissors (RPS). Once the counter gets a counter, you’re going in a circle. In reality, a game like Overpower is way more complex and is like RPS but with hundreds of options and varying degrees of advantage, instead of win/lose being the only outcome. The definition of a Hard Counter is when that advantage gained by the matchup is bigger for one player, and is balanced by the matchup not lining up as often as other counters. The player risks having to guess exactly what the opponent will play and then is rewarded for guessing right. If they guess wrong, they could be in for a rough tourney. The card design we want to avoid with the concept of counter design is the ‘dynamite’ or the counter that has no counter. Negates in Overpower and Counterspells in Magic are so broad, they’ve been dynamite in lots of cases. Counterspells at least have a cost to play due to Magic’s resource system but negates in OverPower, don’t have this limitation. We need counters in every game but they shouldn’t be so broad that they stop every single unique mechanic in the game. There’s also the issue that most players don’t enjoy playing with or against decks that stop every fun card the other player is trying to play. Going back to player choice and expression, while some players do enjoy this design, most of us find it uninspired. Players tend to respect tech that when discovered, nobody saw it coming or by pairing cards no one expected to go together. Counter deck players get the bad rap (maybe valid) that they didn’t even try to find interesting combos, their goal is to just stop you from playing yours. You can see why an environment that is filled with nothing but negates or defense, can also be broken and anti-fun. Why risk being creative when a counter-deck meta actively punishes it?
- Mind The Skill Gap…Skill gaps are great because they prove that you’re running a merit based game. The more you play, the better you get and the more rewarded you should be. Broken cards risk even this basic concept. Let’s say a pro plays a weaker player and has a normal record of winning 70 out of 100 games. That’s a win rate of 7 out of 10 ( 70%). If the broken deck is handed to the weaker player, and their win rate climbs to 50% or more, we might have an issue. There’s no way the player improved this quickly over 100 games, so the issue has to be the cards. The matchup can’t be at fault because the pro’s win rate shouldn’t be that high in a bad matchup to begin with. Could it be variance then? Not over 100 games and especially because good players do everything to eliminate variance as a factor. Let’s say we give the same decks to 2 players that are really close in skill, now what happens? What’s weird is that we went from variance not being a factor, to it being the ONLY factor. Neither player can overcome the other in plays and the variance optimizations will be similar too. All that’s left is the variance and who got the better shuffle. The key factor that’s missing vs balanced environments is the deckbuilding. This gives both skilled players an option within their control and they can get an edge through creativity and deck innovation.
Final Thoughts
Just remember that broken cards are a relative problem and there’s no such thing as a broken card without an ecosystem of other cards and interactions it can exploit. There are as many solutions as there are ideas for cards.
What designers hate to acknowledge, is that this process is also reactive. Cards will slip through the cracks and playtesting with the best players and biggest teams still has limits. It’s just as important to listen to player feedback after a release, as it is during playtesting. We never want a large volume of errata but some errata is better than an alternative where players love the game but refuse to play because a rule or card is taking their fun away. Our goal moving forward is to have a watch/ban list and to make sure players are aware if we’re going to take action. We fully understand that changes like bans can affect travel plans to events, investments in cards and your next tournament results, so we don’t take them lightly and there will be a strong data component to back up any bans.
Weappreciate you taking the time to read and we hope it gives you more ‘behind the scenes’ looks at our processes moving forward. Here at Lazarus Rising Games we love giving our community visibility behind the curtain so to speak.
Thank you and venture well!