What Has Made You Love a TCG Company? – Table Talk: February 2022

We’re at the end of February and, like the short month, we’ve got a quick Table Talk question for you!

Each month, we pose a question to our fans on Facebook and in our Discord, and we’ll take some of our favorite responses and feature them in that month’s Table Talk article! We’ll always include 1-2 of our Patrons, as a special extra bonus for supporting us, but there is no paywall to being featured here, so please make sure to join in the fun next time and let us know what you think!

We wanted to channel some love in February, so this month’s question is:

“What has made you love a TCG Company?”

All of our answers chosen were from Discord this month, so let’s jump in and see what our Discord friends had to say!

Ave Dominus Nox told our discord about their trials with games that haven’t panned out the way they had hoped. They always look for games that have great deck building and can avoid power creeping too far – and their best example was Netrunner (from Fantasy Flight Games, not the original WotC TCG!).

While Netrunner is technically a Living Card Game, those games share a ton of DNA with TCGs. Netrunner was a beloved game that was ended due to loss of the license in 2018, and surprisingly Wizards of the Coast hasn’t revealed any further uses for the license after the LCG was shut down.

While quality of deck building is always going to be subjective to some degree, power creep can more easily be shown through direct comparison of cards. I think an interesting point to note here is that LCGs typically follow slower release structures and are less reliant on highly engaged players purchasing quantities of product on hype, so I think they are already a better place to be able to avoid the inevitable power creep that hits most games as they try to continue to make cards that players will get excited over. Regardless, how a company builds their game and how they ensure players’ earlier investments age gracefully as the game continues are probably some of the most important factors in how much trust you have in the company, so even if your take on some of the games they’ve mentioned may be more positive, it’s still very easy to see where Ave Dominus Nox’s opinion is coming from! I don’t think many people would argue that many games could benefit from at least just a little more TLC in managing their balance and power creep!

I was really happy to see this comment! While the mid 90s were a true wild west for TCGs, with tons of companies trying to create their own Magic: the Gathering following its huge popularity, Decipher was notably ahead of the curve with their production quality, IP quality, and, yes, their dedication to the themes of their games – perhaps almost to a fault! They were always Wizards of the Coast’s number one competitor, with old gaming mags constantly citing Star Trek and Star Wars CCG within the top 3 games sold as reported by retailers (until Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh came along!).

Game design has come a long way since then – we stand on the shoulders of giants, of course! – but as we discussed in our recent podcast, as games focus more on clean mechanics and easy to balance rulesets, we do lose something in the form of simulation of the source material. Decipher’s perfectly manipulated source images were complimented by rulesets that were complex and full of enough corner cases and nuance to be able to create cards that could truly extract the details of the movies/shows and all their plotlines and characters.

There are always going to be people who prefer more mechanical gameplay over more simulationist gameplay, and vice versa, but if you are in the latter camp and a fan of any of their properties, you’d probably enjoy picking up some old cards and trying any of their games out. One of these days, I still hope that a miracle can occur and someone will resurrect the Star Wars CCG for a modern era – but hopefully they wouldn’t compromise that simulation aspect too much!

For those who want to play Star Wars CCG with all sorts of new virtual cards and characters, the Star Wars CCG Player’s Committee has been adding content to the game for years and might be right up your alley!

Collision Point – who has their own awesome blog about Flesh and Blood, FanZ, and other games – shared with us an event that Legend Story Studios ran (The Calling Las Vegas 2021) where they got to premiere the rest of their newest expansion, Tales of Aria, by putting it directly into the players hands in limited events. While most card games will show off most or all of their cards sometimes weeks before the packs get in players’ hands, only showing a handful of cards and letting players find and immediately play with or against the rest made this event an absolutely unforgettable experience for the attendees!

We live in an age where preordering is a critical component of sales for your TCG products, so it’s important to get the set information out there to encourage people to preorder, so when a company deliberately takes a hit on that process to create a hype moment for its hardcore fans, that really is something to be lauded. Huge props to Legend Story Studios for doing this, and I’d like to see more companies doing unique stunts like this more often!

Like I said, a short one for a short month – thanks to everyone for participating in this month’s Table Talk! If you’d like to take part in the next one, make sure you like us on Facebook and/or have joined our Discord so you can join in the conversation!

See you all in March for our next rendition!