Teach your siblings/kids to print their own cards on stock. A good print in a card protector is indistinguishable from the real thing.
Other kids wont let them play with them cause it's Cheating to not buy a thing.
Probably, but I actually haven't tried it myself. I've just seen the results.
It depends on how legit you want em to look. I've done homebrew for some card based board games and we put all the cards in plastic sleeves and covwred the printed design on the backs with plain construction paper colour coded for which deck it was supposed to be and had printed homebrew cards mixed with the real ones. You couldn't tell which was which that way.
I kind of miss playing MTG but soon realized after always getting my ass kicked that it wasn't so much my strategy, it was just that other people had more money to spend on better cards, so unless I also went down the rabbit hole of buying cards every week it'd never amount to anything.
I think someone here recommended Forge, which is supposed to be like MTG, but it has all the cards available. I haven't tried it yet.
Yeah it sucks - to be competitive you need to spend AT LEAST $1,000 just on rare lands.
I mean, they're the original lootbox. But unlike lootboxes they can actually be resold, so...
They're better than lootboxes, at least.
That seems reasonable. I only ever played casually so I can't really relate to it as gambling personally.
The internet lootboxes got me way worse once or twice. The lack of physical currency exchange makes it way too easy to get more.
Ah, but how do I acquire the cards to build a cube? Checkmate, liberals.
If you enjoy deck construction but hate rare chasing, definitely look into some LCGs (living card game). Their model is that when you buy a pack you get a playset of each card, and nothing is random. I don't know which is the best competitive one atm (rip Netrunner) but LOTR The Card Game is quite amazing if you want to build decks with friends to fight the game cooperatively.
This is the correct way to do deck building games.
Also, Dominion is a fun game, as you build the deck in real time during play. Part of the strategy is working around your rivals' strategies and snatching up "rare" cards before they do.
I mean, if you want to assemble a sizeable resale value, I could see your point. But I just wanted to collect the pretty pictures for my scrapbook.
comparing collecting a form of physical media to buying a fucking NFT is ridiculous and you know it
Oh man, you don't understand. Once I discovered PokeBeach and learned how to use a flash drive to print to my middle school's color printer, it was game over. I loved that site. That was a way different time though. I had to ask jeeves how to right click back then.
I never accepted when physical trading card packs, already an addictive gambling-adjacent hazard, got turned into digital cards that had no material substance, couldn't be traded outside of some online game, and if that game's servers went offline, the "investment" instantly becomes nothing.
That's one reason I prefer closed set games, like Netrunner, Blue Moon Legends, or Ashes: Rise of the Phoenixborn.
:downbear: Drafting MTG is a superior game mechanic to constructed, and is basically why the game has booster packs.
Honestly, I'd love to draft VOW without running into that Gruul Hansel and Gretel ass legend every third game.
Cubes remove the unique dynamic within sets. They're cool and all, but not the same. Each set is tailor-made to be coherently drafted.
I remember liking some of the yugioh video games because they didn't involve spending real money on packs so I wasn't completely priced out. But obviously that's not the same as the real thing. I've heard that some of the current f2p online tcg games are actually decently balanced for completely free play, but I haven't checked that out yet.
I feel like whether it does or does not need regulation is really determined by outcome.
Lootboxes need legislation because they are obviously and clearly causing real harm to people through hyper-optimised gambling mechanics, fomo and feedback loops placed into the games. It is creating unhealthy gambling addicts out of people which is the exact same reason gambling is regulated in the first place.
Trading cards? Not so much. Certainly not anywhere near the same scale. There is a very clear difference in outcomes between lootbox gambling and booster card packs. I'm sure you can probably find some instances of adults taking it way too seriously and doing unhealthy stuff but it's quite different.
Trading cards? Not so much. Certainly not anywhere near the same scale. There is a very clear difference in outcomes between lootbox gambling and booster card packs. I’m sure you can probably find some instances of adults taking it way too seriously and doing unhealthy stuff but it’s quite different.
I had friends who were really into MTG in college and uhhhh
That's a bit needlessly aggressive. Is their any evidence that card packs cause any kind of longterm gambling habits or gambling addiction? There is for lootboxes, the research on them is growing and finding that the mechanics of these games are producing nearly identical results to straight up gambling and the recommendations are that they should be treated and regulated as gambling.
I don't mean this to poo poo on your points Skoub. I've seen the comparison brought up a number of times in the past (usually used by defenders of lootboxes). I just think they're probably different in outcomes and I'm surprised if study doesn't already exist out there on the topic of them. If it doesn't exist then it SHOULD be done to investigate it, that's the best way to find out for sure whether it should or should not happen and it's also the best way to actually move things towards the goal of making it happen too.
I think the causal difference is ease of access. Digital purchases are a million times easier than the physical purchase that was always necessary for these or other pack-based things (football stickers and trading cards spring to mind).
I can see that changing with digital purchase and delivery of the product but I don't think amazon or other online stores are setup in the same kind of way that videogames with lootbox systems are to minimise the knowledge of how much is being spent. There's a difference in how the packs are purchased, with amazon and online stores you directly purchase a pack with your money straight from your card but in the videogames you actually buy 10,000 points that you then go and spend on various items/boxes in-game to disassociate the feeling of spending the money and make it harder to feel negative emotions about what is being spent. There are multiple things in the system that go deeper than even online purchases of physical card packs. Not to mention that you have to wait for the packs and don't get instant gratification from opening them, so you don't get an instant hit of feel-good drugs from the moment you spend due to immediate opening.
I'm not saying that they're definitely different. Just that there are some material differences that may be responsible for the differences of opinions.
A lot honestly.
There isn't just a power level difference between cards at various rarities, there's also a big difference in complexity, and having different rarities produces more interesting decisions during a draft "I'd like to have this common and this uncommon in my deck, and the common is actually stronger, but the uncommon is probably the only copy of that card in the pod, whereas I will probably see several more of the common, which one should I pick."
I'd say there are probably only two non :libertarian-approaching: choices (EDIT: that preserve the existing draft experience):
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Print cards as they currently do, but also release "playset of every card in the set" boxes at a reasonable price. I think this would be better for players and actually improve drafting because it'd eliminate raredrafting, but it'd be terrible for wotc financially so it won't happen.
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As a society we admit that letting middle school kids spend their lunch money on a booster is functionally the same as letting them buy scratchers and set a minimum age of like 21 on all randomized CCG product. This is more likely since it doesn't rely on a megacorp deciding that the wellbeing of children is more important than line go up.
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Folks, play cosmic encounter. It's a card and deck based board game but here's the cool thing, ITS ALL INCLUDED ASIDE FROM EXPANSIONS!
