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

• sebinspace@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Pokémon.

  They were the original creators of the Pokemon TCG, and when TPC decided they’d start printing the cards without the involvement of WOtC, they responded with some “scorched earth” nonsense. These guys have needed to touch grass for years.

  That being said, I’m surprised there’s no open source TCG.

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  • harsh3466@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    An open tcg would be pretty fun and interesting. I’d definitely give that a go if it existed.

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    • sebinspace@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Awhile back, I pushed around the idea of a spaceship TCG based on my experience in EVE Online (speaking of out-of-touch companies), but I never went anywhere with it. The idea of having a command structure like MTCG Commander, and the rest of your deck being built to protect it. The capital would only take damage after all support ships were destroyed, sort of like attacking the player directly in YGO. Using planet cards like energy/mana, like you’re harvesting resources from those planets to built ships for your fleet

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      • harsh3466@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        That sounds super fun. I’d play that!

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  • HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    The problem with an open source TCG is that you need a way to balance it, which can be hard with a distributed group of designers not in communication with each other. You definitely couldn’t design something in a paper format; maybe as a computer card game.

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    • sebinspace@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I’m sorry, but that’s not true at all.

      It’s not hard to balance it if you treat it like open source software. There’s still an owner that controls what is “official”. If you want to suggest changes, you make a pull request, as you would with software development, which either gets denied or approved by the owner of the official project. If you don’t like the direction the official game is going, you can “fork” it, call it a fork of the original if the license requires it, and you are now the owner of that fork, able to make whatever changes you’d like.

      Open Source does not, at all, imply a lack of control. Blender is open source, but the Blender Foundation still has very strong control over what ends up in the codebase.

      To that end, you can suggest balancing changes to the game project, and the owner of the project can approve or deny it.

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      • HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        It’s not hard to balance it if you treat it like open source software.

        It is even if you balance in an open source environment. “Closed source” successful games still have to invest substantial funds to playtesting. In an open source system, you are developing in the open. This is going to split the game already into beta and stable. You also probably aren’t going to get individual cards approved since you need to design around the interactions between cards.

        If you don’t like the direction the official game is going, you can “fork” it, call it a fork of the original if the license requires it, and you are now the owner of that fork, able to make whatever changes you’d like.

        So now you have multiple versions of the game floating around with sets of approved cards. Unlike M:tG, these sets are developed to not be compatible and it may be difficult to figure out what sets are legal in the version you are playing.

        To that end, you can suggest balancing changes to the game project, and the owner of the project can approve or deny it.

        And you still have the development process, which is hard to fix once you print cardboard.

        If someone wanted to create a higher-quality card, they could.

        I’m not talking about foils, but categorically better cards. You are going to have card developers with a vested interest to make sure their cards get played, and that generally means making cards at a higher power level.

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  • SkepticalButOpenMinded@lemmy.ca ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    In most existing TCG, artificial scarcity is a meta-mechanic of the game. For many, that’s part of the fun of the “collecting“. It’s fun to collect rare cards because they’re in limited supply.

    That said, I think there could be, in theory, an open source way to have artificial scarcity and the fun of collecting. Maybe have a nonprofit that sells official printed cards at cost?

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    • sebinspace@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Yeah, I guess it’s actually more accurate to say this would just be a CCG along the lines of Dominion.

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• harsh3466@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I’m not a ttrpg player, but I followed the OGL nonsense, and that put a pretty bad taste in my mouth. And then they just kept being assholes.

  Right now, I don’t need to dump hundreds of dollars into a new different tcg. As it is I’m happy playing with my friends using the cards that I already have.

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