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[notquitethere]

I've been busy with other things and was waiting on replies here, but I'm definitely up for completing the tournament.

Failbird will fight Tricmagic in Battlefield 1

Elephant Parade will fight Stirk in Battlefield 2

[Stirk]

By a literal reading, 0 heart maid cards should have 3 hearts if played when battle butler is on the field

[notquitethere]

Yes, action processing is quite ill defined here, but I think if you played a 0/0 maid after the butler has been put in play, it would turn into a creature. After all, the game makes no mechanical distinction between creatures and spell cards. A "spell" is just a creature card that ordinarily dies immediately.

[Elephant Parade]

Bump. I believe we're waiting on TricMagic.

[Elephant Parade]

Since this seems to be dead, I'll post my thoughts as a player on what I'd like to see changed for a hypothetical CYOGTCGLT2. From most strongly held to least:

— Add a tutorial on tracking and shuffling your deck to the OP. I had to ask in the thread to figure out how to do this; the game would be more approachable, and perhaps more popular, if future players didn't. Also, ban tracking/shuffling methods that expose your draw order for fairness's sake.

— Remove the random deck score bonus. Interesting in concept, total trap in practice; in addition to losing all synergy and coherence, you're drawing from the full 100% of the card pool rather than the top 10-20%. Also, two or more players could collude to inflate their scores by always playing random decks against each other.

— Remove Rare and Ban as options, leaving only Review. I think giving players unilateral ban power is a mistake—having one of your cards banned feels extremely bad, especially when it's one you enjoy playing with and feel could've been balanced relatively easily. Raring, meanwhile, just turns a card from "always run six" to "always run one," which is problematic in the case of game-swinging cards like Divine Lambitual. I think banning and raring should be possible outcomes for the review process—the former when a card is somehow fundamentally impossible to balance, the latter when raring is actually an effective nerf, as it is for theft cards like Wail of the Banshee and Lamb's Take—not options selected by players. Failing that, a player should at least be able to review a banned card to get it nerfed and unbanned.

— Have a procedure in place that lets cards be banned/nerfed/patched (without using up a ban/review) if every single player agrees. Right now, universal staples like Verdant Growth can sneak under the radar precisely because they're universal: they equally benefit every player who opts to run them, leading some players to ban/review them only once they've banned/reviewed cards that only benefit their opponents. I think Verdant Growth would've eaten a nerf much sooner if this was in place.

— Reduce the copy limit to 4. It'd limit the impact of overpowered cards, reduce deck consistency (a good thing; decks are much too consistent right now), and soften that awful "ugh, I want to run a bunch of funny cards, but the consistency boost from running more copies of my core engine is too strong" feeling that I felt every time I made a deck.

— Award points for style somehow? Right now, the game is in a weird place where the only incentives not to craft the most disgustingly overpowered deck you can are social grace and your own sense of fair play. If, following the conclusion of each duel, your deck was judged for fairness, style, and coherence by a jury of your peers, we might see more theme decks and fewer Blooper Haris.

— Limit the card pool? It might seem to go against the spirit of the game, but the card pool is almost too large. For every absurd card or busted combo you catch, there are ten more waiting in the wings—trust me, I have a notepad file with over fifty of them. That's fun in its own way, but a smaller card pool would let us stop playing whack-a-mole with busted cards and start developing a stable metagame. Trawling the massive card archive for combos is genuinely fun, though, so I'm 50/50 on this.

— Just do away with scores entirely? Maybe there's no way to fairly balance, and thus fairly score, a game where people create their own cards. Maybe our only goal should be to make fun cards, construct entertaining decks, and work toward an enjoyable metagame.

Lest I come across as negative, I had a lot of fun! I really hope a new CYOGTCG starts up soon, whether it's another Legacy Tournament or something else. Of course, what I'm hoping for most of all is for this game to return from the grave...

P.S. Generous Gift should be unbanned and changed to a non-quickplay card that gives stars equal to half the value of the gifted card (rounded up, max 4). I demand justice!

[TricMagic]

I prefer the school style a bit more since cards are made mostly in balance between players, at a steady pace as decks build up. Some sort of card shop for old cards might be a good implementation, where the GM can offer things to add to decks.

[notquitethere]

CYOGTCG LEGACY TOURNAMENT OFFICIALLY ENDS

Point Victory: TricMagic

Fair Play Award: Unraveller


Thank you everyone for participating.


This one was fun to play and see what people came up with but also often frustrating to run! I think it's best to call it now, as the player base other than Elephant Parade had become fatigued. EP's suggestions are all good if this format runs again. Some thoughts:

- I wanted to run the game so that old cards could get some extra play, and in that I was partly successful
- I was originally just going to run legacy cards, but to encourage Supernerd to join I opened up new card creation, but then he promptly quit after the first upset, wasting the effort I'd gone to to make cards that never saw play
- I was sent too many card designs and ideas (I should have reined it in more) and the balance of cards I did make often suffered, especially in the beginning, especially with some of Stirk and Tric's cards
- As the game progressed, players would often submit cards to trick me into making insta-wins (Stirk especially was fond of doing this)
- When players did start using legacy cards it turned into an ongoing whack-a-mole to nerf each of the many broken cards as they came up (so starting with a pool of pre-approved cards might be better)
- There were a lot of fun card ideas players came up with, as well as some really dubious ones. There's still a huge amount of space with this game that isn't just in mimicking MtG or whatever

I'm definitely up for playing another CYOGTCG game, in some format.

[Elephant Parade]

Yeah, I felt kind of bad for submitting so many cards and only using a handful of them. Some of them were too bad to use (No Archetypes Allowed), but I could've worked more of them in.

By the way: if anyone is up for one last round, I have a hideously unfair deck composed of the cruelest combos I could find. If not, I'll just post the decklist and show off how it works. I also have a bizarre meme deck that probably won't work.

[Stirk]

- As the game progressed, players would often submit cards to trick me into making insta-wins (Stirk especially was fond of doing this)

That wasn't a trick it was pretty forward with being insta win :V

[TricMagic]

Divine Lambitual was silly. On it's own it doesn't seem dangerous. But then the cards that got maid before popped in.

[Elephant Parade]

Divine Lambitual was silly. On it's own it doesn't seem dangerous. But then the cards that got maid before popped in.

Nah, it's absurd in its own right. It exposes more than a sixth of your deck and lets you discard six cards—this in a deck that benefits from discarded cards in multiple ways, including a play-on-discard star engine. There's a reason I included a copy of it in every deck I made.


Proposed remedies for banned/rared cards:

Battleship Maid: Nerf or remove the free board nuke; maybe tone down its stats too since it's a self-discarding direct attacker.

• (6: 6/12) This card may bypass non-aquatic cards when attacking. You may discard this card from your hand to deal 1 damage to each card on the field.

Divine Lambitual: Drawing seven cards and discarding six for (0, Q) is flagrantly overpowered, especially in an archetype that loves discarding things. I think you could take it in one of two directions: massive draw/discard power at a major cost, or minor draw/discard power at no cost.

• (0, Q) Discard a card.
• (0) Draw a card, then discard a card.
• (6) Draw six cards, then discard six cards.

Generous Gift: I originally thought this card's brickiness made it balanced, but a quickplay 0* card that can give you 6 stars on the first turn is too much. I've taken away quickplay, reduced the cap, and made it even brickier. It would still be overpowered in a meta without ridiculous stargen engines, but that ain't the meta we live in.

• (0) Give your opponent a card from your hand, then gain stars equal to half its cost (rounded up, max 4).

Join the Cause: Increase the cost from X to X+3.

• (X) Take control of a card on the field that costs no more than X-3.

Lamb's Take: What makes this so disgusting is the intrinsic scaling of card-theft cards. Think about it: when you steal one card of your opponent's choice, you get their worst card, leaving them with (saying they start with seven cards) their best six cards to use on their turn. When you take two cards, you get their best two, and so on. If you can take all seven cards, you've given yourself seven options and left them with only their draw next turn. Proposed remedy: make it harder to steal multiple cards from your opponent by 1) making it non-quickplay and 2) either taking away its X-cost effect or making the cost exponential.

• (0) At the start of your opponent's next turn (before they draw), they give you one card from their hand.
• (X) At the start of your opponent's next turn (before they draw), they give you root(x) cards from their hand.

Star Maids: This one might be genuinely impossible to balance; it rewards you for going all-in on a sprawling archetype that already has multiple ways of buffing itself. Maybe you could make it give you stars based on the number of Maids on the field; that'd give Maid players a way to escape UMW's star debt once they reached a winning position.

• (0, Q?) Gain one star for each Maid on your side of the field.
  

Wail of the Banshee: Remove at least two of the following: the play-on-discard quirk, the 5* pick-a-card-and-play-it rider, and the cost-zeroing effect.

[notquitethere]

While it's new card focused, the arms race setup might have been best, in that the decks were self-balancing after a fashion: players could always design counters for a known set of cards. It's still a lot of work to run.

I did consider ways to make the legacy cards work with a drafting phase, but logistically it seems a bit much for the forum unless there was an elegant way of drafting in four selections or less.

--

I also considered a sort of make-your-own-card point buy system. Stats cost 1 point, keywords would have different costs based on how powerful they are (like star generation could be 3 points), with extra costs for adding multiple effects. But it seemed like that would just help emulate existing cards, not really play into the main strength of the game in making new and unexpected rules.

[notquitethere]

So I thought of one way drafting could work.

- The GM would create a pool of existing approved cards (player count x 20), roughly in balance with one another
- Round 1, players are given a randomised selection of 20, they pick 5 to keep
- Round 2, players then receive the 15 cards of the person previous in the cycle, and pick 5
- Round 3, players receive the 10 unwanted cards of the previous person, and pick 5
- Then they submit 5 card ideas to the GM to tie their deck together, giving 20 personal cards total
- Players would then make a deck of 40, no more than 4 duplicates
- Then everyone fights everyone else.

So everyone gets to make something of a deck, legacy cards get to reappear in a fresh context, and the GM only has to make (player count * 5) cards. Maybe subsequent rounds could have booster packs (like +5 random approved cards, and +2 cards you get to submit).

[Elephant Parade]

That's a clever way of doing it, but why not have players submit their cards before the draft? It'd remove the incentive to create overpowered cards/game-breaking combos. It'd also mean people wouldn't necessarily get to play with their own cards, of course, but seeing them in other people's hands would be satisfying in its own way.

Actually, a couple of months ago I was thinking about running a Sealed Draft myself, but one where nearly all cards are freshly player-created. Your idea sounds more manageable, though.

[notquitethere]

That could be a fun approach. I agree that might curb players' desire to make I Win cards.

Some players really like the surprise element of card creation, though there would still be some of that as players initial draft picks would be totally unknown.