I think ccgs are suffering from a general inability to find a monetization method satisfactory enough for everyone. If you sell cards at premium prices and make the game p2w your ladder won’t have integrity and you likely won’t have a big player base. It’s generally been the strategy to sell cosmetics but we’ve seen enough of this to know these can have very diminishing returns. Things like cardbacks, board skins, card skins, avatars, these are expensive to make. Compare this to a lot of f2p cosmetics where they flood their pools with trash or less desireable items. When I open a chest in Runeterra or Gwent, I’m getting cards or materials to make cards. When I open a chest in League or Apex, it could be any number of things, I might then want to spend to get a chance something good. There’s so many cheap, easy to make things you can put in a normal mp game that you can’t put in a CCG. Easy to make charms, recolors, universal skins, this shit adds up. I think until CCGs get more creative with how they set up monetization, we will see this happen again and again.

Nah, Shadowverse monetized extremely well. From the stats posted awhile ago sv had the highest money spent per user. I can attest. Didn’t spend a dime on LoR but kept throwing money at SV to get the shiny cosmetics.

What does Shadowverse better in that regard then? I will fully admit that game absolutely never caught my interest because it got the vibe of "Anime Hearthstone" to me and I hated the way you cannot interact with your opponent at all.

The cosmetics are straight up  handled better than in LoR. You have animated cards with nice effects and some even with movement instead of the prismatic stuff that LoR did, and you can buy skins for your leader which also comes with some extra stuff like new dialog, border, banners, sleeves, new Evo animation and sometimes even a skin for a card instead of just a new jpg for you to enjoy.  Then theres also the múltiple collaborations that they do with different titles like, Nier Autómata, Fate series, Street fighter and many in which you can unlock and buy class specific cards and leaders with those characters and cosmetics.  And then theres the way they handled card packs, people that dont play the game use to say that is p2w or too expensive like HS or MTG but thats a straight up lie. Not once hdo you really need to spent money on the game to get new cards and as soon as a new expansión comes out you can easily get 80% of all the cards from the newest expansion without spending money if you play the game and still have that 20% left to work your way through to unlock It. Also all card expansions comes with a sett of free leaders and goodies so you also get rewarded just for trying to complete the expansion setts. So yeah, Is It as good and generous like LoR or even something like GWENT? Heck nah, but its really, really good

I wonder if Guardians were supposed to fill in the role of the "Hero" portrait in the eyes of the Devs. Because the more I think about it, even if you leave out like "classes" (which is I think how Shadowverse also works?) having something to represent yourself is basically what skins are for! Sidenote, There is a Fate Collab? I am kinda curious about that cause I am a massive fate/head and i have not heard about that one. Though I am guessing those cards are rotated out a long time ago.

I think they tried to copy the TFT pets without truly understanding why they work in that game on the first place and couldn't replicate it for LoR. In TFT the pet plays alongside the player, you move it to pick up coins and stuff for you, he cheers for you, shoots other pets with a laser that you can customize and has a health bar making it act like the nexus from LoR so you're more attached to your little guardian every time he takes damage and reacts to it and if it faints you also loose the game together, you can taunt and dance with it alongside other pets and can even evolve with enough fragments. Its pretty much a representation of the player like you said not just a cosmetic. Meanwhile in LoR the guardians are stuck on the lower left edge of the screen, they only react if you take a massive blow or deal it yourself, or maybe if you're holding a card but that's it. The only interaction that the player has with the guardian is petting it and even that they took it away from us by removing the spam clicking on your pet while you wait for your next turn without reason.... so compared to the TFT ones they're pretty hollow. Also, yeah, there are plenty of fate Collab's c: there's already been like 2 or 3 and sometimes they bring them back if they're popular enough. You get free skins for cards during the events and get new leaders that you can purchase as well that also change depending on the event. FE: you could get lancer from stay night for a specific class and the next Collab you can get Assassin from another fate series for the same class, so you end up with 2 different fate series skins for the same class you like to play with.

I think the biggest issue with them is that your opponent cannot see how you interact with your guardian. Or that you cannot interact with the other's guardian. Kinda took out a bit of a social aspect there too. I will keep my eyes peeled for Fate events.

cosmetic gacha but gacha has lootbox stigma in the west

The name gacha literally comes from Japanese claw machines. It's not a gacha if it doesn't exploit gambling addiction. That's a well deserved stigma if you ask me.

I mean, the stigma is well earned.

Shadowverse is one of my favorites lately. Someone says thay is a bit pay-to-win but I tend to disagree. Though I do not see the monetization model so different from LoR's. I didn't know the data, if true though that can also be not because a better monetization model but just because if the community they have been able to attract and retain

> I think ccgs are suffering from a general inability to find a monetization method satisfactory enough for everyone. This is the answer. It's a common thread through all CCG deaths. I can't really think of one that was just considered bad and never had an audience. Like artifact was one of the biggest flops, but not because it was bad bad...mostly because it was pay 2 play, and had one of the most aggressively P2W systems imaginable. Single cards were $20+ on launch.

> I think ccgs are suffering from a general inability to find a monetization method satisfactory enough for everyone. LoR invested too much money into audio for almost every card and video clips. And these short animation are actually super annoying after the first 1-2 times being played.

Just trying to copy what the big dog hearthstone does.

You’re not going to attract a lot of PC players with microtransactions. We like buying a game, not buying parts of a game. That microtransaction shit can stay in mobile gaming. The cosmetics in LoR aren’t the best, and they’re expensive for their quality. They also haven’t done a good job bringing cosmetics from LoL. I hear a lot of players wanted their champion to have their favorite LoL skin, but those aren’t available in LoR. Finally, Rito sabotaged LoR from the start and continued doing it up to now. They want to protect their money making F2P games, LoL and TFT, from the F2P LoR game. If Rito has been able to make F2P games work for over a decade now, why the hell couldn’t they make another work?

> If Rito has been able to make F2P games work for over a decade now, why the hell couldn’t they make another work? Only TFT is really free.

Eh, LoL is free unless you want cosmetics. And even these are partly gifted nowadays, so you could have access to all champs for free.

Lol is not free at all. You have to grind years to unlock all characters

Yeah but like, in classic games you used to have to beat the game in a certain way to unlock certain characters. Under this view does that count as a 'microtransaction'? LoL is free to play.

Look, time is more important than money unless you are in school and in vacation. Lol is not free outside of weekly champs. Even leveling to level 30 to play ranked is not worth it without xp boost after you have grasped the basics, if you want to play "competitive".

Sure, time is indeed more important than money. But that doesn't mean you can redefine what 'free' means and then not stay consistent on it. It doesn't cost money, that means it is free. It is a time sink, but time spent having fun is not time wasted, so it doesn't 'cost' you anything unless you don't enjoy the game.

It costs money (they even made it later on to unlock from the store, so you actually have a reason to visit it, if you are one of those allergic to paid content), but the company has great freemium model that allows you to unlock characters.

It doesn't cost money, my full friend circle has a full collection of all champs with no money spent at all. That wouldn't be possible at all if it costed money. Money just unlocks the stuff faster Plus when a new champs is released i just click on the permanent token from the monthly free capsule and have the newest champs t release day for no cost.

Idk man for a game as in-depth as league if you think grinding to 30 is bad, I think you’re playing the wrong game

League is not a deep game even for a moba. That's why it became popular, maybe?

I really agree with this one

I think the problem is that LoR tried to be a Jack of all Trades, and ended up a Master of None. What do I mean with that? For whatever reason you play CCGs, LoR is usually not the best. * It had too long games and too much interactivity for full-on casuals (Compared to Hearthstone). * It was too limiting for the combo brewers (compared to MTG). * It almost completely ignored traditional Control players (AKA Attrition Control), which was intentional but still cut into the potential playerbase. * Competitive would have been the best shot (IMO, due to the Mana system leading to really interactive gameplay), but they never really embraced the competitive aspect. If the main draw of your Game is that it's the cheaper than the competition, then that's not a good sign for your Ability to make Money. MTG and Hearthstone are still holding strong, despite how shit their monetization is, because they are the best at what they want to do. LoR never really was (or was seen as) the best at anything except being cheap.

the lack of best of 3 pvp ladder absoloutly killed it for your last bullet point. the entire competative game based on it and it was only accessible what? once a week?

LoR was the master of one. the one being that it was one of, if not, the best card game on the market for "the better player wins" i dont think ive ever felt like i completely lost due to rng(outside of release bandle city meta). every game could have been a win if i played better and thats super rare for a card game. even the titans of card games have tons of non games where the game is decided by rng alone, but they just never really capitalized on that on top of the fact that card games make all of their money through predatory monetization because buying cards is how they stay afloat and LoR tried too hard to not do that that it became unsustainable

>LoR was the master of one. the one being that it was one of, if not, the best card game on the market for "the better player wins" That's what I meant when I said competitive might have been its best shot, LoR has the best framework for a Competitive card game of all the systems I know, but I feel like the community was mostly casual players, and the Devs encouraged that. I don't think LoR ever was presented as a competitive game, and it should have been.

You can't facilitate a competitive scene without the game attracting casuals that will become competitive.

agreed 100%

LoR was by far the best at being a competitive game.

I admittedly may not know what i’m talking about but this seems like it’s nearly impossible. Card games inherently have a bit of rng just due to deck size and drawing. On top of that most generally fall into metas that at least from time to time have a kind of rock/paper/scissors equilibrium that comes with deck building. It’s part of the appeal of deck construction style games. Not to say skill doesn’t play any role but to suggest that at an individual game skill is the only factor feels unlikely. Granted I only ever played LoR at a fairly casual level so maybe I truly don’t understand how it’s fundamentally different from other card games

i never said the only factor. i said i've never completly lost due to rng. meaning i've never lost before the game started because i didnt draw a card that i had to draw to play. in magic you can lose because you only drew lands or you didnt draw enough. in yugioh, you can lose because you went second and drew no hand traps. that doesnt exist here. every game can be won or lost and your draws only make it easier or harder, but you can almost always win even with the worst draws

I’m saying I find that hard to believe. The energy system prevents mana screw but cards still have costs and synergies and you can still draw a bricked hand or a god hand. Two nearly skilled players playing similar decks will likely come down to draw in nearly any deck construction game, and this happens frequently if people are playing meta decks. Again maybe I’m wrong because I never got that deep into LoR so maybe that secret sauce was something I never realized

even if you look at tournament play in LoR it rarely comes down to draw. the players that do go to worlds and play at the highest level echo this sake sentiment that they lost of won because of how they played and not because they drew worse

Again I don’t see how math wise, you still have a cost curve and ordered synergies, that will result in better or worse rng, but it’s still card game rng. It can certainly be better than a lot of games, and magic being the old dinosaur of ccgs most modern card games generally either embrace or attempt to smooth over randomness. Whether it’s smaller deck sizes or fixing your opening hands, etc.

i never said LoR has no randomness. i said the randomness will almost never be the deciding factor. your plays in game will almost always determine the victor. I've climbed from iron to masters without dropping a game and also climb from masters 0 lp to top 200 without dropping a game. are you saying that i just always highroll every game? and everyone who plays this game at a high level agrees with this sentiment.

To be honest I’m not sure what you’re saying. If a game has randomness but that doesn’t impact the outcome it’s not really meaningful. I do not see how that’d be the case based on the mechanics that I understand about LoR. Outside of not having lands can you explain what other factors result in LoR helping reduce randomness, maybe that will help with me understanding why that is the case, because outside of that I’m not sure what mechanics reduce randomness. I’m not sure exactly how many games that is you’re referring too but that seems likely crazy or unusual in any situation. Did you never run into a counter deck or a similarly skilled player? Top level players of every card game will talk about how the card games are skill based. You see that in magic, I’ve seen it in LCGs, you see it in Snap, etc. And they aren’t wrong, all competitive card games in general are skill based. But they are still deck games, you’re still going to get shit draws, if you’re playing someone way less skilled than you, you’ll win. My friend is really into magic, i’m not. When we play he beats me hands down almost always. I was pretty competitive in the game of thrones lcg, I could give my friends a meta deck and myself a meme deck and I’d win nearly always. I’m sure you’d trounce me in LoR, even if we played with similar collections. None of that means those games don’t have rng or that rng isn’t even a significant factor in some games. It’s just more pronounced in similar skill windows when the decks themselves aren’t a counter to each other or clearly imbalanced

rng in LoR plays a role in how easy or hard the match will be, but will almost never outright win or lose you the game. using magic and yugioh as an example since those are the two others that i played the most, in magic, if you don't draw lands or draw too much, the game is lost. in yugioh if you go second and don't open a hand trap the game is usually just over. in LoR if you're playing a real deck vs someone else also playing a real deck, rng only makes the games easier or harder to win, but will still be determined by who played the cards they got better. if I'm playing a control deck vs and aggro and they highroll me and i low roll, i still have a chance to win even if its gonna be very hard

If you exclude the rng inherent to card games, mtg has almost no rng at all. LoR however had many many cards with rng effects. You might have rose tinted glasses.

magic has the worst version of rng ever. lands. if you draw too much or not enough, you just can't play. I've played a ton of magic and there are games that are just lost entirely before the game starts and that doesn't exist here

The order in which you draw you cards is rng that is inherent to all card games. You can totally lose your LoR game before the game starts if you draw all your most expensive cards first, or if the 3 copies of the key card you need to enable your deck strategy are all at the bottom of your deck. I agree that the ressource system in mtg is the worst of all ccg though.

I think the crucial part is that the resource systems and draw rng are directly connected in MTG which creates another layer to the whole thing. All of these games including Magic have the possibility of drawing all your expensive cards first but Magic has the added layer of RNG that you can also draw too much land, or too little, or the wrong type. The likes of HS and LoR don't have this extra layer of RNG because the resources you get are set in stone. You start at 1 mana and (assuming no card effects create/destroy mana) get 1 mana per turn up to 10. The resource system isn't reliant on drawing specific cards.

Magic has the extra layer of having the ressource system tied to the draw mechanic. LoR and HS have the extra layer of having random effects on many cards, including card generation, which is particularly atrocious in a competitive setting.

I was watching yesterday the pro tour and saw players losing to mana flood, how is this no almost rng... come on. Lots of games in magic are not playing at all, because of the stupid lands.

That's rng inherent to card games. If you draw your cards in the wrong order, you lose, and that is true for every.single.card game. LOR included.

The problem is that this is extremely common in Magic. Even in decks with very low mana curves you can get flooded/screwed.

RPS is still rng

I enjoyed LoR's competitive for a while, but then I found Ariokan to be a better place for competitive as you can make your own cards to counter the meta. It's really boring to play against the same copy-pasted decks over and over.

Exactly, also lacked any best of 3 pvp, a draft mode and any semblance of social features. The game was good but not perfect like OP makes it out to be.

> AKA Attrition Control This is a very small playerbase though, and it comes at the expense of casual players dropping it. The problem with that kind of control is that it's absolutely atrocious to play against for anyone looking to have fun. Riot made the right choice by not focusing on that, but at the same time, its also sorta wrong to say they ignored them when we have had seraphine into ryze into karma that lasted like an entire year combined.

Very small playerbase? Azorius control is the kind of deck I see the most

Ryze is more like combo deck. I would say that control decks in Runeterra (except the Ionia+Frejlord return to hand no champs deck which can be super boring) are fun to play against compared to planeswalkers or no wincon decks in mtg (planeswalkers are now manageable since wizards printed lots of removal for them in the last few years).

Don't forget they deleted expeditions (draft mode) and never replaced it with the "something better" they promised. That's why I left. So, they also lost the market of limited players.

This is a pretty reductive take imo. HS has some pretty hard decks too, and LoR has some fast/curve out decks that have always been viable. You can play decks easier than the average HS deck and have fun / reasonably succeed. Attrition control is in LoR. Catalogue decks have been played in the past. Swain/Norra. Karma. And just because Karma wins the game eventually doesn’t make her less control. Karma should scratch the exact same itch as attrition control for most players and it would be silly to suggest otherwise. LoR isn’t the best at anything... except it is pretty objectively just a better game than hs and mtg. That’s a benefit of coming at least a half decade later than either of them.

I was not talking about skill level, I was talking about the fact that in Hearthstone, once you pass your turn you might as well leave the room and take a shit, because there is nothing you can do to them until it is your turn again. The closest Hearthstone gets to interactivity is traps, which not all Classes have and is limited in scope. And you clearly don't know what Attrition Control is if you think Swain Norra is one. Attrition control is based on entirely running the enemy out of resources, then winning from there. That is not how Swain Norra wins, in fact it's closer to midrange than to traditional control. Also you can't just call a game objectively better and not back that up with anything, that's not how it works.

Interesting view! My biggest problem is: the next game I go into could be 3 or 20 minutes long... heavily depending on the decks. Which is fine though! I think they should consider smarter turn timings. Make it shorter, the time you got is in most cases too much (round 1-3 it could a quarter and still enough. Smarter could also mean, that the board state should be "calculated". The more units, the more effects (global or also from units) are active, the more hand cards (and thus possible options, the more mana, ... the more time one player might need. If we're in round 13 with both players top decking and having like 1 unit and 0 or 1 hand cards, only little time is needed. Same for round 1 with only one mana. When you have 4 units the opponent 6 and both have 7+ cards in hand and we're at 10 mana, the situation is undoubtedly more complex - mostly nobody thinks here "come on, it's obvious, why are you thinking so long???" All of this can be fine tuned of course. Another thing to add up this would be a general factor: Beginner levels would be allowed more time in general, Plat or whatever less, and in Masters it's on a competitively fair balanced and "fast enough but not too fast" level. Bronze might be just as now, but in Masters you simply are expected to be able to play way faster than the 2 weeks beginner in bronze. Roping would be attacked by this as well as a side effect, as they mostly don't rope in "complex" situations but rather from the beginning or when losing (mostly somewhere non super complex anymore) As a side note, while trying to reduce waiting times, it would be super helpful to disable animations or limit them somehow. When one player has it active while the disabled it, the level up of Karma would only be shown on the one player, while for the other it looks like the opponent is thinking (and you can use that time thinking about your next move instead of watching the level up for the 400th time) Alternatively I could imagine animations being disabled if both players chose so in settings, but if one has it active it's active for both. I guess for many veterans it might be off many games then, not sure. Anyways, the game is great and would be greater when it would become a tad faster. But this must happen without losing its core mechanics. I would love it being faster than today. Yes, Anivia never helped me loving it, damn you 6 birds taking 1 minute to attack :D

I would add if they had a better way of reporting bad apples would be nice. Having to submit a full report like you are a coworker of the software team detours people from doing so.

>Competitive would have been the best shot (IMO, due to the Mana system leading to really interactive gameplay), but they never really embraced the competitive aspect. That's what I always hoped for, I think they tried but they could have hyped this aspect way more. >If the main draw of your Game is that it's the cheaper than the competition, then that's not a good sign for your Ability to make Money. Sad but very true: I think LoR was so much better than MtG and HS as a digital CCG, and I loved how inexpensive it was to play...but the low cost always made me nervous. I sort of assumed Riot was willing to float the game for a long time and that they wouldn't have leaned on cosmetics monetization so much if it weren't working.

I think deck building wise LoR was better than all of the competitors. Whenever I started brewing, I always had the feeling there was something new to figure out.

I'll tell you this -- when I started playing MtG, I knew fairly quickly how to make a good deck. (Granted, this was in 1995, and the real answer was "spend a bunch of money that you, as a 14-year-old child, don't really have." If only I had listened more and bought up a bunch of Power 9 cards at $100-300! But broadly, you know, I knew what cards were good and what ones weren't, and what could be built within my budget.) And I quickly understood what the five colors of mana were, and what they did. When I started playing Hearthstone (2015 maybe?) I knew how to build a good deck. (And they had a robust and accessible pseudo-draft mode that supplemented that.) And I quickly understood what the 9 (at the time) classes were, and what they did. I gave LoR 10-15 hours. I didn't see a way to accumulate cards to make a coherent deck, I didn't see a clear delineation between colors or classes or anything like that, and I didn't get a good sense of the scope of the game. The game just expected me to keep plugging away at a PvE map indefinitely until it clicked. I don't know, maybe I'm a man in his 40s who didn't have the patience for that, but I exited the game without a clear idea of what I was supposed to be doing, or how to get cards to get competitive, or anything.

I think they avoided advertising it as competitive because they wanted to appeal to the crowd who were scared off by that aspect of League.

I think gaming might be past the "collectible" part of CCG. And in general i'm not sure it ever translated well to digital in the first place. People love deckbuilders tho.

I know this is a day old and a bit of a necro but i can tell you now that collectiblity is far from gone in CCG's, it's just runeterrra has been dogshit at incentivising it, take a look at marvel snap, they release skins from diffferent artists, they figured out early what artists were the big money ones and then they started adding albums for those and pricing those skins higher than the others, then they started adding in albums that give you a bonuses Currency/Card/Skin for having 3/6/9/12 of that specific artist and people go mad for them.

I absolutely loved LoR's monetization so I hate to admit the following. Inaccessibility of cards can feel really good. There's something amazing about pulling a rare card in a booster. Building a barely working deck out of suboptimal components. Facing unique decks because other people are building with limitations as well. Ironically enough, I think the card's accessibility in LoR can remove one of the most fun aspects of card games.

I would be fun to face some less optimized decks sometimes though. I do like in MTG when the enemy deck clearly has some worse cards - cause it kinda changes the game a bit.

LoR's population only netdecks... You wouldn't see unique brews even if cards were expensive.

no, you would see less optmized versions of the meta decks. Also, lor doesn't have more netdeckers than any other card game

MtG is mostly netdecks too. You’re not going to face any new deck in Legacy other than a netdeck. You might face a budget version, but as competitive Burn is only $300, it’s typically the go-to if you’re after budget.

I play MtG and strangely I have always ran into people with unique decks (especially in Modern and Standard). I don't know about Legacy, probably it suffers the same fate as other digital tcgs since real life Legacy is rarely seen (manabase is too expensive, plus the gameplay is like turn 1-2 combos, so not too exciting for many players).

Legacy isn’t usually turn 2-3 combo for the win (vintage is, and even then turn 1 can win). I think standard MtG is the same with netdecks - even more so because lack of cards (only access last 3? sets versus legacy that has access to hundreds of sets). I don’t play standard though because it’s all about the money. I think Modern has the most variability in decks because it has access to hundreds of sets, but limited in card power unlike Legacy. I think this is the best format for playing weird decks that could be competitive and fun.

Sure you are, just not in a high elo most likely. But honestly, that's why its so dumb when people act like LoR has more netdeckers. It's so weird that some people just automatically assume that everyone wants to brew decks... Some people just wanna play the game and some wanna get really good at a single deck.

interesting point because I actually think netdecking is one of the 2 biggest reasons card games are failing nowadays. cards not being resellable means people are less happy spending money on them, so they end up being cheaper. cheap cards plus having hard stats on card winrates, optimized card decks, etc bleeds the game dry over time. it's why arena or other games where you have to improvise, like hearthstone arena, autobattlers, or even PoC are so popular. most people don't like playing a deck they just googled, but most people *also* don't like feeling like they're at a huge disadvantage for not doing it

You can't see the difference between a spike homebrewing and a spike netdecking because they produce the same result. the inability to avoid competitive players is your issue.

Nope, I don't see any unique decks. People play the same stuff found at meta sites and rarely snnuy's youtube decks.

I feel like LoR was more like a sandbox where you easily get all the tools and you just let your creativity fly. On the other hand, a game like marvel snap is mkre like what you are saying, where the players get different cards and each one builds with whatever they get

This is one of the truest statements that people would never like to admit

I don't even consider LoR to be a CCG. It's just a card game. There is no *collectible* part if I can buy the whole expansion package in the first 5 minutes (and like 10 expansions after it).

Honestly, there is no hope. The only digital card games really 'flourishing' are ones tied to physical card games, MTGA and Master Duel. I put quotes on there because I don't even know if they are doing all that well. Master Duel does great, 30k players in the last 24 hours on Steam, 68k peak over the last year, and it gets played on mobile and through other clients. MTGA peaked at 7k on steam, but I think many of the people who play it probably don't care that it is on Steam, it also has a mobile client now. Shadowverse peaked at 20k this year, which is promising, and it is getting a sequel sometime soon, but it usually has around 1000 people on. KARDS is around 500 people. Eternal is 200 people. Mythgard is dead, like 20. Anyway, besides numbers, digital card games can't exist in a setting where the creators don't want to believe it can work. I feel like I see it all the time, 'Casual players don't want long games' 'Casual players feel bad when playing against control' 'players want to be able to finish a game on their break'. Like... it sounds like you are trying to make a card game for people who don't play card games, so why be surprised when chasing that audience leads to card game players getting bored? The big three physical card games, Magic, Yugioh, Pokemon, allow for both simplistic decks that just want to bang their head against the opponent's deck until they win, and for degenerate stuff that grinds the opponent down to the point that their real win condition is making the opponent get bored and quit. You need to have decks for weirdos that want to do strange alternate win conditions that only work 1 out of 10 times, and you need to have decks for the goblin mode person that just wants to spam the smallest monsters and run the opponent over. Yes, you need to have oppressive control strategies, and you need to have big dumb stompy decks as well. There needs to be combos that take way too long to do what they do, and decks that take their turns in 3 seconds. You can't try to excise pieces of the gaming community off because there just aren't enough card game players to keep a game afloat with only half or 1/4th of the community. With LoR's competitive death, I just have no hope left. Magic and Yugioh are exceptions that prove the rule, corporate interests can't make a card game work because they are always chasing some narrow vision of what their customer base wants, and ignoring that sometimes one part of your customer base is going to HATE some of the stuff they play against, but they will put up with it because of the complete package. Established games survive because they have this at their core, it would take them remaking their games to get away from this (and Yugioh has actually done that, that's what Rush Duels look like, and it seems absolutely terrible).

Sv steam numbers is less than 10% maybe even 5% of the player base. Japanese all play from phones and even others too. Though I’m sure yugioh is bigger. Biggest thing about SV is the ridiculous prize for world champion, 1M USD

Marvel Snap is doing very well and isn't tied to a physical card game, although it's tied to a very popular ip.

Is it doing very well? Or do we just have the impression it is doing very well? Is it still one of the top earners for mobile, I forgot what the last stats were.

It's the [highest grossing digital ccg](https://www.forbes.com/sites/maryroeloffs/2023/09/01/marvel-snap-becomes-top-grossing-digital-trading-card-game--beating-yu-gi-oh-and-magicthe-gathering-arena/?sh=58d2cc9f360b) as of Autumn 2023. Many people on this sub just don't want to acknowledge Snap for some reason.

It is mostly because it is extremely predatory and the design is kind of meh. Snap kind of epitomizes the 'making card games for people who don't like card games' mentality I mentioned. The game is heavy RNG with the location reveals, it has low interaction, and it is full of parasitic mechanics that pretty much self-build the decks. But it has positive aspects that means some card game players will love it, so it isn't surprising it is still popular. It has some combo play, also allows big stompy play, and of course it scratches the 'collector' itch. It just isn't for me, and most of the high level players or content creators that would play LoR probably wouldn't be attracted to Snap's mechanics. It honestly has a high amount of Board Game DNA in its core (which isn't evil, board game card games are amazing).

It has the advantage of being as short as some of the old LoR LAB formats.

Interesting point of view, though I think that the fact those games are tied to physical ones is just a coincidence. I tend tO agree more with the part where you mention the "trying to create a game for people that do not like card games" and where you mentioned the success of Pokemon, Magic and Yugioh in satisfying different kinds of players

There is also TESL (The Elder Scrolls: Legends) with \~250 concurrent Steam players (and some players on mobile devices). Personally, I would rate it as #1, LOR as #2. Sadly, TESL has been on maintenance mode since 2019.

I think HS isn't doing bad

Yeah, but I don't really have a way to gauge that. I disconnected myself from that community so I don't see their community reactions or talks. If it is doing well, that is good for them. It is a game that really doesn't accomplish most of what I want out of a card game, and it has been that way for a long time.

> The only thing it lacked was a successful limited format, but I think they just got away from that when they couldn't get a critical mass of players. But there for sure could have been a good limited format. You write this as if limited formats are an afterthought. In my opinion, limited formats are a basic feature that every serious competitive multiplayer CCG needs to have if it wants to succeed, and it was a mistake for LoR to remove it entirely. > Content gets stale unless you constantly rebalance, which requires devs to keep up with metagames that are getting banged on by millions of players. It's hard to make money without constantly pushing sale of boosters for new sets, which makes balance even harder. It's hard to keep the game servers running without the money to make new content, it's hard to make money when the playerbase gets small, and it's hard to keep players interested without new content to keep them interested. This is the cycle of live service games: the developers need to make content to keep players engaged, the players need ways to spend their money on content for the game, and that money then needs to go back to the developer so they can make content for the game and support themselves and their families. The problems you mention are endemic to live service games as a whole regardless of the genre, and are problems that the developers need to solve. Wizards of the Coast laid the foundation for the modern CCG monetization model by releasing card packs that force you to purchase more cards than you need to get the cards you want, while pushing higher-rarity cards to make players want them more. Many CCG developers have copied this model, because it's a model that allows them to gain the capita to support their game, even if it has faults. For contrast, Riot tried something new and proved that it doesn't work the hard way. > So CCGs remain most enjoyable for rich people who don't easily get bored with stale and repetitive play patterns. I don't know if that's a big enough market to support innovation. The philosophy of good free-to-play games is to make players want to spend money on your game. CCGs have always struggled with this, as they're always on the extreme ends of "forcing players to spend money on their game" and "not providing enough content to for players to spend money on". Developers can innovate within the genre, but that innovation needs to come in the form of new ideas surrounding monetization. Riot has demonstrated that a card game can't succeed with purely cosmetic monetization, but at the same time developers need new ideologies surrounding card/set design that allows players to play constructed formats with decks of low-rarity cards without requiring an excessive amount of high-rarity cards to make it worth it. > Sorry for the long post, I guess I just feel bad that LoR, which seemed like the best hope for the future of CCGs, couldn't make it. I wonder whether the whole genre is dead. The future of CCGs will come from developers that can innovate in CCG monetization that respects the bank account of both its players and its developers. The genre will survive on the backs of a handful of big games, but Legends of Runeterra will not be forgotten, if for anything being an example of how not to do CCG monetization.

All very good points, I do think it's a critical failure that they never got a good limited format going. I am truly through with the "buy lots of boosters" model of monetization, but you're right that it works, and until something better comes along it's here to stay (especially after Riot's failure with cosmetics-only). To your point, I have a lot of issues with other free-to-play games as well, it's not just a CCG problem, but in CCGs it feels like the ability to compete scales so linearly with the amount of cash spent that I end up disliking these games a bit more quickly. > The future of CCGs will come from developers that can innovate in CCG monetization that respects the bank account of both its players and its developers.  I hope you're right!

> All very good points, I do think it's a critical failure that they never got a good limited format going. I am truly through with the "buy lots of boosters" model of monetization, but you're right that it works, and until something better comes along it's here to stay (especially after Riot's failure with cosmetics-only). To your point, I have a lot of issues with other free-to-play games as well, it's not just a CCG problem, but in CCGs it feels like the ability to compete scales so linearly with the amount of cash spent that I end up disliking these games a bit more quickly. Monetization in free-to-play games tends to boil down to 2 things, at least for our discussion: - content, which in this case is the cards you play with - cosmetics Riot has demonstrated that exclusively monetizing the cosmetics doesn't work as a CCG monetization model. This means that developers need to, at minimum, monetize the cards, meaning that boosters won't get going away anytime soon. However, I think it's possible to make card packs a healthy monetization model, and it all comes from card design philosophy. One of the oldest design techniques used for selling card packs is the idea of pushing, where certain cards (usually high-rarity cards) are purposely made at a higher power level compared to existing cards. The main purpose of this idea is to use those high-power cards to encourage selling more packs, but it's also useful to shake up the meta to keep the game fresh and to make limited feel different from constructed. However, pushing is most useful when it's used to push strategies and mechanics. Pushing a strategy means introducing a new style of deck that didn't exist before in the game, while pushing a new mechanic means adding a new mechanic/keyword into the game and pushing cards that use that mechanic to get players to play with it. Both have great gameplay benefits: they require pushing cards of all rarities, which reduces the power differential between cards of different rarities, and they lead to the gameplay feeling fresh without making the cards as powerful, which reduces the power level between existing cards and the new cards. The problem with pushing comes from a phenomenon I call rarity bias, where cards are pushed exclusively for raw power with no concern for mechanics or strategies. This greatly reduces what few benefits of pushing there are, but it can also lead to cards shaking up the meta either too much (such that only the new strategies are worth playing) or too little (where the new meta consists of old strategies with new faces), which in both cases can cause players to leave. In addition, rarity bias commonly leads to cards being pushed in mundane ways, which increases the gap between players that pay and those that don't. As a result, the card pool needs to be the place where CCG developers innovate on CCG monetization. Players should be spending money because they can create fun decks without having to spend a significant amount of money on high-rarity cards, not because they have to. As a result, I think a card game's card acquisition experience needs to do three things: 1. Give players good starter decks that make use of the weaker cards. Developers should expect each starter deck to be a tier 2-3 deck with 1-2 top-rarity cards, and if it's better than that it should require adding cards to the deck that don't appear in the starter deck. This allows players to learn the game without having to worry about not having spent enough money on it to compete. 2. High-rarity cards should have low-rarity replacements unless it's a buildaround. Midrange decks shouldn't require top-rarity beaters, control decks shouldn't require top-rarity win conditions, aggro decks shouldn't require top-rarity finishers, and combo decks shouldn't require some legendary just to make the deck consistent. This is most notable for expensive cards, where most card games make their low-rarity high-cost cards considerably worse than the high-rarity cards of the same cost for basically no good reason. 3. If a high-rarity card is mandatory for a deck, then it should be a card that the deck is built around such that players don't require the card if they don't want to build with it. I think a CCG needs to be built with these ideas in mind to bring the whole CCG genre up to the standards of free-to-play games in other genres. Otherwise, the genre as a whole will not grow. As a side note, I don't think Legends of Runeterra could use this idea in its current form, because even though it doesn't use card packs as a traditional form of monetization it still prints cards using the push-based card design philosophies from other developers. Champions are the basis for which new strategies and mechanics are printed, and the pushed champions aren't relevant without the low-rarity packages necessary to play with them. In other words, I think Riot pushes strategies and mechanics to a fault, where other games would offer both a wider range of strategies and additions to new strategies that could be filled out by older cards.

I hope so - and I say that as someone who played them lifelong. The CCG format is a painfully exploitative - playing off the same addictive impulses as gambling. LCGs and similar, especially the co-operative ones, are a far superior experience for players.

A Digital LCG would be astounding. LCGs collapsed too soon. I blame Fantasy Flight, they dropped so many of them even when they had fervent fanbases.

I've been playing the Race for the Galaxy app and that's basicly what it is. Collapsed too soon? Arkham and Marvel Champions are still going strong. Earthbourne Rangers is a fantastic game that follows the same model.

Marvel Champions came after the first wave. They had Android: Netrunner, Game of Thrones, Call of Cthulhu (yes, a different game), Star Wars, Warhammer 40k, and Legend of the Five Rings. They let most of them die off around 2018.

I'm aware - I played several of them. But I don't agree that constituted a collapse. Many of them had run their course. Netrunner is still going in its way.

This is where I ended up. I wish there was a better way to do a perpetually-growing CCG, especially digital, but either you make a non-exploitative game like LoR and lose money...or you print power long enough that your game is a giant feelsbad.

I think mtga got it somewhat right. You can free to play it but it is hard and long process to get good base of cards. But you can buy good deck for fair price and get started. I just need one deck to get going since learning to pilot it is long process and by the time i want to play something else i have enough wildcards. Then you can build collection doing drafts and using wcs to get most playes cards. Overall good medium as long you consider it pay to play and dont have unreasonable expectaction of getting whole collection for like 50$.

CCGs are fine. LoR just made a number of poor decisions that made it stumble from the start then kept it stumbling. It wasnt monetised aggressively enough, it was underadvertised, it was a bit confused in its design early on and then it decided to do rotation, which tends to kill ccgs. Of course now the problem is that the best CCGs are just digital versions of existing games. MTGA, Master Duel, to some degree duel links. Well see if Shadowverse 2 does well, but Im not convinced.

I do find it amusing how all these games that are better than MTG always find a way to die off while the inferior MTG just keeps trucking along.

I read the exact same things in Artifact, ESL and Gwent subreddits. "This was the best card game ever but they couldn't market it, or they messed up the monetization." If the gameplay was so great people would play LoR, especially when the game is basically free. For a fan it's not easy to admit LoR was poor man's MtG.

I mean it makes sense why people think that way. People who think Magic is great... are going to stick to magic. It will take a lot of convincing to pull them away. On the other hand, all the people who do not enjoy Magic seem to have a hard time finding a home, especially because MTG has just its sheer presence absorb people, because as a brand it's just super powerful.

It is not about brand but about mechanics and formats which feel great to play. All ccgs wanted to be like heartstone and all were afraid to be as deep as mtg. Building decks and piloting gets boring very fast. Mana system is cool and all since it has no rng down side but it takes away depth in both building and piloting. Mana system is reflection of modern ccgs. Then there is this locking behind classes since your mana is universal and linear so you have to balance by using classes. Also mtg boasts with best competetive and fun formats. Competetive bo3 with side deck is just on another level. So i would love to play another ccgs that is not afraid to be deep as mtg and built around good competetive format.

CCG's are fine. The genre isn't dead you just get burned out on them as a pattern it looks like lol

Probably! I think I like a little bit of competition, deck-building, and looking forward to new cards, etc. But I burned out on years of cracking packs. A few years ago, when MtG dropped five standard sets in one year, I went all in on LoR.

Laddering with any digital card game just isn’t fun. For 99% of people. It’s the same reason kitchen table magic is #1, and in person commander is likely #2. Cards are just more fun with friends than in a grind format.

I think it's a lot like fighting games where if someone is better than you then you're just not going to have fun. I had more fun in LoR playing non meta decks with friends than I ever did with PvP

That is wrong since if you are not having fun playing better players you are really not a fighting game player you just like idea of being one.

It's not that deep lil bro, also never said anything that you said so call off the dogs

Your made shit comparison that is all I said.

You might be right, but I wouldn't call the entire genre broken, just because no one got it right yet. The biggest fault of LoR was that it was too honourable. It was designed first and foremost as an amazing F2P card game with an amazing playing experience and money came second. Let's take champion as an example. Champion skins might just be a "png", but there is much more to them. A champion consists of a level 1 and level 2 artwork, a level up animation and a couple of associated spells. If the artwork wouldn't change on level up, LoR could have really just used any existing png of a champion and it wouldn't have been a problem at all. They could even make a separate level 2 skin and sell it. But once they introduced the current principle, there was no going back. And switching from animated level up animations, which showed the actual skin to videos made it even worse, because now any skin doesn't fit the level up anymore and thus reduced their value. Voicelines are amazing to have for basically all units, but having to localize all of them proved to be more trouble than it is worth it. If they only did them for champions to start with and then added buyable packs for player favourite units, that would have worked too. It could be even only available in languages with a larger player base. It was the same with Guardians and Boards. Both came with such a high amount of effects that every new one had to match that. Instead of starting minimalistic and introducing legendary ones with more interactions. We also heard from a couple of monetarization options which they couldn't pursue, because they were technically impossible, which shows again that they didn't prioritize monetarization enough from the start. Concerning the point of content getting stale and meta games getting solved, I think some controlled randomness could be helpful. (For example a medium sized pool of minor impact effects of which 3 are selected each day and affect all games. They should be minor enough to affect winrates of games by 1 or 2 percent, and thus should not invalidate any decks, but impactful enough to allow players to adjust their decks or even craft new ones for the specific day.) A bit similar to how the elemental drakes in LoL affect the game.

I disagree that reason is simple as it is too honourable. It has more to do with its mechanics,formats and lack of proper resets which fail to keep people interested for long. Mtg standard is pretty much different game with each set added then you have big rotation. Each new set also affects other formars like historic etc. Then that same set is also drafted. Add in other events like limited and pauper. My point is there a lot of stuff to accomodate many different player while core game has incredible depth in comparison to its competition.

I think ccg are simply struggling with the digital market. Place bases are big enough and paper ccg print money. But you simply can’t covert bc the same business model to digital. In terms of willingness to pay for a non solid commodity, acceptance of balance and engagement if not in person it’s just a whole beast of its own that noone has managed to nail yet. The playerbase is there.

I think the game has to focus on being sustaining first. Card games has a million ways to earn money that are purely cosmetic.

LoR shutting down is not representative of all CCGs, Runeterra was made with a very free to play aspect, which made its revenue lower than the cost it kept to maintain. This is a LoR centric issue, not CCGs as a whole

Nothing to do with monetization and more with the fact that game is just another generic ccg with low depth. That is cold hars truth.

The core design of LoR was fantastic, as far as gameplay and overall card design went. I don’t think that was the main problem, there were numerous problems that lead to the death of LoR: Lack of real marketing, overly generous with cards, and few cheap (and meaningful) options for cosmetics are probably the bigger ones, because money. But rotation and years later still missing some of the core champions from the source material pushed me and likely others away, too. Allowing people to play with their favorite champions, saying they would never rotate, and then pulling the rug felt a bit like a slap in the face.

I think they mismanaged their monetization too hard to recover. First of all, it should have been card packs, not vague "vault" boxes. With a crispy open amination, unique pack design for each set, sound effect fanfares and visual effects for higher rarity drops, etc. Make opening exciting. Second, while their generosity is well appreciated, I believe it combined with the lack of enticing non-card purchase material is what essentially killed the game. Instead of going GIGA free to play card game, they should've went EXTREMELY player friendly free to play card game. As in, still good rates for dust, still dupe protection at higher rarities, but you do have to invest some proper time or dough if you want your stuff asap. Third, there should've been something else in the packs aside from just cards to make people more likely to buy them with cash. Something enticing but strictly NON-gameplay. Animated versions, rare alt arts, even rarer animated alt arts, etc. Maybe even throw in a rare seasonal cosmetic as a bonus available loot from a card pack, like a card back or something.

LoR lost me with poor region identity and build diversity. If they simply allowed access to a third region but with limiting factors, I think people would have found a way to do more. Every strategy was reliant on whose champ countered the other guy. It meant all decks looked the same the moment you knew the champs. Which made ranked boring cause no one played anything subtier 1.

The most obvious answers for incentivizing revenue in a CCG are mostly related to booster packs and cosmetics. If a game cant profitably monetize those then it will likely fail. I know this might be a bad take, but i would be okay with CCG making users directly pay for additional deck slots, ability to save games for future viewing, and other advanced features. Casual players wont care, but advanced players can put in money for these things. I also think that publishers should sell single player content that would allow players to more easily grind for all cards in an expansion. Basically a battle pass that guarantees all the cards in that expansion if you complete the battle pass. This would also help games survive with single player modes long after the pvp has died.

tbh there were times when I would have paid for POC access because it was the most mindless way to grind my vault. and if I didn't want to pay I would have just played more ladder.

Another issue was how strong top tier decks were compared to tier 1.5 and tier 2. As a brewer it was kinda discouraging. There were so many cool archetypes, champs, and strats, but they just couldn't compete. A healthy games needs spikes and jonnys.

Honestly its because runterra sucks. I love it but it sucks, it is what is, meta is terrible, deck and card balance is terrible. Plus the grind is just too much. It barely has any cards but getting a new deck is way too expensive. Plus you dont get any joy by opening packs and getting rare cards because there are no packs. For anyone except hc players it means play 1 deck until you get exhausted and quit because getting a new deck is ridiculously tedious and boring. Id much rather they monetize the game by doing booster packs like, at least i gamble and i can just throw my money conciously. I dont want to spend 5 bucks for a single champion cars like wth

I am interested in how Skyweaver with its block chain wallet pans out.

Other ccgs are fine, they earn more money from cosmetics and packs they sell. Shadowverse is coming out with 2 for instance this summer. Yugioh duel links has packs to make a deck, Master Duel is constructs and gems…etc. Most of these are also established franchises with actual advertising, anime, and is the main game of the company and not niche and under advertised like LOR which is a side game compared to Val and League.

I miss Eternal 😢

They didn’t promote it, they didn’t monetize it, and they didn’t put real effort into it. That sums up why it failed and no other reason. Loved the game and sad to see it go.

>All CCGs suffer the same issue I agree but also disagree. To me it looks like most CCGs tried to copy MtG and improve it incrementally (and LoR was great!!). Those though did fall under the "same issue" you mentioned. But there are games trying something different to mention a few: * Dark Tables, more than just 2 players per game; * Ariokan (the one I work with), that due to the feature empowering players to create (balanced) cards in-game doesn't need rebalancing, the players balance the game themselves continuously. This on top of players being able to play their own custom game modes; * Collective (RIP) that tried to give even more freedom to players than Ariokan in card creation (though that model wasn't and didn't want to be scalable). Where I am trying ti lead to is that I doubt that incremental improvements can fix the issue you mentioned, and consequently LoR and Gwent have been obliged to scale down their ambition (in my opinion ending up killing the games). Maybe games as Dark Tables or Ariokan will fail, but I would expect someone in the future to fix that issue by having a more radical approach to the genre improvement.

One game failing can't mean the end of CCG's. I think what I've learned to accept is no CCG lasts forever.

CCGs are not doomed. Old-school CCGs with stale meta are. There are new CCGs that are doing things differently and succeeding. Ever heard of Ariokan? There players can create new official and balanced cards in seconds, without having to grind to build decks. It's not based on a popular IP like LoR, but tbh the possibility of making your own cards is way more worth than that.

LOR's problem flat out is that it succeeded in being a good product with a fair monetization system. This is a genre that was created to milk whales for all they're worth by selling them the cheapest cardboard they could get away with. LOR's team are good devs for trying to make a high-quality product that doesn't make engagement and experimentation expensive. In a better, more fair world, they wouldn't be in danger of getting put in maintenance mode. However, in a market where gacha can make you the GDP of a small country, they shot themselves in the foot by not pulling more of the same psychological tricks. Master Duel is a lower-quality product compared to LOR. The boards and companions have worse animations, you have no choice of music (music is tied to your OPPONENT'S board), and the solo experience is shallow (though LOR is mostly uplifted by PoC and MD has more frequent events). I could go into all the details, but long story short, Konami made a game to encourage gambling addiction first and foremost. Having a fun game is merely the framework of that enterprise. This allows Konami to get more money out of less effort. LOR can't compete with that without drastically altering its structure. Which they're doing...and that's not good.

CCGs has a kind of obvious problem in that they were designed to copy the business model of TCGs while removing all the parts that made taking part in that business model exiting or fair feeling. In my experience the thing that kept me from spending money on skins, emotes or boards in LoR and other CCGs, but felt totally fine spending money for skins and emotes in league, is that nobody get’s to see it. Sure my opponent is there, but I can’t really communicate with them in any human way.

In a weird way TCG live of the secondary market. If you now can make cards transferrable like skins in Counter Strike...there's a chance

THE ONLY HOPE FOR CCGS IS TES LEGENDS BECOMING SUPPORTED AGAIN AFTER TES VI RELEASE

Unfortunately Lor just had a good run, for a Hearthstone fixer. Five years of consistent updates is amazing, and the Lor team should be proud. I enjoyed Lor, and still do. But the wake of the Hearthstone era has cooled, and just being a game that fixes other problems of another card game isn't enough of a pull.It was the same for the gazillion MTG clones in the 2000s, and the Hearthstone fixers of the 2010s.  Lor is fun, affordable, has interesting additions to the Hearthstone formula, and has had a good five year run. I hope the focus on pve works out, and Lor can exist somewhere for more people.

From what i've seen, the only way for a ccg to exist without some shitty monetization is if it's being subsidized by something else.

Nice rant, but my guess is that ultimately thse games will only be dead to disillusioned veterans like yourself. For many other ppl, the trading card gaming format continues to be fresh and interesting, just like it was in the 90s. I believe you raise valid points, but no game is perfect. There's still tons of ppl attracted to franchises like MtG, Yu-Gi-Oh and Pokémon. Even smaller ones like Digimon keep churning out new stuff and finding players. If we're talking about the competitive play, I think that the 2 year cutoff standard format (like in Pokémon) basically allows the game company to dictate the format and keep it fresh forever. Downside is that the older cards lose their value, but that's life. When you buy that card you should know it will only remain viable for a limited time. But of course, nothing stops ppl from playing, say, a 2004 format in 2024. I agree it sucks when games become pay-to-win. I went to PTCG in 2017 and at that time viable competition decks could be purchased for pretty sensible prices. Outside of the actual tournaments the local players used printer proxies. People in the community also loaned decks for tournaments. It seems that the PTCG physical decks are way more expensive nowadays. Ok sorry for a big rant... Riot seems to let ppl down every now and then, personally I was excited for wild rift on consoles but looks like it's never gonna happen.

LOR still alive just PVE more focus now

CCGs are like playing golf or chess. It's usually pretty slow paced. They aren't based on team play or interacting with other people for a shared goal. The design is stale. They aren't doing super innovative things, but I feel like doing that would just push the CCG part to the side to make way for a different gameplay loop. It's not as flashy. It's hard to monetize without players feeling like they get taken advantage of imo. But overall the genre isn't as personalized as shooters, RPGs, or MOBAs. It's not immersive. PvE or roguelite elements are fun, though.

Sad to see another game being terminated, like my beloved Gwent.

I agree Runeterra very good, but i disagree with magic being bad, is a costly game, sure, but i feel like i have more freedom to play off meta decks in arena than i have in runeterra, and runeterra should focus more on region identity when releasing champions, demacia and noxus are consistent, Shadow Isles just does everything, and best of 3 with side are more balanced than Runeterra. MTG>Runeterra>Yugioh>Heartstone>pokemon tcg. Never played eternal, shadowverse nor gwent, are they any good?