Deck-building Games Guide #2 – Card types and Card Synergies

Hello all!

I hope you’ve been doing well.

Cards in a deck-building game are the very core that drives the gameplay and the flow.

But before we jump into them, let’s take a small trip back to your childhood. You go into a candy shop and you’re told that you can have five candies to take home with you. You select the ones which are different from each other and eat them all at once. They don’t taste that great.

Cards in deck-building games can be compared to choosing candies at a store. You have to pick the correct combination of candies otherwise it’ll make no sense to your taste buds.

You have to choose carefully in order to make sure you’re making the best out of the choices.

So what kind of cards can you derive? Let’s try and make a small concept.

Classes and Cards

Let’s say, the game in question is a fighting game where lets you play as a Brawler and you fight against other wrestlers.

We have Stamina of 3 to play the cards.

Now the name itself is enough to know what kinds of cards the classes could provide.

Brawler's class would be focused on offense and the cards would be focused on that. Let’s design cards and try to see how the synergies work.

Remember that since we have to build our deck from scratch, we need to have basic cards for our character to use. So let’s start with that.

Basic Cards

Now our Brawler needs some cards to start off his fighting and causing chaos. Our cards will have an associated cost to play them and our character will gain better cards as he keeps defeating other wrestlers.

Here are the cards –

1. Punches – Basic Damage Card.

2. Kicks – Low damage card, sets unbalanced on the opponents.

3. Remove Mask – High-cost card with sets vulnerable on the opponents.

The cards have special abilities on them and here are what they do –

1. Unbalanced – Opponent does -1 damage for the duration.

2. Knocked down – Opponent skips a turn.

3. Vulnerable – Opponent takes x2 damage per 1 stack.

Special cards

Now, what kinds of cards would go with these special effects on our opponents and what kind of cards can players acquire? Let’s design some to make a small synergized deck.

1. Chair-o-Time – High damage card with a special condition.

2. Flex – Gives temporary strength increase.

3. Top Rope – Preparation card.

Card Synergies

The three cards above have all different effects but will play in tandem if you design them so. Card synergies are about making it so that the cards not only work together, but you can stack them to deal with maximum amounts of damage as possible. It can tweak the way players play their cards and the order in which they are played as well.

· Optimal combination of cards would be as follows –

· Flex to increase damage output

· Removing mask to set vulnerable on the opponent so they take more damage

· Kicking to set unbalanced

· Climbing Top Rope to make our last card free of cost

· Playing chair card to do the maximum amount of damage and knocking down our enemy to deny them their turn

Making synergies for cards can be derived from the class of the character. This is just one of the possibilities of synergies, but you must playtest to know how powerful a card is to make sure the cost is fair, otherwise, it can feel impossible to make cards synergized.

The players should think about these and should explore these combinations by themselves, the designer's job is to look at possibilities.

That’s it for this post.

Next week we’ll look at some generic actions that the cards do in the game and how to make sure that the players trim their deck slowly with the removal of cards.

Stay tuned. 😊