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LCGs: the plusses and minuses
- dragonstout
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boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/16034/a-criti...f-a-living-card-game
The lack of limited and the lack of organized play support are the big problems I've always seen with the format, when I was considering buying into one (Netrunner I got just to try out for variety's sake and see how it compared to classic Netrunner). The catchup problems that exist once an LCG's been around for longer than a year hadn't occurred to me, and make it...well, more expensive than Magic, once you're several years in. And that's a pretty high expense bar, right there.
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- Sagrilarus
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"Organized Play" gets stomped on by the obsessive-compulsive competitors unless one of two things is in the mix:
1. Some level of blind-booster built into the play, which will be interesting to work out with an easily-attained card set. Heck, it's a problem with Magic and some of its cards are hard to get.
2. Something that just brings whimsy into the event so the pressure to compete in the single most optimal way is relieved. I'm already hearing this is an issue in X-Wing events where everyone is showing up with the same thing. They show up to win, not to play.
It's worth a read though, well written. I'll be honest, I'm not on board with this concept. It's essentially miniatures gaming with cheap components. My nature isn't to collect and what remains is an "incomplete" game, whether it's truly incomplete or just perceived to be once you get one expansion behind.
S.
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- Sagrilarus
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At that point the LCG needs to compete against all other games in the market with the additional design limitations associated with its LCGness.
S.
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- metalface13
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I think the heart of the problem of lack of organized play is that there isn't really an incentive for a game store to host it. With Friday Night Magic, you've got a bunch of people coming into the store and will probably end up buying a pack of two each. Boom. A bustling night of sales for the store.
But for an LCG? There's the chance some people will buy some expansion packs, but chances are they will already have them. It's kind of the same thing as hosting a regular board game night. You get people in the stores and are selling them sodas, snacks and the odd impulse buy. Not bad for business, but probably not as good as Friday Night Magic.
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If you don't compete.. no problem. I find the Magic Cube more interesting, or themed decks my friend has. Great game... I have no interest in competition. The LCG format is fine if you buy a couple of core sets and then 3-4 expansions tops.. that's what we do.
That's still expensive but not Magic expensive and it gives me a great game I can share with buddies. We say things like: "Here, take this pile of decks and build yourself something, I'll do the same and we'll play at lunch everyday next week."
That cost is for TWO people (at least) to play the game. Not just one.
But you have to be non-competitive and unconcerned about completionist tendencies that some gamers have.
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- dragonstout
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I think the catchup problem that I found more problematic is not the difficulty in hunting down old expansions, but that if you jump in after a few years have passed, you have to spend several hundreds of dollars all at once to catch up to everyone else; right now, people are thinking "oh, it's just a $10-15 monthly purchase", but that's ONLY if you start at the ground level.Sagrilarus wrote: "Catchup" is likely only a problem when viewed from the buyer's perspective. I realize that the publisher has to mind to that, but offering catch-up packs in plain packages at a later date, short of pricing them at the full retail costs of all included cards combined, undercuts the publisher's sales of the more lucrative packages when they are initially released. People will wait to save money. These are the packages that the publisher makes their bread and butter off of. The real issue is more about keeping the prior packages at a reasonable level of inventory so that customers can find them.
Another major problem that LCGs have with organized play as opposed to CCGs is: CCGs have a very very natural prize: booster packs. Most store-level Magic events has booster packs as its prize. You play in a tournament so you can get more packs to do better in tournaments etc. etc. Wizards can send booster boxes as prize support, no problem. But with an LCG, it's assumed that anyone playing competitively already has a complete set of cards. So the prizes for LCGs? A fancier click-tracker for Netrunner, for real? A freaking POSTER??? Now, this wouldn't begin to be as good a prize as booster packs, but what they SHOULD give as prizes are the cards that there are only one of in the Core Set.
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- Sagrilarus
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dragonstout wrote: . . . but that if you jump in after a few years have passed, you have to spend several hundreds of dollars all at once to catch up to everyone else; right now, people are thinking "oh, it's just a $10-15 monthly purchase"
That's a good point. It's cheaper if you buy each month. That should be obvious to anyone.
S.
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- dragonstout
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Not sure what your point is here, but in e.g. Magic, you're not up against people who've bought playsets of every card from the past 20 years, thanks to the rotating Standard format or any Limited format. Obviously people get pissed about rotating formats because it "obsoletes" your cards, but it's the only way yet demonstrated to keep a CCG/LCG new-player-friendly in the long-term. There still exists the awesome Legacy format (among many others) for Magic, but a new player is eased into that, if they want, by having many formats that are playable with a much smaller and more recent card pool.Sagrilarus wrote:
dragonstout wrote: . . . but that if you jump in after a few years have passed, you have to spend several hundreds of dollars all at once to catch up to everyone else; right now, people are thinking "oh, it's just a $10-15 monthly purchase"
That's a good point. It's cheaper if you buy each month. That should be obvious to anyone.
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- Michael Barnes
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With the traditional low cost starter/booster model, that wasn't a problem. You could buy singles or trade to get complete sets or the particular cards you wanted. But AFAIK, no one is selling or trading LCG singles because of the fixed distribution.
The competitive play aspect is another issue, as has been pointed out here things like prize support takes on a very different form (posters, really?) and the popular booster draft formats are not possible. I can attest to the fact that Friday Night Magic is a HUGE event for stores that support it. I'd have 50 people in the shop playing, with some nice prizes from WOTC and I usually offered some additional incentives on top of that. And at least 40 out of those 50 people would buy snacks and drinks, as well as singles, as well as boosters, and if it was sealed deck then they'd be buying a starter and a pair of boosters.
But LCG is more of a board game mentality,and I don't think FFG has really figured out how to reconcile the two very different products. Doing the set-based deck building and reducing the number of cores needed down to two is a step in the right direction, at least.
It is DEFINITELY expensive to catch up, I know that from experience. I think my LOTR LCG catch up was around $200, inclusive of 12 adventure packs (i.e. one year's worth), the deluxe Khazad-Dum expansion, and three cores. That's a big outlay, particularly if you're a new player just getting into it.
But really, that's kind of built-in marketing too...especially if you're going to play Netrunner competitively. After six months of expansion packs, you're likely playing a different game than those who have kept up. So the subliminal marketing is telling you "buy monthly! buy monthly!"
I really don't understand why FFG doesn't offer a subscription service right out of the box on these games. You buy the core, then go home and order your subscription deliverable either to your home for a shipping fee or to a FLGS for free. I would definitely do this for six month runs, maybe not longer than that.
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- dragonstout
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- Erik Twice
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The major benefit of the Living Card Game model is that it doesn't require a secondary market to keep the game alive.
The major drawback of the Living Card Game model is that it doens't require a secondary market to keep the game alive.
Everything else is either minor or not related to the distribution model. A game that has sixty expansions will kill itself without a rotating format, be it a CCG like Vampire or any of the FFG Living Card Games, it's not tied to the distribution model.
A lack of rotating formats will also kill the game because power creep becomes inevitable and even desirable in design. The more cards you have in the pool, the more powerful a new card has to be to see the table. That's not healthy and staples will stand in the way of changing that. How powerful must creature kill be to compete with Swords to Plowshares? How powerful must a counter be to compete with Mana Drain and Force of Will? It's inherently unsolvable design-wise.
And this doesn't cover the awesome fun of having different formats. And with a Living Card Game model you could play older formats without any problem, which is great.
PRICE
I don't think Magic is expensive only because of the random booster packs. Because that doesn't explain 100% Chase Rares in Standard. Not even Mythic ones, just rares. The prices are so much higher than when I was playing that it's insane and there's no
They do increase the price of the game significantly by adding a cost to liquidity but they don't explain 100$ Chase Rares in Standards. When I played no card was ever worth more than 20$, even if it was Pithing Needle, the only good card of its entire set. This makes me think there's more than randomness involved.
Mothly releases also worry me a lot because that's very little time for the Metagame to work and settle. You can't have two big tournaments with the same card pool, that's pretty fucked up.
The more I think about this the more I worry about the future of Netrunner.
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- Michael Barnes
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I think that is a major issue, these products are all competing with each other. I'm now into three (SW, LOTR, and Netrunner) and I'm not exactly thrilled about a $30+ a month outlay to keep the sets current. It's not a bad deal, really, if it keeps the games playing and changing, but still...$30 a month, that's like a bill.
It's not so much the secondary market that's the best/worst thing, it's the fixed card distribution. Of course it's great. You buy it and you have all the cards. But it does do away with the more volatile, permeable parts that really keep the game alive and evergreen.
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