People didn't try any of them, so you get to see all of them and I wanted to share what they meant to me, too:
Flesh and Blood taught me that there is appetite for a deep challenge that isn't MtG's, and that breakpoints are essential to think about in a back-and-forth-style game.
Massive-Verse/Pocket Paragons Massive-Verse/Pocket Paragon is a reminder that you can do glorious things in a tiny package that simplifies — or removes! — deckbuilding.
Decipher's LotR TCG has pushed me to look at every resource system oh-so-very-closely ever since I saw that one demo in Milan in the winter after it came out.
Oshi Push is interesting — not because it treads necessarily new territory, but because it does top-down design in the anime card game space without breaking a sweat. Of all the vtuber cash grabs, I hope this is the one that survives.
Riftbound is here as a stand-in for every traditional 'game of trades' creature basher, MtG (and Duel Masters and Hearthstone) on down. I mulled whether to bring Gundam TCG for this slot, but this is newer and, though I have reservations, better than much of Bandai UX design.
There are two games total that one of my lovely partners could tolerate playing with me (patience of a saint!!!!!!!), and Altered is one of them. I really respect what they are doing for keeping complexity down and clarity up, and in many ways neither goal gets the respect or thought it deserves.
Keyforge is the poster child for 'you really can make something very different if you shake up the formula in precise and thoughtful ways'. Distribution and the entire arc of the experience, acquisition to play, are… lol, key to what distinguishes any game, and often not fungible.
Grand Archive is mechanically interesting, but what I got from it is a meditation on the nature of appeal, on promise and delivery, on audience and appropriateness, and on how these dynamics drive the 'anime cards' booster attached to the TCG consumption engine.
Transformers TCG is so good on the purely tactile, gut level of just experiencing metaphor through material.
BIG THING GOES BIGGER! HOLY HECK
I wish I had the WotC kind of materials pipeline. Could you imagine what one could do with easy access to precision scoring and multisize setups?
UniVersus is a game whose graphic design chops I've recently come to admire. In an age where tie-in TCGs feel even more shallow when placed beside MtG embracing their model, the care put into the graphical sourcing, presentation, and premium feel is wild for the elder US poster child of this model.
The other game I work on (as a narrative designer) — Netrunner. The most influential thing in figuring out how to decouple my understanding of xCGs from the axiom that they should only exist in a capital/consumption-engine fashion.
And finally, perhaps the most influential of all of these games on WR — .hack//ENEMY, for showing me how veering hard into simplicity can lead to a thoughtful kind of back and forth that preserves so much in the way of interactivity without bloat.
If anyone wants to reboot this stuff, hit me up.
Bonus! The incredibly wonderful, absolutely wild masterpiece of a game that is Inscryption. What a love letter to the entire genre — to the culture of it, the experience of it, every part of it!
One day I will rant and rave about it for longer about it, but here's the Cryptic Crafter IRL two-player version. Love the craft on display here. — ✾ A.
Spent the grand total of about six hours organising these cards into a folder and I’m still not done why did I do this to myself. Been great for getting through podcasts tho
