The mild consolation usually given to losing players is a sense of fairness. At a certain point, one player will be advancing towards victory and the other(s) towards defeat. If the player is given a sense of incremental advancement against reasonably challenging obstacles, then the game will probably be enjoyable. When a game involves only a single player, providing “fun” can be the overriding design concern. 'Games are fun' is a game design truism (Caillois, 1957). When Sanctum’s game designers later created Trading Card Baseball, they attempted to address this issue holistically by taking advantage of baseball’s statistical nature. Sanctum’s game designers, after experiencing early balancing problems, developed a game design philosophy that attempts to address the issue every collectible card game faces: the fact that game play advantage can be purchased. It begins with an overview of the Magic: The Gathering card game and follows with comparative case studies of Sanctum and Trading Card Baseball, both of which were online collectible “card” games. This paper explores the complex game balancing issues inherent to collectible card games. Keywords: Game design, collectible card games, CCG, game balance, Sanctum, Magic: The Gathering The approach called for the most obviously and generally useful cards to be the most common and to equate rarity to specialization rather than raw power. Digital Addiction (a company that produced online, collectible card games in the 1990s) developed a different game design philosophy for balancing collectible card games.

The long-term implications of such an approach can have negative consequences on a game’s suitability for casual play. The conventional wisdom is that the more powerful a card is, the more rare it should be. Rarity and Power: Balance in Collectible Object Games by Ethan Ham Abstractįor collectible card games (CCGs), game designers often limit the availability of cards that have a particularly powerful gameplay effect.

Popular card games like magic