Card Game Design

According to Garfield, one of the main concerns in creating Magic The Gathering was making sure that there were no bad cards. In his article, he says "Why make cards people won't play with?" He wanted to make sure that every card was valuable to the game. If you make a card too weak, then there really is no point in having it because people will not play with it anyway. That was one thing we need to make sure that we do when creating our own card games.This not only helps with balance, but our own efficiency as well. Like Garfield said, there really is no point in making a card that nobody wants to use. If we can make all of our cards important in some form or fashion where they can all be played and give an enjoyable experience. then that is what we need to do. 

Deciding the types of cards and how many of each was very important to Garfield, and needs to be important to us as we make our own games. We need to make sure that there are plenty of common-type cards so that the game can continue seamlessly without any stops or reshuffling necessary. There also needs to be a decent amount of negative-type cards. By this I mean cards that cause damage or hinder a player's abilities for a certain amount of time. This brings strategy and obstacles into the game, otherwise, it is literally just trading and drawing cards until you stop. There also needs to be a good number of power cards, but no so many that it makes a player to over powered and there is no contest between players. You want to make the playing field as even as possible, so that the idea of chance has very little impact on the game. One of the best parts of card games is the strategy and planning it takes, so that is what we need to focus on when creating card games. 

One last thing that Garfield mentions is that he went through a "never-ending process of editing the rules and the cards." Even up until the last minute do we need to pay attention to the comprehensibility of our rules. The rules after all, are the most important aspect of your game. It teaches players how to even play the game, so if the rules do not make sense, then the game will inevitably fail as the players have no idea how to play.