Myrmiredon's Card Design Notes

I've been playing card games for a very long time. I've been designing cards for only slightly less. BLOX Cards is a very challenging game to design, so the following is a bunch of stuff I've learnt during my time here for future designers. 
These notes will be mostly for card design, but will touch on game design and game development frequently. I imagine a lot of this will apply to other card games, or games in general.
Expanded as I have time. Notes are in no particular order.
== Note 0: Your cards suck, you will fail, and this is a good thing. ==
Card design is an endless Sisyphean endeavour. I am a seasoned designer, and 90% of my cards suck really, really bad. Those cards never see the light of day; BLOX Cards is populated with the remaining 10% of my mental sewage, which have caused several problems for this game.
This is normal, and a high failure rate is common for even the most veteran designers. You will make cards that suck. You will fail to make cool cards, frequently and often.
Card design is a heartless baby killing factory, where the weak are slaughtered in droves.
This is the first note, put in overtly aggressive terms, due to how common this feeling of failure is. On this feeling of failure, I'm here to tell you that it's natural to feel like you're not good enough or a failure. After all these years, I still feel that way. The good news is that failure is an important part of the design process, one you can exploit.
Before a card ever makes it to the game, it's an idea. Ideas are very common, and very easy to have. Because of how many ideas a person can make on a short timeframe, there's little value in an idea on its own - What makes an idea valuable is it being put into reality, put into a game. A designer can go through a million ideas quickly, and this is something to be exploited.
Because of how inexpensive cards are to make, there's very little cost to tweaking them. When you inevitably make a card that sucks, the only cost to changing the card so it doesn't suck is a few minutes of time. Compare that to something like architecture, where even simple construction projects have huge costs to changing mid-construction as you have to gather more materials, wait weeks as they build more walls, possibly knock down walls you've already made, and pay your expensive workers for being under contract for longer.
I want to stress this: There is almost no cost for failure in card design. The penalty is so low that you can use failure as a method of designing cards. This process is called Iteration, where you change a card after it's been made to fix issues highlighted with feedback.
The full iterative process is:
* 1) Create something.
* 2) Test it and gather feedback.
* 3) Tweak that something.
* 4) Repeat steps 2 and 3 until you're happy with it.
Good card designers can do this in their head several times a minute, and good game developers can do this process many times a month. The faster you iterate - a so-called Iterative Rate - The faster you'll make good cards, and failure is a key part of iteration. This is because actual feedback, especially actual playtest data, is more useful than theorycrafting in your head. The faster you iterate, the faster you get feedback.
That, coupled with it being extremely difficult to make perfect cards on the first try, means you shouldn't bother trying to make the best cards possible on your first pass. Paradoxically in order to make perfect cards, you need to embrace failure and imperfection. Fast iteration also means that any failures you make are rectified quickly, which is why fast iteration is often called a Fail Faster mentality.
This Fail Faster mentality has other benefits as well. Because failure has no penalty you can be very risky with your designs. Pits of the Umberlords (Pack) has a bunch of very strange and diverse mechanics, which is why it's thus far my favorite pack. If I was scared of failure, or if I was worried about getting things perfect, I would have never made mechanics as wacky as Gladiators and Crowd's Favour which make the pack stand out. Creative endeavours are inherently risky, and risk implies failure.
But, failure still hurts. It's never a good feeling to have something you've put your time into not panning out. Newer designers will pour their soul into their designs, growing a tremendous emotional attachment to the hard work and time they've put in to create it. This behavior, while very natural, is an obstacle to iteration - You will be scared to change your darling design if it doesn't work. You will be scared to kill your babies. You will be scared to fail, which means you will fail slowly. Kill your darlings if they're not working - You will stop growing an attachment to your designs as , which will help you iterate faster.
Finally, while I've been over the top about how you suck and will fail, that's purely as a teaching device and is not behavior to be replicated. Being told your work sucks... sucks. No one wants to be told that, and ensure that when giving feedback that your feedback is constructive and positive, no matter the quality of the dumpster fire you're giving feedback on. Someone's work being bad is no excuse for you to behave badly.
== Note 1: Game development is a multidisciplinary field ==
For people new to game development, they often have inspiring visions of being the next Toby Fox or Notch of the world. We've all been there; I certainly have, and I'm here to tell you that these people are freakish rarities. Aspiring to be one will make you worse at your craft.
Video Games are one of the most complicated things humans have created. This is not because they're difficult to create, although they are, but rather because of the sheer amount of different things that go into making a game, many of which are underappreciated. For example:
If you've ever gone through the credits of a so called Triple-A game, this diversity of tasks is why they're so extremely long. No one can be talented at all of these things at once. I would argue you shouldn't even try.
There's a basic economic reason behind this complexity. As Adam Smith, the father of economics notes, consider how much time it would take you to make a single iron nail if you were to start from scratch, doing everything yourself. You'd have to:
* Dig the iron out of the ground;
* Smelt the iron;
* Forge the iron into a shape of a nail.
That's a lot of work for just one nail, and that nail probably wouldn't be strong! You're doing three very different jobs after all. Now imagine that instead of one person doing these three jobs, three people did one of these jobs each and share. Because they're spending all their time on that single job, they can specialize and get really good at it, meaning the digger gets more ore, the smelter makes better iron more efficiently, and the blacksmith makes nails faster and stronger. If you want to be competitive in the modern economy, you need to master a small handful of skills, rather than slightly learn many.
The current team of BLOX Cards has three main people. One of them is very good at programming, one of them is great at animations and art, and then there's me. On my end, I am a game designer, specifically a holistic system designer, who specialises in the design and playtesting of trading card game engines. I do some UX design, some 3D modelling, and some coding, but only to round out any skill gaps the team has, and nowhere near as well as someone who specialises in those fields.
This of course means that you're likely going to be in a team, and a team requires you to meet other people and communicate with them. Do you want to know the most important skill for a team? It's something very banal - Communication. Communication is the single most important skill in game development, and you're going to be doing a lot of it. Personally, the one thing I struggle with the most is follow-through, or asking people that the tasks I've asked them to do are being done.
Finally, yes, there are the Toby Foxes, Notches, and Daniel Mullinii of this world who create amazing projects almost single-handedly. What you'll notice is that their games have small scope and often use a bunch of premade assets (that's free models for the ROBLOX folk out there.) You can beat all of Undertale and Inscyption in a single sitting, and Minecraft before Mojang was made in response to its popularity was very, very small. Most games are not that small a scope, especially eternally updated TCGs.
== Note 2: Beware your Creeps ==
Do you want to know how to kill a card game?
It's not boring effects, it's not OP cards. It's Power Creep and Complexity Creep.
As more cards are added, decks inevitably get more powerful. This is power creep. Note that this is inevitable; you can slow down power creep to such a crawl where it'll take years for it to actually kill a card game, but it WILL eventually kill a card game. If you want to know why card games rotate their cards so you can't use them forever, this is the the reason why (beyond money). The reason why it destroys games is because eventually, you'll have to print absurd cards just to keep up, which will make turn one kills the norm - and then how do you make stronger cards?
Complexity Creep is the same idea for complexity; as more cards get added, the game gets more complex. This is because you not only have to memorize more cards, you also have to memorize board states. Complexity Creep is not inevitable; You can remove complex effects, make cards easier to understand, and remove tons of triggers on the board. You'll actually see it's more fun that way because there's less stuff you have to keep track of.
Whilst power creep destroys competitive events, complexity creep destroys new players. Complexity Creep is ultimately more dangerous, as you can just ban cards or purposefully play weaker decks. You can't just add in new players.
== Note 3: Why do people play card games? ==
There are three overall reasons to play card games. I will call these The Experience, The Expression, and The Extermination. That's the 3 Ex's for mnemonics. Each player appreciates these three core aspects to different degrees.
The Experience: These players play for a thrill. You know those cards with absurd, over the top effects like Jeeeeesus and Priestess Zanzel, the Promised One? These cards are designed to cause thrills, and are designed for players who play for the experience. Cards that do good on this end are cards that simply make you go "wow" if seen or played. Rad is a good example at the common level.
The Expression: Have you ever played against someone who made a yellow control deck? How about taking a gimmicky card like Fenrier or Treas0ner and making a ridiculous combo out of it? These people play for the expression. Players like to express their creativity or their love for certain objects. Archetypes usually do well under this regard. To design for the expression, add in secret, hidden cards such as Pancake Break, and make sure that players who want to play gimmicky decks don't have their dreams utterly crushed and burnt.
The Extermination: These players play to challenge themselves. These players want you to know that they're skillful and enjoy proving themselves. Cards such as Crazycaleb77, Deadeye, Mr.O the Traveling Merchant, NerfModder, and Titano's Cavern are all examples of cards designed for these players. And yes, you do have to design for these players; they won't just be happy playing the best cards. You need to make sure the best cards and strongest decks are all challenging and stimulating to play with and against.
The big lesson is this: Not every card is made for every person. Some cards that people hate are cards that other people love.
There's a second note here. For this example, I'll use Trick or Treat:
Both players summon a random fighter.
Trick or Treat is not a very strong card, and has equally a high chance of making you instantly win as it does making you instantly lose. However, Experiencers love Trick or Treat for its weird shenanigans and amusing board states.
For the exact same reason Experiencers love it, Exterminators hate it. They can't play around it or make interesting choices - sometimes, this will steal a game out of nowhere, and they have no ability to control it. Back when this summoned tokens, I once had to deal with a turn 1 Forgotten One. I was not happy.
With one group of people loving this card, and one group of people hating this card, what do you do? Do you remove it to make the people who hate it happy, or keep it to make the people who love it happy?
I, personally, would go for the second choice. Provided it's not seriously impinging on Exterminator play (Like Delirious Ooze did), then I value people loving the game other people merely liking it. Damn the haters.
== Note 4: What makes a card beautiful? ==
There's also Flavor and Mechanical beauty in cards.
For an example in mechanical beauty, look at Luckymaxer:
500/200
Put four Mechanical Spiders into your hand.
(Mechanical spiders are blue 200/200 tokens that don't generate studs)
This is an extremely simple effect. It may not look like too much, but watch this:
Because the spiders go into your hand, you can hold them back. If your opponent board wipes, you play four spiders and laugh.
Assume for a moment that your opponent has a massive fighter but nothing else. Luckymaxer keeps you alive for five turns; you just play one spider a turn.
You can discard the spiders to generate studs. Sure, a 200/200 on its own isn't that good, but if you discard two spiders, you get 600 power on the board and get to play, say, Korblox Archer.
Because the spiders enter play, they trigger OnAllySummon effects such as CalmFoxz. And because it's a token generator, cards such as Qdhxx turn this already powerful card into something insane.
All of these wondrous plays from seven words. Not bad, Eh?
This is known as Elegance, and is the holy grail of card design. Elegance is when a card has small amounts of text (is easy to understand), but does hundreds of different things. Or, more broadly, when something has tons of depths and does a lot, but is actually very little in terms of size. Other examples of elegant cards include Qdhxx, CalmFoxz, Clockwork, Eye of Heaven. An example of an inelegant card would be Brickmason.
Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing else to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. Remove unnecessary aspects of cards.
What about Flavor? This one's tricky, because one of BLOX Cards' most lacking areas is beauty in flavor. This is easy to understand, as Flavor is a strange concept to put into words. I'll list some examples.
There are two kinds of Flavor: Thematic Flavor, and Ludonarrative Flavor.
We'll be using Biostream as our example for thematic flavor.
1000/350
Put three cards from Hexaria into your hand. One increases health by 300, one increases power by 300, one decreases power by 300.
Hexaria is a turn-based RPG with some card game elements. This card attempts to recreate Hexaria by taking three of Hexaria's cards and putting them into BLOX Cards. This is thematic and on-flavor. This card is generally liked because of this.
While uncommon, it's perfectly fine to take a theme ("Zombies", "Hexaria"), and create a card using mechanics that match the flavor. This is known as a top-down design, while the more common method of mechanics into themes is bottom-up.
Ludonarrative, on the other hand, is best described as how the card's gameplay tells a story. An even stranger concept, we'll be using Glaciem Mage to explain.
400/300
Lock a target fighter for 2 turns.
All frost mages befriend a toothy deer from birth. This teaches them not to give random animals frostbite.
Glaciem Mage locks a fighter for 2 turns. Let me ask you a question: Why? Of all of the effects we could've given the mage, why did we give it the ability to lock?
The answer is because it's an ice mage. The locking represents the mage freezing a target for two turns with its ice magic. This is known as Ludonarrative flavor; the gameplay itself matching the flavor. Note that you can use the same basic gameplay element for different effects; Subata, for example, locks himself while he prepares his weapons to attack. Police officers lock fighters to signify arresting people.
BLOX Cards sucks on flavor. For example:
600/400
After this card attacks, deal 200 damage to who it attacked.
Why does Pyramid Head, a psychological villain from Silent Hill, do what it does?
As the creator of the effect, It seemed like a fun effect and I was under tons of pressure to create 110 cards in 3 hours. Sorry!
ADDENDUM: I'm also going to add another category: Ludo-aesthetics.
Take Cindering:
600/600
Haste. Whenever Cindering enters play or dies, deal 600 damage to your opponent.
Did you notice what's special about this card?
600 health. 600 power. Costs 6 red. Deals 600 damage to your opponent. Has a 6 in its tier box. Has a hexagon in its stud box (SOON™️)
People find this amusing and constantly joke about the card really being called "sixdering"; this was entirely intentional. I actually wanted the card to deal 1500 damage on summon, but in order to not violate the aesthetic of Cindering, I decided to simply give Cindering a 600 damage trigger twice for roughly the same effect.
If Cindering costed 5 or 7 studs, I would be getting a lot of complaints from people with OCD - More so than the questionable power level of the card.
Sometimes, the look of card stats, studs, and effects themselves can be aesthetically pleasing. This generally happens when the numbers repeat ("Sixdering"), the numbers ascending or descending (As an example, a 1-cost 200/200 that makes you gain 300 life), doubling (Indoorsnowball's 1,2,4,8 pattern). This can even manifest in multiple cards - The Mythic shadows have a common that costs 3, an uncommon that costs 2, and a rare that costs 1.
Another example is not having a bio. For very simple effects like Eye of Heaven (60 red, You win the game) not having a bio can add a layer of style, class, and boldness. We typically don't do this because people wonder where the bio is - and only for very short, stylish effects.
== Note 4.5: Flavor Justifies Everything ==
A warning to people that flavor and aesthetics in cards are not as important as mechanics. This is a problem because you can use flavor to justify anything if you try hard enough.
There are some things that colors are not allowed to do. Green, for example, isn't allowed to draw cards, because it's the control color and the control has to be weak early on. Drawing cards makes its control - and its aggro - stronger than it's allowed.
"Primal Harmony" - "Draw two cards". That's a very flavorful green card I've just created. That does not, however, make it allowed.
Blue isn't allowed to deal damage to players or enemies.
"Ice bullets" - "Deal 200 damage to a target creature." Flavorful. Not allowed.
Also note that flavor can be used to justify dissonant flavor. For example, one of my pet peeves are guns and robots and cars in green. It's the color of nature, and life, and manipulating the primal forces. Robots are not alive and guns are not natural.
But you could say that that robot is tending to nature, or that that gun is being used to fend off werewolves from the farm. Which is ugly.
== Note 5: Design Destroys Design ==
Here's two cards. These are both good designs, but let's see if you can figure out the problem with them.
Bonesmccormick 		Plushie Santa
300/100 		2000/0
Whenever you gain life, generate a targeting blip and BonesMcCormick gains 100 health and power.		Whenever this card is targeted, you gain 500 life and put a random yellow card into your hand.
Oops! You just made an Infinite combo! Damario just broke the game again!
Now, the interesting thing here is that Alone, both cards are perfectly safe. Together, though... Ew. This is an example of design destroying design; some cards are simply incompatible with other cards. In short, You can't have both.
When you get into this sort of situation, ask yourself if there's a way to preserve both cards - we could remove the blip from Bones, for example. If that isn't solvable, experiment with both, and see which one leads to better gameplay.
There are more subtle ways this manifests. For example, one of my current issues is if Blue should have lifegain. If it has lifegain, it dramatically hurts burn decks. If it doesn't have lifegain, that makes lifegain decks monogreen, which they shouldn't be. I can only choose one; which one should it be?
== Note 6: Accretion ==
The Ultimate Answer is a blue/red deck that existed for around a month at November 2015. It was an OTK deck that drew cards constantly until it had Thunder Bolt/Luck o The Lobsters, Jayson13, 2 AVote, and Fuchsia Eyes Red Dragon. (Fuchsia Eyes Red Dragon was very similar to Cindering back in the day.) It's called The Ultimate Answer because it was unbeatable if you didn't play dedicated lifegain.
It got there by spamming cards that lock all fighters for some turns.
Back in the day, only IcyTea locked everything. Then came along Blue Eyes Indigo Dragon. Then came along Tiny Tank's two turn lock. Then came along Police Combatant. Then came along Hideaki. With just 9 cards, we've managed to lock for around 15 turns. Chuck in some FatherChristmaz, some Infernal Acolyte/The Stalker, some card draw, and some targeted locking, and you can see the problem. There were too many cards that locked everything.
Now, there are tons of cards that lock now, yes. More, even. But the lock is much less consistent and there are gaps... For now. If we add more locks, dedicated lock decks like this will sprout up again. As a result, we aren't allowed to make new cards that lock everything without making sure we don't add to the pile and make The Ultimate Answer again. This concept - that we need to limit the amount of effects that do a thing - is known as Accretion. It gradually accumulates.
Different effects have an upper limit on how much they can accrete. Preventing cards from being counterattacked is an insanely powerful effect - it's only allowed on a handful of cards.
== Note 7: Interesting =/= Fun ==
I'm going to talk to you about Ultras.
Ultras are an archetype that completely ignore studs and color. Instead, Ultras care about the amount of Ultras in play, with the really scary Ultras only coming out when there's plenty of smaller ones. The smaller ones remove all your colored studs so you can't use them as free fighters, and these are all black fighters because they don't generate studs.
Sounds interesting, doesn't it? It's intellectually stimulating. What exactly do Ultras look like? There could be so many pitfalls with making such a design. How do you reward such a payoff? Are they aggro or midrange? Oh, can I make a turbo deck with them? So many questions to shake my hand off t-
Is it fun?
A classic mistake is to get so caught up in how something is interesting that you forget to think if it's fun. Those two can overlap, but aren't the same. Some designs can be considered masturbatory - they're there to be interesting and nothing else. Avoid these, for they don't add to the game.
Games are meant to be fun. Do not lose sight of that.
== Note 8: Fair/Unfair decks ==
Borrowing some more MTG terminology, there are what are known as Fair and Unfair decks. I REALLY hate the names for these two types of decks, so I'll be calling them intended and unintended decks instead.
Fair/Intended Decks are decks that play the game the way it's "meant to be played". These decks care about card advantage, generating studs, hitting the opponent's face, or fatigue. The vast majority of decks are Intended.
Unfair/Unintended Decks are decks that exploit a certain aspect of how a card functions to win the game. A quick test to check if a deck is unfair is "If I remove a single card from the game, does the deck cease to exist?" If the answer is yes, you have an unintended deck. Examples include innocuous things such as Eye of Heaven and InceptionTime, to combo decks such as Reese Combo and Turbo, to glitches such as Suicide and any deck Damario builds. Note that unintended decks are not necessarily a combo deck, although all combo decks are unintended.
The reason they're called fair and unfair is because little kids tend to look at unfair decks and say "Hey, that's not fair!" The problem is that there are "fair" decks, such as rainbow midrange and the ultimate answer, which are absolutely unfair (With RM, you start with 6 more studs than your opponent, and with the ultimate answer, your opponent can't play the game.), and there are "unfair" decks, such as Kariu Miracle and Green/Yellow Mill, which are completely balanced and allowed. This is why I prefer intended and unintended; Decks like the ultimate answer are unfair, but they play the game in a way it was intended. Kariu miracle isn't how you're supposed to play the game, but it's fair.
"Fairness" is a spectrum. For example, Monoblue aggro is a more intended deck than Dust, which is a more intended deck than Caverns, which is a more intended deck than Kariu Miracle.
Both Intended and Unintended decks are fine, but you want unintended decks to be relatively rare. Let's compare the two:
Intended 	Unintended
Is more interactive - two intended decks poke and jab at each other.	
 	Is more creative - It requires skill to find unintended decks, yet alone make them good.
 	Are harder to counter - with the most powerful decks of this kind, you need very specific cards to answer them.
 	Are more binary - You either do your stupid combo and instantly win out of nowhere, or you fail to do your stupid combo and whiff completely.
Have caution with unintended decks; the strongest unintended decks will always be stronger than the strongest intended ones, and as time goes by, the more these decks appear.
Let's not have a repeat of Dredge, folks.
-Looks at Stormchaser's Gambit-
== Note 9: The role of Randomness ==
By the very function of shuffling a deck and drawing only a portion of it, card games have randomness embedded into them. Why?
This is a very deep chunk of game design theory, so I can only gloss over this area, but it is the fact that card games have built in randomness into them that has kept them around for 25 years. This begs the question: Why is randomness good? The answer to that is very complex.
While this post has all been about card games, this particular note is about games in general. Games are crafted emotional experiences which are accessed via a challenge. Depending on the emotional experience you wish to create, you will employ different tools to create that effect. Like all things that go into a game, randomness is simply a tool to be used - and the main reason for randomness is surprise. Randomness, when put into a game, creates a mixed bag of effects.
At its most obvious level, randomness is good because it adds variety, making sure that no two games play exactly the same, which in turn removes tedium and repetition. This is the same technique employed by rogue-lite games such as Binding of Isaac and Darkest Dungeon. This is one of the main strengths of card games as a medium, and should be exploited to its maximum potential.
At a subtler level, randomness also allows weaker players to win. This is not necessarily an upside, but should be considered depending on type of game you're creating. In a card game, you need as many people playing as possible, and players (especially ones that have never played a card game before) need a better reason than "git gud" in order to keep playing a game they'll enter losing over and over and over. In a game like chess or go, the fact that the stronger player always wins is the entire point, so these games minimize randomness as much as possible.
Randomness is also openly despised, and for good reason. When implemented poorly or obviously, randomness feels like the game is cheating you out of a hard-earned victory, and that is painful. A traditional trading card game should be player versus player, not player versus game.
With that said, here are some basic tips with randomness:
The floor and ceiling of a random effect should be narrow. The floor is the worst possible outcome, and the ceiling is the best possible outcome. The wider apart the floor and ceiling are, the less control skilled players have over the effect. This distance is often called the delta of randomness (A delta being the mouth of a river.)
Very random cards shouldn't be strong. This way, Exterminators don't feel forced to play random games. Experiencers love random effects and don't care about being optimal.
Avoid tokens of randomness. People really don't like coinflips and dice rolls and percentages because it reminds you that the effect is random. However, they have no issue with shuffling a deck and drawing an opening hand, despite that also being just as, if not more random. This is because it doesn't "feel" random - it's not as obvious as coinflips. If you can, try and find a way to hide the randomness - use weasel words like "sometimes" instead of percentages, for example.
== Note 10: Acclimated Complexity ==
Here's a story that's been passed around the dev team.
Once, a very popular roblox youtuber played our game. He played a few games, and quit the game in frustration due to the game's bugs.
One of these "bugs" was with a card called StayBlue.
Health/Power:700/700
Effect: StayBlue can't attack.
He attacked with StayBlue... And it just locked itself. Nothing happened. This made him pretty irate. Why couldn't he attack with StayBlue? It's a fighter, this game is broken as hell!
Now, if you're reading this, you probably know why. It's just a simple issue of reading the card. StayBlue's effect is that it can't attack, therefore it can't attack.
But, our YouTuber was at such a low level of experience that he didn't read effects, or even understand that effects existed. As funny as the situation is, and as easy as it is to call our friend here stupid, he isn't. The issue is he hasn't acclimated to this game's complexity.
This may sound very obvious, but it's important: People don't understand games they've just picked up. BLOX Cards, in general, fails to realize this. This game is very, very bad at teaching newcomers.
However, even experienced players can stumble on some of the more complex cards. Take, for example, Revelling Satyr:
This is a card with four different forms with four different abilities, none of which are explained in advance. When this card came out, even people who have been playing the game for a very long time struggled to fully understand the card. Now, of course, people understand it and similar effects are fine... For the pros.
This note urges people to be cautious about complexity, removing it where possible. Charges and Targeting are two effects that most players struggle to learn, despite how obvious it may seem to veterans.
== Note 11: Card Power ==
So when it comes to power, there's a few things to take note:
First off, there's two kinds of power.
Vacuum power is simply the power level of a card in a vacuum, without considering any other card. At least in the very high-end of cards, this has actually gone down - The very best modern cards are worse than merely top-tier cards of yore, such as old Korblox Archer, Korblox Deathknight, MahBucket, AntiSammeh, Valletta, Eye of Overseer, StickMasterLuke.
Metagame power is the power of a card in relation to a deck. This is a much harder thing to stifle, because the power level of decks increases naturally over time simply by the addition of new cards. There's a joke going around that we just nerf everything - IT'S NERF OR NOTHING - and this is exactly why; despite the overwhelming majority of balance updates being nerfs or straight-up card-death, it's undeniable that the average competitive BLOX Cards deck is stronger than it was, say, a year ago.
You only have a few cards at the insane level of vacuum power, and a few cards at the unwanted trend level of vacuum power - most tend to bulge in the middle. But because these cards are weaker than top 25% (A general estimate), they don't see use.
Here's the thing: Buffing a card does not necessarily increase the number of cards that can be played. Take, for example, a simple card like ThatGrimGuy. ThatGrimGuy is a very good card. But it's only good because there's no better card for ThatGrimGuy's niche. The existence of ThatGrimGuy effectively "bans" ("bans" in the sense that they'll never see serious play) several cards, but if you buff a card to be equally as good (pretty much impossible), or stronger, then all you've accomplished is changing nothing, or making ThatGrimGuy unplayable.
And that's just a simple card. What about the really complicated, niche cards, like Deadeye?
Or Hallow's Treats?
Or Traumatic Clown?
Or Clockwork?How many cards do you think these "ban?" Would buffing these cards unban those cards, or simply unban them and "ban" a different set?
== Note 12: Investment ==
Investment is my personal lens and philosophy when it comes to designing cards.
First off, before we can talk about investment, we have to talk about advantages. There are several kinds of advantages in this game:
* Stud Advantage. The person with the most stud has an stud advantage. Cards that give stud advantage tend to cost no colored Studs, such as TheChakraTree, FuryBlocks, and the acolytes.
* Board Advantage. The person with the stronger board has board advantage. Cards that give board advantage either destroy cards or have good stats. Take note that thanks to BC's board-centric rules, this type of advantage is far stronger than others.
* Card Advantage. The person with the most cards (total in board and hand) has card advantage. Cards that give you card advantage make you draw cards, X-1 your opponent (see Korblox Archer, Dodgeball Player Red), or create tokens.
* Inevitability. The person who is more likely to win as the game goes long has inevitability. In order to gain inevitability, draw less cards, put powerful control wincons in your deck (Myrmiredon, Skeleton Armada), and focus on stud advantage.
* Tempo Advantage. Tempo is a very hard concept to explain, but it refers to exploiting time-sensitive moments and plays. A person can use small stun effects and combat tricks in order to gain tempo advantage. Cheap cards also help with tempo.
* Consistency. Another advantage is deck consistency. An effect you have to build around in order to be good, as well as parasitic cards (archetypes), are allowed to have stronger effects than non-parasitic cards because they've paid the investment of consistency.
All these advantages are interconnected, for obvious reasons.
The prime tenet of Investment is simple: When you are trying to gain advantage in one field, you should have to give up the ability to gain advantage in another. Or, to put it simply, by playing something, you have to give up something else.
A great example of a well-designed card using the lens of investment would be the acolytes. Acolytes cost 4 white, meaning they have a steep tempo loss. They don't have attack (usually), meaning they don't contribute to the board. However, they do set up stud advantage.
A great example of a poorly-designed card using the lens of investment would be the first few iterations of Sylrath.
* Sylrath was a 100/400 that's cheap and costs no colored Studs, making it good for board advantage and stud advantage.
* Sylrath drew a card when it entered play and could 2-1 rather easily, making it great for card advantage.
* Sylrath was cheap and could trade up with stronger cards, making it decent for tempo advantage.
* Sylrath costed 2C, meaning any deck could play it, making it incredibly easy to place into a deck, meaing it did not have any consistency investment.
What was Sylrath "giving up", exactly? It suffered with inevitability, but only extremely grindy control decks that use BlackSymphony or Myrmiredon care about that. We call cards that have no investment "safe." Safe cards should necessarily be weaker than cards that have high investment. Safe cards, however, are allowed to exist - Pillager is such an example.
The benefits of having high-investment cards its that it adds higher levels of decision making in deckbuilding and the game. It makes each resource matter more as only a handful of your cards can create that resource. It also allows more cards to see play, as it enables a higher variety of cards to have a niche that they're good at, because there's less cards that do everything you'd want out of a card. 
== Note 13: The Fog of Balance ==
Imagine you've made a new set of cards and you want to playtest them. You get a group of friends and privately playtest them with vigour for a whole month.
How many games do you believe that is?
Now imagine you release these cards, and people buy packs and test 'em out.
How many games do you believe are played in the first day? Is it more or less than the amount of games you've playtested?
The answer is that, when a set releases, more games will be played with that set than will be played by the entire testing team in the first day. For larger games like hearthstone, it could be more than the first hour or even the first minute. Your players will know far more about the game than you ever will. To further complicate matters, you're trying to make a game that can evolve over time - If you know what the best deck is, your players will find it out in seconds. In order for the format to have a chance at not being solved, it has to be so difficult to crack that the person who's building it can't discover the best strategy by themselves. How can you balance sometrhing like this?
Oddly enough, how many people play a game has an effect on how balanced that game is - The less people play a game, the more tolerant to imbalances the game can be. Given how a single error in balancing can radically alter the game - You missing a key interaction, or a card failing to be a good counter to a powerful strategy, or plain old lapses in insight - With limited insight and no room for error with a larger game, how can you possibly balance a card game?
I provide to you an interesting answer: Don't bother.
While you can't balance the game, what you can do is make basic predictions about the metagame - What general strategies will be good, what counts as skillful gameplay, and maybe a handful of pillar cards (such as lobster and 2hex) that clearly help up certain decks. You don't know what the game will end up as, but you can have a rough idea of a couple splinters of possibility your game introduces.
Instead of trying to fully balance the game, instead aim to make sure that each possible manifestation of the metagame has skillful, rewarding gameplay, as well as deep choices in deckbuilding.
There will likely always be a singular best deck, but as long as it's not blatantly too strong,  and that deck promotes skullful and rewarding gameplay, is it truly a huge problem?
The main way you can encourage this is to balance cards based on how well they uphold the qualities of "fun" - The most enjoyable way to play a game should be the best way, so it makes sense to try to put your emphasis on making sure that the more enjoyable cards are powerful.
Another way you can encourage this is by designing less extreme effects. An extreme card, such as Mzh3000, Telamon, MyCutenessKills (MCK), and such, are cards with a very powerful effect locked behind some drawback - Telamon has an insane cost, Mzh3000 requires your opponent to have a full board, and MCK requires you to build your deck in a very specific way.
There is a time and place for extreme effects - Telamon is a very cool card, and MCK's extremeness enables an entire deck on its own. However, because of how extreme the card is, any error in its balance will be magnified. If there's an error in a modest card like Blockerwiz or SharpTH, it won't be a huge error, and the card will only be slightly worse or slightly better than you anticipate.. If there's an errror in MCK, it could completely change the card from being completely useless to format-warping. In short, you better be sure that your extreme effect is perfectly balanced, which is very hard given your lack of information and inherent inability to perfectly see the game.
== Note 14. Threats and answers ==
Necrosyndicates A1 has been fun, hasn't it? A month in, and while I think it's my best work overall as a designer that achieves every design goal I had for the set and more, it's also had a lot of effects on the blox cards metagame I don't believe are positive. Today, I'd like to ramble about those effects.
There's a lot of very powerful, format-defining cards in NS; Portable Translator drawing a card every turn, Animal Experimentation Kit taking over games, Pent-Up Pentagenarian creating strong locks. There's some stinker designs in the set, and I'm going to spend this time to complain about what I think the worst one is. As a reminder, while power level is part of what makes designs good or bad, as a designer I have to hope that all of my work sees play in some context, and so I'm more focused on what play patterns cards foster, as well as their effect on deckbuilding and the metagame. A card is well-designed in my eyes if it's dynamic from game to game, encourages interesting deckbuilding, has good metagame effects, and promotes good play patterns.
The target of our ire today is Pawesome Party, a 4-white 500/300 green common. A fairly innocuous card. When it's cast, you summon two 100/100 Zombified Catgirls. When it dies, if four fighters have ever died during one of your turns, you summon two more 100/100 Zombified Catgirls.
The card exists to help PLURRAL set up for Bliss, and then reward the deck later on if it's in Bliss. This is standard design for starter cards. So what makes Pawesome Party so pernicious? To explain this, I'll need to talk about Threat Hierarchy.
Threats are any card that can feasibly win the game. Most cards are threats given most cards are fighters that can attack, but there are also more weird examples like Soul Release, a way for control decks to win, and Nevermore, an action that wins the game from the hand. 
Obviously threats should be stopped, so to help you do that the game also has answers; Answers stop threats from being threats. Byte is the cleanest, archetypical example of an answer, with cards like Thoughtgnaw for Nevermore and Melon_Desu for Terrain as other examples. (There are also answerthreats which play both roles, cards like Chuckling Arsonist or Redrune Raider, but we'll ignore those for now. They're fine in small doses, but unhealthy for the game in large doses.)
There is tension between threats and answers for a variety of reasons:
# There's lots of different threats, and lots of different answers for those threats. Rad doesn't care about transformation like Your_Name but hates destruction from Byte, while VetexGames doesn't care about destruction but hates transformation. When a single answer answers with the threatening part of a card completely. we call that a "clean answer." Your_Name answers VetexGames cleanly.
# The stud cost of the answer and the threat, especially the white cost, matters in who wins the exchange. BuzzHamtaro and Rad are similarly statted yet BuzzHamtaro shrugs off Byte much easier than Rad does, due to costing only a single red stud. Being forced to use Byte on BuzzHamtaro is kind of sad even, as it means the BuzzHamtaro player is able to save white studs for later turns or use those unused red studs to play another threat and overwhelm Byte. This is why powerful AoE effects always cost a large amount of white studs, to ensure the person doing the board wipe can't easily accrue tempo in doing so.
# How much a card cares about being answered.
Threats can be split into four categories based on how their apathy to removal.
* 1) Static value. Beat sticks like Rad. Cards that may accrue stats, but are ultimately just beat sticks like Angry Local.
* 2) No immediate value, but accrues value over time. Portable Translator. Redcliff Enforcer. Lezus. VetexGames. Rageborne.
* 3) Immediate value. Practically any oncast effect. Card draw in the form of Soul Release. Hasty cards like BenCanova1. Actions. Token generation like Gangmanstyle556.
* 3.5) Answerthreats. (These are especially good at shrugging off removal as they are removal in their own right, and thus especially disliked, but they're still tier 3 cards and they're beyond the scope of this lecture.)
* 4) Cards resilient to removal. Silver_Semtexagon. Cothran Rider Knight. All terrains. Cards that don't enter play, like Deep Space Loan Shark or Nevermore.
One way to think about this is how good casting a humble Byte is against these tiers. Tier 1 cards are weak to Byte, especially if they cost more studs than Byte. Their way of dealing with Byte is to bait it out with other cards or gamble the opponent doesn't have it. Tier 2 cards don't like Byte, but if they've struck around for a turn they're usually okay with it. Cards like VetexGames dislike transform or bounce effects rather than destruction effects, but the same principle applies. Tier 3 cards don't care if they're scripthed. Sure, it hurts them, but they've already drawn cards or killed something. Tier 4 cards want you to have scripth, because it's a dead card against them. They get stronger the more removal you play.
So we're clear, The tension between threats and answers is a great thing, and is one of the fundamental components that makes BLOX Cards exciting to play. Not knowing if they have removal, trying to wiggle your way around their removal to land a powerful Rad, or slamming one down and praying it doesn't get removed. There's tension, drama, all the things you want in a card game. It's something that as a designer you should want in your designs as much as possible.
Tier 1 threats are the best tier from a design standpoint; A card like Rad is simple and plays dynamically due to how it interacts with various removal. Sometimes Rad trades with three fighters and takes over the game. Sometimes it kills Rad after Rad's killed something. Sometimes you play Byte on Rad immediately and, because Byte costs less, it's actively worse for your opponent than if they had never played Rad at all.
However, tier 1 is the worst tier from a power level standpoint; Each tier is stronger than the one below it. Why play Rad when you can play a Rad that draws cards? Why play a Rad that draws cards over time when you can play a Rad that draws cards immediately?
This means that, as a designer, I want tier 1 threats to be playable and powerful due to how dynamic they are from game to game. This means that I want to encourage lots of tier 1 cards, many tier 2s, some tier 3s, and a smattering of tier 4s. (Having cards of all tiers see play creates dynamic effects with removal in its own right, which is why small doses of high-tier cards are completely fine.)
To loop this back to Pawesome Party, there's no tension in it. This card is a tier 3 threat, bordering on tier 4. There is no commonly played answer that cleanly answers Pawesome Party.
* It doesn't care if it's hit by Byte because it's already summoned two Zombified Catgirls, and will summon two more if you Byte it.
* It doesn't care if you transform or lock it with cards like Your_Name because it's already summoned two Zombified Catgirls.
* It doesn't care about AoE like Langz because if it dies it'll summon two Zombified Catgirls, and its 500 health means it rarely will die to it anyway
* It super doesn't care about bouncing or injecting because it's already summoned two Zombified Catgirls, and then will summon two more.
* The only clean answer to Pawesome Party is an AoE effect that doesn't trigger death effects, which definitely has a total stud cost of 5 or more, and probably has 4 or more colorless studs in it.
To top this all off, Bliss as a deck wants to set up its win condition, Bliss, as quickly as possible. Pawesome Party is nowhere near as powerful as the cards we nerfed to hit the deck in Tour Ship Stowaway and Raving Rascal, but it still has the play pattern of forcing your opponent to immediately be able to stop you proccing Bliss. So it's a card that enables Bliss quickly, while also being nigh-impossible to answer cleanly. This is a nasty combination of effects that I believe is the root of why people are calling Bliss a linear strategy. (You ever seen Excited Bouncer in control decks? You're calling that linear? ok nerd)
Additionally, because the card is of a high threat tier, it causes the accretion issue of lots of cards in high tiers making tier 1 cards bad. One solution a designer can use for lots of tier 3/4 cards is to print better removal, and in such an environment why bother playing a tier 1 statstick like Blockerwiz that dies to removal when you can play Pawesome Party instead?
On a tangent, I've come to realize just how pernicious tokens are to throw around, and how they clog the game down far too much when used in the numbers that decks like PLURRAL are wanting. One of blue's weaknesses is its answers tend to all be single-target; It's got bad AoE. This is an extremely sound restriction given blue's powerful card draw and boardstate-independent answers like locking and bouncing. Couple this with Blue's weak stats and lack of want to flood the board, and this turns Pawesome Party into about as perfect a counter for Blue you could ask for. While tokens are nominally bad cards, If you have six cards in play and your opponent has two, they can only kill two of your cards. This matters for PLURRAL where you want sheer quantity of cards which is answered by your opponent's own swarm of cards, and Pawesome Party forcing a fast response from a color unable to do so creates frustrating games.
There's been murmurings that Blue is the worst color right now. While I agree (but think the claims are overstated; Blue is still completely playable), cards like Pawesome Party which demand a fast, multi-card board state to answer is the core reason for Blue's woes. 
Finally, for as much as I've ragged on it, I'm not changing Pawesome Party. I dislike changing cards unless they're too strong or too unfun, and Pawesome Party is unfortunately neither of those things. It's an evocative card that sells you exactly on what PLURRAL is meant to do as a deck. If I was to change it, I'd replace the death trigger with the oncast giving a small AoE buff if you're in Bliss, so that way that card cleanly dies to Langz or AoE depower or such.
== Note 15: The Metagame Clock ==
There is a fundamental tension at the heart of Blox Cards; Expensive cards are more powerful when cast than cheaper cards, yet they can only be played later. This has a lot of subtle effects on the game.
If you want to reliably defeat most value-orinted decks, say Monored, one way you can do so is simply by playing ever so slightly more expensive cards than it, because those cards are expensive and expensive cards are better. Kamov is a good card, but Korblox Archmage mocks it. ChaoticCommando is well-statted, but not as well as Krocostar. At the same time, while Krocostar and Archmage are great cards, they're terrible compared to Ancestral Martyr and Forest's Final Defence.
At the extreme end of this dynamic where you play slightly more expensive cards, you have control decks, which plays much more expensive cards than other decks to the point that they're happy to have games take 12 or more turns just so they can hardcast Ancestral Martyr or Shirozaru.
To counter these slow decks, You can eschew all of your expensive cards, aiming to kill as quickly as possible by vomiting cards onto the board. These are aggro decks, the natural punishment for overflowing your deck with better expensive cards, and creates a deckbuilding challenge; Slower decks need to balance a line between playing more expensive cards and winning faster games, while also playing enough cheap/reactive cards to not get punished by aggressive strategies.
From the simple fact that expensive cards are better and slower, three distinct decks have emerged:
# Fast decks with no expensive cards (beatdown);
# Steady decks with some expensive cards (midrange);
# Slow decks with many expensive cards (control).
Slow decks are beaten by fast decks due to dying before they can cast their cards. Fast decks are beaten by steady decks, which can interact quickly and have a few expensive cards that mop up aggro decks. Steady decks are usually not fast enough to kill slow decks before they bury them in expensive cards. This rock-paper-scissors matchup is known as the metagame clock, and is a fundamental part of any card game with a resource system.
An important part to note is that these deck speeds are relative; The faster deck in a matchup is the beatdown, while the slower deck is the control. The longer the game goes on, the more expensive cards are cast, the more likely the control deck in that matchup will win. Korblox are a steady deck that exploits this relative deckspeed to their advantage. They are slower than a lot of decks and against those have to play like a control deck, slowing down the board and surviving until they can stick an Archmage down and win from there. However, Korblox are not as slow as a deck like GB control; While Korblox Archmage is a strong card, it's terrible in the face of Grimclaw the Sacred or Shirozaru. Against these slow decks, Korblox switches into beatdown, oftentimes employing cards like Arte71 to deliver sudden bursts of damage, or cards like gravity coil which punish expensive cards. This ability to switch between beatdown or control equally well is the definition of a midrange deck. 
Owing to this inherent metagame, expensive cards intentionally being the strongest cards in the game tends to lead to healthy results, and also allows players to more freely choose what types of games they want to play and engage in.
== Note 16: Curve Compression and Removal Checks ==
Now take everything you've read in note 15 and shoot it out the back because Gentlemaniac exists.
This metagame clock makes the assumption that expensive cards ARE actually better than cheaper cards, which is a very large assumption. For obvious reasons, being expensive is bad. A card being cheap is always better than a card being expensive. If a deck can get away with playing nothing but cheap cards, it's correct for it to do so, even if it's a value-oriented control deck.
One area this manifests is through cantripping fighters and card draw. A card like Beebo or M3soSad are secretly also expensive cards, because you can cast them and immediately cast what you draw from it. If you can play a lot of cheap cards that draw into each other and provide about as much value as an expensive card, why play expensive cards? This feature is curve compression - Decks playing cheaper and cheaper cards and using them in tandem to mimic the effects of expensive cards.
But more important to the discussion of gentlemaniac are cards that scale over time. In NSA1, Portable Translator's ability to come down T1 and draw a card every turn was a serious problem, and it also meant it provided more value over the course of the game than an expensive card; If it stayed in play for 3 turns you just played a T1 vetexgames, which is trivially silly and why the card ate two nerfs. Gentlemaniac being a starter has a similar dynamic; Coming down T1 and, over the course of two turns becoming a 1000/400 (or better) while also drawing a large number of chairs makes it do the same job as an expensive card, despite the fact it's a starter. If your starters can do the same job as expensive cards, why play expensive cards?
It's this scaling property in conjunction with its cheapness that makes it particularly pernicious, because it removes many tools decks can use to answer such cards. As a rule, cheap cards shouldn't provide continuous value. As an insane example, take a BB 1000/1000, a trivially overpowered card, and consider how you can deal with it cleanly.
* You can try to scripth it; Per threat hierarchy (see note 14), scripthing something that's drawn 3 or so chairs still puts you behind.
* You can lock the 1000/1000; but that doesn't work on something that draws chairs.
* You can play an even bigger card and try to kill it in combat; But the chairs given by this card naturally shield gentlemaniac from such offense.
The only clean answer to gentlemaniac is an early transform, but even this doesn't help you because it's a starter. If you have a card that reliably wins the game if not answered, cast early, this puts pressure on your opponent to have removal early. We can call this a removal check. Removal checks can be done well and be a healthy part of the game; Massive cards like Faith and Integrity or Grimclaw the Sacred are designed to give you a small window where you can answer them before they run over the game. The problem is the turns these checks happen.
If you want to consistently answer a T1 removal check, a hypergeometric calculation tells us you need 6 answers you can play T1 in your deck in order to do so 80% of the time.
Let's assume these T1 removal checks exist. This means that any deck has to put 6 or more T1 removal spells in order to beat the removal check, massively reducing the number of flexible slots people can play and also forcing even slower decks to play very cheap cards. This creates stressful games as players have to answer dangerous cards immediately, puts agency out of players' hands as they have to hope to draw these removal checks off the mulligan, and most importantly makes casting expensive cards more perilous; If you're going to be dead before you can cast expensive cards, why play expensive cards?
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