Decentralization of power, politic, and organic joy in a revolutionary children's card game

For too long, the Trading Card Game players can feel like they are drowning in endless problems: Greedy marketing, out-of-touch designers, unbalanced meta, too much RNG, too little RNG, too many changes, too little changes… The trading card game community is a wild one that would complain about just anything. Yet, most of the players do not understand the complexities of game design, marketing, art, team management, and how to effectively manage them all together at once. Sometimes, it feels as if the players are just idiots throwing cabbage while the developers are crunching their life away trying to please them. 

Yet, as a “prideful” player myself, I can’t help but feel “I am better than those professional developers”. There are definitely instances where I feel frustrated with the company’s design decisions. Take for example Legends of Runeterra’s ladder meta was dominated by Azir Irelia in patch 2.7. It felt dreadful and hilariously sad to play against the deck. The ladder was filled with either Irelia Azir players or decks specifically designed to counter them. Despite the community’s frustrating experience playing against this deck, Riot live design controversially took a stance to not nerf the deck under the reasoning of “only a slightly above average win rate” and “popularity of a newly released champion”. 

Azir and Irelia were nerfed one month later. 

“If only I was the decision-maker, I would cancel the collaboration with Fortnite, reduce the amount of RNG in Hearthstone, change the monetization model in Cardfight Vanguard...” But what if you can be the decision-maker?

Collective: The Community Created Card Game has a radical vision: Give the power to the player themselves. Let the players design the cards and make balance updates, whether the cards and updates make it through or not depends on the will of the players! Most players also dreamed of having their own cards implemented into the card game, Collective: The Community Created Card Game is a gateway to make that dream come true. What is also important here is the idea of “accountability”. If a balance change and card design go wrong, it is not the fault of a few “greedy, out-of-touch money makers”, but that the player voted for them themselves in the first place. 

Sounds exciting, but does it work? Can the player base develop a game that can compete against the established Trading Card Game giants? It felt impossible, and then I saw the light. Collective: The Community Created Card Game was a game that I was going to dismiss as simply mediocre, but now I am very glad that I did not give up on the game, as it provided me with an experience that I simply cannot get in any other card game. Yes, I will play Collective over Magic and Legends of Runeterra any day. But I will nevertheless try my best to describe my experience of playing Collective fully, both the good and the bad. 

The premise of the game

Collective: The Community Card Game is built on the foundation of pre-existing card games, such as Magic: The Gathering and Hearthstone. Thus, a lot of the themes are not brand new. You build a deck of creatures and spells, the creatures have attack/defense points, mana cost, and abilities, both players bash each other until one of them loses all their health. 

Currently, you can play in single-player mode, multiplayer mode, and card creator mode. In single-player, you can either play the Roguelike deck builder mode of Sentinel or battle various AI in Colosseum with your normal deck. The multiplayer ladder mode is your typical 1v1 experience with a ladder point system enabled. The card creator mode is the real spicy one, where you can play with any cards you want against a dummy or another player, this allows you to test out new designs that are not implemented into the game yet. 

Game design-wise, what sets Collective apart from other TCGs is its heroes that you play as. The heroes have reward systems that affect the way you play and deckbuild. Take Heldim as an example, he gains two EXP whenever you attack with only one unit. When you level up, you get a sweet two-mana flyer. It creates interesting deck-building dynamics where you are rewarded for getting one big attacker rather than multiple small attackers. While the pool of heroes is limited to eleven and the number of playable affinities (think the color system in MtG) is only three and neutrals, they do a fair job of enabling different playstyles of aggro, midrange, control, and combo. 

The turn system heavily resembles Legends of Runeterra (keep in mind that Collective debuted in 2018, while Legends of Runeterra debuted in 2020). It has a coin initiative system, where the player with the coin would play and attack first. During a turn, both players can play their cards, and the combat phase would begin after both players decide to play nothing. For the Legends of Runeterra fans out there, you can do “open pass” in this game as well, which creates an interesting mind game where both players are bargaining and tricking each other, and that just makes a sweaty nerd like me so pumped... 

What really catches the attention of most players, is that your cards could be in the game! After you make a card, it has to go through a voting system, where you can either upvote them on Reddit or choose to upvote/downvote after a match is finished. If your card is one of the top ten most voted cards, then it will be permanently added to the game! 

If you have played any trading card games before, then you can design cards for the game and have a decent idea of how to create a working prototype. I wanted to explore what it is like to make a card myself. ~100 hours later, I had not done that yet. Because I liked playing the game too much! That is a testament to how good this game is. Yet, if I was a casual player who simply wanted to play for fun, the effortful hill to reach the joy of the game might be somewhere I never reached, and I would have never discovered the magic of Collective. 

Painful Beginnings

Collective is a difficult game to get into, and there are many many reasons for it. 

The first reason is that the technical prowess is not there. The UI is poor at giving the proper feedback, which creates a lot of confusion. For instance, when you block, you cannot see how the blocks are made unless you hover over your units. You have to constantly check you and your opponent’s heroes to see whether they are leveled or not. The list goes on and on, and there is a lack of developers with time to solve these problems. 

Then there is the janky, inconsistent art style and themes that range from elementary school level Microsoft paint to professional illustrator art, a 3D fantasy style angel hero Heldim to a 2D drawn to a background less hero Ashgerdy. It can feel like everything is out of place and it took a while for me to get used to it.

Out of all the inconveniences, my biggest problem with the game is that the number of things to learn given to the new player is far too much. Rather than purely talking about Collectives, I want to compare it to a TCG that does a great job teaching new players how to play the game: CardFight Vanguard. 

Segmented learning and a properly done difficulty curve is what made Cardfight Vanguard a much easier to learn TCG than Collective. For Cardfight Vanguard, your starting deck is super simple: A bunch of textless, regionless units and a rare Blaster Blade. Since most of the new player’s cards have nothing needed to read, the player can learn how to properly learn game mechanics such as combat damage and triggers. The one, rare blaster blade, gets players excited about drawing them and trying to make the most out of them, which encourages the player to eventually build a deck with more powerful cards that are like Blaster Blade. 

The story mode and the doable challenges teach the player lessons about the game, one step at a time in a fun and engaging way. The most unforgettable lesson is when I fought against Katsumi Morikawa, and they were unable to play any cards at all due to their obsession with building a deck filled with powerful but overly costly cards. This is a small lesson in deckbuilding: Build your deck with small guys as well to help you win. These small lessons build up little by little until the player becomes an expert on the game. 

Credit

 In Collective, the tutorial does not do a good job of teaching game mechanics one at a time. For example, one of the lessons was supposed to teach me how affinity works and how it affects deckbuilding. That lesson did not sink into my brain until my ~7th hour of playing this game when I finally started trying to build a deck myself. I don’t think it should take me that long to learn the most fundamental deck-building rule of the game. 

Compared to Cardfight Vanguard’s new decks, Collective’s new player decks are too complicated to play with. The new player decks, while filled with various powerful cards and the cards have great synergy with one another, it takes a lot of effort to learn how they work and there are 15 unique cards with different mechanics in all starter decks. Then, aside from tutorials, the best way to learn the game is the single-player mode “Colosseum”. Each level introduces creatures with never seen before mechanics such as rage, feed, active… It felt like I was suffering playing, there was too much to read and the game pacing was too slow due to the nature of the starting deck I chose to play (Dhat). The game modes are perfectly fine for players who already have a strong idea of how to play the game, but it has limited accommodation made for the new players. 

Why play Collective the Card Game over other Trading Card Games?

As I mentioned earlier, I think Collective is a more enjoyable game to play than Legends of Runeterra and Magic: The Gathering. A big reason for this is simply that the social experience of playing Collective is the magic that cannot be found in any other big titles, an experience that feels as if gone extinct. Therefore, I think joining its Discord server helps enrich the experience a lot, as it helps you coordinate games, discuss balance and designs, and share some memes here and there. 

Collective community feels like a mini cozy game shop, where you get to meet the same few regular friends and folks there all the time. Since the player base is quite low, it is easy to meet the same players in the queue over and over again, and I think that is a good thing because it inevitably lets players get to know each other quickly and this natural way of making friends is simply nonexistent in other TCGs. Riot Games have pushed UI features that incentivizes me to add my opponent as a friend after the game, but it always felt too awkward and purposeless to add someone I barely know. 

Another advantage of a low player base is that the game feels like a treasure chest with many discoverable abilities. In typical big TCGs, the game can be solved within days after a brand new expansion, like streamers, pro players, and well-built statistic sites all exist within the player’s fingertips. In Collective, the meta is up in the air. Every other week, some players are able to find and abuse very creative strategies that did not exist previously. Such as Char combo, a strategy that saw zero play in the previous weeks, all of a sudden become the most overpowered deck the very next week. This type of joyous surprise is nonexistent in a world where the player base is too good at solving the meta. 

There is also new content all the time due to its weekly format of card implementations and updates. Every week, ten cards get added to the game permanently and up to five balance updates are implemented. The result is that overpowered archetypes get nerfed quickly and the game feels relatively fresh at all times. 

Personally, my favorite part about Collective is its drafting tournament. How it works is that you play the drafting phase on Discord using its draft bot. Once you import the deck, you can play the game on Card Creator even if you do not own the card. There is no entry fee and the reward for playing is just a psychological “Yay”, but I think this game offers the best drafting experience in TCG. 

My belief is that Collective cube draft gets the best of both worlds from digital TCG and Untap.in. Digital TCGs are smooth to play, but it has limited accessibilities in terms of playable cards, economic limitations, and many of them are done against bots. Untap.in, on the other hand, allows the user to playtest with any cards they want, but its interface can be challenging to use. In Collective, players can submit a custom-made cube, where any cards you make can be played in the cube. While it is also smooth to play because many taken-for-granted features such as card draw and units going to discard piles are automated, whereas it isn’t on Untap.in. 

With its voting system in place, not every card can be voted in even if they are well designed. The cube draft format is a great way for these cards to be playable and test them out. 

Card Design, Archetypes, and Meta Overview

There is a negative stigma towards the idea of user-generated content. The creator of the Collective Nick has explained it himself in his Medium article, the gist is that the players will design and vote with the intent to troll, bully, and put genitals on everything. But this has not been the case for Collective at all. I believe this is because the game is built on a good foundation. 

There are rules when it comes to what is an acceptable design. The rules are relatively lax but just strict enough to prevent game-breaking designs and discriminations. One of the important rules I want to touch upon is rule #14: “at most, players can add two rares and four uncommons each week”. I believe this rule prevents the “wow factor bias” where players have a tendency to always vote for the Rare cards with cool and interesting abilities. The basic common cards need to exist, both to keep the game simpler to play and allow the rare cards to shine in comparison. 

From the beginning, Collective attracted players who were deeply invested in other trading card games and they have a good understanding of what makes other card games fun. Although the rules do a good job of preventing cards from being designed to destroy the game, the player base is able to make intelligent analyses on how the new design affects the game. 

Collective plays and feels like a normal TCG, an alternative to MtG and Legends of Runeterra. I am happy to say that generally, the game allows multiple archetypes and playstyles to flourish. Aggro, midrange, control, tribal, and combo decks all have viable decks and each has its own interesting playstyle. The game has strong playability as I feel that there are still a lot of potentially viable archetypes that I want to try and have never seen other players play before, even after playing the game for ~100 hours. 

However, the game’s system is far from perfect. Sometimes, the voting system and the hero system can prevent archetypes from feeling “complete”. Since the designs are implemented from a card to card basis, the system of cards may not function properly as a whole. There is also the problem of archetypes being left out to dry due to its voting system or simply the lack of designers interested in expanding the archetype. One such example is the Pirate archetype. Currently, the pool has 15 cards and they don’t have very strong synergy with one another. The same thing can be said about Bard. 

For the affinity Mind, while the three heroes have very different playstyle, the heroes impose limitations on the potential of this color. Ashgerdy is obsessed with face damage, Lazaro is a tribe enabler, and Vrikitk is a control hero who wants to play spells. These three heroes leave no room for potentially unit-based control strategies. I wanted to build a deck around the concept of “stealing control” but there is not very much support for this potential archetype as it doesn’t fit into Ashgerdy, Lazaro, or Vriktik. 

Even the established archetypes may fail to get the desirable play pattern. For example, Spider is designed with the intention of being an archetype, but they lack methods to actively win the game, as its high-cost finishers can feel quite underwhelming. The same can be said about Hawkins Ooze, while cards such as Mortemockery Ooze and Grimmig Turned Malice allows for crazy value generation, the archetype heavily relies on a single token to win the game. If the tiny token gets killed, all of a sudden there is no proactive game plan anymore. 

I love Mortemockery Ooze, so much. 

Polarizing matchups are also something that Collective seems to suffer from constantly. The newly invented combo decks are so fast-paced, that even fast aggro decks can find it troublesome to outrace them, since they have the potential to win by turn five. The result is that the player base either runs decks with oddly specific answers or else they lose. But the fact that there are specific answers shows the range of Collective’s design and I really love how a combo deck can be discovered out of nowhere. 

I have talked a lot about Collective’s problems, but things don't have to be this way. Whatever archetypes that you feel need more power, you are always free to design it and hope that your design gets implemented into the game. Just as I am writing this article, the designers are working on giving the Spider archetype a much-needed finisher and identity. 

From the weekly show Submitted For Your Approvals, where they discuss the viability of the submitted cards. 

I am not in a hurry to design new cards because there are also a lot of archetypes that I enjoy playing. Ashgerdy one attack aggro is a really interesting deck to play. It has flexible ways of building the deck, and the puzzle of maximizing the chance of getting three procs off is always interesting. Then, there are the Sands of Mir’aj and Arie the Huntress, two power cards that allow the deck to synergize with one another very well. 

The other archetype I enjoy is Hawkins Undead. While it is a fairly weak archetype at the moment, it is very enjoyable to play. There are just enough undead cards to create ~3 different versions of the deck and their win conditions all tend to be very satisfying, as you can play either the agile Graveyard Uprising + Soulweaver game plan or the Penebui endless board control game plan, and both versions have their own unique strength and weaknesses.

In-Game Economy

All typical TCG titles include RNG when it comes to what cards the players can get, but not Collective. Currently, it has a fairly simple and straightforward system of Gold and Amber. You can purchase heroes and cosmetics with gold, and buy cards with Amber. The rare cards cost 275 Ambers while common cards cost 50 Ambers. The implication is that it is really easy to get rare cards. When you compare it to Legends of Runeterra, a game that is widely considered the most free-to-play friendly digital TCG out there, getting the champion and epic cards can be much more difficult in comparison to the commons. As it would cost 3000 Gold for champions and 100 gold for commons, while it is also somewhat gated by the loot box-like pack opening system. 

There are three forms of income: passive from playing games, achievements, and seasonal pass. The achievements you get while just starting out give you quite a lot of resources, which easily allows you to buy a hero. After mere hours of playing the game, I had enough resources to net deck my first standard deck. I achieved a feat in mere hours in Collective that was impossible after months of grinding Cardfight Vanguard and Magic: The Gathering Arena. Gold and Amber generation does decrease over time, but Collective’s economy is fairly generous for the players. 

Not to mention, games can also be played on the Card Creator mode. This means that you do not have to own the cards to play them, although owning the cards does provide you with more convenience to play on the ladder. 

After ~100 hours of playing, I was able to purchase three heroes and make seven playable decks, and Legends of Runeterra is probably the only other TCG I know of that can match Collective’s generosity for free to play players. 

W- Where are the loot boxes?

Closing Thoughts

If you are a TCG fanatic, a game designer wannabe who wants to see their ideas become reality, or just someone who misses the fun time of playing games with a close group of friends, then I wholeheartedly recommend Collective: The Community Created Card Game. It is a game with many, many flaws, and I would probably be able to type a few thousand more words talking about them. But overall, my experience playing the game has been very positive and I can look past these flaws as the game is mostly functional. 

Despite the game being community-run, I find that its drafting tournament is a real competitive advantage over other TCGs in the market. 

However, I find it difficult to recommend this game to players who have never played the TCG genre before. It feels that everything about the game is designed for the niche audience who are deeply passionate about games, and I am that niche audience. 

It is weird giving this game a score because it is a game that can be “objectively not great”, but for now, I just want to play this “objectively not great” game over anything else. 

Final Verdict: 7.5/10

Collective can be lackluster in terms of technical prowess, but it has a passionate community that creates tools to make the game much more fun. The game enables various strategies to flourish and generally feels satisfying to play. Its unique premise is also a plus. But nevertheless, there are a lot of problems that can hinder the general player experience. 

[12/12/2021] Afterthoughts

This was an article written on October 25th of 2021 and was written intended for a "proper" site. I am no longer interested in the concept of scoring games or speaking in a generally obnoxious tone. I also think that my article may have readability issues, but I am not going to make further changes because I don't feel as passionate about Collective these days as before and I want to focus my energy on learning new things. My opinion right now doesn't align perfectly with how I perceived things at that time, but it is close enough that the editing was fairly minimal. I will still participate in their weekly tournament that I think is fantastic and special.

Originally, this piece was deemed too long to be accepted by the editors from a website I volunteered for. Reflecting back, I was the one in the wrong but nevertheless, I felt somewhat repressed. There is a concept that articles written for Indie/smaller games deserved fewer words than triple-A games. I disagree heavily because I think COllective is much more complex and interesting to analyze than Legends of Runeterra for example. For the latter, the game itself is THE interesting aspect to analyze. For Collective, the creation, the community, and the social aspects of the game feel much more personal and necessary to discuss, which adds layers of complexity. Another aspect is illustrated by Nick, the founder of this game: When he told other people his ideal, most people in the industry believed that it will never work. On the contrary, I bet that most people will believe that the *insert AAA game* would work after hearing its premise. I think there will always be more energy and content to talk about the former than the latter I believe.

After briefly re-reading my piece, I think I failed to do this game justice. There are quite a lot of interesting aspects of this game that I failed to explore deeper:

I hope to do better for all my Lovepon out there. I hope we can all continue learning, so that we will become better, eventually perfect, at destroying video games to create a better society.