Every game is destined to die. I am not talking about the death of when no one plays the game anymore, but rather the death of when the game becomes completely solved, or that it is solved enough for the player to lose interest in it. After months of borderline addiction to playing Collective Card Game, it turns out that this game is also no exception. 

When a streamer reaches this point, they typically talk at great length about what they hate about the game and how the game company should change some of the designs to keep the game fresh. However, I think it is healthier for games to die the same way that every other media dies. It takes 2 hours to watch a movie, and 4 to 12 hours to finish a show, but when it comes to games, players want it to still be fun to play after 1000 hours. 

We should kill games so that we can move on. I will try my best to kill Collective right now so that it will be easier to say goodbye eventually to the game. I will host the funeral right now by sharing some of my findings, lessons, and reflections on everything this game has to offer. 

To me, this game was still a diamond in the rough. When evaluated against the competition in the traditional objective metrics, it has worse art, soundtrack, balance, game design, and so on… But what makes Collective Card Game really good are the less talked about important aspects of the games: The community, not that it is amazing in terms of being supportive and kind, but that it was able to produce quite an interesting dynamic. 

As I am writing this, I have come to the realization that Collective means different things to everyone. For most people, the game’s big premise is that the players can create custom cards. There are the designers, content creators, and the players. I am the player, how many other games can you be a “player” and be “rare” at the same time? Let’s discuss everything through the eyes of a relatively quiet player. 

Dynamics of a low player base

A game is more fun when the player base is smaller because the game is less solvable, and I am not sure how many other people could agree with this sentiment. At least I feel this way because there are a lot of explorable decks that people haven’t figured out yet. As a player, it is my second time experiencing a game where I mattered. My decks have shaped and formed the popular meta despite me not having the skill level of a professional player.

It is a magical feeling because, in a bigger multiplayer game, the sense of existing is not there unless you dedicate a huge amount of effort and is great at the game at the same time. It resembles the old-schooled “Shop Meta” and quite a lot of decks aren’t figured out yet. 

How did I influence the game? For the Pain archetype, I was the first player to add Lizabo Strongarm into the deck so that the deck gets one more self-damage trigger enabler and deals damage to the opponent for casting spells. It is a choice that looks so obvious, and it was a very minor adjustment of optimization, but somehow no one else was doing it. 

A game’s player base is made up of players. It is something so obvious but with Collective, it is easier to see it, each player is worthy of mention because they shape how the game functions. 

That is the ultimate attraction of the game I suppose, the feeling of “I am important”, it is hard to get that feeling in real life when you are doing the same thing everyone else is doing and that you are very much replaceable. Personally, I have always felt attracted to the “niche” for the sake of it. There are oftentimes no real tangible benefits to these desires, it is a disease I suppose, I cannot rationally justify it. Nevertheless, if Collective had over a few thousand active players, I am not sure how much I would play. 

There are, of course, obvious advantages to games with high player bases. Players can queue up anytime and that brings convenience, people can face each other who has similar skill levels, and then naturally content creators want to create educational guides, and streams, that pave the way for more people to join, it is a cycle that just keeps on getting bigger and bigger the same way how I would assume anything gets bigger. 

Hero Design and One Mana Cards

I have been trying to design a game and I am struggling. Perhaps, I should accept my powerlessness and just wing things more. Let’s talk about unintended results that stem from the core designs, how that may be flawed but how that ultimately doesn’t matter as well. Every game is its own language and creators of the games are creators of new linguistics as well. No one created chess and thought about what a “Queen’s Gambit” would be like, no one created Collective and thought about how every single 1 mana card is a “Mythic Rare”. 

In Legends of Runeterra, when you don’t cast a spell, you get spell mana, this means that if you don’t play anything turn 1-2, your resources aren’t wasted. In Magic: the Gathering draft format, most cards are 2-3 mana range with a few 4-6 mana top-end cards. 

What really stands out to me in Collective is that the hero experience system HEAVILY rewards the players for filling their deck with 1 mana card. Insanely, insanely rewarded in comparison to the other card games I was into. 

Heldim: Get 2 EXP if you attack with 1 unit only and create a recurring 2/2 angel when you level up. The difference between having a 1-drop in hand and not can be enormous, here is the snowball effect/board advantage effect: if you are able to attack with a 1 mana unit T2, you can get Cassie T3. Getting cassie T3 makes it easier for you to fulfill conditions of attacking alone with a unit which allows you to get Cassie lvl 3 earlier than you could. 

When you miss the 1 drop, you get into scenarios where you play a 2 drop but now it is much more vulnerable to good removals. The nature of Collective, of course, is that with summoning sickness, removals can be much more reactive and have an extra turn of killing off a unit. Missing 1 drop significantly increases the odds of having your entire board removed constantly, this would result in an opposite snowball effect where you can never attack with any unit at all and only get Cassie lvl 2 Angel at T5. By this point, you would have missed out on potentially 8 flying damage (and an effective blocker against opponent’s threats), which then lead you to miss out on getting a lvl 3 Angel and that would make you 4 damages behind… 

That is 10 damages for not having a 1 mana card. Yes, there is board wipes, metas, and various scenarios that make what I am saying look stupid. But nevertheless, I think it is telling how most aggro meta decks look: At least a quarter of the deck is 1 mana cards. For many of my decks it is 40% of the deck are 1 mana cards. 

This is not unique with Heldim: Ashgerdy wants multiple pingers, so they need an absurd amount of early game pings to get the EXP. Dhat wants to contest the highest HP for EXP, they need a tanky unit T1 to do that so that they get Bip and Bap T3 and then play 4+ HP cards to get more EXP… Bird Doctors require 2+ units from your tribe to get EXP, Sunrise Lizabo decks run 20+ 1 drops I believe. Vriktik needs 2 Actions/turn to get EXP which then means that they have to run quite a lot of cheap actions (probably one of the worse examples)

I think it is fair to say that in a Draft format, I would rate a 1 mana 2/2 Neutral as an S+ tier card a lot of the time and would pick it over the majority of cards in the game. 

I guess a part of the game designer’s duty is to make the most fun strategies to play the most viable ones. 1 mana 2/2 neutral would be boring, and a majority of Collective’s 1 mana cards are just normal small cards, but too many decks/heroes require the player to run an absurd amount of 1 mana cards and perhaps we need more heroes like Pearlmaw, with a slightly different EXP and reward system to make other strategies more viable. 

Timmy’s Birthday in Collective

I think a fair assumption for a “game where player make the cards” would be that people will design too many cards that aren’t practical: Making cards that cost 200 mana and do overpowered things that instantly wins you the game. 

There are plenty of high-cost cards but far less than what normal people would expect. This game attracts a niche set of player base with high experience in game design, art, and coding, a majority of the cards designed and voted in by the community are practical and fun to play with. As much as things can look “terrible” in comparison to the works of a professional artist working 60 hours per week, imagine what an actual average normal person would create. 

I often look at high-cost cards for inspiration for decks and I just don’t feel too much a lot of the time with top ends in Collective, although this is quite dumb to say I guess since powerful high-cost cards are even rarer in other card games as well and there aren’t all that much design space to them aside for “win the game now that you played this”, I wish there was more. 

Pearlmaw’s World

Every high-cost card revolves around Pearlmaw. 

Really stupid thing to say in the current Mind Sim Ta + Tricksune meta but I nevertheless feel this way. Pearlmaw has so much natural Ramp power that every high cost card has to be designed around her. 

Which game ever lasts until round 10? Who is going to play even this 8 mana card? The mana cost of mana cards are completely absurd but it is okay because Pearlmaw can play them round 5 by saving coins. As long as the meta slows down even the slightest, it is a Pearlmaw show since they can ramp faster than any other hero in the game. 

7 mana cards are now “Pearlmaw can play this on turn 4, would that break the game?” Same for every other high-cost unit and spells. 

I really wish Spirit had more access to Ramp and Spirit exclusive power cards. Because currently, it is impossible for them to contest late-game scenarios or play anything >10 mana. 

Marie though is something else. Marie is a hero that lives between “unplayable garbage” and “you lost the game” and that is sort of unfortunate I guess. Her hero active is the overpowered ability and everything else just doesn’t do anything. 

We are reworking things and everything you know will be changed starting today. 

We heard the news in January 2022, but the hero reworks are still not happening yet. 

When? How? Who? Why? No clue. Too little funds mean no one can work on this project full time. The players are full of ideas, ideologies, and discussions of how things should ideally work, but the other truth is that no one knows what is going on. There is little incentive to work so hard for something that is never going to get mass appeal. 

Nevertheless, I think the current state of Collective is functional. The multiplayer queue is fun to play from time to time, the weekly tournaments do a nice job of countering the disadvantage of the game having a low player base, and the constant flow of uploads to Reddit + monthly new cards are fun. 

I can’t help but think that Collective definitely has the potential of attracting a lot more players than what we have currently. A dedicated player base sees the cycle between one set and another as too long and Collective never ceases to become “boring”. 

As long as a variety of designers have an incentive to create, the game will never become boring. The Alt Collective movement is a great example of this, Scattered and Lost and Munchies all make the game a lot more fun to play. Not too aware of the creative side but I have heard about hiding art uploads behind a paywall and that turns away too many people before they even begin playing…