CCG Collection

Often, right where you bought the game. Most game stores have gaming areas and regular “open gaming” times. They also usually run local tournaments for many CCGs on a regular basis. Scrye magazine’s tournament calendar is the most comprehensive of its kind; check for the stores near you.
Also, fantasy, comic-book, science-fiction, and game conventions, from local shows all the way up to mighty Gen Con, provide wonderful formal and informal settings to play CCGs. The larger shows may be more than a day trip, but there are several that are true “celebrations of gaming” that are not to be missed. Again, check the listings in Scrye.
In this weblog, we try to provide some guidance as to which games have larger ready-made player bases. Check the ratings boxes with the individual game listings.
But often, you don’t have to look far to find an opponent. One of the things that made CCGs so popular in the beginning was that, where it took four or five people to play most board games and role-playing games, it only took two people to play a CCG. Magic’s earliest TV ads had the slogan, “All you need is a deck — and a friend.” And, since almost everyone on the planet has played some kind of card game before, you don’t even have to explain character sheets or the funny-shaped dice. They’re already trained on the equipment!

Good Lord, no! In the early 1980s, “urban legends” about college kids who played Dungeons & Dragons and ran off made the rounds. Televangelists who were already railing against heavy metal music and late-night television added it to their hit lists. A novelist cranked out a potboiler on the subject, Mazes and Monsters, and Tom Hanks played the cracked gamer from that story in the movie of the week. 60 Minutes even sent Ed Bradley out to investigate the claims.
Problem was, there was never any problem. The Industry Watch Committee of the Game Manufacturer’s Association has diligently investigated all claims to date of adventure games leading to violent activity. None have panned out. Again: None have panned out. In the few known criminal cases where games were blamed for antisocial activity, all the people eventually recanted. It was just a handy defense.
And concerns with the topics of certain games being “seductive” tend to deflate when people find out the broad range of subjects that games address. Yes, Magic features characters who dabble in magic — but the same Deckmaster game system allows those same players to play-act robots in BattleTech or computer programmers in Netrunner. Gamers have great imaginations and are exceptionally nimble at moving from game setting to game setting.
People who can turn immediately from thinking about aliens in one game to baseball in the next have no problem keeping subject matter in proper perspective. Think about how many times you’ve played Monopoly. Did you run out and become a ruthless slumlord?
OK, bottom line: We do not wish to minimize the concerns of parents interested in what their children are interested in. Some games have themes that are more appropriate for older players, and parents should keep an eye out. Better still, they should try to play a game or two with their kids. It’s no coincidence that Hasbro, which advertises “Family Game Nights” on TV also owns Wizards of the Coast, the company that makes Magic and Dungeons & Dragons.

We’d wait a while too see how useless they really are. Every so often something will come along in a gaming system that’ll revive interest in certain cards that once seemed worthless.
In the meantime, if you’ve got heaping gobs of land cards from Magic, you probably won’t want to stuff them into plastic sleeves. Many of the supply companies that make the sleeves have card-sized boxes available.
If you’re sure you don’t want the cards, you can try to sell them — but note that most other active players of the game usually have the same problem that you’ve got. We suggest finding a friend who isn’t in the game and providing him with a starter deck and your “instant collection” of extra cards. Who knows? You may have just found your next opponent.

It’s hard to say. CCG necrology isn’t an exact science by any means. But there are some tipoffs.
First, if the manufacturer goes away, as happened with TSR. If there is no clear successor to buy and continue the game (or if, as in Spell/ire’s case, the new owner shows little interest), that’s usually a bad sign.
Second, if the license to produce the game has been lost. Comics character Spawn went from Spawn PowerCardz by one company to Wildstorms by another. Wizards of the Coast’s NBA Showdown only came out in early 2002, but the company announced soon afterward that it no longer had the license. That doesn’t mean Wizards of the Coast won’t be happy to answer your questions about the game, but it does mean that you’ve probably seen the last of it, unless someone else picks up the license.
Since many game manufacturers stay around forever, there might be a third category added to “dead” and “alive”: “dormant,” or something like that. There hasn’t been a new release for Columbia Games’ Dixie in years, but Columbia is still around and will be happy to answer any of your questions and sell you cards. And there is nothing to stop them from putting out, say, Dixie: Chancellorsville tomorrow and putting the game back into the fully “live” column.

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Sure. All it takes is someone to come back and pick up the game and start supporting it again with new physical releases.
The third CCG released, Jyhad, is an example. Jyhad was published by Wizards of the Coast, renamed Vampire, and passed on to White Wolf, which stopped adding expansions in 1997. Vampire was then dead for most intents and purposes. Until CCGs got hot again, and it rose from its coffin in a new release in 2000.

These are phrases used to refer to whether CCG systems are being supported at present by their manufacturers (and, to a lesser extent, by their fans).
A “dead game” is very hard to get into, because no one’s out there organizing tournament support or answering questions about rules. And because new releases are so important to the evolving “metagame,” when they stop coming out, players stop playing.
The first CCG to be released, Magic, is very much alive. Its manufacturer is still cranking out releases, supporting tournaments, and answering questions.
The second CCG to be released, Spellfire, is dead. The last release came out in 1997, when Wizards of the Coast bought its original publisher, TSR, and stopped making additions to the game. There are cells of players keeping it “alive” here and there on websites and at conventions — no game published in the millions of copies is ever really gone — but it is, for the moment, dead.
We — and players in general — do not use these terms to demean the systems or their designers. (In fact, there are a lot of great “dead” games.) But the distinction has an important effect on the aftermarket, and it must be made.
A side note: Sometimes when manufacturers stop supporting a game, fans and designers create their own rules and even “virtual expansions” online. We applaud their efforts but continue to regard the question of whether the manufacturer is supporting the game to be basic to the game’s health — at least, when we’re talking in terms of how much people are looking to pay for cards.

Sideboards were introduced with early tournaments for Magic: The Gathering as a means by which players could filter some additional cards into their decks between games — without going overboard and bringing in a whole suitcase of cards.
A typical tournament might let you bring the deck you plan to play with, plus a “sideboard” of, say, 15 cards that you can dig into between games to fine-tune your deck. Sideboards have strategies all their own — players take care that every card there might help deal with unexpected developments in the local metagame.
Why wouldn’t you just put all the cards you might need in the deck you’re playing with?
Because you’d look like a rookie, because that’s a rookie move in CCGs. Sure, if you hauled around a 200-card Magic deck, you’d be sure you had every card you might conceivably need, but the odds that you’d find the exact card you needed when you needed it would be very low.

This is a word you will see in several of the posts in this weblog. Sometimes called the “tournament environment,” the metagame refers to how the universe of cards available for use in a CCG affects the strategies players are choosing. Because CCGs are dynamic — cards coming in through expansions or out due to being banned — certain card combinations come into favor, lose favor, or stop working altogether.
The metagame for any CCG is always changing, and there can even be said to be local metagames — even down to your own house. (If you and your brother only have certain cards in your collections, that’s going to affect the strategies you’re going to use.)
Scrye remains the first and best magazine for learning the latest about the metagames for Magic, Yu-Gi-Oh, Pokemon, Lord of the Rings, and dozens of other CCGs.

Scry is a Middle-English word meaning to tell the future. You’ll see it in fantasy novels where people talk about using scrying pools and such.
Scrye is Krause Publications’ trademark for the leading magazine in the adventure gaming industry. Scrye was founded soon after the invention of the collectible card game market, not just to talk about the strategies for the games (though that’s a major part), but also to follow the ups and downs of the CCG secondary market.

We suppose we shouldn’t care what the manufacturer says — a product is what it is. Some manufacturers have produced games they called CCGs, even though they didn’t meet all the first three criteria. That generally means we just take a harder look.
We do give some weight to intention. Flights of Fantasy and Boy Crazy were both trading-card sets with game mechanics grafted on. Clearly, neither set was designed as a game: Flights of Fantasy had a bunch of tiny numbers players were expected to add up, while Boy Crazy had rules for a matchmaking game. While it’s debatable which game element was more marginal, Flights of Fantasy was advertised as a CCG, even putting “game” on the label. Boy Crazy was marketed a collectible card product that, parenthetically, you might play a game with.
For this edition, we decided that Boy Crazy, while a bizarre product fun to consider, was probably never intended to be a CCG — a conclusion sources at Decipher basically agree with. Flights of Fantasy still barely makes the cut, if only to remind us all of how quick manufacturers were to tie their fortunes to Magic in the mid-1990s.
Astonishingly, we’re finding ever more products from those days that were marketed as CCGs that
“Trading-card game” versus “collectible card game” versus “customizable card game” versus “expandable card game”…

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