Card Game Resource Systems

It’s Tuesday, I haven’t been playing anything new recently, and I need something to write about this week because breaking a habit is the killer of goals.

So today I’m just going to be rambling about resource systems in card games, mostly collectible card games. Also I’m going to be focused on what I’m calling Primary resource systems, IE, the resource generally used to take actions in the game.

Yes, life and cards in hand are resources. They’re not what we’re talking about today.

As a brief note, this is going to be in roughly chronological order of the games release, and non-exhaustive as it’s only going to cover games I’ve played. I’ll quickly explain the mechanic, I’ll give my opinion on in, and I’ll move on.

All that said, lets get started with….

Ancient Era

Yes, I could have called it something else, but all these games came out over 25 years ago.

Magic: The Gathering – 1993

The oldest card game in this list, Magic is an undeniable influence on pretty much everything on this list, either mechanically or thematically.

It’s primary resource system is lands. Lands are a card type that go into the players primary deck, a single one can be played each turn. They’re turned sideways to use them, and at the start of a players turn, all of their lands refresh.

They are also deeply flawed. You don’t have to take my word for it on that one, because once we get to the “modern” era of card games in this list, it will become clear that every card game in the last 10 years started with someone looking at lands, and going “Yeah, no, we’re not doing that.”

This flaw comes in three parts: first, that lands don’t do anything other than be lands, and secondly, they’re in your main deck. This means that they’ll be a fair number of games where you don’t draw them when you need them, and do draw them when you don’t. And finally, even if you do draw lands that you want, when you need them, there’s no guarantee that they’ll be the color you want.

That said, their use as resource trackers and “1 a turn” escalation element means that almost everyone else is going to copy them.

Pokemon TCG – 1996

Of course, with Pokemon, we’re not in that modern era yet. So instead of a good clean fix for lands being in your deck, Pokemon has energy. On the surface, energy is similar in a lot of ways to land. Like lands, they don’t do anything else, they start in your deck, and you can only play one a turn.

However, unlike Magic, most cards in Pokemon are “free”to play, with Pokemon themselves simply not doing very much until they have enough energy to use their attacks. Pokemon also has a lot more card draw then Magic, so getting stuck with clogged hands is rarer, but still happens.

As a result, instead of an escalating resource pool, energy is more a set of thresholds that can be manipulated and protected, especially when you consider that if the Pokemon that energy is attached to is knocked out, that energy is lost. And you can still only play one Energy per turn.

I do think it’s worth noting that TCG Pocket, the mobile friendly varient of the Pokemon TCG got rid of Energy when it had the chance.

Yu-Gi-Oh – 1999

The last pre-modern game on this list, Yu-Gi-Oh’s primary resource isn’t a land equivalent. Instead, I’d consider it to be a combination of “cards in hand” and the single “normal summon” a player gets each turn.

This gives it a distinctly different texture from pretty much everything else on this list. While many of the games here have a sense of slow pacing and escalation, anyone whose played any Yugioh in the last 5 years will be aware of it has the gentle pacing of a rail-gun combined with a roller coaster.

Frankly, as a resource system, I don’t like it very much. It does give Yugioh a very distinct feeling from everything else, but it also means that sometimes games are over before you even get to take a turn.

Middle Era – 2010 to 2016

Is this an arbitrary grouping? Yes. Will that stop me? No.

Force of Will – 2012 (Japanese Release)

And so we reach the first semi-modern game on the list, and the start of attempts to fix the land problem. While it emulates magic in color and card types, one thing it doesn’t do is copy land. Instead, all of your Magic Stones (lands) go in their own separate deck, and whenever you need to play one, you just pull one at random out of that deck.

This solves 2 of the 3 problems with lands, but doesn’t solve getting colors that you don’t want.

Still, it’s a start.

Hearthstone – 2014

Hearthstone, being a digital game, has a lot of tools that other card games don’t. One of those is perfect tracking of game state. It uses this to get rid of lands completely, and replace them with mana. You get one mana crystal per turn, you spend mana from them to play cards, and they refill at the start of your turn.

Its generally perfect as a replacement system, but one that’s a bit tricky to actually copy into paper because it’s a huge pain to track, as it requires using something other than cards for maintaining game state. Not a problem in a digital game, bit of a pain in a non-digital one.

Modern Era

Hey look, we’re finally trying to fix lands.

One Piece -2022 (Japan Release)

It feels weird to me that One Piece has technically been around longer then everything else on this list, mostly because I just started playing it, but whatever.

One Pieces primary resource is DON. It’s actually very good. Each player starts with 10 DON cards in their DON deck, gets 2 additional DON after the first turn turn, and it also has a secondary mechanic where it can be used as a basic pump spell for characters you have out. Oh, and because you get two a turn, but the total number is capped, the game has some neat space to play around with making cards “cost” putting DON back into the DON deck without feeling as losing a resource would in other games.

It’s great, and I have no complaints, except that I might have called it something else.

Gem Blenders – 2023

Ah, Gem Blenders. Gem Blenders is a bit of a weird one to start with, and unlike most of the other stuff in the Modern Era, isn’t using a land replacement style system.

Instead, it’s back to Pokemon’s energy system with Gems, except now instead of thresholds for attacks, they’re thresholds for evolution. It’s a bit too entwined with the rest of the games systems to concisely comment on, but I will note that the game does have the same problems as Pokemon does. A bit better then lands, but not much.

Disney Lorcana – 2023

Lorcana’s primary resource is Ink, and much like the next two items on this list, it’s going to solve the land problem by making everything a land! Well, mostly everything. Instead of a 1 per turn land system, Lorcana lets you put 1 card per turn facedown into your inkwell.

But not all cards! Only cards with a specific border. To simplify things, this pretty much just means that all cards have a flag for if they can be played as lands or not, with more powerful cards lacking said flag, as a mechanism to make them more painful to dead-draw.

It’s perfectly fine system.

Altered – 2024 / Star Wars Unlimited -2024

Both Altered and Star Wars Unlimited use effectively the exact same system, so I’m just gonna group them together. At the start of the turn, both players draw two cards from their deck, then can choose to put one card from their hand into their resource pool.

Again, another pretty straight forward system that tries to solve the problems with land.

Gundam Card Game – 2025

Gundam uses a system similar to One Piece, with each player getting a single Resource card per turn from a Resource deck. That said, it does have one small twist in that cards have both a resource cost, and level requirement. This means that a card with a Level of 4, and a cost of 1 can be played for 1 resource, but can’t be played before you have 4 resources in play (Usually turn 4).

It’s not my favorite system to actually play with, but it’s a functional one at least.

Wrap Up, and some thoughts.

I opened this article with a discussion of Magic: The Gathering’s resource system, and I think that pretty much every post 2010 card game resource system can be seen as an attempt to fix three big problems with that system.

To recap, those problems are:

  1. Not drawing resource cards when you need them.
  2. Drawing resource cards when you don’t need them.
  3. Not having the right type of resource cards to play cards.

Through this lens, we can see that there are two main fixes for these problems:

  1. Every card is now a land! (Lorcana/Altered/Star Wars Unlimted)
    OR
  2. Lands are their own special deck! (Force of Will/One Piece TCG/Gundam)

These are better systems, but the one thing we lose is the element of multi-color decks, and I don’t actually know anyone whose tried to fix that yet.

Anyway, happy Tuesday. I’ve spent close to two hours on this now, I’m gonna go get some breakfast.

Glitch – A Quick Retrospective

There’s no lack of reviews on dead games on this site. Deceive Inc is on life support. Crowfall went offline for “future planning” multiple years ago at this point. Crimesight wasn’t a live service game, but got taken offline anyway, because the world is stupid.

Glitch is a little different then those games because it went offline almost 13 years ago at this point. It was a weird little browser MMO with (almost) no combat, and a sort of friendly Hiëronymus Bosch vibe, if not theme. You hatched pigs from eggs, which you grew on eggplant trees, stumbling around the dreams of giants.

But that’s not what really seperates Glitch from all of these other games. What separates Glitch is it’s long term impact on the world. Not via it’s mechanics, gameplay, design, or aesthetics, but because while Glitch was being made, it’s creators also made an internal communication tool for the project.

That was tool was called Slack.

I don’t actually know if there’s some sort of deep irony in one of the few attempts to build a really weird, interesting, peaceful MMO led to the creation of one of the most bland pieces of business software ever to exist. Something about it seems a bit bullshit.

Still, when so many live-service games just vanish and die, it’s nice to see that Glitch has some form of legacy, even if it’s one completely disconnected from the game itself.

As I found myself being forced to use Slack this morning, I also found myself thinking back to Glitch, to weird landscapes, trying to grow trees, and fights with crows. To a smaller, nicer thing, that not enough people (including me!) paid for, and it died.

Anywayyyy, back to work.

Path of Exile 2 – The (Beta) Campaign

The Path of Exile 2 beta is out. I got a demo a few months ago, but now that I’ve fully played through it, I have even more thoughts. I’m going breaking down my thoughts on it into two writeups, one on the campaign, and one the endgame. Technically, they are the same game, but mechanically they are very different experiences.

Now, before I get into that, there’s some brief background that is necessary. Path of Exile 2 is a sequel to my 2nd most played game of all time, Path of Exile. (about 3000+ hours?) My thoughts are going to be at least somewhat in comparison to it’s predecessor.

As a brief filter, I offer the following phrases:
“juicing maps”
“6L”
“Farming blood adqueducts for a Tab”

If you know what any of these mean, just click here to skip ahead. If you don’t, you are likely to find the following background information helpful.

ARPG’s in Brief

Path of Exile 2, hereby abreviated to PoE 2, is a isometric ARPG from Grinding Gear Games.

For those who might not know, ARPG stands for “Action Role-Playing Game.” ARPG’s are defined by having virtually no roleplaying elements, and the action parts dominated by spamming your abilities every second you have the mana/rage/potato points to do so.

Here’s a less cynical definition: ARPG’s are traditionally top-down or isometric real time action games defined by extensive skill trees, character customization and itemization. Combat generally has two modes, fighting against trash mobs, which are pinatas for stacks of loot, and fighting against bosses, which are also pinatas, except this time they have a baseball bat.

Trash mobs are fairly brainless and just rush the player, while bosses tend to be more correographed experiences, closer to something from a Bullet Hell, or Hades.

The first Path of Exile differentiated itself from other ARPG’s by making everything into game an item, and making those items tradable. Skills are items, (skill gems) which got socketed into other items you wore, and those sockets had colors determining which gems could be socketed.

The ability to refund skills points was an item. To enter endgame areas, specific items were needed. Same to fight endgame bosses. To buy items from vendors, it was necessary to have more items to trade them.

It’s other big differentiator was a skill tree so massive that one of my favorite things to do is pop it out as a joke, just to mess with people, who did not believe it was real.

Finally, there was the gem system. Gems could be supported by other gems. Take a fireball, link it to a multiple projectile gem, and now it shoots three fireballs. Link it to a piercing projectiles gem, and now they penetrate. Link it to a faster cast speed, make a few more tweaks, and now your character is a Fourth of July fireworks display.

Changes between PoE and Poe 2

PoE 2 makes a lot of changes to the above underlying systems, most of which serve to make the campaign much less punishing for inexperienced players. Gold exists as a flat currency to use with vendor NPC’s. This makes getting leveling gear a much easier process.

Gold can also be used to refund skill points. This is possibly the biggest change between the two games, because in PoE, a badly built skill tree would softlock a character. This would make it impossible to get the items needed to respec, and pretty much force the player to make a new character.

Sockets on items and their associated colors are also gone. Skill gems are socketed into a general skill gem menu. The types of support gems that can be used are limited by primary stats. There are even more small tweaks to make suggestions to players on what gems to use, and to prevent them from making choices that simply don’t work.

The skill tree is still massive. There’s now a dodge roll. Movement is a much more flowy thing then it previously was.

The general changes though result in much easier on-boarding experience with the games initial systems, instead of purely being thrown into the deep end, like the player was with the first Path of Exile.

Does all of this mean the game is easier?

Well, yes and no.

The Campaign

Generally I like the campaign. There are some incredibly sloggy bits, notably a single map in Act 2 that just goes on forever, and three or four of the Act 3 areas really tested my patience for just wanting to see the next few things.

That said, outside of these, I really didn’t have many complaints. The bosses feel far more diverse and interesting then their PoE 1 counterparts, and also much harder. The final boss of Act 1 in particular killed me about 10-20 times before I finally defeated it. It’s worth noting that I actually killed it right as it killed me, but that still counts, so on I went.

They’re also just much more fun as a general visual spectacle. My personal favorite is probably Crowbell, a giant crow-man thing that tries to beat the player to death with a bell. The fight isn’t particularly hard, but does have a fun transitions, with Crowbell running around, powering up, wrenching a bell off it’s stand, then using it as a bludgeon.

The trash mobs… well, they’re ARPG trash mobs. The nicest thing I can say about them is that they did in fact contribute to my /deaths count.

Finally, there’s the story elements. I generally quite liked these, even if the current content kinda ends on bit of a cliffhanger. I’m also the only person I know who cared about the lore of PoE, so maybe take that with a grain of salt. There are some callbacks to PoE, but I don’t think missing them will have any impact on your enjoyment.

I will say that I personally experienced a moment of glee getting to fight a character whose only ever been hinted at in flavor text from PoE, but another friend of mine who played the game before me didn’t even realize he was a recurring character, and thought he was someone new.

If you’re playing through the campaign without a build guide, or information about the game, I’d estimate it’ll take about 12-20 hours to play through? There’s a good chunk of game here. That said, the campaign does not currently conclude the story, as that’s planned for the games full release, so if you’re playing the game just for the campaign, I’d hold off.

Overall Thoughts

I like PoE 2. I have problems with the game, but they’re not present during the campaign. It changes a lot of esoteric bullshit that was required to play, made the boss fights more interesting, and is just generally more friendly, if not easier.

Some parts are a bit of slog.

That said, I think the main reason to currently play the campaign is to get to endgame. The campaign is not a finished game yet, with a complete story, and the beta is currently $30.

If the full campaign maintains it’s current level of quality for the remaining acts on full release, Path of Exile 2 will be worth playing purely as a standalone ARPG just for that. But for players who aren’t in a rush, or want a new ARPG, I would say to wait.

How to Get the Lorcana Starter Decks for Cheap

So, maybe you read the last post, and despite the fact that Lorcana boosters are currently going for a street value of $5 an ounce, (a ratio that really feels like it should be reserved for a different type of substance), you still want in?

All right. It’s a pretty fun game. But instead of buying those starter decks at prices people are selling them, we’re instead going to use the power of the free market in our favorite for once.

DeckSealed CostSingles Cost & TCG Player Link
Amber & Amethyst$34-38$24
Emerald & Ruby$23-25$16.28
Sapphire & Steel$30-32$24.37

Here’s how it works. First, click on one of the above links. This will bring you to TCG Players bulk entry page. It will look something like this.

If this all looks good, click the add to cart button! And presto, we have a cart with all the cards in the starter deck!

It’s also going to currently be costing you a lot more then the starter deck. No worries. We can fix that by clicking on the Optimize button in the lower left corner, right under the Paypal option.

After this, TCG player will try to optimize for shipping and buying from the fewest number of sellers. If everything looks good, you can send your purchase though, and end up with your very own Lorcana starter deck for less than a retail video game.

Ed Note: This writeup contains links to TCG Player, the management of which is a bunch of union busting corporate weasels. These aren’t affiliate links, (we don’t ever do that) and we don’t endorse their anti-competitive bullshit. That said, they’re owned by eBay, so it’s not like there’s a better place to go buy cheap singles that isn’t tainted by a desire to screw the employee.

Ed Note 2: This was written when Lorcana was being CRAZY scalped. It’s possible that the prices have gone down to a sane range by the time you look at this writeup. Such is the internet, and writing about collectibles. The general approach to using TCG Player, and the optimize functionality for buying singles likely remains the same though.