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 Hiƫronymus 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.

A Visit to Capital Pinball

Something I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned on this blog is that I love pinball. At the same time, I’m also bad enough at pinball that I’ve never really considered reviewing a table.

That said, my brother has gotten really into pinball over the last few months, so when he invited me down to Capital Pinball in Concord NH, I jumped at the chance to hang out and spend the day just playing a bunch of different tables.

Anyway, that’s how I ended up at Capital Pinball.

Location:
70 Pembroke Road
Concord, NH 03301

Price:
$15 per person per day, no additional fee for any table.
$50 for a monthly membership. (I believe members have 24 hour access to the venue, with the expectation of being good stewards of the space.)

Hours:
Fridays 6pm-10pm and Publicly Posted events
Note: It’s probably a good idea to double check the hours!

The Venue

Capital Pinball is perhaps the only pinball place I’ve ever been to that I’d describe as cozy. The building it’s located in feels like a Phasmaphobia map, or maybe HL2’s Nova Prospect. Despite that, the actual room for Capital Pinball is lovely, with a few comfy chairs, and a set of fairy lights strung around the room so that games can be played without glare.

Of course, someplace like that is still only going to be as good as the tables. Fortunately for me, all of the tables are great.

The Tables

Despite not having my personal favorite table (Medieval Madness), I got a chance to play on a bunch of great ones, including my second favorite, Attack from Mars. I like Attack from Mars as a table mostly for how simple it is, being maybe the only self explanatory table I know of.

Attack from Mars was also one of the only two older tables I played while at Capital Pinball, the other being Theatre of Magic.

Most of our time was instead spent on more modern tables, including a Jurassic Park table which I don’t have the exact model of, and Dungeons and Dragons: The Tyrant’s Eye.

The D&D table is actually quite interesting to me, mostly for the ability save your character and campaign progression between games via a phone app. It’s an interesting feature, and while I don’t actually enjoy the table as much as others, I do find it really interesting from a gameplay perspective.

The other two tables we played a bunch of were Jaws, and Avengers: Infinity Quest. While I was a bit leery of Avengers because of the license, it actually turned out be a great table, and I’d like to play it more. I’m more lukewarm on Jaws, not because I think it’s bad, but because I had a hard time parsing what I was supposed to be doing.

Of course, this is less than half of the total number of tables available.

Overall

Capital Pinball was great, and I’d definitely go back. I don’t know that I’d want to go at a particularly busy time, where it might end up feeling a bit cramped, but it was awesome to just to get to grind attempt after attempt on all of these tables, and I’ll probably try to convince a few more friends to come down with me next time.

P.S. My brother tried to start a new game before I could take this photo of me kicking his ass at Attack from Mars, but I got it anyway.

Get dunked on buddy.

Some quick thoughts on AI in the workplace

Or
This is the sort of thing I would put on LinkedIn if I cared at all about LinkedIn

I got an email this morning informing me that I was only using 3 of the 4 AI tools that have been made available to my company at the expected rate, and I would need to begin using the fourth, and my mind immediately went to XKCD 2899.

The idea of tracking AI usage actually makes sense to me, but as a metric, not a target. Tracking it as a target implies to me a certain level of buy in, belief in the assumption that this stuff makes you more productive at your job. And I’m not actually convinced that’s true for me.

Information Sourcing and CYA

My primary issue with AI in a professional setting (please don’t confuse it with my personal opinion) is that it does very little that’s actually useful for me. I can think of one general use for the stuff that I use willingly, and it’s a internal RAG bot.

Why do I like this RAG bot? Simple, it lists all it’s sources, and it’s hooked up in such a way that it’s better at searching our documentation (internal and client facing) then any other tool. But I don’t automatically trust it’s summaries.

I’m working on an internal cross-team project at the moment with a fair number of my co-workers, and I was a bit surprised to see them treating information from this bot fairly credulously.

I like these people. I trust their judgement in their areas of expertise.

But I will walk barefeet across broken glass before I quote a price to customer in the seven fucking figure range for a feature because an AI told me it was accurate without double checking that shit first.

And I suppose this is why I don’t like workplace AI much. If it screws up, (and as of 2025, this stuff DOES screw up) its ass doesn’t get fired. Mine does.

And I do not trust a bunch of rushed to market, hype driven, LLM’s with my personal job security.

So going back to that opening point: I’ll use our AI tools. But for most of them, I’ll be using them because I’m required to, not because they solve a business problem or need I have.

$5 is $5 Dollars

Or “Class Action Lawsuits are Weird”

Earlier today I got an email informing me that I was a member in a class action lawsuit against Gamestop. Technically this wasn’t the first email, but I pretty much ignored the other one.

The actual law being broken has something to do with the VPPA, surrounding disclosure of “video store rental records.” I won’t even pretend to understand it, or why it exists. But it’s a law that’s been around longer then I have, and it seems to have nothing but a technical relationship with the grounds Gamestop was sued on.


The longer I live, the more I find myself wondering if we don’t already live in a dystopia. Sure, it’s not a dystopia for me, but just because you’re closer to the top of the heap doesn’t mean the world isn’t broken.

I’m not exactly dissuaded when I get notices like this.

“Your rights have been violated by a mega-corporation without your knowledge. Please provide information validating your existence, and $5 will be deposited into your account. You may instead elect to receive a $10 voucher to the corporation that performed the violation.”

All it’s lacking to really cross the line into full on cyberpunk territory is an opening that starts with something like “Greetings Citizen!”, and some extra neon.

It’s very rare that I feel like I’m actually living in “the future.” The only real time it’s happened other than this was when I rode in a Tesla a few years back, and saw its self-driving functionality.

This felt like a step in the opposition direction. “Your rights were violated, have a soda” is a far less enjoyable universe than self-driving cars made by a man who seems to want to be a Bond villain.


Anyway, I filled out the survey. $5 is $5.