LCGs: the plusses and minuses

I thought this was a well-considered list of the problems with the LCG format, as well as some suggestions (some good, some bad) about how to solve them:

boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/16034/a-criti...f-a-living-card-game

The lack of limited and the lack of organized play support are the big problems I've always seen with the format, when I was considering buying into one (Netrunner I got just to try out for variety's sake and see how it compared to classic Netrunner). The catchup problems that exist once an LCG's been around for longer than a year hadn't occurred to me, and make it...well, more expensive than Magic, once you're several years in. And that's a pretty high expense bar, right there.

"Catchup" is likely only a problem when viewed from the buyer's perspective. I realize that the publisher has to mind to that, but offering catch-up packs in plain packages at a later date, short of pricing them at the full retail costs of all included cards combined, undercuts the publisher's sales of the more lucrative packages when they are initially released. People will wait to save money. These are the packages that the publisher makes their bread and butter off of. The real issue is more about keeping the prior packages at a reasonable level of inventory so that customers can find them.

"Organized Play" gets stomped on by the obsessive-compulsive competitors unless one of two things is in the mix:

1. Some level of blind-booster built into the play, which will be interesting to work out with an easily-attained card set. Heck, it's a problem with Magic and some of its cards are hard to get.

2. Something that just brings whimsy into the event so the pressure to compete in the single most optimal way is relieved. I'm already hearing this is an issue in X-Wing events where everyone is showing up with the same thing. They show up to win, not to play.

It's worth a read though, well written. I'll be honest, I'm not on board with this concept. It's essentially miniatures gaming with cheap components. My nature isn't to collect and what remains is an "incomplete" game, whether it's truly incomplete or just perceived to be once you get one expansion behind.

S.

The biggest problem with CCGs was that your bank account became a game component. You can easily get into an expensive arms race with your opponents without necessarily improving the entertainment value of the game. LCGs pose the exact same threat. Limited play can become just as expensive as unlimited play, because competitive players are forced to buy heavily into each new set as older sets become obsolete. If I ever decide to get into an LCG, I will treat it as a boardgame. In other words, I will try to create a variety of decks that are balanced against each other, and then I can sit down to play with friends using just those pre-built decks. Might not be as exciting as tournament play, but it's a lot more bang for the buck.

With that approach (treating the LCG as a complete boardgame from the start perhaps buying an expansion or two) you essentially neuter the concept from the publisher's perspective who's trying to be a subscription service for you.

At that point the LCG needs to compete against all other games in the market with the additional design limitations associated with its LCGness.

S.

That's a nice rundown of the strengths and weaknesses of the format.

I think the heart of the problem of lack of organized play is that there isn't really an incentive for a game store to host it. With Friday Night Magic, you've got a bunch of people coming into the store and will probably end up buying a pack of two each. Boom. A bustling night of sales for the store.

But for an LCG? There's the chance some people will buy some expansion packs, but chances are they will already have them. It's kind of the same thing as hosting a regular board game night. You get people in the stores and are selling them sodas, snacks and the odd impulse buy. Not bad for business, but probably not as good as Friday Night Magic.

These problems don't exist for many players.

If you don't compete.. no problem. I find the Magic Cube more interesting, or themed decks my friend has. Great game... I have no interest in competition. The LCG format is fine if you buy a couple of core sets and then 3-4 expansions tops.. that's what we do.

That's still expensive but not Magic expensive and it gives me a great game I can share with buddies. We say things like: "Here, take this pile of decks and build yourself something, I'll do the same and we'll play at lunch everyday next week."

That cost is for TWO people (at least) to play the game. Not just one.

But you have to be non-competitive and unconcerned about completionist tendencies that some gamers have.

Sagrilarus wrote: "Catchup" is likely only a problem when viewed from the buyer's perspective. I realize that the publisher has to mind to that, but offering catch-up packs in plain packages at a later date, short of pricing them at the full retail costs of all included cards combined, undercuts the publisher's sales of the more lucrative packages when they are initially released. People will wait to save money. These are the packages that the publisher makes their bread and butter off of. The real issue is more about keeping the prior packages at a reasonable level of inventory so that customers can find them.

I think the catchup problem that I found more problematic is not the difficulty in hunting down old expansions, but that if you jump in after a few years have passed, you have to spend several hundreds of dollars all at once to catch up to everyone else; right now, people are thinking "oh, it's just a $10-15 monthly purchase", but that's ONLY if you start at the ground level.

Another major problem that LCGs have with organized play as opposed to CCGs is: CCGs have a very very natural prize: booster packs. Most store-level Magic events has booster packs as its prize. You play in a tournament so you can get more packs to do better in tournaments etc. etc. Wizards can send booster boxes as prize support, no problem. But with an LCG, it's assumed that anyone playing competitively already has a complete set of cards. So the prizes for LCGs? A fancier click-tracker for Netrunner, for real? A freaking POSTER??? Now, this wouldn't begin to be as good a prize as booster packs, but what they SHOULD give as prizes are the cards that there are only one of in the Core Set.

dragonstout wrote: . . . but that if you jump in after a few years have passed, you have to spend several hundreds of dollars all at once to catch up to everyone else; right now, people are thinking "oh, it's just a $10-15 monthly purchase"

That's a good point. It's cheaper if you buy each month. That should be obvious to anyone.

S.

Sagrilarus wrote:

dragonstout wrote: . . . but that if you jump in after a few years have passed, you have to spend several hundreds of dollars all at once to catch up to everyone else; right now, people are thinking "oh, it's just a $10-15 monthly purchase"

That's a good point. It's cheaper if you buy each month. That should be obvious to anyone.

Not sure what your point is here, but in e.g. Magic, you're not up against people who've bought playsets of every card from the past 20 years, thanks to the rotating Standard format or any Limited format. Obviously people get pissed about rotating formats because it "obsoletes" your cards, but it's the only way yet demonstrated to keep a CCG/LCG new-player-friendly in the long-term. There still exists the awesome Legacy format (among many others) for Magic, but a new player is eased into that, if they want, by having many formats that are playable with a much smaller and more recent card pool.

It strikes me that the biggest drawback, and one that is sort of an "all of the above" response, is that FFG is effectively trying to have its boardgamer cake and eat it to while effectively selling fixed pack CCG cards. The whole reason beyond the LCG product is to steer consumer attention away from the many notable issues with the CCG format ranging from the cost to the power creep to the need for each player to buy individual play sets. They tried to solve all of it in one concept that board gamers would also accept, but the problem is they keep fucking it up by doing stupid "rope 'em in" tactics like saying you can play with three Feints...but only putting two in the box. You want third Feint? $39.95 retail for another core set.

With the traditional low cost starter/booster model, that wasn't a problem. You could buy singles or trade to get complete sets or the particular cards you wanted. But AFAIK, no one is selling or trading LCG singles because of the fixed distribution.

The competitive play aspect is another issue, as has been pointed out here things like prize support takes on a very different form (posters, really?) and the popular booster draft formats are not possible. I can attest to the fact that Friday Night Magic is a HUGE event for stores that support it. I'd have 50 people in the shop playing, with some nice prizes from WOTC and I usually offered some additional incentives on top of that. And at least 40 out of those 50 people would buy snacks and drinks, as well as singles, as well as boosters, and if it was sealed deck then they'd be buying a starter and a pair of boosters.

But LCG is more of a board game mentality,and I don't think FFG has really figured out how to reconcile the two very different products. Doing the set-based deck building and reducing the number of cores needed down to two is a step in the right direction, at least.

It is DEFINITELY expensive to catch up, I know that from experience. I think my LOTR LCG catch up was around $200, inclusive of 12 adventure packs (i.e. one year's worth), the deluxe Khazad-Dum expansion, and three cores. That's a big outlay, particularly if you're a new player just getting into it.

But really, that's kind of built-in marketing too...especially if you're going to play Netrunner competitively. After six months of expansion packs, you're likely playing a different game than those who have kept up. So the subliminal marketing is telling you "buy monthly! buy monthly!"

I really don't understand why FFG doesn't offer a subscription service right out of the box on these games. You buy the core, then go home and order your subscription deliverable either to your home for a shipping fee or to a FLGS for free. I would definitely do this for six month runs, maybe not longer than that.

The other issue with FFG's LCGs which is not connected to their format is that there are SIX of them. At that point they're clearly competing with themselves. I mean, sure, each of them except for Netrunner are licensed, so each is going to grab the fans of its license no matter what...but then for the more general market of board-gamers looking for a CCG-like game to play, I can't imagine keeping up with more than 2. At this point FFG is producing more CCG cards, let alone talking about their other games, than Wizards is but with less manpower, and that can't be healthy.

I've wondered about FFG's LCG stability. Between my play group we collect Android: Netrunner and Star Wars. LotR, CoC, AGoT, and Warhammer are not that appealing to me or my wallet. It's possible that in the next 1 to 2 years one of these games gets discontinued.

That was a pretty good article and this is an interesting topic, I have been thinking about it on and off for a while now and doing some research and my big conclusion is the following:


The major benefit of the Living Card Game model is that it doesn't require a secondary market to keep the game alive.

The major drawback of the Living Card Game model is that it doens't require a secondary market to keep the game alive.



Everything else is either minor or not related to the distribution model. A game that has sixty expansions will kill itself without a rotating format, be it a CCG like Vampire or any of the FFG Living Card Games, it's not tied to the distribution model.

A lack of rotating formats will also kill the game because power creep becomes inevitable and even desirable in design. The more cards you have in the pool, the more powerful a new card has to be to see the table. That's not healthy and staples will stand in the way of changing that. How powerful must creature kill be to compete with Swords to Plowshares? How powerful must a counter be to compete with Mana Drain and Force of Will? It's inherently unsolvable design-wise.

And this doesn't cover the awesome fun of having different formats. And with a Living Card Game model you could play older formats without any problem, which is great.


PRICE

I don't think Magic is expensive only because of the random booster packs. Because that doesn't explain 100% Chase Rares in Standard. Not even Mythic ones, just rares. The prices are so much higher than when I was playing that it's insane and there's no

They do increase the price of the game significantly by adding a cost to liquidity but they don't explain 100$ Chase Rares in Standards. When I played no card was ever worth more than 20$, even if it was Pithing Needle, the only good card of its entire set. This makes me think there's more than randomness involved.



Mothly releases also worry me a lot because that's very little time for the Metagame to work and settle. You can't have two big tournaments with the same card pool, that's pretty fucked up.

The more I think about this the more I worry about the future of Netrunner.

I wouldn't be surprised to see CoC or Warhammer sunsetted even this year...I hear less about those than the others, and AGoT has a big boost with the show and new show-centric edition.

I think that is a major issue, these products are all competing with each other. I'm now into three (SW, LOTR, and Netrunner) and I'm not exactly thrilled about a $30+ a month outlay to keep the sets current. It's not a bad deal, really, if it keeps the games playing and changing, but still...$30 a month, that's like a bill.

It's not so much the secondary market that's the best/worst thing, it's the fixed card distribution. Of course it's great. You buy it and you have all the cards. But it does do away with the more volatile, permeable parts that really keep the game alive and evergreen.

I don't think about this topic as much as some ( have 400ish old netrunner cards that i treat like a board game, and occasionally play the Agot starter set decks), but i have often wondered what FFGs business model for their card games is, or even all their games. FFG pumps out a lot of material. Whilst much of it is accessible to gamers, its not to non gamers, and i dont see the market rapidly expanding. My guess with the expansion packs is they work on something like if the last cycle sold X make some more, and keep going til it stops. I do wonder who buys the latest packs of CoC in particular, because its theme, whilst popular is less conducive to long term competitive game play.