One of my oldest friends in this world spent almost a decade of his life touring as a mid-level rockstar. Through all that he would constantly get asked for advice, folks that wanted to know how he managed to make a life out of music, and more importantly, how they could do it too. There were plenty of glib or flip replies, you get asked the same questions so many times you can’t always find the energy to be real, but there was one that always stuck with me.
He said, “You have to be a little bit arrogant. You have to believe, deep in your soul, that you, just plain you, dancing around in circles above the crowd, yelling at the top of your lungs, you, are worth people paying real money to spend an hour with.” And when I asked him about it later, he laughed.
“It’s ridiculous, right? He said. “When you think about it that way. But it’s also true. Every musician dreams of their art making it on a real stage. If you’re going to break into a space that is so supersaturated with people, you have to be a true believer. Even, no, especially, if when you start choosing to believe you’re wrong.”
“You have to be a little bit arrogant”
When so many people have tried to do something, it takes a special level of self-delusion to decide that your attempt is going to be different. And one of the most difficult things is to balance that paradoxically necessary belief, with cuttingly accurate assessment of your actual abilities. The question that you need to ask is “What can I do, that the rest of the world hasn’t?”
Note that I didn’t say can’t. It’s never going to be about doing the impossible or deciding you are a single completely unique star in the night sky. Instead, the key is to find something concrete that you can point to and say, “I can make this mine.” A surprising amount of the time all an incredibly worthwhile question has been waiting for isn’t anything as silly as the “right person,” but simply someone willing to ask it in the first place.
Asking the question
For this project it was “Why do we have to have trash cards?” You know, those thousands of bulk commons, or even low power rares, any Tabletop CCG player ends up with cluttering some random desk somewhere? It’s one of those fundamental truths of CCG existence that’s been around so long folks don’t really stop to consider it anymore. Think about one of the most famous and successful CCGs of all time, Magic the Gathering. Something like 75% of all cards ever created will rarely if ever see constructed competitive play.
There are just always better options that reduce these forgotten pieces of cardboard to pack filler, obstacles that stand between players and the significantly rarer cards they need to achieve their decks potential. And this is arguably the real reason for their existence. By making sure that a huge number of players all want the same relatively scarce resource, the companies ensure that booster packs for their games continue to be opened and they continue to make money.
However, there are plenty of ways to monetize a game sufficiently to keep the lights on. Artificial scarcity of power can’t be the only answer. If there isn’t a fundamental game play-based reason behind the creation of these unloved cards, there’s no need to conclude that they have to exist. And, in the end, my failure to find a satisfactory answer to this question became the fundamental basis for the design of Chrono. “All Cards Deserve Love.”
Shut up and do it
Words are great and all, but at the end of the day they don’t make anything happen. Once you have an idea, don’t get crazy complicated with it, don’t try to make it perfect, spin up your first draft and get going. Once you have something real, the iterations will take on a life of their own. You will learn less in five years trying to refine an idea in your head, than in a couple of months throwing together a messy prototype and then kicking it till it works.
How’s it going with Chrono? Well, so far, so good? We have our world, our mechanics, and most importantly for this article, our first set of 180 cards that we are slowly sending live via our playable Alpha Test. So far, we’ve managed to have every one of our cards find some sort of home, and that’s a commitment we intend to honor.
Effects on the game
While I’m sure this design philosophy will have wide-reaching effects we can’t see from here, there are two important ones that I am confident in predicting. One, deck price. When the most powerful decks are built from only the rarest cards, competition becomes expensive. When every card is powerful and has a place, it will, almost by definition, be significantly easier to put together top-level competitive decks from point zero.
Two, power of limited formats. In other CCGs the only time the “Pack Filler” ever really sees play is in limited formats where you don’t have another choice. This means that limited is often very low power level. In Chrono, while of course limited decks will be less powerful than when players have the entire game at their command, the gap will be much smaller. This will lead, we believe, to significantly more interesting and engaging limited formats.
What’s next
We’re not perfect, and we’re never going to be. Could there be, will there be, times when cards get released that fall short of the mark we want to set? Of course. The answer then is to never stop iterating. Chrono is going to be a living game. The golden days of every Online CCG have always come when the balance patches are frequent and significant, and for Chrono I see no reason those should end.
The plan for when Chrono goes live is to have balance patches every two weeks, always focusing on the paramount design ideal of “All Cards Deserve Love.” I think that, guided by this principle, while we may never achieve an impossible perfection of balance, being willing to never stop striving for it will create one of the most interesting and competitive CCGs that has ever been made.
Heh, “a little bit arrogant.”