What makes a valuable card suggestion?
One of the characteristics of a great game is the variety in play experiences. This creates a greater depth to the game. This greater depth makes the game attractive to a larger audience and makes the game last longer for each player's enjoyment. Since variety is such a central characteristic for a game it is an important and potent area for collaborative improvements.
As you can probably guess the main source for new variety in a Collectible Card Game is new cards. The variable play experience in Elements the Game originates in the many different resulting games that occur when pitting two out of the many possible decks together. Each deck is made out of synergistic combinations of cards from the game's card bank. Hence the variety added with each additional card is incredible to begin with.
However when a card is very similar to another card (Horned Frog and Cockatrice) there is not as much added variety with the second card. This is to be expected from the original cards because more cards had to be added at once to make the game playable many very similar cards were created including the dragon series. However you would not see Zanz make the same kind of an addition now. Since he can add cards slower than at the start he can work on adding cards that help diversify the play experience the most.
Cards suggestions are good if they add variety to the game. The main inhibitors of variety are imbalance, repetition and nonsense distractions. Thus the charactieristics of a good card suggestion are being balanceable, creative and thematic.
The first characteristic of a good card is being balanceable. What do we mean by balanceable? Balanceable means that some adaption of the idea if added to the game, after the dust settles from the metagame adapting, there is a distribution of power between the strategies that is even enough for the target audience to accept. The easiest way to know if something is balanceable is to balance it.
The second characteristic of a good card is being creative. What do we mean by creative? Creative means that it adds something new to the game and that it does not resemble a card in game too closely either in mechanic or effect. Adding something new typically involves breaking a previous preconception. In my opinion the best example of this is when the card fractal shattered the idea that you can only play 6 of a creature. While breaking a preconception is typically a good idea there are some taboo idea based on rules that are meant to remain or have hidden reasons for existing. Taboos can still be broken but in those cases you should give a very good argument for why the game is better off without that rule.
The third characteristic of a good card is being thematic. What do we mean by thematic? Thematic means that the card has a single unifying theme that is present throughout the card. Each of the 4 parts of a card (Name, Effect, Image, Element) is part of a theme. If they disagree with each other about what the uniting theme is then the card ends up with 2+ competing themes and no unifying theme. A good card will have all 4 parts of a card synchronized in thematic agreement ending up with a single unifying theme. A good way to check this it to verify each of the 6 pairs of parts of the card make sense linked in that way.
A subnote about thematic is that good Effects are mechanically thematic. This means that all the parts of the mechanic agree that it is the best way to implement that idea. This is known as the vehicle/rider factor. A vehicle is a term describing a mechanic that is a modifier for another mechanic. A rider is a term describing a mechanic that is being modified. An examples of this is Growth from Lava Golem. In Growth we have 2 vehicle rider pairs. The first pair is the "+2|+2" effect as the rider being modified by the "creature skill" mechanic. The second pair is the "creature skill" mechanic being modified by the duo
activation cost. When the core of an idea starts with an effect, be careful to chose the vehicle wisely for some effects are wiser than others. (Photosynthesis as a Spell card instead of Rustler's skill would be a terrible design)
These three characteristic are very important because they provide cards that can work, are new and make sense. This is the minimum requirements for a card suggestion to be beneficial to the game by adding variety. However card suggestions that add more variety are great cards. The main restrictors of variety are requiring other cards, being a one trick pony or being overshadowed. Thus the characteristics of a great card are working by as a standalone card, having varied uses and having a niche.
The first characteristic of a great card is working by as a standalone card. If a card requires another card for it to work at a balanced level then the number of decks it can be used in just dropped dramatically.
The second characteristic of a great card is having varied uses. If a card only has one use then it will only make one deck type. If a card has multiple varied uses like Rage Potion is both Fire Rush and Fire Stall then it will make more deck types.
The third characteristic of a great card having a niche. Even if a card has diverse uses and works by itself it can still be overshadowed. Massive Dragon is inefficient in attack compared to Elite Charger and inefficient in hp compared to Elite Armagio. If this occurs then the card would only be included as a 7-12th copy of the better version like Elite Cockatrice in USEM.
A card suggestion that is balanceable, creative, thematic, works as a standalone, has varied uses and has its niche would add a great deal of variety to the game. The card suggestion Crusader is a prime example of a card that follows all of these (although it is limited in when it can act as a standalone card).
Please comment and give suggestions/edit the draft yourself in
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