I am,asking about trading card games like Yu-Gi-Oh, Magic, and HeroClix. I know HeroClix uses figures instead of cards, but it still follows this. They are fun to play, but it seems to me that there isn’t much skill involved. It’s all about how much money you are willing to put into it. You can practice enough to master, or at least become much better at most games. But TCGs are different. If you don’t have the powerful (expensive) cards, you will never win a match.
Skill, money and luck all play a role.
Luck is obvious - even the best player in the world playing the most powerful deck can lose a game if their luck is bad enough - if you draw nothing but endgame cards you won’t have enough board control to reach the endgame, and you lose.
Money comes down to two things - having more options and having more powerful cards. The first is reasonable - if you want to play a deck that fits a specific niche (like an all-Sliver deck) it obviously helps to have enough cards to swap cards out in favour of those that fit your deck or the metagame. The problem is when certain cards - especially rare cards - are more powerful than they have any right to be, which lets a “whale” buy power directly by buying the cards to do the same niche as you, but better. For example, there are few decks in Hearthstone that cannot be improved by the addition of a Doctor Boom - it is the most powerful 7-drop by a significant margin, and unless you’re planning on killing your opponent by turn 6, it comes down to whether you have found or crafted this expensive and rare card or whether you’re forced to go without.
This might draw a bit more action in The Game Room. Let me move it over there.
The best part of TCGs is that are endless formats to play, and many of them have limitations on how much pure money can influence the quality of your deck. Take Magic. One format is called Vintage, and it allows nearly every card ever printed to be played, with the most important ones costing hundreds of dollars. It’s difficult to be competitive in that format without spending thousands.
On the other hand, there’s Pauper. Pauper only allows Common cards. There’s a few that cost over $20, but most competitive cards can be had for a buck or two at most.
Then there’s the Limited formats, like draft or sealed. These formats put everyone on equal footing, as you open sealed booster packs and build your deck out of what you open. Everyone has a fair shot, and the guy with the $50K collection has no advantage over the new player. Skill and experience is everything, plus a little luck in what you open.
You don’t even need to keep buying packs for Limited, as you can also build your own Cube, which is a collection of cards that you shuffle and make new booster packs out of. Think of it as designing and curating your own set for draft purposes. And like constructed formats, you can make a Pauper Cube as well, where the whole works costs less than a brand new board game, but with far more replayability.
So, to your question. Clearly, at the top levels of Constructed play, a fair amount of money is required to be competitive. But that’s not to say that skill isn’t part of the game. There’s a reason certain pro players have had continued success for many, many years. If it were possible to buy your way into their ranks, you’d see a lot more diversity in Pro Tour top 8s.
Once you’re familiar with Magic’s rules, try watching the live streams of the events. Or better yet, watch a pro like Luis Scott-Vargas stream Magic Online. Listening to him explaining his thought process behind his draft picks and plays is incredible. I’ve been playing this game for over 20 years, and I still learn new nuances from a master like him every single time I watch.
Good heavens do I hate Dr. Boom. I think when he comes into play instead of that maniacal laugh he should say “My player is a huge dickhead!”
At no time am I more satisfied than when I am taking on a Face Hunter deck and I am able to deal with a turn 7 Boom-drop and still win the game.
As for the OP: Yeah, there’s a certain amount of money involved, especially in physical games where “market prices” can make acquiring certain ultra-powerful cards very expensive. But there are enough guides on the net that can teach you how to make very cheap, very effective low-cost decks that will stand against a good portion of the expensive decks.
And having money doesn’t make you smart. I can’t count the number of times I have gone up against someone who obviously spent money to buy/craft a great, powerful deck full of rare, expensive cards – who had no idea how to use them strategically to win the game. Games I should have lost handily have been won because the opponent had no clue WTF to do with his expensive powerhouse.
If you play hearthstone, go ahead and look me up, my name on there is joemama. I am one of those folks who pledged himself never to spend cash on the game, just use in-game earnings to help me along. It’s slower, but spending real money for irtual-credits in game has never appealed to me.
I can’t speak about Yu-Gi-Oh or HeroClix, but there is definitely skill and strategy involved in Magic. The specifics depend on what format of Magic we’re talking about.
Broadly speaking, there are two ways to play Magic: Constructed and Limited. Constructed is where the players each bring a deck of cards they’ve already constructed. Limited is where the players show up, open sealed product, and build a deck out of what they’ve opened.
In Limited, money doesn’t make a lick of difference - once you’ve paid the entrance fee for the event, you get the same amount of sealed product as every other player. You might get lucky and open some powerful cards that work well together; you might get unlucky and open a pretty weak pool of cards (or maybe you have some powerful ones, but they don’t work well together). But money is no advantage.
There are two main types of Limited play: Sealed, and Draft. In Sealed, you get sealed product, open it up, and what you get is what you get to make a deck out of. In Draft, you open one booster pack, choose a card, then pass the pack to the next player. You do this until the pack is gone, then open the next pack. When the third pack is gone, you have a pile of cards that you’ve chosen that you then make a deck out of. Sealed has more luck involved, since you have zero control over what cards you’ll end up with in your pool. You do still have control over which of those cards you’ll use in your deck, however.
With Draft there is strategy involved even before you start playing the game itself. During the drafting process, you might pick a card because it plays well with cards you’ve already selected. But you might also choose one even if you’re certain you won’t use it in your deck, just to deny it to another player who you suspect would get use out of it.
In Constructed, how money affects things depends on the format. Constructed has many formats: Vintage, Legacy, Modern, Standard, and Commander - plus others, but those are the big ones. For a format like Legacy, in order to be competitive you might have to spend a huge amount of money on cards. It’s a format with an expensive “buy in”. On the other hand, it’s relatively stable - new deck types show up now and then but for the most part once you’ve bought in you’re mostly good to go for a while. Standard, on the other hand, changes frequently. The only cards legal for use in Standard are the newest few sets, so it’s a rotating format. The buy-in usually isn’t much (at least not compared to Legacy or Vintage), but if you want to stay in the game you’ll have to keep buying the new sets.
In Constructed, money is an advantage to a certain point. Where that point is depends on the format, the overall meta-game at the time (which decks are popular vs. which other decks), and of course the fluctuating market for individual cards. But this doesn’t mean that there isn’t strategy or skill involved.
In summary, money is an advantage in some forms of Magic, not in others. Where it is an advantage, that advantage can range from enormous to moderate to slim.
Or, basically, what JSexton said.
The most gratifying game of Magic I ever saw, I watched an idiot with more dollars than sense get his rear handed to him. He had very clearly paid a fortune to put together his deck: For instance, his entire mana base consisted of dual lands (the old-school ones without any drawbacks) and Mox (for context, even one Mox gem is worth at least $700). His opponent, meanwhile, had a much more modest deck that would probably cost about $30 to reproduce, and might have been cheaper if it was what he just happened to be able to put together out of his cards.
Rich guy opens with a land and a Mana Vault. Second turn, he plays another land, and uses them all to case a Juzam Djinn (taking a point of damage in the process, this being back in the days of mana burn). Cheap guy responds by casting Spirit Link on the djinn.
Net result, rich guy has taken one point of damage at his own hand, he’s taking two more every turn also at his own hand, and he can’t effectively do anything to the cheap guy, because any damage the djinn will do will be immediately healed. Plus, the cheap guy is actually gaining a point of life every turn, from the djinn’s upkeep.
As the game went on, the rich guy never even untapped the vault, even once he had the ability to. He just kept on hoping for a miracle that never came, and so ended up doing nothing. Meanwhile, the cheap player just coasted to victory on the results of those first two turns and a single uncommon card.
Back on topic, I’ve often contemplated that an interesting tournament format would be one where the cards weren’t limited by edition or set, but by total deck price. They’d have to be sponsored by a dealer, of course, to use the dealer’s official price list to score a deck. You could then have the equivalent of weight classes: A tournament for decks under $20, and one for under $100, and one for under $500, or whatever. This would guarantee that the tournament would be accesible for those on a budget (as long as they enter the lower weight classes), and would also reward creativity: As a particular deck started winning, it’d become more popular, which would drive up the prices of the key cards in it, which would ratchet it out of its weight class. The way to win would be the first to come up with some clever new idea, before everyone else on the market drove up the price. And you’d automatically police the overpowered cards from old editions, while still keeping the reasonably-powered but interesting cards in play.
The skill is in knowing how to optimize your deck and when to play what card for maximum benefit.
All of those games are a combination of skill, strategy and luck. The gameplay may be more “luck of the draw” for what cards you have in a given hand, but you still have to know how to build a deck to give you the range of cards you need and a strategy for how to deal with what your opponent brings to the table.
Except that, in many formats, you don’t actually need skill to build a deck, since you can just buy the exact cards you need to mimic the deck that someone else built. And even if you’re not using an exact copy of some other deck, you’re likely to be using a deck built to some standard theme, like “green weenie” or “red direct damage”.
Chronos, you might like Canadian Highlander. 100 card singleton decks, nothing banned. However, most very powerful cards have point values assigned, and you have a limit of 7 points that you can spend on broken cards.
I agree with everything the intelligent and handsome JSexton said, but I’ll add this summary of TCGs that I believe adequately sums up the topic:
“It’s pay to play, not pay to win.”
For many organized play formats, there is indeed a certain amount of money that must be spent in order to be competitive. But beyond that, it’s really up to your own skill (and a varying amount of luck) to determine whether you win or not. Spending more money beyond that threshold doesn’t really get you anything other than ultra-rare versions of the same cards you could have gotten for half or even a tenth of the price.
With respect to draft/sealed, they aren’t “pay to win” but they are to a degree “pay to learn to win” - while there are general principles about how to draft or how to build a sealed deck, it takes practice to learn which cards in a specific set are better or worse than they look. This really only matters at very competitive levels, but pros go through hundreds of dollars worth of cards to prepare for high-level sealed/draft tournaments.
But can’t you get that practice using proxies and virtual environments and so on that don’t cost anything?
You can go some distance but for instance the distribution of cards isn’t truly 100 percent random and most of the draft simulator sites don’t really get the “print runs” right, so your fake draft isn’t quite the same environment as an actual draft.
This is true to a degree, but assuming your local store has draft nights for $10 to $15 with reasonable prize payouts, and you can win at least half your matches, and you sell off the money cards you open, you can draft endlessly without very much investment at all. Certainly a lot cheaper than going to the movies.