Rarity systems, despite their names, are extremely common in collectible card games (CCGs) and trading card games (TCGs) all over. The basic idea of this system is very simple: some cards are much more commonly available and easy to acquire than their rarer brethren. Couple this with booster packs containing a semi-random assortment of cards, and you have a solid monetization model that many popular card games are built from. Players who want a specific common card are likely to acquire it after buying a few packs, while players who are chasing certain rarer cards will have to really open their wallet. Monetary motivations aside however, I want to talk about why these cards have different rarities this week, and why rarity systems have stuck around as long as they have.
Complexity
One reason card rarities have been such a mainstay of CCGs and TCGs is because they limit newer players’ exposure to overly complex mechanics. When starting to build their card collection, newer players are frequently also trying to learn the core mechanics of how the game works: what actions are allowed to be taken at what times, what resources must be used to play cards, what do all these crazy symbols mean, etc. Keeping the more complex mechanics that frequently break these rules relegated to the cards that newer players will encounter less helps spread out the learning burden. With hundreds, or even thousands, of different cards available to players looking to get into established CCG/TCGs, it is essential to make the knowledge necessary for gameplay as accessible as possible.
Power
Another facet of card rarities is that a card’s rarity is often indicative of its relative strength. For players of all skill levels, it can be difficult to figure out how powerful a card is when reading its text for the first time. In this regard, the card’s rarity can be used as a baseline for its power level; the rarer a given card, the more powerful it generally will be. There are always exceptions to this, however. Sometimes designers experiment with a new mechanic, and their thoughts on how strong it will be turn out to be incorrect, or the card’s complexity demands a higher rarity for the reasons stated above. Given that new expansions typically contain 100+ cards, however, this simple baseline can really help guide players’ early decision making on what cards are powerful enough to use and what cards are not.
Gatekeeping
Assigning rarities to cards can lead to some significant problems, however. For Magic: the Gathering, there is a significant secondary market that assigns individual cards’ monetary value. The rarer and more powerful cards are bought and sold for higher prices, often leading to the best competitive decks also coming with a high price tag. This in turn can create a barrier to entry for newer or casual players, where they suddenly have to pay hundreds of dollars on top of whatever they have already invested to remain competitive. When faced with the decision of paying more for stronger cards or continually losing to cards they can’t afford, many players like myself will simply choose to go have fun elsewhere. Digital CCGs such as Legends of Runeterra and Hearthstone have addressed this by not allowing players to exchange cards, thus denying individual cards any value. They have also allowed players to unlock specific cards through earning in-game currency, reducing the need to invest in dozens or hundreds of randomized booster packs, further increasing the accessibility of their games to newer players.
In Conclusion
As is the case for almost everything in life, making different cards easier or harder to obtain comes with benefits and drawbacks. This system helps ease newer players into the more complex parts of the game, giving rookies fewer reasons to give up. It also provides a convenient baseline for estimating a given card’s power level, reducing the amount of time it takes players to learn the ins and outs of new cards. These benefits do come at a cost though, and can create a barrier that players are not able to afford to get past.
In the meantime, I hope you have a legendary week, and I’ll see you next time!
-Mark
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