The First Set

Posted Oct 23, 2024

The first set in Orbs CCG is unique. It's not how I want to design sets going forward, but there's a number of reasons why I'm doing it this way for the first set. This blog posts explains what's different about the first set (compared with how I want to design sets going forward) and why I'm doing it this way.

First, some history. Orbs CCG was originally made in 2012. It was a digital card game with optional asynchronous play, however, there were just four colors at first: blue, green, red, and yellow. There was only ever one set, and more cards were added to it over time, including the colors black and purple. I always designed it to have six colors from the beginning, but it's cheaper and quicker to release fewer cards at first, rather than wait for all six colors to be ready.

Note Orbs CCG was designed in a time when there were few to no digital collectible card games. Orbs CCG came out before Hearthstone was even announced (and had minion cards and trap cards before Hearthstone). Magic: the Gathering Online (MtGO) was the only Magic: the Gathering digital client, and it cost money to even play (it wasn't free to play), and wasn't available on a Mac. One of the best performing mobile games of the time was Rage of Bahamut, which was more of a "card battler" than a strategic CCG, meaning you basically just brainlessly tapped your screen to "play" it, rather than thinking through strategies. There were basically no good strategic digital collectible card games available.

Orbs CCG was early to the CCG space, and was a lot of fun, but it was never a huge commercial success. I stopped working on it eventually. However, a few years ago, I decided to revive the game as a RPG/CCG hybrid game. Part of the problem with an indie free-to-play game, like Orbs CCG, is that you need a lot of players to make money. In most free-to-play games, only a tiny fraction of players even spend any money, and the median amount spent is pretty low too, so you want to have a large audience. The amount of money you make scales with the number of players, whereas the amount of work you have to do to make the game and make cards is more or less a fixed cost, so from a business perspective, free-to-play games generally want to try to have a ton of players. That means a large marketing budget, which could mean raising funding from venture capital. I never raised enough money with the original game, which was the root of the problem. When I was considering remaking it, one strategy I latched onti is to make a RPG game, so I could sell it on Steam for around $25. If every single player is paying $25, that's amazing compared to a free-to-play game, where maybe only 2% of players pay you a median of $5. The numbers work out a lot better.

I started making Orbs as a RPG, but realized it's a ton more work than just making a collectible card game. You have to design an entire RPG on top of that. If I'm already doing the work to make a playable card game, why not just release the card game as a standalone product? I could always add a RPG later, if I wanted to. So that's what I'm doing now.

What does that history have to do with the first set? Well, the first set is a bit of a hodgepodge of cards from the original game, and from the RPG I was working on. I have a ton of art that I'd like to reuse, however that means I have to design cards around the art, rather than designing a set from scratch and getting the art to match the cards. I also have some cards that I know I want in the RPG, that it'd be nice to have in the card game as well (I'd like them to use the same cards). I'm still trying to make the set intelligently, but have a lot of constraints due to the art that I already have.

Furthermore, the first set of any game has a goal that other sets won't have: to introduce a ton of cards to the game at once. I want to have a large card pool so that players can build a variety of decks. I want every color to be represented. I want constructed to support a variety of archetypes (aggro, midrange, control, etc). I also want to support asynchronous play as well as live play, which means I need to the right cards to support both, particularly cards with a Secret ability that can trigger on an opponent's turn.

The first set also does not have all the mechanics that I'd like, and the designer tools are a bit limited compared with what I'd like. What this means is that I can't design everything as well as I'd like, because programming those additional mechanics would increase the scope of the project too much. I have to cut some things, and focus on what's most important. I can always add more mechanics later.

Finally, the first set serves as an introduction to the game. I want to make sure that the set shows off a variety of Orbs CCG's capabilities. This is a goal that a typical set wouldn't have, so future sets can be more focused on leaning into their particular design space.

Once the first set is out, I can design sets more carefully. I can design sets around a theme or mechanic, and there will be less pressure on a single set to do the heavy lifting of trying to support everything all at once (since there will be an existing card pool to draw from).

Furthermore, future sets will often have just five colors plus one splash color, rather than six colors. I'll explain this more in another blog post, but the basic idea is that it makes limited better by having fewer two color archetypes to have to consider.

Hopefully this blog post explains why the first set is very different from how I want to design sets going forward. It's a unique experience at least, and unique sets can be fun in their own way. Hopefully you'll enjoy it!