Recently Omnigamer managed to get an interview in with Enterplay about the upcoming My Little Pony card game, with some images here, here, here, and here.
Granted, the subject matter (an MLP card game) is close to my heart due to my previous project, MLPDCG. That was halted when the official game was effectively announced, though no C&D has been sent as of yet and they still haven’t replied to anything I’ve sent regarding the domain after someone reached out to me about it.
I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t worried about the game. From experience not only as a long-time card player, but from my own market research and experience with the MLPDCG project.
Here’s what I’m worried about:
- Keyword-heavy, possibly referring to rules elsewhere. Lots of unusual terminology. Player knowledge burden. The cards in general are more complex then they look at first glance.
- Small text. Looks to be just smaller than MtG text, which is an adult’s game. Kids will have a bit of a harder time reading this than normal. Also, you mixed Serif and Sans-serif fonts together you monster.
- Primary market. It’s obvious this is aimed squarely at the teen and adult bronies. However, these fans are known for moving on extremely quickly, so while initial sales will be decent, the sales will fall off somewhat fast. It’s not helping that said fanbase is slowly dwindling, as the game is about a season too late for any real effectiveness.
- Colors. The yellows in particular look off and hard to see (which every card game has to figure out. Yellows and light greens just don’t print well without a trick like Pokemon’s sponge-matte for visibility) and the gradient does it no good. Color-blindness hasn’t really been taken into consideration which I feel is a shame. The cards end up looking a bit flat.
- Additionally, the colors look “off-brand”, as the color choices don’t immediately say “MLP” (which is pinks, light purples, blues, and a bit of green). The problem cards are a good one to point out, in that the show does NOT favor darker colors and ESPECIALLY blacks, usually going the purple route.
- Continuing the design, the screencap area is still smaller than I would’ve liked. Not to mention it has a boring, no-work gradient square border in a show that loves the frilly curves. This hurts the collectibility.
- The “Faceoff” mechanic, which is also known as Star Wars: CCG‘s “Destiny” mechanic. It didn’t work then and it was notoriously hard to balance, with Light Side winning the majority of the games solely due to Destiny. Cards that can manipulate this mechanic are going to be hard to balance due to said manipulation being inherently powerful. At worst, the mechanic will be so polarizing that one would have to build the deck solely around it (likely being forced to include Zecora, Pinkie Pie, or both) in order to stand a chance.
- Friend Spam, though I’m not privy to the new changes made so this one may not be as bad. In particular it looks like the MCs may have a hard limit in how many cards that can be fielded, but that’s rather arbitrary.
- Arbitrary resource gain. Since there’s few ways around it, the player that gets ahead usually stays ahead. Again, it sounds like they’ve changed it from GenCon but ANY resource system like this has problems.
- From what I’ve been told, the MC cards (the ones required to play the game) are locked away in the starter decks, raising the cost of entry further while limiting availability. It’ll really hurt any form of “pick-up-and-play” the game could have, and that’s one of the big reasons why MtG, PKMN, YGO, and even Cardfight Vanguard have been so successful.
At least it’s not a direct battle game like so many other fangames. Twilight should never have an Hit Point count. There’s likely other positives that I just can’t see without the cards and rules in-hand.
This game, however, just looks to me of the “Hey, we have the licence, it doesn’t matter if it’s any good if the players buy it” mentality that’s poisoning the market for this kind of card game. There’s a massive stigma for IP-based card games (especially screencap games) that MLPCCG isn’t going to improve.
Well, mine wouldn’t have been any better, but it would’ve been nice to be able to continue work on it.