This is a design post. It is mostly directed towards Trading Card Games (TCGs) but it does encompass other game with customizable player choice.

I’ll keep this simple and understandable for newcomers to those concepts. I’ll generalize some points for readability’s sake.

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In Magic the Gathering, there are 5 different colors, and cards can cost colored or colorless mana. For example, a card that costs 2G, costs 3 total mana, one of which must be green.

So in order to play cards, we need to play lands which produce mana.

If you compose your land base with Forest cards, you can produce plenty of Green mana.

Inclusive vs Exclusive

The concept of colors of mana is Weakly Exclusive. It discourages you playing multiple different strategies at once. If you play cards of all 5 colors, there is a chance you might not draw and have access to the necessary colors of mana.

Now imagine there was a land that produced two different colors of mana. It could allow you to more easily play two different colors, increasing the chance that your cards. This card is Weakly Inclusive. It encourages you to play multiple strategies at once.

The core balance between Inclusive and Exclusive strategies is part of what makes deck-building compelling. It encourages players to push the limits of exclusive strategies and try to greedily achieve as much ‘power’ as possible.

Weak vs Strong

Now to explore the terms Weakly and Strongly. I use these terms to describe how effective an individual example is at being Inclusive or Exclusive. The card Timber Gorge is not very strong and does not overpower the exclusive strategies of running individual colors.

Now I will shift to Hearthstone for further examples.

In Hearthstone, there are 9 classes, similar to Magic’s colors. Each class has it’s own class cards.

You cannot play class cards from other classes (generalization: I’m ignoring random effects).

The complete inability to play Fire Elemental in Paladin is Strongly Exclusive. There is no way to overcome that boundary, the strategic implications of the card Fire Elemental are completely disconnected from Uther (the Paladin)

 

To balance out the concept of class cards, Hearthstone also has Neutral cards, which can be used by any class. The existence of neutral cards is Strongly Inclusive. It encourages you to run individual cards or strategies in multiple decks.

An example of a powerful Neutral card is Dr. Boom. It is a powerful late game drop that can see play in practically every deck. The existence of Dr. Boom as a Strongly Inclusive card is degenerate.

Degenerate

There is no word to singularly describe what I want to use here. Degenerate is close: to diminish in quality, especially from a former state of coherence, balance, integrity, etc.:

The existence of Dr. Boom, as a Strongly Inclusive card, diminishes the quality of balance within the game. However, as a single instance, he has limited impact. Too many of these types of cards can devalue many strategies.

This is not a new occurrence within TCGs which I will come back to later.

Now let’s shift back to Magic the Gathering, to talk about Multicolor cards, the closest equivalent to if Hearthstone had class cards that were usable by multiple classes.

Remember how Magic uses 5 different colors. Some cards cost multiple colors of mana.

 

Compare Feral Krushok and Fusion Elemental. One requires a single colored mana, the other requires five different colored mana.

In Magic, multicolored cards are allotted a higher power level to compensate for the difficulty of acquiring multiple colors of mana. My example demonstrates this by Fusion Elemental’s 8/8 body compared to the 5/5 body.

Multicolor cards in Magic are both Inclusive and Exclusive. The reason they are both is that as powerful multicolor cards exist, they encourage players to branch out from individual strategies to create new ones. They are exclusive because it is difficult to combine these new multicolor strategies together.

However, Multicolor cards can become Purely Inclusive when multicolor mana becomes too achievable. It no longer becomes a cost to produce multiple colors but a requirement. This results in powerful multicolor cards degenerating the balance and power of mono-color cards.

MODERN

In Magic the Gathering, there exists different formats of play, which define the cards that are legal.

(Formats allows the developers to not require that every new card be comparable with every older card. This reduces the power creep that must happen over time to keep players interested in new products.)

Modern is a very broad format in Magic. It allows most cards printed in sets since Eighth Edition (2003-present day).

Magic the Gathering suffers from Over-Inclusivity in certain situations. Over-Inclusivity is where too many individual strategies can be combined at once, resulting in degeneration of previously healthy gameplay.

Over-Inclusivity happens in Magic the Gathering when multicolor mana becomes too achievable. There are many cards in modern that ease the challenge of producing multiple colors of mana. Many modern decks play 2-4 colors at relatively low cost. The result is degeneration in the number of potential strategies, combining rhe most powerful inclusive cards from multiple colors.

Inclusive: Anything that encourages combining strategies. Usually by lowering the cost of pursuing multiple strategies or giving cross strategy rewards. Inclusive cards are generally ‘value’ or ‘just plain good’

Exclusive: Anything that discourages combining strategies. Either by lowered chance of success, anti-synergy or lower resilience. Exclusive cards are generally ‘build around’ or ‘needs the right support cards’

Hearthstone Design Direction

Hearthstone has a solid design direction currently.

Many of the recent and upcoming cards are Strongly Exclusive.

Look at these following cards. Most of them encourage you to pursue a specific side strategy, which are generally incompatible with one another. This combined with the Strongly Exclusive class borders results in many different possible spaces to explore, while allowing for reasonable balancing.

To play Reno effectively, you often give up playing duplicate cards, weakening your ties to strategies that want duplicate cards.

Playing a deck full of 1-Attack minions is generally a downside, but Hobgoblin encourages it heavily, potentially giving you a large advantage. Note: Most powerful minions usually have more than 1 attack, excluding Hobgoblin’s strength from overpowering other decks.

In order for the ‘Holding a Dragon’ mechanic to be effective, you need a decent dragon density in your deck.

The ‘Holding a Dragon’ mechanic is especially well designed because it is Weakly Exclusive to aggressive decks. Aggro decks trend to have fewer cards in hand, thus have less chance of gaining the rewards for ‘Holding a Dragon.’

The new expansion Whispers of the Old Gods features Strong Exclusivity for cards like C’Thun. You can run cards that greatly benefit C’Thun, but don’t benefit other strategies. This encourages players to explore a semi-limited space that can be powerful without overpowering pre-existing strategies.

Flaws of Exclusivity

Exclusivity is great. It narrows the testing space which makes life easier for designers and developers. This makes balance and bug-fixing much easier.

There are downsides though. Here are a few:

• Reduced possibility space means fewer options. Players might feel like there isn’t enough possibility space for them to explore.
• Reduced possibility space means it will be tapped and expended sooner, resulting in potential boredum.
• Too many or too powerful Inclusive cards heavily squelches potential decks – Dr. Boom, Tirion, and the Paladin class are great examples of this.
• Cards that are too Strongly Exclusive can become Inclusive.
• Archetypes that aren’t supportive enough lead to player disappointment (Hobgoblin & initial ‘Holding a Dragon’ instances)
• Design can seem lazy to players. It can feel like the developers are forcing archetypes to exist if they are too exclusive.
• Exclusive strategies need to be meaningfully different which requires a large possibility space in the original game.
• It is challenging to thematically extend and support existing strategies without disrupting the tenuous balance.

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Directions for the Future

It’s okay to force archetypes occasionally.

It’s okay to make Inclusive cards, but they should also demonstrate Exclusivity in other ways.

Fel Reaver is a great example of Inclusive Breeding Exclusivity. It’s Inclusive for an aggressive deck, but it creates Exclusivity as it costs you your ability to play the long game. This means that you can have a more powerful early game at the potential cost to your late game. The even better part of this card is how it encourages your opponent to make a dangerous decision of leaving the powerful Fel Reaver alive.

Another Inclusive Breeding Exclusivity card is Zombie Chow. It encourages late game decks to exist at the cost of weakening your early game capabilities. It has just enough impact on the game to prevent it from snowballing in either direction early on. It brings multiple strategies together while preventing itself from being run in other strategies.

 

These cards are best defined as strong but also introducing a weakness for using them.

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I hope you enjoyed reading this. I definitely enjoyed writing it.

If you’re interested in more, let me know through the contact form.

 

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