Recently, my high school friend David said he was trying to play some TCGs to learn mechanics as inspiration to design a TCG. If you’ve followed my journal at all, you’ll know I collect and play a bunch of defunct TCGs.

The collection has grown since the last post:

In any case, this felt like a perfect opportunity, so I sent him some (lots) of game decks and rules and materials for his research.

The time I spent pulling together the decks (and, in some cases, building decks, as I didn’t have any handy) brought back my many-years-old desire to start some sort of blog about defunct card games. In particular, I’ve always been fascinated about the composition of starter decks for various games (Are they legal decks? Is a single product for 2 players? Do they include extras like booster packs? Are the cards in the deck randomized? Are the cards in the decks starter-exclusive? Are fixed decks identified on the pack or “blind” packed?), and it’s been interesting to see how the older TCGs mostly had random cards, and how that’s changed with more recent TCGs to include fixed (and often starter-only) cards.

In any case, I’ve started the blog here, on my TCGs site. It currently includes my favorite TCG (.hack//ENEMY) and one I know very little about (Super Heat), and I’ll be adding more from my collection over the next periodoftime.

At some point I might want to record some gameplay videos or such to add as well, but many of these games already have a good number of videos available on youtube, so that feels less critical.