Hey look. A blog post. I’m in shock. How about you?

Over the years I’ve played a number of CCG’s. I enjoy the whole deck creation and then see what other people come up with aspects of it. I started with Magic and since then have been into Legend of the Five Rings, Deadlands Doomtown, Dredd the CCG, City of Heroes, World of Warcraft and back again to Magic. In all that time I’ve stuck to a few rules when building decks.

• Make it as small as possible.
• Themes are fun and synegry is great.
• Don’t use proxies

The first rule is simple, if you break it then you might as well play all your cards in a huge pile and randomly pick from it. Sure it’s only 61 cards because you really need that one extra card and there’s nothing you can cut. Next thing you know it’s an 80 card deck that never works. Sure it’s got fun combos buried in it but you’ll never pull them off.

The second is more a personal thing, I’d prefer to play and lose with a deck I came up with than win with a deck I copied off the internet. I’ve broken at least one card game doing that which was a shame but there you go. Seriously, if you played City of Heroes and you couldn’t beat Rochefort you were in serious trouble.

And then there are proxies, I understand why people use them but I don’t. And this morning I think I realized why. You put proxies in a deck for two reasons, either you have the card but it’s in another deck (this I might do, I’d be more likely to put in a reminder on what deck it’s in), or because you don’t have the card and you’re testing a new deck. The thing is, in this case to card may well be rather expensive. Like, Snapcaster Mage this chap sells for £30 (or £60 if it’s foil…). So lets say I make a deck with 4 snapcasters in and it does well and I decide I’m going to try using it in the big leagues. Of course when I was testing the deck 3 of them were foils so now I have this perfect jewel that’s only going to cost me £90 to build (yes I have 1, no you can’t have it). And I know what I’ll be like, I’ll give in and spend the money.

Which right now I can’t afford. Ho hum.

And also, constraints are good. Without constraints designs get stale or impossible. If you’ve only got one of a card you need to work round this, or come up with a new plan.

So there you go, why I don’t use proxies. Feel free to use them yourself when playing games with me, but one thing I do ask. Can you please make them legible? Pretty please with sugar on top?