[моё] How to come up with a unique CCG – and irreversibly ruin it. Animation Throwdown

Animation Throwdown showed the most disgusting mechanic for online CCGs

You see, 99% of the IMPACT on the board in this game and its clones give "combo cards".

Which are composed of two halves of completely different types.

And they don't necessarily have anything in common (besides the art) with their prerequisites.

It looks something like this:

On a turn you can play only one basic card.

Playing the second half onto the first removes the halves and gives a combo card.

Basic cards are, by definition, terrible – only combo cards will lead to victory.

The problem with this mechanic is rather unexpected: even in the starter deck the large majority of combos with cards from this deck... are not discovered.

You can't just, in Doodle God style, slap two cards on top of each other and use the result – you first have to shove both into a special contraption and wait.

For fifteen minutes or more.

And repeat this procedure once for each pair of cards that can be combined.

On paper this is a fluffy P2W monetization: dump donor currency – eliminate the "inconvenience".

But as the player's card library grows, you have to spend more and more.

And more.

And more.

And more.

And the "inconvenience" here is a misnomer.

The game does not want its killer feature, which makes it special among other collection‑card‑image games, to be used.

The game fiercely resists this.

The game aims to give the player not a dopamine kick between the brain hemispheres, but a death by cringe.

Because in normal CCGs, if you open a good card in a booster/box/loot box/dog, it's a pure emotional catharsis and a desire to pay more to build a solid deck around that good card.

But in AT and its extremely rare clones – the opposite: sadness, melancholy and bitterness: now you also have to grind real‑time days to power up combos for that card...

So.

Do.

Can't.