Designing for the future

The current game I am working on, the key was to create a balanced frame work which would handle future expandability. As I believe I read in Brian Tinsman's book on game design, how large expandable games work is by having core rules that span everything you create, and then having specific cards break the rules in different ways.

In the game I am working on, I had to get a solid base game, and am now working on factions that break the core game in predictable, and balanced ways. All the best in your endeavor.

Instants etc. cards have about as much design space as mechanics you have in your game.

Usually, when I start with how I want the outline of the game to play - I pick out components of that game. I do this by zone, and part of the game.

A game I'm working on is like this:

Game Components
Hand of cards - mechanics: Drawing, Discarding
Party - mechanics: Adding, Subtracting, Interaction with the elements
Circle - mechanics: Adding, Subtracting, Interaction with the elements
Line - mechanics: Adding, Subtracting, Interaction with the elements
Hero Deck - mechanics: Drawing, Searching Shuffling
Special Deck - mechanics: Drawing, Searching Shuffling

Parts of the Turn
Play Cards - mechanics: quantity of plays,
Take Hero - mechanics: quantity of heroes taken
Draw Cards - mechanics: quantity of cards drawn

Rules
Breaking restrictions

So that's the design space, its best if you stick with those elements as they will feel more natural. I usually try to define ranges for these things. For example - I want people to have a hand of 5 cards. The smallest hand people could have is 0 cards, and let's say the largest hand I want people to deal with is a potential 12 cards. So I could create a card that let's people have an additional 7 cards. Or have 7 stackable cards available that let people have an additional card. The rules for the game exist outside of the bounds of the game - and if you plan on having expansions you want to define (and play test with) those bounds. Expansions typically want to have bigger, better, more powerful cards so you want to have room to expand those as well. But for this early testing (before deciding inclusion) you'll want to test cards that reach all the bounds for every mechanical element, and break all the restrictions on your rules. Depending on the depth and complexity of the game, this could be an inordinate amount of cards.

This is if you don't have an idea of what you want the cards to do. You can then focus and refine the design down to what makes the game the most interesting. Typically focusing on just a few elements of the game, rather than the whole thing, so that you have room to expand and grow (even possibly keeping some interesting elements back for later.)

MtG cards don't have that many elements to them... but the GAME has a huge number of elements. More parts on a card don't necessarily lead to expandability.

Lets think about that game for a moment:

Phases of a turn (cards can effect all of these)
Untap
Upkeep
Draw
Pre-combat Main
Combat
Post-combat Main
End of Turn
Clean up

And that's a distillation.

Now the components are all cards, but there are a large number of types of cards
Land
Artifacts
Creatures
Enchantments
Planeswalkers
Instants
Sorceries

And each of those have different forms. Cards (instants) can affect ANY of those sections in multiple ways - I'll give an example how that technique could apply to your game in a moment.

In your explanation of the "small parts" I am worried that you are adding complexity without depth. What do the alignments do? Are you incorporating them just because you want to have more card options? If two creatures are "different" but don't interact with the game in an appreciable way, then it doesn't necessarily add features - just cost. If you have Good creature X, and Bad creature X - and they are the same aside from their alignment. And they can each only cast good or bad cards, but all the good and bad cards are the same aside from their alignment - have you really doubled your card amount? Or have you just "skinned" the game. Assuming you provide distinctions between good and bad cards (ie not create functionally identical cards), then you'll have the same amount of cards you would have had if you hadn't made good and bad, but you've made deck construction more complicated. This is not BAD, but it sounds like you're approaching it from the wrong angle.

Adding components because you want to increase complexity is good. Addition components because you want to increase diversity is not necessarily good.

But still to understand what "Instants" should be able to do in your game - you need to define all the parts of the game. I know you have creature choice, bidding, antes and antes. From there you should be able to approach a starting list:

Change you creature to a different card,
change your opponents creature to a different card,
look at your opponents card <- from my understanding, these are all of the ways to interact with creature choice. Now you can vary these in some ways (this is something magic excels at). If you employ a discard pile, maybe some of those cards go back in the deck instead of the discard, or maybe they go back to your hand, maybe they get removed from the game, and maybe they go into an opponents hand, deck, discard pile after played. And maybe each of these gives that option a different cost. That's 21 potential cards - just based on playing a card, and then what happens after the card has been played. That's without going into even more detail about changing the creature card - is it one in your hand, discard, or deck? Or in your opponents? So just with that one element of your game (Choosing a creature to attack with, by placing it face down) we have over 100 (I think the number is 105 without possible messing around with how you look through your library). And that's without adding elements and components. Will all of these be GOOD cards? No, and lets not forget the idea of balancing the cards about the internal workings of your game - do they cost something to play? Etc.

Some of the ability to do things like that come from experience, designing a lot of stuff - and from permutation and repetition - and also from playing a lot of games. Magic looks like it has a TON of cards, but how many are exactly the same card but with a different name, or a different color? How many were wrong choices? How many come from expanding the game rules to include more features? A lot. Most I'd say. This isn't bad, it add diversity. But it isn't the same as depth and complexity. I have play a LOT (a lot... oh so much...) of Magic. But it isn't the best game to emulate, I think, for early design work. You can eke so much out of so little in game design - that unless you're getting something really good out of it - its better to l eave it out.

But all that is coming from the perspective that elegance is the ultimate design goal...

That does sound like an interesting concept for a card. (Does it negate combat resolution?) I didn't say there wasn't a good reason to add extra mechanics - or even that it was bad to do it - just you want to do it for those reasons and not "Oh I can have 1 bad Dragon, and 1 good Dragon that's twice as many cards with barely any work!" :-) I've seen a lot of games (especially CCGs) that work that way.

Just curious - any reason in particular this has to be a CCG instead of a stand alone card game?

Cards have really much many designs, you can get ideas by Google search .. this is the best method