I have herd recently that there is a game called "dominion" which is a kind of CCG where you buy cards throught the course of the game to place it in your deck. Then you reshuffle your deck many times during the course of the game. So it's like if playing a CCG but the deck creation is done during the game.
I liked the idea a lot because it promotes the idea of playing a CCG out of the box. Most people does not want to play CCG even if you supply the decks, so this could be an alternative.
I realized that I could use that in one of my design. The only problem so far is the amount of cards required. Originally, there was supposed to be 5 sphere of magic with 20 unique spells each. Player would have drafted spells to put in their deck at the beginning of the game. Which makes 100 cards.
If I use in game deck building, now there are multiple copies of cards because cards are flushed (and reshuffled) when used during the game. When researching, you can draw 5 cards according to your wizard spheres and keep X cards to add to your deck. This mechanic also allow spell trading which could be interesting. But now I need multiple copies of each spell which increase dramatically the amount of cards I need. In Starcraft, each technology has 2 cards, so I estimate that 2 cards for a spell for a player is OK. Since more than one player can have the same spell, 4 cards should be OK. If I have 20 spell, that makes 80 cards for each of the 5 sphere which mean 400 cards.
Now I realize that most CCG has a lot of cards but only few of them are used ( ex: you need at least 200 cards to make a 40 card deck). So this is why I am not sure if I should use a mechanic like that. Of course there are other game mechanics that allow to put a spell into play permanently to avoid having it in your hand.
I did not know that there was that much cards in the game. From what I have see, there was like 10 different cards to buy and that's it.
As for my game's card flow.
- Spell research will make you draw 5 cards to add to your deck (not sure if can pick them all.
- Some resource on the map will increase your handsize
- Some resources on the map will increase the number of spell you can cast and maintain per turn.
- You can always discards card.
- You replendish your hand up to your hand size. (Making it easy to pass throught your deck)
- Some game elements can make you put some permanent spells on the table which would reduce the number of cards in your deck and which does not count as a spell to maintain.
- You can decide to remove spells from your deck when reshuffling the deck. But there might be a minimum deck size.
I am not sure if spells will all be of the same strength. The problem is that if the spells are all shuffled together, drawing weak spells at the end of the stack would be pretty much useless. So I was thinking that each spell has an equal strength and it's power (range, damage, effect, etc) is indexed to some elements of the game.