MTG Alternatives

[JohnnyDavids13]

I am a long time player of MTG, and am also looking to make my own version of the game. I know, bad idea, market is pretty much taken over, etc. This is more for my ownm personal use with friends. Does anyone know of any other games that might have some interesting mechanics that I might be able to take inspiration from?

[Reynard]

I used to really enjoy Hyborean Gates. I never understood why it didn't take off except that MTG was on a meteoric rise at the time. It had excellent artwork by Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell.

[Tempest]

The best alternative to MtG right now is probably Hearthstone, imo.

[NeikeDjour]

And/or the game before Hearthstone, the WoW TCG. I really enjoy the dungeon decks (not the raids) in that game. I've heard Force of Will is quite similar and a lot of people have been getting into it. Basically MtG but the mana is in it's own side deck, and you always have a card like a plainswalker out that basically can summon those mana or do other special abilities.

Any particular reason why you want to make your own version of a TCG when there are so many out there to try out and have fun with already? It's quite the time and money investment. The main detractor I see is making enough unique cards to make your own styled deck out of, and then printing enough copies to be able to facilitate it for yourself and friends. But if that's what you want to do, go for it. I've remade board games that were originally video games a few times now, notably Phantasy Star Online Episode 3 which had 441 cards (took me a little more than 2 years) and Triple Triad (Around a year), but those already had the graphics and mechanics figured out for me. I haven't actually printed all of the cards for PSO EP3 yet because it just costs too much for me to do that at this time. I just printed enough for 4 premade decks.

On the topic of TCGs, I'm a huge fan of them and I like trying all of the different ones out there. Over the years I've tried a lot, the most notable ones for me were WoW, Pokemon, MtG, Yu Yu Hakusho, Weiss Schwarz, and back in the days Yu-Gi-Oh. WoW and Yu Yu Hakusho are both out of print, so it's cheap to buy booster boxes and have a really decent collection to build and play from without having to invest much.