Collectible Card Games

What are Collectable Card Games?

A lot of my time (and even more money) is spend on playing Collectible (or Trading) Card Games (CCG's or TCG's). Although each game has different gameplay and strategies, they have one thing in common. The games are played with a lot of different cards. The cards are sold in packs which contain a fixed number of cards, but you will never know exactly which cards they contain. In order to get the right cards, you will either have to buy lots of packs or trade with others to complete your set. Atop of this, the cards are usually printed and distributed in a way that will cause some cards to be more rare than others. This means that certain cards are printed less, so it is harder to get your hands on them.

In a Collectible Card Game, you object is to beat your opponent by using a subset of your own cards. Each player will have to bring his own set of cards, often called a "deck". To create a deck, the player goes through his (oftentimes huge collection of cards from that game. He will then decide which cards he will use, as some cards are more usefull in combination with others. This will finally result in a deck to play with.

To distinguish between the games, there are criteria that can be used like the genre or the way to win a game. As games fight for their share of the market, they will have to find ways to interest people. There are cardgames for lots of genres to assure attention from certain groups of players. This is one of the major reasons why publishers of the games try to get licenses from major movies or television programmes. After all, a lot of people who already play a game but are really into the series of the X-Files will probably have a look at the X-Files CCG, because it offers a setting they like. Likewise, fans of the show who have never heard of cardgames, or are not interested in them, might try the game, just because it offers them a chance to play their favorite character.

Genres

Like I said before, a lot of companies have tried to find their own little place on the market of cardgames. I will try to list as many cardgames as possible, grouped by genre. Note that this is a grouping based on the information I have got, which sometimes is no more than one single card.

Fantasy: Dragon Storm, Fantasy Adventures, Guardians, Highlander, Imajica, Legend of the Five Rings, Magic: the Gathering, Middle-Earth, Spellfire, Towers in Time, Wyvern, Xena.
Horror: The Crow, Heresy, Kult, Mythos, On the Edge, Rage
Science Fiction/Space: Aliens vs. Predator, Babylon 5, Battle Lords, Battletech, C 23, Galactic Empires, Star Quest, Star Trek, Star Wars, X-Files
Sports: Fast Break, Red Zone, Top of the Order
Super Heroes: Ani-Mayhem, Overpower, Super Deck, Wild Storms
Western: Doomtown
Other: Killer Instinct, Power Cardz, Redemption, Sim City

Games I play

Shortly after the first CCG (Magic: the Gathering) started, lots of people started a secondary market, buying and selling single cards. My present tradelists can be found by following the links to the different games, as presented below.

Right now, I own cards from four different cardgames, these being Imajica, Kult, Magic: the Gathering and X-Files.

I only play Magic on a regular basis, as most people play that game. Since these games cost quite some money, it is rare for people to abandon one game to start another. Besides, not all games have the same appeal. However, I would still like to play more of Imajica and Kult, so if anyone from the Netherlands is looking for a player, just mail me.

Whenever I play Magic with my friends, we play multi-player games. Because of this, all the decks I built are more suitable for multi-player games than for one-to-one duels. Some of my multi-player decks can be found here. I only included decks with specific themes or just a fun thing to play. And just because they are meant to be used in a multi-player environment does not mean they don't play nice in a friendly two player game.

Back to Contents Imajica page Kult CCG page Magic page X-Files CCG page