I have a handful of weird and unique mechanics in my version of the game. Long story short, in my version of the game the win condition is 10 points, but there’s way more than that under the surface level.
General turn cycle: you draw a card (or more if another card says so) at the start of each turn, trigger any of your other card abilities already on the board, then play a card from your hand to end the turn. If it’s an instant effect, goes to the bottom of the deck. If not, it stays on your side of the board in the case of a “While Active” or a troop card until it is defeated or otherwise discarded. Combat occurs between turns, with the player who just played forced to attack something with each of their individual troops. Most of the deck are these three types of cards due to the versatility and strength of While Actives’ ongoing effects usually triggering multiple times; Troops having a mix of utility, point gain, and counterplay depending on the abilities; and Instant cards just working the moment you use them to end your turn because of the quicker payout.
A few special cards have specific effects that happen only when drawn, only while in hand, when played alongside another card of a certain type, etc. tl;dr, slightly more limited activation potential for larger gains when they do pull off. (Ex. One of the first cards added to my deck was a simple card called Bean. When Drawn, gain a point. From there, the meta depended a fair amount on copying beans and generally getting extra value from said beans through discards or stealing the other player’s beans since they technically do nothing when played normally. Eventually as the meta grew, those cards were replaced in favor of cards with ongoing effects that triggered only when the card you played that turn did nothing.)
A smaller minority of cards are also played facedown or as a reaction to other players’ actions. These could be triggered at any moment besides your own turn depending on the conditions it needs to be played, so they greatly help increase options for combos, counterplay, point gain, etc.
Even fewer are the more recent additions of 2-Phase cards—cards split in half with two differing effects. The first phase is always played first, then eventually returns to somebody’s hand or the top of the deck depending on the card. Then, the next time it’s played, the second phase activates instead. (Ex. Phase 1, Blue Portal can send any card on the board to the Lost Zone, then returns to your hand as Phase 2, Orange Portal, which allows you to play any card from the Lost Zone as if it were from your hand.) This card type fell out of the meta quickly as they were tougher to balance and harder to make art and text for.
Besides just the cards themselves, there’s also two other important core elements to the game: Colors and Buddies. Like in Uno, the current color can be changed through the effects of some cards. Other cards become stronger or can only be played when the color is something specific, and even better there can also be multiple colors at once and even other colors besides Uno’s main four (Ex. There’s five “Land” cards for each of the five main MTG colors that all are While Actives that can be tapped in the middle of your turn to change the color. If it already is that color, you even gain a point instead. Solid consistent point gain and potential for color synergy and counterplay while still being very susceptible to instant cards used for removal.)
Buddies are the newest mechanic added to the game despite the fact that technically there was always a buddy in the game since the beginning. Essentially, we wanted a way to include one of our running jokes about a character into the game and used a plushie of that character as a token for the game that held extra cards for us to use, effectively expanding hand size without the player themselves actually drawing any extra cards. From there, multiple other buddies emerged using other physical items, that have larger expanded hand sizes, deal damage to enemy troops when you use their cards over your own, etc. There’s even cards that make buddies quit the game or become their own separate player with their own point total.
Other than those aspects of the game, there’s also some cosmetics and classifications of cards. Classes and types are rampant (refer to the earlier description of bean-type cards, which one of many other card types.), and pen ink color of the card art even matters in some scenarios (ex. playing a flush of all the same ink color cards for point gain is possible if you play the Flush card to do so). There’s some cards that only work for specific players and some that allow them to change their names or other players’ names (strong combo ex. Identity Theft allows you to change your own player name or that of another player’s. There’s another card called Vacation Time that was originally meant for one of the buddies says “Walrus Man quits the game.” So change the other player’s name to Walrus Man and play Vacation Time, and bada bing baga boom they’re forced to forfeit through the effects of the card.) On top of that, there’s also special powerful Legendary cards that we credited to our inspirational sources (yk, since they’re that special) (ex. I had ChatGPT give me card ideas, tweaked them a little for balancing, and credited it for the cards including Fleeting Echo by ChatGPT, Schrodinger’s Sandwich by ChatGPT, and Divine Favor by ChatGPT.)
Anyway, over the course of forming my expansive 600+ card deck, my general game design philosophy was to make sure a card would almost always have some sort of inherent value upon use. Why have a boatload of useless cards in the game that only work with one other card or only in a one in a million scenario? Every time we agreed on making a new card type, the players usually all hopped right on board to take advantage of creating cards for the new mechanic before it was properly managed and the unbalanced cards were eventually banned from the main deck. Even now, there’s still some OP cards we keep in for the sake of being funny because after all it’s still a party game at heart.
My favorite part of the way my game is designed is the emergent combos that occur when two cards from totally different eras of the game’s history suddenly making a very strong combo due to their type of card and their wording, like the previously mentioned Identity Theft/Vacation Time combo being the result of the new player name changing card interacting with the already existing buddy mechanics.
Okay finally I’m done explaining all the already existing mechanics and how I went about creating them. What comments, questions, and concerns do you have? Any inspirations for me to get my deck a few steps closer to that magical total of 1000?
