Collective: The Community Created Card Game Preview

For too long, the trading card game players have been fed up with design and marketing decisions made by the big companies. In response, Collective: The Community Created Card Game has a radical vision: Give the power to the player themselves. Let the players design the cards and make balance updates, whether the cards and updates make it through or not depends on the will of the players! But can the playerbase themselves design an actually good TCG? Collective: The Community Created Card Game was a game that I was going to dismiss as simply mediocre, but now I am very glad that I did not give up on the game, as it provided me with an experience that I simply cannot get in any other card game.

Collective: The Community Card Game is built on the foundation of pre-existing card games, such as Magic: The Gathering and Hearthstone. Thus, a lot of the themes are not brand new. You build a deck of creatures and spells; the creatures have attack/defense points, mana cost, and abilities; both players bash each other until one of them loses all their health. The game currently has a single player, multiplayer, and card creator mode.

The first few hours of gameplay can feel painful due to the lack of technical prowess. The UI is poor at giving the proper feedback, such as unclear blocking UI and a lack of level up meter, which creates a lot of confusion. Then there is the janky, inconsistent art style and themes that range from amateur Microsoft Paint to professional illustrator art, which can be a turnoff at the first glance. Another aspect that holds the game back is its poor way of teaching players the game, as it gives too much information from the get go which makes it difficult to learn.

Once you are able to look past these inconveniences, there is a really unique game here. A big reason for this is simply that the social experience of playing Collective is the magic that cannot be found in any other big titles. The Collective community feels like a small cozy game shop, where you get to meet the same few regular friends and folks there all the time. This feeling of closeness can feel more difficult to find in other similar games.

Collective feels like a treasure chest with many discoverable items. In typical big TCGs, the game can be “solved” within days after a brand new expansion, as streamers, pro players, and well built websites all exist at the players’ fingertips. In Collective, the meta is up in the air. Every other week, some players are able to find and abuse very creative strategies that did not exist previously. Such as the “Char combo deck”, a strategy that saw zero play in the previous weeks, all of a sudden becoming the most overpowered deck the very next week. This type of joyous surprise feels like a fresh breather after playing many established TCG.

Personally, my favorite part about Collective is its drafting tournament. My belief is that Collective’s cube draft gets the best of the both worlds from digital TCG and Untap.in. Digital TCGs are smooth to play, but it has limited accessibilities in terms of playable cards, economy limitations, and you often do your drafts with bots instead of humans. Untap.in on the other hand, allows the user to playtest with any cards they want, but its interface can be challenging to use. In Collective, players can submit a custom made cube, where any cards you make can be played in the cube. At the same time, it is also smooth to play because many taken for granted features such as card draw and units going to discard piles are automated, whereas it isn’t on Untap.in.

After every match, players can vote for or against a card to be permanently added to the game.

Another advantage Collective has over other TCGs is that it is relatively free-to-play friendly. You are able to build a deck and purchase a hero after mere hours of playing the game. Not to mention, games can also be played in the Card Creator mode, a mode where players can test out any cards they want. This means that you do not have to own the cards to play them, although owning the cards does provide you with more convenience to play on the ladder.

However, there are some problems with Collective. Polarising matchups is something that Collective seems to suffer from constantly. The newly invented combo decks are so fast paced that even fast aggro decks can find it troublesome to outrace them, since they have the potential to win by turn five. The result is that the player base either runs decks with oddly specific answers or else they lose. But the fact that there are specific answers shows the range of Collective’s design and I really love how a combo deck can be discovered out of nowhere.

Another problem is that sometimes, the voting system can prevent archetypes from feeling “complete”. Since the designs are implemented on a card to card basis, the system of cards may not function properly as a whole. There is also the problem of archetypes being left out to dry due to its voting system or simply the lack of designers interested in expanding the archetype. One such example is the Pirate archetype. Currently, the pool has 15 cards and they don’t have very strong synergy with one another. The same thing can be said about Bard.

I have talked a lot about Collective’s problems, but things don't have to be this way. Whatever archetypes that you feel need more power, you are always free to design it and hope that your design gets implemented into the game. Just as I am writing this article, the designers are working on giving the spider archetype a much needed finisher and identity.

From the weekly show Submitted For Your Approvals by StrangerSide on YouTube, where curators of Collective discuss the viability of the submitted cards. In this episode, a design was implemented in an attempt to make the spider archetype feel more complete.

If you are a TCG fanatic, a game designer wannabe who wants to see their ideas become reality, or just someone who misses the fun time of playing games with a close group of friends, then I wholeheartedly recommend Collective: The Community Created Card Game. It is a game with many, many flaws. But overall, my experience playing the game has been very positive and I can look past these flaws as the game is mostly functional.