One aspect deckbuilders prize is duplicating and removing cards. Got a great card you play at every opportunity, but your deck isn’t serving it up to you fast enough? Well, either make another copy of it, or throw out the trash so that you draw it more often. Or both!

There are some problems with duplicating cards in a board game, namely, unless you pack an extra card of every type, you are asking people to print their own. Or, place a “played once” marker on a card, but then they have to remember that it has been duped. So I’m still mulling that – but allowing players to edit their deck is a good feature to include.

I don’t always love deckbuilders with crappy cards. In games where you can level up cards, the starter cards can end up being less crappy — but they are generally always inferior to drafted cards later. So allowing players to chose what they want to play runs the risk that some cards inevitably end up used less — or worse, useless. The purge option exists as a way of taking out the trash, but honestly that feels like making the player choose limited options for card removal to deal with poor card design by the game creator. “Gee thanks, you made me spend my in-game money to purge a bad card from a game I paid real world money on. You sure gave me player agency here, jerkwad!”

So, giving the players their full deck all at once is definitely a design shift, but I still would have had to deal with “this card is crappy” anyway, and incorporating deck editing was always part of the plan. Still, I’m liking the idea.

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