Personally, I think best of all time is the Shields system from Duel Master.
Each player puts five cards from the top of their deck face-down at the start of their game; these are their Shields. Whenever a player takes damage, one of their Shields breaks and goes into their hand. Many cards would have “Shield Trigger” effects that would allow them to be played after entering your hand this way. Some, such as Holy Awe, could turn the tide of the match.
All I see in Holy Awe is power-lactating tits.
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Space dick pissing
Does a videogame count? In Inscryption, when you lose a run you’re able to make a custom card by combining three of the cards you collected in that run. After doing this several times you can make a ridiculously OP card that makes the run a breeze.
Inscryption is amazing, and I’m not even a card game person. Fuck that damn egg deck, though.
I also choose Inscryption but for the ability to sacrifice cards to add their ability to another card, which can also get ridiculously OP.
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For example, if you put the Cockroach’s Unkillable Sigil on a Skink, whenever it dodges an attack it creates an Unkillable Lizard Tail card that’s free to play and can be sacrificed repeatedly, as well as used to block. This is one of the ways of dealing with the Kaycee’s Mod challenge that makes the bosses spawn 8 Grizzlys.
There’s so many weird combos and stuff to discover in the game, even after completing all the challenges in Kaycee’s Mod I wish there was more to do.
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The wires and gems mechanics are really cool too. Honestly, the felt kinda underutilized, but I guess they’re both towards the tail end of the game, and both fairly complex.
I’m stuck at the Angler currently
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For me that would be the transparent plastic cards used in gloom so that piling them over each other can add values or abilities or modify them.
Favorite? Meld in Magic
https://www.thegamer.com/magic-the-gathering-mtg-every-meld-card-strongest-ranked/
There’s only 6 pairs of them across all of mtg. You meet some conditions and mush two cards together to make a bigger card. Some are good, some are meh, but they are large and that’s what counts
I like how strategic use of cards can ruin any relationship in Uno.
Pretty much everything Elder Scrolls Legend did. Only card game I liked but one thing that stood out was the two lanes. One half was just a regular battle field but the other half was called the shadow lane. Any cards you placed there were protected for the first turn.
I can think of a lot of mechanisms that I like, but I can’t think of anything that really “stands alone”. I mean, I think that good games that involve trying to exploit mechanisms like TCGs, cardbuilders, and most roguelikes also involve trying to make use of the synergy between different mechanisms, so how well a mechanism works is heavily dependent upon how the rest of the game interacts with it.
I wouldn’t call it my favorite, but prize cards in Pokemon are an interesting mechanic. More often than not a curse.
Always thought it was more of a win more mechanic that kind of wrecked things
It can be a win more mechanic, but since it’s random cards, it can also lock a key card out of your deck.
I don’t know a lot of card games, but I thought the row system was neat in Gwent (i.e. frontline, middle, backline).
I also like the aura enchantments in Magic: The Gathering. They tend to change up the battlefield in interesting ways.
Start wars unlimited has another cool battle arrangement system
Star realms had a good way to negate first player advantage by giving the first player less cards in a starting hand.
You would probably like the current Digimon card game. Very similar mechanic with security, and their energy system is pretty neat
I like xyz summoning in yugioh. There were plenty of cards that could swarm the fields with monsters, but they were usually weak af; basically glorified tokens. With xyz you just put em together into a boss monster with some power behind its effect. Then the rank up spells where you can summon one with another really added some extra flavor.
Shame the game got a little too fast after 2023. I mean I like it faster and having more options than “eat shit til you draw an out,” but it feels like there’s more outs than deck
