"Gone Bad" Or "Non-Rant on VtES Card Design"

On Magic Online the "Magic: The Gathering" head designer Mark Rosewater has written quite a number of articles defending either why there must bad cards, or why sometimes these bad cards even appear as rares. These are the articles which deal with rarities and so-called bad cards in MtG. Most of the arguments also apply to VtES.

• When cards go bad
• Rare, but well done
• One with one with nothing
• The good, the bad and the ugly truth

I do not agree with all of Mark Rosewater's arguments, e.g. he argues that bad cards are good for community since it furthers the bonding between the players if they all complain about the same card. Hillarious argumentation... But I can see that the MtG designer has difficult task to perform when designing cards and assigning card rarities to an upcoming expansion.

What's making it so difficult, is that the card designer has to consider quite of number of different constraints/aspects:

• overall game design, theme, distribution of power level between clans/discplines.
• only a limited space for each rarity is available. In VtES this is even worse, since the "Uncommon" slots in a booster are usually taken by the Crypt cards.
  
• business aspects, i.e. the company wants to sell as many booster displays as possible, i.e. they want to make the customer buy as many boosters as possible while not scaring him off or upseting him.
  
• various demand/requests of players need to be matched:

1. constructed players want new cards which can compete on tournament level
2. draft players (although often to a lesser extent.
3. collectors want to get all the cards without spending too much. Here also reprinting cards from a previous expansion with a different rarity are an issue.
4. new players want reprints since there are several butter-and-bread-cards from expansion that are either expensive and/or no longer available. Seasoned players are usually not so happy about reprints.
   
5. different player types; MtG has dubbed them "Timmy" (power player), "Johnny" (combo player), "Spike" (competitive player) and "Vorthek" (theme player). A full description can be found here.

From my (player's/collector's) point of view these are my criteria for rarities in VtES:

• a good common card is a staple card, either that is commonly used in most decks or can be used in abduance in certain decks.
• a good uncommon card that is either limited in usage, this can be clan requirement (or other requirement) or the cost of the card (e.g if costs more than 3 pool).
• a good rare card is a unique like a retainer, ally, location or other master, or a card that goes into a deck only 2-4 times max.

If you look at the latest VtES expansion "Lords of the Night" in terms of distribution of cards across rarities it's quite o.k from my point of view.
Most of the staple cards like "Public Trust", "Mental Maze", "Camera Phone" are commons. The uncommons are those cards you might not need in high quantities ("Nightstick" or "Autonomic Mastery" or are for special usage ("Eternals of Sirius"). The rare cards are 50% unique cards ("Swiss Cut" or "Charigger, the Axe"). It seems as if some of the rares should actually be uncommons instead, like "Cobra Fangs" or "Preternatural Strength", but there wasn't enough room for it, so some of them had to go to the rare section instead.

Also if you look at the reprints in the starter you find many cards that haven't been reprinted in the lastest expansion or base sets. So players get a quite complete set of cards even if they started playing or buying recently.