This was a letter jeff Donais posted in response to a question asked by JoFo on my Yahoo! group. I thought I wpuld share it on the Realms, since this topic has been broached here as well...

"We aren't specifically trying to acheive something that requires multiples of the same cards in the packs, but that is a side effect of getting what we wanted out of the game when it comes to sealed pack viability.

Everyone (product management, R&D, organized play, creative content) involved with the Marvel TCG are long-time TCG players (Magic, Star Wars, V:TES, Netrunner, L5R, etc) and we've all played in sealed-pack and draft tournaments for various games. Some of us were competitive on the Pro Tour and some were just long-time "casual" players who still appreciate a health dose of competition.

It's obvious which games work well in sealed-pack environments and which games were not designed to work well in those environments.

When creating the Marvel TCG, we wanted to do as much as possible to take sealed pack into consideration.

There were many, many things we did to help ensure the game was balanced for constructed and sealed/draft alike. One of the things we did for draft was to ensure that the 5 main teams in the game were represented appropriately, so any team would be viable to draft.

That sounds like it might be easy, but it's extremely complicated and weeks of study went into just this area alone.

Every team has a different number of characters and the characters have different spreads of costs. Additionally, some teams relied on army characters (Doom, Sentinels) which was another factor to take into consideration. We also wanted to make sure that there were top-level tournament cards at every rarity, so people could build decent decks, even if they didn't have much money to invest in the game.

We developed a complex way of building the collation. Actually, it's not that complex if you've played Advanced Squad Leader (which, incidentally is my favorite game outside of TCGs). It will probably be the subject of a long article in the coming months, but I don't want to go into extreme detail in this email. Suffice to say, we wanted to acheive something that no other TCG company has yet done with it's collation. This required us to build many sheets of cards and drop cards into the booster in a fairly complex ratio. Some characters needed to appear on several of the card sheets in order to assure a uniform rarity across many packs but still ensure their team affiliation was represented in a balanced way.

So, occasionally you'll see a situation where a character appears twice in a pack because the production hoppers each dropped that card from the sheet. We calculated exactly how often it will happen and are quite fine with it. It happens less than once per box, on average and just with commons.

There is simply no way to properly adjust for every factor unless you are willing to allow this to happen occasionally. We could have made every team have the same number of characters with the same cost, but that would have been boring and that's not what our game is about. Our game is about each team being unique. Doom is all about Doom and ways to support him, X-men is all about team synergy and each character adding something to the fight at each power level, Sentinels are all about army characters massing and coming back in a relentless manner. Each team plays differently and was built differently, so we had to carefully collate

We know that experienced TCG enthusiasts open packs for the rare inside. However, the commons and uncommons are still extremely important when it comes to sealed-pack play, so we were sure to use those cards to make the game great for sealed-pack play.

This turned into a longish article. Sorry about that. It's a very interesting process and we took great care to build the kind of game that we wanted to play. At almost every decision point we had a choice of saving money and going with a cheaper route or cutting profits and providing a better product. We tended to
choose to lose a few percentage points of profit in order to make the game better.

We all firmly believe that if we spend more money on original artwork for every card or pay extra money for the whitest paper to showcase the card art, that the customers will appreciate it and we'll make out profit that way through increased volume.

Some might call us "manufacturers" but I just call us gamers who love to build great games. This is the first product that the new UDE game development group worked on and we're proud to bring it to you.

Thanks,

Jeff Donais
Director, Game Development Group
Upper Deck Entertainment"

When people started mentioning getting some of the same cards in boosters, I figured it was a reason like that and not just messed up.

Nice to see a company give a decent answer to a decent question.

Well, that explains why no past games have been so rediculously flawless.

Seriously, you new Upper Deck guys have thought of everything. Every irksome bug and error of past TCGs and Super-Hero based games alike was systematically prevented in this game, and it shows. No other card company in the world holds a candle to you.

You've raised the bar.

The more you praise the game, the more I can't wait for Friday (The day which I'll get my packs)... Arrrgh...

Once again, thanks for the thoughtful answer, Jeff. Nice to get a good, straight-forward answer for my "doubles within the pack question"... oh, and the extra 50 paragraphs were nice bonusses. :grin:

Ok, Upper Deck is going about this all wrong. Haven't they learned anything from HeroClix? Whenever anoyne asks any kind of question about the game, booster packs, the tournament formats, the company making the game, the people making the game, future expansions...anything... You're supposed to say, "We believe this is in the best interest of the players." Nothing more, nothing less. And all this nonsense about putting quality ahead of profits?!?! Are you guys on crack? That's not how game companies operate! You're only supposed to *say* you're giving the players what they want - you're not supposed to actually do it.

Ed

this shows that all the bashing upper deck takes in ygo is not even close to their fault, this game here should within two years be fully able to take the number spot in selling cards and run away if they can keep the gameplay and tournament structure good, and no cards like yata please