Mystick

Mystic is a card game released in 2000. Like James Ernest's Brawl, it came in several standalone sets (there were four in all, two under the label "Domination" and two more under the expansion set "Companion"). Each set came with two playable decks of cards, so you could play a two-player game right away, and more cards allows more players (up to 5 at a time). While the decks of cards are pre-constructed, players are able (and encouraged) to construct their own custom decks according to certain restrictions; it is therefore a customizable card game, but not collectible.

Nothing has been done with the game since, but it is still worth examining the design for several reasons: its mechanics, its aesthetics, and its business model.

Mechanically, the game clearly borrows from Magic: the Gathering, but the play is streamlined. Turns are very quick; on your turn, you take a single action, and then you are done. Your action cannot be interrupted or responded to in any way while it is taking place, so there is none of this business of sitting around and waiting for people to maybe do something, or to alert you that their turn is over. Just take an action, then the next player does the same, and play continues in this way. Interestingly, this does not prevent the game from including a number of "counterspell" effects (that is, cards that undo the effect of another card); since you only get one action per turn, if your action is to put a card in play, my action can be to get rid of your card before you have the chance to use it.

Cards come in four types: "Pawns" (the basic cards that can perform attacks), "Attachments" (cards that are placed on a Pawn and modify it for good or ill), "Environments" (cards that sit around in play modifying everything), and "Actions" (one-shot effects). On your turn, you can either draw a card, or play a card, or have your pawn make a challenge.

Challenges are the heart of the game, and they do not work like any other game I've seen. In the center of the table is a pool of tokens (which essentially represent victory points). You can challenge this pool, or you can challenge another pawn that has tokens on it. Challenging involves flipping cards from the top of your deck onto your "mystic cross" (basically a play area with slots to hold eight cards), and then comparing whether the cards are the same suit as the pawn making the challenge. Each match is a success, and you take a number of tokens equal to your successes.

You score victory points in two ways: by winning tokens in challenges, and also by holding onto those tokens until the end of the round. When the round ends, all tokens being held by pawns are scored, and then removed from play; in this way, the pool of tokens in the center gets smaller as the game goes on. When the pool is completely empty, the game ends, and whoever has the most victory points wins. As such, if you are leading in victory points, you tend to want the game to end (so you challenge the pool a lot), and if you're trailing then you want to extend the game (by challenging other pawns instead of the pool). It is hard to get very far ahead in victory points, so games tend to have a lot of back-and-forth between who is winning at any given point, making things quite tense.

There is another way to win. If your opponent's deck is ever empty, they're instantly eliminated. Note that you reduce the size of your deck whenever you make challenges, so there is a tradeoff between gaining victory points and managing the size of your deck. This adds yet another back-and-forth between the players, as the player who is behind in victory points may try to run the opponent out of cards before the pool empties.

Decks are only 39 cards, and you can run through them pretty fast, so even multiplayer games don't take more than half an hour or so. It's also hard to win quickly, so most games take about the same amount of time (compared to many trading-card games that are highly variable in their play time, depending on how aggressive or defensive players' decks are). All in all, Mystick puts together some very interesting mechanics in a way that keeps play time short, predictable, and interesting.

That brings us to the aesthetic of the game. You might think 39 cards is a very strange number for a constructed-deck game. The reason each deck is 39 is that two decks together make a total of 78 cards... which still isn't of significance unless you're familiar with Tarot. A Tarot deck has exactly 78 cards, and this game is based (very loosely) on this deck. (If you're curious, it is similar to a standard Poker deck, except each suit has an additional face card so there are 14 cards per suit, and there are also 22 suitless cards called Major Arcana, which have names like "Death" and "The Lovers".)

Each Mystick card corresponds to a card in a Tarot deck (including a displayed suit and rank), and a Mystick deck is composed of two suits and half of the Majors. And now you see why each set of Mystick cards is sold as two playable decks: each set comprises a single complete Tarot deck. If you wanted to, you could therefore ignore the entire Mystick game and just use this thing to tell your fortune, or play some classic card games that use the extra cards from a Tarot deck (I understand that the Major Arcana were originally like a trump suit in modern card games, and that in fact the whole reason why we have a smaller Poker deck today is so that people who just wanted to play card games could distance themselves from the occultists). This association with Tarot is interesting, relatively unique among modern games, and could either be an added point of interest or a huge turnoff depending on the player.

This brings us to the backstory of the game (as every customizable card game needs a backstory, apparently). In this game, players assume the role of ancient beings who have controlled the fate of human history through their various schemings. As players are ancient, even though they are in the modern world, they still see things as they were hundreds or thousands of years ago, and this is the explanation for why the artwork depicted on each card is old (mostly Renaissance).

The artwork is quite good, and generally fits the card effect well. It also happens to all be in the public domain. So, another way of saying this is that the designer went to great lengths to invent a backstory explanation for why the game had no art budget... and it makes me wonder why there aren't more games (particularly of the indie persuasion) that do something similar.

Ed's Note: While, say, a Rembrandt may be in the public domain, a color photograph of a Rembrandt almost certainly is in copyright. Consequently, using pre-20th century art in a game is tricky; to be perfectly legal, you need to obtain permission from the owners of the photographs you use (usually this is the museum that possesses the art, since they don't generally allow freelance photographers to wander their exhibits with a camera). Of course, the purpose of any photograph of a work of art is to reproduce it as accurately as feasible, so even the act of resizing the image in Photoshop is likely to make it very hard for a copyright owner to prove that the image you use is a derivative of one to which they own the rights, since other reproductions of the image might reasonably and equally have been the original source. So in general this is tricky. (I once wanted to use Guernica as the cover for a Spanish Civil War game, but the rights issues proved difficult to resolve.)