Doing a Yu-Gi-Oh RPG and I need deck ideas

[Blackhawk748]

Wasn't sure whether to stick this in Roleplaying Games or here, but I figured since I'm almost exclusively asking about the card game side of things it made more sense to be here.

Anywho, so I started planning out a Duel Monsters RPG for me and my friends and they have started to do their deck building. They get to open up 17 Booster Packs (from Primal Origin backwards) to get 155 cards to build their first deck. There's a few limitations, but mostly just gentlemen agreements.

Anyway, in the game they live in the Outlands, a dirty, grungy crappy place outside of a massive metropolis. they have limited access to cards (thus why their decks are a bit of a mess) and the Main City (name pending) encourages them to duel because all residents of the Outlands have dermal markings that absorb Duel Energy. This goes back into large storage towers that whatever group they belong to gets to use, but each group must tithe a certain amount to the city.

The more energy you gather, the better the cards you can get. Simple, right?

So right now I've got a few factions, The Scrapyard (Machine oriented decks), The Circle (Spellcasters), the Wasters (Zombies and Rock), The Marsh Court (Faries and Water), and the Church of Elemental Union (the Bad Guys). Now, everyone clearly has a theme to work off of, but my issue is that I need to make some scrub decks for the lowest ranks and I'm not sure how to properly simulate the hodgepodge nature of slapping a vaguely themed deck together. Well, outside of just booster drafting, but that would be time-consuming.

Any ideas?

[iTreeby]

You could do a cube draft and the leftover cards could be "out lands tier"

[Blackhawk748]

You could do a cube draft and the leftover cards could be "out lands tier"

Forgive my ignorance but what's a Cube Draft?

[Tvtyrant]

Forgive my ignorance but what's a Cube Draft?

A cube is a draft environment of one of each card, usually designed around a particular power level with several archetypes in mind. I don't think that's really what they meant, I think they meant pack drafts where you open a fresh pack and most of it is garbage chafe cards.

Another option is boosters have rarity thresholds based on cost. Bronze, silver, gold, platinum. The likelihood of a rare goes up as they cost more, and you can buy them at vending machines by cashing in other cards. So a Bronze might take so many commons or one uncommon, etc. This means they are constantly trying to gamble their collections on the hopes of a single good card, since they just can't get enough scrounged for a good pack. Workers make the equivalent of one bronze pack a day out there, and saving enough cards to buy a gold or platinum pack is almost impossible because most of your commons are traded for food (I would do all of this through armored vending machines.)

[Blackhawk748]

A cube is a draft environment of one of each card, usually designed around a particular power level with several archetypes in mind. I don't think that's really what they meant, I think they meant pack drafts where you open a fresh pack and most of it is garbage chafe cards.

Another option is boosters have rarity thresholds based on cost. Bronze, silver, gold, platinum. The likelihood of a rare goes up as they cost more, and you can buy them at vending machines by cashing in other cards. So a Bronze might take so many commons or one uncommon, etc. This means they are constantly trying to gamble their collections on the hopes of a single good card, since they just can't get enough scrounged for a good pack. Workers make the equivalent of one bronze pack a day out there, and saving enough cards to buy a gold or platinum pack is almost impossible because most of your commons are traded for food (I would do all of this through armored vending machines.)

Ah, interesting.

And I had planned on something like that but you would spend Duel Energy to get new cards and could trade in other cards for credit.

Obviously the trade in value is kinda crap because the main city had a vested interest in people having lousy decks, but they do need to give out decent cards on occasion otherwise people wouldn't bother.

Might combo the two actually...