Pokémon Card Design: Randomness

Some degree of randomness is unavoidable in trading card games, but there is a point when you have too much or not enough. If you don't have enough randomness at the highest level, then the most skilled player is practically guaranteed to win.

This may sound like good game design, but it's not. If the more skilled players always win, they're getting the same experience with every game. The worst players get virtually no room to improve, because they get stomped every single game. There's no sense of novelty or growth and the meta goes stagnant.

This is the most fundamental reason randomness is necessary. But let's do a deep dive, using some actual cards as examples.

Advocating for Randomness

Let's assume we're making a non-random version of Dark Gyarados from the Team Rocket set. All we need to do is halve the damage inflicted by Final Beam and remove the coin flip, right?

Well, Dark Gyarados is usually loaded up with three energy (to enable its attack) and then Final Beam is just treated as a fun bonus that sometimes gets in a cheeky revenge kill.

But if we remove the randomness, then we know the exact amount of damage it will do, and we know it will always trigger. It goes from being a fun card to being an oppressive presence. You can set up situations where the defending 'mon is guaranteed to die if it attacks.

For a more extreme example, what if we removed the randomness from Gambler? (It would obviously need to be renamed, for starters). So perhaps instead we shuffle our hand into our deck and draw 4 cards. Is that as fun as the all-or-nothing craziness of Gambler? Hell, is it even as good?

Part of the design of Gambler is that it can turn a losing game into a winning game on the spot if you win the coin flip. Against stall decks, getting tails refills your deck. And if your hand is getting low, it's a good last resort to have as a one of.

Not to mention that removing the randomness would disrupt the ecosystem of the format, which already has too many powerful draw effects.

These are some of the ways that randomness can be a good thing, when handled well. An inconsistent card is inherently less likely to be broken than a consistent card, so randomness can be used as a balancing factor.

It also creates tension, as neither player knows what's going to happen. It can affect strategy, as players may be less willing to commit resources to an inconsistent card.

Kangaskhan, for example, has a soft incompatibility with Pluspower. You normally use Pluspower to do 10 more damage when you know your attack is going to be just shy of knocking out the opponent.

But with Kangaskhan's Comet Punch, you don't actually know how much damage you'll be doing. You can make an educated guess (average 40), but most players won't want to equip a Pluspower to Kangaskhan.

This affects deck-building and turn-by-turn strategy, and these considerations wouldn't be part of the game if Kangaskhan always did a flat 40 damage.

There's also a certain level of skill expression involved in dealing with randomness. Knowing what the odds are gives you an invisible advantage. When I attack a Squirtle with Kangaskhan, I know that I have a 75% chance of knocking out that Squirtle. I can base my strategy around that.

When deck-building, we base the number of basics, trainers, and energies on patterns we've slowly built up in our minds with randomness in mind. How many good starters and pivots and draw cards do I need to ensure that my opening hand is highly likely to be optimal?

Randomness also raises the skill ceiling in some ways. We don't always run 4 copies of a card. We're incentivized to run more copies of a Basic than the Stage 2 it evolves into, because we want to increase the chances of seeing that Basic in our opening hand.

We run more search effects and less search targets, because the search effects are going to get us to the search targets anyway. There's a whole game within the game dedicated to minimizing the randomness of your deck as much as possible.

The Other Side of the Coin

Poorly Balanced Randomness

When randomness is poorly designed, it can feel extremely unfair and punishing. All-or-nothing effects that have a tangible effect on the end result of the game are especially prone to this.

The game has had a tense relationship with Gust effects. In order to "balance" a gust effect, there was a printing of Pokémon Catcher that only activated on a coin flip.

The problem is that this is a game-winning effect. Games could easily come down to this coin flip. Failing to land Catcher at a critical point could lose you the game and landing it could win you the game.

When a hundred small acts of randomness influence the game, it tends to even out to being roughly fair. But when a single coin flip can heavily impact the outcome by itself, that's when we have a problem.

There's a reason that this effect is usually just printed on Supporter cards with no coin flips in the modern era.

Poké Ball is an example taken to the opposite extreme. Instead of having a really broken upside and a really horrible downside, this card ends up being forgettable on both sides of the spectrum.

Between Pokémon Trader, Computer Search, and Professor Oak, there were plenty of ways to get to your 'mons in the first format this card was printed into. The upside feels minimal.

Meanwhile the downside is just wasting a card. No one wants to waste a card. The downside is as unfun as possible, and the upside isn't exciting. Gambler, by comparison, always does something. That something will either be crazy powerful or super detrimental, but it's something.

In order for randomness to be fun, it needs to build up over time and have a mostly net-neutral effect on the game over the course of dozens of game actions. But it also has to have a considerable impact on the current turn, and should require course correction if something goes awry.

When Randomness Crosses the Line

The Divisive Neo Formats

Formats that incorporate the Neo block tend to be divisive, for one simple reason. This format had a lot, and I mean a LOT, of coin flips.

Baby pokémon required you to flip a coin every time you attack to see if you could even play the game against them. And many of them had powerful attacks or support effects.

Let's say my opening card is Cleffa. Your opening card is Tyrogue, another baby. I attach an energy and a Focus Band to Cleffa, a card that has a 50/50 chance of preventing a knock out. I'll also lay down a cute little stadium card called Chaos Gym.

Next, I'm going to use Eeeeeeek, but your Tyrogue is a baby. So I need to flip a coin. If heads, I get to draw a fresh hand. If tails, I skip my turn. Okay. This is fine. Big risk, big reward. I get heads and refresh my hand.

So far, so good, right? This mostly sounds like a normal turn in the TCG, just with some give and take. Well...

On your turn, you try to play The Rocket's Trap, a powerful trainer card! But Chaos Gym activates and you flip tails. This means I get to steal your effect.

And now I have to flip a coin for The Rocket's Trap. I get heads. You lose 3 cards from your hand due to its effect. You decide not to play any more trainers this turn.

Instead you attach an energy to Tyrogue and use Smash Punch... Or at least you try to. Between the baby rule, Smash Punch's effect, and Focus Band's effect, you need a total of three coin flips to go your way.

You have a 12.5% chance of actually knocking out Cleffa, and a mostly empty hand.

This is what happens when far, far too much luck is integrated into the game. It doesn't really feel like either one of us had any control over that exchange. What if all those coin flips had gone the other way, just out of curiosity?

I would have failed to renew my hand, you would have successfully ripped three cards out of my hand, and then you would have knocked out my Cleffa.

When you incorporate too much luck, it leads to a loss of control and player agency. That's not to say the game completely lost its appeal. The Neo formats do have their own unique charm to them. But it's less like playing Chess and more like playing Snakes and Ladders.

There is still skill expression to be had in trying to find ways around all of the coin flips and general degeneracy, but it does ultimately feel like a parody of itself.

Closing Thoughts

As with many things in game design, the moral of the story is that randomness is just a tool for the designers.

It can be used to balance out a broken card, to create tense situations, and to give new players a way to bridge the skill gap between them and their opponents.

It can raise both the skill floor, since new players might sometimes steal a cheeky win due to luck, and the skill ceiling, as veteran players will learn to look for ways to reduce inconsistencies in their strategies.

Or...it can be poorly balanced and blow up in your face, reducing the level of skill expression and forcing your players to interact with unfun mechanics.

It's not inherently good or bad. It's just a tool.