User:Masem/Digital collectible card game

A digital collectible card game is a video game genre inspired by physical collectible card games (CCGs). Such games typically feature the same mechanics as CCGs, such as custom deck construction, the ability to acquire more cards, and gameplay rules to challenge other players. However, digital CCGs differ as they offer gameplay elements only possible or made more efficient due to their virtual nature, and the use online connectivity.

While other digital CCG predate it, Hearthstone, developed by Blizzard Entertainment in 2014, is considered the most successful game of its type. Other examples of digital CCG include Gwent: The Witcher Card Game and [[The Elder Scrolls: Legends].

Concepts
Digital CCGs follow similar rules and broader gameplay mechanics as physical CCGs. Games for digital CCGs require the player to construct a custom deck of cards from their current inventory, often limited to a fixed deck size and a limited number of cards of a specific type. Once built, the player engages with one or more other players or with a computer opponent to attempt to win a match. Such matches nearly always follow the Magic: The Gathering (MTG) model, where the goal is to take turns playing creatures and spells to attack the opponent's hero or avatar and reduce their hit points to zero before they can do the same to the player.

Where digital CCGs different from physical counterparts is their ability to include gameplay effects that would be impossible to perform with a physical game or that are made much more efficient with the digital version. For example, several cards in Hearthstone allow a player to select from randomly selected cards from any of the cards available to the game, and not the ones they own. Temporary effects on cards, such as damage, health and attack boosts, or other buffs or debuffs, can be easily shown within the graphics of the program, while physically tracking all such effects can be difficult to accomplish. Further, the game developers can apply updates for cards immediately through software patches as they tune their game.

Related to these digital CCGs are games that use concepts of digital collectible card games but including other video game mechanics or genres. Games such as Faeria and Duelyst have cards that allow players to summon creatures to a tile-based game board, and mechanics of these games include moving such characters around the board to move into appropriate range for melee attacks or to help defend other characters. Other games use digital CCG mechanics but as part of a different genre, typically allowing the player to collect cards and construct decks as a means of outfitting their playable characters, and in which obtaining new, more powerful cards is similar to improving character attributes, equipment or other elements of character-progression gameplay. These games otherwise use typical facets of CCGs, including drawing and selecting random cards from their premade deck. Such games include both Guild of Dungeoneering and Hand of Fate, dungeon-exploration games where the player-constructed decks determine what equipment, encounters, and rewards can be earned, and Card Hunter, a tactical role playing game where the equipment that a party character is equipped with determines what cards will be present in that character's deck.

Frequently, these games feature microtransactions to obtain need booster packs, in addition to packs that can be earned through standard progression of the game. Like their physical counterpart, booster packs contain a random number of cards, selected by the game based on rarity. As most digital CCG do not feature trading options, having duplicate cards beyond the maximum number allowed by deck construction is useless, and these games feature a means to transform excess duplicate cards into another type of in-game currency. For Hearthstone, cards can be transformed into "arcane dust" which can then be used to craft any other card, the amount needed proportional to the card's rarity.

History
Collectible card games emerged in 1993, with Magic: The Gathering (MTG) as one of the most successful examples of its type. Over time, with improvements in home and video game consoles, many physical CCG created computerized versions of their games to enable players to engage in matches remotely, such as Magic: The Gathering Online (MTGO). These program generally helped with deck constructMTGO was designed