Category: Designer Theory
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Why you should adopt Manifold TCG early.
We are in a trading card boom. Trends go on 30 year cycles, and 30 years ago the 90s were the collectibles decade. There are a lot of new card games on the market, and Magic: the Gathering and Pokemon are bigger than they have ever been before. Why, then, is Manifold TCG the game…
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Choosing Heroes and Finding Your Niche
This is a child post of Manifold Foundations. In a game of Manifold TCG, players start with a team of heroes and a deck of support cards. The game’s fundamental win condition is to defeat your opponent’s heroes before they defeat yours. This means that at every point during a game of Manifold you have…
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Pretty Cardboard and Math Rocks
This is a child post of Manifold Foundations. Manifold TCG combines two of my favorite things, cards and dice, into the best TCG you’re going to play this decade. We’ve expertly combined modern game design theories with classic distribution sensibilities. And the cherry on top; you get to roll dice. Warhammer players love rolling dice.…
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Manifold Foundations
Manifold TCG is going to be the best kept secret of 2026. This is a fast paced deckbuilder that has revolutionized the TCG space by incorporating a dice element. Magic: The Gathering Commander players will love building decks around heroes, Warhammer and Dungeons and Dragons players love rolling a bunch of dice. And disgruntled TCG…
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The small TCG problem
The prevailing opinion is that launching an indie Trading Card Game is a fool’s errand. You’ll spend a small fortune printing your game, but you simply cannot print enough to justify randomized product, you wont get enough rares into the communities, and communities will be too small to actually facilitate trading. I laid out in…
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Why TCG?
Being a TCG is a divisive decision, and one that immediate splits the community into passionate groups. TCGs are expensive, booster packs are predatory, and new sets mean you constantly need to keep up or you get left behind. Why can’t you just buy the game? Well, at the risk of repeating what I said…
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Meet the dream team
In why we choose trust I talk about how we are committed to supporting the hobby store and we’ll publish easily fathomable print runs, and plenty of other things which could easily be ChatGPT drivel. You can also look carefully at our cards and figure out our dirty little secret. One could easily dismiss us…
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A Perfect Balance
Collectors want their cards cheap when they buy them, and expensive when they sell them. Retailers want high margins on their collectibles, but don’t want any issues restocking their games. Trading card games are too expensive, but cheap games don’t sufficiently support play spaces. These forces are constantly at odds with each other. Relatively subtle…
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Why we choose ‘Trust’
You find a booster pack of the hot new set on the shelf at a retailer. It has a price tag of $9. Hamilton warns you it’s not a good idea, but you promptly trade him for those sweet 12 additional game cards, and reap your reward. You wade through the commons and uncommons, pretending…
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The Big Sell
When we first set out to design Manifold, we had one premise that we desperately wanted to meet. Star Wars Destiny had just been announced as deceased, Magic: the Gathering was moving into its Secret Lair model, and Flesh and Blood was revealing itself as a highly collectible but moderately playable game (with some scandalous…