Hello everyone
I've been working on a homebrew TCG for the a bit over a month and I'm thinking I'm finally at a point where I can start sharing some things. It is a dueling game inspired by MTG, but also inspired by city building games or logistics games like Transport Tycoon Deluxe or Factorio.
Each player starts with 20 Capital is attempting to get to 50, or reduce their opponent to 0. Capital is also the currency used to play cards. Every point you spend may move you further away from victory, but the income you gain from it may be exactly the amount you need in the future to snag the win.
Each card will have a Cost to play, and many cards will have a Revenue and Expense. Each players turn after drawing a card they add up their Revenue, subtract their Expenses, and add the Profit to their Capital. There is no combat phase, but players may still influence each other through a variety of cards. Sabotages may remove expensive Productions or Investments, a Contract card that stays in play may prevent you from building anything on the Locality you just placed, or a card may attack your Capital directly.
How cards can be placed is also important. A Resource card provides somewhere for an Infrastructure card, which in turn provides a number of slots for Production cards. These Productions and Infrastructure may themselves have a slot available for Investments which will augment their stats. Locality cards are population centers which will have a slot for Infrastructure and also a number of Demands. If you have a Production that matches a Demand, the Locality provides Revenue.
It may seem like it would be a pain in the ass to monitor all those numbers and do the math, but the way the cards are separated in to their own Supply Chain by Resource or Locality, it's very easy to use something like a D6 to individually mark the expected profit from each chain each round.