In the same time as when Tarot and deck suites emerge to cement cards as a thing how far of a stretch would it be that there would also be a game where it's like mtg where you have some cards to represent creatures with little stats/effects on them and spell cards stuffs with players competing to knock down some arbitrary number of heath from the other guy.

Would it just instantly implode from people inventing cards with no sense of balance? could clubs start gatekeeping cards for quality? card collections would be a wild west affair of bespoke prints and institutions commemorating events or doing special runs for things that heepen as it all just blows up like stamps? I dreamed about it and imagined this alt world where I was in a pawn shop episode seeing a deck building guy come in with a basket of insane powerful/rare/old cards like a William of orange that lets the player switch to controlling the other player's position on the board condition that the couped player's cards in hanf would approve of the takeover and other such unglued tier nonsense but also taken completely seriously because it was a singlular copy sign'd and owned by the guy in question.

>>96001467 (OP)
Woodblock printing has been around nearly 2000 years and made it to the byzantines by about 1000 ad. So, then i guess

>>96001467 (OP)
What about capitalism, would mtg work as a cultural game instead of a for profit collectable game?

>>96001467 (OP)
Ancient Egypt

>>96003231
Within the lore of YGO the the flashbacks to Egyptians playing the cardgame was a symbolic representation of the summoning magic used. The cardgame itself was made be Pegasus as a way to copy that magic and bring it into the modern world.

>>96001467 (OP)
We can only begin to speculate the wacky collectorship implications to be had in a world where a card game gets to marinate for so long it becomes ubiquitious like 52 and chess. They would be public domain/historical printings commemorated like stamps or coins as anyone with sway enough to commision a batch could freely produced cards since it's not like a company would corner the concept of the card game wide enough to stop it. the only gate would have to be local quality control and errata books Oh god you could crush an elephant in the doorstopper volumes of that centuries old trading card game.

letting a TCG's internal culture develop over centuries instead of decades like Stamp collections is crazy...There is aready a constalation of semi-mythical treated cards from the 90s as is lol, 'muh first editions charizards', 'muh power nines', that junk is all small potatoes in comparison to "that clutch card general ducklefuckle played to win clemency for his surrendering army in 1781" Real cultural game tcg would probably end up as a very class divided sport with princes and bougies and public figures accumulating cards worth more then normal paper like a kind of 40k army figurine collection hobby with decks implicitly encouraged to be themed around the person/family/organization that they represent such that a famous hotel's shared deck is distinguishable on card vibe from a railway mogul's deck. They'd probably make it so there are rules baked in that more valuable cards trump less so in some way with a mix of age, psa grades, uniqueness and general invented reasons for notoriety all being qualifiers sort of like how art gets valued irl.


Now i'm stuckimagining a competitive scene where it's not completely insane to see matches where there's a norm of having guys patron'd by different estates to use their old and valuable cards in games where cards from the estate collections are on the line as an entry fee.

>>96001467 (OP)
i think a 'fantasy card game' like magic the gathering has only come to fruition through two main reasons:
1. the concept of mass printing.
2. much of the world not needing to worry over famine, war, pestilence, etc.
on point 1, i'm assuming that you're talking about a card game with individual unique art and stats, and not just reusing a regular set of playing cards. the first problem that arises is logistical. in the ancient days, printing was scarce, and things that were printed had to be important, for the cost and labor of actually making it. even just printing a couple of decks would be quite costly. nowadays, printing is cheap and easily accessible in a relative sense.
on point 2, for most of humanity's history we were preoccupied with just trying to survive into the next season. people dedicated their time and resources purely into survival, and for the first time in history, much of the world doesn't have to worry about that.
i think this is the earliest time MTG could've been invented. companies can mass produce cardboard and make profit, people can afford to spend a king's ransom on cardboard.
i could be totally wrong though. i did zero research and i don't know anything.

>>96003863
These are both bunk, or at least they're overexagerations of the troubles to be overcome, 'especially' the notion you are putting out of life being to much of a scramble of survival for levity and games, at least in any(read: 99%) time/place where there's stability enough for people to fuck around. There is that factiod that gets thrown around saying peasents worked less hours then modern people and there is a lot of iffiness to be had about definitions and the like around that it is something that is or isn't true depending on how you measure it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRwwXxhXdHU


If someone(s) were really were determined to do a production of a hundred bits of art on thin rectangles with a bit of rules writing to go with it nothing is going to stop that crew from making thousands of slips of it over a month other then outside intervention. Among those who have use for writing material which could be used for cardbacks the paper/papyrus/whatever else was never in short supply, the troubles had always come from the effort of getting all those words down into copies of big books. Most people of any means should have had access to playing cards long before the guttenburg days since early tarot/suites are a 1400s thing.

https://youtu.be/H_nT6EFUZmI?t=276

>>96004094
>ummm akctually it was great in medieval times.
Yawn. You autists are so tiring.

>>96004112
The medieval era was a period of 1000 years give or take.
To suggest that it was always a struggle for survival with no capacity for surplus or free time for playing games is as ludicrous as suggesting that it was some kind of golden age where people didn't work as much.

These arguments are so stupid because the truth is somewhere in between and making gross sweeping generalizations about a period of 1000 years will always be inaccurate.

Just for reference there's been less time from the middle ages till now than there was from the start of the middle ages to the end.
1000 years is a long as fuck amount of time and situations could vary a lot depending on region and timing.

>>96003254
NEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEERD.

>>96003759
>>96003863
I think you guys are missing a big point: A standardized rules set. You can have local variations for chess and standard playing cards, for example, because the pieces themselves don't have inherent balance values besides the amount of copies of said piece and the number on the face of the cards.

Let's say something like MTG starts being made in a Venice post mass printing creation. Who would decide the power of cards and its uses and print it on the card? What would stop other printers from printing stronger and stronger cards to sell their cards above the others?

I can only see a game similart to MTG thriving in older times if it was attached to a big enough organization in charge of keeping the basic rules or powerlevels in check.

Or at least, upon creation, each card has to have a "reserve" of points it can spread to power and toughness directly related to their mana cost.

>>96005593
Powercreep cycles as we understand them today a short-term issue in comparison to the timetables this would have to be playing out over. There's quality control for most gambling halls to reject devinart oc tier trite at the door and also just the soft factor that when everything is overpowered everything gets balanced again when you to have enough of the busted cards going into the pool.

Language troubles would be the much more dire problem since cards with their weight of technical language should be quick to fall off to regionalism.

>>96003759
Themed decks are a bridge to far but you're probably on the right track to say that it would become very classist.

>>96005593
The obvious solution is to have a TCG as a religious affair sanctioned by the church. The meta is pretty stable until the protestant reformation leads to the Thirty Years' Tournament.

>>96001467 (OP)
I doubt you would be able to have a standardized game where pieces were diverse and would be traded freely. There's no central authority or efficient communication to determine that we have a library, battlefield, exile one, main phase 2, etc. The elegance and versatility of the typical deck of cards is that it's just 4 suites and 13 ranks and they have no intrinisc meaning outside of the game, so the ruleset is entirely localized. You can't print (paint?) aladdin when in east bohemia the p/t values are actually crops/coin production and the artifact type doesn't exist in favor of the Time card type (subtypes holiday/year/season/etc). A highly mechanical, evocative game like magic could perhaps have been made as a sort of card-based wargame, but the trading card system is entirely a product of modern society, capitalism, property law, technology and the stupidity of nerds (who the fuck pays for this shit? I just print cards or play on lackeyCCG)

>>96001467 (OP)
Boardgames have been around for thousands of years but card games didn't really pick up mass market steam until a couple centuries after the printing press. I'd say about the same time poker and other card games were getting popular is when MTG could've picked up, but the problem is MTG cards are a lot more complex and need more materials to produce than your typical numbered playing card. So I'd say it's only really in the late 1800s when printing got much easier AND fantasy was becoming popular that you could've reasonably seen it. Coincidentally that's also when tabletop wargames got popular.

Crossposted the thread to /his/ since we're better to answer it.
>>>/his/17813002