Snippitts of Illusions

Of all the game mechanics that are out there one of the most innovative has come out the last five years or so: the deck-building mechanic. Now building a deck has long been the staple of collectible card games. It's always something that takes place outside the game though and the options are only limited by your selection of cards on hand. Somebody that has more or better cards are naturally going to have considerably more options and, if practiced, will be able to dominate the game due to resources outside the game itself. Magic the Gathering is the most obvious culprit of these sorts of games. People scramble for the best cards which typically fall in the uncommon and rare levels and only those with the ability to obtain said cards will naturally be able to play them. This isn't to say having access to those cards instantly make you unbeatable however. Literacy in game mechanics is just as (or more) important than actually having those cards, but having the harder to find more desirable cards can certainly up the odds of winning. But once you've selected the cards and built your deck that aspect of the game is gone. 

The deck building game uses the idea of building the deck as a primary driving mechanic for the game itself. The most obvious example is the card game Dominion. In Dominion everybody starts with the same group of cards in individual decks. Each player obtains cards from a central pool by either purchasing them with coin cards from their decks (most common) or through action cards from their decks (less common).  Every player has an action, in which they can play a card, and a market, in which they can buy a card from the central pool, as part of their turn. Action cards will add more actions, give you extra coins, give you another buy, or let you draw cards among a few other things. Dominion doesn't have a tremendous amount of player interaction in the base set, but the multiple expansions that have been released has added more "attack" cards to the game. The primary mechanic for Dominion, which is one of my favorite mechanics, is the deck building: purchasing cards from the pool and adding them to your deck (which undergoes a lot of reshuffling as the game progresses).

Dominion was one of the first games to utilize this mechanic, but there are a tremendous amount of variety out there for somebody wanting to explore the idea of deck building. Ascension is simpler in scope, but has a feel more like Magic the Gathering over all. Like Dominion players start with identical individualized decks but unlike Dominion they are actually combating a central enemy and the victory points are not cards that clutter your deck [victory points are cards in Dominion, part of the game is creating a combo engine that will allow you to purchase more expensive victory point cards] but instead exist outside it in the form of tokens. The pool of cards in Ascension is limited and ever changing, but the concept is the same: add cards from the core pool to your deck by using the in-game currency and actions. 

But there are others, oh so many others. Thunderstone took the deck builder and added the concept of explorers exploring dungeons. RuneAge has each players with a private pool of cards as well as a very limited central pool, building armies to fight each other and against a scenario deck (which is clever). There's deck building games with horror themes (Resident Evil, Eaten By Zombies) sci-fi themes (Star Trek, Core Worlds) super hero themes (both a Marvel and DC have licensed games with heavy deck building mechanics as well as several unlicensed games) and so on, and so on. There are also a games that have incorporated deck building as one of several mechanics to help give the game depth (the best example is Mage Knight: the Board Game). Not to mention games that have taken the concept and applied it to other things: Puzzle Strike uses poker style chips and Quarriors uses the same mechanic with dice. 

Long story short there's a smorgassboard of deck building games out there for a guy like me that has yet to get enough of that particular mechanic.