Scott points out the news that the two Everquest games will soon have an integrated collectable card game. MMOG Nation has an interview with Smedley. The ‘huh’ quote:

MN: Will players be able to trade?

Smedley: No. Otherwise we’ll get into a situation where the gold sellers will get into this, and we’re going to stop that cold.

So a collectable card game with… no trading. Huh. That’s very… um… well, it would seem on its face to fly in the face of what one expects from a ‘collectable’ card game. If you want a specific rare card, you can either: buy booster packs, or get booster packs in game (i.e. grind them).

I personally buy way too many Magic cards. Often a box or two when an expansion comes out, if it catches my fancy. That being said, I’m a hardcore combo deck guy (referred to a ‘Johnny’ by the Magic development team). If I want to build a deck around a rare card (playing with Pandemonium, for example, makes me all tingly inside), I need 4 of them. Without 4 of the rare I need, my entire deck concept collapses. Being able to purchase or trade for the rares I need is vital to my play style. But buying a box (36 packs) of boosters gets me 36 out of about 70 possible rares – I might not even get ONE of the rare I need (the rest of the cards are divided between uncommons and commons).

All of this presupposes standard CCG-style rarity rules, but — without trading or purchasing individual cards, IMHO, the game quickly becomes a ‘money’ game, where the winner is based on whoever has the cash to chase rares by opening a nearly infinite number of booster packs. Actually being competitive will be way more expensive than in MTG. (As a way of comparison, Magic the Gathering’s website has a weekly feature called ‘Building on a Budget’ which teaches how to build a cheap deck for $30 bucks!)

So yeah, I should be right in their target audience — MMO freak, collectable card nut, but this one line in the interview has pretty much soured me on the idea. It will be interesting to see if they readdress this, or if the community finds workarounds.

Edit: Further downstream in the thread, Scott Hartman corrects where I was wrong on this issue. Sorry about that!

Original comments thread is here.