If you have been playing card games for years, there is a good chance that you are familiar with the term “powercreep.” However, if you aren’t involved in Hearthstone, Magic: The Gathering, Pokemon, or any other contemporary collectible card games, this term must seem quite foreign. But have no fear. Although the concept likely isn’t entirely relevant to your everyday life, this article will explain it in great detail.

Powercreep is a part of every card game. Many individuals who primarily play card games such as Magic: The Gathering or newer releases influenced by it such as Hearthstone or Legends of Runeterra might find it easily noticeable in these games. The general formula of this type of game is simple: you use cards to defeat your opponent, usually by reducing their life total to 0. You might use creature cards that can attack and deal damage to your opponent, spell cards that have a useful one-time effect, or other cards that provide you with a lasting advantage. However, the core remains the same throughout: every card requires you to pay a resource and in return gives you a benefit.

Judging a card’s overall power level involves analyzing the benefit it provides in relation to the cost required to play it. As an example, every creature card in Hearthstone has health, attack, and mana cost. Health represents how much damage a creature can take before it dies, damage represents how much damage it deals when it attacks, and mana cost is simply how much you must pay to play the card. In Hearthstone, your maximum mana increases by one each turn, starting from zero. So, you could play a 2 cost card on turn 2, and on turn 7 you could play a 7 cost card, or a 5 cost card and a 2 cost card. 

Creating a “balanced” card requires balancing this ratio of cost to payoff. Using the formula of cost / attack / health, a 1/1/1 might be a bit weak, while a 1/2/2 would be quite strong. Simply increasing the attack and health makes it significantly better; it would be able to attack for twice the amount of damage each turn and survive twice the damage as well. Therefore, following this formula, would a 7/8/8 creature card be vastly better than a 7/7/7 creature card? That late in the game, your opponent would have a much larger variety of options to deal with it, and the additional attack and health are barely significant when you must invest such a high cost. The change from 1/1/1 to 1/2/2 is essentially a doubling in power level, but a change from 7/7/7 to 7/8/8 is much less significant. Here, it becomes evident that the power level is not linear, but much more like a curve. A 7 cost card can be played on turn 7, but a 2 cost card could be played on any turn from 2 to 7. The more resources you invest into a card, the less flexible it is; therefore, the payoff must be significantly better to warrant playing it.

It is clear where issues might arise. The purest form of powercreep is the printing of a card that is strictly better than another card that already exists. To use our previous example, the creation of a 1/2/2 creature would make a 1/1/1 creature entirely irrelevant; there is no reason to play the weaker one, no upside. What if this 1/2/2 was so strong that it pushed other cards into irrelevancy? Some might say that this isn’t an issue. You could simply begin printing other cards that match the power level of this card, bringing things back into balance. However, these newly printed cards might powercreep other, older cards. Thus, the cycle begins.. Printing cards with lower power levels to try to mitigate the issue would be a commercial failure. Those cards would be irrelevant too, and nobody would be interested in buying them. At this point, unless precise measures are taken, the overall power level could start to rise indefinitely, obliterating entire strategies that used to be viable.

Powercreep isn’t always bad, though. Sometimes, it is simply the healthy progression of a game. There are only so many cards that can be printed at a certain level before things begin to get stale and the pool of design ideas begins to dry up. It makes sense that a game’s power level will slowly rise over time as new and exciting designs are printed–sometimes slightly above the average in terms of power. Unfortunately, some games take this too far. Many games implement the practice of “chase cards” or “chase sets,” which is the printing of cards that are so abnormally above the average power level that it’s almost a requirement to purchase them and use them in order to play competitively. This is a short term profit, yes, but power levels could rise unsustainably as a result, and older strategies that are widely loved by players could be wiped out instantly. This is evident in Magic: The Gathering, when the card set “Modern Horizons 2” was released, warping the entire game around its extremely powerful cards. Of course, Magic: The Gathering is not alone in this.

To clarify, a card with a power level that surpasses a much older card is not necessarily a bad thing. A gradual rise in power level over time is normal. Nor is powercreep at play if a card’s power level surpasses another card that was never good in the first place; a card only powercreeps if it is suddenly and significantly stronger than the average power level, not the absolute baseline. Hence, card game designers today should try to learn from the mistakes of other games and manage powercreep in a healthy way. Too many veteran card players have quit a card game because the cards they were familiar with were wiped out by a sudden jump in power level. Powercreep is a destructive force, but in the right hands, it can be a powerful tool to reshape the state of a game.