What is a Living Card Game

Since the beginning of CCGs in the early 1990s, a person could go to their local hobby or game store and purchase a random 40 card starter deck and/or a booster pack that would contain 8 or 10 randomly selected card. It was a crap shoot whether you would pull that much-needed chase case card, the rare card to finish out your collection, or just one more of the same crappy rare you already have six or seven of. Later theme decks were introduced, allowing players to know which cards they were buying. However, not all cards are available in theme decks, so players still find themselves chasing the cards they need to make their deck work. The model works for games, fueling a profitable CCG industry and allowing many variations of deck construction and tournament play.

Some card games are not as suited to the traditional CCG distribution model. So Fantasy Flight Games is spearheading a new distribution model called Living Card Game (LCG) for their story-driven card games, including "A Game of Thrones".

With the LCG distribution model, players know the cards they are buying. They can buy a core set, which for these first two games will include only cards that have already been printed. As the name suggests, the core set is a good way to get the basics. You can expand on the cards provided in the core set by buying expansion packs (called chapter packs in Game of Thrones), which are published monthly. An expansion pack has 40 cards: 1 each of 10 different rares and 3 each of 10 different commons.

One of the benefits of the LCG model is that it offers players a more affordable way to build their decks. At first glance, you might say ‘no’, but when you take a closer look at the economics, the answer is ‘yes’. Let's look at A Game of Thrones as an example. Suppose your deck revolves around a rare character card included in the latest chapter pack. Because you are limited to three of a card in your deck, you would need to purchase only three of the latest expansion pack. At $10 per pack, you would spend $30 to get all three instances of that card. When completing a CCG deck, players often spend much more than that buying boosters or singles to fill out their deck with certain chase cards.
The other benefit is that players can construct their decks without worrying whether they will be able to get the cards they need. Fantasy Flight Games has committed to keeping all cards they release in print. So if you come up with a deck idea that needs a specific card, all you have to do is go to your local game shop and buy the chapter packs that contain those cards.

Fantasy Flight Games currently has three LCGs available:
• A Game of Thrones, based on the novels written by George R. R. Martin. These novels are scheduled to become an HBO series in Fall 2010.
• Call of Cthulhu, based on the writings of H. P. Lovecraft. These stories also inspired the RPG Call of Cthulhu by Chaosium Inc.
• Warhammer Invasion, based on the Warhammer miniatures strategy games by Games Workshop Limited.