What Lorcana, Magic, Star Wars: Unlimited, and others can learn from the dead Dune TCG

polygon.com:

Trading card games aren’t just popular with players. They’re also incredibly popular with executives, as they can be lucrative for publishers and distributors alike. Magic: The Gathering became a $1 billion brand for Hasbro in 2023, which went quite a long way to improving its bottom line, if we’re being honest. As the company increases its Universes Beyond offerings, incredibly powerful tools for selling cards to people not yet comfortable playing a game of Magic, how can other TCGs hope to compete? What must new games like Disney Lorcana, Star Wars: Unlimited, Altered, and the more established Flesh and Blood do to thrive? A few possible answers may lie in the story of the 1990s-era Dune: Collectible Card Game.

The TCG market in 1997 was not so different from today. Magic: The Gathering reigned supreme. Dozens of competitors and a few blatant cash grabs had all come and gone. Every new game sought either a new gimmick, a popular IP, or another way to offer something Magic did not. Enter the company Last Unicorn Games with Dune: CCG, which asked players to turn the wheels of a galaxy-spanning political machine in the hopes of being admitted to the Landsraad, the main political body of the Dune universe. Dune: CCG was built from the sand up to be a multiplayer game, not unlike Magic’s community-made format of choice, Commander. Rather than always paying a straight cost in mana to play a card from their hand to the table, players could bid against one another to inflate the costs of the choicest cards. To win, players had to accumulate both favor on the political stage and the valuable resource spice from Arrakis. There was even a third resource that helped to further complicate things.

Adding to the cognitive load was the fact that each player brought two different decks to the table. The House deck included most of the cards and types: generic characters, military units, events, etc. Cards in the Imperial deck represented main characters and locations from the Dun