Workflows

Designing a Card Game with Inklings

Card game design is a documentation problem that slowly becomes a spreadsheet problem that eventually becomes a “why does every card I design say draw 2” problem. The game starts as a single interesting idea — pirates and ninjas, fighting on a boat, with weird combo potential — and expands into hundreds of cards, abilities, faction identities, rarity distributions, and balance concerns that all need to stay connected to each other.

This guide walks through building Cutlass & Kunai, a fictional Pirates vs. Ninjas collectible card game, using Inklings to keep the design space organized from first concept through playtesting.

One Game, One Workspace

Create a workspace called Cutlass & Kunai. Everything lives here: factions, cards, abilities, balance notes, playtest logs. One workspace means one search covers your entire design history — when you vaguely remember writing something about a card that did something with hand size six months ago, you can actually find it.

Your workspace structure by the end of a full design cycle will look something like this:

Cutlass & Kunai
├── Factions
│   ├── The Crimson Tide (Pirates)
│   └── The Shadow Clan (Ninjas)
├── Base Set
│   ├── Captain Blackpatch's Parrot (Probably Evil)
│   ├── Shadow Fold Jutsu
│   ├── The Salty Cutlass
│   ├── Smoke Bomb Surprise
│   └── ...
├── Abilities
│   ├── Plunder
│   ├── Shadow Step
│   ├── First Strike
│   └── ...
├── Balance Notes
└── Playtest Log

Start by creating the top-level pages. The hierarchy is flexible — you can drag pages to reorganize at any point — so don’t spend too long on perfect structure before you have anything to put in it.

Your Two Factions

Factions are the conceptual backbone of Cutlass & Kunai. Before designing individual cards, you need to know what each faction does — their mechanical identity, their color in the game’s vocabulary, what they want to accomplish in a game state.

Go to Settings → Types and create a Faction type with these properties:

playstyle (text) — one-sentence mechanical identity
signature-mechanic (text) — the ability keyword that defines this faction
color-identity (text) — if you’re using a color system

Then create two pages inside a Factions folder and assign the Faction type to both:

The Crimson Tide (Pirates)

Playstyle: Aggressive board control; put pressure early and bury opponents under resource advantage
Signature mechanic: Plunder (triggers when you deal combat damage)
Color identity: Red/Gold

The Shadow Clan (Ninjas)

Playstyle: Combo and hand manipulation; survive the early game and win with a sequence the opponent didn’t see coming
Signature mechanic: Shadow Step (enter play hidden, reveal to trigger effect)
Color identity: Black/Silver

These pages aren’t just documentation — they become reference points you’ll link to from every card you design. When you’re staring at a card that doesn’t feel right, you can open its faction’s page and ask whether it fits the identity you’ve written there.

Define the Card Type

Cards are the main entity in your game, and they need structured properties to support the balance and collection work you’ll do later.

In Settings → Types, create a Card type with these properties:

faction (select: Pirates / Ninjas / Neutral)
cost (number) — mana cost or equivalent
power (number) — base attack/damage value
card-class (select: Unit / Spell / Treasure / Trap)
rarity (select: Common / Uncommon / Rare / Legendary)
set (text) — which set this card belongs to

The set property as a text field instead of a select keeps it flexible for early development when you’re not sure how many sets you’ll design. You can change the type later; for now, type “Base Set” and move on.

Once the type exists, assign it when you create card pages. Open any card page and assign the Card type from the type badge in the detail panel. The property fields appear — fill in what you know, leave blank what you’re still deciding.

Abilities as Their Own Pages

Here’s where Inklings earns its place in the workflow: abilities are not just text strings that appear on cards. They’re design entities with their own rules, interactions, edge cases, and balancing concerns. Give them pages.

Create an Abilities folder. Inside it, create a page for each keyword ability:

Plunder — “When this unit deals combat damage to an opponent, trigger this effect.”
Shadow Step — “This card enters play face-down. When revealed, trigger this effect before opponents respond.”
First Strike — “This unit deals combat damage before non-First Strike defenders.”

Now, in each card’s editor, link to its abilities using wiki-links. In Captain Blackpatch’s Parrot (Probably Evil):

This unit enters play with a coin counter. When Plunder triggers, flip the counter — on heads, draw a card; on tails, your opponent does. See [[Plunder]] for full timing rules.

The Plunder page gains a backlink from every card that uses it. Open the Plunder page and its backlinks panel shows you the complete list: every card in your game that depends on this mechanic. When you change how Plunder works, you immediately see what’s affected.

This matters most for mechanics like First Strike, which interact with other abilities in non-obvious ways. When you discover that First Strike + Plunder creates a game-breaking sequence involving Deck Swab of Destiny, you can trace the chain through backlinks instead of grepping through card text.

Tags for Design State

Cards move through a lifecycle as you design and test them. Tags track that state without adding another property field.

Add these tags to your workspace and assign them as cards move through the process:

needs-balance — designed but not yet checked against the faction curve
ready-for-playtest — properties set, abilities linked, ready to test
broken-in-testing — encountered a problem in a playtest session
cut — removed from the set but kept for reference

Group these under a tag group called Design State to keep them separate from faction tags or thematic tags.

In the sidebar, filtering by ready-for-playtest gives you the current playtest pool. Filtering by broken-in-testing gives you the list of problems waiting for your attention. Filtering by needs-balance shows you what still needs work before the next playtest.

The cut tag is worth keeping rather than deleting cut cards. You’ll redesign something later that has the same problem as a card you already tried. Having the failed design accessible means you don’t rediscover the failure from scratch.

Container Rules for Sets

Your sets need to stay organized as card count grows. Create a Base Set folder page, then configure a container rule on it.

Open the Base Set folder, navigate to its settings, and set a container rule: any page created directly inside this folder automatically receives the Card type. Set it to direct children only — abilities and other non-card pages shouldn’t inherit the card type.

Now every card you create in Base Set gets the type automatically. When a second set enters development, create a Crimson Tide Expansion folder with the same container rule. The type is consistent; the set property distinguishes which set a card belongs to.

Collection Views for Balancing

This is where the structured properties pay off. Navigate to Settings → Types → Card and open the collection view. Every card in your game appears in a table, sortable and filterable by any property.

Sort by cost to see your mana curve. Sort by faction then power to compare what each faction can put on the board at each cost. Filter by faction: Pirates and sort by card-class to review the Pirate unit lineup in isolation.

This is how you catch the classic problem: seventeen cards that all say “draw 2.” The collection view makes homogeneity visible. If every Ninja Spell at cost 3 does the same thing with different art, you’ll see it in the table before anyone has to play the game and tell you it’s boring.

Common balance checks to run:

Pirate units by cost vs. Ninja units by cost — are the curves roughly parallel?
Rarity distribution — how many Legendaries, and are they actually legendary?
Neutral cards by card-class — are they filling gaps or duplicating faction strengths?
Cards with no power value (Spells and Traps) — do they have cost-appropriate effects?

Wiki-Links Between Cards

Some cards reference other specific cards. Silent Shuriken Storm makes all Ninjas with Shadow Step deal bonus damage. Treasure Map (Upside Down) lets you search your deck for any card named Plank Walking Protocol. First Mate Blunderbuss gives a power bonus to every Pirate aboard.

Link these references explicitly. In Silent Shuriken Storm’s page:

All [[Shadow Step]] Ninjas gain +1 power until end of turn.

In Treasure Map (Upside Down):

Search your deck for [[Plank Walking Protocol]] and put it in your hand.

The Plank Walking Protocol page now has a backlink from Treasure Map (Upside Down). Any card that tutors for it, copies it, or specifically interacts with it appears in that backlink list. When you redesign Plank Walking Protocol — as you inevitably will, because that card is doing too much — you can immediately see every other card that depends on it.

This is especially useful for combo tracking. Shadow Fold Jutsu + Smoke Bomb Surprise + Ninja Vanish (But Dramatically) creates an infinite loop that wins on turn 4. Wiki-links between those cards make the combo chain navigable, and when you nerf one of them, backlinks show you whether the combo survives in any other form.

Agent for Balance Review

Pro+Agent

Once you’ve got a full playtest pool, ask the agent to look at the design space as a whole. It can read your entire workspace — every card page, every property, every link — and synthesize patterns that are hard to spot when you’re deep in individual card design.

Useful questions:

“Compare the mana curves for Pirates and Ninjas. Does one faction have significantly more efficient options at any cost?”
“Which cards have no wiki-links to or from other cards? Are any of these isolated designs that don’t interact with anything else?”
“How many cards in the Base Set reference Shadow Step? Does that keyword have enough support to be a viable strategy?”
“Find cards where power exceeds cost by more than 3. Are these intentional power cards or mistakes?”

The agent won’t design cards for you — that’s your job — but it can tell you what the data looks like before you spend another weekend playtesting a fundamentally broken curve.