Origins

Since I'm not exactly a professional designer or anything, most of my designs are inspired by another game, and then slightly modified again and again and again until it's been twisted enough to be considered something of my own creation.  It's hard to separate this in your own mind sometimes, knowing that there are bits of your designs that were really "borrowed" or "stolen" from another game.  It's hard to be sure if what you're creating is truly original, or if you're just re-hashing something that has been done before.

From a legal standpoint, at least you're generally safe in that you can't actually copyright a game mechanic.  You can put a patent on it, but even that is hard to defend.  The patent is generally a scare tactic to prevent anyone else from creating a game like yours.

As I said before, my background is in competitive CCG play.  One of those games was a game called Magi-Nation: Duel.  It was a game that only lasted about 3 years before going under for numerous reasons, but one of those reasons was not the game play.  It employed a really great energy system that eliminated the need to have resource cards in your deck which also prevented any concept of "resource screw" or "resource flood". I really loved to play this game, but since it is a dead game (almost a decade gone now) and outside of a freakish miracle where the current cartoon with the IP of the game takes off like gangbusters, the game will never be reprinted.  So this is the system that I decided to start with to try and make a deckbuilding game.

The second game that I used for a little bit of inspiration for my game is from the game Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer.  I'm not sure if the mechanic is used in any other games, because it's not a very unique mechanic or anything, but it is the way that the selection of cards that you have available to purchase for your deck is chosen.  In some games, you have piles that are chosen before the start of the game, and you're limited to just the piles that are chosen to purchase cards from.  In Ascension, all of the cards are shuffled together, and there is a preview row of sorts where there is a limited number of cards that are available to purchase, but when one is bought, another is filled in from the top of the random pile.

So that's where I started,  the energy mechanic from Magi Nation and the preview/purchase mechanic from Ascension.  I'd like to say that they went together quite seamlessly, but I'm usually not in the habit of lying.