Raini: The Lords of Light — Official Policies

Big Chad Raini will defend this policy with his life.

In our “Year of the Rabbit” announcement post last month, we made it clear that Raini Studios will never reprint old RTLOL NFT cards.

We also briefly touched on plans to release a complete, formal text of our Reprint Policy in full for everyone to reference moving forward — this, along with our Competitive Play Policy, can be found below:

Foreword — our History and Goals

The Raini Studios team have been fans of collectible/trading card games (CCGs/TCGs) for a long, long time — a few of us have been playing them for over a quarter of a century!

The Raini Studios team enjoys an old-fashioned game of cards.

Developing our own card game has been both a joy and a challenge, and in doing so we’ve drawn on our years of experience as players to inform our approach to game design.

In short, we have been laser-focused on making the entire RTLOL ecosystem — both game mechanics and NFT card economics — fun, fair, and balanced.

We’re building more than just a game here; we’re also creating collectible items within it. As Web3 continues to grow — and the digital collectibles we call “NFTs” continue to gain mainstream recognition — thoughtfully creating frameworks that preserve and enhance the value of these collectibles is crucial.

Fun, fair, and balanced has been our guiding principle as we develop and release new cards and sets, and with the RTLOL full launch on the horizon, want to ensure our thought process and intent on these matters is unmistakably clear moving forward.

Let’s start with our Reprint Policy.

RTLOL Card Reprint Policy

First, let’s define terms.

By “digital collectable” we are referring specifically to any item which is released on a public blockchain.

In simple terms, we are using the term “digital collectible” interchangeably with “NFT”, with both referring to the same thing — items held by an end-user, in their personal crypto wallet, under their control.

Why both terms?

Up until now, Raini Studios community members and RTLOL players have been almost entirely “crypto natives” — early adopters who are very familiar with the space.

As we get further into 2023 (and beyond), we anticipate a great deal of mainstream interest in RTLOL, and will be onboarding many who are new to Web3. With that in mind, we want any RTLOL explainer documents to be as clear and easy to understand as possible for anyone — “crypto native” or not.

For this reason, we’re going to make more frequent use of terms that will be immediately understood by crypto newcomers alongside more technical “crypto native” language; this will help familiarize newcomers with Web3 terminology, and make any RTLOL-focused reading materials as accessible as possible right away.

We want every gamer to experience the joy of being Recursive Realitied!

With that out of the way, let’s talk about the policy itself:

As stated previously, RTLOL NFT Cards will never be reprinted.

This means Raini Studios will not, under any circumstances, release an RTLOL NFT Card (“digital collectible”) which is a functional reprint of an existing RTLOL NFT Card. For the purposes of this policy, we define “functional reprint” as either:

• a new NFT Card that was already previously released as an NFT Card, or has the same name as a previously released NFT Card
• a new NFT Card that has the exact same in-game functionality as a card previously released (i.e. — using a Minion as an example — this would mean we will not produce another NFT Card of the exact same color, gem cost, power, toughness, and ability text as that previously released Minion)

NOTE: We are making a distinction here between NFT Cards and Account Bound Cards. Any cards that are “Account Bound” — i.e. cards which cannot be traded from one player to another (such as Base Cards) — do not fall under this policy.

Ultimately, the purpose of this policy is to provide clarity and establish consistency in how Raini Studios will manage the RTLOL ecosystem, keeping it healthy and thriving for years to come.

If you’re an OG player, your cards will remain valuable and retain strategic importance. For new players, future sets will allow for innovative new approaches to be just as effective as tried-and-true deck builds.

In short, Lords of Light will continue to reward skill and creativity for all players — new or old!

Was this a screenshot of a recent Tournament, or a 2036 World Championship Finals prediction?

RTLOL Competitive Play Policy

Here we’ll outline the rules and regulations Raini Studios will use to govern official RTLOL tournaments and events.

Obviously, our community is welcome to host their own tournaments using whatever rules they like 😉, but our official tournaments will be run as follows:

• Eternal Format — meaning all sets released within RTLOL, starting from Genesis onward, will be tournament-legal; the same deck you use today will be eligible for the 2036 RTLOL World Championships.
• As we’ve mentioned before, we will continue to maintain a Banned/Restricted List for competitive play — we consider this a nuclear option, and will do everything possible to avoid adding cards to this list. At this stage, we currently have zero cards on this list.

Let’s dig a little deeper into these two items.

Eternal Format — why?

The reason is simple — rotating formats are not only terrible for long-term collectors, but make for a poor experience on the player side (e.g. if I don’t play RTLOL for a while, I come back and none of my old decks can be used anymore? Unacceptable.)

The spirit of this ties right in with our Reprint Policy — doing whatever we can to keep secondary RTLOL card markets healthy and thriving.

Hopefully we never need to use it, but the Restricted List should help the meta not get destroyed — like this Staking Well

But why the Restricted List then?

As our card pool grows, our goal and hope is that banning any individual card never becomes necessary. Much thought, planning, and testing go into new card releases.

However, when creating on-the-fly, there is always a risk of unintended consequences, no matter how much forethought is given. Retaining the right to ban a card from competitive play if it’s completely broken — and warping the meta-game — serves as a “break glass in case of emergency” protection for the entire ecosystem.

Rest assured that our goal is to never use this provision — however, it’s crucial that the provision exists if it were ever needed.

As always, we remain keenly interested in the feelings of our players and the greater community, and will continue to do the best job we can to guide the development of the game we all love so much!

On that note, a more likely scenario would be the need to adjust, or “balance” cards as we move forward. Any changes made in this regard would only be for the sake of a clear improvement in competitive play, and will always maintain the spirit of what a card was originally intended to do.

That all being said, “measure twice, cut once” is the ideal we strive for, and something we’ll continue to take very seriously as RTLOL grows and evolves.