Brainstorm Best
Stella Kreuter
About 20 years ago I was leading a brainstorming session in one of my MBA classes, and it was like wading through oatmeal. We were talking about something that many organizations struggle with: how to build a culture of equality in a male-dominated environment. Though it was an issue the students cared about, they clearly felt uninspired by the ideas they were generating. After a lot of discussion, the energy level in the room was approaching nil. Glancing at the clock, I resolved to at least give us a starting point for the next session.
I love TappedOut's ability to create custom categories for cards (in the old and new deck editor). I'm still experimenting with the categories I want to use. The Command Zone team uses terms in their "... dsh, dsh, dsh, ... STATS" like ramp, card draw, removal, and boardwipes ... and they've used terms like enablers and enhancers before.
Ramp, Card advantage, Removal, Tutors, Sweepers/Mass removal, recursion, and Disruption/protection are the custom categories I use. I may add another category for cards that fit into more than one, or just put those cards in the category that they best serve. Other than that, I will often use tags such as 'combat enhancers,' 'beaters,' 'alternate win-cons,' and 'Tribal support/anthems,' in decks that those categories apply to.
I've found that when reviewing decks, 99% of the time I will turn off custom categories if someone has added them to a deck. Because people use waaaaay too many. Seriously, you don't need to break your lands up into 4 different categories, "Lands" will do just fine.
But if I had to suggest custom categories: Lands, Ramp, Card Advantage (that's tutors and draw), Removal, Win Condition, Utility. Much more than that and your categories start blending together and becoming meaningless.
I agree with enpc. I use custom categories for my own organization usually. In a couple cases I do have everything labeled but not turned to default, just a mention in the description for anyone who prefers it.
Cool, enpc - that hits the heart of the matter in an intuitive way. So you seem to run with about/exactly 6 categories then. I will then count things like scry under Card advantage and big creatures & evasion under Win condition.
Recursion will generally go under utility in my mind. I get that you can call it card advantage, however I would say that you're getting access to a card that you already had, but not helping you dig for new stuff. Thus utility.
Protection can be one of two things. It can either be utility for stuff like Privileged Position or can be win condition if you're using a Mother of Runes to connect commander damage (for example). It just comes down to how you are actually using the cards.
As I said, if you feel like you must use custom categories, you don't need a lot. A the end of the day, either a player will know enough cards to know the difference between a boardwipe and single target removal and will probably know the key ones (Wrath of God, Cyclonic Rift, Toxic Deluge, etc.) and so you don't need to spell out the different between single target and mass removal, or the player will know barely any cards and so they need to read all of the cards anyway. And that that point they should be able to figure out the differnece between "kill thing" and "kill everything".
And that principle kind of goes with all of it, either a plyer will knwo most of the cards and what they do so there's not a huge value add in putting cards in custom categories, or the player will have no idea and have a bunch of reading ahead of them. And that's honestly why a good description is much more valuable than a bunch of custom categories.
Not to mention, I actually think it's really important to see how much of your deck is permanents, how much is lands, how many instants you're playing, etc more than ech of the user defined categories. I can generally count the ramp in a deck pretty quickly (it seriously only takes 30 seconds to go through the categories), but knowing how creature heavy the deck is is generally more useful. And look, that's my opinion on it - others might like custom categories more but in my experience of deck building, the spread of card types has been very important.
Wow, thanks for taking so much effort to reply, enpc! I started out unsure about which main categories to use, as I'm experimenting with discovering what wheels to turn. Almost like playing a synthesizer: knowing which dials have the most important effects to create the sound you like. As I aim to create 25 decks that combine well, this helps me a lot.
aholder7, thanks! I agree that deck descriptions (and clear questions) encourages others to help effectively. I also enjoy thinking about how to describe its strategies and power level - and sure, giving it a fantasy story flavour.
For me the categories help me identify how the deck mechanics provide me with the much needed resources during the game. For instance: I used to play too few removal spells in my decks, so whenever my playgroup played with my decks, there was a huge battlefield information overload. People became so reluctant to attack, games turned into who's going all in first?
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To start, you need a structured brainstorm. Traditional group brainstorms where everyone sits around and throws out ideas are proven to be extremely ineffective. With my team, I love to start with a silent brainstorm, in which everyone spends the first 10 minutes writing down as many ideas as they can on Post-Its. The only prompt I give is that the idea should be original and help our target audience see the world differently or be better at their job.
One of the ideas that came from this process is our free content strategy course. You can sign up for the lead gen module here to access free lessons and tools, including this brainstorming worksheet.
It's been said that ideas don't matter, and that only execution does. I wholeheartedly disagree. You need both to succeed, but you can only get so good at execution. A great idea gives you much more leverage.
Why? Because it's the most flexible. You can build anything. But the other three aspects are constrained. You have to choose from a limited set of viable problems, channels, and models. Always start with the constraints.
A good problem is one that many people have, otherwise you won't have enough customers. For indie hackers, this number doesn't need to be too big. Usually a few hundred thousand is enough. In some cases, much less.
You want these to be people you genuinely like talking to, because they'll be your customers for years. And ideally you have the same problem as them, too, so you can empathize with what they're going through.
It's best if the people who have this problem hang out together and identify as a named group. For example, "developers" or "teachers" or "NBA fans" or "YouTubers." That means they're likely to make all sorts of recommendations to each other, including product recommendations, which makes word-of-mouth growth possible for your business. It also gives you juicy channels to target, which will come into play later.
It helps if the problem is a growing one, meaning more and more people have it every year. This sets the stage for your business to grow. And you want it to be a problem that people encounter frequently, so they'll seek the solution on a regular basis.
Armed with this knowledge, it's time to find a problem. You're going to have to brainstorm. Some people recommend that you just sit around waiting for inspiration to strike. I don't. That might take years, if not forever. Be proactive.
It's hard to say where the best place to start brainstorming is, not because there are so few, but because there are so many. There are thousands of good problems out there, and practically anything can trigger you to stumble across one.
For that reason, it makes sense to start with one of these guidelines in mind, and let that be your trigger. For example, since it's helpful to solve a problem that you have yourself, why not take a look at your own life and see if you can spot any problems. What worries you, exasperates you, or annoys you?
The other guidelines also work well as brainstorming triggers. Who do you like spending time with? What groups are you a part of? What are some problems you notice people solving frequently? What's something that seems to be growing into a bigger trend?
My personal favorite is to start by looking at where people are already spending lots of time and money and go from there. Money changing hands is almost always a sign that there's a valuable problem being solved.
Remember that even though artists like to complain about the record labels, they do record deals regardless. It doesn't matter how great your music is if nobody ever hears it. Your business can't make money if you can't reach your customers.
I won't get into testing traction channels, because that's beyond the scope of this post. But the first channel you start with should almost always be direct outreach leading to 1-on-1 conversations with customers, either via the phone or in-person.
That's usually the easiest way to get your first few customers. You don't have to be a marketing genius to send some emails or make some phone calls. You'll also be much more persuasive personally than your website will be on its own, and you'll learn crucial lessons from these conversations.
The only reason big companies don't do this is because it's expensive and doesn't scale, but that doesn't matter for you. You don't have to care about scale when you're trying to go from 0 customers to 1, or 1 customer to 10, or even 10 customers to 100. Don't copy what big companies are doing when you're a small company, or you'll throw away your natural advantages.
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