Design Concepts from Magic: the Gathering
tl;dr: Building a "cube" in Magic: the Gathering is in many ways similar to building a TC plug-in for the EV/CF series. I've built a few cubes, and in the process I learned a lot about designing them well, and lately I've been thinking about how to adapt those design concepts to an EV/CF context and to Orion Skies specifically. Magic is one of the few other games that has truly stood the test of time, at least for me. I definitely recommend trying it if you can find someone to play with. In addition to the EV series, one of the other handful of games I have enjoyed since childhood is Magic: the Gathering. For those unfamiliar, it's a strategy card game with (currently) about ~22,000 different cards , each of which has unique abilities. There are a few different ways to play, but it always involves choosing which cards to put in your deck such that the combination of cards will have a coherent strategy. Your opponent(s) have done the same with their deck(s)