Ze3k
Not sure what you mean by moving parts? o3o
Using zOMG as a starting point: One person has up to 40 rings (edit: yes, I'm discounting the post release unbound rings - none of those created new abilities, they're all just modifiers), 8 of which can be "in play" at a given time. Solo, you only ever have to consider combinations of those eight rings. Even in crews, you still only have to contemplate numerical buffs and debuffs and their effect on the character, and that's still within the 40 rings - IIRC zOMG enemies don't have any debuffs that don't have an equivalent buff (rooting/duct tape, fear/cat, etc.). You're still looking at a tightly limited range of possible events you're going to have to account for, and it's a stable structure. Any given situation, you know for a fact that you're at most dealing with eight of forty possible actions for any given character, and you know that they're not going to be changing frequently. That set of "abilities" forms the bedrock foundation everything else is built for and to.
CCGs, the cards *are* that bedrock. And there are a lot of them. I don't recall seeing a list of how many cards are in release at the moment, but I'm certain it's more than 40. Every card has the potential to break the game - synergy is a nasty, nasty beast and the Law of Unintended Consequences gets a heavy workout in CCGs. When you're looking at, say, 500 cards (pretty sure that's lowballing the current release), those 500 cards can be used in any combination between minimum and maximum deck size and every single one has that potential to be the game breaker - be it giving one unit an impossible to breach defense, an unstoppable OHK, an edge in combat/exploration that can't be countered etc.
Example from a long-dead CCG. Full set of cards available, but three cards pulled from disparate sets that weren't intended (but not prohibited) for working together created a one-turn victory. If the player with that three-card deck went first, they won. I don't remember which game that was, but I know a slightly larger deck also worked for Illuminatus, etc. - it's why the banned card lists exist, and why any game without a huge testing apparatus *MtGCOUGHCOUGH* tends to wind up with a banned list that closely resembles the LA Metro phone book in size.
It gets worse with expansions, where you have to deal with both making the expansion internally consistent so that people who focus on the new toys aren't suddenly hosed as well as making it work with what previously exists in the game. If you don't, you're locked into a horrible trail of endlessly releasing broken cards that are banned or "fixed" in the next set by an even MORE broken card.
CCGs may *look* simple on the surface. But compared to MMOs? The workload's reversed. zOMG cost what it did because of the artwork and the architecture they created. Once that was done, a MUCH smaller team could have been retained to push out gradual expansions (pretty sure this was actually the business plan pre-Qix departure). CCGs can be created and tested over a prolonged period leading up to release by a VERY small team, but once you're going live - and even moreso once you're expanding - the requirements for staffing just increase.
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