Part of the development process through play testing requires cards or card abilities to be changed or replaced. This can be because of the card ability in isolation or because of a concern for the overall balance of the game as a whole. The most interesting changes are when the entire concept of a card is replaced with an entirely different concept. Let’s take a look at some examples of that.
All the cards I will list here are good enough cards, and they were rejected mainly just to make room for cards that seemed more important for one reason or another.
Crazier Eights: Pantheon
Crazier Eights: Olympus
There are a lot of cards that didn’t make the cut for the final version of Crazier Eights: One Thousand & One Nights. Playtesting and brainstorming both can motivate the need for new cards to replace the old, and other updates. Some of these cards are really perfectly good and interesting, but they might not have been needed for one reason or another. Let’s take a look at some of these cards:
When trying to tune a card game through updates and playtesting there’s a good chance a lot of the cards won’t make the final cut and will be replaced. There are a lot of cards that didn’t make the cut for the final version of Crazier Eights: Camelot. Some of these cards are really perfectly good and interesting, but they might not have been needed for one reason or another. Let’s take a look at some of these cards:
Tuning a game requires that you try to improve it through an update. It is important to tune a game several times. I also recommend game designers make multiple significantly different versions of a game to check what works best. How much should a card game be playtested and updated? There is no easy answer, but I can talk a bit about how much Crazier Eights has been updated over the years.
When developing every version of Crazier Eights I want to make sure the set of cards is balanced. When you think of a card game’s balance, you might think of the balance of particular cards. Are any of them too strong? That is a concern, but a more important and interesting concern is the balance of the game overall as a whole, which is a bit more difficult to discuss and examine. Still, it is an incredibly important issue, and it is the issue I will focus on here. In particular, I will discuss a bit about how I tried to make sure Crazier Eights: One Thousand & One Nights is balanced through counter-balance. 
I discussed how I worked on games similar to Crazier Eights for about ten years before I published it as my first official game