We had a chance to crack some packs and spend some coins in the arcade recently, and came away impressed with the twists that its designers and Mothership Games co-founders, Brian David-Marshal and Jay Van Hoy, have introduced to the TCG mold.

We had a chance to speak with Brian and get an even deeper look at the code behind this arcade, learning more about how the game came to be, the inspiration behind some of its characters and mechanics, and more.

Cataclysm Arcade’s Kickstarter campaign is currently running through July 8, 2026, with an expected delivery in Q4 2026.

Cataclysm Arcade TCG - Our Interview with Mothership Games

IGN: How long have you been working on Cataclysm Arcade?

BDM: The storyworld that the game lives in is something I have been pecking away at for a few years. It was born out of my love for VHS rental store era science fiction movies, martial arts flicks, and any movie set on a train. (Important question that has dominated many game nights — Is The Warriors a train movie or is it a movie with trains in it?)

As for the game itself it has been almost two years since we commenced work on it. I was pretty shocked by how quickly the game design came together given all the difficult hoops we had placed in the team’s way to jump through. I fully expected that we would have to compromise on some aspect of a- playable out of a pack b-fully playable TCG or c-built for multiplayer but that was not the case. I think having those goals clearly defined at the outset gave us a focus that let us work more cleanly and quickly than if we were just exploring in the dark for what the product design was going to be.

It is also worth noting that the playable out of single booster pack aspect is something I have been waiting for a TCG company to do for more than 27 years. Ever since the first wave of Pokemon frenzy when I was a retailer and owned Neutral Ground in NYC. Seeing kids save their allowance for a booster pack and not being able to do anything with it was pretty brutal. I fully expected that a game would come along and do this ever since. I got tired of waiting.

IGN: Now I have to ask, since you brought it up - where do you fall on the Warriors? Is it a train movie or a movie with

BDM: I firmly consider it to be part of the Cinematic Train Universe but it is not a universally held position among the CTU Council.

IGN: When designing CA how did the comic-book style come about and how did it influence the game’s mechanics - if at all - as you were developing it?

BDM: This originally all started as a graphic novel called Something Called the Sky, which was a writing exercise I undertook to scratch an itch in my head about a convergence of movie genres. It literally started with Sky standing on the top steps of a subway platform in a torn bloody tuxedo with an axe. I had no idea what he was doing there or where he was going (and he still hasn’t fully explained the tuxedo to me) but I knew I wanted to find out with Steve Ellis.

Steve is an artist I have worked with on comics and games projects in the past and we have a creative energy together that can spin out of control in the best possible way. When I decided to make this the world for our game, Steve was the first call I made and he has been setting the tone for the world ever since.

Also in this era of extruded AI slop I knew I wanted to work with comic artists and celebrate their work and showcase art where you could see the brushstrokes and decisions that went into each card. I also love seeing all the different styles emerging in this world. We have a series of promo cards by comics veteran Scott Kolins that are drawn and reproduced to have the look and feel of pencilled comic book original art that has not been inked yet — down to us scanning his blue lines and notations around the pages.

I definitely have a wish-list of folks I want to get into this game in the coming releases.

IGN: CA features a large cast of color characters and creatures. What were your main inspirations behind the cards and are any inspired or pulled from ideas you had during your comic book days?

BDM: I have always loved a good post-apocalyptic setting, whether it was movies, comics or books. My love for all of these things have seeped into the DNA of this world and game. Some of the inspirations and homages are more obvious than others but there are also some deep cuts. There is a gang of Mystics called The Boom. And I chose that name for an era of comic publishing in the same time period that our Cataclysm happened -- mid-80s -- which was the sudden emergence of indie publishers after decades of dominance by the Big 2. All the characters in that gang have a word in their card name that is pulled from a comic publisher from that era. Shaman of Eternity references a black and white imprint I started when I was still a teenager called Eternity Comics. Our first title was a post-apocalyptic adventure comic -- Ex-Mutants.

IGN: How do you design the cards that go in the set? Do you decide the mechanics you want on a card first and then design the character around that, or do you design the character and then decide what sort the stats and abilities they should have?

BDM: It is a mix of both. Most of the main characters — the bosses and many of the rares and mythics — were designed around characters that lived in my story bible for the world and are top down expressions of their narrative design. Cards like Charlotte, Nightbringer, Sky, Unlikely Champion, or Eff with me Ammo are definitely character-first types of cards.

Bleargh, Noxious Entity is a funny counter example. This was a card Pete designed to fill a specific role. He was balancing the distribution of characters across levels and wanted a card that was free to attack with. There are a handful of cards that start out this way. When I sat down to write the brief for it I had to come up with a brand new character that was a common.

I was pretty fed up at the time with all the “cute widdle guys” that IPs were leaning into — and yes Grogu, I am looking at you. They all felt very cynical to me. Like they came out of a focus group session or something where the feedback was to make the eyes bigger and the body even smaller.

Bleargh was my anti-cute character. He is a magically animated pile of subway sludge. You know all the filth and refuse and runoff that sludges down the middle of a NYC subway track? Now imagine that forty years after the apocalypse when those subway tracks are the stage for a brutal bloodsport. I thought it was such a funny throwaway idea and fired off the art brief to a new artist we were working with Samuel Alexander. And he crushed it. But still I didn’t think much of it until we were at Pax Unplugged last year and hosted an influencer event on the first night of the show.

We started doing demos for them and two different creators at two different tables both squeeed “Bleargh!!!!” and I swear I could see heart emojis where their eyes should have been. And it has been like that ever since. Bleargh is the breakout character of the game. There is a Cult of Bleargh on our Discord. We are doing a Bleargh promo card and having a Bleargh Day on June 27th.

Our most popular non-boss character totally started as a mechanically designed card file entry.

IGN: What would you say is the main format CA that the game was designed around? The “crack-a-pack and play” mentality or constructed play?

Brian David-Marshall: When Jay and I set out to tell stories while making games we had a team meeting to define what we wanted to be doing and how we wanted this first game effort to play — and be played. I think the biggest take away from that week long session was that product design and game design were essential to each other and not things that existed in two separate silos.

We really wanted to our game to have a good first time user experience and we knew it had to playable out of a single booster pack but it also had to live and breathe as a fully expressed TCG. Pack play was important but it also had to be a a game that would be played in other formats. There HAD to be Constructed play. Booster Draft. Multipack sealed. Etc. So the game was designed around being both and we were very lucky to have amazing team members leading the charge on both fronts in Drew Nolosco, our Head of Product, and Pete Ingram, the lead designer.

It was also utterly crucial to me that the game was not just playable for more than two players at a time but was built from the ground up with both heads-up and multiplayer experiences in mind. Social gaming is the way most players experience TCGs now. It is the way I play TCGs now. I was a diehard Spike for a long time until a bunch of folks who were central to the Commander format — including my dear friend Sheldon Menery — reminded me that you could play games with your friends and it really shifted my view on what games should be.

Sheldon, who I miss every day, was very much in my ear throughout this process and I hope he would love the game we have built. I recently got to play the game with his board game group on his actual game table while drinking a bottle of wine from his collection. It was a very special moment for me.

IGN: On the production side, is there any sort of logic that has gone into pack construction itself at the factory to make the booster packs function with the cards inside?

BDM: There is a lot of frantic paddling happening beneath the smooth sailing above the water to make Play Out of a Pack (Play out of a Quack?) work. The main thing that we do is have a pool of commons that is associated with every boss and when that Boss lands in a pack, four of those cards, that were chosen because they play well with that boss, will also be in the pack. We want folks to have the opportunity to get a good glimpse of what their cards can do and maybe be inspired to expand on it as their collection builds as they look to Constructed. The rest of the pack is random within a couple of bands of rarities and card types.

"In this era of extruded AI slop I knew I wanted to work with comic artists and celebrate their work."“

IGN: The general coin/level mechanic feels different than many other TCGs I have played, and the paying to attack stands out especially. How did that system come about and evolve over the course of development?

BDM: I really wanted to do something that felt different from how other games have approached their resource systems. We quickly knew that for playable out of a pack we would need to use generic resources to ensure playability and with the fighting game motif I loved the idea of gating fighters to different levels when they could enter play. The Level 7 fighters feel like end bosses. They are going to be hard to deal with when they land.

I think the very first pass on the card file had the gating mechanic and each card did way too many things which were spread out across the resource curve. So those two elements were baked in pretty early and it turned out to be a lot of fun and felt different and challenged the way folks have traditionally approached resources. As we have polished the game we made the cards have fewer modes and baked attacking into every fighter.

I think the biggest evolution in all of this came as we refined the turn system with each player taking a single action in rotating sequence around the table until all players passed. We learned a lot during playtesting about how to set the costs for actions and attacks. The thing that you learn very quickly in The Arcade is that you want to be the last person with actions at the table so you get to operate unencumbered for the level. A low cost to attack or activate abilities is a huge factor on being able to preserve other actions for later in the level.

IGN: With your history and knowledge of MTG, when creating CA, were there any aspects to that game you made a conscious decision to avoid carrying over to this new game, and what about the opposite, mechanics you knew from the start you wanted to adapt?

BDM: While I love and appreciate the mana system that allows Magic to be such a vibrant game even 33 years after it was first released -- that mana system is the only reason I have beaten some of my Hall of Fame friends over the years ;) -- I knew I didn't want to put that barrier to play into this game. I didn't want folks to have to worry about getting enough resource cards to play. It becomes one more thing that retailers and players need to grapple with on the supply side and I just don't think an indie game is able to keep up with that. Especially if we wanted to make our games pack playable and have a density of cool cards to play with in every pack.

The biggest thing that we knew we wanted to adopt from Magic was an emphasis on multiplayer, social gaming. In the time since Wizards adopted Sheldon's pet format EDH, and renamed it Commander, they have grown their company by billions of dollars. That modern upward trajectory for the game really begins with the advent of Commander and we knew that we wanted to build our game with that play pattern in mind.

There is something so joyful about multi-player; so inviting. Your win expectancy when you sit down at the table is different. Even if you are the objectively best player sitting down the table can resolve to defeat you. When you play games heads up it just you or your opponent and winning becomes the sole focus. When you play multiplayer you still want to win but you also find yourself relaxing a bit and having a good time. It is also so gregarious and hungry for more people. Multiplayer (and multiplayer sealed pack especially) are my favorite ways to play card games right now and this was something we built around from the start.

"I have been waiting for a TCG company to do [this] for more than 27 years... I got tired of waiting."“

IGN: What is the reasoning behind limiting the constructed format to no more than 2 factions?

BDM: We did not want to get into a situation where every deck was the same 10 best cards that were spread across all the different factions. We wanted folks to have to make some choices. There is room to open it up based on mechanics on bosses in the future but right now it felt like the best way to keep things from collapsing down to a handful of cards dominating.

IGN: What is your favorite card or combo in the initial set?

BDM: I love Sky. He was the first character I created in this world and, as I said earlier, I didn't know where he was taking me in the story. I love opening a pack with Sky as my boss and then just shuffling the pack without knowing the contents and starting to play a four player game. And then I will see where he takes me. He hasn't steered me wrong yet.

IGN: Can you give a rundown of what the gameplay strengths, styles, or gimmicks for the various factions? Do the factions behave similarly to say, Magic's Color Pie?

BDM: Each faction has unique mechanics and abilities and there is a mechanical and narrative design philosophy behind all of them.

IGN: One of the core pillars that allows a TCG to succeed is its community support. What is your planned support for LGSs and organized play in general?

BDM: We are leaning very heavily into social multiplayer games at the LGS level and will be at most of the major gaming and comic conventions over the summer and fall getting folks hyped for this game. We have multiple gameplay formats we will be implementing and OP support for that will start during Kickstarter fulfillment with our Retailer tier and the accompanying OP kits which include foils, metal cards, playmats and special storyline packs that will let players have an impact on the future of Cataclysm Arcade narrative design.

IGN: Are there plans for bosses with multiple faction affiliations down the road to increase the number of factions usable in a single constructed deck, or is the single-faction direction a design decision that you plan to stick to for the foreseeable future?

There is a ton of room for us to play with factions and we have plans to explore all of that space as we move forward with new sets in 2027.

IGN: Arcades are known for have all sorts of different games featuring different genres and themes. Will future sets all share a similar look and theme, or will we get sets that may feel more medieval, horror, etc. but united under the CA game system?

BDM: We are definitely going to explore more of this world in future sets; whether that is underground, aboveground or underwater. We will see what the rest of the world looks like 40 years after the apocalypse and how they engage with the Cataclysm Arcade broadcast. This is a storyworld and we are very much going to tell that story through the game. Characters are going to live and die. Secrets will be revealed. Fighters will shift loyalties and some will even become bosses. And we are going to let players have a hand in those events through organized play.

IGN: What sorts of ideas is the team playing around with for future sets and support for CA?

BDM: We have a lot of exciting things in the works like player driven narrative outcomes but right now we have to get through this Kickstarter campaign which has been amazing but is definitely keeping us rooted in the present.

Scott White is a freelance contributor to IGN, assisting with tabletop games and guide coverage. Follow him on X/Twitter or Bluesky.