Great topic, great post.
I'm glad someone mentioned Magic: The Gathering. It means I get to lead into a game design philosophy I'm trying to get into my own game I'm working on that includes semi-collectible elements.
Richard Garfield versus recent MtG designs.
Recent MtG designers have more or less put a lot of effort into the rare cards being really powerful, and dumping garbage into the common cards, while uncommons are the bulk of strategy.
Richard Garfield never designed MtG to be played or designed that way. He actually preferred making the common cards really strong in strategies with the uncommons providing stronger support and the rares offering lynch pins that could make the commons strategy incredibly OP. In other words, Richard preferred a constructed deck that reflected the rarities of the cards themselves, with commons being the bulk of the deck and very few rares that were specialized for the strategies.
When he stepped away from designing is when MtG design changed all that around to make all the rare cards required to be the bulk of the deck because they had all the strongest strategies that worked well with other rares. You couldn't play at a competitive level unless you paid in hundreds if not thousands of dollars for the best cards.
Also, Richard never expected his card game to last for 25 years.
The recent Dominaria set was a Richard Garfield design set. It returned to that idea that the powerful cards were in the commons while the rares supported common level strategies. It was a breath of fresh air that pulled a lot of players back to the game, myself included... for that one set.
I bought booster boxes. I built decks. I played in sealed league and sealed tourneys. I had fun.
Then the next set, Core Set 2019 dropped, and I stopped playing again. I didn't like what I saw. Yes, it sort of continued the design philosophy of Dominaria, bringing out a few new cards to support the set while reprinting old cards that were good for the coming year. But it still predominantly carried that non-Richard design of making the rares the strongest and the commons garbage. At least it did in my eyes.
Now Richard is about to come out with KeyForge, a "unique deck game" where you buy a deck of cards that has been preassembled to provide a unique strategy, for every deck you buy. Every deck sold is different. No two are alike. And no, you can't combine decks. You aren't collecting cards and assembling the decks, you are buying a sealed deck and playing it straight as is. The bulk of the deck will be carried by the "common" cards, with the "rare" cards providing key lynchpins to the deck's strategy without being the must-play cards to win... as much as "common" and "rare" have any meaning in a game where the decks themselves are all unique.
I don't know if this concept of commons being the good base and rarer stuff helping to synergize that base has a place in TD. Likely not without a massive turning of the giant cruise ship that it has become. But it is interesting to think about a design philosophy that makes a long-time player excited about the common tokens more so than the URs and making them consider that common tier to be the bulk of their build by virtue of the design mechanics.
Having URs reward builds that consist of all other tokens being uncommon or lower, legendaries that give super bonuses that compound themselves the more common tokens are equipped, the rare token that is really good but doesn't allow more than two or three URs and no relics or legendaries... That could be really interesting to see in TD.
It'll never happen. Fun to think about from a game design perspective, however.
Avatar Image by Graven, 2015. Thanks, Graven!