The horrors of balance

I don't know if anyone knows this, but once upon a time I used to be a pretty hardcore A Game of Thrones player. (Unfortunately, hardcore does not necessarily equate GOOD, I certainly did well within my own meta, but I'd always crumble under other meta's control decks, and things of the sort)

Anyway, because we were so wrapped into this game, I got to know the designer pretty well. His name is Eric Lang, and he was this sarcastic skinny guy from Canada who had never eaten hot wings in his life. I remember him saying one time "Man, I've got the idea for hundreds of cards in my head, I just have to worry about balancing them, that's the bitch" He's right, and this is the part I hate.

Most card games have some sort of income system, something like "Batman costs 6 to play, because he's the bane of every criminal in Gotham, but Robin only costs 2, because he's a college kid that wears tights."

A Game of Thrones, even, had cards that cost up to 10 gold. Final Fantasy is weird in the sense, that there is no income mechanic, which means instead of 11 (0 also counts) balance points for characters (Where 0 is the worst character and 10 is godlike) there is only one.

On paper, this makes the game a lot less complicated, but it will also make cards harder to make, because they will all have to meet the exact same standard, or it will end up like Marvel Vs Capcom 2 with everyone picking the same 8 characters in a 56 character game.

I think that based on my prior card game experience I can do this free-hand pretty well. But I really wont know until it's played, so I'm thinking of trying to do it mathmatically. Something like giving each character a required point total, and giving every aspect of the card a point value. That way it will be easier to find overpowered and underpowered characters. I can imagine it getting awfully complicated, but it's something I'll be trying to figure out.