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S1 Ep24: Delectable Card Games
68 Plays7 years ago
Visit the Shadow Realm with Dave and Jake as they delve into RNG madness with a discussion of collectible card games!
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Transcript
Introduction and Importance of Intros
00:00:05
Speaker
time to discuss card games with Jake hello honored listener welcome once again to or possibly your first episode of the soapstone podcast I am always as Dave and my co-host Jake hey how you doing tonight Jake
00:00:27
Speaker
doing pretty good, pretty good. I like that you're covering all of the bases for the opening. I'm trying to do my best with our role reversal to remember how the intro goes. Yeah, this is gonna be the episode. We gotta be prepared for the new listeners. This is our breakout one.
Magic: The Gathering - Trading and Discovery
00:00:43
Speaker
yeah yeah like i say every time one day johnny will get there yeah yeah the card games you mentioned card games you want to talk about those yeah i figured we'd start with some of the og a bit of that mtg if you know what i'm saying yeah but that magic the gathering that that's what that stands for that makes sense
00:01:09
Speaker
What level of naive should I be for them? Do you want me at like zero knowledge, infant, or? I want you curious but willing. Yeah, okay. Oh, magic. I like magic. There you go. Gathering of magic sounds cool.
00:01:24
Speaker
Yeah, and it is very much a gathering game because it is a collectible card game. I mean, I'm sure there is still some degree of trading going on at this day and age for myself. If there's cards I need for a certain deck, I'm more likely to just buy them because I feel pack lottery is kind of a shit show. Right. It's fun. I guess we should clarify collectible card
Understanding Collectible Card Games
00:01:48
Speaker
games. You collect the cards.
00:01:50
Speaker
not the game itself is collectible. Though I've tried. How many magics do you have? I have three different magics. Wow, nice. Yeah, so when I, I kind of was introduced to magic a lot later. My brother-in-law actually
00:02:07
Speaker
Had played some cards. Okay. I saw that's the first time I'd seen magic cards. I was like these look cool My parents were like those are evil and I'm like, oh, okay And they were right. They were right as it turns out. They're just saving me money but when do you actually start playing then not until like I guess you may know but like 2016 or something like that was a brief stint where I tried it I didn't really play it all until then
00:02:34
Speaker
But that was the trick. You're talking about the packs, how you can buy singles or you can
Magic Mechanics and Strategies
00:02:40
Speaker
buy packs. And I love the idea of opening packs is the trick. Like the sensation of being like, oh man, I'm gonna tear this pack open. And it's like, it's optimized, right? Looking card by card to see what you get. That's the joy of... So you're coming from it for the discovery aspect. Yeah.
00:03:01
Speaker
I mean, I have to be at this point because I don't know anything about it. It's all discovery.
00:03:09
Speaker
Yeah, it's a very dense though. Magic's been around for a long time. Yeah. Um, I said I was going to do the day thing, but it's been around since that's why I provided you the segue ran into it and I just boxed in the segue just like the segue. I'm running off the fucking clip. It's been around for 20 plus. I want to say it came out 94 initially and I started playing. I think my first game was with.
00:03:36
Speaker
a friend of mine who I grew up with and it was like 10th edition magic so like the rule set was very limited but I'm like okay these are the mechanics this is how it's played right you put out your lands to tap for mana you spend mana to pay for spells or creature cards okay pretty simple I didn't touch it again for a while then there was a magic tournament in college and I was like I don't fucking do anything on Saturdays so I went to it as host there's probably like 20 people
00:04:05
Speaker
and I drafted some cards and I won the thing. That's like take a card from a pack, pass it around. Yeah, so you essentially build out your deck out of what you have and then keep trying to beat people and beat everybody pretty much. Right, yeah. It's a good life goal. Beat people, beat everyone. So I got some cards from that and then I got some packs and you obviously get to keep what you draft because you pay for that as the buy-in. And then I was like, okay, this is kind of cool. Yeah.
00:04:34
Speaker
So then I just went deep into the paint with it and I have been playing on and off ever since.
Deck Building and Game Complexity
00:04:41
Speaker
If we were to go to my apartment and I gave you the actual binder now, you'd be like, I could work out with this. They really have the collection edge there. There's so many different effects and types of cards and magic and different ways you could build a deck.
00:05:03
Speaker
It's almost impossible to just jump in at an arbitrary place and be like, okay, I'm going to build a deck. But there's a lot of potential there for the people that can do it.
00:05:14
Speaker
Yeah, it's surprising how much there's actually there. It's similar to like trying to explain Dota 2 to somebody. Yeah. You're like, well, you just set them down. Like, I need you to be here for like two hours and just pay attention. How much time do you have? Because you can explain the simple mechanics of magic to somebody, how you have your untapped phase, your upkeep, your draw phase.
00:05:41
Speaker
Main phase one, combat, main phase two, and that's the end of your turn. Then there's an end phase technically. And in between, you can do everything at instant speed for instant available cards. And someone goes, oh, so if I do this, this happens. You have to say yes, unless another card states otherwise. Because magic is really good at adding lots of different mechanics and variety, but on top of that,
00:06:08
Speaker
because of the wealth of cards they have over the years, some of them are gonna have some adverse or weird interactions.
00:06:17
Speaker
So it's like, oh, so if I take your life points down to zero, I win the game, right? You're like, well. And then you have to explain platinum angel to people. Or if it's on the board, on your side, you can't lose the game. Yeah. I think that was some of the difficulty for me kind of coming into it is just anytime you're learning a new game, you need to know what your opponent is capable of in order to have an idea of what moves you should make. And it takes a lot of learning to reach that
00:06:47
Speaker
reach that state in a game that has that much diversity you're just like what's your opponent capable of and it's just like they're just like wearing a trench coat just bust open just like like cards and cards and cards and cards all the way down you're just like i don't know what any of this is yeah and that's how i was at that point i started too because
00:07:09
Speaker
When I won the little tournament thing, I had to pick from some cards. When I got first pick, and I didn't know which ones were good or valuable, so I picked one like, well, I like them black. So I picked a massacre worm, which is a cool black card. Like, oh, I could probably use this in something. The next person, who I'm pretty sure was Ryan Oravec, if I remember correctly, took one of the swords, which is a high value, a great utility type card. And I didn't know until like three years later, I'm like, son of a bitch.
00:07:40
Speaker
Yeah, no, there's a lot of knowledge that's required about context to know what cards are good at Magic. Because something might look really good kind of on the surface, or it may look very bad. It's probably a better example. This looks absolutely terrible. Like, why would I want to pay life to draw cards or something like that, right? And then you're like, oh, no, actually, that's one of the strongest effects in the game. Yeah, go for that.
Magic vs. Digital Card Games
00:08:07
Speaker
And I don't have specific examples for those, but those interactions is where magic breaks out. Like the fact that it has all of the phases that you mentioned, it's got this like action response system where every time that you do something, your opponent may have an opportunity to kind of jump in, unless, you know, special circumstances I'm sure. Unless otherwise stated.
00:08:33
Speaker
But that back and forth like lends a ridiculous amount of potential for the games to unfold And that's that's the strength I think of magic is obviously designed as like a physical card game as it is a physical card game, right? but since they started from that it can
00:08:56
Speaker
do a lot of things that don't easily translate, I think, into the digital space. Although, obviously, there is magic online, which is the digital space. Technically, yeah. But could you provide an example of that? Yeah. So I think maybe not a specific example with cards, but I'm thinking of maybe pacing.
00:09:19
Speaker
If you're sitting down with friends and you're going to play games, we all play board games. We have RPGs and Dark Souls and farming games and things like that. And we're normally willing to stick around for a couple hours or something like that.
00:09:37
Speaker
If you translate to the digital space, it's more of an investment for sure to be like, hey, welcome to the game. Your first match is going to be an hour long. It's a little harder to jump into, so other games have taken out all of those phases. And in the extreme, not even in the extreme case, in the average case, you can't do things on your opponent's turn. That just makes it much more predictable and easy to play out.
00:10:08
Speaker
Yeah, I feel like a lot of the electronic games have migrated closer to a
00:10:13
Speaker
A mobile, viable setup? That's a probably good way to put it, actually. Because everything's kind of well-animated and very visible. It has sound effects. And if people are playing Hearthstone on their phone all the time, it just lends itself. You don't have to think as much. When it's your turn, you do things. When it's not your turn, you wait to do things. It's hard to understate how important magic is, though, for laying the groundwork for all these other games.
00:10:43
Speaker
Because everything else is a variant off of the systems that it has in place. Yeah. Well, so like with magic, there are the five colors of magic. There is black, which deals with your death and decay. Right. And sacrifice type effects. My personal favorite. So you're talking about like essentially damaging yourself for some type of value. Anything that damages me. That's what I'm going for. Jake, you need to see somebody.
00:11:10
Speaker
It's like, oh, I draw cards too. I guess that's fine. So green is more of your vitality and verdance and your big creatures and mana ramp. White is.
00:11:23
Speaker
I don't want to say shit. It's fine. But it's usually a lot of smaller tokens or enchantments. Pillow fort is what I've heard. One of the strats can be a pillow fort. But it's usually cheaper, lighter stuff. But it also has a lot of healing built into it as well.
00:11:43
Speaker
Red is usually straightforward, a very aggressive burn spells are typically with red. Direct damage, things like that. Yeah, you're just trying to get things out there, hit the face, swing for the face. Yeah. But you can't do it in magic. I'll let you finish up the colors.
00:12:00
Speaker
And blue, everybody's favorite color of magic. Literally no one. One fight against it. Yeah, it's rough because it lends itself to a lot of draw
Magic's Color System and Gameplay
00:12:10
Speaker
and counter spells and other unique interactions. So it's a very controlling color. Yeah, the notorious one is, I guess most things in magic are spells.
00:12:25
Speaker
And so counterspell by extension is pretty good because you're just like, oh, you wanted to play a like creature or minions or whatever someone that in, you know, all of these options. Now we're just going to counter that counter that.
00:12:40
Speaker
Yeah, it's blue is the color that's like shuffling through their hand like after you do anything being like, okay, that's fine. I play land. I'll let it slide. You can't do anything about that. I'll allow it. And then magic has all of those combinations of multiple colors. So I mean, obviously I'm really basic. So I'd start out with
00:13:06
Speaker
Maybe two, I think, is probably the most common mono color. I don't know how meta that is. Mono colors are usually not as common this day and age, but it can still be viable. Certain colors usually won't branch out into other things, so if you want a more rounded deck, it makes sense to kind of splice in other colors. Cover your weaknesses.
00:13:27
Speaker
So if you're, let's say blue, very controlling, you're not really going to have a lot of aggression and damage. So maybe you want to pair that with red or black or something. Yeah, there's a lot of potential there. And you mentioned these.
00:13:45
Speaker
and each one, oftentimes the cards are going to require mana from both colors. So in magic, like you mentioned, you have to play out lands, and then you can tap your lands. Sometimes they come into play already tapped. I think basic lands don't come tapped. But you kind of just build up this repertoire of cards over time that you're gonna use to generate all of your mana.
00:14:10
Speaker
of different colors and a lot of games after Magic have found there's this concept known as mana screw which is theoretically theoretically it's possible that if you had a hundred card deck and 99 of them were you know mana one wasn't no it's a bad example 99 of them
00:14:34
Speaker
That's a terrible example. I'm going to cancel that example entirely. You may never draw mana when you need it, right? Yeah. According to probability, that's not how it plays out and your opponent has the same limitation. So yeah, there's a chance that your grand final is to the tournament and you like literally draw no mana, but people have. It's been in the game so long that people know how to deal with it, I think.
00:14:58
Speaker
First up, shout out to my main boy, RNGesus. But Magic is one of the few games where it's built around how you've built your deck. Because you get to choose the ratio of how much mana or ramping or scaling cards you want to put in.
00:15:18
Speaker
So if you have like a smaller deck and you'll have a lot of ramp to get land and mana production out there, you don't want to have these like 12 cost cards because what are the odds that'll work out perfectly? You have 12 mana in your deck and 12 cost, okay? You have 12 lanes.
00:15:33
Speaker
Whereas most things nowadays will have like a, you'll get stuff over time. Gradual ramp. You have one mana, the next turn you have two mana, then three mana, then four. Which is the way Hearthstone works, which is going to be kind of the CCG
Hearthstone vs. Magic
00:15:49
Speaker
standard for some of the games we're going to talk about. It's the most basic, I think, implementation you can have for that.
00:16:00
Speaker
have other ways to ramp kind of like Magic does, but not nearly as many. And they don't have other ways to manipulate their mana to the same extent that Magic does. Yeah, they have some light things with the mana crystals that you have. I think, is it Druid? Druid, yeah, it's a lot of ramp. Who will allow you to get like an extra mana crystal. So you can kind of beat that ramp a little bit sooner than your opponent. Right. Be able to draw bigger cards faster. Yeah.
00:16:26
Speaker
That being said, not all of the formats of Magic might subject themselves to Maniscrew. Like you said, you can put as many lands in your deck as you want in a lot of formats. But you can do whatever you want with those cards. You could make your own game with Magic and then with Magic cards.
00:16:47
Speaker
I mean not sell it but you know play with friends something like that your own format exactly. Yeah, and Like I remember one time I was just looking on the wiki at all these other formats because I was in a particular deck building mood. I really like deck builder games and Co-op games in particular. It's like maybe this is my in maybe my in for magic is to try to find a co-op game and
00:17:10
Speaker
so that all of these players that are really good can help me instead of smashing my face in with blue. I was looking at a zombie survival type game where you would build an opponent deck which operated under certain rules.
00:17:29
Speaker
where it would pull off like however many cards off the top every turn and then put them into play immediately and you had to like fight back the zombie horde nice with everybody's decks and I love something like that the fact that you can just come up with that format is awesome and you're not gonna find that in a digital game yeah
00:17:48
Speaker
What's interesting, because I have to mention Commander at some point, because that's pretty much the only format I play now, because I can put the cards I built over time. I don't have to keep swapping them out. I just have a deck that I really like, and I doubt anybody else does. Statistically unlikely. Unless you just grabbed it online. But before Commander was Commander, it was called EDH. And it wasn't actually a thing that was licensed by Wizards that they accepted as a format. It was something that people just made.
00:18:15
Speaker
And then it got kind of passed around and talked about enough and it was like, everybody's playing this thing. We should take this thing and make money off of it. Yeah. So they started making cards that fit the format. They started making things like, Hey, this is a valid commander deck. These creatures can be technical commanders. Now they have planeswalker commanders and they've really gone ham with it, which I like because I really enjoy that format as it stands.
00:18:41
Speaker
Yeah, I guess any card text that mentions how it affects multiple opponents probably doesn't matter that much. The card is never intended to be used in 1v1. Yeah, and it's really cool. It's so official. I mean, they have their own banned list of cards. You can't play any EDH, so. Yeah. I'm sorry, Woodfall Primus. I'm sorry. So yeah, Magic is a very adaptive game.
00:19:10
Speaker
there's certain things that it can't do that obviously digital card games could do. Shuffle for me. Yeah, shuffle for me. So that was a big thing. I could probably deal with it now, but when I wanted to play Magic back in the day, I definitely struggled shuffling as much as the game required. So that's why I played other games like Hearthstone, which I mentioned would be our standard for the
00:19:36
Speaker
online CTGs. That's not because it's the best, per se. It's just been around as a foothold. Yes, it's the most popular in the digital space. And they make a lot of money. But contrary to magic, Hearthstone has a lot of limitations right at the gate. We already mentioned the mana system differences.
00:19:57
Speaker
rather than picking what combinations of colors you want to put in your deck. You have nine classes and each of them have some of their own mechanics and some of their own cards, but they can also all draw from a neutral pool. So just cards you can put in any deck.
00:20:18
Speaker
And you mentioned the Druid ramp likability. That's an example of they have a lot of cards that can actually cause ramping. And they'll get some kind of periodically throughout expansions. Like Magic, they have a standard. So those cards go away eventually in standard format. But they stick around in Wild, which is their unlimited format or their eternal format.
00:20:47
Speaker
What's it called magic actually that legacy is I think legacy is one of them But legacy might also have its own ban list. Yeah, I'm sure there is one or just hey do whatever the fuck you want But know that most people will be running with turn two or turn three windex. Yeah. Yeah, there's not many of that many of those in Hearthstone But They will limit certain mechanics to specific classes. So druid has the ability to ramp they'll have things like
00:21:17
Speaker
And a lot of their ramp potential is actually in the classic set, which are the cards that came out like early in Horsebone's lifespan. And they haven't been phased out. And they stick, they're evergreen, so they're around forever. There have been instances where Blizzard realized that having cards in an eternal pool that will always be in the design space for standard actually causes a lot of problems.
00:21:45
Speaker
If like one deck just sticks around forever freeze mage good example But yeah, that's where a lot of druids ramp ramp comes from is that his classic set? Other classes have their own features, but that's probably the most iconically iconic to pick out And they'll play differently because of that so their decks oftentimes end up being very different They'll still exist like
00:22:12
Speaker
top level archetypes like control or aggro or something like that, but they usually have their own spaces they live in, each kind of class does. Back to some of those advantages of this being an e-card game.
00:22:28
Speaker
Yeah, other advantages, you can manipulate your opponent's deck. You can manipulate your own deck. It's impossible in a physical game to literally duplicate like one of your most expensive cards. You're like, oh, this mythic, yeah, we'll duplicate that 15 times and then shuffle it into my deck.
00:22:43
Speaker
Right. I mean, you could emulate that behavior, but it would be expensive and very conditional. Yeah. There were actually, let's hand it back to magic briefly, early strategies where you would just run a lot of shuffle cards. Yeah. It's like in your sideboard to make them shuffle their own deck. Your opponent. Yeah. Because this is before cards, these were a big thing, but people would still have valuable cards in there and they wouldn't want to keep shuffling their deck because it's going to damage it slightly.
00:23:10
Speaker
Yes. This is the origin of toxic behavior. Welcome to magic. Yeah. So it's much easier to manage that your opponent messing with your deck in Hearthstone. And there are cards like that. Rogue has some cards where they'll shuffle ambushers into your deck. So as you're drawing from your deck, you'll hit one of the cards they shuffled in. And it just puts something into play on their side or something like that.
00:23:37
Speaker
You're just like, ah, that's not what I wanted to draw, right? But that's pretty strong, too, if you're only drawing a card to turn. It does usually have a prefix or a suffix, like draw another card. Oh, okay. But sometimes that doesn't help you if they've triggered this effect multiple times and jump a lot of things into your deck, because you're just like, okay, I drew a 4-4 for them that's immediately in play. That's bad. Thankfully, I get another card.
00:24:01
Speaker
It's a 4-4 for them immediately in play, thanks for, you know, et cetera, et cetera, until, you know, they've filled their side of the board and they win as soon as you pass the turn. Hearthstone is a lot easier to, I think, track, but not as much as it has been in the past.
00:24:21
Speaker
In recent expansions, they've added a lot more, a lot of cards that kind of don't have to interact with their opponent to have crazy effects. The most extreme of these is a mecha-cathoon card that was added that makes it so. If you have no cards left in your hand, it's in play, you have no cards left in your deck, and it dies, you win the game outright.
00:24:46
Speaker
Usually you have to kill your opponent. This is a condition that doesn't require that you kill your opponent, which that's a magic thing, not a Hearthstone thing. What are they doing?
00:24:58
Speaker
Some people can enable that a lot easier than others. But the formats, they've tried to expand over the years. Like I mentioned, they have the standard format, they have the wild format. They have an arena where you pay the in-game currency, which is gold, you get for completing quests and things like that. To get a ticket to enter, you can play out up to 12 matches. If you get all 12, then you get the highest reward. Otherwise, you're rewarded with how many wins you get, and it's over when you lose three times.
00:25:26
Speaker
So some players only do that. You draft kind of similar to a drafting system like magic, where it's just like, here's several choices, pick a card. Several choices, pick a card, several choices, pick a card. You're not passing the pack to anybody else, but you can try to make something work. You don't get to keep the cards though. Those are just there for that run.
00:25:52
Speaker
It's kind of cool though. It allows new players to be like, oh, here are other things that do exist. Yes. Yeah. Also, it's interesting that again, comparing it back to magic Hearthstone has a way for you to accrue cards over time. Right. Just from playing the game in client. Whereas magic, not so much.
00:26:12
Speaker
Yeah. It's basically looking at the averages. You probably for every, you get one quest a day and your average quest will probably give you about half a pack. So every two days, just doing quests, you could probably get a pack, but not more than two packs.
00:26:31
Speaker
I was immediately leaning like the pack-a-day thing and then like, two-pack, and I was like, checker thing, buddy. Yeah. And like other things in life, a pack-a-day may not be healthy in the CCG market. It's a very slow compared to some of the other games we're going to talk about. It's a relatively slow way of developing your deck. And Hearthstone has a problem where it's really hard for new players to get into it. Yeah. Like, you can't buy a pre-con deck like in Magic, where it's just like,
00:27:01
Speaker
Here's, you know, a hundred cards and you could literally just play them in EDH. That doesn't exist. So if you get a question, it's like, hey, win five games as a warrior. And you're like, all right, well, I have no good
Hearthstone's Limitations and Economic Model
00:27:14
Speaker
warrior cards. You're like filling it with neutrals. You're like, does this count? Yeah. You can find yourself like in this short end of the stick in that position as a new player. And that might force you to buy packs, but for me, that would force me to stop playing.
00:27:32
Speaker
So it is what it is. So you've stopped playing? Right now I have. I have dropped a lot of money in Hearthstone over the years. My next question is going to be how many packs have you lost? Yes. I don't want to answer that. That's how bad it is. But I would definitely say that I probably... I don't think there's a game I've spent more money on than Hearthstone in any space. Interesting. Yeah. I don't know if I can say that considering Dota 2 and Battle Passes, etc.
00:28:02
Speaker
That might be a close second. It might pass a little bit, but I don't think I've ever spent that much at one time kind of compared to Hearthstone. Here's the problem with Hearthstone is a new expansion comes out. You want to buy a bunch of cards?
00:28:17
Speaker
Unlike magic, where new expansion comes out and you want to buy specific cards that you know are going to be good, you have to buy the packs for Hearthstone. You can also craft specific cards, but that requires you to destroy other cards that you have. And your payout for that is usually like 25% of the value.
00:28:34
Speaker
So worst case scenario, you can get very little value out of some of these packs. So it's hard to make a good competitive deck. Yes. It's based on luck. The whole thing is based on RNG obviously.
00:28:49
Speaker
Card acquisition being based entirely on RNG can be very demoralizing when you drop 120 bucks on an expansion and You find yourself missing half the cards you wanted for a deck that you wanted to make That's sad
00:29:05
Speaker
Yeah. And that's like, it doesn't feel like a free to play game at that point. You know what I mean? Yeah. I will say magic does suffer from that a little bit. But like I said, you do have the option to get individual cards. Yeah. Also, it depends who you play with. But in the earlier days, it wasn't uncommon for people to use proxies saying, hey, I didn't want to spend $35 in a single card.
00:29:30
Speaker
But I print out a picture of it and I put it into a sleeve and let's play with it as this. So it allows you to play with some other things without shelling out hard. Right. Because you can customize the game. If you want to allow proxies, you can homebrew that rule at the moment's notice. You can't do that in a digital card game, right? The other trick is Magic allows four copies, I believe, of a card in your deck on average outside of EDH, I think for standard.
00:29:59
Speaker
Yeah, you can have up to four of any one non-basic land. And then their deck size is somewhere, I'm not sure exactly, around 40, probably more than that, but 60. Standard, 60, EDH, your commander is minimum, sorry, let me say, minimum of 100. I think standards, you don't have to have exactly 60. Yeah, you can go beyond it if you want to. You can always go beyond, or I think you can go less to, I feel like there's a minimum.
00:30:28
Speaker
But obviously the more you stuff into it, the less likely you are to draw any one given card and vice versa. Yeah. And that's an issue Hearthstone has. It has a deck size of 30, but you can only have two copies of any given card in your deck and one copy of a legendary, like the highest impact cards on average, like the deck defining cards. So Hearthstone is known for a lot of RNG.
00:30:54
Speaker
Like, again, both players kind of have it, but they're like, all right, we don't have mana screw because you each get mana each turn. It just ramps up over time. But maybe you never get that one legendary that enables the win condition you built for in your deck. Or maybe it's the very last card you draw. Because there's only one copy, there's no redemption midway through if it's at the bottom of your deck, right? Yeah.
00:31:19
Speaker
To tout magic again, one thing that's cool is you have interactions from so many different cards. So let's say you're having trouble drawing your win condition. Yeah. You can play a card to tutor for it and search through your deck to find it.
00:31:34
Speaker
Maybe it got destroyed and it's in the graveyard. There's cards to get out of the graveyard. Maybe somebody exiled your card. They were technically cards to get things out of exile. They're pretty few and far between. But where there's a will, there's a way, and you can do pretty much anything.
00:31:51
Speaker
It would be just like magic to have a counter to a card that says, remove this card from the game. I take this card back from the game. God damn it, it's got me again. To be fair, they've added recently more mechanics that are magic-like, so they have tutoring in the form of the keyword recruit, which is just pull something from your deck and put it into play.
00:32:16
Speaker
So if you only have one thing in your deck that meets that condition, you know what you're going to pull from your deck. But not nearly to the extent that magic does. Magic manipulates everything. They also for a long time lacked, they had single player content in the form, Hearthstone had single player content in the form of adventures.
00:32:37
Speaker
which actually injected a lot of value to people who didn't want to go out and buy a thousand packs to get things randomly. If you purchased an adventure, it's like 20 bucks or something. You'd have a bunch of PvE content, fight a bunch of coolly designed bosses with great voices, and get a bunch of cards. And you knew exactly which cards you would get as you beat the bosses.
00:32:57
Speaker
So it's technically like buying an expansion pack. You just have to play through the content. Exactly. And at the end of it, you'd have unlocked all the cards in the expansion. A lot of them would be legendaries or like really good. And so you kind of had this core that you knew you could have access to without like randomly trying to obtain them. They since discontinued that entirely with the introduction of the standard cycle. So adventures don't exist.
00:33:27
Speaker
So even more into this, like you have to buy packs and get stuff that way. That's really obnoxious. They replaced it with single player content, which is really good. Like super fun things like dungeon runs and like exploration things, custom classes, or like classes that don't exist in the main game that can do really cool things like rewind your turn and do it again with the exact same RNG you got the first time. All of these cool ideas with no tangible in-game rewards.
00:33:55
Speaker
or like a card back you might get, but no collection boosting things. It's just something you do for the fun of it. Exactly. And like props on them, it doesn't make them any money unless it makes people play the game more, but at the same time, we're playing collectible card games. We want to collect cards, so.
00:34:16
Speaker
That's why Hearthstone ranks the lowest on my personal review for how collectible the cards actually are. Jake, you sure seem disenchanted with Hearthstone. Yeah, that is a mechanic. That's the other way you get cards, but that's all right.
00:34:36
Speaker
Oh, I was actually making a magic reference to Disenchant, Redestroy, and Enchantment. Oh, okay. But I like that it's a double meaning. That's cool. Yeah. Yeah, they're definitely, definitely double dips. But that's enough about Hearthstone. I can rant about that because I've spent years of my life wasted trying to grind the ladder. Dave stopped his stopwatch. We made it. Not worried about content filling on this one.
00:35:05
Speaker
But yeah, it does have a lot of overlapping mechanics. Because like we said, Magic kind of started a lot of them. And other ones are like, let's not reinvent entirely new mechanics. Let's essentially do a version of it or the same type of thing. Like, taunt's pretty common across the board. Double strike, having haste, not being able to be targeted, et cetera. Right. You'll see those in a lot of these games.
00:35:31
Speaker
Yeah. And it's worth noting before I completely move off, Hearthstone has really high detailed art that they commission and amazing voice acting for their cards. Some are hit, some are misses, but
00:35:49
Speaker
A lot of the reason people play Hearthstone is because it feels really good to play Hearthstone. The feedback of playing the game. Did you say tactile? I was going to say tactile. That's the opposite of anything that means anything here. I know what you mean though. It has a good feel to it. Whereas Magic as a Paper Game obviously doesn't have voice acting unless you're really good at doing it while you're playing. But it does have really detailed art because they've had
00:36:17
Speaker
I don't even know how many artists over the years. They've kept a lot over different generations of the game. And like some people will get picked up, some people fall off.
00:36:26
Speaker
But it's always interesting to see a unique spin per a couple of sets because usually they'll be themed to a degree. Right. Because there's always a story throughout Magic of which plane you're on. It's got lore. A lot of these games are going to have lore. We don't care about the lore. Magic's got a lot of it though. And Unmake is a really cool looking card. Full art Unmake.
00:36:49
Speaker
If you still have there, did you give it back to me? I gave it back to you, yeah. Good. Because you asked for it. I'm like, you asked for it. Jake, are you playing these cards? I'm going to take this back. I'd say actually a lot of these games actually have really good art. And I think when you're in a digital space, keep using that term. Yeah. You need something to draw people in. Yeah. Because it was just a card with text.
00:37:10
Speaker
Nobody gives a shit. You need a certain draw factor where you kind of feel like Yugi Moto playing that car. You're like, hey, I'm putting this down for this effect. You know, shit. You have to make sure you have more cards in the future when, you know, your next turn comes around. So the draw factor is very important. It's true. But yeah, that's that's that's Hearthstone. That's Magic. We're going to compare some other games to them.
00:37:34
Speaker
relatively quickly, hopefully by comparison. We'll see though. What's
Elder Scrolls Legends - Unique Mechanics
00:37:41
Speaker
next on the list, Jake? Next on the list is The Elder Scrolls Legends, which I convinced one of our co-workers to play and then promptly abandon the game. Because it's basically my modus operandi is start playing a game, get people to play, and then quit.
00:37:57
Speaker
But this one, it's different from the standard formula in these ways. It has two lanes, is the normal play. As you play out minions to one lane, they'll just be normally in play, have no special effects. The other lane will stealth them immediately, so they can't be attacked conventionally.
00:38:19
Speaker
So you kind of have to manage the fact that your opponent could attack you from either of these lanes, and you yourself can use them to your advantages. So if you have one card that can enter the battlefield and it needs, you want to like buff it up, or maybe it hasn't entered the battlefield effect, but you need it to stay around, you can try to protect it by being like, and to the stealth lane.
00:38:41
Speaker
So, but you constantly have to manage both lanes. Exactly. And it's worth noting that normally, minions that are in one lane won't be able to attack minions in the other lane. Like, they can't usually interact with each other, with the exception of some special cards that, like, basically have your guys dance from one to the other. There's an actual ballroom card thing where it shuffles everybody across the lanes, which is really cool.
00:39:09
Speaker
But color-wise, it's more similar to magic with a little bit of Hearthstone class-based features.
00:39:21
Speaker
and it uses colors. A lot of these games will use colors that are, I don't want to say, derivative of magic, but they're clearly inspired by it. The association is pretty common across the board. Yeah. I think green for anything, whether it's Hunter and Hearthstone, green in magic, green in Faria, or Elder Scrolls Legends. What's that game, man?
00:39:43
Speaker
It's life and plant shit. In this game, green is also the color of thievery. It represents the attribute agility if you ever played the Elder Scrolls games.
00:39:56
Speaker
Agility I feel like it's heard that in other games as well Yeah, so it those their cards have things like pilfer every time that you attack the enemy face You may have an effect your card gets stronger you draw a card you do something like that or it'll have lethal Which is the same thing as death touch death touch or poisonous in Hearthstone? Hidden enemy deal damage they die And that's kind of
00:40:24
Speaker
That's a solid base for a more defensive deck if you want to throw in like another color like purple. Purple is endurance. That's where mana ramp is and the Elder Scrolls Legends. They also have, interestingly enough, pretty much all of the vampires are kind of thrown into that. So things that have drain or the ability to steal health from the opponent and give it to you are all included in that.
00:40:48
Speaker
They have the classic everybody has a blue pretty much every game here is gonna have blue basically be intelligence and screwing people over with special effects and We prefer to call it control. Yes, I'm not screwing people over. Yes But it's the same thing So they have that they also have red which is direct damage again. Those are the two I think across most of these games if you have red it's gonna normally be direct damage and blues gonna be
00:41:16
Speaker
Control, as you put it. Yeah, it's just like a stoplight. Green means go and build your lands and creatures. And red means stop hitting me in the face with that spell, please. Yes. I have things in the board. They're here to block your attacks. Could you use them? Right? Stop just hitting me in the face. I'm going to bolt, and to bolt, and to bolt, and to bolt. Wait.
00:41:45
Speaker
But it has some interesting things they've thrown in. Those are all kind of standard features besides the lanes. One cool thing they have is a rune system where everybody starts at 25 health and every five health that you lose, it breaks a rune, which causes your opponent to draw a card.
00:42:03
Speaker
So if you are getting your face smashed in by an aggro deck, every five damage he does to you allows you to draw a card. It's just a bit of a comeback mechanic. Exactly. So if you're just getting smashed in the face and you have absolutely no recourse, you always have the possibility of drawing something that gives you recourse. They even have a special effect built around it called Prophecy, which is if you drew this card because someone smashed you in the face and broke your rune,
00:42:30
Speaker
that'll immediately have an effect. And that can actually have a more magic type effect where you can play immediately, like interrupt their turn, which is pretty rare in these types of games.
00:42:44
Speaker
So, question for you Jay, because obviously I have not played this game. If you've heard the crickets on my side, how do you get cards in the game if you're starting out? So if you're starting out, you're provided with a few basic cards, but this is one of those games where it has a campaign you can play.
00:43:04
Speaker
and the campaign will give you rewards as you complete it. It'll give you more cards. It has a mechanic where you can, if you have a basic version of a card, you may as in a reward be able to upgrade it and then it'll give you a path where it's just like here's a really crappy card that basically no one would want to put in their deck unless you just
00:43:21
Speaker
don't have enough cards to play and you can turn it into one of two like good cards. Okay. The branch out in different ways. So that's really cool. You take like little scrub like new blitz soldier and you're like and he's a general or he's an assassin you know something like that.
00:43:37
Speaker
And that's a cool mechanic. You can buy more single player content that additionally unlocks cards. So kind of like the Hearthstone Adventures, but they'll have more of a narrative twist to them. You'll be following a story as you go from encounter to encounter. And sometimes they have choices, which threw me off the first time I played the game, because it's like, hey,
00:43:58
Speaker
You've gotten, you know, this magical orb. You already have an opportunity to obtain this magical orb. But if you snatch the orb, then your ally will die. Like he'll be killed by the big bat or whatever, right?
00:44:11
Speaker
Does that translate to losing a card then? It's a choice between cards. So you pick the orb, it'll give you an artifact card that you can then put into play later and put in all your decks. But maybe if you save your ally or exactly if you save your ally, you'll get like a legendary minion you could put into play. So.
00:44:30
Speaker
If you're really RP focused and you just don't want to be spoiled on anything, then I mean, you're listening to the wrong podcast, but also, um, you wouldn't want to look up the results. I literally looked up the results online every time because I need to know what cards I'm getting. Got them in max. Got to know. Yeah. That's a cool idea.
00:44:49
Speaker
And it's an idea that a lot of the other games in this list try to catch up on. Single player content. I actually prefer it. In a game, like we'll mention Faria later, obviously come back to that you mentioned it. You can just play that game single player. Like you don't have to play against other players if you want. The Elder Scrolls or Legends is the same up to a point. And you really need that for electronic card games because
00:45:17
Speaker
It sucks to be like, hey, are you online? Do you want to do the thing? Yeah. And I think that's one of the reasons they also want us to do that versus paper card game, because it's expensive to manufacture these cards and do all these things, almost upkeep, where you can just have a, like, hey, just hop on the game. Yeah, exactly. So it's cool to just turn on your computer. I mean, if you ever turn it off, fucking nudes. My power bill is so high. I would never accuse our listeners of actually turning off the computers.
00:45:47
Speaker
But you just kind of like hop on and do a thing. So like I've been doing a lot of single player inferior. Yeah. And we did a couple of matches. I'm like, fuck you, Jake. I want to get actual cards and they come back again, which we'll probably do that some point later, maybe like next week. But without that, it's things can't stand on versus alone. Yeah.
00:46:10
Speaker
It's like certain formats could, certain games can, but if you allow players to just enjoy the game at their own pace, usually without turn counters either. It's literally just spend as much time as you want. Do anything else you want. You can walk away from your computer for five hours and come back. That's great. I appreciate that convenience. It's really nice if you're watching something kind of second monitor and you want to also play a game, but then you realize you have to
00:46:39
Speaker
pee like nobody's business. Yeah, exactly. You can step away. Yeah, there's no rope burning and like in Hearthstone against somebody. There's nobody who's angry at you for not coming back to the table yet. Yeah, you just walk in, you just leave your deck there, grab your shoes, leave. Yeah. And last note for Elder Scrolls Legends, you can purchase pre-cons in that, like you could for magic. That Hearthstone lacks. Yeah. Very useful.
00:47:04
Speaker
I'm not going to try and sell just buying cards, but if you are getting into something, it's a really fucking nice convenience. Yes. Because I know at least magic has dual decks. You're like, Hey, people trying to learn the game. Here's two different colors. They play differently. You can play with a friend and they also will give a lot of these things away at a tournaments or other.
00:47:28
Speaker
magic-related events to be like, hey, here's how you learn to do Crank. Well, in its own way, yeah. Use your taste. Your playable taste. That's free. But it's just, it's nice because both Magic and Hearthstone, and I'm sure soon other games, get this huge fucking library of cards in World. And you're like, how do I remember what everything does? And you're like, it's going to take time.
00:47:55
Speaker
So like for me, I know a lot of magic cards off the top of my head and what the effects do, but they keep adding things. And there's lots of things that already exist that I'm still not aware of. It gives you a platform you can jump off to experience the rest of the content. The problem is when a game does not give you a platform at all, like Alaha Hearthstone, where it's just like,
00:48:18
Speaker
You are at ground level. Everybody else is somewhere up in Bioshock infinite land. Good luck. Yeah. Right. It's a gap. You need something. So pre-cons put pre-cons in your games people. But.
00:48:34
Speaker
That is probably what I've got for Elder Scrolls Legends. I'd recommend it for anybody who really likes the Elder Scrolls. It has a
Introduction to Faria
00:48:42
Speaker
bunch of jokes, a bunch of characters. You will see familiar faces all of the time. And it's got a very clean aesthetic, like cut and dry, which I enjoy. But there's another one, and we've been talking about it already,
00:48:58
Speaker
Yeah, it's about fairies. Yeah, it's not as cheeky as it sounds, but Jake got this from me the other night so I could actually play it. Yeah. And I've actually really been enjoying it.
00:49:12
Speaker
It seems to play kind of similar to Hearthstone in a way. But you have static mana. You accrue mana over time. So with the mana you don't spend, you get to keep, which I really like. It is cool. You start off with three cards, you can mulligan some. But the big thing is, is it actually has a different board state than just, here's my shit in front of me and your shit in front of you. Super hexagons. Yes. The fact that a hexagon is just...
00:49:41
Speaker
Like I said, it pleases me in a way that I can't say it's not sexual anymore. I just really like that shade. It's the superior gun, really. It is. Sex gun. But you can actually have one action per turn. Your actions are, I can draw another card. I can get an extra mana point to use. I can place two basic lands, which are called planes. And you actually place them as tiles.
00:50:09
Speaker
And basically wherever you place your lands is where you can build your units. Right. Cause there's water there before, right? Yeah. It's just an open expanse between you and your opponent. Yeah. Um, and they're also scattered across the map are like four mana points. So if you have a unit near these mana points, after you've kind of built this land bridge over, you will accrue additional mana per turn. Yep. Yeah.
00:50:34
Speaker
It's a really interesting mechanic that plays into the eternal counterbalance between aggro and control where maybe you want to build out and grab that mana early. Yeah, so I feel like we just have to talk about our first match the other night. Yes, yeah. I had been playing through the story and I'm like, okay, let's be the economy, bitch. I build two planes over.
00:50:58
Speaker
The other option is to build a single special land, because each color has a specific type. So all cards have a mana costing to pay for, but certain ones will also have the prerequisite of you need at least two forests in play, or three mountains.
00:51:16
Speaker
So I went over and I built to get a mana point. Jake starts building down the middle, making a path right for my dick. I was like, I see the face. I'm going for the face. And so I built them to the other mana crystal so I can get more mana. And then Jake...
00:51:31
Speaker
Because it's not a huge map. He built right up to my face. So now he has the option to play units right next to me. Yes. And then just start attacking in the face. It was a strategic advantage for me. And it's important to note, you can only play your units where you have built. Yeah. So since he had built right up to my face, I can no longer build units right in front of my guy. Yeah. I had to build them to the adjacent lands. To the side of your god character. Yeah.
00:51:59
Speaker
And you can only build your lands off of connecting lands or if you have a unit, any adjacent cell to that. Yes. Yeah. So there's some limits on like how quickly, how greedy you can be. Um, on the opposite side, like I ended up winning that match because I kind of just flooded the area around your face and just overwhelmed, but waterboarded me basically. But we were, we were playing like similar, um, similar green decks.
00:52:28
Speaker
So I didn't even have, like, necessarily more aggressive cards than you. That was just the strategy and the board at the time. Which is basically the reason to play Faria, is the fact that there's those two levels. There's what's in your deck and there's how you play what's in your deck. And...
00:52:45
Speaker
A lot of other CCGs don't have that kind of distinction. This gives you that tactical hex-based strategy game where you can outplay someone who may have cards that might be better than yours on average if you're just a better player. And the other advantage is a lot of, I'd say most card games you want to establish board presence. You need to get stuff out there.
00:53:14
Speaker
There's obviously things that can kind of board wipe, but they're few and far between. Yeah. So the more board presence you have, usually you're at an advantage, but there's sometimes the advantage to sit on your cards because you accrue the man over time. You're not losing anything there. So if you have like, um,
00:53:33
Speaker
Let's say two, three cost cards in your hand. Turn one, you have three mana, you hold off. Turn two, you six mana, you can double drop. Right. You can flood at one point, just empty your hand. On top of building out the two planes or one specific land type, your other options for your action that turn is to draw a card. It's one thing, which can be used to make up some of that card advantage.
00:54:00
Speaker
And so if you dump everything in play, then you'll probably be short on mana, and drawing cards might not necessarily be the solution. In my case, I went really aggressive. I'm just like, all right, just run out there, drop all of my biggest guys, and just hope that I kill Dave before he stabilizes, because his economy is so much better than mine.
00:54:23
Speaker
So while Jake was getting three mana turn, I was getting five. Yes. So I just knew it was a matter of time until you start dropping those seven sevens and like other guys with huge taunt. And I'm just like, I'm just going to run out of mana. Yeah, I can't I can't resupply my army. And yeah, there's other decks that are more aggressive than the way I played there.
00:54:43
Speaker
and there's plenty that are way more control-based. We're just like, all right, just the minimum amount of low-power guys that can get out there on the mana wells and kind of deal with oncoming attacks. And then here's my in-game win condition drop, like a 15-cost guy. Like the guy I played that turned everything into forests. Terram. Yeah. The legendary tier cards in this game are also really cool. They all have like
00:55:14
Speaker
They have game-winning effects in a lot of cases. Or just other cool effects. And again, because it's an electronic game, one of the green legendaries, once you play it, will benefit other cards in your hand. So any creatures in your hand or deck will get a plus on plus one. Flat out. So maybe you have a shitty chump locker. He's now an average chump locker.
00:55:41
Speaker
Because there isn't a way to heal damage dealt to monsters as far as I know. Not that I've seen. You could just increase their health pool with buffs. Yeah, you could give them more plus and plus ones. That's technically healing in a sense. But it's increasing at the top instead of the bottom.
00:56:00
Speaker
The way movement works for units you have placed, typically units can move one hex at a time. And then from that place they've moved to, they can attack anything adjacent. Exactly. And attacking stops your movement options after you've done it. You can't attack and then move. It's always moved and attack. Or just attack in place. Exactly. Yeah.
00:56:22
Speaker
So a lot of it just comes down to that grid-based play and how you can work around it. There's always exceptions. There's things that can fly over terrain, fish types that can swim, all of these other options at play you can build towards. But the interaction in the early game and the choices you have before your deck even comes into play is really cool. That's something other games don't really play around with.
00:56:52
Speaker
Yeah, I'm really liking. I haven't even tried the sand, which I guess is the yellow kind of deck. Yeah, like deserts and stuff. It has the ability to shift lands around. So you can target somebody's land or one of your own and just move that hex cell to an open space. Yeah, there can't be a unit on it, but you can. There can. It can be a friendly one. Yeah. But if there's an enemy unit, you can't move their land and their guide to strand them off in the ocean for nothing else.
00:57:21
Speaker
I know this because there's a puzzle that makes use of this and puzzles in this game are usually or they're always you have a way to end the game right now with this board state. Do it. Yeah. Like one turn lethal puzzle. And I think it's a brilliant way to teach the game.
00:57:41
Speaker
Yeah, because a lot of them are almost stupidly easy. I attack the guy. You killed the guy. Congratulations. You did it. Solved the puzzle. It starts off with basic like, okay, this deals damage. Okay, I have to get through taunt before I can get to the guy. Yeah. Okay, I have to move here. Or you have to plan out interactions in a certain way. Exactly.
00:58:04
Speaker
I've gotten through like 22 of them now, or maybe 30, but I was doing one before I came over and I tried it like three times. I'm like, I'm just, I'm not seeing it. So I'm going to go back to it, I'm sure. But it is cool that they're teaching you in that way.
00:58:23
Speaker
Cause with other games, it's kind of like, Hey, like you can play the game or you can Google or you need to just talk to a friend really. Yeah. This, this forces you to be good in a moment at least. And it forces you to learn that lesson. Yeah. Whereas like you, if you're playing a standard match or just against a person or an enemy or something, and it's not designed with this board state, you might just be like, ah, it sucks. I guess I lost, you know, right? You know, yeah, you know, going into it, there's a way out.
00:58:53
Speaker
and I think that's absolutely brilliant. You completed a lot of puzzles, so I expect you probably got a lot of rewards and chests and things like that, which is the equivalent of decks. Yeah, they're like card packs. Yeah, diamond decks. Every chest, oh, I got a new deck. You killed the guy, here's one new deck. Oh, gee, thank you, mister. That's very generous. No, but card packs, yeah.
00:59:18
Speaker
Yeah. And I'll usually try and wait until I have a couple of chests so I can open them all at once, like Christmas morning. Not really, everyone knows I'm Jewish. Well now they do. It is cool that you can do that. There's also in-game currency which you can spend on either
00:59:37
Speaker
uh chests for more cards or other things which are just cosmetic yeah the um there's limits to how much you can kind of get as far as using the in-game currency to buy chests but they do have like mythic chests which have special special cards in them um
00:59:55
Speaker
But the interesting thing is, and this is where things get more complicated from a economic standpoint for the game, it costs money. Like Dave mentioned, I bought it for him. Most of these games are free to play, except Magic. Well, technically Magic is free to play. It's just going to be a spectator sport at that time. But this one has right now, as of this recording, a $25 upfront cost, which I think is probably too high. It's not.
01:00:26
Speaker
So like I would argue a lot of games aren't even worth $60 that are like triple A. Yeah. So like this being a 25 seems a little bit of high for it just being some random studio. Now I really enjoy it. Yeah. But I still would place it closer to like 15 hands down. Anything less than that I'd buy it for you type thing. And I would I would personally I would buy this game at 25 if I knew what the game was.
01:00:51
Speaker
If I already knew the game was good. Yeah, but if I was just Joe nobody on Steam and I'm looking at Going through games. Yeah, I'll look at the card games. This one costs money and not even gonna look at it
01:01:02
Speaker
you should let people get in and then make their their commitment to it. But here's the trade-off. There's very few ways to reliably just spend money in game to get chests. Like there's the mythic chest that we mentioned. That's a very inefficient way to get cards and it's not necessary because compared to all of these other games that we've
01:01:25
Speaker
talked about and we'll wrap up with. The payouts are like very generous. You can complete a quest and get two chests like right off the gate. Yeah. So that's another eight cards. Yeah. And the legendary drop rates are higher and it just feels like you're always pulling in more and more resources. On top of that
01:01:46
Speaker
Here's the problem Hearthstone's had is it's possible to get all of these duplicates for cards that you already have, which are already immediately worthless. They're just 25% of their value. You can't get duplicates beyond the playable amount in Faria.
01:02:01
Speaker
So as soon as you have your stack of three or your single legendary, you won't see that in another chest. So if you've got all the crappy cards, you know that you're only going to get good cards. That's really nice because I know with Overwatch I keep getting these sprays, which get cashed in for like no money and like, cool, thanks for that. Yeah.
01:02:24
Speaker
So less of that and the trade off is you have to pay money upfront, unlock DLC kind of expansions with money and start the game from scratch with money. So we'll see how that works as a financial ploy, but it's more fun to play once I'm actually in the game.
Gwent's Unique Mechanics
01:02:44
Speaker
Yeah. And it feels way better to get those rewards.
01:02:47
Speaker
Like if I saw just it on Steam, I don't know if I would check it out. I actually might have before Jake got it for me. But since we've been playing, I've definitely sunk some time into it. And it's...
01:03:00
Speaker
It's not crazy complicated, but it has enough going on that it keeps my interest. And it starts you slow. It starts you like really slow as far as the mechanics. Um, it's not going to throw you in the deep end in any capacity. Now you start off with like 36 training wheels. Yeah, it's actually just all wheels. You're just like in an empty room, just full of wheels. There's no furniture or anything. That's basically the game start. But, uh, by the end of it, you know what you're doing and that's always nice.
01:03:31
Speaker
I'd agree. So you say it's a good game? I'd give it a good, good out of 10. I'd give it a good out of 10. Yeah, good out of 10. Maybe even a good out of 9. Yeah.
01:03:41
Speaker
So anyways, get that. Play it with us. Just kidding. You can if you want to. By the time you actually hear this, we've probably stopped playing the game. Yeah, I've already. No, I'm just kidding. Oh man. But that's very kind of quickly going through some of these remainders. The last big one we wanted to talk about was Gwent.
01:04:01
Speaker
It's a different game. Entirely different. So much so that I'm like, I refuse to play this game. Yeah. But now that I've actually seen it played and I understand the mechanics, I still don't want to play this game. But it's interesting how they approached it. Yeah. So this game has existed in Witcher 3 and then it's a standalone game on its own with slightly different mechanics that doesn't really matter. They're relatively minor.
01:04:28
Speaker
But it's unlike the rest of these games that we've been describing. It's like a battlefield-based game where you play units on your side, sometimes play units on the enemy side, but the goal is have a higher army point total than your opponent at the end of the round. And then in a best of three or a best of five, if you win more rounds, you've won the match.
01:04:50
Speaker
you can't attack the enemy like directly your guys don't enter combat or anything it's just how there's no combat no blocking yeah it's just you playing things to manipulate board state and then points get evaluated yep which sounds really simple it is actually because it is really simple but
01:05:12
Speaker
how people do things in Builder Decks. I was watching some of the... some pro tournament. I didn't realize this even was a thing. Yeah. But it's interesting to watch, really. And it has really good animations, too. Oh, yeah. Again, like, you have that card interest. And if you played Witcher 3, it's a lot of characters or NPCs. You're like, oh, shit, nice. Yeah. It's nice to see that tie in. They have the same cards you can get, like, in the game. Plus a lot that they've added on top, but...
01:05:43
Speaker
Yeah, they're basically like, hey, people like this fictional game that we made in a game. So we'll make that outside the game. It's worked all right for them so far. So worth looking into, especially if you're disillusioned with everything else that you've played because it's nothing else. It's completely different, I should say.
01:06:02
Speaker
So I'm going to ask the obvious question here that anybody would have for Gwent. Yes. Why would I not just play my highest point value cards and just win? So there's actually an advantage to losing some matches. And to answer your question more directly, the game starts out, you draw your cards, and then barring other special card draw effects, that's it.
01:06:29
Speaker
You don't draw cards at the beginning of your turn, you don't have mana, you don't have anything like that. It's just each turn you can play what cards you want and pass. And in particular, one card per turn, actually. The trick here is if you go all in and you invest all of your resources in that first round, then in subsequent rounds you may have no cards.
01:06:56
Speaker
So if your opponent just sees like, for some reason, he's just blowing his load basically in this first round, you could just sit back, lose that first round, and then just roll you for the next two.
01:07:08
Speaker
And that's the way best of threes work, or he'll win the match. Because you just want to have cards to play anymore, really? Exactly. So mechanics for this game have built around that. Things like the ability to put spies on your opponent's side of the board, which gives them points, but allows you to draw cards from your deck.
01:07:30
Speaker
Usually, you're like, all right, this is a bad thing for a good thing. So it's a great thing if you're planning on losing the round. You want to give that one up to a different one. The other option is to invest high value things on your side of the board and then swap them out with a decoy, which brings them back into your hand and leaves this little training dummy on the board. So you make your enemy overcommit, basically. Exactly.
01:07:52
Speaker
You're like, oh, no, you're like fists up. I'm going to fight this. Hold me. Hold me back. Yeah. And then it's my mom texted me. I'm late. Just lock away. And that's that's where the
01:08:06
Speaker
It's a lot of resource management where the resources are your actual cards. But the mechanics themselves are relatively simple, so a lot of people that don't like traditional card games enjoy going for that. But if you do like original hard games and card games, then... I call them hard games because they're hard.
Quick Overviews: Eternal, Shadowverse, Duelist, Artifact
01:08:26
Speaker
They are pretty difficult. That's why you only do solo. Then you may like Eternal, which is free to play on Steam. Very inspired by Magic the Gathering. Has a lot of similar kind of response action type setup where you can interfere with what your opponent does. Basically play blue. But I haven't played that one a ton. Took a quick look at it. It seems solid. And if you wanted a non-Magic the Gathering online
01:08:55
Speaker
Magic the Gathering Online, this would be your budget kind of option there. Conversely, there's Shadowverse, which is...
01:09:06
Speaker
It's like done in Flash. It's a lot of anime styling. Somebody did put a lot of thought and care into it. But as far as gameplay, it is so fucking basic. Like, if you took Hearthstone and stripped it down, and stripped it down, and stripped it down till it was a skeleton, that's what you have here.
01:09:27
Speaker
So you say it's a good game. Eh. I wouldn't say it's a great game. Yeah. It is free. So if you want to check it out. Yeah. I mean, kill some time with that. Sure. It's really just wouldn't. I recommend like, hey, let's play this game together. Yeah. It exists. It's fine. Yeah. We actually both loaded it up and then decided not to play the game together. Yeah. But yeah, it's.
01:09:50
Speaker
It's very generous and I was free to play model, but the fanservicey art style kind of just wears on me after a time when I want to see more interesting things and anime girl number 54. But if you want anime girl number 54, this is prime.
01:10:05
Speaker
It also has buff dudes, if that's your deal. That's anime girl number 55, actually, is the buff dude. Next one here is an honorable mention of Duelist, which is even less known than the previous ones. I haven't played this one personally, but I've seen gameplay of it.
01:10:26
Speaker
And this is another kind of board game, a battle map style. You play your cards, they enter the field, then you have them execute each other, essentially. So some throwback to Faria, but I prefer Faria's art style. Duelist is really pixel-based. And I haven't given it much of a fair shake, so I can't criticize it too much.
01:10:49
Speaker
It is what it is. That's why I'll criticize babies. Lastly here, we have artifacts. Oh my gosh. Did you ever process that quick? I've never heard that. That's just me being dark and edgy. Last year is an artifact, which is Val's Dota 2 game. It seems to also have lanes similar to Elder Scrolls. And they either have to take out two towers or their nexus, but you can play heroes and lane creeps.
01:11:19
Speaker
Is that what they call it? No, the Nexus. They call it a Nexus. What does it call it? It's the Ancient. Ancient? Isn't the Ancient?
01:11:26
Speaker
I don't know what they call it an artifact. It could be, but I'd be surprised if it's not the ancient. I was still thinking about Blizzard things. Yeah. Nexus. No, that's fair. The Nexus of their power, the ancient. Yes. But it seems interesting, but I'm wary because Val has been pretty just money hungry recently. Yeah. It's not to say that they make poor products and expect money. Yeah. But from what I've heard, you can only get packs from
01:11:55
Speaker
Buying them. Yeah, there's not a way to like oh you played the game. Here's some stuff like the other games We've mentioned it's kind of you have to buy the base game. You have to buy packs Like I hope it works out that sounds like a system that could be interesting if their games just super super fun But I like my I like my progression while playing. Yeah, it's kind of similar to Heroes of the Storm I'll keep my distance and just monitor the patch notes Do you even check the patch notes for heroes though?
Conclusion and Listener Engagement
01:12:25
Speaker
I'm gonna get to play that again. That being said, I think it's probably time to call it for this episode. As always, I'd like to thank everybody for sticking around till the end of a longer episode about things that we don't even know if you're interested in. But hey, you know, that's life. I mean, one day people will come and give feedback. One day.
01:12:47
Speaker
And if you want to do that, then you can feel free to like us on our Facebook page, comment there at Facebook.com slash soapstone podcast, or send us your feedback to our Gmail at soapstonepodcast.gmail.com. We're always happy to hear it, and we look forward to any discussion about this episode that may spawn. Yeah, definitely. It's good stuff. Oh, I forgot about Yu-Gi-Oh! No!
01:13:41
Speaker
It's time to doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo!