Review: Shadowverse (Japanese Hearthstone)

[GreatGreyShrike]

On a tangent, I would like to submit a request for some folks to do some in-depth reviews of some of the other not-MtGs out there.

Well, it's not on the list you had made but it's basically a Japanese Hearthstone, so I figure it's relevant.

Shadowverse is the Japanese equivalent of Hearthstone, put out by Cygames, who previously did some browser games noticeable mostly for their high art budget. This game also has fairly high production values for mobile, with tons of animation and voice acting and so forth for a card game. The game is free to play with purchaseable card packs and stuff. Unlike a lot of the free to play games, it is surprisingly generous in terms of what you get for free, and you can totally play it without spending a penny (as I do). You get kind of a lot of card packs and cards. One of the major reasons I don't play the one of the more dominant CCG competitors is, well-



-and Shadowverse has been a lot of fun without spending a penny thus far (about 80 hours on Steam, some amount more on cell phone).

Shadowverse has anime aesthetics all over - the card game has typical anime character art, and a really staggeringly high proportion of the characters are scantily clad women. Also, like >3/4 of the spells show women casting the spells involved. I did say it was the Japanese Hearthstone.


Examples: The game's version of Merlin, and a typical spell card.

The game was first and foremost a mobile game, for iOS and Android. The controls show that, and the PC port (on Steam) is not particularly amazing. It functions well enough but it's not really adapted for the keyboard/mouse controls over the touchscreen it was designed for. It's functional, though.

However, that aside, the game is surprisingly fun and deep, and does a *lot* of things right. The game's design team includes MTG pros including the World Championship 2011 winner Jun'ya Iyanaga. (Cygames has given out free card packs to celebrate when their pros' wins in competitive MTG).

I figured it was worth talking about, because so many of the things it does are amazingly good ideas that make the game better. Much of it is a conscious decision to imitate Hearthstone but better. It is basically a better Hearthstone in a lot of ways. A lot of the stuff it does is not particularly applicable to physical CCGs, because some mechanics would be a HUGE pain to do with physical cards, but still it offers a lot of interesting ideas.

A lot of this review is going to mention Hearthstone terminology; this game is consciously imitating Hearthstone a lot of the time.

Business Model

This is a CCG where you can earn 'gold' daily by playing 'missions'. If you just play the three daily missions you get (things like "win 4 games as Shadowcraft or Havencraft") and don't play at all otherwise, you'll probably get enough gold to buy about 12-16 card packs per week, each pack containing at least 1 'silver' card and 8 total cards; you can liquefy cards you aren't using to a secondary 'vial' currency, and put together enough stuff to build a new deck every couple of weeks on average, more or less (depending - some decks have huge overlaps with others in terms of rare cards you need to make them, there are several high-level-viable pauper decks with few/no rare cards, a few decks need TONs of rares, etc). Cards are currently divided into the standard cards and two major expansions so far. You get a HUGE amount of stuff for signing up at first; being a Japanese game, there's a bunch of shenanigans where you can reinstall the program repeatedly on your cellphone until your starting sets of cards include a lot of good stuff. If you spend an hour on rerolling on Android you can then link a good roll to Steam and then play primarily there. A 'good' roll helps you by having more legendaries of the sorts you want for your first deck and by having good neutral legendaries to help you with the other decks. In general, though, you don't really have to do this and there are a lot of low-rarity lists that are quite powerful, some even into the highest levels of play. If you go through the story missions, then beat the hardest single player AI's for every class, then play 20 private matches with different opponents, you get around ~80 packs or so, and you can pretty easily do that early on and have a quite large collection of cards within your first week of play and be able to field a couple of different meta decks that are pretty complete and have a good start of several others.

The game provides a few things to buy for real money. You can buy 'preconstructed' collections with a large numbers of valuable rare cards from earlier expansions, you can buy card packs that are the same as the card packs purchased for daily gold. You don't have to do any of this and a lot of people never buy anything.

There is a decent single player campaign mode that effectively acts as a tutorial for each of the different classes - each deck has a number of missions that can be completed, and there's a bunch of neat rewards for beating each campaign path including campaign-exclusive cards. It's a good way to introduce the game and learn the mechanics.

The game is apparantly very popular in Japan and it's popularity on Steam is growing - it's beating Magic Duels and Duelyst combined on Steam popularity right now. It has periodic 'expansions' released, consisting of new cards packs to buy like MTG sets - the Rage of Bahamut expansion dropped a couple weeks ago, and the metagame is still shifting in response. Probably their best move in marketing and advertising was that they did a bunch of paid promotions with Hearthstone streamers / players / youtubers to advertise the game, which got a lot of people interested in the game.

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Leaders/Decks

There are 7 leaders in Shadowverse, each deck has a leader. This leader selection allows you to use cards of that 'craft'. There are a bunch of neutral cards as well, that can go into any/every deck, but other than that every deck has to be 'mono' of it's leader type. Each deck is made of 40 cards, with up to 3 copies of each card in it.

The various leader types:

• Forestcraft
• Swordcraft
• Runecraft
• Dragoncraft
• Shadowcraft
• Bloodcraft
• Havencraft

Each leader type has multiple different deck types for it, and each has different mechanics and abilities that make playing it feel unique and different from the others. There is a lot of difference even between the various decks a single leader supports.

Pacing
You start with 20 health, and you can`t ever go higher than 20 under any circumstances (you can heal yourself for 0 health if you target a heal at yourself when you are at 20 already). Creatures are about MTG-sized in terms of curve, so the game can end around turn 5-ish in theory, but is quite variable in length depending on decks and strategies involved. A typical game takes between 5-10 minutes and runs until turn 8-12.

At the start of the game you get three cards, and get a free mulligan to send any number of the three back to your deck for different random cards. Then the first player draws a card so his hand size at turn 1 is four cards, and the second player when it's their first turn draws two cards to get five total for their first turn. Then it's one card draw per turn to the end. If either player runs out of cards they instantly lose when they try to draw and can't - but there are no enemy-mill effects in the game yet so it's relatively rare to see your opponent mill/cycle to death by accident.

Each player's turn is the only time they are allowed to act or make decisions. This allows everything to happen fast and asynchronously without MTG's passing priority - or counterspells. Again, a lot like Hearthstone. Each player's creatures can attack other creatures or the opponent player, with the attacker choosing how the attacks work out, and with HP ablating from units and not normally getting restored. There are mechanics to force creatures to kill other creatures before attacking the opponent directly (called Ward in this game, similar to Hearthstone's Taunt effects). Each creature normally has MTG's summoning sickness and can't attack on it's first turn, but some creatures have Rush and can attack other creatures on their first turn, and other creatures have Storm which allows for attacking the player OR creatures (like MTG's Haste or Hearthstone's Charge). There are a bunch of other keyword effects like Fanfare (=Hearthstone's Battlecry, does something when the card comes into play), Last Word (=Hearthstone's Death Rattle, does something when the card dies), etc. More detail on this stuff later on - it is largely intuitive and used well, but the interface for seeing the definition of these terms is always present when they come up in game, but it is a button that doesn't look pushable but is to bring up a tooltip explaining the term in question. It's a bit of garbage UI that is garbage even for Mobile, but luckily after a few games you'll know all this shit already.

The game has a simplified (Hearthstone) mana base. Like Hearthstone, you get 1 mana to spend on the first turn, 2 on the second turn, etc. up to a maximum of 10. These just happen automatically, and you can't really interfere with your opponent's mana.

There are three types of cards - Followers (MTG: creatures, Heartstone: minions), Spells (Hearthstone: Spells, MTG: instants/sorceries) and Amulets (sort of like Enchantments or Artifacts from MTG). Followers and Enchantments take up space on the board, and you can have 5 things on the board at once at most. This prevents you from going infinite and limits going 'wide' strategies.

Evolution

This is a mechanic that is game defining and makes the entire game more interesting, tactical, and decision-oriented instead of luck-oriented. It's one of the best bits of design - a mechanic that is simple to explain but endlessly tactically deep, and everyone interested in CCG design should play a little Shadowverse just to see this mechanic in action.

Basically, every card has two versions - the basic version you play normally, and an evolved version. The cards have art for both versions, and sometimes these are minor palette changes + art flip, but other times they are completely redone art. The evolved card *most often* has +2/+2 attack and defense, and *always* gains Rush, the ability to attack another creature even if it was just played.


Example art change

This means that most any creature in your hand you can afford, can come into play and instantly get +2/+2 and the ability to trade favourably into your opponent's board this turn without summoning sickness (since you choose who it trades into). This helps control your opponent's board and respond and swing things if they get ahead. It makes games swing back and forth in terms of who is winning and losing repeatedly, instead of someone just snowballing into victory. Aggro decks who want to hit their opponent for face damage as fast as possible can evolve people with Storm who can hit face as they come out, or can Evo people who were already on the board, to hit harder for more face damage; control decks can play cards and turn them into effectively creature removal that sticks around on the board and gives board presence and maybe does other stuff too.

Evolution has limitations. Each player has a limited amount of 'evolution points' - the player who plays first has 2 Evo Points and can evolve twice total, while the second player gets 3. The second player also draws an extra card on their first turn, as mentioned above. Finally, the second player can spend their first evolve on their turn 4, while the first player has to wait until turn 5. This largely makes up for the first player advantage, sort of like Hearthstone's coin mechanic, but each time it's a tactical decision what to evolve and when in order to dodge removal, gain extra effects, etc, and adds complexities to deckbuilding (what you want to have in there specifically for evolvution).

There are a large number of cards with special evolution abilities that evolve differently from the normal +2/+2. For example, instead of +2/+2, Priest of the Cudgel (a Havencraft 3/4 for 4) gets only +1/+1, but also instantly banishes (=MTG's Remove from the Game) a target creature with 3 or less defence. Combined with it's +1/+1 and Rush from evolving, Priest of the Cudgel will usually 2-for-1 your opponent's creatures (remove 1, hit another) and still be around as a threat afterwards that your opponent has to deal with, potentially going 3 for 1 or better in terms of card efficiency. As another example, Bloodcraft's Dark Summoner is normally a bear, a 2/2 for 2, but when evolved it gets +3/+3 instead of +2/+2 and becomes a 5/5... but also does 3 damage to your leader. Neutral's Lucifer is normally a 8-drop 6/7 that restores 4 defense to your leader at the end of your turns, but when evolved Lucifer becomes a 9/8 (+3/+1) that does 4 damage to your opponent at the end of your turns - so if you are behind you can leave him to stall, but if you are ahead you can evolve to push through some more damage. Swordcraft's Floral Fencer is a 3/4 for 4, and when evolved it only gets +1/+1 but it puts a 2/2 and a 1/1 on the board as well, granting instant and immense board presence for the 4th turn of the game


^This. evolves into these↓


In short, evolves are a precious resource that lets you swing the game heavily in your favour, and makes comebacks a lot more possible while letting advantage still matter. Deciding when to evolve and who to evolve adds a lot of strategy to the game, and adds a ton of potential for comebacks and counterplay, and predicting your opponent.

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There are a few different modes of play. In ranked and unranked, you are matched up against random internet strangers and you each fight with your preconstructed decks. These are a lot of fun. In Private matches, you can play against your friends via ID codes etc. These are all pretty self explanatory. The replacement for Hearthstone's Arena (and MTG's drafting based games) is called Take Two. In it, first off you choose one of 3 randomly selected Leaders for your deck. Then you are presented 15 choices for deckbuilding, each choice between two pairs of cards. You make a deck of 30 cards by choosing between these pairs of cards, with the starting and ending pair guaranteed to have high rarities. You then play through 5 matches against other people with 30 card drafted decks, and depending how many you win you get some gold and a card pack back. This drafting mode is pretty fun, and you sometimes see really unusual cards that people took just because the other card with them was so good / necessary. It's a lot more chaotic and random. Noticeably, the 1st player and 2nd player mechanic is pretty balanced in regular play but in Take Two drafting the decks are a lot slower and worse usually, so the second player has a more significant advantage (closer to 55-45 than 50-50). If you are good at these Take Two games you can win all 5 and get nearly as much gold as you spent on them + a pack of cards, and play again and again and ... etc, but if you don't like them you can just ignore the whole thing.

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In the next parts of my review I will go over each of the different specs and discuss how they each play, and notable strategies/decks for each in some depth. I figure 2 crafts per post (including a bit about neutral cards which are a mixed bag) and maybe a wrap-up post of some sort.

I haven't done any reviews here before, so let me know if I'm fucking it up. I know TGD's ethos of rage and hatred, and I promise that some of the various craft evaluations will be much more ... aggressive... than what I've written so far. This is largely because so much of what Cygames has done in broad strokes is good, while the fine details have the major fuckups.

[Josh_Kablack]

Well, it's not on the list you had made but it's basically a Japanese Hearthstone, so I figure it's relevant.

Well I'm sure there are a lot of things not on my list which are likely relevant -- thanks for doing this.

[Mask_De_H]

The Den ethos is justified rage and hatred; getting mad for no reason is just twatshitting.

The game already sounds interesting, and much better than the gatcha hells I expect from SEA Mobage.

[GreatGreyShrike]

Forestcraft


Leader: Arisa, a young Elf girl.

In terms of aesthetics and appearance, Forestcraft is pretty much solid Green from MTG. It's all about Faeries, Elves, Forest Beasts, and the occasional Treefolk.

In terms of gameplay and style, Forestcraft is closer to Blue than anything else, but it's central mechanics are pretty weird. Forestcraft is a Combo/Control deck of some sort usually, but there are a lot of different possible combos and strategies and different ideas and timings possible.

The central elements to Forestcraft are:

• Cheap Fairy cards
• Per-Spell-This-Turn effects
• Bounce Effects
• Per-Cards-In-Hand effects

First off, there's cheap fairy cards (in MTG these would be tokens). Illustrated:


Something you will never put in your deck, but which will find it's way into your hand

Fairies are 1/1 for 1 with no other effects. They are put into your hand by other cards. Fairy Whisperer is a 1/1 for 2 that puts 2 fairies into your hand; Dark Elf Faure is a 2/3 for 3 that puts a fairy into your hand whenever she attacks. Elven Princess Mage is a 4/3 that evolves and puts 2 1/1 fairies into your hand and reduces those fairies' cost to 0. Waltzing Fairy is a 3 cost 2/2 that puts a fairy into your hand when it comes into play and another when it dies. Fairy Circle is a spell that costs 1 and puts 2 fairies into your hand. One of the cheapest removal spells Forestcraft has is Sylvan Justice which does 2 damage to an enemy follower and puts a Fairy into your hand. Etc. There are like two dozen cards that give you fairies one way or another



A short selection- this is just a few of them

These fairies are extremely cheap but not terribly effective. However... the second element of Forestcraft now comes into play: cards that scale based on number of cards played this turn. There are several cards that work on this principle: Glimmering Wings is a 2 point spell that draws one card normally, or two if you've played two other cards before it. Elven Archery is removal that does 1 damage randomly to an enemy follower for every card you've played the turn you play it. And Rhinoceroach is a 1/1 for 2 that has Storm (can hit face when it comes into play) and gets +1/+0 for every spell played before it in the turn. So you play a bunch of cards with modest value, and you get a ton of Fairies in your hand to fuel later turns when you can play a bunch of cheap or free fairies to make your other stuff better. There's a helpful UI element showing how many spells the Forestcraft player has played this turn for easier counting.


Rhinoceroach looks like a 1/1, but you most often see him hit the board as a 4/1 or better.

Bounce effects fit in nicely here in several ways. You return stuff to your own hand mostly, with spells like Nature's Guidance - a 1-mana cantrip that returns any card from the board to your hand, and draws you a card to replace itself. So you can play things that do stuff based on the number of spells you've played this turn, and then bounce them back into your hand to do it again next turn, or do it twice this turn in some cases. Elf Girl Liza gives all your followers protection from enemy targetted spells for a turn, and you can bounce her back up and do it again next turn. And it works together with the hand size thing that follows too.


Bounce your stuff back up to your hand where your enemies can't hurt it, where you can play it again. This is just the cheapest bounce spell, there are a bunch of options

As you get inflated hand sizes, you can cast spells that work based on your hand size - Forest Gigas is a 1/7 for 7 that gets +1/+0 permanently for every card in your hand when you cast him. Silver Bolt is a spell that costs 9 and draws a card then does 1 damage for every card in your hand to anyone (including the enemy leader!).


Silver Bolt - a way to deal 9 to the face when people are playing wards to stop your guys

Playing with Forestcraft decks is quite enjoyable. They are very interactive combo decks, in that they combo using creatures, and you can be aggressive and try to force them to put stuff on the board or die. Aggro and midrange decks try to force them to play creatures early without proper support in order to trade and not die, so they interact with one another - it's an art to figure out the minimum you can get away with without dying for the Forestcraft player, and how to exert pressure and win suddenly just before the combo hits as the aggressive player. Since you are filling your hand up with cheap fairies, you *can* drop them early to fight back if your opponent is doing a lot of pressuring, but you want to try to squeeze as much value as possible and get the best possible killing turn.

The most rare cards in Forestcraft are frequent 3-ofs in the most common meta Forestcraft Decks, which means Forestcraft can be super expensive to build. Two of the most powerful cards are Ancient Elf and Crystalia Tia, and both are legendary cards (the most expensive to make and most rare).


Yes, a 5-drop 1/1 is seriously one of the most amazing cards in the entire game

Ancient Elf is a 2/3 for 3 that has Ward (=Hearthstone Taunt - you must attack it before other creatures or it's owner). More significantly, when played, Ancient Elf bounces all allied followers back to the player's hand, and gets +1/+1 for every card bounced this way. It's great to stall, it combos well with roaches and other similar cards, and it synergizes well with most Forestcraft gameplans. You can play stuff that does enter the battlefield effects, bounce it, and then play it again for extra value, or you can pick up a bunch of guys before casting spells that work on your hand size. Crystalia Tia is a 1/1 for 5, that, when it enters the battlefield, summons a 4/4. If 2 cards or more were played before Crystalia Tia, it evolves the 4/4 and gives it Ward (and Rush, as per normal evolution rules - so it's a 6/6 that will probably eat an opponent creature and which will stop your opponent from hitting you or other vulnerable targets). You can see the synergy where you play Crystalia and get a big 6/6 ward follower, then bounce the Crystalia back to your hand and play it again the next turn to make *another* 6/6.

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The most common deck for Forestcraft to run right now is Roach (OTK) Forestcraft. Rhinoceroach as already mentioned is a 1/1 that gets +1/+0 for every card you play before it, and has storm so can hit the enemy in the face when it enters play. If you play roach, bounce it, and play roach again, you'll hit the enemy for 1 damage and then 3 damage for 5 mana. If you play 2 fairies and do that, you'll hit for 3+5=8 damage. The deck is all about trading and doing a little damage early while playing cards like Goblin Mage (which puts a random 2-cost follower from your deck into your hand - and if your only 2 cost follower in the deck are roaches, well, you'll always get a roach). You build up to say 7 mana and have two 0 cost fairies, two 1 cost fairies, and a roach and bounce in hand, and then play 4x fairies, roach, hit, bounce, roach, evolve, hit and do 5+9=14 damage in a turn from an empty board state on 7 mana, and that can go up a lot with more roaches, more zero/low-cost cards, more mana, etc. Similarly, Fortunehunter Feena is a 4/5 for 5 that when it evolves, it puts a Goblin Mage in hand and sets it's cost to 0. Play the mage to turn always conjures up a Roach and also counts as a card played. Basically, you do a little damage and trade early on, while trying to build up to make a big Rhinoceroach-based play to win the game ideally somewhere between turns 5 and 8.


Core spells of a meta-defining deck at present

A deck that was prominent in the meta before the recent expansion was Path to Purgatory Fairies. Essentially, Path to Purgatory is a Neutral Amulet (hard to remove from the board for many decks) Which does the following: When you have 30 shadows (= 30 cards in graveyard+discard), Path to Purgatory deals 6 damage to all enemies including the enemy player at the end of your turn." So you play control fairies and the fairies you lose die and become shadows, and you build huge hands which you discard to draw huge hands with a hand cycling spell, and so on, and build towards a Path to Purgatory amulet that will, every turn, kill 90% of anything your opponent could play and would also put them on a very short clock.


Path To Purgatory - And she's buying... a pathway... to purgatory

Tempo Forest is all about playing fairies and trading them for value and board-clear, and then playing buffing cards. A Wind God follower is a Neutral 5-drop 1/5 that gives out +1/+0 to allied followers when it enters the battlefield and at the start of every turn, and if you can keep it alive even a single turn with a field of fairies that can be devestating. Elf Knight Cynthia is similar, where it gives out +1/+0 to things every time they attack (largely the same effect as the Wind God).


Enough +1/+0 bonuses will let you kill anything, even with pathetic 1/1 guys

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Swordcraft


Leader: Erika, a Princess Bodyguard

Aesthetically, Swordcraft is all sword-wielding peoples, generals and admirals and leaders, and other stuff like that - basically, a lot of the White or Red humans, but also including Ninjas of various kinds, and some other martial characters (Pirates, Vikings, etc) as afterthoughts. Also, for some reason, Maids.

In terms of playstyle, it's can go wide sort of like White Weenie decks, but can also be played more of a midrange or control style with high value creature plays.

Swordcraft has probably the most fucking obnoxious terminology in Shadowverse. There are two 'types' of followers that are important in Swordcraft: Officers... and Commanders. Every Swordcraft Follower is either an Officer or a Commander, and can receive bonuses/interactions based on this. Why the fuck they had to have two synonyms as their terms for soldiers and those soldier's leaders is beyond me. Fuck this shit, it's super fucking confusing for new players, there are tons of words like 'soldier' etc. that would be infinitely clearer. There's at least a button to put symbols over the cards to show which are officers and which are commanders at a glance. This might be some artifact of translation from Japanese, but even so it's annoying as fuck.

That said, Swordcraft is still probably the easiest to learn to play, and has the distinction of some of the most expensive and cheapest decks in the entire game. Swordcraft is all about the synergy between Commanders and ... sigh... Officers, but is really not tough to learn or build, so it's good for learning

• Often goes 'wide' - creatures that put other creatures on board directly (not into hand).
• Commanders Buff Officers - and Vice Versa
• Lots of Storm (Haste/Charge) effects
• Lots of Ambush (Stealth) effects

Floral Fencer was mentioned in the original description of Evolution; you evolve a 3/4 and it becomes a 4/5 and puts a 2/2 and a 1/1 on the board. There are other cards like Oathless Knight (2 mana for a 1/1 that puts another 1/1 on the board when it hits) and Alwida's Command: 6-cost spell that puts a 2/3 Pirate with Ward and a 3/2 Viking with Storm on the field. Sea Queen Otohime is a 6-mana 3/4 that fills up *every empty slot you have* with 1/2 guys. In general, lots of flooding the field with low-medium power creatures.



She usually comes on the board like this, with her 4 friends

There is some obvious synergies with these sorts of cards, and cards that buff everyone on the field. Sage Commander is a 6 drop 4/4 Commander that gives everyone +1/+1 when it enters the battlefield. Royal Banner is a 4-drop Commander Amulet that gives only Officers +1/+0 when the enter the battlefield and when the banner is played. There are a lot of these sorts of effects, and usually you only choose a few of them to synergize with your field of guys - they tend not to work together well, especially because they use up your slots for playing stuff in. Also, there are a lot of officers who get better when played when a commander is in play. Snippy Gardener is a 3/2 for 3 that gets +1/+1 if an allied commander is on the field when it's played; Fervid Soldier is a Bear (2-cost 2/2) that gets +1/+0 for a turn whenever you play a Commander. Some other commanders give bonuses to single officers, like the Palace Fencer is a 2-drop 2/1 that gives an officer +1/+0 when it enters the battlefield.


The Crusade equivalents of Shadowverse

There are many storm (haste/charge) drops in Sword. The quickblader is a usually 3-of that is a 1/1 for 1 with storm - remember that with evolve in the game this can occasionally be 3 instant face damage from an empty board, and can seriously win games as a topdeck which is sort of crazy for a 1-drop. The current king of this tendency towards Storm is Albert, Levin Saber. He's a 5 mana 3/5 with Storm, which is already pretty good. However, he is a new card from the most recent expansion, Rage of Bahamut, and he has the following additional effect: "Enhance (9): Can't be damaged until the end of the turn this card is played. Can attack twice per turn". The "enhance" keyword, new in RoB, lets you play a card for more mana than it normally costs and get a bonus effect. This means that if you have 9 mana, you can play this guy (who normally costs 5) for 9, and get the additional effect - which gets him to hit twice every turn, and if he's hitting creatures the first turn he'll take no damage doing it. You can Evolve this guy and do 10 face damage from an empty board on turn 9, or remove two creatures with less than 5 toughness and still have a 5/7 that will attack twice every turn on the board. This guy is one of the best 'bomb' cards and finishers in the game, and *also* can be played early for a 3/5 with storm.


Actually a 9-drop that can be played early if you need to

Ambush / Stealth effects are also a large part of Sword's schtick, though not currently that popular in the metagame. Ambush is a keyword where a follower can't be targetted or attacked until it damages something else. This is sort of a slower Storm effect that is more vulnerable to board clear, but it also lets you keep things on the field without being killed for later, if you want to buff a creature before you use it or whatever. Shadowed Assassin is a follower that gives all allied followers Ambush, so if you have some creature on the board that's providing cool buffs that you don't want to die, you can play the Shadowed Assasssin and make it immune to targetted removal and creatures.


Ninjas!

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I mentioned that Swordcraft has some of the cheapest decks in the game, and the most expensive. The first (cheapest) is aggro / Banner Sword. Originally, this deck was using the Royal Banner Card and no other commanders, all cheap officers that often have storm or good damage and some removal. You use no other commanders, because you run a in addition to the Royal Banners, the 2-drop 1/1 Maid Leader. The Maid Leader tutors for a random commander from your deck, and if you only have Banners as your only commander, will always get you a banner. The deck tends to be fast and run out of steam pretty fast too, after around turn 6 it drops off a lot. The original aggro sword list has fallen out of favour in the new meta following the expansion for all sorts of complicated meta-related reasons, but variants exist, most often adding in Albert, Levin Sabers and taking out Maids, running instead extra early minor buffing cards and the same Neutral Wind God I mentioned in Forestcraft, along with a lot of storm cards.

More expensive sword decks tend to exploit that the Sword legendaries (most rare cards) are really, really good. I mentioned above Sea Queen Otohime, and she is Legendary, as is Albert the Levin Saber. Aurelia, Regal Saber is a 2/6 for 5 with Ward that gets +1/+0 for every enemy in play when it enters the battlefield and if there are 3 or more it is immune to targetted spells, and Tsubaki is a 4/3 for 5 that kills something with power 5 or greater when it enters the battlefield. Basically, there are a lot of cards that sword can drop that cost 5 or more mana that are really high value and trade extremely well in mid/late scenarios, so midrange and control sword deck variants play many of these cards and try to trade and control until they can get into really good card value and win. A lot of cheaper sword decks start out with less legendaries and slowly drift into more, going from aggro archetype steadily towards control, as they get more and more cards.


These cards are good, but control sword is an expensive list[/img]

Next time:

Rune and Dragon! (probably tomorrow evening).

[OgreBattle]

Hearthstone has waifu wars whenever a new set comes out

I figure the main difference is Americans draw more dwarf and cow women, Japanese seem to do thigh more often than butt.

[nockermensch]

This game made me return to the CCG scene after an hiatus of ... 20 years, or so. I played M:tG waaay back then, then sold the cards to buy World of Darkness supplements and kind of ignored the whole evolution of this genre.

Of course, what made me come back was elven tights.

[Leress]

I've been playing Hearthstone since it's closed beta, and after watching a couple of streams of this game I am thinking about playing this game as well.

[Mistborn]

Mark another one down for the elven tights train. I signed up around Friday and it's been pretty cool. It might even replace Magic online as what I do with my life.

As the Shrike said Forestcraft feels very good to play especially coming into it as a long time storm player. But unlike a MtG storm deck your engine is heavy on creatures allowing you to take some aggressive lines of play.

The other deck I've been having fun with is Runecraft. They have a mechanic called spellboost which is kind of like Prowess and Affinity had a baby. Every time you play a spell all the spellboost cards in your hand get better, usually by costing less. It's awesome.

[Koumei]

As someone who has never played Magic, thanks for explaining enough that I get all the terms straight away. If you had just said "Rush is like Haste" I wouldn't have understood and I think would be the only person on the planet not to.

On that note, when you refer to any 2/2 for 2 as a Bear, is that common MtG parlance (presumably due to either the earlier most common 2/2 for 2 cards being bears, or the fact that there are nine or so types of bear that are all 2/2 for 2)? It's hard to tell, because bears have a somewhat legendary status on the Den, what with their quantum state.

[OgreBattle]

Bears being 2/2 for 2 mana without any other features are an MTG thing because of

[GreatGreyShrike]

So, on to Runecraft and Dragoncraft!

Runecraft


Leader: Isabelle, a somewhat more mature magical researcher.

Runecraft is aesthetically all about wizards and witches and explicitly 'magical' stuff (golems, fireballs - a few random magical creatures like Beholder expies).

In play, Runecraft has a bunch of different plans, some of which feel distinctly Blue or Red in MTG terms (blow things up with spell damage, small spells that draw cards to replace themselves, sometimes can Time Walk for 2 mana). It tends to have a lot of control elements and a higher number of spells than other crafts across the board, but the specific plan makes for a bunch of very different decks based mostly on what the high end stuff it's trying to field is.

Runecraft before the recent expansion hit had *one* and only one real strategy, and a bunch of dysfunctional stuff that didn't really work well enough together and was sort of tragically incapable of putting together a win - the designers effectively split Runecraft into a couple of different parts, and before the patch one of them didn't have enough good stuff to make a whole deck out of good stuff and was stuck working with mediocre or even bad cards. In the Rage of Bahamut expansion, things have gotten MUCH better for Runecraft, and it now has 4+ high tier archetypes that are all functional and playable (more or less, depending how you count hybrid strategies).

The major unique elements of Runecraft are the following:

• Spellboost. Your cards with Spellboost get a bonus for being in your hand when a spell (non-follower and non-amulet card) is played by you.
• Earth Rite. Some cards are earth rite amulets that sit on your board after having an effect when they enter, and don't go away by themselves. Other cards eat these amulets up when played for bonuses.
• Lots of direct damage from spells, creature burn spells, etc.
• Lots of Cantrips (small, cheap spells that draw a card when played)
• Lots of 'spells' that summon one or more followers.

Spellboost is possible in theory but not really in practice for an IRL card game, because it would require huge accounting work and be miserable to actually play. The videogame implementation works really well. There are a lot of creatures and spells that get bonuses for being in your hand when you play them. For example, the Rune Blade Summoner is a 4 drop 1/1 that gets +1/+1 for every spell you play while it's in your hand. This means that you can drop it early for mediocre-low value if you need to, it's about on curve with 3 spells boosting it to be a 4/4 for 4... but you can also save it and drop a 10/10 or more from your hand for 4 mana in the lategame.


This card usually is like a 10/10 or something by the time you see it

However, the most common spellboost effect is not this sort of effect buffing, but the cost buffing - there are MANY creatures and spells that that have a ridiculously above-curve cost that gets reduced by Spellboost effects. The Oggler looks like a boondoggle at 5 for a 3/4, but the cost is reduced by 1 every time you play a spell so often comes out cheap or for free which is crazy for a 3/4. Fate's Hand is a draw 2 cards for 5 mana effect that is again reduced by Spellboost to come out for cheap or free and therefore leads to spellboosting other cards. There are a bunch of cards with this effect, and you can make a pile of them and then have turns where you drop an entire board of bodies for nearly or completely free.


These cards would blow at full cost; good thing you can play a bunch of cantrips and then play them for free!

As mentioned, there are a lot of cantrips and cheap spells to power these Spellboost effects and stall when they come online. Insight is a cycle card that draws a card to replace itself and does nothing else, which would be completely useless durdle - but spellboosts make it into a 3-of in many decks. Magic Missile does 1 damage to any target and replaces itself.


This card does nothing but 'be a spell' but since it doesn't cost much mana and has no card cost, it's a core part of several decks

Timeworn Mage Levi is a particular follower worthy of mention, as he shows up in every single Runecraft deck and is a candidate for strongest card in the game - it is a 2/2 for 2 that evolves to a 4/4 AND when it evolves, puts a 1-cost spell in your hand that does 3 damage to any target. This is a really strong Evolve effect, especially for something that gets full stat value. Piercing Rune is another spell worth a mention - it's normally a 4 drop spell that does 2 damage to a creature and 2 damage to the creature's controller, which is decidedly overpriced, but when it's in your hand when any creature evolves, it drops to 1 cost permanently. So a lot of Runecraft turn 4s when playing second involve dropping Levi, Evolving him, and then swinging at a creature with a 4/4 and hitting another creature with a spell for 2 damage, burning the enemy's face for 5 total damage and removing 2 creatures while spellboosting twice.


Levi, his fireball, and the Piercing Rune you can also cast that same turn - possibly the best turn 4 in the entire game

Earth Rite is a little weird - but it's resource mechanic is the sort of thing MTG does often enough with e.g. Energy or Investigate. There's a lot of ways to get Earth Rite amulets into play - there are many you can play directly with fanfare effects, like Red Hot Ritual - an amulet that costs 2 to put down, with a fanfare effect of "Do 2 damage to any enemy follower". These amulets just sit on the board and don't do anything by themselves. Then there are cards with Earth Rite, which at various times but especially when they come into play look for these Earth Rite amulets, and if there is one in play, destroy it and give you additional effects. So these end up being an additional resource, that use up slots on your field (limited to 5) and give you bonuses in exchange. In general, an Earth Rite-creating effect and an Earth Rite using effect will be greater in sum than two equivalent spells without these shenanigans would be, but you have to balance your production and use rates of another resource to make it work - a deckbuilding and play challenge.


Red Hot Ritual is an amulet that kills something and then sticks around to power up other spells

Since these are so much about these amulets and less about spells and no spells use both Earth Rite and Spellboost, there is little incentive to make a truly mixed Earth Rite and Spellboost deck - mostly, you choose one or the other and run with it. Earth Rite decks often borrow a couple things that are generically good like Levi and Piercing Rune, and Fate's Hand, and sometimes Spellboost decks will tech in Petrify when the meta requires amulet removal.

The cards that use up Earth Rite amulets do a bunch of things. A lot of them make Guardian Golems, 3/3's with Ward (=Taunt), like the spell Golem Protection - a 5 drop spell that Summons a Guardian Golem and has Earth Rite: Give +2/+2 to allied Guardian Golems - putting a 5/5 on the board is good for a 5-cost spell, and if you have previously put golems on the board you get ludicrous value. However, there are weirder effects. One of the more powerful control/removal cards in the game is Professor of Taboos. It's a 3/5 that gives the permanent effect that every time an enemy follower dies while it's in play, you get a 2/2 zombie. Also, at the end of every turn, it does "Earth Rite: Destroy a random enemy follower" - so it will make it's own zombies very trivially and build your own board while destroying your opponents, so long as you can keep it alive and supplied with Earth Rite amulets.


The golems are nice, but the Removal+Zombie Army guy is actually ludicrous.

---

There are 3 extremely major and popular Runecraft decks. The easiest to describe is 'Dirt' rune - basically, you take a pile of good Earth Rite spells and put them together and make many golems and zombies, and basically play some variation of midrange/tempo/control with it. Sometimes back before the recent patch people used their Legendary the Sun Oracle Pascale, which every turn at the end doubles the stats of every card you have as an Earth Rite effect (eats an amulet to do it) as the finisher. In Rage of Bahamut, the other cards added to the game mean that people are playing Neutral finishers like Prince of Darkness instead (which I will discuss later in the Neutral section - in short, it's a big and expensive finisher/bomb card). In general, this Earth Rite deck got a LOT of goodies in the expansion and Earth Rite decks went from 'pretty close to unplayable' to 'viable', with the addition of cards like Professor of Taboos and Dwarf Alchemist.


Once a useful card in a niche deck, now sadly outclassed

The second is based on Dimension Shift, or D-Shift. D-Shift is a spell that costs 18(!) normally, which is 8 more than you ever get mana orbs. However, it spellboosts and costs less and less as you get more spells played while it's in hand, and what it does is let you take an extra turn. So you basically stall and control with mostly spells, and then build up to a turn where you drop 7/7 flame Destroyers (spellboosted to cheap or free) and follow that with a D-shift (for cheap or free - the reference to playing Time Walk, MTG's original take another turn spell that originally cost 2 mana, was not an accident) and then you win in your second or third consecutive turn. It has a tendency to win after playing solitaire for 60 or 90 seconds because of it's extra turn mechanic, which can be annoying. It's a control deck that goes off like a bomb somewhere between turns 8-10 mostly, and while it does use a legendary, the Merlins x 3 in most deck lists are good but not strictly necessary - they tutor for spellboost cards and spellboost on attack, so they're very helpful to the deck, certainly, but you can build a D-shift deck without legendaries. It has some amazingly good matchups and others that are actually quite bad - if it's fighting a deck that wants to play control and take it late, D-shift beats that sort of thing a huge percentage of the time, but D-shift struggles with aggro decks. Before the expansion, this deck was the only top-tier Runecraft deck; afterwards, it's fallen off a bit in popularity but still shows up and is good.


If your opponent is alive long enough to play D-Shift, you are almost certainly going to lose

The third major Runecraft deck is based on a card introduced in RoB, Dimensional Witch Daria. Daria is a 9-drop 5/5 that spellboosts to cost less by spellboost, and when played Daria banishes your hand and replaces it with 5 drawn cards that each get spellboosted 5 times. So basically, you stall a bit with spells and creatures with spellboost, then put down Daria and pray for lots of effectively free or very cheap creatures to be put into your new hand - you can under ideal circumstances fill your board from emptyness to being full of 2/2, 3/4, and a 5/5 in a single turn around turn 5 to 7, and potentially do it again the next turn if they manage to somehow wipe everything, if you happened to draw into another Daria in your Daria-draw. You basically play sort of like an Aggro or Tempo deck. It's sort of highly random, if you get your stuff out very fast and your opponent doesn't have enough good board sweepers then you probably win, if they can hit your board with enough good sweepers or you just draw nothing that spellboosts on a Daria you probably just die - mostly you don't have enough storm damage to win on the turn from when you flood the board with creatures, so if they have sweepers in hand they get a chance to play them almost always. While there are variations of lines of play for both players, it still feels overall more luck of the draw dependent than most other decks in the game.


Daria coming out means that you can expect anywhere from 0-5 creatures dropped for free immediately thereafter

There are a few other Runecraft deck archetypes that may be playable, I've seen them occasionally in high-tier matchmaking but am unsure about their viability. There are a couple spells that make (1+spellboost) numbers of 1/1 Snowman followers, and you can boost those with cards that give +1 attack to all followers whenever you play a spell, or you can throw as many Snowmen away as fast as possible to turn on Path to Purgatory (see the Forestcraft Path to Purgatory description, but with spell-wrought snowmen instead of Fairies). There's also some sort of hybrid D-shift + Daria thing that may turn out to be playable or maybe not.


If you play this for 5 snowmen, and they all die trading into your enemy, you're at 6/30 shadows just from this spell to activate Path to Purgatory and wreck someone

[GreatGreyShrike]

Dragoncraft


Leader: Rowen, a weredragon.

Aesthetically, this craft has the fewest waifus per card, by a really quite marked amount. Mostly because there are so many cards which are basically 'A dragon'. They still manage to fit a few waifus in as dragon riders and dragon summoners and so forth, so never fear - and some of their Waifus are top-tier, such as Forte (who we'll get to). Also, you'll have noticed that this craft's leader, Rowan, is not actually a waifu! Don't worry, you can spend some gold and replace it with alternative Leader Forte (based on a card), a top-tier waifu (no game effect from switching leaders, just aesthetics).

Practically speaking, this deck is mostly based on Ramp shenanigans like Green from MTG - you get to play cards to get more mana, so that instead of being on six mana on turn six like an ordinary chump you can be at 8 or even 10 mana by then... at the cost of having played no or few creatures and spells that DIDN'T ramp up your mana. There are several ways to ramp up the number of play orbs (mana) you have, and they're all in Dragoncraft; there are also some 'make another card cheaper' cards, and similar. There is also some Red-ish Discard-as-a-cost and discard-to-draw stuff.

The major unique elements of Dragoncraft are the following:

• Overflow. Your cards with Overflow do extra stuff when you have 7 or more play orbs (mana) - so they get better in the later portions of the game.
• Ramp. You get extra play orbs via spells and creatures, letting you Overflow earlier.
• Lots of big 'bomb' spells that have good stats or effects in a variety of ways
• Lots of followers with the "cannot be attacked" ability
• Discard. Some things give you bonuses for discarding, and some others cost discards, and one gets to come into play when discarded, etc.

Overflow and Ramp go together as mechanics like PB&J. You get a lot of ramp, a lot of low-level creatures who get bonuses to be more competitive when you play them with lots of play orbs if you draw your cheaper stuff later on - Dragoncraft players would normally feel quite sad if they drew a low-cost card later in the game after spending so much effort ramping up to cast big spells, so having some of their smaller cards come with benefits like +3/+0 stats or drawing a card when played because of Overflow makes that feel a lot better.

Dragon Oracle is particularly well designed - it's a 2-drop spell that gives you a play orb, and if you have Overflow active, you draw a card. So if you have 7+ orbs and orbs are less valuable (or actually worthless, at 10 orbs you're maxed) you can still get a card draw out of playing it, so it doesn't waste a draw step completely. Aiela, Dragon Knight is a 3-cost 2/2 with Last Word: Gain a Play Orb, so you play it as a creature and throw it into something to stall your opponent a litle and get a play orb for more mana down the line. Draconic Fervor is a 5-cost spell that gives you a play orb, 2 cards, and 3 life, which is very slowish for what it does but can still be helpful and gets you into card draw which is particularly nice if you aren't doing discard dragon and are therefore lowish in ways to draw cards.


The Oracle goes into most Dragon decks IMO, the others are a little more situational

There's a few other cards that do ramplike things too - there's a 6-cost 5/5 that subtracts 2 from the cost of something in your hand, and a 2-drop spell that gives you a random card from your deck costing at least 5, and then reduces it's cost by 1.


These cards put guys into your hand and lower their costs lower in a way that would be terrible in a non-electronic card game but which works well here.

There's one ramp option that stands out as particularly unplayable. Phoenix Roost is a 5-drop that makes cards in your and your opponent's hand cost 1/2 as much, rounded up. So usually you play this and then play at most a single 10 drop (if you were already at 10 orbs), and then the next turn your opponent can play everything in their hand all at once to try to win. You could have, of course, just played the 10 drop directly without Phoenix Roost and then not given your opponent a drastic and game-winning advantage of having the first turn of fully half cost cards... I have never seen this card not lose the game for the person playing it. I can make up fanciful scenarios involving the enemy having no cards and playing this and then immediately shattering it with the 10-drop Bahamut to get your hand cheaper without giving anything to your opponent... but that sort of fanciful scenario is something so unlikely I have never seen it happen - if your opponent is reduced to topdecking against a Bahamut the cost of the remaining cards in your hand is probably 100% irrelevant, so in that obscure situation you'd win either way. Basically, this is probably the worst card in the game, being actively disadvantageous to play in virtually all circumstances it could be played.


I have never lost a game where my opponent played this card

The higher percentage of 'big' bomb followers in deckbuilding doesn't mean a whole lot - it mostly just means you get to pick which you're gonna include in your deck from a larger selection than otherwise, and it's harder for your opponent to figure out what to expect. Polyphonic Roar is an amulet that makes a 5/5 Storm (haste/charge) dragon every turn; Fafnir is an 8/10 which does 2 damage to every other follower as it enters the battlefield. Both of these 9 drops are fine threats, one is tough to permanently remove or stop and the other has more immediate impact. However, a couple neutral victory conditions shine in Dragon decks too, especially Prince of Darkness (Satan), and Bahamut, because in Dragon decks you can ramp up to these game ending 10-drops faster.


There are a lot of different 'big dragon threats' in Dragoncraft

There are a few different 'Can't be attacked' cards that are interesting. These are mostly like the Mist Dragon, below: drastically overpriced for their cost compared to their stats, but the enemy has to play removal spells or Ward cards in order to stop them, they can't just trade into them with their normal creatures. The best of these followers is the Legendary card Dark Dragoon Forte. She's a 5/1 for 6 with Storm and cannot be attacked, and having a full set of Fortes in your Dragon deck is a really good start to help push through the 20 damage to victory - it's usually worth it if you get even 1 attack in and then eat removal and die. I think 3x Forte go into every dragon deck, 5 storm damage for 6 mana is just really good.

Dark Dragoon is an amazing 6-drop, while Mist Dragon is merely sort of OK - mostly because if the enemy has removal in hand then Mist does nothing but Forte still gets her swing in for 5, or 7 if evolved, before she goes down to spell removal

The entire discard mechanic as it stands currently is really interesting. My feeling is that it's too unreliable and random to be really good and solid, but when it gets it's act together it can do a huge amount of damage in a turn and is really threatening. A number of the cards discard specifically the lowest cost card in your hand, so work well with ramp (getting rid of ramp pieces drawn later on in ramp decks), and overall there's way more synergies between Discard Dragon and Regular Dragon than there are between, say, the pieces of Spellboost Runecraft and Earth Rite Runecraft.

There are a bunch of interacting synergistic parts to the strategy - Dragonewt Scholars are 1/2 for 2 that Can't Be Attacked and when they attack, you randomly discard one of your lowest-cost cost cards and then draw a card. Wildfang Dragonewt is a 2/2 for 2 that has as it's upside, "Whenever you discard a card from your hand, deal 1 damage to the enemy leader". Golden Dragon's Den is an amulet that makes you at the end of every turn discard a low-cost card and draw a card. Dragomancer's Rites is a card where things start to go crazy, it makes it so whenever you discard a card from your hand you draw another card. And the neutral 2 cost spell Altered Fate discards your hand and then draws a card for each card you discarded. There's a bunch of other similar effects on bigger spells, and one follower card that when discarded comes into play instead, but you can see where this is all going - spells which have a discard that's in theory a cost gets turned into extra card draw and free damage on the enemy leader, and eventually you draw to huge 9-card hands and discard them all to do damage to the enemy leader per Wildfang on the field.



---

In terms of decks, what typically happens with 'normal' ramp Dragon is that you start out behind, get ahead when you get Overflow for a while, and then you fall behind again eventually. There's a lot of potential for midrange/tempo Dragon decks of various sorts that do the ramp thing and have a slow board state at the start in exchange for a more powerful turn 4-8 than what your opponent can do. There's also aggro/face dragon decks, where you typically play cheap cards cards and use a lot of "can't be attacked" combined with storm and direct burn removal to push damage through for early victory, ignoring those of your opponent's creatures which aren't wards and which therefore can't force your guys to fight them.

In theory, discard dragon might be a thing. If you get perfect hands where you have exactly enough of each of the strategy's essential cards and can replace whatever parts your opponent removes, you can have quite crazy synergy on the board; in practice, so far as I've seen you often get stuck with overlapping effects of one kind or another with not enough of the other synergy pieces you need, and your opponent will remove the only copy you can find of a key part because so much of the parts that kill your opponents are on creatures, and it just sort of flops badly and you have a bunch of weak-ass overcosted cards. The deck sometimes wins super hard but loses super badly frequently as well, and seems really unreliable and also just difficult to pilot - there may be a viable Discard Dragon deck somewhere, and it may just be a matter of people figuring out exactly what parts of the engine are essential and in what ratio. Hilariously, this sort of deck can actually mill itself to death on accident fairly easily by drawing all of it's library and automatically losing because it is trying to draw cards that don't exist, and I've seen that done a couple times now.

---

Next time - Shadowcraft and Bloodcraft.

[Creighton]

Welp, as a long time MTG player who does not particularly like Hearthstone, you have me installing this now. The Izzet mage in me (Red/Blue) is particularly excited to see what the Runcraft faction is like. Good job

[Koumei]

Runecraft seems to be the best developed so far.

Not in terms of the development process of design, just in term of boobs. I'm not even ashamed to say I'd play Runecraft for that.

[Mistborn]

So I got all the cards to the competitive build of D-Shift a couple days ago and it's been great. I think it might be the thing to fill the hole in my life left by the lack of viability of storm in modern. There's something wonderful about playing a deck that's 40% cantrips by weight. They way your card draw, control elements and combo all flow into eachother is a thing of genuine beauty.

[Omegonthesane]

A few days of playing and I am now pretty sure CCGs in general just are not for me. Like, to the point of wanting to snap my phone in half after one unlucky turn, and there is no way in hell I care enough to work things out well enough to get a 20% win rate in Take Two let alone to construct actual decks.

Probably not just a luck thing or I'd have kicked the roguelike habit by now.

[Covent]

Well, trying this and enjoying it. But have to admit the fact that I got three of the professor of taboos from my free packs help. Just gonna have to be patient and wait for free packs to build up the rest of the deck.

One question, are the rupies for anything except buying packs?

[Omegonthesane]

Take Two has an entry fee and I think there's some cosmetics that gold can buy, other than that I don't think so.

[GreatGreyShrike]

One question, are the rupies for anything except buying packs?

Rupies can be used for cosmetics like replacement leaders, or for buying card packs, or for playing Take 2. Take 2 costs 150 and always gives at least a standard card pack and some gold back; if you win a lot of the matches you get more money back. If you go about even (2-3 or 3-2) it's slightly more efficient to play take 2 than to just buy standard card packs, and if you go 4-1 or 5-0 regularly it's vastly better (usually giving most or all of your entry cost back, and sometimes 5-0 gives 2 packs). But none of this is really worth it if you don't like Take 2, and you can just ignore the whole thing if you want and turn your gold more directly into card packs.

As a starting player you can get a bunch of Take 2 entry tickets for free by beating the campaign, and everyone gets a free Take 2 entry every ~2 weeks from the login bonuses. You should use those up before playing Take 2 for rupees.

[GreatGreyShrike]

Here we go with Shadowcraft and Bloodcraft, two achetypes heavily drawing upon MTG's "Black" both in aesthetics and mechanics.

Shadowcraft


Leader: Luna, child necromancer.

Shadowcraft is aesthetically similar to the undead parts of MTG's Black, being all about Necromancy and the undead - skeletons, ghosts, zombies, liches, all that sort thing. There are perhaps fewer waifus than anything but Dragoncraft - those which are there, are various necromancers and summoners of the undead mostly.

In playstyle, Shadowcraft is still mostly Black - sacrifice of creatures to fuel effects. The using graveyard and the amount of cards already spent / destroyed for power sort of analogizes to MTG's Delve mechanics, though the implementation here is less finicky (you just have Shadows to use up, rather than removing individual cards from a graveyard).

The big thematic playstyle elements Shadowcraft has going for it are the following:

• Necromancy: Spells and creatures that get bonus effects by consuming Shadows (points from discarded/destroyed cards).
• Last word effects: Creatures with Last Word do beneficial stuff when destroyed.
• Sacrifice effects: Cards with effects that have an extra cost of forcing you to destroy your own creatures

Shadows are present for every deck, and indeed some decks previously mentioned use 'build up to 30 shadows and put down Path to Purgatory' as a way to finish out games. Shadows are normally generated every time a creature you own dies, or when you play a spell, or when you discard. However, in Shadowcraft these Shadows can be consumed to grant you bonuses and abilities, and also some creatures have abilities which give you bonus Shadows as a benefit. For example, there's a 2-cost removal spell called Undying Resentment that does 2 damage to a target follower, which is a bit below curve. If you have 2 or more shadows, it will use 2 shadows up to automatically deal 4 damage instead, which is above curve for removal. There are a lot of necromancy effect cards, most of which happen as the card is played or evolved. One example is Charon, a 5-drop 4/5 (a little below curve). If you evolve Charon, you get a 6/7 (full +2/+2 benefit) and ALSO activate "Necromancy (6): Summon a Lich. A Lich is a 4/4 follower, so that's sort of huge - you can just drop 10 damage worth of creatures into the field on turn 5, divided into two big creatures so it's fairly resistant to cheap wide or single-target removal. There are many cards which activate necromancy to buff themselves or otherwise have additional effect - Death's Breath summons 3 zombies, and has Necromancy (6): Give +0/+1 and Ward to allied Zombies. Of course, when these zombies die they become Shadows and fuel more Necromancy...


These cards all use up Shadows (your graveyard) for bonus effects

There are far more Last Word cards in Shadowcraft than other factions. The Skullcradle Widow gives you a 1/2 for 2 that draws a card when destroyed, for example. Hell's Unleasher is a 4-drop 1/1 that puts a 4/4 Lich into play when destroyed - so you usually want to break it open as soon as possible for the Lich inside. An Attendant of Night is a 1/1 for 3 that does the same 'make a lich' thing, but can only attack the enemy face and followers with ward, so you can't suicide it as easily into enemy creatures - but luckily you can sacrifice it! The most 'big' example of Last Word cards is the finisher card Mordecai the Duelist. It's an 8-drop 5/5 that has "Last Word: Summon a Mordecai the Duelist" - so it basically instantly returns if you kill it off normally, the only way to permanently remove it is to banish it (in MTG: Exile) which removes it from the game without triggering Last Word. So you can sacrifice it or trade into enemy creatures freely without that being a real cost, and removing it from the board is hard, and as a 5/5 it puts your opponent on a short clock.


These sorts of last word cards synergize well with Necromancy that is based on your number of cards killed

Sacrifice spells and creatures are a big theme in Shadowcraft. Necroassassin kills one of your followers that you choose, in exchange for which it also kills a random enemy follower, and is otherwise a decent 3/3 body on top of that. Soul Conversion is a 1-cost spell that kills an allied creature to draw 2 cards. Of course, you can sacrifice things that you want to die anyway like the Attendant of Night or Mordecai...



There are a bunch of combo cards that synergize with this whole Shadowcraft gameplan. Urd is a neutral follower that's a decent 3/3 body in her own right, and as a fanfare (enters the battlefield) effect, she kills one creature and then returns it to play. So if you play Urd on a Hell's Unleasher, you get a Lich AND your unleasher back again, ready to Unleash another lich when it dies; if you play Urd on a Mordecai the Duelist, you get two Duelists. Then there's Nephthys - an 8 drop 5/5 that is REALLY weird but potentially uninmaginably strong. Nephthys chooses from your deck up to 4 different creatures of different mana costs, puts them all on the field, and then kills them. Besides making shadows, this also triggers their last words. Nepthys therefore encourages you to build decks weirdly, with a bunch of say 2-cost creatures and then a limited number of types of high-cost creatures with amazing last word effects, so you can guarantee that you get say a Mordecai and a lich and a 'kill enemy creature' last word effect all from playing Nepthys on an empty board. It's a really big potential bomb effect, and a Nephthys going off can often set you up for a win the next turn. On the other hand, if you want to guarantee effectiveness you have to constrain your deckbuilding hard and rely on a lot of medium-high cost spells so that you can guarantee Nephthys will have a big impact.


These cards synergize VERY well with Last Word shenanigans

There are some cards which kill enemies for bonuses in various ways. Pluto kills someone and absorbs their stats as she enters the battlefield (gets their power and toughness +1 each) - and she is not played often currently because she's sort of expensive and a different removal spell has sort of replaced her. Khawy is a guy who is a 4/5 with ward, and when he eventually dies his Last Word effect is that he kills the strongest enemy on the battlefield and adds their power to his owner's HP, which makes him amazing at stalling out to get to lategame with.


Khawy in particular is really high-value for surviving into turn 8 for a Mordecai or Nephthys strategy

The last really notable and sort of weirdest Necromancy card is Cerberus. It's a generically very good legendary, a 5-drop 3/3 that, when played, gives you 2 different spells in hand - one spell does 2 damage to any target for 1, another gives any creature +2/+0 permanently. It doesn't really work with your whole sacrifice schtick, but it's super flexible and can be used for removal or to push damage through or whatever, and it still gives you multiple Shadows for a single card (1 when the 3/3 dies, 1 each when you play the 2 cheap spell cards it gives you). It sort of synergizes a little with the rest of your gameplan, and is just generically very strong and flexible; it's fallen off a bit in the expansion, because it doesn't tie into the Last Word / sacrifice stuff that well, but is still pretty interesting.



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You tend to want to do some control or midrange with Shadowcraft, depending what you're sacrificing and using, what your high end is, etc. Shadowcraft decks are often very resistant to ordinary types of removal because of all the last word effects, which helps all archetypes. One big decision is probably whether or not to include Nepthys, and if so how much to build your deck around it. Some decks build heavily around it, some included it but don't build around it, and more aggro tends not to even bother with 8-drop effects in general. It's most common to play Shadowcraft as some sort of control deck with a plan where you stall and trade in the early/midgame and build up some shadows, and eventually build up to finish off the opponent with Mordecai duplicated by Urd or the like.

I honestly have never seen Aggro Shadowcraft as a thing, but apparently it's a high-power strategy in some tier lists. I just have never seen it played. As far as I can tell, it's mostly about using highly efficient Last Word followers and guys to trade efficiently and have MANY friendly casualties, combined with The Shadow Reaper, a cheap 2-drop 1/1 that gains +1/+1 when any allied follower dies.


There is a deck based around this card and lots of Last Word spam and going 'wide'. I have never played against this deck.

Bloodcraft


Leader: Urias. Again, don't worry, you can replace this guy with Vania, Vampire Princess if you are so inclined!

Vampires are thematically entirely about Vampires and Demons. Mostly the MTG-style vampires, more alive-bloodsuckers rather than undead, and the various demons they summon are usually very human. So a very high waifu quotient.

In strategy, Bloodcraft is Black/Red stuff mostly. A lot of cards use your health as a resource / cost, and others do Drain stuff (MTG: Lifelink, spells like Drain Life) where they heal you by inflicting damage on your enemies.

• Vengeance effects - cards that get additional effects when you are 10 health or less.
• Health costs for additional effectiveness - use your own HP up to get a better board presence and effectiveness
• Drain - Regain HP by inflicting damage with certain spells or creatures

In theory, the Vengeance and Health Cost effects would synergize and work together. In practice, the designers fucked up hard with Vengeance, and as a result a majority of cards that have Vengeance effects are coasters that you don't include in a deck if you want that deck to be good. The screwup is on a fundamental level inextricably tied to the mechanic itself - a bonus for being at 10 hp or less. The thing is, literally nobody makes 'vengeance' based Bloodcraft decks, because at 10 hp many decks can kill you in a turn with storm effects, burn effects, etc and so it's not really a good idea to try to spend your time hovering around 10 if you can avoid it. Furthermore, if you're winning and controlling the board you usually can't get yourself to 10 or less in a reasonably fast time by burning yourself for power, and if you're losing and have a bad board position you REALLY don't want to be damaging yourself hard when they have a significant board presence already. So basically, a large number of "Vengeance" cards basically either don't get played at all ever, or get played because they are independently good without the vengeance triggering. For example, Alucard is a 4/4 for 7 with Storm, which is pretty good value for a midrange deck (more resistant to being burned than something like Dark Dragoon Forte, but can be hit by creatures unfortunately). It has a vengeance effect where if you are at 10 or lower Health, it restores 4 hp to you. It is played *not* because of this effect, but because it's good to push through 4 Storm damage even without it - the Vengeance effect will occasionally trigger and help out, but it's not required to be a good card.


Alucard, in spite of being a Vengeance card, sees play in some midrange decks

On the other hand, there are a lot of cards which don't see any play at all, because they are basically low-value if they don't have vengeance, and you can't count on triggering vengeance without losing badly the next turn. For example, Nightmare is a 2/2 for 2 that might as well be a bear most of the time (it's "gain +2/+0 if vengeance is active for you" is not helpful), as is Rain Devil (2/1 for 2 that draws a card if Vengeance is Active) as is the Venomous Cobra (1/3 for 2 that has Bane when you have Vengeance (Bane is basically Deathtouch from MTG - an effect that kills enemy creatures regardless of your power when attacking them). Basically, a huge number of cards in Bloodcraft from before the most recent expansion are unplayably bad because they relied on Vengeance upsides to make them useful, and that was not a workable strategy because Vengeance itself was inherently unworkable.


These cards, and many like them, are bad because the central Vengeance mechanic is unreliable and not really something you can build a deck around.

That all said, you have HP as a cost and HP restoration schemes which are more workable as mechanics. For examples, Razory Claw does 3 damage for 2 mana and can be targetted at the enemy face as well as creatures, which is amazing value for a card, but it does 2 damage to your face at the same time. So it's really quite amazing in aggro decks (where if your health matters you've probably lost the game anyways). Similarly, the 2 drop 2/1 Storm Blood Wolf is really good in aggro decks, even though it does 2 damage to you when played - you don't really care that much about your HP usually for an aggro deck, and being able to hit face for 2 and still have a body on the board afterward is really good, and you can evolve it to hit for 4 to the face off of 2 mana.


These cards cost 2 hp each to play, and you play them anyways and don't care

On the HP restoring side of things, we have removal spells like Vampiric Kiss (2 damage to an enemy follower, 2 heal to you), and creatures like Temptress Vampire (when it comes into play, does 5 to any target and heals you for 5 as well). Some of Bloodcraft's cards like the Sweetfang Vampire come with Drain (like MTG's Lifelink) where when they hit enemies they heal you for as much damage as they did. The whole 'hp restoration' stuff is more interesting for control blood decks, as a way to deter or slow down people from killing them while they get to their high-value lategame.


Some of Bloodcraft's various ways to regain HP by damaging the enemy.

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There are a few different ways to play Blood. Aggro blood uses a lot of really efficient and effective small creatures, some of which came in the recent expansion that made Aggro blood into a thing that works. These creatures include Yurius, the Levin Duke, a 1/3 for 2 that does 1 damage every time your opponent plays a creature, and is tough enough to remove that it often does 4-5 damage total by itself including it's attacks if you keep removing the enemy creatures that would otherwise kill it.


Yurius almost by itself made aggro blood viable

Also for the aggro blood player, there's a bunch of cards that make 1/1 bats on the board (such as Summon Bloodkin) and other cards that do damage to your enemy's face when bats come into play (Vania, Vampire Princess) and help generate/do damage with bats (the Vampire Fortress amulet creates a bat every turn, and if your board is full destroys itself and does damage to your opponent based on the number of bats you have). This all works together to create a really fast aggro deck that kills very fast - when it wins. Night Horde is a particularly good Removal spell for an aggro deck - it first summons two 1/1 bats, and then does 1 damage to a target for every bat you have. So it synergizes with other bat stuff, and makes board presence and removes an enemy all at once.


Vania, Vampire Princess, and the various bat-summon stuff do a lot of face damage and put a lot of bodies on the field at the same time

Midrange blood is similar to aggro blood but trades out some early game strength for a better midgame - usually it does more trading and less face damage at the start, but then has some Storm followers and burn spells to finish things off at the end. It uses cards like the aforementioned Alucard and the Imp Lancer (6-drop 3/6 with Storm) to finish off enemies.


Imp Lancer: A 3/6, or 5/8 with evolve, that trades efficiently into a huge number of things and can also hit face very hard

Control Blood is one of the most expensive lists to put together, but is really powerful and versatile. Before the recent expansion made aggro/midrange blood into things that work, this was the only viable Blood deck. Control Blood revolves around expensive legendaries like Bloody Mary. Bloody Mary is a 5-drop 4/5 which makes any damage you do to yourself redirect to your opponent - making HP cost effects into burn. You can then benefit from a few big self-burn effects like Dire Bond, an amulet that burns you for 6 when it enters the battlefield and then slowly heals you back for a total of 6 while drawing you 3 additional cards - when played alone it's 'just' card draw that can incidentally trigger vengeance but makes you vulnerable, when played with a Bloody Mary it's huge burn that heals you and draws you cards on subsequent turns. Bloodhungry Matriarch is another good control card, it does 2 damage to all enemy creatures when it enters the battlefield and every time an enemy creature dies it does an additional damage to the opponent. You get a lot of really strong high-end effects with great removal attached if you make it into the lategame as a Bloodcraft Control deck, basically.


Bloody Mary and Bloodhungry Matriarch are defining Control cards, but are also Legendaries. Dire Bond is 'only' Gold rarity.

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Next time: Havencraft, and Neutral cards.

[Sir Aubergine]

The best card is, of course, Ultimate Carrot.

Why? Well it's shapely and succulent!

[momothefiddler]

An Attendant of the Dead

Attendant of the Dead

I'm guessing this is the wrong image, but I'm not sure?

Also thanks for this review. I'm liking it a lot and I might play, but given how quick I burned out on Hearthstone maybe not.

[GreatGreyShrike]

^Actually, in that case I fucked up in the text rather than the card art. It's now fixed - thanks for pointing it out.

I have been putting together these overviews' text basically from memory and then going back to insert card art in between later on; in this case I messed up the card name (conflating with a different card) and then didn't notice the confusion when I was going through to edit in card art. I usually just think of the card as 'Attendant'.

[Archmage]

I got two copies of Daria in my starting sets of free cards.

GUESS WHAT I'M PLAYING.

[nockermensch]

This game provides two interesting examples on how to handle thematic complexity, joining several weak concepts and separating large ones:

Swordcraft has knights, samurai, pirates, maids AND ninja. (but not paladins, who go into Heavencraft)

Meanwhile, "undeads" get divided into vampires (bloodcraft) and "everything else" (shadowcraft).