I have really enjoyed this over the last few weeks. It is just casual enough for me to play a few relaxing rounds, without thinking too much. And complex enough, that there is a challenge to beat the Gauntlet boss. I’m terrible at collecting cards though. I can’t get myself to destroy cards that I don’t have 4 of, in order to craft new ones. So my deck is probably very un-optimized.
Look, I know you need to make money. I know you gotta sell packs.
But man, fuck you.
Does seem a touch overpowered. Of course that’s what your annihilate spell is for…
Yeah I mean it’s not immune to removal or anything. But for God’s sake, it would be an excellent card with neither ability as a 5/6 for 4. With two of the best abilities in the game? That work incredibly well together?
It single handedly shuts down entire archetypes, and is merely one of the best cards in the game in other matchups. This is a Solforge card, not something that belongs in Eternal.
It is really powerful, but Time as a class is pretty weak, so you almost never see it in constructed formats, at least at high levels. I have a deck that uses it that’s decent, but almost everything I play against is either Primal/Shadow or Fire/Shadow or Fire/Justice/maybe a splash. The only Time deck I recall seeing at competitive levels is the Shimmerpack deck. So the card is great, and whenever they do balance nerfs there are people on the game’s discussion boards complaining that it hasn’t been hit, but I suspect they keep it that way for game balance. I mean, what’s the third-best Time card, after Sandstorm Titan and Xenan Obelisk? The only removal is giving Killer to big creatures, there’s no evasion, there’s minimal card advantage…
That’s a fair point. But it’s also IMO a terrible way to approach color balance. The solution is to give time better staples and flesh out its core mechanics, not leave absurd cards overpowered. Playing against that is very much not fun.
I agree, and I hope they come up with some better stuff in their first big expansion. That said, Time maps pretty closely to green in MtG (big dorks, mana fixing/acceleration, only removal involves your having creatures to fight your opponents’), and MtG hasn’t really figured out how to make green interesting other than to keep pushing creature size. I think they need to invent a new mechanic and I don’t have any offhand ideas of what it should be, but otherwise the only way Time becomes competitive is to push more creatures close to the Titan, not going the other way.
My brother convinced me to give Eternal a try when I saw him last week. I’m just doing the intro quest things thus far. Seems to fall somewhere on the spectrum between super-simple (Hearthstone) and more complicated than it really needs to be (M:TG). I’ll get through the intros and try it out for a while. Any suggestions on the best approach for a complete newb? For what it’s worth, I love Hearthstone’s Arena mode (balance issues and all) but don’t like the climb-the-ladder constructed format too much.
You’re in luck! Eternal has a mode (“Forge”) which is pretty much identical to Arena. You have to pay a bit of gold each time, and the easiest way to get gold is to complete quests, which usually (but not always) means playing against other people. So you may end up doing a bit of constructed.
Forge is great – You choose your deck just like Hearthstone’s arena (three random cards, and you pick one), but you get to keep the cards after you’re done. Then you play against AI opponents, and if you can get 7 wins, you get a reward and you go up a Forge rank, which means next time you’ll be against harder AI with better decks.
If you win Forge and rank up, the reward plus your rank-up reward comes out to be worth more than your entry. But if you’re already at the top and can’t get the rank-up chest anymore, then the reward is less than your entry, even if you win all seven games.
If you’re a fan of non-constructed in general, then Eternal also has Draft, which works like Magic drafts do – you open a pack, pick a card, and then you get passed a pack that someone else picked a card from. The barrier to entry is higher (5000 gold), and you’re playing against other people, but the rewards are much better – 7 wins gets you almost your entire entry fee back, plus the cards you drafted, plus three (or five, I can’t remember) packs from reward chests.
Honestly the starter decks are pretty good introductions to the various mechanics and colors - I had an easy time picking up Eternal by just playing them vanilla in ranked to complete the various dailies for a while (after doing the campaign, obviously). I recommend it.
Forge is good but comparatively expensive compared to HS Arena, but you get to keep the cards you pick. It’s against AI as well, but Eternal’s AI is actually worth playing against even if it’s (obviously) not as good as a skilled human.
Draft is very much like a MTG draft, except not with a fixed pool of players or anything silly like that. There’s some behind-the-scenes logic to make picking cards feel like drafting at a table, and it works pretty well. You keep the cards here as well, but it’s quite expensive.
So, I’ve been playing for a few weeks now, getting through a daily quest on most days. There’s a lot to like about this game, but why oh why did they have to use the old cards-for-mana (or power) paradigm? It’s slightly better than Magic, but still probably 20% of my games are decided by either I or my opponent not getting the right power-to-other ratio. Outside of that, I like pretty much all that I’ve tried, but it only takes one mana-screw game to really poison my enjoyment of the whole experience (for that day, at least).
Yogg was awesome and was the cornerstone of one of my favorite decks, the Yogg and Load hunter, until they nerfed him.
Dedicated resource cards (and different types of resources) make for more interesting deckbuilding decisions and gameplay.
A big part of why I can’t bring myself to stay interested in games like Hearthstone and Shadowverse very long is the way they lock you into very limited deck archetypes as a direct casualty of giving you guaranteed perfect mana. Those games’ class systems are the only thing stopping them from devolving into “everyone plays the best thirty cards in the game and whoever curves out more efficiently wins.” Magic simply builds a solution to that problem into its core game design, by saying “you can play whatever cards, but only if you’re willing to spread yourself thinner and thinner with each additional color you want to play,” and Eternal takes the same approach, but with some advantages only available as a result of being a digital-only game (and some disadvantages that come from not being around as long and from being targeted to people playing on phones and tablets).
You’re not wrong, but dedicated resources isn’t the only way to implement a design that encourages those things. My favorite is actually a game called Infinity Wars, which I’d still be playing if they didn’t have such a terrible technical implementation and unimpressive business model. IW has no dedicated resources, but still gives you incentive to vary your deckbuilding through faction-based restrictions. The gameplay uses a simultaneous turn model that eliminates the back-and-forth priority passing that bogs down games like Magic and (to a lesser extent) Eternal, but still allows for lots of strategy. It’s a great game from a design perspective, just tough to play because of all the surrounding issues. I wish there were more games that explored more of the CCG design space than “just different enough from Magic to avoid being sued” or “as simple as possible.”
I assume it’s so that it’s possible for ordinary players to occasionally beat people who have paid to win or who play all the time and have ultrapowerful decks. But yeah, it’s ridiculous to have 2 power after 10 draws, or contrariwise to never see a single unit unit come up.
I also hate having a questionable first draw and redraw to one power and 4 and up cost units.
For the record, I’m 99% certain that has never been possible. At least since I’ve been playing, which has been most of the game’s existence, the second draw gives you at least two power. It used to be 2 or more, now it’s 2-4.
For me, bad draws are annoying, but the times that I get one the game ends so fast that it’s easy to forget about it by playing again. It’s certainly annoying when you bomb out of a draft because it happened a few times, and I will cop to having taken 1-2 day breaks from the game while my quests refresh and my irritation fades, but it’s not that big a deal overall.
Part of the problem in Eternal is that the game uses 75-card decks, much higher than other popular CCGs. This means more variance, which ends up meaning decks need more mana-producing cards, and makes mana screw and mana flood more common. This isn’t inherently a problem - look at the immense popularity of Magic’s fan-made Commander format, where each player uses a 99-card deck and a “commander” that lives outside of the deck - but the game needs to be able to support concepts like deck-thinning (which can be done in quite a few ways) and tutoring for specific cards out of your deck, and I don’t think Eternal is quite there.
Okay. Faulty memory on the number but the rest still stands.