… or finding some card sheets online to print out, if it would otherwise be a dealbreaker.
Sorry, I’m normally rabidly anti-piracy, but this is the first game in the last decade or so that begs for it. In fact, I wonder if Sony/WotC would support that decision, if it was either a sale with you copying the card set, or no sale at all…
Sure, you could do that. You could also do that with M:TG cards or any other CCG. The question is, who wants to play with flimsy cut out print outs of the cards.
Good CCGs aren’t hurt when everyone has access to all the cards, as there are a broad variety of good cards available, and the good cards typically aren’t rare.
People who are short a few hard to find cards to make a certain strategy work, and aren’t really interested in shelling out more money just to fool around, especially as they’ve already invested an inordinate amount of money into the game, and the strategy may well just not work.
Back when I used to play CCGs I had copies of most of the cards I played with, but wasn’t above using replacements upon a few occasions. You don’t use “flimsy cut out print outs” either, you just use another similar card, and agree that it’s a placeholder for something else.
Even if you do copy all the cards certain cards you are only allowed 3 in your deck of 30 cards total so if you don’t know what you are doing you will still lose. This game is balanced very well for competitive play.
Doing this with a traditional CCG when you have to maintain/shuffle a normal deck, and doing this in a system where you pull cards out on demand and put them under a webcam are two very different things. Not to mention the latter requires that you pay $70 for a ‘starter,’ which I think deserves taking into account as well.
My position: I stopped playing physical CCG’s because of the abusive monetary mechanics. I only buy fixed-price CCG’s now, which pretty much only come in the digital variety. In this case, if I were to buy this thing, it would be at a flat cost with home-made cards to fill out the set.
It should be noted, however, I haven’t done this, and likely won’t, because I like to keep things legit. I would far rather than Sony changed the offering such that it was a fixed-price set.
I still find myself wondering if, all things being equal, they would rather I not bought a copy at all, or would rather I bought a copy and printed off the cards illegitimately. Unless they’re taking a loss on the starter, the latter seems like what they would want.
Perhaps an attorney versed in copyright could chime in here, but I’m 99.9% sure you can create ‘derivative works’ for your own personal use and for using/sharing with friends and family. For example, if I wanted to play MtG with a made up Black Lotus with my son, I don’t think Hasbro can stop me. They can stop me from selling it, and perhaps from exhibiting it publicly, but I’m pretty sure that’s about it. Now with PSN, I don’t know. I would think that if you set up a game between you and a friend, and you both used proxies, I just don’t see how that could be illegal. I guess if their software license explicitly prohibits you from creating proxies and using them to play with your friends/family, that could be a problem, but I don’t have the game so I wouldn’t know.
Thoughtpirating.
I’m so bummed out by everyone’s lukewarm reviews… sigh
ok… after looking around a bit, I’ve determined that I’d really like to give this game a go. So what’s the minimum to buy to play it with 2 players. just 1 expansion pack? Is an expansion pack a must? Or can just just buy a bunch of extra boosters and use those to build multiple decks for 2 people to play with?
– edit –
Never mind I figured it out.
So… I got this game recently and really want to play it but I can’t seem to come up with any camera settings that actually consistently recognize the cards. The calibration program seems to tell me that its all good but when I actually go to play card recognition is iffy at best. Anyone with any advice on the best way to set this up?
Try your settings at warm and dark seems to have helped most with camera setting problems also put your camera on the right side of the mat so no shadows are messing with the camera vision.
Also make sure you have a good amount of lighting in the room - if you have good lightning in the room, shadows won’t be an issue.
Thanks for the advice, the Warm and Dark settings seem to have worked. I can now play without wanting to throw the eye out of a window.
Eye of Judgment is only $43 now. Two questions:
After all my griping above, I bought it for about that price from an Amazon DotD a couple/few months ago.
The first problem is that I was barely able to play, presumably because of lighting issues. Despite having every light on in my house, it still had trouble picking up the cards. But if I shone a flashlight on the card, it would read it for a while, then eventually and randomly lose it again.
Even setting that aside, it was hard for me to get a feel for the game itself, because of all the hokey bullshit with the cards and the camera.
I don’t mean to be a hater, and I’m the sort that generally triest to find the positive in things, but there’s so much wasted time and technical problems and frustrating nonsense involved that after spending a few hours with the game, I finally managed to finish one single game (after multiple failed attempts where games were aborted midstream because cards wouldn’t read). And while the game seemed fun enough, it was at such annoying cost that I’ll probably never play it again. And honestly, it wasn’t that good.
And that’s coming from a CCG fan, a WotC fan, and someone who spent money on the game in good faith wanting to get his money’s worth.
Seriously, I don’t understand why anyone would subject themselves to all this hokey bullshit. This game is more work than play, and there are games out there that are easy to play.
If and when they come out with an all-digital version, that will be worth trying. But the cardboard and camera are all unnecessary and counter-productive to having fun.