Anyone tried War of Omens?
Looks like a combination of a traditional CCG with a deckbuilder like Dominion.
How many of these games are non-collectable? I don’t want pay-2-win elements. So far the only ones I’ve found are Faeria (which is dormant and grind-2-win, which is still bad but not as bad), and Sirlin’s games, which are character-based.
I hadn’t heard of it, but thanks for the tip. I checked it out for an hour or so and am definitely intrigued enough to play more. It feels surprisingly polished and attractive, plays quickly, and seems to have a decent amount of single-player content, though I haven’t jumped into multiplayer yet. The mechanics are quite interesting, with a “bank” of 10 cards selected ahead of time that are randomly offered for you to buy and add to your deck during play. Four separate resources, and a significant component of fighting directly against the opponent, which can sometimes feel lacking in deckbuilding games. I can’t speak to how well the mechanics will hold up long term, but I have a few concerns about damage being a freely assignable resource. The f2p model seems to be fairly reasonable, with a pretty rapid pace of acquisition at least for common and uncommon cards.
The only major red flag sticking up for me was the same issue that put me off of Conquest of Champions – individual cards are leveled up by burning extra copies of them, which means that you can wind up playing opponents that have flat-out better versions of the same cards.
I think that Scrolls has the same model of an initial buy-in and then grinding, but I haven’t played it myself. And there’s Summoner Wars on tablets, which has a fixed card pool for each faction that you can customize within. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen anyone bring over an LCG-style model yet.
Spectromancer is noncollectible. Although you also can’t construct decks so it may not be the best fit.
I mentioned this in my own digital CCG thread a while back, but Kings & Legends is a surprisingly good browser CCG. I’ve played it as much as, say, Duel of Champions (which is saying a lot.)
This is fantastic, BTW. Thanks for bringing it up.
For those who haven’t seen it, the art and feature set isn’t exactly top-notch, but the game itself is both fairly original and reasonably sophisticated. Of special note is that there are 4 asymetrical factions, each of which work completely differently. And yet, from what I can tell, they do appear to be reasonably well balanced with one another.
It’s got a pretty generous F2P model with fairly big-bulk buy-ins. I did buy in, which I feel great about because it’s a novel game, but there’s no reason you should expect to have to just to try it out. You can get a lot of mileage for free.
I also feel compelled to make one of those “Yo Dawg…” images for this, since you do deckbuilding to build a deck, which in turn is used to deckbuild another deck. True story.
This is a crosspost from the SolForge thread, but I thought it may be of interest to some of you here, so I hope it’s okay.
So the ForgeWatch Invitational Top 64 was played last weekend (closed tournament with invites based on performance in earlier larger tournaments), and I managed to advance to the Top 16 to be played this weekend, earning a guaranteed 5k in gold. The top 16 will be battling for the first prize, which is 35k gold and being able to design a card to be included in a future set release.
For anyone interested in watching the best SolForge players (and me) play this game, ForgeWatch will be streaming it, starting at 9 am PST (4 pm UTC) on Saturday at twitch.tv/forgewatch. I’ll also stream my matches at twitch.tv/brakara but it will be with a 5 min delay and no audio since it’s mainly for optionally being recasted by ForgeWatch.
The brackets can be found here:
Congrats, that sounds awesome!
Is there any real prize money? ;)
No, since it’s a community run event with no participant fees, the prizes from Stoneblade are just in-game gold (everybody), legendaries of your choice (top 4) and design a card (winner). The exact prize structure is here:
The World Championship, on the other hand, has a $5k guaranteed prize pool for the top 2, to be played at GenCon next year. There’s already been two qualifiers, with 5 to go where the next one is October 11th I think. But here you pay to participate and half of the entry fees are going to the prize pool. It’s still a good deal though, since you get gold for the money you pay for the participation ticket (5600 gold for $20, where $10 goes to the prize pool). More info can be found here:
In other digital CCG news, War of Omens introduced their “tournament” mode today, which is most closely compared to Hearthstone’s arena mode. Some interesting differences though. Both the game and its tourney mode are worth checking out. I believe it also just got approved for Steam Greenlight.
Most have probably already seen this, but the current Humble Bundle is all good card games:
Scrolls, SolForge packs, Magic 2015 + expansion, Talisman + prologue, Dominion pack, and Star Realms. And more if you pay $12+ (including Card Hunter).
Nice! Looks like I’m finally going to get into Star Realms and Scolls.
Yeah, I strongly recommend buying in for $12 just to get the whole kit and kaboodle. Most of it goes to charity, though you can choose the charity/dev/humble split.
Also, since each game and piece of DLC is a separate code, you can redeem what you don’t have and give away the dupes for what you do have. It’s a great deal.
Speaking of which, I have a Scrolls (full game unlock) code I will give out to the first person to post here saying they want it. Though honestly, you should just spend the $12 to buy the bundle yourself.
The $12 bundle for Scrolls includes a lot of shards to make the initial grind go faster. Scroll isn’t RMT-ish, but it does have some grind that I don’t like. It’s worse than Faeria in that department
Thanks for the heads up on the Humble Bundle. I got sucked into Infinity Wars last year, eager to try these others. Anyone have opinions on Hand of Fate? Seems to be a mashup of a single-player CCG, roguelike, action rpg thingie coming out of EA in February.
Of the humble pack, I think I have the most interest in the Dominion packs. I think they got for $7/ea, so the bundle is a great deal. But… I’m wary of a browser based game. Any opinions on how populated the community is if you have the expansion packs (I don’t want to base it on just what I can see from the f2p offering). Otherwise I’ll just break down and buy the paper card version despite it costing a crapton more.
The last few days, I’ve been having a lot of fun with Cards & Castles, which is the best mobile option for this genre I’ve found yet. It’s basically a mix of Hero Academy and Hearthstone, complete with an Arena-style draft mode that can be played asynchronously.
I had forgotten how much I like Card Hunter.
So I decided to try Infinity Wars again the other day, mostly because they sent me a code for a free pack. I like the mechanics of the game, and the cards are varied and interesting. I’d stopped previously mostly because I felt like I was unable to make any progress without spending money…not enough cards to make a decent deck, not enough ways to earn more cards. I’m not averse to spending some money to enhance my experience, but I won’t get back on the “you gotta pay to keep playing at a reasonable level” treadmill that killed Magic Online for me.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that they’ve added the ability to play with some pre-constructed decks that seem pretty good. I’m sure if I keep playing and run into really good players I’ll get stomped, but I’ve played a few games with the pre-cons and always felt like I had a good chance to win. A couple even ended up as actual wins! It’s still frustratingly slow to gain enough currency to buy anything (either packs or entry in the limited arena-style format), but playing those pre-cons is fun enough that I’ll do it for a while and see if I get somewhere on the currency.
Has anyone tried Earthcore: Shattered Elements; a new F2P iOS CCG?
It is a new take on lane mechanics using a rock, scissor, paper mechanic with something different: Risk Factor. You play a card and the better it is the more Risk it will cost. The Risk number is how many hit points you will lose.