Right now I’m into a trading card game called Altered. This weekend I attended a prerelease event for their new set, “Trial By Frost,” at a local game store called The Missing Piece.
I have a long and uneven history with customizable card games. I skim over them, rarely getting far into the collection or deckbuilding aspects.
- I’ve mostly stayed clear of Magic: The Gathering. When I was a kid it was wrapped up in the satanic panic of the 90s, and I was gifted a starter deck but didn’t really play. As an adult I’ve played draft with friends but have been hesitant to commit to it as a lifestyle game, despite the appeal of recent sets like Bloomburrow. Also at the shallow end of this pool I’ve found the play experience mechanical: Decisions at the table seem very secondary to the importance of deckbuilding, and I don’t want to keep up with the constant changes.
- My first obsession and the closest I’ve come to playing with a community was Decipher’s 1995 Star Wars CCG. I was in cub scouts, and the older kids were playing this and the 1994 Star Trek CCG. At some point someone gave me their collection, and this properly became a hobby. Visits to a local games store to buy a booster pack were a big deal. In retrospect I was enamored with the theme, but never really understood the mechanics of this game – it was all Calvinball to me. On a camping trip I once dragged friends into a 4-deck, 2v2 game that lasted about six hours, and it’s kind of wild they put up with it.
- Around the same time the 1996 Pokemon TCG got popular at my elementary school. I remember thinking it was simplistic and inelegant compared to Star Wars Cards. Of course, it went on to be much more popular!
- In 1999 Decipher published Young Jedi to capitalize on the prequel movies, and naturally I had to pick it up. The game was night-and-day from SW:CCG to my mind. SW:CCG was sprawling and could fill a dining table, while YJ was focused enough to play on a cafe table. Where SW:CCG filled out an expanded universe with every background character, vehicle and prop from the original trilogy, YJ gave everyone easy access to main characters. I played quite a bit, but never got into collecting.
- During undergrad I played Decipher’s Lord of the Rings TCG with roommates, exclusively using friends’ cards. This played great in groups of 3-4 and was very fun on the table even without getting into deckbuilding. It was also a “journey” game and had a rotating asymmetry that’s stuck with me.
- I played some Yu-Gi-Oh with my brother-in-law back in 2013, and quickly discovered how much emphasis that game puts on memorizing your deck. Not my thing.
- When Hearthstone came out in 2014 I gave it a try. It took advantage of being digital, streamlined play with very quick matches and 30-card decks, and being able to play online was huge for me since I’ve always struggled to find ways to play in person. I didn’t stick with this too long, but had a good time with it.
- I have an Android: Netrunner core set but have only played it once! I’d love to get to know this game better, but I need someone to play it with.
- I was working at PopCap while PvZ Heroes was being developed; I playtested at least once, then picked up and played a bit after release. It learned a lot from Hearthstone and introduced PvZ’s “lanes” mechanic but unfortunately didn’t really last, as far as I know.
- I played Marvel Snap for a bit when it came out, and I love the small decks (12 cards), fast games, and high level of interaction between cards that would be difficult to play in a physical set but works great since this is digital. Great filler phone game, I might have to go back to this.
- I picked up some cheap Lorcana cards last year, and have only played their solitaire challenge so far. The theming is great! The core mechanics feel like MtG simplified and streamlined for broad appeal, which is fine but not exciting to me. What is exciting is building a deck where the 101 Dalmations move in with the Madrigals, or a “1996 Disney Afternoon” deck, without much regard for actual mechanics. In that sense, I find this most similar to my experience with 1995 SW:CCG.
Why do I keep trying these? I think my game design brain is fascinated by how this genre has developed over time, and by how each of these games itself seems to contain many sub-games since you can build a deck that emphasizes certain mechanics. But I’ve never been engaged enough to drop a lot of money on any one of these games, or to plug into a community which seems to be an important part of the experience.
That brings us back to Altered. Late last year I did a search for “what’s new in card games” (somewhat relevant to my work) and ran across this recently-Kickstarted game. It’s got a gimmick: QR codes on the cards, so your physical collection is digitally registered, with various ramifications. But it also feels like it’s trying to do something different with its core mechanics, and so far I’m really enjoying that. Things I like:
- It’s a “journey” game, like the LOTR TCG! Instead of tracking life points, victory points, or depleting a deck, you are moving tokens across a short map, with terrain that affects play.
- There are two “lanes,” just enough to introduce one more decision layer to everything.
- Cards are short-lived by default, so there’s less “snowballing” – it requires active effort to steadily accumulate power.
- Games are jumpstarted with 3 mana, and generally add one per turn creating the same legible curve as Hearthstone, PvZ Heroes and Lorcana.
The digital collection aspect has a good integration with BoardGameArena for quick online play, which is mostly where I’ve been playing, both against strangers and with friends. I’m still new enough that in most matches the opponent will pull something I’ve never seen before, which is fun and sometimes frustrating. Perhaps the game stays this way – it emphasizes globally unique card variants so even a relatively seasoned player has some chance of being surprised.
I’ve barely started exploring this game but I’m already more invested than I have been with these games in the past. I bought several starter decks and some extra booster packs, joined multiple Discord servers, and played online a bit. So when I heard the first expansion “Trial By Frost” had local release events coming up, I decided to give it a shot. It sounded like a slice of card-game culture I’ve never experienced.
The event was a “sealed” format tournament. That means: For the ticket price, everyone received 84 random cards from the new set, and had a half-hour to prepare a three-color deck of 30 cards. (Standard “constructed” decks are one-color and 40 cards.) Then we played five half-hour rounds, with additional cards given out as prizes at the end to winning players. I won two and lost three, landing in the bottom half of the 16-player tournament. I’m glad I went, but have mixed feelings about the whole experience.
I very much enjoyed the actual gameplay! Players were creative with their deckbuilding and despite the randomness inherent in the whole process we definitely saw strategies emerge. Playing against people who are more familiar with the game also helped me learn. People were friendly and patient with my inexperience. Despite that inexperience, pulling off a couple of wins felt good – and they genuinely felt like a combination of luck and skill.
On the other hand, I left feeling a little dissatisfied in two ways, both exacerbated by operating on three hours of sleep. One is not feeling great about the time invested. The whole event was about 4.5 hours, and while that’s a totally reasonable amount of time for a whole tournament, I found myself thinking that there isn’t really space in my life for this hobby. I had to leave work a little early to arrive on time, and I felt guilty about spending this one evening away from my family to play cards with strangers. I can’t imagine doing this every week.
The other disappointment – and perhaps it was optimistic to hope for this – is not feeling like I found a potential new community. Everyone was kind and most seemed to recognize each other from past events, but conversation was largely constrained to the game itself. These were enthusiasts who have been playing Altered since its Kickstarter (or earlier) and had studied previews of the new set in advance. The group were also mostly “serious” card game players. Most seemed to also play a lot of MtG, and at least half had all the gear: Branded playmates and boxes, fancy tokens and dice, card protectors on everything. There was a lot of etiquette to in-person play that I didn’t know, some of it probably borrowed from other games. And while I wouldn’t describe the group as insular or gatekeeping, I left with an uneasy sense that these are not my people.
Again, very happy that my local store hosted this event and I got to attend. I learned a little more about myself. I’m definitely one of those people who reads about games more than I play them 😅 and that might ultimately limit my ability to engage with a gaming community.