The Boardgames Thread / Board games

since nov 2018 they sold and registered 2.6million decks( and it's been pretty much dead for about a year now! )

for a little background on the game it was designed by the guy who made magic the gathering and it's unique selling point was each deck was complete and along with a handful of tokens was everything you needed to play a game against an opponent, each deck was made of up 3 randomly chosen "houses" (of seven), each with 12 cards per house and could not be changed. it was given a uniquely generated name and image as the card back and there wasn't another exactly like it.

each deck was randomly generated using a number of rules so that no other deck would ever exist that contained those exact 36 cards.

the problem was that randomness essentially made it like opening packs of football stickers or scratchcards, you were making a very expensive gamble that it would be a good deck and more often than not it would not be (opening a display box of 12 would typically yield 1-3 serviceable decks for local competitive play).

when opening a deck you were first trying to get the houses that worked well in tandem with each other, then within each house you had to hope that you got the right combination of the more powerful rare cards and that those cards provided a good balance that worked with all of the various mechanics in the game (points generation, points steal, creatures, combat, defence, artifacts, special actions).

all that meant that you could open a deck and immediately tell it was a waste of money because it just contained bad cards or lacked any ability to counter specific kinds of opponent tactics rendering it toothless or you could open a deck with a specific card combo that could lock your opponent out of the game with ease and sell for hundreds of pounds on the open market to people looking for the very best decks for the national/international tournaments where you brought your most powerful deck to play.

on top of that they would release new sets every 4-6 months or so with completely different houses and cards so there were continually changing things to see and of course new metas and gameplay mechanics introduced. gotta buy them all!

you could of course buy a single deck and only ever play with that but you would see only a fraction of the available cards. the most interesting format of the game saw a pool of players each open a brand new deck and then play in a round robin style tournament pitting the deck they have just opened against their opponents brand new deck so it relies on a lot more skill to play "blind" not knowing what cards are in their deck to counter you. throw in a couple of quid to cover prize support and you were looking at the cost of 3 pints for an evening of entertainment, do that 2 or 3 times a month and maybe buy a display here and there to check out a new set and all of a sudden you have 100+ decks in no time at all.