SPALDING WARGAMING CLUB
November 15th, 2018 was the day Keyforge: Call of the Archons was released upon an unsuspecting world. Tom Vassel on Dice Tower liked this new fantasy card game. IGN called it a "bold new idea". Polygon wondered if it could find its place in an already-crowded market. Well, it found its place. Most retailers sold out on Day 1 of release and publishers Fantasy Flight Games sold out of all of their stock by November 19th. There are echoes of July 1993, when Wizards of the Coast launched a modest little card game at the Origins Game Fair in Texas: a year's stock of Magic: the Gathering cards sold out immediately and a reprint was ordered. Magic sold its 10 millionth card later that year, in September. Comparing Keyforge with Magic is instructive, because both were designed by Richard Garfield. Garfield was a doctorate student in Mathematics, designing games as a hobby, when Wizards invited him to pitch them a game that could be played in minutes and was portable enough so that fans could get a game going while “waiting in line at conventions.” What brings Garfield back to the designer's table after all these years? He's trying to 'fix' Magic: the Gathering. Reflecting on the way M:tG morphed from a quirky hobby game into a world-conquering corporate behemoth, Garfield laments that some of my favorite ways [of playing] disappeared over time ... I have often wondered if I could get back some of that really exciting play, which was characterized by tools that weren’t universal. Each player had treasures no other player had, but also had less powerful cards that needed to be used in clever ways to get the most value. Some context might be needed for unreconstructed wargamers. Magic is a collectible card game that invites players to construct a deck out of the cards you own to beat your opponent's constructed deck. Buying extra packs of cards increases your chance of acquiring more potent rare cards and building a more powerful deck. Since there is such a thing as eBay, you can now shop specifically for the rare cards you want, introducing an element of pay-to-win into a collect-then-play game. Magic tournaments have become big deals: an all-conquering deck can be worth a $250,000 prize. Important rare cards change hands for big sums. You'll need that prize money to buy a Limited Edition Black Lotus. Watch this fan opening up a vintage deck of M:tG cards and stumbling across the legendary Black Lotus. The draw happens at 8:00. The lucky guy sold the card at auction for $27,302. It has since sold for 3 times that amount. Alas, the card is banned in most tournaments. But Garfield isn't alone in wanting to take Magic back to a simpler, more innocent time. Robert Dougherty is a professional Magic player and multiple tournament winner who set up White Wizard Games - the people who brought us Star Realms. Dougherty has his own version of 'fixing Magic', a game called Epic that was released in 2015. Here are two games with similar aims to recapture the fun of '90s Magic: the Gathering, but one is designed by Magic's original creator and the other by one of its most successful players. The designer's versus the player's perspective: Keyforge versus Epic. Which is best? Only one way to find out. Let's contrast gameplay. Magic bequeaths to its successors its two-stage structure:
Epic and Keyforge both de-value the economic aspect of play. Epic lets you play any number of cost-0 cards and just a single cost-1 card every turn. This means your big monsters and devastating spells will be hitting the table right from turn 1. There's no gradual level-up, as in Magic, where the big beasts only see play towards the end of the game. Instead it's turn one: Sea Titan: boom! Great art, huh? More about that shortly. You might notice that Sea Titan isn't the best play on turn 1 since its on-play 'tribute' is to return an opponent's champion to their hand, so maybe save it until turn 2? Epic cards come in 4 suits: Good (yellow), Evil (red), Wild (green) and Sage (blue). Lots of cards gain an extra 'Loyalty' power if you an reveal two other cards of the same suit in your hand, so this retains some element of long-term hand management, as you may choose to keep cards in-hand to act as fuel for more powerful abilities. Raging T-Rex and Strafing Dragon both have Loyalty bonuses but the Fireball's top power is cost-0. Play one of the cost-1's and reveal the other two to activate its Loyalty bonus, then maybe throw in the Fireball's cost-0 power for good measure or hold onto it to trigger future Wild Loyalty effects? Keyforge also simplifies Magic's economy system, but in a very different way. In Keyforge there are 7 suits (or 'Houses'): trollish Brobnar, demonic Dis, cyborg Logos, kitschy Martians, Sanctum paladins, roguelike Shadows and bestial Untamed. Each turn, a player nominates a single House and then plays, discards and/or activates all of their cards of that House - but only the cards of that House. As with Epic, this kicks a game of Keyforge off with the power level dialed to maximum. However, it encourages you to hold on to cards until you an make an optimal play, rather than drizzling out a few cards at a time. Both games take from Magic the convention of cards arriving on the table in an unusable exhausted state ('summoning sickness') so creatures rarely get to do anything in the turn you play them, giving your opponent a turn to blow them up. One card of each House with their distinctive identifying icons in the top left and colour schemes on their titles Keyforge departs from the Magic/Epic template in another important respect. You're not dealing damage to your opponent and keeping track of your own Life. Instead you're gathering resource tokens called 'aember' (silly spelling): at the start of a turn you convert 6 aember into a key and the first person to forge 3 keys wins (forge three keys... Keyforge... geddit?!?!). You pick up aember automatically by playing certain cards, but, instead of fighting, every creature can be used to 'reap' aember too, so you battle each other's creatures largely to stop them working as aember-factories. In a way, Keyforge reverses the strategic structure of Magic: the victory-engine comes out first, then the economy kicks in. Keyforge and Epic both offer a faster, less complex route into exciting gameplay than their parent-game, but at the expense of long-term strategic play. They are characterised by dramatic board-wipes and other reversals of fortune that send whole lines of cards into the discard pile, re-setting the game and abolishing carefully-laid plans. In Keyforge, aember is constantly being stolen or passed around while, in Epic, weak minions are brought out to act as suicidal blockers against big attacks. Magic-veterans might find this swingy play style irritating and deplore the lack of wise resource-management but for newcomers these games offer a wild ride right from the outset. There's another aspect to Magic: the Gathering that is adapted in very different ways by these new games. I said earlier that Magic has a 2-stage structure, but really it has 3 stages:
For Magic fans, deck construction is the whole point, like Army Lists in Warhammer 40K. You curate your card collection and tinker with you deck-lists as new cards are added, taking cards out or adding them in as you learn from victories and defeats. The tabletop game is the tip of the iceberg; the real work goes under under water and out of sight. There's a sense in which, like a Samurai duel, the fight is won and lost before swords have been drawn. Epic does away with this, because you buy a fixed deck of 120 cards that make up the entire game. From this, beginners can deal themselves a random deck or experienced players can 'dark draft' a deck: you each take 5 cards, select 1 and pass it to your opponent who chooses 2 and discards the rest; keep doing this till you each have a deck of 30. Dark drafting means you have some (imperfect) information about what your opponent chose for his deck and (limited) freedom to choose cards for your own deck (say, focusing on certain factions, monster types or spell effects). This means that, whereas in Magic you could find yourself up against any possible card from over 15,000 printed cards, in Epic you can get to know the 120 base cards pretty well and even the later expansions only double that amount. Epic confronts you with old favourites and familiar synergies: the ghastly Drinker of Blood who hurts you and heals its owner every time a card is destroyed, good old Kong who deals out 13 damage every time he hits the table, the Thrasher Demon that kills anything it damages and the maddening Thought Plucker that makes you discard cards every time its unblockable attack gets through. Nonetheless, these aren't your cards. They just form your deck for the duration of a particular game. Next game they might be in your opponent's deck. The cards are a common property of everyone playing the game. That special proprietary relationship between a player and their deck is missing. Which brings us back to Keyforge and the new game's single most innovative feature. Every deck is unique and personal to you. Keyforge offers 370 different cards, split between its 7 Houses, and you get 37 of them in a deck (made up of cards from 3 Houses). No two decks are the same. The designers claim (perhaps tongue-in-cheek) that there 104 septillion deck combinations. That'll be a US septillion, not the rather more staggering British septillion, but it's still a billion trillions! Each deck, when you open it, has its own name, concocted by a demented computer algorithm. Maybe you get something a bit dull, like (real names here) Zipsy, the Underwater Genius, or a bit whacky, like Discosaber, the Elder of the Outlands. Then they start getting peculiar, like The Pilot That Jabbers At Heteronormativity or The Villain That Digs Up Porridge. Some of them are really cool: The Emptiness That Plans For Eternity reminds me of certain board games Then there are the problematic ones. Ah, the Emperor Who Pays For Boys! But then Titanflayer The Father of Racism hit a few nerves too. The Child Who Terribly Fears The Church seems topical. Wang The Seriously Bruised conjures up images. Before you go sinking a fortune into Keyforge decks, looking for ones with 'hilarious' racist or sexist names, FFG gave already noticed that the algorithms have generated "unfortunate pairing of words" (yayy!) and taken "corrective measures to adjust the naming algorithm for future decks" (boo!) and, what's more, "defective Archon Decks that we have flagged for removal will not be playable in any official KeyForge Organized Play events" (double-boo!).
The only catch is - and it's a huge catch - that if these cards aren't in your deck, then that's that. There are no booster packs. You can't buy extra cards in auction like the Black Lotus and add them later. Your deck is what it is. It's up to you to make the best of it ... or buy another deck and hope for better. You understand now why this game is going to get a grip on people, right? Want to know more about Keyforge decks to hunt for? This video (up to 7:30) describes the Four Horsemen cards that synergise beautifully and always occur together. If there's a downside to Keyforge's irresistibly bespoke appeal, it's that the game lacks Epic's sense of setting. The Houses in Keyforge have been plucked from their different realities by the godlike Archons and set to battle each other over aember in some strange dimensional hybrid world known as the Crucible. That's why elvish thieves fight robots, ogres, paladins and pulpy Martians. It's a mad genre mash-up. Epic is set in a consistent world. OK, a slightly odd fantasy realm with a city named Covenant and dinosaurs and time-traveling wizards as well as armies of undead, demons, dragons and angels, but it's a coherent setting and a game of Epic narrates a struggle going on within that world that is, well, 'epic' in scope. Events are referenced in the expansions, such as the rebellion in Uprising and the plots of the demon-lord Raxxa in Tyrants and the heroism of Captain Markus as a running theme. Epic is honouring Magic: the Gathering which, from 1996's Mirage expansion, started weaving serialised narratives into new cards, culminating in the Weatherlight set with its detailed metaplot. It's hard to imagine how Keyforge can attempt something like this. Related to this - and perhaps entirely subjectively - is the difference in art. Both games have colourful illustrations, but I think Epic wins out here. Keyforge has its moments, with the gurning trolls of Brobnar and the witchy forest folk of Untamed being standouts, but there's a tendency for static scenes and a lack of variation. The paladins of Sanctum stand stiffly in their gumetal plate armour and once you've seen one retro-kitsch 1950s Martian, you've seen them all. In Epic - and again, perhaps this is subjective - there's a more dynamic, even panoramic, quality to the art. Angels swoop from above, dragons soar, the undead claw their way towards the viewer, the heroes look as though they're in the midst of doing something, caught in mid-quest rather than posing for the artist. I can't help feeling this artistic vitality derives from the coherence of the setting and the game's attempt to tell a story. There are lots of reasons to get on board with Keyforge. The buy-in per player is pretty cheap (about £7-9 for a deck) and the game scores big by offering you a digital version of your deck on the Crucible website, where you can practise in real-time games against other players. Epic has an app-based digital version that's in alpha-testing right now. I've got a copy. It's pretty good. But Keyforge has stolen Epic's digital trousers. Nonetheless, I'd urge curious gamers to check out Epic. It retails at about £12, but that gives you 120 cards, so that 4 people could sit down to play it (yes, it can handle more than two players) at only £3 each. That's amazing value for money. If you mostly play games with just one other person, you have to sink a lot of cash into Keyforge to see a variety of decks, Houses and cards, but Epic gives you its whole world in one modest box. Epic gives you a world in a box, but Keyforge tantalises and teases because each deck is so incomplete Get off the fence, you say, Which do you prefer? I guess, if forced to decide, I like Epic's gameplay slightly better. There's more skill in drafting a deck and beating your opponent. In Keyforge you never really know if you won or lost because of the choices you made or because one of the decks is simply better than the other one. But what prompted this review was not to declare one game 'better' than the other, but to reflect on design choices revealed in these games. Both games honour the same ground-breaking product in Magic: the Gathering. One is respectful, a careful re-tooling of the parent game into something faster and lighter but offering similar tactics of drafting and duelling in a growing mythic narrative. Epic is a game by someone used to playing Magic at the top level and wanting to offer that experience to everyone: you get to draft a deck of high-end spells and top-drawer monsters then play a spectacular battle, without having to shop around for a Black Lotus. Epic makes every player feel like a Magic Grand Master, building a killer deck from an elite selection of cards. This is how you feel playing Epic The other game is a much more radical reinterpretation, throwing out many of the core conventions and staking its success on untested new technology. Keyforge only became possible with recent developments in printing, allowing computerised presses to assemble and seal unique decks sight unseen. Keyforge doesn't make you feel like a Magic champion: it makes you feel like a Magic newbie, but from back in '93 and '94 with the first flush of excitement, the discovery of new cards, the quest for the perfect deck, but without the baggage and the endless curating and the shopping for booster packs A vintage Magic booster pack. Keyforge aims to give you the heady buzz that these little brown packets used to generate. But what blows my mind is that the latter game is by the original designer who seems delighted to move on; the former is by his biggest fan, devotedly reconstructing his past achievements. Epic aims to deliver a turbo-charged version of Magic for a new audience; but Keyforge is much more ambitious, looking for a new way of realising the idea behind Magic for old audiences and new. Garfield didn't have to do this. He was set for life by the success of Magic. But he's not content to leave things as they are. It's not often we see restless aspiration in a business with so much money sloshing around. In a world where the Rolling Stones keep cranking out tours and U2 keep churning out albums with music that endlessly pastiches the sound that made them famous, we've come to expect creativity to drain away or end up parodying itself. We tell ourselves that Epic is the best you can hope for. We don't expect to see fresh bursts of innovation like Keyforge And creatively, Keyforge wins hands-down. Epic takes the whole experience of shopping for and curating a Magic collection and puts it in a tiny box, "here's one I made earlier," like those cakes and toys they used to make on Blue Peter. Job done! Anthea Turner, queen of Blue Peter craftwork But Keyforge finds a brand new way of doing Magic-style gaming, with players gleefully opening new decks and challenging strangers to see how their decks match up against new combinations. So, if Epic is another slick tour by the Stones or U2, then Keyforge is like Bowie, reinventing rock'n'roll and going through changes. Every time you think your current deck has got it made, someone unboxes a better one and the taste is not so sweet. What a nice point to finish on! |
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