Author: MrBlueSky

Magic player attends Lorcana Event with no experience. The results will shock you!

Non-Clickbait Title: I went to an Azurite Sea pre-release, and got 3rd.

I went to an Azurite Sea pre-release just about two weeks ago. I had never played in a Lorcana sealed event before. In fact, I’d never played in any Lorcana event before this one, and I’ve probably played less than 20 games of Lorcana total.

(Okay, that’s not counting grinding first chapter games with a friend about a year and half ago, but again, it’s been a while, and there game has had like 5 expansions since then.)

So why did I decide to spend $45 to play a sealed format for a game I don’t really play, for a set that I’d done no prep for? Well, because I make poor decisions when I’m bored.

Arrival, and Opening Boosters

I was relying on my expertise at Magic to carry me through the event. However, after cracking my boosters, I was hit with a few key realizations.

The first was that I had no sense of how “good” any given card was stat-wise, something that I can do with no effort in Magic. Is a 1/2 for 1 that quests for 1 worth playing? Should I only be running 2/2’s for 1? Something I take for granted (assessing stat values) was completely gone.

The second thing was the deckbuilding structure itself. In a sealed Lorcana event, you can use all colors of cards. This is a bit of a double edged sword, because what it actually means is that deck construction becomes a game of cutting 32 of the of the 72 cards you’ve opened.

Finally, I was confronted by the fact that I didn’t have a good sense of what the Inkable vs Non-Inkable ratio should be.

Faced with this dizzying array of choices, as well as not really knowing how locations worked, I decided to go back to my basics, and reach for my classic strategy.

BREAD

BREAD is a Magic strategy that dictates card value order in limited/sealed formats. It stands for the following:

B- Bombs
These are cards that will win you game if you resolve them, either due to high power, or just a very strong effect.
R – Removal
Cards that get rid of your opponents’ cards. Notably, there are far fewer of these in Lorcana than I’m used to, and they’re much higher costed. I actually only had a single card that could do any direct damage to a character.
E – Evasion
These are cards that get through to your opponent even if they have lots of characters out. Fortunately, Lorcana does have a good example of this: The keyword Evasive. These characters are tricky to remove and can safely build lore turn after turn.

I ran both of these in my deck, and they both did a LOT of work.

A – Aggro
Cheap cards that can be played early, and apply pressure.
D – Duds
Cards you just don’t want to play.

Deckbuilding

Confronted with an overwhelming number of cards, and 25 minutes to build a deck, I came up with the following plan:

  1. I would build out a pretty standard curve, prioritizing 1 and 2 cost cards, with a majority of the deck being under 4 cost.
  2. I’d try to run as many characters as possible, and few locations, but no items.

After building this deck, I made one last big decision, and probably the single decision responsible for my final result: I added in Pooh Pirate Ship.

Now, while this goes completely against everything else above, as it’s an un-inkable, type-specific item, I figured it could be worth it. Something that had become clear to me was that Lorcana had very little direct removal in the lower rarity slots, so I was unlikely to run into those sorts of cards. The second bit was that because Sealed formats for card games in general are at a much lower power level, they often stall out into top-decking.

My thought was that Pooh Pirate Ship would be a siegebreaker sort of card, allowing me to continually challenge with my pirates, and then fetch them back to replay them. And while I only had 8 or so pirates, I had two pretty decent targets for recovery in Mullins and Jim Hawkins, both of which seemed to have decent stats for combat.

These two quite honestly carried the day.


With deck construction complete, it was time to play.

The Games

I didn’t take great notes on my individual matches. But I can talk to the effectiveness of the decisions I made.

I finished with a record of 2-1, with most of my matches going to 3 games.

Match 1 wasn’t exactly a stomp, but I managed to pull ahead in the late game. Match 2 was my only loss of the three, and while it was possible I could have pulled out a win, I made some pretty significant misplays around my Vanellope Von Schweetz, choosing to Ink the locations that I would have placed her at.

That said, my game 2 opponent was also significantly better than me at managing the early game tempo, and outran me to the point that even when I had set up my board, I couldn’t clear their characters before they won.

Finally, for match 3, I managed to hit two Sail The Azurite Seas back to back into an early Jim Hawkins. He refilled my hand, giving me the win early, and then I was able to use Pooh Pirate Ship in the second game to grab back my cheaper 2-3 drop pirates for another win.

Overall

The last time I wrote about Lorcana was about a year ago. I predicted that if it could weather the storm, it would be set up to become one of the larger card games in the space. Not the most shocking armchair prediction, but something that seemed unclear at the time, what with the pretty blatant scalping making it impossible for folks to actually buy the game.

As far as I can tell, Lorcana seems to have done that. I’m not really a Disney person on any level, and coming in with no knowledge of the characters or cards, I still had a pretty good time. Games felt tense and plays felt meaningful.

Some of my habits from playing a lot of sealed Magic did carry over (recursion and evasion is good!), while others didn’t (My single damage spell did VERY little work). I think that sealed Lorcana might actually be a more interesting experience than Magic sealed, because it allows combos that can’t be done in the normal game, whereas sealed Magic is pretty much just slower standard Magic.

Overall, it was really fun to see how Lorcana has developed since I last played it, and also to see the design space that’s getting used now. For example, typal is much more of a thing than it used to be. I’ll probably try to play a bit more Lorcana, as I am getting a bit burnt out on Magic, and Foundations didn’t really sell itself on its limited format.

Grab Bag – November 2024

I play a lot of things that don’t end up on the blog. Sometimes it’s because the game is too small, sometimes because the game is too big. In either case, I still want to talk about them briefly before PAX Unplugged happens, and they are swept into the great void.

Wilmot’s Warehouse

Wilmot’s Warehouse is fundamentally a game about organization. As such I feel a that something should be noted before I give my thoughts on it.

From where I am sitting writing this, if I turn my head to the left, I can see, on top of each other, the following:
1. A hammer
2. A large set of strength cables
3. A cardboard box for wallmounting, and a variety of other objects.

If I crane to the right, I can see sketchbooks, notebooks, self help books, and computers, all stacked together. Should I manage to owl, and do a full 180 degree turn, I would see a table that has on it trading cards, dice, more notebooks, and uncashed checks. In front of me, on my computer desk, in addition to my mouse and keyboard, I see duct tape, a key, business cards, and in-game reward codes that haven’t been redeemed.

All of which is to say, organizing things is not something I do well in real life. As a result, when it is a primary game mechanic, and I’m asked to do it VERY QUICKLY I do not experience what I would call joy. Instead, I experience a set of emotions I tend to associate with work meetings with clients, and performance reviews.

It’s a very clever little game, but it’s absolutely not for me. It’s a puzzle game where the first part of the puzzle is realizing that there is a puzzle.

Of the items on this list, Wilmot’s Warehosue is the probably the one that deserves its own writeup the most, but because it just isn’t for me, it’ll probably never get one.

UFO 50

Remember those old “200 games in 1” bootleg ass CD’s? Or maybe those Plug-N-Play machines with a bunch of random garbage on them?

UFO-50 is kind of like that, but if all the games were good. Or at least interesting.

I’d like to do a full writeup on the game at some point, but the reality of it is that it’s a huge pain to try to beat all of them. I’ve actually only beat like 5 of them, and with perfect clears on 4.

And frankly, while I don’t enjoy everything in UFO 50, I only feel like I had to find 6-7 I really liked for it to be worth it. Also, if 50 games feels overwhelming, here are a few of my favorites.

#9 Attactics – Real time unit placement.
#12 Avaianos – A 4X game with scythe action selection style upgrades. (IE, each turn you worship a god, which gives a set of actions, and you get to upgrade those actions each time you select a god.)
#46 Party House – A clever little roguelike bag builder.
#24 Caramel Caramel – Cute little Shmup that I’m really bad at.

Zenless Zone Zero

I actually wrote 60% of a post on Zenless Zone Zero, took a break figuring I could put it up in a few months, and in that time they apparently completely removed one of the core systems I’d described. This would have required me to go back and play more of the game to actually figure out what the current experience was like, something I didn’t feel like doing.

I’m going to put the opening here, because it captures my feeling on the game pretty sufficiently.

It was the best of games, it was the worst of games, it was a brilliant spectacle fighter RPG with puzzle elements, it was a high production slot machine, it was the future of free to play, it was the end of the live-service bubble, it offered joyful combat and a fun story, it offered obnoxious time gated farming – in short, the game was so much like Genshin Impact that the critic wondered if he should just link to that writeup instead.

I played like 40 hours, and honestly, the first 20-30 are pretty fun, but once I hit the end of that, I ended up in the typical “grind your dailies” portion of every F2P game that exists. Now, in ZZZ, the dailies/weeklies are boss fights against excavators fused with ghost devils, and rogue-like style dungeon crawls, but they’re still dailies.

So once it became clear that I’d finished the story that was available, and everything required a daily grind, I just moved on.

And while I’m talking about F2P games, friends of mine have been playing a bunch of The First Descendant, and Throne and Liberty. The First Descendant is pretty much just “What if Warframe was REALLY horny?” and Throne and Liberty is a pay2win Korean MMO, so I don’t actually care what the game play is like.

But hey, they’ve played like a billion hours of each, and had fun, so who am I to judge?

Chained Together

Rage games are an interesting genre, things like Getting Over It or Jump King. Chained Together is a rage game you play with your friends.

Fortunately, it also has checkpoints, or I would not have beaten it.

There isn’t a lot to say on this one. I think part of the reason that Sexy Hiking and Getting Over It were so well received is because they were doing something new, if nothing else. Jump King is sort of in a similar space, in that no one had make a game with quite those mechanics.

Getting Over It in particular seems to want to talk a lot about the nature of what the game itself is.

But something about 3D rage games has always felt a bit… cheap to me? They feel like they were cobbled together out of Unity store assets to make a quick buck, and get streamers to play them.

In either case, we beat it in about 5 hours. (With checkpoints) It’s a good enough game if you want to grab 3 friends to do something stupid on a Friday, and no one can decide if you want to play Jackbox or not.

Vagrant Song

I started a writeup on Vagrant Song, and it was mostly vitriol. I did not find this game worth playing, and after a bit, even it’s outwardly charming art started to piss me off. After all, what’s the point of rubber-hose style art, if it’s NOT MOVING?

I only played the first 3 fights, which took about 6-7 hours total, and during that time I found it a pretty mediocre multiplayer boss fight sort of thing.

I legitimately do not understand who Vagrantsong is for. Like, seriously. You want a replayable multiplayer roguelike based on positioning and combos? It’s called Inkbound. You want roleplaying and turn based combat? Play 5E. You want better turn based combat? Play Pathfinder.

You want a mediocre campaign game that takes too long to play, that feels like an extended GM-less boss rush with limited agency to accelerate the fight?

Good news!

I have a copy of Vagrantsong I’m looking to sell.

If anyone ever tells me that they love Vagrantsong, I am going to have to stifle a little voice inside my head that wants to respond by asking if they’ve played any other tabletop or video game in the last 20 years.

Pokemon TCG Pocket

In a sense, I am grateful for Pokemon TCG Pocket. It’s given me something to write about this week. I won’t have to endure the depressingly real world of Disco Elysium, or parse out how Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess works. I don’t have to return to UFO 50 and try to figure out how to review 50 games in one writeup.

No, I can just complain about a little app, and call it a day, and ignore some other things stressing me out.

Opening

The starting moments of a game are critical ones. They’re the moment that developer tries to hook you in. It can be a flash-forward, an exciting call to action, character creation, introduction to mechanics, or one of many other different things.

TCG Pocket starts by having the player open booster packs.

This is followed by opening more booster packs.

You can’t actually play a game with the cards until you’ve reached level 3, something you do by opening more and more booster packs, and critically, using the not-quite-premium currency to speed up the pack opening timer. Sure, you could wait the 2 days or so it would take it do it normally, but I would be shocked if more than 5% of the playerbase actually did this.

But after reaching level 3, is that experience worth it?

Not really.

Gameplay

The game generally plays like a simplified version of the physical Pokemon TCG.

Like the physical TCG, there are multiple types of cards, primarily the Pokemon and trainers. Pokemon cards are played out onto a bench, with one Pokemon in the active slot at any point in time. Only the active slot card can actually use attacks. Trainer cards are one-time use effects that can do a variety of things, generally drawing more cards, healing damage off your own Pokemon, or switching which one is in the active slot.

The game has been slimmed down from a standard Pokemon game, however. Players only need 3 points to win, instead of 6. Trainer card effects have been simplified, turning Professor Oak into a Pot of Greed. The bench only has 3 slots.

The biggest change has been made to energy. In the physical game, energy cards are a part of the deck. Only one can be played per turn, and they’re played onto Pokemon. Pokemon can only use attacks that they meet the energy threshold for.

In Pocket, they’re not part of the deck. Instead, you generate a single energy each turn, and can play energy onto a single Pokemon each turn. As a result, it’s no longer possible to get too many or too few energy, even though you can get the wrong type. This is a nice idea that’s currently irrelevant, because the game rewards mono-type quite heavily, with only one incentive for doing otherwise.

The thing is… it doesn’t really feel like it matters. The rewards for winning in PVP are basically nonexistent. None of the daily missions require it, and none of my non-premium missions require it either. PVE is more rewarding, but the events are on a timer you can speed up with money, and many of the rewards are one-time, or locked behind using a specific deck type instead of just winning. The game’s balance is also pretty middling, with just a handful of decks being relevant, and they rely upon 2 copies of one of the rarer cards.

And that kind of makes sense, because it doesn’t really feel like it’s about the battling. It’s about the collecting. Critically, it’s about the booster packs.

Booster Packs

Everything about Pocket is designed to reinforce opening boosters. The home screen is the booster opening page. The link to the in-game shop is more prominently displayed than the link to the battle options.

Booster pack openings are an 8 step process. Select a pack type to open. Select a pack from a revolving carousal. Swipe the top of the pack for a crunchy lovely opening sound. Tap through each card in the booster, with what I can only describe as a glittering chime for each card, and more for rarer ones. View the full results. Watch cards slot into your binder. Swipe up on new cards to register them into your card dex. Watch them slide into place, and your card collection count tick up.

It is then time to open another booster pack.

I’m breaking this down not because it’s overwhelming or slow (though it feels a little drawn out). I’m noting it because it’s indicative of where the game’s priorities are.

Overall

Many people do just collect physical Pokemon cards without playing the trading card game. I certainly did growing up. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with just enjoying the art and collecting them. If Pocket TCG was purely the collection elements, without the aggressive monetization, it wouldn’t be for me, but I wouldn’t have as many problems with it.

But Pocket isn’t just “Not For Me.” It’s an aggressive experience that’s designed to build player engagement habits, and convert those habits into cash. I don’t respect it, and I don’t recommend it.

I’m also not going to pretend that it doesn’t work, that it isn’t at least partly compelling. Bait is designed to be tasty. But I am not a fish. I can spit out the hook.

Journey to Incrementalia

Journey to Incrementalia is single player idle game, placing it in a genre that I have some thoughts about.

But I beat it in six hours! I spent most of that time actively playing!

And I was only tempted to break out AutoHotKey and start writing macros once or twice!

All of which makes me wonder if it counts as an idle game/clicker game at all.

Journey to Incrementalia

The premise is simple enough. You are a necromancer. You have been brought back from the dead to reach Incrementalia, a mystical land of… something. And you’re going to do this by raising the dead, and hurling spells at anything that moves.

It starts out as a pretty standard idle game. Ponder the orb to generate mana, spend mana to summon skeletons, and watch skeletons break down the wall.

But it quickly breaks away from normal idle game scaling because of its resource system.

Resources and mechanics

Journey to Incrementalia has 3 primary resources: mana, souls, and skill points.

Mana is pretty standard. You click on your orb, you get mana. You spend mana on a small smattering of permanent stat upgrades, summoning units, and buying souls.

The other two are much more interesting.

Skill points are used to get access to spells, and to buff those spells. For example, one of the earliest spells in the game is the Goblin. Putting 1 point into it lets you hire goblins, and additional points buff the amount of poison goblins apply when they attack.

That said, the number of goblins (and other units) are still limited by souls. There’s a bunch of ways to get souls, but even at the very end of the game, I only had around ~2000 or so.

So this is the part where things get good, and change from most other idle games I’ve played. It’s free to respec skills, and change builds. But since the player is still limited by the number of units they can field, it’s necessary to think about army composition.

This turns the game into an optimization problem instead of just clicky-clicky number go up.

As I reached higher and higher walls, I found myself respeccing constantly. Maybe I’d just unlocked a new spell to buff skeletons. Maybe it was a unit that let me apply poison more effectively. Maybe I just had enough mana generation to sling unending waves of fireballs, ignoring units completely.

My personal favorite combo was one where I constantly sacrificed skeletons, causing them spawns ghosts that slammed into the wall, applying poison stacks. These skeletons would then be re-summoned automatically, and the process would repeat. It was a sort of necromantic carpet bombing, and I enjoyed it immensely.

This was the best part of Journey to Incrementalia. Looking at the skill tree and trying to do napkin math in my head to get the biggest numbers possible, or realizing that I’d overlooked a spell or upgrade, was a lot of fun. So was spotting overlooked combos.

Some Criticism

Journey to Incrementalia is very fun when you have a bunch of skills to play with. When you don’t, it’s much less enjoyable, and this included much of the early game. Pretty much everything to the 25th wall wasn’t as good.

The game also isn’t particularly replayable. Different selections on side-quests didn’t result in different rewards or quest text, something I found disappointing.

Finally, the game is still somewhat buggy. I didn’t hit any major issues, but I did find a bug where I could summon infinite volcanoes, which slowed my PC to a crawl. I’ve also seen posts from some folks whose game has just straight up bricked. Some of these have already been fixed, but these would have been dealbreakers if I’d encountered them.

Overall

Journey to Incrementalia was most fun when I browsing the skill tree, and doing napkin math. It was at its least fun when I had done that math, and was just sort of waiting for my strategy to play out.

I’m actually fine with the game’s length, even if I wish it came online a bit faster. There’s also a few spoiler-y late game mechanics that I wish it did a bit a bit more with.

Perhaps if it did do more with its narratives or builds, I’d feel more strongly about recommending it. As it is though, I don’t hate it or love it, and I’ll leave that decision to folks with $5 and an afternoon or two to burn to answer that question.

TCG Card Shop Simulator

I was having trouble finding something to write about this week, so I finally bit the bullet and bought a game I had hesitations about, but thought I’d enjoy: TCG Card Shop Simulator. And I was right on the money!

And while I personally enjoy the game, it currently lacks depth in any of its systems. I don’t really want to recommend it in its current state.

Side note: In that sense, it reminds me of MMORPG Tycoon 2, a game I purchased 3 years ago, and is now on version 0.2. Early access is a grave of ideas.

But let’s say you do fork over $13. What do you get right now? A sort of abstract sim game with some card collection elements. Here was my experience.

Tales From The Gameplay Loop

After I named my store, I ordered inventory and waited for folks to wander in. When those customers finished their browsing, I went and checked them out. The checkout mini-game is a majority of the “gameplay” that I’ve seen so far. There is a small element where customers can show up smelly, and need to be sprayed with air freshener. I dealt with this by setting up two auto cleaners near the entrance to my store to double blast anyone who walked in, like it was a tower defense.

While the player can hire helpers NPC’s to run the checkout, the only one I could afford was so slow that I just did it myself. It felt more practical to have them stock shelves, where it didn’t matter that they moved like molasses.

The other parts of the loop involve buying new furniture and displays for the store, buying stock, adjusting prices, and selling singles. More about selling singles in a bit. First, let’s talk about the other parts.

My general take on this game is that it functions mechanically, but lacks real depth to any single system. Employees don’t get better or worse as they work for you. There are a few different types of furniture, but they all function the same, and there’s only one type of play table. NPC’s don’t have names or preferences, there are no regulars, grinders, or “That One Guy.” The player can adjust prices, but it doesn’t seem to influence market value.

Furniture is both deeply unaspirational, and as as my friends will point out, better than what I have in my apartment.

In that sense, the game feels very static, almost like a clicker game. I would wait for things to happen, acquire money, buy a bigger store, buy more stuff to put in it. Rinse, repeat.

A sort of capitalist zen garden.

But I never felt like I was really working toward anything, or making more than incremental progress. That said, I do want to talk about one system the game has that did make me feel something.

Cracking Boosters, and Selling Singles

TCG Card Shop Simulator has a fairly reasonable system for opening booster packs to add cards to your own collection. It’s nicely animated, works reasonably well in partnership with the rest of the game, and is mildly compelling. But it’s not what I want to talk about.

No, what I want to talk about is how this game has finally made me understand why stores don’t like selling singles, mostly because the process is a huge annoyance for tiny amounts of profit. I never want to sell a single under $10 ever again.

And this is in a sanitized, digital version of the process! I don’t have to keep perfect inventory, or look up pricing, or worry heavily about shelf space. But every time some unblinking digital homunculus walks up to the register with a card that’s a $1.27, and a $5 bill, I want to leap across the counter and chase them from the store.

So in that sense, this game has made me feel a weird sort of sympathy for local game stores, and their equivalents. I now understand why no one wants to sell me 30 commons for $8.71.

Overall

Sure, TCG Card Shop Simulator is fun right now in a sort of zen/whiteout sense, but there’s no guarantee it will ever get all of the features it has promised, or even that I’ll remember the game exists by then. If you have $13, and need to just zone out from the world for a few hours, it’s great.

After 8 hours, my card store looks like… well, pretty much any other card store on the planet honestly.

But it lacks any real depth to any system, or even the aesthetic customization that would set it apart as a fun toy for designing a dream card shop.

TCG Card Shop Simulator is $13 on Steam.

Post-Script

As far as I can tell, NPCs in TCG Card Shop Simulator don’t react to anything you do, including jumping on tables, throwing boxes around, and just generally nuisance in the store.

Somehow while playing, this manifested into me envisioning my player character as a sort of long limbed, pale cryptid that always wears a flat cap covering their face, speaking only in curses and praise, clambering over counters and leaping across tables as it restocked and moved to check people out.

It also made me realize that I would still probably shop and play at this store, even if the owner occasionally scuttled across the table in the middle of the match if the prices were good enough.

This was followed by me roleplaying as this character for 30 to 40 minutes, including nodding my head, and saying “Blessings upon you, yes, yes!” whenever someone paid with exact change.

This is not a thing I usually do in games. I don’t know where this came from. Also, at some point I decided they had a tail like a lizard.

He should really be skinnier than this, all bones and sinew.

Thanks for reading.