Category: Card Games

Magic Player shows up and wins One Piece TCG pre-release with no preparation.

The last time I wrote about showing up to a pre-release for a game I’d barely played with no clear strategy in mind, it was for Lorcana’s Azurite Sea. Last week, I decided to do it again, except this time for One Piece’s newest set: The Azure Sea’s Seven. I just want to note that it’s wild how close the the names of those two sets from entirely different cards games are.

We’re not here to talk about set names though. We’re here to talk about my “incredible” victory. Spoiler: almost no one else showed up. I played one game, and the fact that I won that one game made me the champion.

Not exactly my most impressive accomplishment. And while I’d have liked to play more, I’m also happy to just take the prizes and call it a day.

Still, this was my first time playing One Piece in a limited format, so let’s talk about how that went.

Deckbuilding

Normal One Piece deck construction requires that all of your cards match the color of your Leader card—a special card that starts in play. For Magic players, this is pretty similar to the rules for making Commander decks.

For limited One Piece, I was told that I could use any leader I had, and that I didn’t need to follow color rules. We were also all given a special Luffy that counted as all leaders and all colors. This led to my first big decision, because while I hadn’t brought any leaders with me, I had opened a Dracule Mihawk.

Because Luffy counted as all attributes, and my opponents were pretty much guaranteed to be playing Luffy, (none of us had done a One Piece pre-release before), Mihawk would be a base 6000 power to their 5000, making it a fair bit harder for them to attack into me, and much easier for me to attack into them.

On the other hand, running the all colors/types/names-Luffy meant that every single ability that cared about the Leader card would trigger, and that I could use any types. At the time, I thought the utility from running Luffy was the better choice, but looking back at it now, it might have been better to just run Mihawk.

Still, it seemed more fun to use Luffy, so that’s what I went with.

As for deckbuilding, this is normally where I would just include a list of the cards I picked out. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the presence of mind to take a photo of decklist, and instead just sorted things out when I got home. Still, I can at least talk about the deckbuilding.

I went fairly top-heavy with my deckbuilding, aiming to mostly include my higher cost cards. I figured that anything over 8000-9000 power would be pretty capable of just pushing through. I also tried to make sure I had a decent smattering of cards that drew me more cards.

Again, since I’m mostly a Magic player, I was going off of my experience with limited Magic more than anything else, and valuing bodies, and card redraw. If I’d picked up any removal, I would have taken it, but I didn’t see any cards like that in my opened packs.

The end result was a fairly top heavy deck with some lower cost cards to refill my hand and give me bodies early on in the game.

The Game

Since it was best of 1, and I lost rock-paper-scissors, my opponent opted to go first. Something that became very clear after just a few turns was that I had not remotely considered how valuable cheap blockers could be in the early game, trading a single card to block a hit to life points. Despite this, I did manage to take an early lead, trading aggressively and getting two or three hits into life points.

It was around this point that tempo started to switch, and I found myself on the back foot. My opponent had continued to play out blockers, and I found myself unable to push through. My opponent had accumulated a fairly decent amount of card advantage, something like 6 cards in hand to my 4.

(Side note: For folks who might not know why this is important in One Piece, many cards have a sort of bonus ability that lets you toss the card from your hand for a temporary defensive buff. It’s a very cool mechanic, but it also means that card advantage can give you more space to play with.)

I tossed down a Issho in an attempt to even up the card balance a little bit, bringing myself down to 2 to their 4, hoping that I would be able to end the game before I just got outpaced. It did not work as well as I had hoped, but it did force them to toss a few more cards to keep from taking more hits.

And this was where I found myself around turn 4-5. I was starting to lose control of the board state, I was behind on cards in hand, and my opponent had finally built up a board state that was both threatening lethal, and that I was unlikely to be able to respond to.

One of my last cards in hand was Whitebeard, and I had a choice. I could push my luck this turn, and try to go for lethal. It was possible that my opponent would be able to toss their hand, while trying to do the mental math, I thought it was pretty likely that I would be able to end the game that turn if they didn’t have two +2000 counters in hand.

On the other hand, if I committed to that path, I was guaranteed to lose the next turn if all of my attacks didn’t go through.

The flip side was that even if I did play Whitebeard, there was no guarantee I’d survive, and even if I did, I would still be on the clock with no real outs that I was aware of in my deck. As impressive as Whitebeard’s 8000 power was, since we were on turn 5, it would only take my opponent spending half or less of their don to pump someone to kill him after I used him to block.

All things considered, I ended up going with the riskier play, and it worked out! I managed to take the game.

Overall Thoughts

I really like limited formats for card games, but One Piece felt especially fun. I think way that Don works as a resource system combined with the All Colors Luffy made it a very interesting format. Notably, it’s also probably the only time I’ve seen limited-only cards really elevate a card game’s experience.

I’ll probably do another pre-release if I get the chance. I think I have a lot to learn about how to play One Piece. Limited always feels like a much better learning environment for me, because when I lose it’s due to skill instead of someone having netdecked better (and also is more skilled).

Oh, and since it’s fun, here’s a photo of the pile of prizes.

Lorwyn Eclipsed – Pre-Release and Thoughts

I went to a Lorwyn Pre-Release on Friday. It went well. I went 3-0 in my pod and got 2nd place overall after a cut to top 4. That said, I also think I got quite lucky.

If you just want to read and see the deck+pool, click here. Otherwise, I’ll be talking about the whole experience.

Pre-Event Prep

I did a little more prep than I usually do for events, but still not a huge amount. First, I did what I consider the bare minimum: reading through every card in the set on Scryfall. However, unlike some sets, I did this with a friend. I’ve always found having a second pair of eyes, and a chance to discuss things helps spot interactions or mechanics I might otherwise miss.

One thing this early review did was to make us think about Curious Colossus, and check how exactly its effect works. And while this was completely irrelevant to me, my buddy ended up opening TWO copies of it, and making it a build-around in his pool—something that might not have happened if we hadn’t known it was a permanent effect.

Next up, we did some test pools on Draft Sim. This is not usually something we do, but we had some time, so we loaded up some sealed pools for Lorwyn Eclipsed, built some decks, and put in the time to play two to three games with each. I’m always a bit leery of trying to take too many lessons from a single pool sim, but I think playing a few gave me a much better sense of the format, and the cards in it.

Here were my key takeaways:

  1. The lack of any two-color lands felt quite weird after Avatar and Final Fantasy, though to be fair, Edge also only had one fixer below rare (Command Bridge). In any case, running 3 colors “felt” more risky to me.
  2. Removal felt much lighter than many other sets in the past. (Below the rare slot at least!) It was hard to tell if this was just our test pools, or removal was just generally at more of premium.
  3. The lack of removal meant that bombs tended to stick around MUCH longer than they might otherwise, making them all the more valuable. Same thing for fliers.
  4. Red/Blue seemed like a weak pool to build in sealed. (Side note: Having played tonight, I’ve actually revised my opinion on this, mostly because of Tanufel Rimespeaker.)

So, my assumption going into the night was that it would be a bit of a sloggy format populated with some very scary bombs, and less removal than usual.

Deckbuilding and Pool

(To see the full pool, click this link)

After opening my packs, my assumption about removal felt fairly accurate. My kit promo was a Blood Crypt, and normally I’d be be excited about a foil shockland, but not when it’s only worth $10 instead of being an extra playable bomb. I had a single boardwipe in white, 2 red bolts, zero blue counterspells and a single bounce, two flier killers in green, and 4-ish pieces of removal in black.

My rares also failed to inspire confidence. I opened zero mythics, and another shockland, meaning two of my rare slots were somewhat dead. Between High Perfect Morcant, Maralen, Fae Ascendant, and Selfless Safewright, I decided to go into black green, splashing blue just to be able to drop Maralen.

Here’s what I ended up making.

Looking back at this, I do find myself questioning my choices, but not a huge amount. My game plan was simple: stall out the game long enough to get either Morcant or Maralen, and use their triggered abilities to take over the game. While it was possibly a good idea to run red instead of one of those two primary colors, I was worried I wouldn’t have the curve to support an effective red/black deck, or enough siege breakers to support red/green. And at the same time, my bombs were all multicolor.

It’s quite possible there is a better deck in this pool, or a few more blue cards I could have tossed in to improve this list. But at the time I felt fairly choked off by already having no fight spells, and figured I’d take my chances. I also thought if I got smoked round 1, and I’d swap in red as a primary color.

As a side note: for my first two games, I had a second Unforgiving Aim, instead of Requiting Hex.

Match Performance

Match 1 was a set of games into someone playing red/black goblin aggro. Game 1 was won by a somewhat unlike hero: my single copy of Rooftop Percher. 5 mana for a 3/3 flier isn’t fantastic, but I was valuing fliers highly, and figured the rider abilities couldn’t hurt. As it turned out, we both ended up filling our boards, and I was the only person with evasion.

My opponent also missed several opportunities to dig for an answer to the Percher with Gristle Glutton, and I suspect if they’d played a bit more aggressively, they would have likely beaten me. As it was, I got lucky.

In fact, that luck continued with game 2! My opponent flooded out, and I just beat them down before they could play anything to stop me. Again. Luck.

Match 2 was the game that made me reconsider my opinions about the elemental archetype. My opponent was running green/blue/red with an elemental focus. I don’t have any particular memories of game 1 outside of having to spend Bogslither’s Embrace on a Tanufel Rimespeaker to stop them from getting massive card advantage, but it was a close run thing.

Game 2 turned when I managed to drop Maralen, and pull enough cards with her from their deck to get commanding board position, and force my way through, mostly off of an Unexpected Assistance.

This brought up match 3. My opponent was a friend of mine who’d also gone 2-0 convincingly, and while I manged to win game 1, I lost game 2. Going into game three, things seemed to be going against me as my buddy managed to put out a massive swarm of smaller bodies and Kithkin tokens, with a Timid Shieldbearer backing them up.

Unfortunately for him, Magic the Gathering is a game where luck can just absolutely screw you. I managed to get out Maralen once again, and Maralen immediately pulled Adept Watershaper off the top of his deck. With that out, I was able to continually push into his board, and eventually force lethal in an all out push by Blight Rotting his pumped Reaping Willow.

With my 3-0 record, I made it to top cut. I won’t go into the details here, but at the store I play at, just playing more matches gives better prizing, so I was cheerful about getting to play at least one more match before getting defeated.

In what was becoming a regular theme of the night, match 4 (a best of 1) ended fairly quickly after my opponent flooded out, and I dropped a series of 2 and 3 drops into a fairly early Selfless Safewright and ended the game before too much happened.

At this point, though, my luck finally ran out. In the best of 1 finals match, I milled Maralen with my own Scarblade Scout, and then got solidly chipped down and out by Rooftop Percher, and Shore Lurker. Honestly, I wasn’t that surprised, as my opponent had built a deck that didn’t rely on its bombs as much as mine did. Looking back at my games, at least 2 or 3 of them turned on critical top decks, and my opponents not drawing into removal.

Still, 2nd place isn’t too bad.

Overall

Lorwyn is an interesting set. I think at least a few of my opponents deserved to take games off me that they didn’t manage to, but hey, that’s the nature of luck.

Personally, I’m a little underwhelmed by Lorwyn. Games felt very tense, but never felt very exciting, if that makes sense. I don’t have a strong feeling yet about if the set is a “bad” limited set. I suspect it’ll be a much better experience in draft than sealed, where typal can really shine, and removal will be easier to grab.

It was a bit of a bummer to see that all the shock lands I opened weren’t worth very much, and the the lack of foil stamped cards also was a bummer. I don’t know that I’d do more 6-pack sealed of Lorwyn, but I do want to try to draft it at least.

Anyway, that’s all for today. I’ve been going full tilt all weekend since Friday. It is 1:00 AM Sunday. I am going to sleep.

Then I will write about my One Piece pre-release, and Donkey Kong Bananza, and this F1 arcade went to, and Horses.

But for now, sleep.

Card Game Resource Systems

It’s Tuesday, I haven’t been playing anything new recently, and I need something to write about this week because breaking a habit is the killer of goals.

So today I’m just going to be rambling about resource systems in card games, mostly collectible card games. Also I’m going to be focused on what I’m calling primary resource systems: the resource generally used to take actions in the game.

Yes, life and cards in hand are resources. They’re not what we’re talking about today.

I’m going in roughly chronological order of game release date, and I’m only going to cover games I’ve played. I’ll quickly explain the mechanic, I’ll give my opinion on in, and I’ll move on.

All that said, let’s get started with….

Ancient Era

Yes, I could have called it something else, but all these games came out over 25 years ago, and I want to cause my editor pain.

Magic: The Gathering – 1993

As the oldest card game on this list, Magic is an undeniable influence on pretty much everything else, either mechanically or thematically.

Its primary resource system is lands. Lands are a card type that go into the player’s primary deck, and they can play a single land each turn. Lands are turned sideways to use them, and at the start of a player’s turn, all of their lands refresh. Cards have costs, and using a land pays for 1 unit in a card’s cost, so on your second turn you can play a card that costs 2, or two cards that cost 1, etc.

They are also deeply flawed. You don’t have to take my word for it on that one, because once we get to the “modern” era of card games in this list, it will become clear that every card game in the last 10 years started with someone looking at lands, and going “Yeah, no, we’re not doing that.”

The problem with lands come in three parts. First and second, because lands are in your main deck, players frequently draw too many lands, or too few lands, and both result in deeply unfun games; games where you have no real cards to play, or don’t have enough lands to play real cards. Third, because lands are one (or sometimes more) of the 5 colors you need, sometimes you’ll have the right number of lands, but the wrong types.

That said, the invention of lands as resource trackers and “1 a turn” escalation element works neatly, and leads to every future game trying to copy them.

Pokemon TCG – 1996

Of course, with Pokemon, we’re not in that modern era yet. So instead of a good clean fix for lands being in your deck, Pokemon has energy. On the surface, energy is similar in a lot of ways to lands. Like lands, they don’t do anything else, they start in your deck, and you can only play one a turn.

However, unlike Magic, most cards in Pokemon are “free”to play. It’s just that the Pokemon themselves don’t do much until you have enough energy to use their attacks. Pokemon also has a lot more card draw than Magic, so getting stuck with clogged hands is rarer (but still happens).

As a result, instead of an escalating resource pool, energy is more a set of thresholds that can be manipulated and protected. Plus, if the Pokemon that the energy is attached to is knocked out, that energy is lost. And you can still only play one Energy per turn.

I do think it’s worth noting that TCG Pocket, the mobile friendly variant of the Pokemon TCG released in 2024, got rid of energy.

Yu-Gi-Oh – 1999

The last pre-modern game on this list, Yu-Gi-Oh’s primary resource isn’t a land equivalent. Instead, I’d consider it to be a combination of “cards in hand” and the single “normal summon” a player gets each turn.

This gives it a distinctly different texture from pretty much everything else on this list. While many of the games here have a sense of slow pacing and escalation, anyone whose played any Yu-Gi-Oh in the last 5 years will be aware that it has the gentle pacing of a rail-gun combined with a roller coaster.

Frankly, as a resource system, I don’t like it very much. It does give Yu-Gi-Oh a very distinct feeling from everything else, but it also means that sometimes games are over before you even get to take a turn.

Middle Era – 2010 to 2016

Is this an arbitrary grouping? Yes. Will that stop me? No.

Force of Will – 2012 (Japanese Release)

And so we reach the first semi-modern game on the list, and the start of attempts to fix the land problem. While it emulates magic in color and card types, one thing it doesn’t do is copy land. Instead, all of your Magic Stones (lands) go in their own separate deck, and whenever you need to play one, you just pull one at random out of that deck.

This solves 2 of the 3 problems with lands, but doesn’t solve getting colors that you don’t want.

Still, it’s a start.

Hearthstone – 2014

Hearthstone, being a digital game, has a lot of tools that other card games don’t. One of those is perfect tracking of game state. It uses this to get rid of lands completely, and replace them with mana. You get one mana crystal per turn, you spend mana from them to play cards, and they refill at the start of your turn.

It’s a perfect replacement to the land system, but one that’s a bit tricky to actually copy into paper because it’s a huge pain to track, as it requires using something other than cards for maintaining game state. Not a problem in a digital game, bit of a pain in a non-digital one.

Modern Era

Hey look, we’re finally trying to fix lands.

One Piece -2022 (Japan Release)

It feels weird to me that One Piece has technically been around longer than everything else on this section of the list, mostly because I just started playing it, but whatever.

One Piece’s primary resource is DON. It’s actually very good. Each player starts with 10 DON cards in their DON deck, gets 2 additional DON after the first turn turn, and it also has a secondary mechanic where it can be used as a basic pump spell for characters you have out. Oh, and because you get two a turn, but the total number is capped, the game has some neat space to play around with making cards “cost” putting DON back into the DON deck without feeling as bad as losing a resource would in other games.

It’s great, and I have no complaints, except that I might have called it something else.

Gem Blenders – 2023

Ah, Gem Blenders. Gem Blenders is a bit of a weird one to start with, and unlike most of the other stuff in the Modern Era, it isn’t using a land replacement style system.

Instead, it’s back to Pokemon’s energy system (but called gems). Except now instead of thresholds for attacks, they’re thresholds for evolution. It’s a bit too entwined with the rest of the game’s systems to concisely comment on, but I will note that the game does have the same problems as Pokemon does. A bit better than lands, but not much.

Disney Lorcana – 2023

Lorcana’s primary resource is Ink, and much like the next two items on this list, it’s going to solve the land problem by making everything a land! Well, mostly everything. Instead of a 1 per turn land system, Lorcana lets you put 1 card per turn facedown into your inkwell.

But not all cards! Only cards with a specific border. To simplify things, this pretty much just means that all cards have a flag for if they can be played as lands or not, with more powerful cards lacking said flag, as a mechanism to make them more painful to dead-draw.

It’s a perfectly fine system.

Altered – 2024 / Star Wars Unlimited -2024

Both Altered and Star Wars Unlimited use effectively the exact same system, so I’m just gonna group them together. At the start of the turn, both players draw two cards from their deck, then can choose to put one card from their hand into their resource pool.

Again, another pretty straight forward system that tries to solve the problems with land.

Gundam Card Game – 2025

Gundam uses a system similar to One Piece, with each player getting a single Resource card per turn from a Resource deck. That said, it does have one small twist in that cards have both a resource cost, and level requirement. This means that a card with a Level of 4, and a cost of 1 can be played for 1 resource, but can’t be played before you have 4 resources in play (Usually turn 4).

It’s not my favorite system to actually play with, but it’s a functional one at least.

Wrap up, and some thoughts.

I opened this article with a discussion of Magic: The Gathering’s resource system, and I think that pretty much every post-2010 card game resource system can be seen as an attempt to fix the three big problems with that system.

To recap, those problems are:

  1. Not drawing resource cards when you need them.
  2. Drawing resource cards when you don’t need them.
  3. Not having the right type of resource cards to play cards.

Through this lens, we can see that there are two main fixes for these problems:

  1. Every card is now a land! (Lorcana/Altered/Star Wars Unlimted)
    OR
  2. Lands are their own special deck! (Force of Will/One Piece TCG/Gundam)

These are better systems, but the one thing we lose is the element of multi-color decks, and I don’t actually know anyone who has tried to fix that yet.

Anyway, happy Tuesday. I’ve spent close to two hours on this now. I’m gonna go get some breakfast.

One Piece Card Game

I had a busy weekend. I played a lot of Deadlock, I lost horribly at a Magic draft, and I fixed a lot of technology for one of my parents. I got absolutely none of the work I had hoped to do done, but I did get a chance to try out the One Piece Card Game.

Yes, it really is capitalized like that.

Wait, what’s One Piece?

One Piece is a manga series that’s been running since 1997, which is to say it’s only slightly younger than me. I could say a lot of things about it, but they’re not relevant to this review. All you really need to know is that it’s an adventure series, it’s been running for an incredibly long time, and… I quite like it.

No really, I’ve been reading this series on and off for probably close to 20 years. I check weekly for updates. Thinking about it, One Piece and Pokemon are probably the two longest-running franchises I have interest in.

So, a card game (I like those!) based on a manga (specifically a series that I really enjoy). I should love this right?

Right?

The Gameplay

Well, I love the gameplay at least, even from my limited exposure yesterday. There’s a bunch of cool systems here, and I’m going to try to hit the highlights.

First up, like all modern card games, One Piece CG sets out to solve the land problem. But it does so in a different way than some of its peers. You have a side deck of 10 DON cards. Then, each turn after the first, you flip out 2 of the them, and that’s the whole resource system.

In addition to being tapped for mana, DON can also be put onto your Character and Leader cards to temporarily buff them on your turn. I liked this, because it meant I felt like I always had something to do with my resources.

Other neat systems include the game’s life tracking. This is effectively Pokemon’s prize card system, but reversed to become a catch-up mechanic. Short version: when you take damage to your life, you get cards. I like it.

Combat also has combat tricks, and they’re done in a way that doesn’t require me explaining the stack to someone, while also making a vast number of cards multi-modal. I liked that as well. Combat is also a bit different from other games, but not in anyway that I feel compelled to elaborate. It provides lots of interesting choices, and I like it.

So. Bunch of great systems

The Things I don’t like

Let’s imagine there’s a Harry Potter TCG. Let’s imagine it’s very popular, and while we’re imagining things, let imagine JK Rowling isn’t a massive TERF.

I know, I’m asking you to imagine a lot.

But while we’re in this beautiful alternate universe, let’s say that one of the sets is based on book 6. Imagine it’s called “Snape Kills Dumbledore,” and the cover art is a great big picture of Snape blasting Dumbledore with Avada Kadavra.

That would feel kind of odd, right? Kind of spoilery?

This is something the One Piece TCG does. Absolutely huge plot points are just… completely spoiled/revealed in the names and designs of the sets? And the cards?

I dunno. It just feels weird.

There’s a bunch of other things that add to that weirdness, at least for me. I consider myself a One Piece fan, but I’m purely a fan of the manga. One of the decks that I played (And enjoyed playing!) was based around characters from a spin-off video game. A video game that reviewed quite badly.

I love One Piece as a manga, because of stuff like this.

Not 3D models that look like this.

Also, two other minor annoyances.

  1. Some of these card names are ridiculous.

Like, I’m sorry. What?

2. Many of the cards have character names displayed in the standard Japanese way, which is to say family name and then given name. The problem I have with this is that there is at least one archetype (Vinsmokes) where this makes it a bit of a pain to actually read and process the cards. This is minor, I’m sure I’d get used to it if I played enough, but it feels unnecessary to include the full family name because it’s also irrelevant to the mechanics of the game?

I dunno. Please don’t take this as me being culturally insensitive. But I’m just… frustrated by design decisions that while authentic, make the game harder to play.

Also, while this is just a hunch, and playing a few games of a TCG isn’t enough to really get a good read on something like this, I kind of dislike that the game seems to be following archetype-based design as opposed to color based design. It’s just a vibe, but it’s still there.

Overall

Much like with Star Wars Unlimited, I actually think these systems are great, but I’m a bit turned off by the theming. Which is weird, because I like One Piece and I don’t give a shit about Star Wars.

It feels weird to say that I’d excitedly play more One Piece, but have zero intention of picking up any decks or cards? Especially at some of the prices I’m seeing, like, $50 for the non-basic starter deck? I’m good.

Anyway. Great game. Cool systems.

Not sure I want to spend any money on it.

Super Battle Mon

Super Battle Mon is a sort of micro-TCG, where decks are 7 cards (10 total if you have a sideboard), games are 6-7 minutes long, and you can play without a table. More on that last one later. I quite like it!

Image of the Super Battle Mon Starter Deck Box Set

It’s also in the middle of a crowdfunding campaign for a pair of mini-expansion structure decks. So if any of this sounds fun, I’d encourage you to go check it out and consider pledging.

The goal of Super Battle Mon is quite simple. Each player starts with their entire deck in their hand, and each turn both players play a Mon. After resolving each Mon’s abilities, you compare your total Mons’ power to your opponents’, and the player with lower power discards a card. This continues until both players can’t play any more cards, and the player with the most Mons in play wins.

Two decks of Super Battle Mon cards are laid out on a card mat.

So what’s the catch? Well, there are quite a few. Many Mons can be cheated into play. Mons also have costs that have to paid by discarding cards, and each card spent paying those costs is one less Mon in play in the long run. There are mind games on what your opponent’s next Mon will be, and there are counter plays to overly devastating strategies. (Looking at you Capybara.)

And all of it is packed into a very short game that can be played in just a few minutes. And honestly, that form factor is a large part of my enjoyment. Games are so short that even when I did get blown up, I just dug into my collection and built a new deck.

Overall Thoughts

TCG’s as hobbies are notorious for being time and money sinks, but with Super Battle Mon, every booster pack is a deck. It’s possible to build a deck, play it, rebuild it, play it again, and then scrap it and build a new one in less time than a single game of Magic.

Is it a perfect game?

Well, no. Not yet. There’s a fair number of errata for the first set, and the ability resolution system is a bit clunky. Not a bad system. Just a bit tricky to parse correctly.

Still, Super Battle Mon does an excellent job of delivering on what it’s trying to do: the bite size TCG experience, without the pain points of most modern TCG’s.

And since they managed to fulfill their first crowdfunding campaign, I feel pretty comfortable pointing folks at the second one. So maybe if you want to play a card game with more playing and deck building then just buying cards, check it out.