Category: Card Games

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – Pre-release and Thoughts

Ed Note: I wrote most of this back on Feb 27th, then got busy with a few things, and didn’t finish it until today.

Another Magic set, another prerelease. There seem to be a lot of those these days, don’t they? And apparently we have Secrets of Strixhaven in like 6 weeks? Jesus Christ.

Anyway, Teengage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I’ll be doing a little bit of UB ranting as I do this, but I mostly write these after-action reports for myself, and so other folks can take a look at my pool and prepare themselves for limited events, so let’s pull that pool up.

Apologies for the slightly scuffed image; the missing cards are two copies of Anchovy and Banana Pizza (sorcery speed artifact that kills) and Krang and Shredder (late game bomb).

As a side note: only 5 people showed up for this release. This meant that each round, someone got a bye, which was a bit disappointing. At the same store, Lorwyn sold out.

Deckbuilding

I am deeply ambivalent about this deck. On the one hand, all of my strong bombs were black, I had 4 pieces of removal in black, and I had a reasonable amount of decent white stuff. Plus I had Quintessential Katana, which did a ridiculous amount of work.

On the other hand, post release I sat down and realized I had some pretty good red stuff. And as we’ll see, it’s not like the deck I made performed great, so it’s hard to feel like I really made the best choices here.

In any case, this was a set where I didn’t get a chance to test dummy pools, and I did less prep than I probably needed to. It will be borne out in the results.

So lets talk about the matches!

Matches

Match 1 was against Red/Blue artifacts. This got off to a good start, when I manged to take a fairly decisive game 1. Perhaps a bit too decisive, as I was confident going into game 2, and not as worried as I should have been when I lost.

And then there was game 3. Oh, game 3. Game three was a mess. I made several critical misplays, most notably where I whiffed a Make Your Move on a Ray Fillet, Man Ray that my opponent removed a +1/+1 from, causing both the spell to fizzle, and them to grab an extra card. This was compounded when they dropped a Donatello Mutant Mechanic that was I completely unable to remove.

End result was a board state where I was chunked down by artifact creatures until I died.

Game 2 was another match against… Red/Blue artifacts! This time I managed to win, but I’ll be honest, I don’t remember exactly what happened, and I didn’t keep great notes for this one. I do remember that I managed to play Armaggon, Future Shark to wipe their board.

Game 3 was… a bye. Yeah, remember when I said that we had a total of 5 people show up for this prerelease? This was the result. A 2-1 record, that really was more of a 1-1.

Overall Thoughts

I’m obviously unhappy with my performance in this pre-release. A 2-1 record isn’t great, I made a bunch of avoidable misplays that potentially cost me games, and then I got a bye so I didn’t even play a third match. I usually like byes, but only when I’m already winning and I get a break.

I’m also really unhappy with how TMNT plays in Sealed. I’m pretty sure I used the set mechanics less than I played games. Disappear and Sneak are cool in theory, but I had none of the core support cards like Dream Beavers to enable them. The end result was a very bland experience, one where I spent most of my time just playing a very dull game of Magic.

There’s a temptation to paint all of Universes Beyond with a broad brush, and while the product as a whole likely comes from a CFO’s desire to Scooge McDuck into a vault of money, the individual sets have been varied in quality. I’ve really enjoyed Avatar, Lord of the Rings, and Final Fantasy.

TMNT was not like those sets for me. It was a fairly mediocre experience.

Post Script: This is going up a bit later than I had intended, but since release I’ve done a few drafts, and… yeah, draft is better, but I still can’t say I love the set.

This set has convinced me that I’m probably good to skip most of the Universes Beyond sets for the rest of the year. There’s too many of them, and I’m just not interested in playing them in paper. If they’re actually good, I’ll just draft them. But I’m tired of pre-releases every 5 minutes for sub-par turnout.

My LGS cancelled weekly Lorcana, and now the game is dead.

Non-Clickbait Title: Ravensburger has shot itself in the foot repeatedly, and it killed my local Lorcana scene.

Okay, so that’s a little bit of a lie. My local game store (LGS) did cancel their weekly Lorcana events, but as far as I’m aware, the game isn’t dead. Yet. But the local population of players has cratered.

I like looking at weird things that happen in TCG’s, and Lorcana has recently given me an interesting little case study in players at my LGS, and how/when the drop-off happened.

I also think that for the specific population of players I played with, I can trace back the decline to two or three fairly specific events, and that interests me! So let’s talk about it.

But first…

Why does it matter that weeklies are cancelled?

The store I went to for Lorcana ran casual weekly events. These were non-prized, non-competitive freeplay events. You bought in for $7, got a booster pack of your choice, and were entered in a raffle to win some other organized play prizes.

These events were the lowest possible entry point to get into Lorcana and connect with the local community. If you are brand new to the game, if you’ve never played a card game before, if you didn’t go out to card game events… this was the easiest way to try out the game in the lowest stakes, most chill energy environment available.

Without these events, the first rung on a ladder of getting into the game has been removed. It won’t stop weirdos like me who show up to sealed events for games they can’t play, but I do think it makes it much more daunting (and expensive!) for almost everyone else.

I think this is bad, but I think its especially bad for Lorcana. A lot of Lorcana players in our local were Disney fans first, and Lorcana players second. The traditional label for this would probably be “casual” players, but I don’t think that fits here. These were folks who came to every pre-release and bought cards by the booster box. They might have played the game casually, but they didn’t engage with it casually. They were more interested in making decks around their favorite characters than trying to break the meta.

Anyway, that’s a lot text to say:

  1. Loss of weeklies was bad because it removed the first step in on-boarding for new players or players who wanted to get more involved.
  2. It’s especially bad for Lorcana because it removed the environment where a lot of players could play the sorts of decks they liked to make.
Cause #1 – Weekly Challenges

Prior to Lorcana’s set 9 (Fabled) release, Lorcana weeklies had a point a system. Each week, you could show up, earn points for doing a variety of different things, and at the end of the season, the folks with the most points got some special prizes.

I don’t want to focus on the prizes here, but I do want to look at the challenges. Some of them notably rewarded playing weird decks. So instead of everyone just showing up with their best deck each week, there was an incentive to build out a deck to try to meet that weeks challenges, or to play a multiplayer game.

In short: there was a reason to keep things fresh.

(And as a side effect, probably lower the power level of the decks of the players who really wanted to earn points.)

When Ravensburger got rid of this, it removed both the incentive to show up every week, since prizes were now just raffles at the end, and it also meant that there was no reason to even try to make a new deck every week. Meaning that on a week to week basis, every week started to feel the same.

Cause #1.5 – Prize Adjustments

I debated giving this a full sub-section, but I think its comparatively minor. A bit after the weekly scoresheet changes, Ravensburger swapped out their prizes. Previously, I think there had been things like playmats, pins, and cards. Right now, there are only cards and these really underwhelming card boxes.

How underwhelming? Underwhelming enough that I, the king of taking free stuff, the supreme sovereign of snatching up game-adjacent garbage, paused before accepting one of these things. I mean, I still took it. But I was unenthused.

I don’t think that this on its own really did too much damage to Lorcana, but I do know that for specific players, this was highly demotivating. It wasn’t a bomb, but it was a surgical removal of another incentive for that set of player to show up and play.

Cause #2 – Set Rotation

Different games have different terms for the idea of set rotation, but all of them loosely follow the same idea: at some point in the lifespan of a TCG, older sets of cards removed from the standard play pool in order to make room for new sets of cards. It can be viewed as a necessity in order to prevent the game from becoming stale, or a way to get people to buy new cards.

Regardless, virtually every card game does it, and Lorcana was no exception; they called it Core Constructed. And after their rotation, Lorcana required that decks at these weekly casual events be in the Core Constructed format.

I think this was a terrible idea.

I do think that Lorcana needed rotation from a mechanical standpoint. Set 1, while not committing any of the flaws of say, Alpha Magic, or base set Pokemon, has some flawed designs.

Honestly, on the grand scale of “Well that was a mistake,” a free Wheel of Fortune still ranks lower than “What if land destruction was free?” or “What if you could take turn 5 on turn 1?”

So yeah. Rotation made sense from a competitive standpoint, and a design standpoint.

But I don’t think it made sense for the large subset of the player base who were Disney fans first, and Lorcana fans second. There were a fair number of adults and kids who could no longer play their favorite deck because those cards weren’t reprinted in Fabled, and so… they stopped showing up for weekly casuals.

Synthesis

So when my LGS held their final casual Lorcana event, I was the only person who showed up. I sat around for a bit, did some drawing, then went food shopping while the rest of the store was full of folks playing Riftbound.

The removal of weekly challenges and prizes disincentivized entrenched players from showing up to play, while also making the ones who did show up bring the same deck week after week. Set rotation killed off a lot of casual decks that didn’t need to be killed off, while making folks who’d never played a card game before feel a bit cheated, and question their investment of time, money, and energy in the game.

So here’s my guess as to what happens next:

The lack of casual play will remove a critical part of the playerbase pipeline. The events that are still supported will have lower and lower turnout, as it becomes less and less interesting to play with smaller numbers of people.

End result? No more Lorcana at the local game store.

Conclusion

Okay, so I know I called that part above this synthesis, but I think there’s a much more interesting takeaway here: Ravensburger doesn’t understand their playerbase, and treated them like they would Magic: The Gathering players.

To be fair, I would have made the exact same mistake if I was in their position. No one has to put me in charge of a possible multi-million dollar TCG yet, based off a brand worth billions of dollars, but still.

There’s an assumption that the final form of the “hardcore” player of a CCG/TCG is out grinding tournaments, tracking their full collection, building copies of and iterating on meta decks, and just generally fully engaging with the game portion of the collectible card experience. I think in the case of Lorcana, some of the meat and potato grinders weren’t doing that. They were collecting, they were buying tons of cards, and they were making fun weekly decks for character they liked.

These were the ‘hardcore’ players. They attended every prerelease, they had built decks for store championships, they tracked every set. But the game was only a portion of the experience, not the end state. Lorcana had core players, but they looked and behaved differently than they might in another game.

Or at least, that’s my crackpot theory.

Quick Lorwyn Draft Review

Last night I got a chance to draft some Lorwyn! I’ve been curious about how this format would play in draft ever since the pre-release. My local game store, the Fourth Place did an event, so I figured I’d take the opportunity and head over. (Side note: If you’re ever in the area, you should stop by. It’s a great store.)

I would like to say that since the pre-release, I’d practiced and learned the set. This would unfortunately be a lie, because outside of a few drafts on arena, I have done zero prep. I hadn’t even bothered to look at a pick list.

Instead, I had a simple plan: ignore what everyone else was doing, and force Blue/White Merfolk.

This was it. The extent of what I’d learned from my digital drafts was that Tributary Vaulter and Shore Lurker could take people to pieces, and that Gravelgill Scoundrel made it possible to push through clogged boards.

So yeah, that’s what I did. Spoiler alert: I won the pod.

It is a deeply uninspired list, but still managed to be solid. Perhaps the only notable thing about it is the lack of rares, with Deepway Navigator being the only one. It runs 24 non-lands, and has 2 cards with mana value above 4. It also runs zero one drops. Pure and simple, it’s very much a “just find a way past them” style list.

The games were a pretty swift set of matchups, going 2-1, 2-0, and 1-1-1, followed a Bo1 playoff I won.

I don’t know that there’s anything I can even learn from this. While there were some close games, and I did take a few losses, it was almost always dependent on my opponent getting out something like Virulent Emissary or Scarblade Scout to have a bit more extra life, and slow down my early turns. The moral of the story seems to be that “fliers are good” and I kinda already knew that.

Overall, I have mixed feelings about Lorwyn as a sealed and limited set. Ignoring aesthetics and theming, the mechanics have never really clicked for me. While I was initially worried about the lack of removal during the sealed pre-release, draft has made it pretty clear that there actually is plenty of removal. At the same time, the very low number of counterspells remain a bit weird.

In the one to two dozen games I’ve played of draft Lorwyn Eclipsed, it has never really felt super fun or exciting. They’ve been tense! It’s felt good when I’ve won, or pulled out of sticky situations, but I’ve never had any huge moments of dropping a bomb, or feeling like I’ve figured out something incredible, or spotted clever synergies.

Some of it may just be the colors I’ve drafted. Merfolk arguably have the least interesting play pattern—mostly just tapping creatures through card effects. But there are only 8 convoke cards under rare, and only two are instant speed.

I like winning in Lorwyn. I just wish I liked playing a bit more.

As a final note, I’ve seen some complaints/comments online that the set really pigeonholes you into your archetype, with very little space to branch out. I don’t think I’ve drafted enough of the set to make the same statement confidently, but it does seem accurate to the experience that I’ve had so far.

Also, I promise I’ll go back to writing about games instead of just things I’m doing shortly, but despite losing my job, it’s been a weirdly busy last few weeks.

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.