The MLP CCG - first impressions · 9:52pm Dec 26th, 2013
Got a few preconstruct decks and a booster box just before christmas. Opened up with some friends, made decks and stuff. I've been into Magic: The Gathering and Legend of the Five Rings before, spending countless hours and just as many if not more dollars on the damn things, so I wanted to give this a try.
So how does it play?
Two players (multiplayer not possible at the moment). Players bring in problems that they try to solve. You can also solve your opponents problems.. You do this with your starting pony (being one of the mane six), friends, events and resources you play. You can also play troublemakers to hinder your opponent from confronting problems. It's decently well designed, but has a lot of HUGE flaws at the moment.
The first one, of course, is the rich kid syndrome. Out of ANY game I have seen in recent years, even far worse than Magic: The Gathering, this game has it the worst. Means you can just forget about buying a starter and a few boosters and just having fun. Why? Because if either of you pulls out even one ultra rare, he wins. Simple as that. Ultra Rares are ridiculously overpowered, even compared to Rare cards. For example, compare an uncommon for 3 bits that allows me to move it for half the cost and attack with three power, to an Ultra Rare card that costs the same to play, gives the same attack, can do the same cheap movement, but ALSO brings 3 other friends along. It gives a benefit of up to 6 bits per action compared to the Uncommon version. For reference, the bits are the mana of the game which you get according to the highest score among players. It goes from 2-5. So getting over a round's income worth of actions for a ridiculous discount. In simple mathematics, one Ultra Rare is worth 3-4 Commons in your hand. How rare are these UR's? I got three from my booster box of 36 packs, and that's pretty high according to The Internet(tm). You get one for about every 30-40$worth of boosters you buy.
I fully expected that Rares would be better than normal cards, but the joke is that half the Rares are useless. They do the stuff that's usually reserved for Uncommons in other games: fringe benefits and jank. Several of them only support some very unusual colour combinations (more on this later) that nobody plays. Commons have no place in decks on any level, not even on the casual. Just about every Common was just the same pony, just with a different image and a name. Same cost, same power, no abilities. And there's a LOT of them. It's like every common being a Benalish Hero or Grizzly Bears. There are a few Uncommons that are the backbone of your deck, but that's maybe 15 of your 45 card decks. Some styles of decks aren't even possible to play without the UR power cards.
The exception ofc are promo cards that weren't available anywhere else except in select big city tourneys in the US. Means anyone not in the US and in those cities has to shell out 120$ for a full set of three of those promos. Yes. 120$ for three cards. If you want the Ultra Rare cards, those are 20-50$ each. Means that right now, building a functional competitive deck would cost you close to 500$ easily. (EDIT:After some surfing, you could maybe reduce this to 300$ if you played a non-mainstream deck.) Means that if you want to play this thing competitively with other bronies, get ready to shell out ridiculous amounts of cash on it.
Second is the distribution of cards in the boosters. For some reason, there are several 'problem' cards in every booster. You only need a few of them to play, and you get a full set from a preconstructed deck. That's it. All the rest you'll get are extras. They are even worse than commons. It's like putting 4 lands in every MTG booster.
Third is the deck construction itself. You have to play a multicolour deck, or at least splash other colours a lot, because every problem that you play requires two different colours to beat. Sure, this gives you more avenues for building decks, but it also means your decks become less reliable. If you don't pull cards of two different colours in the beginning, you can't even face your starting problem. You have to splash on off-colour into your deck, but very few support the main mechanics of your main colour, so it just makes you play bad cards instead of good ones you'd want from your main colour.
Fourth is the actual game mechanics, as in, the tempo. The game is decided on round 1-2. If you don't get a good starting hand, you can't get an advantage, and if you don't, you lose. This game doesn't have any comeback mechanics. You gain power steadily and linearly, as does your opponent. In each game I played and watched (about ten) it meant that the first one to get a lead stayed in the lead until the game ended. The games became arduous exercises is going through the motions after the two first rounds. The games last too long even with one side dominating because there is a limit on how much you can score per turn. After the halfway point, both players get to score the same points, then have a faceoff, then do it again the next turn. Both gain victory points at the same rate, so it's like watching NASCAR...
...with no crashes, because fifth problem would be: No removal. Like at all. You have a few cards that actually move your opponent's cards away from the problems, and I think I saw maybe one or two that can dismiss (you know, kill) an opponent's friend cards in very situational circumstances. Then there are a few that can remove equipment/enchantments (called Resources) from the game. All of them very situational. So the more you zerg stuff onto the table, the better. There is an arbitrary 'home limit' that means that you can only have 3-4 friends hanging around your home, but that doesn't matter because you're already swarming the problems with your cards. Having no removal might make it more kiddy-friendly, but it also takes away any chance of taking out that _one_ Ultra Rare enemy card that is single-handedly destroying the whole game for you.
Sixth one is the faceoff/dueling system. When both you and your opponent are trying to confront the same problem, you have to fight for it. You add the power of everyone at the problem together and slam it against the other players team.
...And then you pull the top card of your deck to add its strenght to the total as a totally random element to the duel. This can range from a 0-6 bonus, which means that you can't risk a faceoff unless you are ridiculously in the lead. On the other hand, it's a pretty good thing because even the underdog 'might' win and score big. But then we come to the old luck-versus-skill thing. The reason why people spend so much time honing their decks is to make them reliable. Then you are forced into a situation where you have to put all you have into luck. I don't mind losing to someone because they outplay me, quite the contrary. But when I lose a game on luck alone, it irks me. Why not just roll a die to see who wins after all the preparation? Don't get me wrong here, I think the faceoff mechanic was a pretty interesting one and it actually hurts the weenie decks that play a lot of small creatures because their strength values are a lot lower. But the bad side is that even after the faceoff is over, both parties involved just return home. Nobody loses anything, and the winner gains a whopping 1 victory point (of which you need 15). Faceoffs are almost of no consequence. Sure, you could build a deck that focuses solely on them, Pinkie Pie being one of the stronger ones for that, but building a strong weenie zerg deck would still be better because you'd still win with the base numbers and the overwhelming numbers you can bring everywhere.
Seventh are the troublemakers. They are another make-or-break mechanic. In the early game, they win you the game and give you a ridiculous lead for almost no expediture or risk. In the later game, they are a waste of cards because your enemy can just laugh them to death. Very polarising and not really healthy for the game. You can play one on the first turn that makes your opponent discard a card EVERY TURN. If you're lucky, you get to play two of them. That's two cards discarded every turn until they somehow kill those troublemakers while you just leech victory points from your problems.
There is a lot of good in the game as well. Most of the cards are very thematic (You know, Rare and upwards, the ones that actually DO something?). Pinkie is random as hell and is best at pulling random shit. RD zips around with her pegasus friends (as long as you get the promo/UR versions of her and her friends). Rarity sees in the future and decides what you get to play, Twily profits from other's misfortune and solves problems for money, Fluttershy crushes people with her critter cavalry and, well, AJ is still useless, so they even got that right. Several cards are named differently from their 'fanon' names, like Snowflake is now called Burly Biceps (a far worse name, methinks). Fiddlesticks got her name change to something like Fiddle Waddle and is a Rarity card... ehh. Small details.
So the verdict is this: It's not very good. It COULD have been, but it's not. It's fun to play, but so riddled with bad design choices and especially because of the ridiculously overpowered Ultra Rares that it makes the Gameloft MLP iOS game look like a bargain. The basic mechanics are pretty fun and give a surprising amount of depth to the game. Those mechanics don't matter, though, because the first one who scores always wins the game. After that, it becomes a boring game of going through the motions in hopes of winning a lucky faceoff... that still doesn't change the fact your opponent is two points ahead of you and you can't do anything to pass them.
This is my opinion and first impression anyways. If you've had the chance to play, do tell me what you thought. As always, personal attacks/trolling/insults will earn you a quick delete and a block.
A nice, detailed review. A shame about the game design. My wife was kinda interested in playing with it but it sounds like we'd both get bored really quickly.
Not sure why Hasbro keeps handing this IP over to terrible game designers. I would like to see *one* good game come out for MLP. Be it a console game, tablet game, card game, whatever.
1650598 The game itself is not utterly terrible. It just lacks several mechanics that would usually balance specific types of decks, which are incidentally the ones running rampant right now.
I dont know too much about game design. Do you think a lot of these problems could be solved by introducing new cards and mechanics to counter those issues or would the core mechanics of the game need to be altered to solve it?
1651087 Definitely. Most of the game could be fixed with more cards. If they added more removal, mass removal at that, it would help the Brute faction quite a lot. Right now Weenie and Combo are too good and both of those would get fixed with targeted removal.
The only problem is that right now it's a pay-to-win game. M:TG, L5R, Pokemon and YGO were various levels of bad about this, (L5R was totally playable with uncommons. Promos were easy to get with little money straight from the company too. M:TG has gone from one end of the spectrum to another, with some sets even running better with non-rares.) This game takes it to a whole another level of money-milking though. I mean, it's so ridiculous that only Ultra-Rares and Promos are actually on the level that promotes any other kind of play except "build more ponies than the opponent, hit head on wall". Like I already said, that's also the type that is least efficient right now.
It's as if they were trying to get money from stupid fans of a kids' show that have way too much money to spend on trivialities, eh?
its obvious you havent seen the new expansions canterlot nights, and rock and rave
they fixxed most of the problems you pointed out
uncommons now have insain abilitys like drawing you a card every turn and other abilties like that
commons: same as above but have cards that have high power
rares: again really good as it introduces purples abilty to see your own deck
urs: still broken as all hell but very beatable
killspells: look at pink and white now, white has exile spells, and pink has your kill spells, hell the new pinkie mane turns your little 1 power dudes into walking time bombs
names: ok dude there are very few characters that they give the fanon name too, but they do give us some such as dj pon 3/vinyl, octavia, and lyra
trouble makers: ok yes yellow perasprite(the one that cuases discard) is broken more so if you can get two out, but also dont forget you can always pay to draw an extra card, but the mane thing for trouble makers are to stall your opponent or to attract attention
no comebacks: HA im sorry but thats funny, unless your opponent is at 13/14 you can always ceatch up
i hope you have learned something
2431559 Actually I run our local MLP:CCG group of about 20 bronies, arranging tournaments and going around cons demoing the game. I have a Maud Pie villain deck that crushes people left and right... except those damn fluttergui control decks. I do disagree on some of your points seeing as how there is still not enough mass removal to stop aggro and the pink/white removal outside of showdowns is still stupidly expensive and only serves to slow your tempo down.
Ahem. I might have to write another blog about the game, seeing as how I've done a full 180 with my opinions.
hey can you offer any advice about starting up a group?