{"id":724,"date":"2016-06-06T14:25:00","date_gmt":"2016-06-06T12:25:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/?p=724"},"modified":"2016-06-06T14:25:00","modified_gmt":"2016-06-06T12:25:00","slug":"spellweaver-review-its-magic-jim-but-not-as-we-know-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/spellweaver-review-its-magic-jim-but-not-as-we-know-it\/","title":{"rendered":"Spellweaver Review: It’s Magic, Jim, But Not As We Know It"},"content":{"rendered":"

Links open in new pages<\/strong><\/p>\n

Magic:\u00a0 The Gathering is a great game with a troubling digital<\/a> history<\/a>.\u00a0 In one sense, it’s really sad, because Hearthstone<\/a> is immeasurably polished – a thing that Blizzard is absurdly good at.\u00a0 And where Blizzard have gone, others have attempted to follow, because surely, if they can make it work to the tune of a silly number of people throwing money at imaginary cards that they’re never going to really own [because the servers will go down and then you’ll be left with nothing] then someone else has to be able to share the pot, right?<\/p>\n

Probably.\u00a0 But a lot of that is going to depend on lots of little factors.\u00a0 And where Spellweaver comes up strong in some of those factors, it’s just kind of bland and uninteresting for a lot of the rest.<\/p>\n

Let’s start at the very beginning. [a very good place to start!]<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>
Your starter pile. In PVP, this really is<\/i> a pile.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Spellweaver works the same way most of these [new] games work:\u00a0 you have a hero.\u00a0 The hero has a life total and a hero power.\u00a0 You build your deck based on the colour of your hero.\u00a0 If your hero is green, you’re naturally going to play mostly green cards.\u00a0 You can swing into an extra colour [but a third becomes problematic – I’ll get into that in a moment.]<\/p>\n

Cards are the usual suspects:\u00a0 You have creatures, spells, artifacts and enchantments.\u00a0 Spells are generally one-time effects, while creatures, artifacts and some enchantments stick around until they die.<\/p>\n

\"Spellweaver<\/a>
It’s important to stress that once you have the “levels” for something, you never have to worry about that part of the cost at all again. Ever.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Magic<\/a>
Magic costs are “all the symbols” together. You always<\/i> have to worry about “do I have enough of the base colour to cast this?”<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Oh.\u00a0 And in a curious throwbacky twist, this game has lands.\u00a0 Yes.\u00a0 Really.\u00a0 And lands have the same problem they do in Magic:\u00a0 don’t draw enough?\u00a0 Great, you’re mana screwed.\u00a0 And to talk about Mana screw, I actually have to discuss casting cost.\u00a0 And here’s one of the more interesting parts of the game [that also leads to one of it’s greatest downfalls.]<\/p>\n

In Magic, there’s the concept of “converted mana cost.”\u00a0 You take the number of total mana symbols on the card – coloured and otherwise – and you add them together.\u00a0 The way you read a magic card is:\u00a0 “this card costs two green” – and you have to pay that two green with specifically green sources like lands that can only produce green mana – “and six others.”\u00a0 If you control a smattering of green, red and white lands, you can pay the rest of the mana with that land.\u00a0 So, the converted mana cost is “eight in total.”<\/p>\n

In Spellweaver, it looks<\/em> like there’s a converted mana cost, because costs are always written as “two red symbols and three generic mana symbols” but this is the first real problem with the game.\u00a0 You never<\/em> count those coloured symbols as part of the cost.\u00a0 Instead, they’re the “level” of your investment in that colour.\u00a0 The cost of a card is literally always just the gem stone in the upper left hand corner.\u00a0 But you must meet it’s level requirement in order to cast it.<\/p>\n

For people coming from Magic, this is very weird.\u00a0 And it takes a while to get used to.\u00a0 It also has a design consequence:\u00a0 playing multi-colour in Spellweaver is very difficult unless you’re just splashing other colours.<\/p>\n

Because the game set up literally requires you to pay shrines to up your level in the requisite colour, it means that – especially at the beginning of the game – things start off really slowly while you dither around with “should I add a level in my colour?\u00a0 Should I make more generic mana?”<\/p>\n

\"Whoo<\/a>
This is me in PVE. I’m playing the grindy “easy” AI, but hey! I have a shot!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

And this is where the downfall of Spellweaver happens:\u00a0 that dithering?\u00a0 The players have decided it’s not worth it.\u00a0 A lot of the PVP boils down to who can get going the fastest, because there aren’t really any good ways to deal with a legion of guys.\u00a0 So the design intent of Spellweaver – which was to make colour matter – has forced another subtheme into the game.\u00a0 Speed matters.\u00a0 Because there’s so few ways to deal with a horde, everyone plays the horde.\u00a0 And not just “the horde,” but “the powered horde,” because they’ve been in the game for long enough that they own every card in existence.<\/p>\n

This creates a new player problem, which – in turn – is going to kill the game:\u00a0 players will try the game, discover there’s PVP, discover that the starter decks get you trounced in a matter of minutes if you play with them, and leave.\u00a0 Because…<\/p>\n

…getting cards is super difficult.\u00a0 In Hearthstone, you can buy a pack of cards almost every second day, but in that particular game, the cards you get for free are actually reasonable and matter to the long-term health of the game.\u00a0 Everyone has access to fireball in mage.\u00a0 Everyone has access to Hex in shaman.\u00a0 In Spellweaver, you have to pick your starter.\u00a0 And some of the starters leave…a lot to be desired.<\/p>\n

There’s also the speed with which you obtain cards.\u00a0 In Spellweaver, because it’s impossible to win in PVP when you’re just starting out [it seems like there’s no real match-making], you will simply never be able to unlock all of the quests for a given region.\u00a0 Nor will you be able to reap the fruits of playing in PVP [which gives better payouts] – you are stuck playing the incredibly<\/em> grindy AI.\u00a0 Incredibly grindy gives slow XP [and XP is how you unlock new starters – one every five levels] – and low money payouts.\u00a0 And this, too, is going to drive people away long term.<\/p>\n

That and the tutorial.\u00a0 Good Lord, that tutorial.\u00a0 It barely covers the game’s bases.\u00a0 It doesn’t bother teaching deck construction rules.\u00a0 It attempts to teach how speed works, but then leaves you somewhat in the dark.\u00a0 [Speed is a measure of how fast a creature “goes.”\u00a0 Really fast creatures can attack everything.\u00a0 Really slow creatures can only attack the creatures with their speed or lower.] – it never properly explains flying.\u00a0 [If you’re from Magic, it’s not the same.<\/em>]\u00a0 The casting cost dilemma is brought up, but never properly covered.\u00a0 The tutorial needs work.\u00a0 I don’t like the new digital incarnation of Magic:\u00a0 The Gathering, but it’s tutorial is [more-or-less] superb.\u00a0 Spellweaver can learn from that.<\/p>\n

Other than all this, the game is a pretty bland Magic clone.\u00a0 Land problems and all.\u00a0 It’s not a bad game – the art is fantastic – but it’s going to drown in a sea of other me-too games, because it’s not doing enough to differentiate itself.\u00a0 There is also the matter of the PVP being newbie-hostile.\u00a0 These twin things, I think, are going to make Spellweaver die a slow and – sadly lingering death.\u00a0 Which is too bad, in one sense.\u00a0 The art direction for the cards is rather good and my hope is that the creators are taking this kind of feedback on board and bettering the game, but this betterment is going to have to happen quickly.\u00a0 The digital card game boom is very nearly basically over, thanks to Hearthstone.<\/p>\n

Final verdict?\u00a0 Play, but don’t touch the PVP unless you dump a ton of money or time into the game.\u00a0 It’ll just make you feel bad.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Links open in new pages Magic:\u00a0 The Gathering is a great game with a troubling digital history.\u00a0 In one sense, it’s really sad, because Hearthstone is immeasurably polished – a thing that Blizzard is absurdly good at.\u00a0 And where Blizzard have gone, others have attempted to follow, because surely, if<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[10],"tags":[167,305,225,39,69,306,68],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/724"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=724"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/724\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":730,"href":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/724\/revisions\/730"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=724"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=724"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=724"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}