Shadowverse (ie: Anime Hearthstone)

So. I hope this doesn't already have a thread, but I couldn't find one.

This game just came out on Steam, although it's already gotten an expansion so it must be older than that. As the title of this thread implies, this is a digital collectible card game that plays almost exactly like Hearthstone. Except anime. Each player has a hand of cards, either followers or spells, that cost a certain number of points to play, and you get one more point to spend every turn up to a maximum of 10. Minions can't normally attack on the turn they're played, can choose the targets of their attacks, retain health between turns, etc. If you can think of basic Hearthstone mechanic, it's probably in here too. Oh, except no Hero Powers.

There's one big new game-changing mechanic though: Evolution. Each player gets a certain number of Evolve points at the start of the match (2 for the player who goes first, and 3 for the player who goes second), which never recover except from a certain Neutral legendary which is rather popular. Starting on turns 4 or 5 (again, depending on who goes first), you're able to use up to one point per turn to Evolve a follower on the board. Evolved followers generally get +2/+2 and Rush, which is like Charge except they can only attack other Followers on that turn. Some Followers have other special abilities that only activate when they're evolved, or when another minion is evolved. Pacing your evolves properly is the key to victory; they're absolutely necessary for making a comeback on the board, but if you use them up too early you're giving up a potential advantage later. For what it's worth, Evolved minions have totally different art and voicework, which is kinda cool.

Another thing is the existence of Amulets, a third type of card that's neither a Follower or a Spell. Basically they take up space on the board, but can't be attacked, and have various powerful effects.

There are seven classes, each with wildly different mechanics:

Forestcraft: Elves and fairies and whatnot. Their gimmick is that half their spells/followers create 1/1 token cards that go into your hand, and the other half get stronger based on how many cards you've already played that turn. In terms of Hearthstone, it's like a weird token rogue. A very interesting class that requires you to juggle the two competing concerns of having board presence with your tokens, and saving them in your hand for a big play later.

Swordcraft: Knights and ninjas. Their gimmick is that half the cards are Officers, and the other half are Commanders. Officers are cheap and aggressive, while Commanders will buff the Officers on your board. In terms of Hearthstone, it's a face aggro class based around flooding the board with small minions that will be buffed by the other minions you play (ie: Abusive Sergeant, the class).

Runecraft: Wizards and Alchemists. Their gimmick is Spellboost, a property that many of their cards have that makes some number on the card change for every spell you play while that card is in your hand. They might get cheaper, deal more damage, draw more cards, etc. The pinnacle of this gimmick is Dimension Shift, a 15 cost spell (remember, max is 10) that gets cheaper with Spellboost. And gives you an extra turn. Seriously. Their gameplan is to somehow survive with removal spells until they can get three turns in a row and kill you.

They also have a sub-gimmick that uses entirely different cards. They have a lot of Amulets called Earth Sigils that cause various effects when played, but otherwise just clutter up your board with Amulets that do nothing on their own. However, other cards will destroy Earth Sigils for awesome effects. Thematically, this one's about golems and alchemy. This is my main deck right now, so sorry if I went into a bit more detail than necessary.

Dragoncraft: Dragons. What'd you expect? Their gimmick is Overload, which causes their cards to have additional effects when they have over 7 play points (mana). A pure ramp class that can generate empty play orbs, and has several effects that discard the cheapest card in your hand to draw more cards (as well as some discard synergy). They want to get to their lategame cards ASAP and keep up an endless barrage of giant dragons.

Shadowcraft: Undead and Necromancers. Their gimmick is the expenditure of Shadows, a resource that builds up whenever one of their followers dies (or is created by cards that specifically create Shadows). These Shadows are then automatically used up by cards with the Necromancy tag, as long as you have enough, for various bonus effects. It's like... Necromancy 4 will use up 4 Shadows. Naturally, they also have a lot of Deathrattle (er... "Last Words") minions that create more minions, the better to die a lot for you. They generally don't use any sort of gimmicky game plan, they just overwhelm you with high value Necromancy cards.

Bloodcraft: Vampires and Demons. Their gimmick is Vengeance, which causes cards to have additional effects (notice a pattern?) whenever the player is below 10 health (you start with 20, so that's half). You also have a lot of cards that hurt yourself. The idea is that you stay right on the edge of death while barely keeping yourself alive with powerful drain effects. High risk, high reward. Or you could just go face with a swarm of bats. That's an option too.

Havencraft: Clerics and Holy Animals. Their gimmick is that instead of summoning minions directly, they can put down relatively cheap amulets that turn into powerful-for-their-price minions after X turns. They also have cards that will decrease the timers on their amulets, as well as a significant amount of healing effects. They play the slow game, but can be hard to rush down. One of their cards literally wins the game after 4 turns of it being in play. There's also a face aggro version, relying on summoned animals with charge.

Anyway, it's a free-to-play cardgame that's rather generous with free packs for new players. In fact, it's so generous that some people recommend continuously creating new accounts in hopes of getting a high number of valuable legendaries among the free starter packs (which isn't possible with Steam, I think). There are also a decent number of single player modes that offer gold or cards, including a fighting game-esque story mode.

edited 4th Nov '16 11:12:59 PM by Clarste

I have been playing it for a while now, it's been on mobile for 6 months or so I believe.

Aside from the fact that Dimension Shift is the most painful thing ever to play against, I think I like it better than Hearthstone currently. Being a F 2 P player though is more painful than HS.

And yeah no steam user can reroll sadly. I didn't know this was a thing till a couple of days ago. They throw a lot of stuff at you at first and it slows down pretty fast.

I have taken affinity to forestcraft and trying to ladder with [1] but a long way to go till I get the cards I want.

edited 4th Nov '16 11:03:07 PM by Memers

I know someone who made a quick Forest deck by literally disenchanting every single card from the classes he had no interest in playing. He started the day before yesterday and it's already pretty strong. It's sort of a flaw that, compared to Hearthstone, you want like 3 copies of every legendary you're using, but on the other hand you get 8 cards per pack and the odds of each individual legendary are higher.

Personally, I'm using this Runecraft deck. Honestly, it's kind of expensive dust-wise but I opened two Pascales so I felt obligated to build a deck around that. Given that I've been playing for like 2 weeks, it still feels pretty generous to me.

edited 4th Nov '16 11:20:08 PM by Clarste

Oh yeah, this has a basically atrocious Friend system, but here's my friend code: 856018820

Hehe, Clarste you show up in forums of like everything I'm into! I just started yesterday and my friend code is 998 943 869. This seems like exactly the kind of game I've been looking for, being a Yugioh player way back and all.

edited 11th Nov '16 9:45:40 PM by Moekou

Not much to say except that I'm still playing it. I guess you could feel free to ask if you ever want some advice.

Let's play together sometime!

I really want to try making a Flame and Glass deck for fun.

I'm a new player (moving from Hearthstone). Currently running a somewhat-shitty Forestcraft Purgatory deck and a far less appealing Discard Dragoncraft deck.

I'm getting constantly slaughtered in Take Two battles, though.

From what I understand, for Take Two you want a class that relies very little on combos or synergy. So Swordcraft or Shadowcraft. Although I've also seen people do surprisingly well with Runecraft Earth Sigil decks (just pick everything with Earth Sigil synergy and ignore Spellboost).

Incidentally, after getting to A rank I retired my Pascale deck because it's just too unreliable. I've been using a Face Dragon deck instead, and while I can't be sure if it's actually better, at least it wins or loses faster.

Well I am probably going to quit, Dimension Shift is the most unfun thing in existence! I am sorry but that card should not exist in a fucking card game.

Hearthstone may have some unfun shit but god damn cards that just grant you 3 additional turns to dick around and emote crap before killing you is enough to make me quit. The fact that you can't mute the opponents just rubs salt in it.

edited 17th Nov '16 7:35:18 AM by Memers

Kinda funny someone named Memers is annoyed by meme behavior. I don't play Runecraft (lacking in most key cards) but I find Dimension Shift pretty amusing in concept. It's an 18 cost card in a 10 max cost game, and can go wrong. It's also one of the only ways to get out Flame and Glass which I like since it's like Exodia...It's a card that could win the game or be worthless depending on if you can keep the combo going.

I just lost to Dimension Shift for the first time as I typed this haha but it was fun to see. In order to gather up the cards for the combo to drop 2 evolved 9/9 creatures on me the same turn they used D Shift, they had to turtle the entire game and could have easily lost if I was more offensive, or didn't happen to have 17 Health or he didn't have the two evolutions left. so it feels pretty fair. It's cool seeing such a big comeback

I was planning to go Fairy but I've been having a surprising amount of fun playing Dragoncraft, the one I least wanted to play thematically initially.

I'm since the ingame matchmaking system is worthless for private players, I'm abnormalagonist on Skype, feel free to add me to arrange some games!

edited 17th Nov '16 1:16:10 PM by Moekou

D-Shift honestly isn't a very good deck. It fits essentially into the "miracle" archetype where they just keep drawing cards, hoping to get the combo. Which actually describes a lot of the more popular decks right now, like Path to Purgatory and Enstatued Seraph. While I definitely find those annoying, and they heavily punish midrange decks like Pascale, I don't think it's fundamentally a problem with D-Shift as a card. I mean, yeah, it's essentially "Spellboost: win the game", but they still have to do something and it's easily countered by aggression, which forces them to use their spells less efficiently just to stay alive.

Not really, the spells and minions they use to stay alive and dig through their deck are the same spells and minions they are using to spell boost D shift and the 7/7, and they are damn good at staying alive even vs aggro.

But the 'I win button' isn't as infuriating as the way it's done.

I said "less efficiently". Yeah, they're the same spells, but maybe they're not playing Fiery Embrace for free, or they have to play Fiery Chains early and waste their mana. Or maybe simply not get the time to spam all their draw cards all day every day. And if they're super desperate maybe they'll have to play their spellboosted 7/7 early (to evolve and trade) and ruin their own combo. It's a complicated deck that has a lot of complicated things that can go wrong. And again, it has one of the lowest winrates of any top tier deck.

I can certainly see how it's frustrating to play against a deck when you can't tell what's going on since it's all in their hand though. But if you lose to them it's most likely because you had a bad matchup or they just got lucky. Which is honestly much more of a problem in this game: larger decks compared to Hearthstone make winning much more a matter of luck of the draw, since a greater percentage of your deck will remain unused by the end of the game.

edited 17th Nov '16 1:50:53 PM by Clarste

It isn't even always Spellboost: Win the game, half the time my opponents basically waste it because they need to just to buy a turn and stay alive. And it's an hilariously awful topdeck or card to draw later into the game.

Well, yeah, if they play D-Shift early then they're basically forfeiting the game.

I don't have most top Rune cards such as D Shift or Merlin, but I got a ton of crappy Conjuring Force. But I managed to get a win with it and Snowmen which I find hilarious. Summoned 4, opponents took these weak 1/1 mooks for granted, and then next turn I boosted them to 5/1 each and they all attacked for game. "Golly it's chilly in here!"

Conjuring Force is traditionally considered one of the worst cards in the game, so congrats on getting use out of it.

Can you not drop back to lower ranks once you reach a higher one? There were trials to reach rank B, and after getting the rank, even losing doesn't drop me back to C. I had planned to reach the top then drop all the way down so I can just play at low levels with uncompetitive fun decks while still earning points towards the monthly prizes...

Nope. Once you reach Master (the highest) rank, you're stuck there forever, unless Cygames decides to do a full ranking reset at some point, but for now, seasonal resets only affect Master-rank players, taking them back to Master 0.

Darn, so eventually to complete daily missions with crappy decks in themes I don't play, I'd have to play unranked and not earn any points towards the monthly rewards. Booo~ >.<

I seem to be on quite a big no-Legendary drought, the only one I've gotten in the last 20-30 packs is Skullfane#3.

edited 22nd Nov '16 8:05:18 AM by Moekou

Wow, after a long lack of new legendaries, I get two Rose Queen on the same day within a few packs (many hours apart, so no time RNG conspiracy here). Guess I have no choice but to make this niche deck! Anyone wanna play?

What are your favorite fun decks?

Rose Queen looks like a fun one. I always have trouble with late-game fairy generation though.

Today I got thrashed by an Mordecai deck. Apparently Urd can duplicate a Mordecai, a move that legitimately impressed me. It's pretty much downhill after that. Other notables today include an opponent finishing me with a Phantom Howl after I laid down two PTP. Man Shadow is strong.

I find Face Dragon fun, simply because I can't get over the cleverness of using Dragon Emissary (draw a card with 5+ cost) while only using Forte as a 5+ cost card. The biggest problem I have with this game is the randomness of draws, so effectively getting twice as many copies of a key card in your deck is pretty cool.

edited 28th Nov '16 4:31:52 AM by Clarste

New expansion announced! New keyword is Enhance. Cards with Enhance will have a 2nd, higher, play point cost that will automatically be used when you play them with enough points available (kinda like Necromancy). This causes them to have an additional, powerful effect. For example, a 2 point Dragon spell that deals 3 damage to a follower, that at 6 points also deals 2 damage to all enemy followers (5 total to the main target). So flexible cards with both early and late game value.

Some new cards.

edited 29th Nov '16 8:50:03 AM by Clarste