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As someone who has long been a bit huffy about the absence of the complex CCGs of old in the digital space (and more than a little bit over the state of the Magic Duels client), and who has settled in to grumble and curmudgeon while I wait for The Elder Scrolls Legends and Duelyst as the closest thing* we'll get to L5R/any Living Card Game for iOS, Star Crusade is more than a little bit out of the left field. We’re still doing the HS thing, no doubt. But Star Crusade mixes it up more than any proud clone in denial before it: Something I’ve never seen before, but there are actually TWO additional resources beyond Supply (mana). One is a secondary character resource gained from destroying enemy troops and face-ing your opponent. It is used to power special abilities, but also to energize your cards, which plays them with additional abilities or stats. Considerations like this adds to complexity in a way that necessitates further and farther planning, and also makes interactions - and the tactical choices they produce - more flexible and variable. The other is weirdly situational but also very clever: Firepower, granted by cards that explicitly increase firepower. It increases direct damage (damage from non-critter cards). In addition to being a very flexible mechanic that offer more mechanical and tactical variety, that can shift the balance of power in a number of ways, surprise, create room for more strategies and reward forethought and planning, it can also serve as the kind of catch up mechanic that Elder Scrolls Legends does so well with their Rune card draws. And that is so badly needed in a post-Hearthstone world. In addition, there is a larger number of pre-set (words-in-bold) abilities than I’ve ever seen in any CCG but the the physical classics. There are THREE different abilities that prevent damage in different and moderately smart ways. More attack abilities (attack twice, attack upon summon, etc) than in HS. More ways to empower cards, or have them synergize. From the limited card set that is available, there also seems to be a greater number of unique card effects than HS. Along the lines of Elder Scrolls Legends. Remains to be seen if that trend will proliferate as the card base grows, or if the devs have exhausted their mechanical smarts already. Characters/classes (“races”) also have three special abilities, active as well as passive. I’ve yet to make up my mind how they influence gameplay yet, or if I even like principle (I was glad to see TESL remove them altogether). Deck building is maybe a little bit more flexible than in HS. I think. Can’t really say for certain. After constructing all sorts of fancy, pretentious deck combos with high-flying, multi-step routines in HS, I found the most success by just putting all my beasts into one Hunter deck and watched them synergize to the high heavens. Perhaps deck building is overrated. But Star Crusade is not on a par with Elder Scrolls Legends’ and Magic’s color principles in this regard, regardless. All together, I feel a little closer in spirit to Magic/L5R/LCGs in how deep and wide and far I must go to string together synergies, counter threats, establish and maintain reliability, control the board and cover my bases. I have more options to do all of these things. Win-win. But it is a VERY small step still. Two steps away from the hearth, 98 to go until sufficiently gathered... The interface is nice enough as well. I’ll never understand Blizzard’s antagonistic decision to have us tap our hands before we can drag cards from it on the iPhone. Luckily, that’s the one thing from HS that does not seem to have become archetypical. In Star Crusade, the UI works as any CCG should, intuitive and quick and consistent. I’ve a particularly high threshold for the kind of fancy board animations that my old physical Call of Cthulhu and Netrunner cards would have no truck with anyways, but I suppose Star Crusade is at least Oh, and the help files put all other digital card games to possibly redundant shame. There is literally a video for any kind of operation or mechanic, and these can be invoked directly from the cards themselves. Given how quickly relatively simple rulesets of the Hearthstone paradigm become second nature (and how modern CCGs and MOBAs have proven casual players fully capable of stampeding past any difficulty thresholds), I don’t know if this is a worthwhile investment. But it is a sign of attention to detail. And might actually bring in the rare few who still feel alienated by the digital CCG onslaught. What I really miss, spoiled by the Elder Scrolls Legends beta’s campaign mode and single player arena, and Duelyst’s lore challenges, are ways to advance and earn space cash for boosters in single player. The requisite modes, ranked and casual and areana, are there, but there is currently no single player content beyond a practice mode that unlocks a few additional races. Single player in brutal online player-versus-player card combat, ya say? Yeah, who knew, it is actually the perfect complement, allowing us to play when we don’t feel like a real challenge, when we want to be divided and neglect our turns, without regards for connection loss beyond having to replay the match, or when we simply wish to grind in peace until we own every single card and realize that in a properly designed CCG card availability is only a precursor to winning, not a guarantee. And yet, for AAAAAALL this praise… Star Crusade still represents a very cautious incremental step away from the comfort and safety of brightly coloured Hearth and static walls of Stone. Into space, admittedly. But with a modest shuffle, rather than on wings of steel and trailing plasma and wormhole radiation as we plunge boldly into the unknown. Whatever design is new here is only novel for temporary scarcity of choice. New in the sense of “a few expansions out from the current state of the dominant paradigm”, rather than the drastic and impressive design decisions innovative developers of physical card games have produce to secure unique niches for their MtG challengers in the last three decades. So for me, Star Crusade still offers limited appeal, and will only last for so long. Where so is a direct function of the ETAs of the mobile Duelyst and TESL clients. And for all my comparison-induced praise of Duelyst and TESL, these games really represent the bare minimums in mechanical complexity and variety I require to invest time, money, sentiment and all functions thereof into a competitive online card game. So as I sew shut and mop up a post that was intended to be three paragraphs long, I’m not quite sure who either Star Crusade or this review is for. I suppose there might be a class of citizen who have grown weary of Hearthstone and are ready to leave behind years of investment, both material and emotional, but still seek an ultimately near-identical experience rather than an evolution of the format. If you are one of those so strangely blessed, this might be one of the finest gaming experiences available. Me, I’ll make the time pass by rambling in forums with badly hidden snobbery about just how good card games could have been if every dev catered to my miniature market segment, until Fantasy Flight finally gets their stuff together and risk their good name and full coffers on the very dubious assumption that a format based around the personal meeting and hardcore enthusiasm will translate into a digital realm already dominated by the accessible. If you are a snob like me, come join me in Duelyst and Legends until then. * And brilliant games in their own right, I must say. Duelyst is just unique in all good, intricate ways (presentation, lore, mechanics), and deeply tactical once the minions hit the board. And TESL is perhaps the perfect hybrid of Hearthstone's casualness and the complicated mechanical shit of yore, as well as superbly polished, brimming with content, and really quite atmospheric, in a static, cardboard-passive sense of the word. And both are generous with gold and card gain to more than one fault. It's slowly becoming a good time to be a card gamer on mobile.
