Card Advantage

      Card advantage is an important topic in many trading card games. The theory is that the more cards that you have, the more options that you have in a turn and the more chance you have of drawing your best cards. I left writing this article for some time because I wanted to get an idea of more of the set before writing it. You see, Altered TCG is both similar and different to other TCGs when it comes to card advantage.

Things you expect

     The similarities are in the two standard forms of card advantage. Drawing cards and making tokens. Every faction is able to draw cards, though some are better than others at it. They all however draw cards in their own ways. Bravos gets card draws for doing Bravos things (putting boosts on characters and playing high-cost characters), Ordis gets boosts for playing lots of characters, and Muna draws cards alongside the opponent. Axiom draws cards for having lots of Landmarks, Lyra draws cards for doing random things or having zero stated characters, and Ymzir draws cards for sacrifices or casting spells.

     Creating token characters is the other typical way of getting card advantage. Axiom, Ordis and Ymzir all have token character producing artifacts or spells that can make multiple creatures with just the one card. The Axiom Brassbugs tend to be larger than the Ordis soldiers, but the principle is the same.

     Finally, there’s the traditional concept of a spell removing more than one character. Currently we only have one example of this (Kraken’s Wrath) which is in Ymzir and I suspect that is where we will find it primarily, with Axiom having it as a secondary effect.

New Things

     Altered works very differently to other TCGs. Instead of one hand, the game has two hands – an open hand (reserve) and a concealed one (hand). This gives us two ways of getting card advantage in Altered. The traditional card draw, which gives us two uses of a card (and worth 2 mana in the game) and the resupply effect that puts a card into reserve and gives one card use (worth 1 mana). Resupply tends to be represented mostly in the Axiom, Ymzir and Lyra factions.

     The second new thing in Altered is having a character hang around for extra turns. In traditional TCGs the creatures persist within the game, but in Altered they only last in play just one turn normally. Anchored breaks that rule, allowing a character to spend an additional turn in the expedition zone, meaning that the card effectively doubles its use in the game. This is virtual card advantage, since although you are not drawing a new card, you are retaining your existing card in play. This ability is primarily in Muna and is taken to a extreme with the Eternal ability. It is seen as a secondary ability in Lyra (Coniferal Coneman, Hydracaena), Ymzir (Meditation Training, Sneezer Shroom) and Bravos (Parvati, Dracaena) at a much lower level of occurrence.

     The final new thing in Altered is the ability to lose fleeting when coming out of the reserve. This is seen most often in Bravos (on Sun Wukong, Bravos Vanguard, Helping Hand and Hua Mulan) but seems to be secondary in Axiom (Athena, Bravos Vanguard), Ordis (Athena) and Ymzir (Helping Hand). This is similar to Anchored in that you can get the use of the characeter more times, however you need to pay for the character each time out of the reserve to get to replay it and it is vulnerable to sabotage.

     By splitting the card advantage up between all the factions, the design team has given each of the factions a different feel to the way that they play.