What I love About Altered and my Worries

     I’m going to start of on a positive note giving the reasons why I really love Altered as a game. The first and really obvious thing that you notice about the game is the art. The art is fantastic for the game, and it is instantly recognisable as a style, even though it is done by multiple different artists. Now there are tons of good artists out there and games with good art. I’m not much into anime art (it really turns me off games and makes the cards look ‘messy’ to me, so the art on Altered was a breath of fresh air to me. My wife always commented on the great art that was on Magic the Gathering, so although the art is fabulous it cannot be the only reason.

     The second thing that I noticed about the game that drew me to it was that Altered is very different to most other TCGs. The majority (though I accept not all of them) are about battle your opponent and beating them up until they have no life points left. Altered is one of the few games where there is no direct conflict, and the game is a race game rather than a game of direct conflict. The fact that its more inclusive and less conflict-based means that it is likely to pick up more people who are not likely to play another TCG. I think that this alone does something that many other TCGs don’t do. Even Keyforge, (which is another ‘race’ game as its goal) has creatures directly attacking other creatures.  The only TCGs that I can remember where there was no direct conflict between players was Mythos, but even that had attacks from Mythos creatures on your investigators.

     The next thing about the game that drew me in was that the game was very approachable. There are many games out there which are very complex and whose rule sets are somewhat difficult to grok. Magic has become overtly bloated and I recently looked at a new game where the rule set was confusing and not at all easily understandable. Games with things like the ’stack’ in magic may feel more ‘advanced’ and interactive but that complexity comes at a cost for those casual players who might want to pick up the game and play it. Lorcana ratchets back the complexity of the game to try and widen its audience to bring in all the Disney fans who were not necessarily the target audience for a normal TCG. Now Lorcana also has combat which doesn’t necessarily make sense in a Disney based TCG, but that is something that I’m not going to go into now.

     Perhaps the most unique thing (sic) about Altered though is the trading card model that it employs. This model has several parts to it that make it really stand out from all other TCGs and are things that will have not really seen much before.

1. Unique rarity cards that really are unique – I don’t believe that there are any other TCG where a rarity level means that there is only one such card in existence. Keyforge had a fixed deck that was a unique deck with a unique name, but all the cards within that deck could be in other people’s deck. This is the first time we have seen functionally unique cards that only one person has access to. This is exciting because your deck cannot be copied (or Net-decked) since the Uniques in your deck cannot be replicated. You can probably make near copies of a deck with Uniques from the same family of cards, but it won’t be identical. This really plays into my psychographic which is to have something that is my creation that I have built.

2. Physical security for your cards – Provided you scan your QR code straight away into the app, your cards can easily be replaced if they get lost, stolen, destroyed by your children or chewed up by the dog. Once you have the card in your app you will always be able to print the card again via the Cartamundi service. Now there is a danger of hacking to get hold of someone’s cards and that will need to ensure that Equinox’s data security is to industry standards.

3. An inbuilt trading market – Whilst there are online card markets where you can buy and sell cards, you are at the mercy of the seller to be honest in sending you the card you buy and to be honest in the description of the card’s condition. Here the internal market you are not buying the card but are buying the digital ownership of the card and you can then get Cartamunid to print you off a new copy.

4. An ability to play casually and to recoup a lot of your costs – So if you don’t want to play in competitive events, you can sell your collection digitally on the Altered app but keep your physical cards. So, if you are just going to be playing with your partner on the kitchen table you can buy cards and then recoup most of your outlay. This makes the game ultra casual friendly, which answers the issue of TCGs being a ‘money-pit’.

5. A rarity-based limitation on deck design – Another argument that is often made against many TCGs is that they are pay to win. Although I think that the argument will never fully go away, I think that Altered TCG goes a long way to limit this as much as possible. Since rare cards are better than commons and unique cards are better than rare cards, the obvious thing to do it just fill your deck out with all Unique cards. Altered TCG has tried to go against this obvious pay to win strategy by restricting decks to playing only 15 rare or unique cards, with only 3 of those can be unique. This means that you ‘could’ get a box or two and trade on the market to make yourself a pretty reasonable deck. This mostly answers the question of ‘pay to win’.

     I’m a sucker for good lore for a game. I got heavily into the WoW MMO lore for a long time and I read all the Magic the Gathering lore too. From what I’ve seen so far, the lore of Altered is Unique and different and something I want to know more about, so a big cheer for Yoshi on the Altered team for this.

     Last up on my list of big wins is the game play itself. The game play is fun and there are interesting decisions to make every turn a challenge and a great contest. Not only that but I find the game to be relaxing to play. Some games are high tense games that attract hugely competitive people who are not so fun to play against. All the people I’ve met chatting to and playing against with Altered have been so cool and an absolute blast.

Concerns

     So, I’m just going to finish this article off with a few concerns and worries I have for the game. These are mostly not major things, but they are in the back of my head, and I really hope they don’t come to pass.

1. The TCG market is very crowded with three established games (MtG, Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh) as well as some good and popular up and coming games (Flesh and Blood, Lorcana Star Wars Unlimited and One Piece). The last two of these have popular IPs associated with them, though Star Wars is now on its fifth game. With a market this crowded can a new, relatively unknown game with a new IP succeed. I really hope so, but it is a concern for me.

2. My next concern is around power creep. The first set (Into the Gates) currently has a bunch of vanilla cards to make the game less complex at the start and easier to learn. Going forward most of these very simple designs will have been used and to carry on making cards the team will need to explore new mechanics and design space. No longer will there be a question of whether a 2/2/2 is better or worse than a 3/3/0, since they might all be eclipsed by commons that do more. I’m hoping the design team knows their onions though and are able to keep the power creep and complexity in check over the years.

3. The next worry that I have is that the decks might be too fixed in what they do. Because you have a hero / companion as the centre piece of the deck, its power will encourage you to build the deck in a certain way around that power. The supporting cards are seeded into the varies rares and Out of Faction (OOF) rares such that you pretty much build the deck to a formula and then add your three unique cards. The powered performing heroes will then go by the wayside, and you’ll be left with the top 2 or 3 choices of decks to build. This is what happens in many other metagames in trading card games, and I really hope that the deck diversity and the creativity will be there for players to investigate. Now the developers have said that multiple builds will be possible with the same hero, so I just have to trust them for now, but my worry is the hive mind will start to go at the different architypes.

4. My final concern relates to the marketplace and people trying to abuse it to scalp prices. If people try and undersell cards, they will be snapped up instantly by big TCG trading houses and relisted at much higher prices. In this way you can potentially profiteer on the market and make things more miserable for others. I know that there have been ‘buyouts’ before on TCG player by people trying to make money on the latest ‘hot’ card and I hope that this doesn’t come to the Altered marketplace.