What is the Altered TCG

Buying Altered

Altered Trading Card Game is a game whereby you are trying to re-unite your hero and companion in their travels across Asgartha. You buy cards and can then make up your own 40 card decks with an associated hero / companion pair to play the game. The game is sold in starters (Containing 30 card decks - one per faction) and booster packs of 12 cards. The cards in the booster packs have different rarities for the same core card (Common, Rare and Unique). You may only play 3 of any individual core card in your deck no matter what the rarety that you use. The rareties are described below:=

Common - there are 8 commons in a booster pack. These are the simplest form of a card and also technically the weakness in power. Heroes are all set up as commons and one of your commons in a pack will be a hero card.

Rare - there are 2 or 3 rares in a booster pack. These are slightly better versions of the common card it is associated with OR the are a faction shifted version of another factions common. Each comon has ONE faction shifted rare associated with it.

Unique - In one in 8 booster packs one of the rares is replaced by a Unique card. It is a power boosted version of a rare card, with the boost ability being Unique to that card. That is there will only ever be one version of that core card with those particular abilities in existance. This makes Unique cards truly Unique!

Token / Foiler - The last card in the pack will be a token card in 7 or 8 packs. In the 1 last 1 in eight packs it will be a foiler card that can come in any of the three rarities (explained below). 

Why wouldn't you not just play 40 Uniques? 

Given the description above it would seem that the more that you buy and the more Uniques you get the better your deck will be. Well not exactly. The deck construction rules for the game are one of the Unique (sic) aspects to the game. You can only play with 3 Unique cards, 15 rare cards and the remainder of you deck (22 cards) will be commons. So you can't just buy your way to a decent deck.

What's to stop me just netdecking when the best deck is found?

Having Uniques in your deck will make your deck individual to you. No one else will have exactly the same deck that you do. Your deck will not behave exactly like anyone elses and hopefully it will encourage some Lyra creativity in your deck design.

So just another TCG with a bit of variance then? 

Altered TCG differs from many other TCGs in its style of gamplay. The chief differences being ...

• This is a non combat game. You are racing and not trying to beat each other up.
• Cards (usually) stay in play only one turn at a time, meaning that you can't just use your best Unique and have it on the table round after round.
• The game has an interesting mechanism for holding and resusing cards (Reserve) that you have already played. You can hold two cards in reserve each round that left play, so their is skill in which you bring back (for one turn only) and which you banish to the discard pile.
• The game uses face down cards as mana. Now this is not unique as other TCGs have done it before, but it does present interesting choices. On top of that you begin the game with 3 mana orbs, meaning that you are straight into the game proper and not spending 2 turns setting up.
•  The game has fabulous art and uses known and unknown chracters as beings that help you from beyond the Tumult. 

Okay, sounds cool but is it really ground breaking?

The big elephant in the room hasn't been discussed yet. That is that every card in the Altered TCG has a QR code in the bottom right of the card. You can scan in any card that you have bought from a booster into the app and now you have ownership of that card. Ownership means that you can ....

• Play that card in an Altered official tournament
• Trade or sell that card on the official app to another player worldwide without risk of it getting lost in the post
• Get more copies of that card for yourself or your friends for non tournament play and testing through a Print on Demand (PoD) service for a small fee (estimated to be $1 per card at present).
• You can get copies of the card you have bought on the app in your localised language. So if you have bought and Italien card you could get it printed in English or whichever language you want.
• You can use your foiler cards to get foil copies of a card with the same rariety as the foiler through the Print on Demand service. You can also trade unused foiler cards on the market if you don't want to foil out your deck. 
• There will be a facility (maybe not at the start) to lend cards to another player for a time on the app.
• If you lose your deck or it gets stolen then it will be useless to the theif but you can get it reprinted and still play with it.
• Buy and sell cards on the app to get the deck you want together.

So its an NFT scam then?

Nope. This is an app run by Equinox and not some NFT blockchain scam. If Equinox stops making the game and discontinues the app you will still have you cards to play with as you see fit. If the game is an online only game such as Hearthstone you could lose everything, but with Altered you will not.

So how do I get hold of it?

The game will release in August 2024 and there will be a kickstarter starting on 30th January 2024 if you want to get a hold of it early and perhaps want some cool extras. The Kickstarter will only be available in English, but once it is in distribution it will be available in English. French, Italien, German and Spanish.

Where can I learn more?

Best place to learn about the game is the Altered TCG website at https://www.altered.gg/.