Talking About Altered

A few weeks ago I had a post thinking about the different card games in my life, and at that time I hadn't really touched Altered any besides thumbing through what I received from backing the game on Kickstarter (two starter decks, a box, and a two-player mat that's actually kind of difficult to transport). 

Well since then I've actually gotten to play those starter decks, join in some Altered drafts, and gotten more real games against humans in on the digital client. So here are some more developed thoughts about the game. In no particular order, and this probably isn’t really a “review” either. 

Contest without combat

Many TCGs default to being dudebashers. I bash my dudes into your dudes and sometimes into your face. If things have power and defense and/or HP you likely have a dudebasher. 

However, flavorfully, even if your character cards might have a martial bend or have swords, they do not have an attack/power/some other synonym stat and they do not bash one another. Their stats represent a proficiency with crossing different types of terrain. 

It may be minor but it does feel different to have a game without the combat edge to it. 

A measured but steady pace towards victory

Using Magic as a reference again, the basic victory is to get your opponent from 20 life points to 0. But with that damage being dealt by creatures, you can get there from any total. An early lead isn't necessarily doom, plenty of games have been won after someone gets knocked to 5 life points or less, stabilized, and turned the corner. This is possible because the speed that you can complete the victory condition isn't capped. 

Compare to Altered, where your goal is for your Hero and Companion to cross the territories between them to meet up. You can advance both your Hero marker and your Companion marker in one turn, but a marker can only move one territory forward each turn. 

And given that the different territories have different forms of terrain in them, and you might need Mountain points to advance while your opponent needs Forest points, you're forced to block your opponent and advance your own victory, which I think might be a taller order than in Magic. 

Now, it is possible to play a control game and run your opponent out of enough resources that they can't compete against you any more, but to get to that point they have to be out of resources and not just low, or not just have their resources be outscaled and irrelevant in the boardstate. And if in the meantime the opponent has gotten close to winning, it becomes harder to win before they can. But I have had games where I end up drowning the opponent in cards.

I know I called out Lorcana for feeling decided way too early, and Altered has some of those vibes. But Altered does have novelty that makes me actually want to learn more about the game where Lorcana made me go "Well I could just play more Magic and not have this problem."

Different emphases of card advantage and planning

The inclusion of The Reserve adds a new dimension to Altered. Characters do not permanently stay on the field in this game, and at the end of the turn they are sent to the Reserve, where you can only store two cards to play next turn. The "when played" effects are also divided between those that work from the hand and those that work from the Reserve. But when you play things from Reserve they gain the Fleeting status, and go to your Discard instead. So you may use things twice. 

It adds a certain face-up nature to the game. You have to decide what you're saving. You can also see what your opponent wanted to keep so you know what's probably coming. There are fewer cards in Altered that directly draw a card than you might expect, but a lot of effects that send a card to your Reserve. Multiple cards that say "Draw a card, then put a card from your hand in your Reserve." 

But also it incentivizes cards that apply the Fleeting status to your opponent's Characters, so that they go to the Discard instead of Reserve. Maybe the opponent will advance this turn- But I can give myself an advantage next turn by taking away those tools. 

At first I didn't understand why I would use cards that gave my characters the Asleep status (they don't go to Reserve, but don't count towards your advancement this turn) until I got into one of those scenarios. The rare Sandman, for instance. If I'm definitely not advancing in one expedition this turn, I could play Sandman to save my biggest character for the next turn and buff them in the process. 

Finally a 1:1 digital and physical experience

The idea that your collection should be shared between physical cards and digital cards has been around for a while, I think. Or at least doing something so that spending money on one doesn’t feel like a waste because you’re not helping the other. If you’re going to be an extremely invested player it probably doesn’t matter, but to a greater or lesser extent at times I get conscious about my hobby spending. I could get the cards so I can play Magic in paper, and then practicing Modern or Pioneer on MTGO isn’t an option. I could build up Standard decks on Arena, but it won’t help me play Standard at my store. 

And in Altered every card has a QR code on the front and they have a very responsive scanner built into the app. They’ve got a digital version on Board GAme Arena that you can play for free and import the decklists you’ve built on the app. It’s pretty painless to do. While I haven’t gotten into buying/selling/trading I understand a lot of people have and it must be pretty reliable. 

Equinox (the company making the game) is working on getting print-on-demand services going for players to be able to order replacements. I think we’re still waiting to see the pricing, but they’ve brought up letting players make the orders through their local game stores so that they can get a better shipping rate from bulk discounting. 

Also waiting to see the prices since the game doesn’t put foils in packs. Packs might have a “foiler” code card that lets you flag a card in your collection so that you can order a foil version of it. I think that’s got the potential of being a nice touch. You lose out on the trading opportunity from exchanging foils or chase cards you don’t need, but you just do directly get the cards you want. 

Rarities and deckbuilding

In Altered cards aren’t fixed at a rarity. For Magic, I can buy a Dkuskmourn pack, and Valgavoth will only ever be at Mythic rarity. But in Altered, the baseline version of a card is at the common rarity. Then buffed versions of those cards with the same name are rares. Since they share a name, they all count to the same “three cards with the same name” limit. And you’re only allowed 15 rares in your deck total. And then there’s even more changed and buffed versions that are uniques, and you can only have three uniques in your deck in total. 

Not all the uniques are worth it in every deck, they’re not necessarily strictly better versions. From what I understand they’ve got an algorithm to run a certain number of changes and then they sanity check them before release. 

It’s an interesting idea to fill the game with semi-secret chase cards. Has a bit of the air of card games before the internet enabled Big Data, the days when you’d buy magazines or catalogs to see all the cards in a set. 

On the downside, the cynical side of me says that it’s the Present Year and people are going to share information. People are posting their uniques, and there’s ways to see what uniques have been scanned into the app. 

Uniques can be thought of as like restricted cards in Magic’s Vintage format, where you can only run one copy. While it may limit overall power, it also makes games swingy and dependent on the luck of the draw. There haven’t been very many tournaments, and I don’t know yet if anyone’s been tracking their games won when drawing specific cards. 

From a purely competitive perspective it might not be ideal to add in that much variance. From a more casual perspective it’s nice having these surprises and unique (pun intended) additions to the game. Closer perhaps to that original vision Richard Garfield had that players wouldn’t know everything there was to know about the card pool, that there’d be some surprises waiting for them still.

Addendum: The impact of being the first player

The way that I speak about Altered, the turns are simultaneous. Both players draw their cards at the same time, expeditions move at the same time, and the cleanup step happens at the same time. Both players have a full range of options available to them at all times. Compare this to Magic, where only one player at a time can play sorcery-speed cards and only one player at a time can declare attackers in combat.

In Altered, there is a phase in the turn where players start to alternate their priority to play cards, starting with the player with the First Player token. And once you choose to pass, you are passing through the rest of the turn and forgoing your ability to play any more cards.

There are absolutely cases where you want to be first. Getting to discard something your opponent's reserve before they play it, or using something like The Council to nullify your opponent's abilities. But committing to the board first also feels disadvantageous. If you run out of options first, your opponent has free reign to play. And you might have reactive cards and want your opponent to commit something expensive to the board first. So ideally you would both want to go first and take the last action. Cheap cards like Martengale become valuable as ways to pad out your turn.

Card games that have sequential turns like Magic or Lorcana usually wrestle with the advantage of going first. Magic just throws its hands up and tells you to deal with it, skill issue. Hearthstone and the upcoming Gundam Card Game (and Magic Spellslingers rip to a real one) give the player going second a temporary resource to fight back against the advantage of going first. Lorcana has experimented with a two-game format where no player gets to go first twice.

But with going first not being a clearly best choice and heavy incentives towards having the last action, Altered does buck that concern.