Remembering Altered
For the past couple of years Altered has brought me joy. I’ve played a lot of Magic over the years, from weekly Commander groups to SCG tournaments. Not to great success, but to my enjoyment. Enough to be very used to Magic. Enough to be interested in something new. Not just new, but striking out in ways to make itself different. That was Altered.
Was Altered.
So what had me enthralled with this game? Maybe it will best soothe my grief to explain.
Aesthetics
This game charmed me. Which is both a surface level appreciation and a deeper one. Altered is colorful and enduring. Altered is a game of representation. People are creating, people are striving, people are looking ahead to something. The terrain cards your pieces move across were of colorful landscapes, with a new set in each release to further tell the story of the expedition into the unknown.
Contest Without Combat
The standard TCG design is that you play dudes, and then those dudes will hit your opponent’s dudes and sometimes they’ll hit your opponent and then you do it enough to win. The goal in Altered was different though- Your Hero and their Companion started off separated across unknown terrain and the goal was to reunite them before your opponent did. It’s a subtle distinction, but it lent the game a different air that we weren’t fighting each other. And it made sense- We weren’t rival Planeswalkers trying to blast the other with magic, we were two members of the Expedition Corps daring each other to be the first to track this patch of the unknown.
Continuity and Storytelling
I will hold up Altered as an example of doing storytelling in a TCG right. The background is that a magical calamity happened, and reshaped the world. A group of survivors banded together on a single peninsula, eventually mastering the unleashed magic that’s made imagination real. The world is no longer stable outside the wall keeping our survivors protected, and after hundreds of years they are ready to step outside again. First though, they must defeat the ancient Kraken that drove their ancestors into this land. Then into the mountains, to the dead world-tree at the source of this unnatural cold. And then another mystery, another city… all abandoned yet flowing with a substance that amplifies their magic… but unleashes a terrible force buried underground. The expeditions then have to cross vast skies and floating islands, their ways barred by massive Leviathans that they must defeat… or must they? And now with the last set, the expedition has finally found another city, new survivors.
Altered stayed with its world and its characters, and there were a lot of callbacks as characters met and interacted through the releases. It lent a real sense of continuity in a way that Magic’s multiverse has struggled to as of late. And each set, even if you weren’t reading the fiction online, there were enough cards to realize the gist of the story. That feeling of continuity was one of the game’s strengths to me.
The Simultaneous Turn Structure
Magic’s instant speed spells and effects and the priority system give the game a lot of depth, and a lot of baggage. Some games simplify their system into not letting you do anything on the opponent’s turn, but that turns the game into alternating solitaire and not a back and forth. Altered has the start and end of a turn resolving simultaneously for both players, and in the main phase each player alternates resolving one action at a time. It’s a system I loved, because it gave the feeling of an intense turn in Magic without the baggage of holding priority. Can I just go for it? Should I just go for it? Should I play a cheaper thing to try to bait my opponent out? Doing the math in my head, running through the possibilities if I play a character to my Hero expedition or my Companion expedition… That was the intense gameplay I loved.
Ironic, perhaps, that the game cast itself in such a bright and friendly art style when the mechanics should appeal to the crunchy, driven competitor.
Card Rarity
Every card in Altered has at least two variants: Common and Rare. The Common is the baseline. The Rare is changed in some way. Sometimes they’re strict upgrades, sometimes they’re clear sidegrades, and sometimes the shift changes the role and function of the card completely. Out of the 39 cards in your deck, you could only have 15 Rares, and that pushed a lot of decision making. What is the load bearing effect for your deck? What needs to be one mana cheaper, or to have better stats, or to have its ability tweaked into something more powerful? I had a lot of agony over trimming down to 15 Rares, but that was the kind of challenge I loved. And a way to let players show their priorities- When I play someone and they show a certain Rare, I can start guessing why they chose that specifically.
Uniques
Characters in Altered have a third rarity: Unique. Uniques were generated,the developers had a process to randomize costs, stats, and abilities into something that would not be repeated. They could be similar, but never exact. I’ll have some things to say about this later, but on the whole I think Uniques were fun. Card games have no mystery any more in the digital age, databases are everywhere and the toothpaste of information can’t be squeezed back into the tube. But Uniques you’d never seen before were always novel, and it was a fun deckbuilding moment to pore over my collection to choose the three and only three that would serve this deck best.
YOU HIT THE GROUND RUNNING IN THIS GAME
ALL CAPS FOR EMPHASIS BABY. ALTERED IS LIKE LORCANA IN THAT YOU PUT A CARD FROM YOUR HAND FACEDOWN TO BE YOUR MANA. BUT THIS GAME STARTS YOU AT THREE MANA. NO LAND GO DEAD EARLY TURNS HERE HIT THE GROUND RUNNING WE ARE SHORTENING THE TCG EXPERIENCE YOU ARE GETTING STUCK IN FROM THE WORD GO.
Card Usage
When you play Magic, your Creatures are Permanents (in that they have the card type) and permanent (in that they will permanently stay in play). Most games are like this, your board could continue to grow forever. In Altered, though, Characters are not permanent (quality) because you can only use them twice. Each turn represented one day of exploration, and at the end of the day your Characters went to the Reserve. You could keep two cards in Reserve between turns, play them as if they were in your hand. Having the second zone of a face up “hand” made games interesting. You could see certain things coming, and the game was lot freer about putting cards into your Reserve than letting you draw them, similar to the impulse draw in Magic.
Any Character or Spell played from Reserve gained the Fleeting status, which meant that they would go to the Discard instead of back to Reserve. You had two bites at every apple, so the challenge was to make them count. Your hand could empty quickly, and you had to work around your resources being gone and not merely outclassed but still present and spendable.
Digital
I never found the QR codes obtrusive. And it was really cool to know that my collection is my collection. I have a box of Modern stables, but that don’t do me no good if I open up Magic the Gathering Online and want to queue a league. But my Altered collection is my Altered collection is my Altered collection. And I could painlessly play online games on Board Game Arena with nothing but a free account to link to my Altered account. While it launched after unfortunate delays, they added Print On Demand as well. No need to worry about damage to cards or losing one, you would still have to pay for it but you could print any replacements you needed.
Looking back on things, were there issues? Yes, a few. I’m not blind. And they’re worth pointing out before the end, as there may be some lessons to learn.
Demo Products
I don’t own a game store, but in playing Altered I hung out with a few local store owners. One thing that they commonly lamented is that there really wasn’t a way to get people into the game. There weren’t something like new player kits, something that people could be hooked with. There were precons, yes… but that’s product a store is trying to sell. Promos weren’t explicitly handed out to be used in new player events.
Maybe the economics would never work out, but I can imagine a demo handout product, an undersized deck for a special, simpler game for new players. That would also come with a Unique just to make the game spicy and give new players something that no one else in the world has and encourage them to download the app and scan it into their collection. Something cheap or free, explicitly for stores to not have to sell and to run events for new players. I don’t know that it would have solved every problem, but I do think the game suffered from the lack of SOMETHING like this.
Unique Balance
I won’t change my stance that on the whole I think Uniques were a positive for the game. But they weren’t all created equal, and needed a slightly more active hand in balancing. Uniques that loop with themselves were an embarrassing slip up that shouldn’t have made it into print, and some things were clearly not weighted as they should be. Token generation, card draw, keeping Characters in play… These were unfortunate to see.
Locked to the TCG Structure
TCGs come with bulk. That is the way of it. You don’t need all the Commons, ultimately. Altered had slightly extra baggage- Each card had one Common version… and two Rares. Rares were usually the limiting factor in deckbuilding, and to open them you had to open packs and get more commons that don’t serve you any.
Perhaps Altered shouldn’t have been a TCG. Perhaps it should have been something more like an LCG or an ECG, which aren’t distributed in randomized packs. In this Alter(ed)-nate universe, rather than ripping randomized boosters, players could get fixed packs for each Faction with a playset of everything. Or get a set box for slightly less than the price of buying six Faction packs. I still like Uniques, so maybe each Faction pack comes with one or two and the randomized product is a Collector Booster Pack that’s 50% alt arts and 50% Uniques. Players can get fixed collections, and still have the benefit of Uniques being, well. Unique.
After this is where the post turns more personal.
The grief, I think I will be wrestling with for a while. When I backed Altered on Kickstarter, I was in such a comfortable place I could fire and forget on neat projects like this. By the time it arrived, I was in a bad way. Depression had really sunk its talons into me, and I isolated. I still struggle to leave the apartment. I mean, I can go to work and the grocery store fine… But I don’t go anywhere fun. I don’t go anywhere I might connect to people. I really, really struggle with my anhedonia. I’m a frog sitting in a boiling pot, unfortunately used to it by now and hanging on but still sometimes wishing I felt anything else.
When Altered arrived I had no social life any more. I still don’t. But here was this game, this stuff that I had bought long ago when I was better and now it was here and looked… fun. So I searched, and I found local stores, and I went. Altered got me to hang out and play at weekly events again, when I had closed in on myself and just left friendships to wither.
Did I do enough? I have so little energy left. I was never banging the drum, I was never actively recruiting, I never went to stores that weren’t running it and asked if I could volunteer a demo day on their discord… I had it in me to show up every week but I don’t know how much I had after that. I can feel my therapist’s disapproval that my thoughts keep going to these “I should” statements. I should have done more. I should have been better. I should have been more active. I should have been more outgoing. I should have been more charismatic. I couldn’t save the whole game but I watched as interest waned through the months. Could I have saved the local communities?
No, pinning my mental health on something like a game is not smart. But when I was stuck and alone and struggled to see a future for myself… there was a game about people coming together and facing challenges. There was something new, something that got me to step out of my door and talk to new people and do things on the weekend and play games again.
I played a lot of Magic, but I don’t any more. I left my Commander group, and no one DMed to ask where I went. I stopped going to Modern weeklies. I really struggle with how to feel about a game that’s leaving me because I just don’t feel a pull to these Universes Beyond releases. I was there for the first week of Gundam Card Game events… and then I just stopped and I can’t say why. I never even checked to ask if the store up the road has it on their schedule. Netrunner, I miss the crowd but I’m less guilty because they’re on the other side of town and mannnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn I’m not sitting an hour in traffic. I'm sorry y’all are great but I’m so worn down by stress.
What I have is Altered. A game I treasured, but not enough people did. Equinox hasn’t shared their winding down plans at the time of writing, and maybe the game lives in some form. But soon the tense will change. I had Altered. I won’t any more.
I will miss this game, and if we have no other connections I will miss the people I shared it with.