Most TCG's pit you as some kind of master wizard strategist, summoning creatures and magical forces to fight on your behalf. That's all well and good, but sometimes I just want to get up in some dude's business and deliver a personal beatdown myself. That's why I was pretty excited when I found
Ederon, a young web-based TCG that recreates in-your-face, mano-a-mano combat with TCG mechanics. Depending on your deck, you might don some plate mail and an axe and start a-whackin'; you might nimbly evade your opponent's thrusts and whittle him down with counterattacks of your own; you might answer a sword to the gut with a big fat fireball to the face. It's all held together by an innovative class system that drives deck design and ensures varied battles. Though not without its flaws, Ederon offers great fun and variety in crafting your ultimate fighting champion and pummeling the fools who stand in your way.
The neatest thing about Ederon is that it completely does away with any kind of mana, energy, or resource system. Instead, every card in Ederon is associated with one or more classes, and you may play a card for free as long as you are the correct class. A deck can have one, two, or three classes, and you can swap them in and out whenever you want at the expense of doing anything else that turn. So, you can become a Guardian, throw down an axe, and change back into a Wizard. You lose a turn, but now you're a dude who can shoot fireballs
and hit people with an axe. Sweet.
It doesn't get more accessible than this. No download, no lengthy registration involving questions about your mother's medical history and your chinchilla's birthday. Pick a user name, password, starter deck, and start playing.
Ederon's classes are the usual mix of burly hackers, nimbler types, and magic users. Each class has its own flavor and limitations, which makes for a lot of interesting decisions during deck construction. A dual- or triple-class deck has a lot of options and can counter a lot of threats, but loses many turns switching classes to play all its cards. A solo deck guarantees consistency but suffers from a limited design space. Sorcerers aren't going to have a lot of armor; Knights aren't going to have a lot of tricks. It's a challenging problem to determine how much and how many of your bases you want to cover, and with eight unique classes, there's plenty to experiment with.
Despite the variety of classes, Ederon is an easy game to learn due largely to its simple turn structure. On your turn you can only play one item, attack once, and play one spell. “One” is very important here: if you've got in your hand a truncheon, a big ol' shield, a suit of armor, and a flask that gives hitpoints, you can't just slap them all down at once. You have to play those items one at a time over four turns, deciding which item is most important and when. Some cards, like damage-boosting spells or ammo cards for ranged weapons, can be played before the attack phase in lieu of an item, while attack spells can only be played after an attack.
Because of the small maximum hand size and limitations on cardplay, the tactical decisions in Ederon are never very difficult. Thankfully, the class system demands a healthy chunk of strategic thinking. If your opponent plays a Guardian, you can bet a giant honking weapon is coming down next turn, with massive armor to follow the turn after that. You've got your Sorcerer out in a Sorcerer-Paladin deck — should you take this opportunity to pummel your opponent with armor-piercing spells that the Guardian can't counter, hoping that you burn him faster than he can hack you to pieces? Or would now be a good time to switch back to that Paladin, equip a weapon, and try to outlive your opponent's attacks by hoping to draw into your healing spells? High level decisions like these are challenging and exciting, as the bulk of the game's complexity is concentrated in a few key moments in each battle.
Ederon may not be huge just yet, but it's got enough of a following that you can usually find a game pretty quickly.
The battles, by the way, are tense and fun, and usually boil down to a nail-biting war of attrition — very rarely is it possible to just blow over your opponent. I once got an opponent to 1 hitpoint and couldn't win because he countered all my damage spells. He then knocked
me downto 1 hitpoint and we both clung desperately there for several rounds; I was able to stay alive with healing spells just long enough to force an opening and attack for the win. The slow games mean that you can expect to see a good chunk of your deck each game, reducing luck and increasing the value of skillful deck construction.
The four decks that are available to a free account are reasonably balanced, fun to play, and give you a taste of all eight classes. Balance only becomes a problem at the higher levels of play, where some of the most effective decks are neither fun to play nor fun to play against. These decks stall the game either by laying down an endless stream of fat weapons and armor, or by loading the player's hand with damage prevention and counterspells. Victory is achieved by preventing the other player from getting any damage through, forcing him to exhaust his entire deck and lose. It's one thing to lose by being outwitted, outmaneuvered, and consequently hacked to death; losing by “running out cards” doesn't fit with the theme of glorious heroes battling to the death.
Most of the audiovisual elements of the game are superb. The servers are stable, the interface is good-looking and intuitive, and the account creation process is completely painless. A username and password are all you need to get going, and there's a clear tutorial on the site that explains how to play. You can be in the thick of your first battle within ten minutes of landing on the site. One minor grievance is that the deck editor shows card text when you hover over a card, but the game room doesn't. Thus, to see what a card does when you're actually playing a game, you need to click on it and wait for the blown-up picture to appear off to the side. This leads to a lot of clicking your first few games, as you don't yet know what any of the cards do.
Aside from the small card text, the in-game interface is clear and makes it easy to see what's going on.
As with any TCG, the starter decks are only fun for so long and then you've got to fork over some cash if you want to dig deeper. It costs $4.95 to upgrade to an “advanced” account, which nets you 60 cards divided between two classes of your choice. It's a pretty good deal for the money, but what the site doesn't tell you is that you'll lose your beginner deck after the upgrade. This is really annoying, especially if you liked the two classes you started with and were hoping to expand them.
If the 60 cards you start with aren't enough (let's be serious, they won't be), you can buy additional booster packs in three flavors. The smallest booster is ten cards and costs $1.95. You can save a whopping 75 cents if you buy a 60 card booster for $10.95, and there's also a “basic set” for $9.45. The basic set is equivalent to five small packs (with a savings of 30 cents,
score!) and includes eight class cards (one of each). You'll need to buy at least one basic set if you ever want to play with any classes besides the two you got when you upgraded your account.
In addition to buying boosters, you can acquire cards by trading with other players. The trading system is web-based and doesn't work in real time, but it gets the job done. You can check out the cards in any player's collection and make offers for the cards you want. If you decide that the Hunter class sucks and you never want to play it again, you should be able to trade off some of your Hunter cards in exchange for the classes you do want. The interface could be a little better, but the fact that a trading system exists at all in such a low profile game is pretty impressive.
“Apocalypse?” That can't be very powerful. Here, I'll give you a Soft Leather Armor for it.
Ederon generally boasts a solid interface, but the deck editor is the one place where it's really weak. Saving and loading decks, and adding and removing cards, are all easy enough. Unfortunately, there is
no way to sort the cards or filter them. They're sorted by type (ability, item, or spell) and that's all you get — bafflingly, there is no way to sort by class or by name, and finding any particular card is a pain. The cards are displayed in binder format, with a number under each card telling you how many of that card is currently in the deck. You can change this number by clicking the + and – signs under the card, but the cards you add to the deck aren't spatially distinct from the ones that aren't. You can't tell at a glance what you've got going on — you have to flip back and forth through the binder pages and look at the number under each card.
The deck editor: a glaring chink in the otherwise fine interface.
Quibbles aside, Ederon is clearly the product of a very talented and dedicated group of folks. The lag-free online play, the artwork on all the cards and different areas of the game, the presence of music — not to mention the depth of gameplay — are an incredible achievement. The developers have acknowledged in the forums that there are still a few issues with the game and that they'll try to work them out. Overall, it's a fun, accessible game that's worth a look — Ederon might just be the twist you've been craving on the tried and true fantasy TCG formula.
|
Presentation Rating = 8.0
One of the easiest TCG's to get into, hands down. Pick an alias, a password, and a starting deck, and boom, you're ready to go. There is artwork on all the cards and in the game room, and the user interface is remarkably well designed (except for the deck editor). The main weakness is the writing — since the creators of the game speak English as a second language, a lot of the flavor text and other in-game text is shaky. Probably the biggest gaffe is that the Sorcerer is female.
|
Gameplay Rating = 8.0
Ederon isn't a brainbuster by any means, but there are plenty of challenges to deck construction and making the correct strategic reactions to your opponents' decks. Tactically it's a bit simple, but that doesn't mean it's not fun. Swapping out classes and slamming down all kinds of different tricks is a blast.
|
|
Support Rating = 6.0
The developers are somewhat communicative on the forums and do what they can to please their fans. The game seems to be evolving, but there aren't any tournaments or promotions. Pretty much all you can do is buy boosters, make decks, and duel other players.
|
Innovation Rating = 9.0
Using classes as a replacement for resource management is a supremely elegant mechanic, one that impacts not only the flow of play but also deck building considerations. Plus, the main theme of the game is darn cool. Not that I mind being a faraway wizard commander of armies and minions, but sometimes it's just nice to get in there myself and whoop on some clowns.
|
Ederon RSS Feed