Many heroes have a new red border, marking them as Mercenaries, and when you pay their cost you have to make a decision: Get their effect immediately or get nothing now but add them into your deck for later. This Easy AI was about to be in for a world of hurt (Image: Jacob Vander Ende / KnowTechie) Furthermore, Shards of Infinity is now a deck builder where you can pay for cards that you don’t add to your deck It is now much more difficult to evaluate exactly what to do, which makes for an interesting game every time you play.
The seemingly small change in goals has cascading design implications and all of them make for an extremely engaging experience. Now the cards that stay in play aren’t idle constructs like they were in Ascension, they’re actually active Champions with special abilities and their own health points, so you have to make decisions about when to attack them and when to attack your opponent directly.įurthermore, some cards have Shield values so they can protect you from damage while they’re in your hand. This also means that the combat currency is used differently since you can attack your opponent with it. Most importantly, you’re no longer pulling victory points from a pool and accumulating victory points with the value of your cards: in Shards of Infinity you’re now trying to whittle your opponent’s life points down to zero, a la Magic: The Gathering. The titular “Infinity Shard” (Image: Jacob Vander Ende / KnowTechie) Pretty similar to Ascension so far, right? Games take about 5 to 15 minutes (specifically on digital, since the game does all math and shuffling for you) and can be played with humans or AI, in person or online. The game is all about building an effective, coherent engine and then utilizing that engine to move towards an important victory threshold, all while your opponent(s) is/are doing the exact same thing. Most cards are played and discarded, but some cards enter play and stay in play. There are four factions of cards, which include a defensive faction with high numbers, a faction that’s all about card draw and bonuses when you play other cards from that faction, a faction about combat and removing bad cards from your deck, and a faction that’s all about low cost and getting as many of them into play at the same time as possible. Like Ascension, you have two primary currencies, which include one for purchasing new cards and one for combat. Don’t get me started on the divisive “deck builder” vs “deckbuilder” (Image: Jacob Vander Ende / KnowTechie)Įvery turn you draw five cards from your deck, which starts as a basic deck of 10, and you play them all in any order.
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