Shrines work as your resource cards, but they’re much, much more useful than Magic’s Lands. Shrines, or “How I Learned to Love Resource Cards Again” The dynamic combat mechanics involve both attacker and defender in making choices. Here, the zombie is selected to attack and the game is showing that due to it’s Speed, it can only attack one of the enemy’s Creatures due to the other one having a higher Speed value.
Some damage Spells only target a whole line rather than the whole field, so there’s more strategy here to where Creatures are positioned than just being all clumped together on your side of the battlefield. Creatures in the support line are protected from attacks, but can’t attack from there unless they have an ability that lets them do that. There is also notably more of a spacial dimension here than Magic’s battlefield, with a front line and support line at the back. Even with this added layer of complexity, it makes Creature combat refreshing and exciting again and now I don’t know how I could ever go back to seeing Power and Toughness alone as sufficient for interesting combat. This makes the board state a bit more complex to work out at times, especially since attack targets can actually be chosen by the attacker (but the defender can sub in defenders of their own if they’re not exhausted and have the right Speed). Speed can be from 0 to 4 and works as a kind of combat initiative value – Creatures can only block and be blocked by Creatures who have the same or higher Speed value. However, there’s an added dimension here – Speed.
This card does a good job of showing off all the unique elements to the game’s system: Creatures can have energy charges which are spent or referred to by abilities in some way, while also showing how Speed is an important new addition to Creature combat.Ĭreatures have the usual attack and health stats, equivalent to Magic’s Power and Toughness, and health works here like Magic’s Toughness rather than Hearthstone’s “sticky damage”. While Creatures look familiar at the outset, there is a whole new level to which they operate that reinvigorates the Magic-style of combat. Spellweaver has all the essentials, if by different names: Creatures are the same, Sorceries are simply called Spells (and even Instants are called Instant Spells), Artifacts are the same, but Lands are completely different, called “Shrines” and one of the game’s best selling points (I’ll come to those later).
If Cryptozoic’s HEX: Shards of Fate feels a bit like “Magic 2.0”, Spellweaver would be light-years ahead at “Magic 3.0” – such is the innovation shown here in updating and evolving so many of Magic’s dated design flaws. With that said, assuming you’re familiar with the fundamentals of Magic: the Gathering, what makes Spellweaver so different and such an improvement over and above Magic? This is no craven “fly-by-night” Magic clone that has been done to dust already – this is the purest evolution of the Magic-style of gameplay currently in existence, in my opinion, based on including all the modern design elements that we have come to expect from more recent games such as Hearthstone. If you are at all familiar with how Magic: the Gathering plays, you’ll be well equipped here to have an idea of how Spellweaver plays, but hold your horses. Gameplayīefore we get to what features the game has, let’s look at the core gameplay. The main combat screen, which might already begin to look familiar to veteran TCG players, still holds some tricks up its sleeve.
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