Saturday, January 4, 2020

Dave Reviews: Magic Cards, but not, you know, Magic Cards

Res Arcana
Welcome to a game about planesw wizards who cast spells using mana essence of five various colors that... uh...


Ok, let's try again. Res Arcana is not Magic, not all that close really, despite sharing a number of aesthetic similarities. It's a deckbuilder if you took out the deckbuilding, which... probably doesn't help either.

Res Arcana works like this: You have eight cards. That's your deck. You start with three in your hand. There are no cards that you play and then discard; everything stays on the board to serve a purpose. You draw one card per turn, at the end of that turn, unless you have an effect or ability that lets you draw more. You can discard a card to gain two essence (or one gold essence, which is more valuable); as with a deckbuilder, any cards discarded this way are shuffled and create a new deck once the library runs out. If you never discard, you never shuffle, and if all your cards are on the board, your game from then on consists of using the effects on the board. You get no more cards to play.

That's not really a problem, though. You know the cards in your deck, and since there's a very good chance you'll see all of them by the end of the game, you have an idea what you'll need to do to maximize their efficacy. Your methods for scoring points—primarily picking up Places of Power and monuments—are open knowledge from the start, so you can decide what will work best for you and aim to collect those items.

What's odd about the game is that the first time you play, you're instructed to use particular three-card starting hands, then shuffle the deck and deal out each player's other five cards randomly. Because you don't need the cards in your deck to synergize with each other so much as help you collect Places of Power and monuments, this doesn't create as many problems as you might expect, but it can still pretty easily result in decks of noticeably varying quality. There are also definitely combinations of cards a player might want, e.g. something they would want to use multiple times per turn with other cards that give you an untap straighten effect, and you have no control over whether you land such a combination. In future games, one normal way to play is to get eight random cards with no preset starting hand. This makes players work around whatever they get, perhaps use discarding more liberally, and otherwise find ways to play with any deck.

But another option, and the one that makes a lot more sense given the nature of the game, is drafting. It takes longer, for certain, and is mainly for those who want the fullest control over their experience. You also definitely do not want to do draft style with anyone prone to drastic overthinking, as the process may become unbearable. But you already have some level of randomization involved with draft; there are forty cards, so even with four players, eight of them will remain sidelined. It makes sense to combine that with more control over what ends up in your deck, as well as all the additional strategy that draft entails (e.g. recognizing someone else's choices and working to counter them). It makes sense that they would offer a version of the game that doesn't involve drafting, since the game is certainly playable and not everyone cares about or enjoys drafts, but if you do, the game becomes much nicer.

Score: Six green essence out of nine (plus one gold for drafting).

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