Welcome to the *CG thread, where we talk all manner of Card Games – Collectible, Trading, Living, and otherwise! Feel free to chat amongst yourselves about the card games you’re playing or anything card game-related that strikes your fancy.
A bunch of stuff has been happening! Here is some of it:
- A Black Lotus was sold on eBay for $166,100, making it the highest a card has sold for on eBay since the last time that this exact same Black Lotus was sold there. (The previous time it was sold for a bargain price of merely $87,672 which is still more than I make in a year)
- Dana Fischer, at 8 years old, became the youngest person to make Day 2 of a Magic Grand Prix at Grand Prix Los Angeles.
- Hearthstone kicked off its Year of the Dragon by announcing moves to the Hall of Fame (essentially banning) for Baku the Mooneater and Genn Greymane (and some of their friends), shutting down the Odd/Even decks that have been dominating Standard for the past year. Three other cards were also removed from the Classic set: Naturalize, Doomguard, and Divine Favor.
- Also announced from Hearthstone: Paid single-player content. After seeing huge success in the switch from paid Adventures to free “______ Runs” over the past year, Blizzard is going back to the “free trial with paid extra content” model for solo content. The basic model will be building off of the “Run” modes, but greatly expanded, and unlike the Adventures of old, there will not be unique cards gated behind the extra content. Instead, buying the extra solo content will reward players with packs and cosmetics.
- Magic: the Gathering announced Modern Horizons, a booster set that will not be legal in Standard but will instead bring reprints and new cards directly into the Modern format. Previous non-Standard booster products have never made new cards Modern legal (though they did bring new cards to Vintage and Legacy), but Modern Horizons is going to change all that and kill and/or save Modern depending on who you ask.
- The Yu-gi-oh Abridged Series parody channel was demonitized on YouTube without notice last week. The creator, LittleKuriboh, is working to sort this out and at the time of this writing, it sounds like things are going to be fixed soon.
- Keyforge announced an expansion, Age of Ascension. Keyforge has been a big hit this year, so an expansion makes sense, and it will be interesting to see how an expansion shakes things up for a game with such an unusual buy-in model.
- Mythgard, a new browser-based digital CCG from a new team including some ex-Blizzard devs, is in Alpha. It uses a lane-based board and an “any card can be played as mana” resource system, but straps some innovative mechanics on top of them. I’ve never really been a fan of the “any card can be played as mana” system, and especially not when devs claim that it “solves” resource problems from other games (see my previous articles on resources and a probably forthcoming deep-dive on different mana systems) but I’m at least intrigued by what I’ve seen so far from Mythgard.
This week’s prompt: What are you excited about in the coming weeks/months/year?
Or, as always, feel free to talk about anything going on with you in the world of *CGs.