[Scrolls] Decay is out!

Echo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdZpx2vyCm0

Scrolls is Bethesda's Mojang's second game after Minecraft. And it's a... collectible card scroll game! Currently available with the same beta buy-in model as Minecraft, you can get it for 15 Euros or 20 American pesos. Don't worry, you don't have to spend more money on it after that. Unless your really want to, but more on that in a bit.

What the what?

Cards are "scrolls" in Scrolls. Yeah, really surprising. you build a deck with a minimum of 50 cards scrolls, a maximum of three copies of any one card scroll. Then you fight!



Yeah, it's not traditional TCG-style combat. You have a hex grid split into two sides - you're always on the left side, the enemy is always down on the right. On your turn, you can take one of two actions: sacrifice a scroll for one resource, or sacrifice a scroll to draw two new scrolls. The resources are what you pay to play the scrolls.

The goal is to destroy three of the enemy's five idols on the other side of the battlefield.

Resources

The resources are the factions, kind of like colors in Magic. You have:

Order: military dudes, that set up tons of troops around one heavy hitter that will buff anything around him and then steamroll you. They have lots of movement-related spells to help their dudes move around the board faster, or prevent your dudes from moving at all.

Growth: Bunnies. And wolves. And vikings. Think "lots of burly men with beards and axes". And bunnies. Growth has a heavy focus on buffing individual creatures that often start out on the weaker side of the spectrum, turning them into monstrous killing machines. Yes, the bunnies too. Oh god the bunnies

Energy: Machines. Artillery. Explosions. Robots. Robots with artillery causing explosions. You get it. Plenty of direct-damage spells to zap you with.

Decay: Not available yet, but I'll take a wild guess and say undead, necromancers, damage over time spells, resurrecting killed units, that kind of stuff.

Pay to win?

Nope. After the initial purchase, you can buy Mojang funbucks called Shards. You can buy individual cards with these, but also with gold. See, each week you have six random cards (two common, two uncommon, two rare) available to buy, so you don't have to pray for the Gods of the Random Booster to provide. You can pay for these cards with in-game gold, or with shards. Seven days later, you get new cards here.

Shards can also buy purely cosmetic stuff for your avatar and other starter decks - which, again, is also available for gold if you don't want to spend more money. Fairly reasonable gold prices too.

The meat of the purchases, the 10-scroll random booster pack, can only be bought with gold. No pay to win there! It's 1000 gold for 10 scrolls, two uncommons and one rare guaranteed. Apart from that, you can buy one random scroll for a specific resource for 175 gold each.

They're pretty generous with gold if you win a game - expect 300+ gold from a ranked win. There are also "trials" that set you up in a funky scenario oh god not the bunnies again that give a one-time reward.

Arcadians to play with

There's a chat channel called "Penny Arcade" (with a space) that a bunch of people hang out in when online.

Various resources

• Online Deck Builder: build decks, share links.
• Scrolls Prices: estimated market prices for trading.

Auralynx

... speaking as probably the only guy who enjoyed Disciples 3... did it have to be hex-based? I was already waiting to see if Banner Saga ever delivered.

Tamin

hexes are civilization, heretic

... I like hexes.

Zhebel

I would love to buy the game, but I can't get any of the payment options to work. When I try to use PayPal, I get an error message. I also tried a pre-paid Visa card, but it didn't work either.

Echo

I had tons of trouble trying to buy it from scrolls.com - try this page instead.

Auralynx

Tamin wrote: »

hexes are civilization, heretic

... I like hexes.

You misunderstand! I love hex-based make-mans-fight games. Cutting out the map-wandering grind from HoMM , King's Bounty, and Disciples is, in a way, a public service!

... but it does mean that 2013 continues to be the year where indie devs steal all my money.

cooljammer00

TotalBiscuit's WTF on this made me want to get it really badly, which Minecraft was never able to do.

edit: Maybe it's cause Scrolls looks much more like a game with objectives than Minecraft.

"Shouldn't there be a board, or pieces or something to Jenga?"

Echo

Whew. Had a damn tense game with my Energy/Growth deck vs a mono Order deck. Plenty of back and forth, but I finally pulled a Tick Bomb to nuke his Obelisk and then do seven damage to the third idol for a win.

xyceres

Tis a lot of fun to play and reasonably well balanced for a new release ccg (csg I suppose).
However this balance thing doesn't apply to the precon deck you start with.

Growth and Energy are the best precons to start with.
I'd say energy is better straight outta the box but growth gets much better with relatively few tweaks and will probably overtake it due in strength due to ease of use
Order however is a harder to play faction and the precon is missing some very key elements plus order rares are going for very high prices as they have some very nice ones (speed and imperials resources I'm looking at you).

Basically when it comes down to mono resource play starting at precon newbie I'd say:

• Growth starts ok, gets good very quickly but due to scroll prices and demand can be difficult to transition to great
• Energy starts out between ok and good, can transition to good with little issue and can hit great easiest (only there most powerful spell or 2 actually fetches a high price for some odd reason)
• Order starts bad but has the potential to be really good it's just been the consensus that most newbie order players couldn't get the wins to improve the deck.

Granted a very good player could probably use any of these decks to destroy average players. But no one picking up the game for the first time is gonna be that good.
If you want to see just how this could be done Blinky (one of the best alpha players) used the energy precon to beat a hard bot (I win more often than lose in ranked but I stand no chance against a hard bot) and did an AAR that can be found here

Echo

I'm almost in the top 1k players now. Damn time vampire of a game.

Auralynx

Heh. Purchased, registered, grabbed Energy, was promptly treated to a 6 card buy-these menu with none on it!

This does look pretty entertaining though.

Echo

Also I hang out in the "Penny Arcade" (two words) channel when I'm on.

Seidkona

I play this. I picked order. I lose a lot.

DarkMecha

I play Order too, but damn it my knights shall prevail!!

Echo

Vitriolic Aura in the Growth precon deck only works on melee attacks, but doesn't say so on the card. It just says "when the unit is attacked".

Sterica

Echo wrote: »

I'm almost in the top 1k players now. Damn time vampire of a game.

Between this, Hex, and Might & Magic, I expect in a year for you to be all disheveled and dirty, mooching library internet for your TCG fix.

Echo

I can quit any time I want

Gandalf_the_Crazed

Order is fun, it has a lot of tricks to learn, though.

Like the interactions between Vengeance Veil, Resonant Helm, and Kabonk.

Drake

Love the thread title.

So we can buy this thing now? Interesting.

Echo

Kabonk is the little spell that could.

Got Heritage and some Memorials? Drop Heritage on Memorials, Kabonk them, cash in three scrolls.

Then play the card that draws a structure and do it again!

Rami

I'm a bit put off by a battlefield that looks exactly like HOM&M, and also because I recently finished Prime Worlds: Defenders and that had a ccg format but did nothing worthwhile or interesting with it.

Gandalf_the_Crazed

Rami wrote: »

I'm a bit put off by a battlefield that looks exactly like HOM&M, and also because I recently finished Prime Worlds: Defenders and that had a ccg format but did nothing worthwhile or interesting with it.

This is Mojang.

By the time they're done, there will be 10 resource types, multiple texture packs, and modded servers that have unique blacklists of prohibited scrolls.

Mahnmut

Gandalf_the_Crazed wrote: »

Rami wrote: »

I'm a bit put off by a battlefield that looks exactly like HOM&M, and also because I recently finished Prime Worlds: Defenders and that had a ccg format but did nothing worthwhile or interesting with it.

This is Mojang.

By the time they're done, there will be 10 resource types, multiple texture packs, and modded servers that have unique blacklists of prohibited scrolls.

I don't know, does it have mod support? It doesn't really look like it has a lot in common with Minecraft's design philosophy.

Darkewolfe

How many dollars does the base game cost, and is there any sort of additional purchase that you'll almost certainly make and account for in the base price?

Echo

20 dollars for the base game. You pick one starter deck, the other two can be bought for 6500 gold each (about 300 gold per won game), or some Shards which is their funbucks.

xyceres

You only need to buy the base game [$20] (boosters cost about 3 wins and a loss is almost a single random scroll).

I got to 656 ranking 2 days ago gonna work on getting higher after work today.

malkoth

Took the plunge and picked the energy deck, kinda fun so far. I really like the resource system they're using here and the sacrifice to draw more cards as well.

Auralynx

Rami wrote: »

I'm a bit put off by a battlefield that looks exactly like HOM&M, and also because I recently finished Prime Worlds: Defenders and that had a ccg format but did nothing worthwhile or interesting with it.

It may look like HoMM - I thought the same thing - but it plays more like a more-flexible version of Duel of Champions; the hexes are lanes which control targeting, and you can shift guys (but not structures) around some. I'm not regretting the buy-in as yet, though if I can't find my way to a higher-tempo Energy set-up I will be a little bummed. Pretty sure dual-faction decks are an option, too.

dispatch.o

I somewhat regret my starting choice as energy, there's just not much interesting going on. I've tried a couple of things, and until you get some good cheap structures, you're confined to having to just let one or two of your idols go so you can turtle up the rest of them. Unless you get a lucky draw on a magma pack and machine heart to dump on something small and cheap, you're not going to have any real options for burst without inflating your deck.

Corehealer

Thinking about getting this game; not 100% sold on it. 20 dollars for a TCG with hexes seems a bit steep for me, but I dunno. I spent a lot of time playing Magic the Gathering 2012. Could be good.

xyceres

Corehealer wrote: »

Thinking about getting this game; not 100% sold on it. 20 dollars for a TCG with hexes seems a bit steep for me, but I dunno. I spent a lot of time playing Magic the Gathering 2012. Could be good.

the big thing is this is not $20 for a TCG starter set this is $20 for absolutely everything (given a reasonable amount of playtime).

DiannaoChong

I feel like I have the gist after 1 match and the tutorial, not sure how I feel about it. I'll continue to give it a shot tomorrow. I feel like its going to take forever to build a cohesive deck of any type.

Kroyd_Krenson

Been playing this and enjoying myself as well. I hope they introduce a friends list soon, would make trading easier.

Kisidan

Really enjoying this so far. Picked Energy, then played against a really entertaining Growth deck, so I plunked down a whole £3.50 to buy my way in to the Growth starter.

I'm seeing a LOT of Order players, probably about twice as many as either of the other types. It takes a little while to get going (the precons aren't very interesting), but when you start to get a decent collection, you can see how many different strategies there are. Its going to be great fun working out which ones are viable.

xyceres

Almost back to the rank I was at 2 days ago (the massive amount of new players pushed me back over 100 [currently 883 with 1463 rating]). How is everyone else doing leaderboard wise?

The last game that got me to this point had an amusing ending. Had to choose to win by either casting essence feast or by saccing essence feast (for resources) and cast god hand instead. I feel I made the right choice by winning with essence feast.

Echo

Almost broke into top 1k, but then I dropped like a rock by not playing much for a day. 8->

Echo

Important detail the game doesn't tell you about that already cost me several wins: your units attack in order of front row to back row, top to bottom.

PLA

Echo wrote: »

I had tons of trouble trying to buy it from scrolls.com - try this page instead.

It isn't letting me log in, today.

xyceres

Woot got 2 god hands from trading with a streamer for some cards for his gravelock deck.

Edit: Also broke rank 500 which is nice

Echo

I like Heritage and Powerbound. Kill my shit? I get cards!

Or, in the case of Memorials: I kill my own shit? I get cards!

Descendant X

What do you guys think the chances are that this game will come out on Android?