Didn't see a thread for Shadowverse so here goes!
Shadowverse is a f2p online collectible card game for android IOS and now
steam
It shares lots of superficial similarities with Hearthstone. But if you play it a bit you will see that in depth the gameplay is quite different.
short gameplay trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-PyNSe1in0
The gameplay basics are the same as Hearthstone. The goal is to reduce the opponent to 0 life from the starting 20. You start with a hand of 3 cards which can be individually mulliganed and the second player gets 2 draws. There are 7 classes each with unique mechanics. You get an increasing amount of mana every turn to play followers (minions), spells, and a new class of cards called amulets which are similar to MTG enchantments.
One highly unique mechanic is card evolution which I'll go into detail about later but it encourages fighting for the board and greatly increases the tactical depth of the midgame.
There is a constructed ladder and an arena/draft mode.
The art style is anime/manga with the class avatars and most cards have voice effects when they come into play, attack, and die. The interface and animations are a bit over the to with particle effects but you get used to it really fast and can turn off the excessive animations.
The game still has voice emotes like hearthstone (less trolly imo) but there is an autosquelch setting so you never have to hear them
Evolution
At turn 4 for player 2 and turn 5 for player 1 you can activate card evolutions. An evolution typically gives a card +2/+2 and allows it to attack the turn it is summoned, but not attack face unless it was previously summoned or has storm (charge). Using an evolution costs no mana but each player gets a limited number, 2 for the first player and 3 for the second player.
Some cards have unique effects that fire when they are evolved, usually at the cost the increased stats. For example a lizardman clones himself when he evolves but he gets no stat bonus. This increases the complexity of deckbuilding because you need to take into consideration evolve effects that you may not get to fire during the game.
Evolves are one of those things that sound weird when you try to describe them but if you watch a few matches it will make total sense.
Differences between Shadowverse and Hearthstone
- no coin, second player gets 2 draws on first turn and 3 evolves compared to 2 and can evolve first (major arena advantage, about even in constructed)
- almost no RNG (a couple of random target spells/effects but less than 1% of cards)
- no secrets
- lots of follower removal, almost no burn/direct face damage
- 5 follower slots instead of 7 on the field so board space is a serious consideration
- no fatigue, any failed draws automatically lose the game
- powerful finishers mean games tend to end before or right around 10 mana
- neutral spells
- can't craft animated cards
- 40 card decks, up to 3 of each card (including legendaries)
Arena
After playing Shadowverse arena it is very difficult for me to go back to hearthstone because the setup is so much better.
Called Take Two because instead of picking one out of three cards you have two choices of two cards. This makes the choices both more interesting and helps maintain deck balance.
Also the arenas are strictly 5 matches win or lose. That means you aren't "rewarded" for doing well in arena by having the run take an hour longer than losing early.
You can only go "infinite" at 5 wins but at around a 3 win avg you will earn enough gold between rewards and daily quests to be able to play many arenas a day if you are so inclined.
I didn't see an arena stat tracker so I'm manually keeping track of my on-stream stats in a
spreadsheet
My friend code is 386 187 505 feel free to add me
I'll attempt to follow this thread and answer any questions
Posts
http://goo.gl/gCnisB
Let me know if there are any other statistics/summaries that I should put up there
Was interesting, but it seems aggro decks are crazy more powerful than anything else, way moreso than Hearthstone. Mostly because the max stats of minions is a lot lower (it's rare to have any minions cards over 4/4) and the face only has 20 life instead of 30.
No denying aggro is good but healing and taunt are arguably more powerful in Shadowverse than in HS. Did you play through the PVE campaign? That unlocks a lot of key cards including every class' Dr. 4
The evolve mechanic doesn't seem like much when you first start but as you play a bit more it becomes pretty clear that it is a real innovation in the genre.
Honestly I don't play much constructed so I can't comment too much on the "meta" balance but it seems like there is a greater variety of viable decks despite the smaller card pool than HS.
Best card I got was a legendary 9 cost, 4/4 that gives you back 3 evolution points.
Going 2nd seems like such a huge advantage. You get to evolve first AND you get an additional evolve point. That's a lot more useful than being 1 mana ahead considering that higher cost minions are nowhere near as manage efficient as they are in Hearthstone. The additional card draw the 2nd player gets on the first turn is just overkill.
So I guess I am building a Havencraft stall deck?
Going 2nd is more of an advantage in arena, in constructed I read the difference was ~5% with meta decks. I assume it is worse for non-optimized decks since they are over all less efficient.
Olivia is the legend you are talking about and it is incredibly powerful in arena. Haven't seen it much in constructed though it seems like something that could go in a lot of decks.
Had a crazy Bloodcraft deck that kept giving me high cost cards. One of them was the Prince of Darkness legendary. 10 cost 6/6 card that replaces your deck with a 10 card apocalypse deck, which is made up of insanely great cards. Basically you hold out until you can play that and it's game over.
Two cards were a low cost 6 attack dude with storm. Another was a 5 cost 13/13!!!! o_O
(Looks like the card is called "Satan" in some versions? Really weird early 90s era Nintendo censorship going on there)
The scary thing is the 13/13 is probably the WORST card in the apocalypse deck
And yeah there was some weird censorship, like the runecraft hero's cleavage was covered up but to be fair it was truly absurd
Good job with your arena run! I love the 5 wins and out format for it compared to hearthstone and really like the pick 2 cards instead of 1 out of 3. After playing so much of this game I can't go back to hearthstone
How do you beat Urias's final stage? He trades poorly into Erica's board vomit.
more cross class discover means that you have less ability to play around anything, but at least it looks like they are releasing some functional neutral taunts
as for the shadowverse campaign its been a while, but I beat all of the pve content (except the elites?) with unchanged starter decks
some of them took a few tries though so keep cracking, the AI isn't the best
Most of the final scenarios are for-real decks, even if the AI isn't; repeat until it gets a bad draw or you get a good one has worked for me.
Beating the Swordcraft and Forestcraft campaigns gave me trouble though. I had to look up decks to eventually beat those. Apparently they're the overall best classes in the game but nuts if I could figure out how to make decent decks with them on my own.
I ain't got time for that and I don't think you can on steam, but its easy enough to make a new account on android
If you log in you get 13! free packs (assuming you finished the tutorial)
6 million downloads milestone and a member of cygames sponsored team won a big MTG tournament (I think)
anyway, free stuff!
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