7 thoughts on Keyforge

I bought KeyForge decks for several friends this Christmas, and played a couple games yesterday. If you like TCGs, I recommend spending $20 to buy two decks and trying it with a friend! Here are my other thoughts.

*** 1 ***

Let's just call it Keyforge, not KeyForge. Internal caps just... feel like they're going to make something feel dated later, and they're annoying to type :) Relatedly, "Æmber"? Really?? I need to be able to type and pronounce this word. I'm pretty sure it's pronounced "amber", because "I gain 3 amber" sounds a lot better than "I gain 3 ember".

*** 2 ***

Components needed to play: I just bought individual decks instead of the starter box set. This is a great feeling -- none of us have a big bulky box lying around, we each just have our decks! I can bring a deck to someone's house trivially, just in case someone wants to play! I was a little worried about not having the tokens in the box set, but found that during play, we used the following:

• 3 or 4 yellow dice to track Aember (usually you just need 1 per player)
• 2 purple dice to track Keys forged  (1 per player)
• A handful of blue dice to track damage on creatures
• A handful of other markers or dice to track stun on creatures and other misc effects

So, basically, I'd show up to the first few games with a medium-sized collection of dice and markers, and see what you use.

*** 3 ***

To me, Keyforge doesn't feel very similar to Magic, Hearthstone, and other Magic-like games -- it feels about as far from them in game-space as something like the Pokemon TCG (which I also recommend trying out if you like TCGs). In order, the things that I'm guessing make it feel not necessarily better or worse, but definitely different:

• No mana system: instead, you choose a House (think color) to play, then play / activate / discard as many cards from that House as you'd like. If you're sitting with a hand of cards and thinking "I have 3 mana this turn, next turn I'll have 4, what can I afford to play and what will I be playing later?", it's going to feel pretty similar to Magic / Hearthstone / etc. Removing mana changes the feeling of decisions (e.g. I'm not thinking about how to use mana efficiently), means that decks don't need to be composed with mana curves in mind, means that "must keep this card in my hand for later" is much less common, that you can often play many cards per turn, etc.
• Not "reduce opponent's health to 0": at first, I thought "collect Aember to win" would be really different. Then, I noticed that it's structurally similar: imagine that each Aember is 1 damage, and each Key is one "shield"; now you're doing 6 damage to break a shield, and have to break 3 shields to win. Not so different, right? However, collecting Aember still feels different to me. I think this is because a creature's combat power doesn't determine its Aember-gathering rate, because Keys are meaningful chunks that allow Aember gain / loss / stealing to be more dynamic while still ratcheting the game forward, and (most subtly) because the cards treat Aember more as a resource than as a damage-substitute.
• Not "draw a card each turn": instead, you draw back up to 6. I think this gives a very different game feel, and keeps card advantage from being a major consideration.

I really appreciate that Keyforge feels very un-Magic; I'm frankly kind of bored of games that feel like Magic, and am very happy to see more of the space of card games explored. (Another plug for Pokemon TCG if you enjoy thinking about game design -- I played it just because a friend liked it, and was like "holy wow, there are a ton of cool ideas here, why is this space so unexplored?!")

*** 4 ***

It feels like I'll play a lot more of unique-deck games (UDGs) than I historically have TCGs. The basic proposition is: "Pay $10. Now you have a deck that's all your own, it's at least playable and probably competitive with all your friends' decks, and you can play a game in ~20 minutes." In Magic or Pokemon, I personally have problems (emphasis on "personally", because obviously all of these things that I don't enjoy are super-fun to a huge group of people, and Magic / Pokemon are objectively great games):

• Constructed: "Buy a bunch of cards (for significantly more than $10) and build a deck. It's probably going to take a lot of time to figure out how to do this; in theory that's fun, but in reality, you don't enjoy it that much, and you're not great at buying cards or building decks. If you want your deck to be unique, expect to take a lot more time and some additional money. Now play against your friends, and hope that they built decks with similar philosophies, otherwise one of your decks is probably going to be much better than the other. If you want a new deck, it's at least $20 + time, worry, and effort. End up with a collection that makes you feel vaguely guilty for not using it."
• Limited: "Draft with friends. This takes all day, and you'll never play with the decks again. Also, you're not good at drafting; consider getting good at that, but realize that you don't actually care to get good enough to have a great time. Leave the cards with your friend, because they might actually use them."

(In reality, I've ended up playing mostly Wizard's Tower because that's the best version of Magic for me.)

Looking at these problems, maybe you can see why my main way of engaging with Magic is to read about it online and talk to friends about it; when I actually play Magic, the experience typically falls short of what I was hoping for. I'm hoping that UDGs like Keyforge will be more playable for me. 

(I would buy decks of a Pokemon UDG in a heartbeat -- I think it'd be an incredible improvement over the TCG on a ton of dimensions, and much better for young kids!)

*** 5 ***

On the other hand, I'm guessing that I won't spend nearly as much time reading, listening to podcasts, watching videos, etc. about Keyforge compared to Magic. Magic's deck-building core generates an incredible market of ideas; the difficulties that makes me dislike playing constructed Magic are food for the distributed Magic Brain that I love to watch and talk to!

*** 6 ***

I really enjoyed Richard Garfield's explanation of what he's hoping Keyforge will be. It's in the instruction manual, but I thought I'd include it at the end of this post. Perversely, it seems like Garfield kind of intends Keyforge to not have a Collective Brain on the level of Magic -- if there's no secondary market for cards, maybe it'll preserve a world where I don't see cards until they're played against me? I'm excited that Keyforge might be a purposefully obfuscated game; it can't be spoiler-proof, but it can remove the incentive for reading spoilers. (I'm personally not planning to go read spoilers of all the cards, and regret seeing some cards online.)

*** 7 ***

I'm hoping that homebrew formats take off, and it seems like there's a lot of potential for this -- e.g., take a pool of decks, mix them together, draft or construct decks, then sleeve up and fight. Each card's back identifies the deck that it's part of, so putting your decks together should be reasonably easy; the "default state" of a collection is a functional collection of standard decks, instead of a big mess of cards that could be made into decks or draft packs with a bunch of effort.

***

Conclusion: Keyforge is exciting! Maybe it'll be a fad like Pokemon Go, and maybe it'll have more lasting power. In any case, I'd recommend making the minimal investment to try it out.

***

Three cards for a Mill draft deck

Elder Dragon redesigns

The Elder Dragons are not very good cards. How about a redesign?

1. They should be mostly aimed at Elder Dragon Highlander, so they should do well with multiplayer / casual.
2. Elder Dragons should be big and cool.
3. They should be different from normal creatures in some way.
4. Elder Dragons are not Planeswalkers.

What I ended up doing:

• These are all creatures with loyalty counters on them. At any given time, their toughness is equal to the number of loyalty counters on them, and they each ETB with 7 loyalty counters on them. Loyalty abilities work the way they do on Planeswalkers (once per turn at sorcery speed).
• Flavorfully, Elder Dragons are hunting planeswalkers; they're happy to stick around and help you out if their particular form of mayhem is happening, but they're happy no matter who gets hurt.
• Each one has abilities that call back to particular cards -- they can cast ancient (and hence more powerful) forms of well-known effects.
• The most powerful ability can't be triggered right away, but shouldn't be too hard to get. (This seemed important for Commander, where they can be re-cast each turn after you hit 7 mana.)
• These have terrible names, but part of the exercise is not changing the names. Oh well!

The cards:

Arcades Sabboth: can cast improved versions of Biomass Mutation or Wrath of God. Cares about artifacts, enchantments, or lands being bounced or destroyed.

Chromium: can cast improved Castigate or Time Walk + Ancestral Recall. Cares about spells that cause life-drain mostly; I'm not totally happy with this trigger.

Nicol Bolas: can cast a better Reanimate or a goofy ability that lets you make two players attack each other in multiplayer (for Bolas, his character is so well-defined that I felt like I needed to hit it). Cares about death and discard.

Palladia-Mors: can cast double Lightning Helix or a souped-up Overrun. Cares about big creatures fighting.

Vaevictis Asmadi: can cast double Maelstrom Pulse or Channel Fireball! Cares about players getting hit hard or drained for life.

A "new" Magic: the Gathering format

The rules:

• Put all your non-land cards in a big pile. (You can include lands with cool abilities in this pile.) This pile will be both players' decks.
• Put all your lands in a big pile (face up so you can tell the difference). This is the land deck. Whenever a player does something to a deck, including drawing cards, they get to choose the land or the non-land deck. (This includes drawing your opening hand.)
• All lands tap for any color of mana and have all basic land names and types. They basically count as any basic land all the time.
• Players share a graveyard.

Why I like it:

• Basically no setup
• Minimal mana or color problems
• Optimized for things happening during the game, rather than i.e. skillful play, deck-building interestingness

I expect that this will be my default way to play in the future; it's awesome!

I thought that playing with a shared deck of cards selected kind of at random was called "Wizard's Tower" (because of the tall shared deck), but it looks like I'm wrong; I vaguely recall a similar concept called "Mass Magic" or something, but a bit of Googling gives me nothing. Dan and I added the separate land deck after the first couple of games, but it turns out that there's a format with basically these rules called fat stack. The "every land counts as all basic lands" doesn't appear in any shared-deck formats that I found, but I wouldn't be surprised if someone else thought of it first; it's pretty obvious.

I think I'll make my Star Wars card game (a project I haven't blogged about, but that I probably will blog about in the future) like this; it's a more streamlined experience, and realistically nobody's going to be building decks for my hobby game design project anyway :)