This week we’re back at it again with another Faeria Community Highlight! Faeria Community Highlights are a series of posts that discuss some of the most important and well-known community members and highlight their content. This week we’re speaking with J0k3se, a community member most know for his YouTube and Twitch streams. Let’s hop right into it!

Hey there J0k3se. Thanks for participating in an interview with us! Let’s kick things off by telling us what you do and what your role in the community is.

Good morning and thank you for having me!

I’ve been super excited about Faeria ever since my brother-in-law first showed me the kickstarter page. When Faeria hit Steam I knew right away that I wanted to do my very best to help the game grow – because I love it! I know from my background in Starcraft that community-created content is incredibly healthy for a game, so I started setting up Twitch. I wanted to show this beautiful game to my friends and to anyone who would happen to find my channel. I learned quickly that streaming is really hard! At least for me. I wasn’t necessarily enjoying the streaming part– it was stressful to me– but I kept going.

Then something beautiful happened! The viewers started sending me a lot of encouraging messages with tons of positive feedback. I got messages from different players/viewers almost every day for weeks! I kept streaming as often as I could. I talked a lot about Faeria strategy while I played which the viewers seemed to enjoy a lot. I even managed to get DanF (developer) and Sho7gun (balance tester) with me on stream once where we discussed removal cards. That was big for me. After that I started to feel more comfortable streaming, and I started to actually enjoy it. Time went by and as new streamers arrived I tried to visit their streams as much as I could to welcome them to the game and to offer some advice. I kept getting a lot of PM’s with questions on Discord about different Faeria-related things, so I decided to write a guide called “How to improve at Faeria”.

In March Scream112 (MetagamingTV) and I hosted and casted the first community-created tournament, “Codex Cup #1” after which I was invited to cast “Coil Gaming Faeria Lunar Rumble #1” and “Tales of the Ouroboros”.

While casting I got to know Crow, and invited him to do “Faeria Showdown” with me, which has now become quite popular and my favorite event to cast! All in all I have casted seven tournaments/events so far, and made plenty of interviews with the best players.

Even though I get plenty of positive feedback, I don’t think I’m even close to as good as most of the other Faeria casters. I’m really bad at showing my excitement during games, which is unfortunate since it is a rather important quality for a caster.

After a lot of casting I want to focus more on helping new players again, so I recently launched my new website, faeriacoaching.com, offering free coaching to help them get into the game. I very much enjoy helping people and that, in addition to making interviews/talks, is what I would like to say my role in the community is (currently).

You have a new show called Yak Talk that came out a few days ago. What’s that about and what benefit could it provide to potential viewers?

Yak Talk is basically supposed to be a “Faeria news” show, much like MetagamingTV’s Kappa Council, but much shorter. Nightingale and I are both very active on the forums, Reddit, Discord and Twitch, but far from all players are, and we want to compile the recent events and talk about it quickly in the video for those who aren’t.

What do you think the future of Faeria is from an eSports perspective?

Faeria has enormous potential. I am a big eSports fan and I am super excited about the future of Faeria. The game has what it takes, but the difficult part is making sure everyone finds out!

If you had the choice, what new features or modes would you want added to Faeria?

I would love to have access to various statistics for my account and for my decks. I would also very much like to have the ability to watch replays (and share them).

Another thing that I would love to have, but don’t think will ever happen for multiple good reasons, is a draft-mode like the one used in Magic the Gathering.

Do you have any advice for people trying to get into the competitive scene for Faeria? How about for people new to strategy games?

The best way to get an understanding of the game is to play it. After you’ve played it go watch better people play. Many streamers communicate with the viewers whilst they play and explain their moves. The Faeria community is incredibly friendly so if you are watching someone but don’t understand why they play like they do, don’t be afraid to ask!

Once Pandora is released, will you be sticking to that or be playing it in addition to ladder?

I’m actually not so crazy about Pandora. I will obviously try it but I don’t think I will play it more than I play regular ranked games. But who knows, maybe it will be a lot more fun for me than I’m expecting it to be. Let’s hope so!

Thanks again to J0k3se for speaking with us! Just in case you missed last week’s community spotlight with Cappuccino, you can check it out right here. See you next week!