Difference and Excitement

By Adrian Sullivan

Sometimes there are these moments when you mix the known with the unfamiliar, when your brain melts just a tiny little bit as it tries to wrap itself around what is happening. You can kind of tell what is happening, but you know that it is somehow different. What is happening is new in a way that you haven’t experienced before, and suddenly you have to really grapple with what it is that just happened.

The first time that I can actually remember feeling that way had to do with music. I was with my friend Chris, when he whispered to me, “You have to check this out.” He put in Guns’n’Roses, Appetite for Destruction. It was unlike anything that I had ever heard, and it just spun me around, making me suddenly re-hear all of the other ‘hard rock’ that I’d been listening to up to that point, and see it all with new eyes. Things were different after that moment.

The last time I felt that way about a game was probably when I first played Dominion. The whole concept of deckbuilding as a genre felt so incredible that first moment, and it stirred the imagination the more that I thought about the possibilities.

Well, that was the last time. Until now.

Playing the prototype of HEX: Shards of Fate gave me the feeling that I was witnessing the beginning of something entirely new. This had the potential to change things fundamentally.

I was invited to Cryptozoic to check out their new game. It felt like a pretty secretive affair, and when I arrived at their offices, there were a few other people joining me, all people steeped in the TCG world, like I am. I have been writing and broadcasting about TCGs since 1997 and even done some design work, and these other people were tournament players, writers, and broadcasters as well. I could tell Cryptozoic was serious.

They began to explain to us the fundamental concept of HEX: this was going to be a digital TCG, but what it was going to do was take advantage of the design space that being a fully digital TCG had to offer.

What does that mean, you might ask?

Well, at its most absurd, imagine a card that asks you to tear it half and put both halves on the table as a pair of monsters, but if you put them back together, it has a different effect. On paper, such a card might be something you could design, but it would utterly destroy itself through use, and you could only ever activate it once. This is not the case for a digital card, though. Suddenly a whole realm of potential opens up, and if you’re someone like me, who loves to create and design, you immediately start thinking about what is possible, and imagining new cards.

Now, HEX has an incredible world concept and storyline. We were told all about the various races and factions in the game (my favorite was the shin’hare, a kind of evil bunny race that have a culture reminiscent of feudal Japan mixed with conquering/enslaving warmongers), and all of these ideas were incredibly well thought out. But, me being me, I just couldn’t stop thinking about how the game worked, and what was possible.

I’m not allowed to talk about everything I saw, but let’s take an overview of it.

HEX is a Trading Card Game

For those of us who are steeped in TCGs, we know the special pleasure of collecting cards and building our own decks. TCGs really let us have a sense of personalization that no other genre I can think of does. One of the reasons that people love TCGs are the wide varieties of ways to play the game.

If I only care about drafting cards, I can draft with HEX. If I only care about constructing decks, I can focus on Constructed. If I like to do both, I can. If I’m a collector, that is there for me too; I’m not one of them, but I know people who practically never play their game of choice, but just collect and trade endlessly.

Importantly, the people at Cryptozoic know what the TCGs already on the market look like. They made a decision to make HEX familiar to existing TCG players; if you are already into TCGs, learning HEX will be incredibly easy.

HEX is an MMORPG

I think this element is kind of mind-blowing. Personally, I’ve never been someone that got into MMORPGs, per se, but I do play Kingdom of Loathing. I think it is really awesome that if I want to, aside from just drafting or playing constructed with my decks, I can put together those decks and go on long, story-driven special quests, all of which I can play solo. I was shocked to discover that this element of the game was being worked on by Kevin Jordan, one of the original designers of the World of Warcraft MMORPG. If you ask me, that’s a huge ‘wow’!

HEX is a digital game

I touched on this briefly above, but let’s say more about what this means.

One of the things about playing a TCG in the real world is that your card is an actual physical object. If you bend it, it may break. If you write on it in pen, those marks are stuck on it, and you can’t exactly remove them.

But what if you could write on a card with pen? The thing that kept hitting me as I thought about what it meant that HEX is digital is pretty simple: the computer can keep track of everything. I don’t have to.

Let’s make a simple example. Pretend I have a shin’hare that has 0 ATK and 1 DEF, making it the weakest possible kind of creature that could stay alive. If I give it a magical enhancement that increases its ATK to 2, then in a typical TCG, if it died and I somehow brought it back to life, it wouldn’t remember that it had gained that bonus. In HEX, however, that shin’hare will remember, even if it gets shuffled back into my deck. If I draw it later, it will still remember.

Letting the Digital Experience Take Root

Hopefully, you get the idea of what it means when you are no longer constrained by physical space. You understand that you could have a card ‘remember’ that it was made stronger even if you have it put back into your hand by another card.

So, let’s go a little further. If I have a card that makes a copy of itself, I don’t have to pretend that it has made a copy of itself and use a token. This is the digital world! I can have it really make a copy of itself. One card that I saw, for example, made this power clear. Sliver of the Immortal Spear could make a copy of itself to shuffle into your own deck. Of course, when you drew this copy and played it, this new copy was a copy in every way, and it, too, could make a copy of itself. When you have 5 copies out, you can do 5,000 damage, effectively winning the game. Making a card like this for a regular ‘paper’ TCG would be prohibitive, if not impossible.

What if we keep going? What if we have a card that can shuffle itself into your opponent’s deck, and if they happen to draw it, it explodes on them, like some kind of booby trap that you set for them? Wouldn’t that be amazing?

So, what if we keep going? What if we have a card that modifies a random card in my opponent’s deck every turn, making it worse? How on earth would we do that in the non-digital realm? Would we secretly take a random card from our opponent, hope they are using card sleeves, and then put a slip of paper into the sleeve to show that it has been modified?

In the realm of the digital, you actually don’t have to worry about doing any of these things, since the computer can do it for you. And the possibilities as they affect the way cards can be designed, and thus affect gameplay, seem truly limitless. If you’ve read any classic sci-fi books, you may be like me, and suddenly realize you’ve spent your whole life living in two dimensions, when there was this whole other dimension that exists, and now that you’re aware of it, you can’t stop seeing it.

I know that I’m so pumped for HEX when it comes out. I’ve been working in gaming for a long time, and I still keep just picturing what is possible; I feel like my mind is on fire! One thing that was so gratifying to me as I walked around the Cryptozoic offices and talked to everyone involved in HEX, is that the Cryptozoic folk aren’t messing around. They are serious about getting this done, and getting this done right.

While I was there, I found out Cryptozoic has been working on this for years. It seems to me that they were incredibly open-minded and interested in making sure HEX is as great as it can possible be; all of the people at Cryptozoic spent time listening to the ideas of all of us visiting to see the game, not simply telling us how it was. I know that when I was on my way home, it just seemed to me that they were doing everything that could be done to make HEX a success.

I know that I can’t wait to play HEX when it is released.

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Good things come to those who wait. When you put faith in this Constant, your hope will ultimately be rewarded with many copies of these heavenly beings.

The Sword Trainer teaches your new troops a thing or two about how to wield a blade. The result is a well-equipped army that will get at least +2 ATK when they enter, and potentially more if your Sword Trainer has grown in strength as well.

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