Scrolls...ok, wtf is going on?

[logorouge]

Long story short: Couldn't sleep last night, bought the game, currently playing through the trials. So...same handle as here, see you around.

[Stormweaver]

For what it's worth, mollstam(?) the dev is in general 1 right now, going by scrollstam5.

- he left, now we have jon, the 'I added cats to minecraft' guy.

[Katalliaan]

I thought that Jon was the "I fixed the AI guys!" guy.

[logorouge]

And after 2 successful trades I was unexpectedly challenged and faced my first human opponent.

The playfield was quickly littered with memorials. Memorials of all colors, as far as the eye can see.
I knew something was coming, but my lack of experience was preventing me from knowing what.
Then a great wolf appeared, quickly followed by a Golem Skin enchantment. The wolf had become the beast and I was all out of bootsies.
In the end, I managed to counter his tactic a few times but was ultimately overwhelmed by his super-powered beasts.

So yeah, I'm really enjoying the game. :D

[Stormweaver]

Finally gotten together the cards I needed for my energy/growth non-gravelock hybrid, Figured I'd start playing ranked matches now.

Six games. Three wins, three win via ragequit. All vs Growth. I think I've managed to fix that annoying late-game weakness to growth energy suffers from. Double quake is still a pain, but surprisingly manageable now.

Of course I wasn't exactly playing the cream of the crop of players, but it bodes well.

[Stormweaver]

New cards!

Lot a nice cheap sniper for energy, a nice cheap resource boost for energy/order, and a fairly situational resource boost for growth.

[Sarudak]

Wow. Why are they giving such a boost to energy? I really don't think it needed it...

[Pucc]

The dust runner looks like a reusable copper automaton. That'll be hell for an order opponent who has quite a few 3hp units.

[Shengji]

The dust runner looks like a reusable copper automaton. That'll be hell for an order opponent who has quite a few 3hp units.

Ha, thats the hard counter to my deck then!

[danielngtiger]

The growth and order cards seem a bit contrived to me, but I do think encouraging multi-resource decks is a good think so I should probably wait to pass judgement on them. Dust Runner is certainly a nice card, although I'm not convinced energy really needed it.

[Stormweaver]

A lot of people are bitching about it tbh, but the way I see it - Energy already have lots of lulzy 'destroy x, damage y' cards...at least you have a chance of stopping this one :)

[Sarudak]

Yeah I don't see any good way of countering the dust runner as order. As if order didn't already have a hard time against energy. :(

[Stormweaver]

It can't touch walls. It can't touch anything with 4hp.

I'd recommend waking stones. To anyone and...everyone really. It's an awesome card.

[Sarudak]

I have waking stones and energy has the hard counter to that with tick bomb. Also it can easily touch units with more hp if you weaken it first. A thunder surge will wipe your weak units and put your strong units in it's range. Or a single spark on anything up to 5 hp. The synergy this unit has with the strengths that energy already commands is great.

[Stormweaver]

Well, hopefully energy will have a showing in the top 100 then?

I have to admit, energy is going to be the deck to have in the lower tiers now.

[Shengji]

This game is currently going the same way as every other trading card game I have ever seen in that there is two or three valid builds for each sphere, no sphere has a build which is unbeatable by any other deck. Because of the free-to-play-like trickling of the cards to players it can be weeks before you complete your deck so you'll be locked into a specific build for a long time. Playing against players of any skill, half the battle is won or lost in the deck construction and a further quarter in your opening draw.

Consider this - your reasonably skilled opponent has a build which beats yours (rock paper scissors, it is not possible to study other players and their decks), you've had a bad draw (no mulligans or redraws even for penalty). It doesn't matter how good a player you are, you cannot win. My personal take on the game is that it needs a mulligan, a pool (an set of cards to be swapped into and out of your deck after you have information on your opponents deck) and some basic information on your opponents deck, easier multi sphere builds and faster access to cards (or cheaper) in order to move the skillsets required away from deck building and more into the actual games.

Don't get me wrong, deckbuilding skills are important and great, but having them dominate the game so much is not good when the games are so long. I regularly play games which last over an hour, but in many of those games, I have known I cannot beat my opponent which is frustrating. There have been plenty of games in which I know my opponent is better than me, both in deck building and in game skills but because my deck is his hard counter, I still win. Too much deck building and too much rock paper scissors on a very long game for my tastes.

[Gilberreke]

This game is currently going the same way as every other trading card game I have ever seen in that there is two or three valid builds for each sphere

Yeah, called it. I haven't seen any card games that managed to fix that problem, so I'm not expecting Mojang to find a way.

The way Magic kinda fixes it is by allowing mulligans and by setting up clever multi-round tournaments that let you adjust your deck after round one.

[danielngtiger]

I broke rank 1000, and I'm definitely getting the impression that there are many ignorant energy players out there. I tend to do very well against other energy players I meet, although that has begun to change as I make my way slowly up the rankings. What really stood out to me though was a match against a guy playing a tricolor deck with all the memorials in it, to gain resources really fast. By round ten he had ~5 order, 8 energy, and 4 growth to my 8 energy, which was rather scary. He put up a good fight, at one point I really thought I was screwed after a quake, but in the end he didn't quite seem to be able to use those resources to the fullest, and I won at ~round thirty. At that point he had 9 growth, 16 energy, and 7 order, but he wasn't using all that up, which made me wonder if he had too many ramping cards and not enough end-game. Long ramble aside, what he said at the end was "I'm really surprised, I've never lost to an energy deck before." I did feel I had good draws, and a hellspitter mortar got a lucky hit on one of his cannon automatons, but it didn't seem like it should have been undefeated vs. energy.

[AngelWithDirtyHands]

After reading this thread (and finishing my exams, woot!) I decided to buy this as a treat for myself =^.^= enjoying it so far, picked an energy deck and working through the easy trials. I like the look of the mechanics in all three and am looking forward to earning enough for a second starter deck! Thanks for bringing this up guys :3

I haven't started ranked matches yet, but I'm not SteamAngel on it (grr was taken :P) so I decided on TheCorinthian as my username. See you there!

[MoRmEnGiL]

After playing around a bit, I have to say, I think Mojang made a horrible mistake by enabling buying and selling cards from other players with gold. The card pool is not big enough to warrant such a measure, and all this promotes is save money and buy the cards you want directly to build your uber deck.

But half the fun in CCGs is opening boosters and seeing what you get.. Which is effectively less that optimal if you want to build a competitive deck, since you can cherry pick your cards in the secondary market.

I'm all for card for card trading directly, don't get me wrong, but having this huge market in place from the get go strikes me as a bad idea.. I want to keep opening scroll packs, but my instincts tell me I'm better off grabbing scrolls from the tradehubs..

[Azdoine]

Scrolls latest feature: crafting. Bet you never saw that one coming from a Mojang game.
https://scrolls.com/2013/07/introducing-crafting

Why do I get the sneaking suspicion that this is a Dark Omen of Things to Come?

[BinoAl]

Scrolls latest feature: crafting. Bet you never saw that one coming from a Mojang game.
https://scrolls.com/2013/07/introducing-crafting

Why do I get the sneaking suspicion that this is a Dark Omen of Things to Come?

Let’s make one thing clear before we go into the details: crafting will not affect gameplay. A scroll’s attack, countdown, health, and traits will remain the same regardless of whether it’s been upgraded.

It looks to work like Strange weapons in TF2, which I personally loved. They just track stats, and, at tier 3, gain a pretty effect

[FlowerChild]

Errrr...ok, what's the point?

Maybe it's time for a thread title change. I'm beginning to feel like this is all somehow familiar :)

[danielngtiger]

Errrr...ok, what's the point?

The point seems to be a card sink, at least according to the devs. However, I'm not sure it was really necessary/a good use of development time, and many scrolls players seem to think the same thing, in an interesting change from minecraft where the players seem to just blindly support new content, however pointless it may be.

[MoRmEnGiL]

Actually the card stats is a very cool feature that I like, but other than that, why on earth is it tied to a permanent scroll sacrificing mechanic is truly beyond me.

Also the more I play, the more I realise that energy does not have an end game. At all. If it gets to very late game, order and growth have an immensely better game, due to card drawing. Especially multiple quakes into lots of cheap drops and godhand is unnerving. And don't even get me started on imperial resources. Uuugh.