I'm In a Card Playing Mood!

 I've been in a card playing mood for the last few weeks now but I've stopped myself from buying cards from games that forces me to buy many in order to get any good at it. 

In the early 2000s, I was into magic and attended a few tournaments in my local community. I did pretty poorly in all of them simply because the other players were a bit older, with jobs, and were spending all of their money on the game... there was no way that I could compete with my monthly allowance worth of cards.

Still, I joined these tournaments because I enjoyed the community and I still do in a lot of ways. I miss that community but I don't miss the price to pay in order to be good within it. 

When Wizard announced Magic the Gathering X Forgotten Realms coming at the end of July I really thought this would be the set that would lure me back into magic but then I remember how it was last time I played and decided I needed an alternative...

"Trading Card Games" have been designed with the philosophy that you need to "pay to win". This isn't a concept that people like in video games but seems to be widely accepted from within the TCG community. 

I'm no longer a fan of this philosophy...

So what do you do when you like playing card games but don't like investing too much energy/time into getting the right cards? Well you look for alternatives and the following 2 seems to be the most promising...

• Keyforge - I've mentioned this game last week and I hope it catches on because there's something truly beautiful here. Sure, some decks are better than others but there are far greater chances of having decks at the same level than decks that are vastly superior. It's awesome to be able to sit down with someone knowing that the game that we're about to play will be with decks that are similar in strength while still having vastly different strategies.
• Ashes Reborn - I found out about the original Ashes only after it was discontinued and I was really annoyed that it had been canned since it seemed to have been a great game to play. When I found out about Ashes Reborn, I immediately seized that chance to play and I wasn't disappointed. Similar to Keyforge, you don't need to buy millions of individual cards to build decks and the mechanics put a lot of emphasis on strategy rather than simply build an army and attack.

My hope is that these games will resonate with the community and we'll be able to play these for years to come.