Eternal - An Introduction

Eternal Card Game

I’d like to introduce you to a game I’ve played quite a bit lately, Eternal.

I am going to talk a bit about how to play, but many people have done that already, so what I am going to focus on first is why you should give this digital card game a shot.

Summary:

• The economy is excellent.  You will not find better value for your time than Eternal, or value for any money you choose to spend.
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• The play modes are all very good, and most are extremely time-efficient.

• Play vs the computer to learn and experiment, a very low stress experience.

• An excellent all-human draft mode.

• Ranked leveling up that is not much of a grind.

• Very easy to learn, with or without a MTG background (my wife is pretty good at all the game modes, and has no prior CCG experience)

• Great digital effects.

• A ton of excellent cards, build-arounds, for all deck archetypes and colors.

• A great engaged community

Give it a try, it is one of the best games I’ve played.

The Economy

This game is extremely free-to-play friendly.

 

Your first win each day gives you a pack of the most recent set. 

You get a quest each day that can give you 500 gold worth of quests, and maybe a pack.

You are not pressured into playing a bunch each day to collect rewards, but you can get reasonable rewards for your first 3, 6, 9 wins in ranked each day. (around 300 gold per 3 wins)

The vs AI modes are actually moderately profitable, and super-fast (more on the AI modes later)

You can destroy cards you don’t want, to make cards you do, at a ~4:1 rate.  Premium (foil, shiny) versions of cards roughly make any other card of that same rarity.   MTGA has a rate of roughly 100:1, which is absurdly bad in comparison.

You get “Shiftstone”, the card crafting material just for opening packs, which helps you craft the cards you want.

My wife and I each put $40 into the game, just because your first purchase gives you quite a bit of rewards, and we wanted to give back to Dire Wolf for making such an amazing game.  This is by no means mandatory, but I have no regrets (closing in on 100 days played in steam…)

You can spend money to speed things up if you want, but I haven’t found that necessary at any point, beyond my minor investment described above.

The only thing that requires dollars to be spent are cosmetic items.  Everything else can be bought with Gems (the real money conversion in the game) or gold.   There are some cool items, like your personal avatar, card backs, “totems” (statues that sit on the battlefield and are interactable), that are gems-only, but they are not required in any way to have fun playing the game.

Magic: Arena is a joke compared to Eternal from the economy perspective.  Multiple studies have been done comparing the cost of building a budget and competitive deck in the various competitors, and Eternal is roughly a factor of two more efficient than the competitors.

The rank-up benefits through the first few tiers of vs-AI mode are extremely generous.

The cost to enter events is generally similar to the cost of buying packs from the store directly (don’t buy packs from the store directly), and then you get some kind of bonus, either even more packs from playing the games, gold rewards, cosmetic items, random cards of high rarity if you do well, and so on.   

In other game systems, you pay a premium to enter an event, and you have to do extremely well to break even.  It is hard to find a game mode in eternal that is not far superior to buying packs directly, when the opposite is so often true elsewhere.

VS-AI Modes – Excellent!

One of the hardest things psychologically in online PVP games is that someone has to lose.  

Also, it can be very intimidating as a new player to go into a game against a faceless opponent who likely is far more experienced than you, has more cards, more knowledge of the system, and you have to overcome quite a bit before you can get to a point where you are winning more than you lose.

Eternal solves this to some extent with the VS-AI modes.  They have a gradient of difficulty through the ranks (Unranked, Bronze, Silver, Gold, Diamond, Master, and a secret high master rank where the AI gets more powerful cards the more you beat it).  

These modes are quite generous in their payouts up to the Master rank, which can fuel forays into other modes, and generally serve as a way to get gold into the economy and ramp up new players on mechanics, in a safe environment.

After Master difficulty, they are still a good psychological result (you can have a high win rate vs the computer).  They serve as a sandbox to try things out (Gauntlet) or build your collection (Forge) in a very low-pressure environment.

The VS-AI modes are extremely play at your own pace.  The computer gives you as much time as you want to make all decisions (nothing is timed, unlike player-vs-player modes), and acts extremely quickly, to the point that I can often complete a Gauntlet (7 games) in the time it takes me to play two games in ranked.  There is no queue, no waiting, and if you need to take a break to take care of your daughter, eat dinner, or whatever other real-life thing intervenes, you can basically pause and come back.  This is extremely helpful.

The computer behaves quite predictably in what it does, so you can take advantage of this with certain cards or strategies.  Victory is by no means certain, but it is fun to win, and there is a strong psychological bonus to beating the stupid computer =)

The only place it feels a bit unfair (at Masters) is in the Forge environment, where you roughly have as good a deck at Masters, as Bronze, but you can be facing multiple very difficult to defeat cards or strategies from the AI.  Still, you have a loss to give even in that mode, and even with these handicaps, I believe it is possible to average high enough to make even this a profitable long-term play mode.

Draft – Excellent!

Eternal uses a “asynchronous draft” system.  Every pack you get passed is the result of a real human interaction with a pack, and the same chain of humans is upstream of you with each pack.  This continues in whatever direction you want to perceive it as until the first pack is over.  Then for the second and third packs, the same thing happens in a different direction (from a different upstream chain of real players).   Pack 4 you’re back to the pack 1 chain of players, and that’s the draft.

This is in almost every way superior to a “traditional” draft.  It has the following advantages:

• Pick at your own pace.  You have as much time as you want to make a pick, in case you need to think, or real life intervenes.

• There is no waiting whatsoever between picks.  You can finish the 48 picks in a draft in 1-5 minutes if you are fast, good luck finishing a human-MTG draft in less than 30 minutes.

• “Wheeling” is replaced by every pack being new, which I have found to be far better than wheeling anything.  You can get high pick quality cards in the later picks, which is something that will just never happen in a real draft.

• You are making 45 card decks (instead of 40), but you have more cards (48 vs 42), more rares/uncommons (4 packs vs 3), and as previously mentioned, if you read well you can get at least a playable out of the last 4 picks in a pack, something quite unlikely in a traditional draft.

• You don’t have to wait to start the draft, you don’t have to wait until x players are ready.

The “Downsides” are

• The lack of wheeling (irrelevant IMO, or even a upside)

• When you swap to pack 2, they use an algorhythm to choose what historical real pickers they should choose as your effective downstream players.  So, if you don’t pass any , it is more likely that the people that pass to you won’t have had any in their pile after pack 1.  It’s not the actual same people on the swap from pack 1 to 2+3, but it is pretty reasonable.

MTGA can’t figure out how to do human drafts at all, and MTGO can’t do them efficiently, but Eternal has been doing them for years in a truly excellent player experience with asynchronous drafting.

The cards themselves are great for draft, it feels like there are quite a few playables, good fixing for formats that need it, and aggression, control, ramp, are all reasonable strategies.

"Rare drafting” for the Shiftstone is a viable strategy, especially for new players, to maximize growing their collection.

Play skill is a strong factor, you see the same players in the top of the standings each month, and it is possible to make Masters (for the shiny legendary at the end of the month) with some dedication (10-15 drafts or so).

The Influence System.

You know what’s fun?  Not figuring out how to tap your lands to cast your spells, or have the computer do it wrong for you.

Eternal keeps it simple There is Influence (the colors/symbols with numbers under them), and Power (the 7/7 or 8/8 in the image above).  Influence is a prerequisite, that is not spent at any point, but always available to meet the requirements of your cards.  Power is a pool that refreshes each turn to play your spells.

This system is phenomenally better for drawing out of poor power/land situations.  If you had no Red/Fire for the first few turns, and then draw one (even a depleted Fire), you can immediately start casting all of your single-influence Fire spells.  With MTG and the tap-your-lands system, you will be waiting several turns to play your spells, which increases the number of non-games (in MTG, vs Eternal)

I like the variety of power/lands that are available.  There are good power for unit decks, control decks, midrange decks, two color, three color decks, one color decks….  There are payoffs for being single color, or spell-lands.  It’s just great.

The Defender-Chooses-Blockers system.

In Hearthstone, the attacker chooses where the damage is going, which is incredibly powerful for whomever is attacking.  Magic does it better, in my opinion, and Eternal reuses this mechanic.  This increases the interaction between the players, and helps the defender out a bit, which is something that is probably net positive for a game like this.

The Battle Skills/Abilities.

There are a ton of useful, viable, intriguing battle skills/Keyword abilities in Eternal.

Don’t know what they are?  There is in-game hover text for everything that is keyworded.

Don’t know what a card created by a card is?  Hover text.

You can even tell that an ability has been used, because it is greyed out.  Simple, straightforward.

Want to see some tips and tricks for using them?  There are a whole lot of “puzzles” in the game that explore the possibilities with certain mechanics.  I personally like them quite a bit, they seem like a great teaching tool.  (and they should add more!)

There is something like 15 “battle skills” and quite a few keyword abilities.  I can talk for quite some time about each, and it is quite difficult to even say what the top 3 would be.  I just keep thinking of more of them that I like!

There are also several battle skills (Overwhelm (trample), Quickdraw (first strike)) that only work on offense.  For Quickdraw especially this prevents some board stalls from stacked “first strike” blockers.

The Digital Environment.

Eternal does a good job of utilizing the digital environment innately.  They get quite a bit of benefit in the design space for not having to deal with a paper implementation.

Abilities like Warcry, Revenge, Aegis, Silence, Berserk, Destiny, Fate, Echo, Killer, persisting information in zone changes, tokens going to the void, would all difficult to implement in a game like MTG.

If you are a fan of streaming, Eternal has done some serious work to enable a great viewing experience by allowing you to hover over cards streamers are playing on twitch, see their deck-lists, it’s amazing!

Best of One + Merchants.

 

Fast, powerful, versatile, very interesting from deckbuilding, and with new flavors coming out in recent expansions, this is a really good system for Eternal, and I would dub it superior to best of 3 + sideboard.

Eternal had a sideboard for a while, but no one is talking about sideboards now that markets exist.

It is just better to play three games with half a sideboard then play a very long single match, and then try to play in a tournament with that extremely clumsy scheduling of “the speed of the slowest person”.

Eternal does have best of 3 or best of 5 for big tourneys, but I would not want to play best of 3 for ranked, draft.  It’s just too slow, and what is the benefit?  The good player or match-up “wins for real” slightly more?  That is not a benefit for half the players, who would rather be on to the next game, where they have a better shot of having fun.

The Deckbuilding Possibilities.

There are so many synergy cards, build-arounds, that I always have something to think about.

There is real, credible competition for most slots, where you might choose one creature over another for one aggro deck, but for another aggro deck with a slightly different overall strategy, you might play quite a few different creatures, even in the same color combinations.  That is truly impressive.

There are aggressive, midrange, control, and ramp tools in every color, each with their own outlook, flavor, advantages, and disadvantages.

As you will see in future posts in the topic of Eternal deckbuilding, there are a TON of directions you can go, and options for each point on your curve.

Constantly Evolving Meta

Every month or two there is a new card released as a free daily quest reward.  There are new sets at a reasonable frequency.  They have campaigns, or mini-expansions about once per set release.

Every week or two there is another mini-Event, generally a riff on the existing format, with a rules change that shakes everything up.  This is an excellent opportunity to build new and interesting decks for that rules set, and it is difficult for their to be a "best" deck and for that format to get boring before it wraps up.

They can make adjustments to the power level of cards, and tend to buff as much if not more as they nerf, which is a good design philosophy.

They are very generous when they nerf, giving full disenchant values for even side-grade changes to cards.

The Community

There are multiple active "teams" putting out content for the various PVP modes.  Twitch support is great, so solid streaming content is always available.  The Eternal SubReddit is active and engaged in trying to make Eternal a better game, giving feedback to the developers and helping each other learn from one anothers Drafts, Event Deck-Building, and so on.

 Summary

Eternal really is an excellent game.  You should really give it a shot.  It is exceptionally free, exceptionally respectful of it’s players time, and has a truly stunning pool of cards begging to be put in decks, to become the next Tier 1 monstrosity.

Why haven’t you heard about it if it’s so great?  Well, one of the community complaints is a lack of advertising to make more people aware of the game, but this historical trend is starting to reverse itself.  You may have seen ads for Eternal on ChannelFireball.com, and other locations.  Louis Scott-Vargus, CFB VP is one of the designers/developers of Eternal, as well as well-known Magic: The Gathering professionals Patrick Chapin, Patrick Sullivan, Conley Woods, Josh Utter-Leyton, Michael Jacob, and many more!

You can expect to see more Eternal content in the coming weeks and months, the floodgates are about to open =)

Hearthstone - Rogue Legendary Quest

I opened three packs of the new hearthstone expansion, and happened to open the rogue legendary quest, which seemed quite powerful to me.

The way the quests work is very interesting. 

You always start with them pre-mulligan (though I assume you can mulligan them away, not sure why you'd do this).

They all cost 1 to play, and they all trigger on some semi-hard thing to accomplish.
You can't (likely) counter the first ability, but you could in theory set up a counter for the second spell (since it costs 5, you could in theory have a mage secret up or whatever)

The rogue secret reward is pretty strange, the in play minions, the minions in your hand, your bounced minions, etc, etc, are 5/5.  Now, once they take damage post-this, they can go down from 5/5, but it is still a phenomenally powerful ability.

Triggering the quest:

Hearthstone has a limit of the cards you can have in your deck of 2 of any particular card name, so at first glance it seems impossible to play four of one thing, since you'll only have two in your deck.

But it's not, clearly, and here's how we go about it:

What these cards do is let you return your own cards to your hand, so you can play them again, and trigger the quest one more time.

It's important to have a good number of these in the early game, because you cannot trigger your quest normally without these cards, and the quest is what turns your otherwise junk minions into real threats.

Shadowstep is actually probably the most powerful version of this, because despite doing nothing on it's own, it is the cheapest.  It enables combo well, and it makes the minion replay cheaper.  Mana is tight if you want to go off early, so shadowstep is really 4 mana less than these other options.  It also makes it a lot easier to charge people to death in one turn.

The Payoffs.

The payoffs are these crazy charge minions, because you can play them for one or two mana post-quest, hit something for five right away, or just hit face, and then use your other bounce-self spells to bounce your guy, replay it, and hit them for five again, and again, and again....

Charge is really critical, as is the mana cost.  The version dog used to make rank 1 legend did not use Bluegill Warriors, likely because they cost two and it is harder to combo-kill with them, because as I said earlier, mana is very tight in the final turns.

I like it, but it is the worst charge minion here, so if you were going to cut one, this is the one to cut.

Random Spell Enablers:

Mimic pod is pretty good, because it is a cheap enabler.  It gives you two copies of a random card, which means you need your deck to have a high concentration of enablers, because drawing more random stuff is a relative disaster.

3 is the largest cost so far, which means this is a full turn for the most part in the early game, but if you draw an enabler, you're pretty much good to go.

One note is that this does pay you off a bit for having prep in your deck, more uses for a card is generally good.

Preparation may not look like it does much, because there aren't exactly many expensive cards in the deck, but it critically reduces the cost of the quest reward.  It's much more possible to kill someone when it costs 2, than when it costs 5, it can save you a whole turn.

In addition, it does reduce the cost of some random cards in the deck, like Mimic Pod, Eviscerate, or Thistle Tea (when I was playing a single copy of that)

Cycling:

Fan gives you a bit of interaction, especially with agro decks (which tend to run x/1s), and Novice gives you something to bounce that does something (sortof).

Swashburgler is better because it's cheaper, but worse because it's going to draw you something stupid (a non-enabler, non-copy of a card in your deck, etc).  But it is cheap, so it's an okay thing to cycle.

Options like loot hoarder are terrible, because you don't want your enablers to be deathrattles.  You're going to bounce your stuff, not get it killed.  This is also why I thought the Igneous Elemental (or whatever) was stupid.

It's somewhat important to cycle cards, because you only have so many enablers.  Drawing multiples of the same creature doesn't hurt either. 

Interaction:

 

Interaction is a bit overrated.  You're not going to face for four with Eviscerate, you'd rather have a bluegill for a variety of reasons (it's a 5/5, and you can bounce it, etc), so I'm not super sold on Evisc for this deck.  Backstab is good interaction early, and can enable combos.  I liked it quite a bit when I was running SI:7, and since you dagger quite a bit on turn 2, it can kill a three toughness guy turn 2 or 3.

These do combo somewhat with the spells-matter portions of the deck, if you use those (Violet Teacher, Edwin Van Cleef)

Misc:

Dog played a copy of each of these legendaries.  I don't have Patches, but I did play with Edwin and he can be big, but he seems to be much more of a backup plan than a primary plan, and I'm not sure it's amazing really, but it's fine.  Violet Teacher is another backup-y card, and it is probably good post-quest.

Moroes is another way to generate 5/5s, but doesn't seem a ton better than a bluegill, so I'd probably replace patches and moroes with bluegills.  I do have Moroes, so I could use it if I want.  I probably won't craft patches since having singleton non-combo minions seems like it greatly reduces the likelihood of the quest working in the first place.  I've played a couple dozen games with various versions of the game, and have had a hard time losing when I completed the quest.  I was playing with a single Thistle Tea, against low rank opponents, and some pretty random decks, but things like taunt, healing, and so on didn't do much against what was basically a one-turn kill for n 5/5 hasting creatures.

Other Other:

The problem I ran into was not drawing enough enablers (which is why I liked Thistle Tea), and would kind of like some actively playable creature I could play. 

SI:7 is amazing for general board control/interaction, and it's pretty easy for me to envision playing this instead of Eviscerate, especially with Backstab, and a bunch of 1 cost stuff.  Perhaps it's too slow, but it's the best creature I can think of to play a bunch of times.

Fire fly gives me something I can play with the early two cost bouncers turn three.  I can develop, get more copies of cards to play.  There is really something to be said to just be able to do anything whatsoever to advance your plan, and Firefly doesn't cost you much.  I think this card is probably better than smuggler, since it is a more credible creature (harder to kill), and it gives you another creature (which is likely better than giving you some random spell), but I could easily be wrong here.) 

Thistle Tea sets up the quest, but it is extremely slow.  I do like it a bit more with prep*2 in the deck (something I did not originally have), but it is totally a random inclusion.  I feel like professional players are winning on turn 4-5 with this deck, so the idea of spells that cost 6 is not amazing.

Same story most likely with SI7, which is grindy, but you could just win instead.... 

I really like this deck, it seems super powerful, and I wouldn't be surprised if this was nerfed in some way.