Note: UVS Games was kind enough to send me two Universus decks recently. This isn’t a full on review of the game, but I do share my thoughts later in the post.
For reasons relating to an unannounced personal project, I’ve been thinking about TCG’s recently. I’ve recently gotten back into playing Magic on Arena, which I did first as part of my job at CBR but which I’ve continued to do with a small group of friends. I played a lot of Friday Night Magic in middle and high school, and EDH really won my heart (I started when it was still called EDH, but only just). So I’ve been into card games like this for years, but only recently have I tried branching out into other TCGs. Nothing else seemed to offer anything I couldn’t already get from Magic, especially once Arena came around. But I’ve recently dipped my toes into two other games; the Pokémon TCG and most recently Universus from UVS Games. So today’s blog is gonna be looking at what I think each of these games does and how.
Magic
Magic is the Trading Card Game. It’s widely regarded as the first, and whether that’s literally true or not it’s certainly the oldest game of its kind that is still active. I’d say its grip on its genre is potentially even greater than Hasbro’s other fantasy elephant in the room. There certainly are other TCGs with large playerbases, but the resources required to support a robust card game limit how wide the playing field can be. Being a multi-million dollar brand, Magic is no stranger to shitty behavior. But in the interest of analyzing game mechanics, I’m going to gently put aside AI-art fiascos and Pinkerton scandals and the rest. For now, it’s about the cards.
Magic is ultimately a game about slowly generating resources in order to play progressively more powerful cards in order to reduce your opponent to zero life points before they do the same to you. Inside of that relatively simple structure, you have a lot of levers you can pull to try and get an edge. Maybe your deck is focused on having more resources, whether that’s mana ramp or card advantage. Maybe your deck is focused on disrupting your opponent’s resources through control or tempo strategies. You have mill decks that attack a different final score with cards that tend to be relatively cheap, though limited in scope. You have midrange-y decks that just play efficient cards on-curve. Regardless of their strategy, all Magic decks have some relationship to the linear progression that is established by the “Draw one, play one” nature of the game. Draw one card each turn, play one land each turn. Everything else on top of that is a choice, a strategy, a play. It’s a nice pacing mechanic that prevents games from ending straight away.
I also think this relatively simple structure is what allows Magic to be so flavorful. In this interview I did with Richard Garfield, Magic’s creator, he lays out what I think is a very apt description of what games like this are good at when it comes to the story.
“I think games are very good at generating flavor… I love adding flavor to my game. But where I usually try to emphasize it is not a narrative but the characters, the creatures, the elements of the world. I think reflecting them and having the mechanics reflect the way they relate, that’s of a lot of interest to me.”
Richard Garfield
Going all the way back to Alpha, you have Magic cards that do just what they feel like they should. Swords to Plowshares removes a creature from the battlefield, sending them to the fields to provide healing to their controller. Volcanic Eruption destroys Islands and damages everything around. Raging River has you split your attackers across two sides of a gorge, and the opponent has to divide their forces accordingly. From the beginning, Magic tied game actions to in-universe ideas. Drawing cards is about knowledge. The discard pile is called the graveyard. Mana comes from the earth. All these core ideas have been played with and twisted a lot in the years since, but they help make sense of game actions in a way that becomes intuitive once you play even just a few games.
The other thing I think Magic’s many levers allow for is all the funky and wacky interactions. This is what keeps me coming back to Magic now – there’s always another weird deck to build, another strange interaction to try to exploit. When I first started playing at FNMs in 2011ish, I latched onto the infect archetype. I used to terrorize my local store with a Venser the Sojourner + Stonehorn Dignitary control deck that locked my opponent out of their attack steps forever before beating them up with Blade Splicer Golem tokens and Lingering Souls spirit tokens. I briefly played a very strange infinite combo deck in Theros standard with Triton Tactics and Elite Arcanist (it wasn’t very good, but it was very fun), and I’m currently rocking a variation on this Harmonic Prodigy shamans deck in Historic. Magic has somehow never managed to lose the feeling I got flipping through booster packs when I was 12. “Can I make this card work? Does this interaction work the way I want it to?” To a certain extent, the answer to that question is usually yes.
Ah, simpler times.
So by my estimation, there are three things that Magic does well: a robust competitive environment, enticing deckbuilding possibilities, and an elegant marriage of flavor (if not narrative) and the mechanics. These three strengths are so well documented that Magic has nicknames for the kinds of players who like them; the competitive Spike, the creative Johnny, and the story-oriented Vorthos. As someone who has been a Magic player for a long time, for better or for worse these three pillars are going to help form the lens through which I look at any other card game.
Now again, I want to say here that I have no love for Magic as a brand. I think Hasbro’s greed is already damaging the game in a big way, and given their newly announced multi-year collab with Marvel, we’ve seen nothing yet. But I do also believe that there are talented people working on Magic, and their hard work continues to pay off despite Hasbro mismanagement.
Pokémon
I like Pokémon a good deal, I don’t know why I waited this long to try the TCG. Last year, prompted again by job reasons, I downloaded the Pokémon TCG Live client and muddled my way through a few games. I haven’t played nearly as much Pokémon TCG as I have Magic, but my short time with it elucidated a few key differences.
Pokémon the TCG is more about building an engine than it is about slowly accumulating resources. The goal is to set up a good combo of active and benched Pokémon whose abilities feed into one another and generate enough damage to knock out your opponents Pokémon faster than they can hit yours. The Energy system offers a pacing mechanic that is somewhat analogous to lands in Magic, but it’s far from one to one. The real pacing mechanic in Pokémon is the six victory cards; knock out six of your opponent’s Pokémon in order to win. The combo Magic player in me actually really enjoyed this aspect of the game. I played the Solrock-Lunatone starter deck, which tries to get an active Lunatone on the field backed up by a field of Solrocks that can retrieve psychic energy from the discard pile to keep the Lunatone powered up.
I definitely didn’t find the Pokémon TCG as deep or compelling as Magic. I also don’t love how little interaction there is. While there are cards that can move your opponent’s Pokémon, affect their hand, etc, it’s not nearly as common as in Magic. It largely feels like one player does their combo, the other does theirs, and whoever has the better combo wins. That being said, it is pretty satisfying to assemble your combo, dig through your deck for the right cards, and watch all your pieces click into place. I do hop on and play a few games every once and a while, but it almost feels more like playing solitaire than a truly competitive game.
The Pokémon TCG is of course not operating as a lone actor. It came out at the same time as the original games, and it continues to run parallel to video games as parts of the juggernaut that is the Pokémon brand. It drives a robust industry around pack openings, card reselling, and the like. I’d wager there’s a lot more people who buy Pokémon cards with no intention of playing them than there are people who do the same for Magic.
Universus
This brings me to the game that is newest to me: Universus. Now like I said, I was sent two Universus decks to review. Learning the game was a little intimidating, especially because each set uses a slightly different card layout. But once I got my head around the game and played a few rounds, I actually really enjoyed it.
Once again, Universus is not paced like a Magic game. You have a life point pool, determined by your chosen Character card, and you have cards that roughly function like lands in Foundations, but that’s about where the similarities stop. Rather than a cost, Universus cards have a difficulty, which must be “checked” in order to play them. This is done by revealing cards from the top of the deck and comparing a separate, unrelated value. Failing a check can be mitigated by using Foundations, which is what makes them kind of like a land. But outside of checks getting more difficult with each card, there’s no hard limit on how many cards can be played each turn. This strikes a nice balance between Magic’s “get one resource each turn, play bigger things or more things later” approach and Pokémon’s “play everything all at once all the time” gameplay. In the games I played, each player could safely play 3-4 cards each turn, only one or two of them being attacks. The progressive difficulty mechanic makes each turn a matter of pushing your luck, trying to keep up the attack while keeping enough resources in reserve to block the opponent’s next strike. You also draw up to your hand limit every turn, so you are always able to get a full suite of new options; it never really stalls out. I found myself always thinking a turn ahead, but never two or three, so the action was always immediate and quick.
I’m no fighting game fanatic, but the flow of a Universus game did make me feel like I was pulling off slick combos at an arcade. You want to balance speed and power to make your attack harder to block and more devastating. The Cowboy Bebop deck I played had enough mechanical synergy to get those cool combo turns going without being overwhelming. I think this game far outpaces the Pokémon TCG in terms of having levers to pull on, and I know I barely scratched the surface of the gameplay.
My biggest gripe with Universus is on the flavor front. Now I admit, I never finished Cowboy Bebop fan, but I feel like I should be able to understand something about why the deck works with the mechanics it does, but I’m largely left scratching my head. Nothing in these decks grabbed my attention and demanded I build around it, which is something I think a lot of Magic cards could do even for a brand new player. My suspicion is that a lot of these terms and mechanics make a lot more sense when they’re used in a fighting game context rather than paired with anime tie-ins. Something is always going to be lost in translation to CCG rules, but flavor doesn’t strike me as Universe’s priority. I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean I’m not rushing out to build more decks tomorrow.
As both a player and a designer, I find it useful to think about what levers a player has available to them in devising their strategy. Too many levers and the game probably gets unbalanced or overwhelming, too few and it’s not engaging. When looking at these three games, I find that Magic has what feels like a good number of levels, Pokémon has too few, and Universus keeps its levers hidden behind a lot of moving parts. I think they’re there, I just can’t reach them yet. This metaphor may have escaped me.
I also keep coming back to the flavor question. I think the key to successfully representing characters and the world mechanically lies in clearly defining what different mechanics mean in-fiction, though you can find a lot of wiggle room once you’ve made those clear. Universus didn’t hit that mark for me, though it’s entirely possible I’m missing things within that mechanics-to-story relationship that a bigger fan of the properties being adapted would catch straight away. In the future, I’d like to investigate this flavor question in TTRPGs as well, because I think there’s a few different camps that those games tend to fall into as well. Is that just my excuse to finally talk about 4th edition D&D on this blog? Maybe.