Creator: Challenge Games
Subscription Scheme: Free to play; player can pay for card packs and membership.
Interaction Emphasis: Player vs Player
Basis: Browser based
Duels Warstorm is a MMO Collectible Card Game. CCGs, by nature, don't appeal to most people. This one is no different. However, among all of the MMOs I've played over the years, this has to be one of the best. You sign up and the first thing you do is create your avatar. This is what you will look like to all of your fellow players, so make the end result something you like. Afterwards, you will get a choice between two heroes. They are Lord General Pozak (Human) and Light Priestess Enyi (Elf). Each has command of six Units of their own race. It doesn't matter what you choose since you will soon be earning free packs that can contain the other Hero and Units you missed out on initially. After this choice, you are ushered into the battlefield, where you will notice something.
In Warstorm, you do not control your cards. At all. Your control begins and ends in the deck building phase where you set up your squads. A squad is made up of one Hero and a combination of Units, Spells and Artifacts determined by three numbers lining the right side of that particular Hero's card. The sum of those three numbers will always be 6 and all slots in a Hero's squad must be filled for it to be used. This is a logistical constraint that doesn't affect you initially, since there are no Spells or Artifacts in the Novice packs (free packs) you will be earning and all Heroes you may get from that set will invariably have 6 Unit Squads (those Heroes can't use Spells or Artifacts).
There will, of course, come a time where you want to use more than humans and elves, seeing as all the Novice Pack has are Human and Elf Units and Heroes. As of the time of this writing, there are a total of five races. The ones
I haven't mentioned are Demons, Orcs and Undead. Each race has certain abilities and strategies that set them apart from the others. Each race can also be differentiated from the others by the color of their cards. Just to name two in a contrasting exercise, Elves have green colored cards and Demons have red colored cards.
Challenge Games recently introduced a Reward Points system where you gain Reward Points (RP for short) for doing things like purchasing card packs and inviting friends to join the game. This system allows for the player to get special Reward cards that cannot be acquired through other means, as well as purchase additional Novice Packs (waste of RP since you get these for free to begin with) or purchase Expert Packs (good idea; you'll see why in the next paragraph)
Expert Packs are one of the four packs purchasable with cash or Challenge Coins (Challenge Game's official currency which is obtainable by paying cash or by completing sponsored Trialpay and Peanut Labs offers), and the only pack also purchasable with RP. This allows a player unwilling to pay for the game to get some of the best cards in the game. Even better is the fact that you can get Units and Heroes (that can, in some cases, use Spells and Artifacts) from any of the five races in those packs, as well as Spells and Artifacts.
There are seven rarities of cards in the game, which are easily distinguished by the color of said card's name. From most common to most rare they are: Gray (also called Tier 1, or T1), White (T2), Green (T3), Blue (T4), Purple (T5), Orange (T6) and Red (T7). Red cards cannot be obtained in Novice packs at all and are the sole domain of paid packs and certain cards you can earn via Achievements. Gray cards, in contrast to Reds, only appear in Novice packs.
There are many other things that I could mention about Warstorm, but I believe it is best that you go explore it for yourself. I'm sure you will be pleasantly surprised at the game's complexity. I'll see you on the battlefield! ;)
- Winterfate
July 10, 2009
