Wise Wizard Games: Epic Deckbuilding Card Game

So today I want to talk about the latest release from White Wizard Games, Epic: Card Game. Epic is a short, fast-paced card game that follows the ECG (expandable card game) format of regular releases of fixed cards. The game follows a similar pattern as Magic: The Gathering. The players are gods that wage war between their champions, which consist of everything from humans to wurms to zombies, on earth, and the goal is to kill the opponent by reducing their health to zero. Pretty standard there.Components120 unique cards, plus 8 "token" cardsMSRP: $15So overall this looks like a great deal, and it is. 120 unique cards would normally go for a lot more than that.The cards are fairly standard TCG cards, though they are of higher quality than those of Magic or FFGs line of Living Card Games, which is great.The game does not come with Health trackers, however there is a free score keeping app for iOS and Android.The GameSo the first thing you should know, and the defining element of the game, is that you lose all gold at the start of the turn, and then receive one gold. "Wait a minute!" you may ask. "But if I can only ever have one gold at a time, how can I play this massive T-Rex? After all, a creature that big should cost a lot."Umm... What? The T-Rex costs one? What about the Burrowing Wurm? One. What about Thundarus, the Dragon Lord of the North? One. Yep, every card costs either one or zero. This leads to some incredibly new gameplay, and is the main reason why this game is different from Magic. Every card is perfectly balanced with each other, mostly because they are all so broken that they balance. Which brings us to the second part of the game. Every card is so god**** broken.Whereas in Magic, broken cards are rare, and only found by people who spend lots of money, which leads to a financial-tied imbalance in the game, every card in Epic is broken. Let's do some examples.The Burrowing Wurm on the left has an 18 offense, and an 18 defense, plus it has the Breakthrough ability, which allows it to deal damage even if it is blocked. "Whoa, that card is overpowered!" Not any more than the other cards. In fact, many people consider that guy to be one of the less good cards. Now on the right, we have an event card. Event cards can be played during specific windows, and give one-time affects. This card just happens to allow the person who played it to either draw to cards, or break all champions. Breaking a champion is the word for killing it. You place broken cards in the discard pile. Being able to reset the board state is highly powerful when you are behind. For one-cost, that is amazing! Just like every other card. In Magic, you go, "I have to build up mana to play this awesome card." In Epic, it is "which awesome insanely powerful card should I play?" In a two player game, you can play one one-gold card on your opponents turn, and one on your own. So this leads to some really interesting and dynamic play.The Factions:Like any good CCG, Epic has four factions. However, these factions are more loose associations rather than cut and dry separations.Good (Focus on small units, healing)Evil (Focus on small units, targeted kill)Sage (Focus on card advantage and severe control)Wild (Focus on direct damage and massive, vanilla units)However, these factions are fairly loose. You can include cards for every faction. In fact, the only time that factions matter are for cards which have Loyalty abilities, in which to you reveal two cards that match the card's faction to receive a bonus. The designers did a great job of making it so that a lot of cards have loyalty affects, and nearly all targeted kill affects outside of Wild need loyalty. This was a big risk to approach factions this way, and it worked excellently.The FormatsMuch of the advertising for Epic has been showing off the multiple formats of the game. These actually are a little disappointing. There are something like ten formats in the rules, but in reality, many of them are slight variations on each other. I break the formats down to:Two-player (sealed)Multiplayer (sealed) (with many slight variations)DraftCube DraftConstructedStill, all in all, that is very good. However, they are not the primary draw that WWG would make you think they are.The draft rules are very well handled, and are in my opinion, this is the best draft game out there in terms of strategy and affordability. You only need the one set to draft, or three to cube draft. The draft rules would work great for tournament play, which brings me to the biggest disappointment about the game. Constructed play.Constructed play consists of players building decks of 60 cards, with limitations on how many 0-cost cards you can include. This is the format WWG uses for tournament play. However, this is handled poorly, and is in general a bad idea for this game. If I wanted to have a complete cardpool for constructed, including the upcoming Tyrants expansion, I would have to pay $105. So much for a cheap game. And the looseness of the factions, while they work perfectly, better than any other system, in Draft play, it begins to crumble in constructed play. So don't go into this expecting it to be highly competitive, and for their to be tournament scenes in your community.Overall this is an excellent product, and something I would recommend to casual gamers as well as hardcore Magic players (especially since they just announced the 100,000 dollar Worlds). However, unless you want to spend a lot of money, constructed is probably not the way to go. As far as other LCGs go, it does well with the fun factor, but there isn’t as much depth as in some games, so this will mainly be a(n excellent) casual game.Rating: 9/10

TLDR: Killed my opponents with an army of life-sucking killer dragons 42/10 would buy again. This game is quite literally epic and I would recommend it to anyone. It is a great strategy game that makes you really think out your plays and will be new and different every time. I haven't played with anyone that has disliked this game yet. It is a fantastic strategy game that you should definitely pick up, especially when you consider the low price point!Ginormous Hydras, Thundering Dragons, Sneaky Mages, and Devious Necromancers. Thematically Epic hits the nail on the head for anything you could hope for in a multiplayer dueling game, but it also has incredible game play mechanics most obviously derived from games like Magic the Gathering, Yu-gi-oh, Pokemon, Force of Will, Hearthstone? etc...At its core Epic is very much so like Magic the Gathering. Epic has 4 different colors of cards that each have their own flavor and feel to them. You have: Good (yellow), Evil (red), Wild (green) and Sage (blue). You have a 30 card deck, which is composed of creatures and spells (called events in Epic). Generally you can only play creatures on your own turn (with an exception for creatures with an ability called ambush - flash in MTG), but you can play events (sorcery/instants in MTG) on either your turn or you opponent's turn. The goal of the game is to reduce your opponent's starting life total of 30 to 0 before they reduce yours to 0. Similarly to Magic the Gathering, your creatures are going to have an attack and a health stat and they can attack the other player of be used to block your opponents creatures. Every creature has unique abilities that will always keep the game fresh.Now that we have addressed the similarities, lets talk about the differences. Epic is different from Magic the Gathering and other games in the way it does resource management. All creatures and spells cost either 1 coin or 0 coins. On your turn you will receive 1 coin to spend on your cards. If you don't spend your 1 coin by the end of your turn, then you lose it. BUT at the end of your turn, you also get 1 coin which will disappear if not used by the beginning of your next turn. This is very different from most other games because you can play your most powerful cards right from the start, but you also have to keep in mind, that you might want to save them until after you have cleared through some of your opponent's kill spells. This creates a unique and interesting balance. And the fact that you always get a coin in between your turns means that your opponents and you constantly have to keep on your toes because anything can happen!Another major difference is that, while Epic can be played with 2 players it can also be played with up to 4 players using just a single box of cards. I think the game can be expanded up to 8 players with 2 decks of cards, but I think those games would take far too long to be enjoyable.There are several different ways to play Epic: you can play with the pre-constructed decks, each consisting of a single color, or you can draft (the better option :) ). The way drafting works depends on how many players you play with. With two players, you shuffle the whole deck and then flip over the top 4 cards. You then randomly determine who goes first and they become player A. Player A chooses 1 card and then player B chooses 2 cards and then player A takes the last card. Then you flip over the next 4 cards and Player B picks the first card, player A picks the next 2 cards and player B takes the last card. You repeat this process until both players have a 30 card deck. Then you start your duel. Considering the fact that the game consists of 120 cards, this means you will always have fresh new combinations of decks to try out. When drafting with more than two players, you build 3 packs of 10 cards for each player by randomly shuffling up the cards. Then you pick up the first pack and you will look at the pack, select a card and then pass it to the next player. You continue picking cards until the pack runs out of cards and then repeat the process with the remaining two packs alternating the direction you pass on the 2nd pack. Ultimately you get a lot of control over what your deck looks like and it is part of the fun of the game.The multiplayer dynamic of the game can be very fun and is made interesting by the fact that your creatures can only block once per round. So, you really have to figure out when the best time to block is.The only slight drawback to the game is that there is no provided way of keeping track of your life-total. So, you either need dice to keep track or a pen and paper. Wasn't really a problem for my friends and I since I have an abundance of D20s, but you have been warned!Ultimately, this is one of my favorite games and I would recommend it to anyone hands down and it is one of the most frequently played games between my friends and I. We are eagerly anticipating the next expansion and the diversity it would bring to the game!If you found this review helpful, then please let me know below. I am trying to figure out how to improve my reviews to aid other Amazon customers and any feedback in the form of likes, dislikes and comments would be appreciated!BONUS FOR MTG PLAYERS:Other minor but important differences between this and MTG are that this game doesn't have a stack, you have multiple attack steps, and any single creature can block a group of creatures. The lack of a stack and opportunity to respond to other players actions killed me internally for a while, but I think it is nice for players who aren't used to the complexity of MTG. Also, I like the multiple attack steps and blocking mechanics and how they are different because it opens up new kinds of strategies in the way you play the game. Some of these things may be a turn off to MTG players, but I thought they were a welcome change that added variation. That being said, all MTG players I have played this game with have loved it. Would recommend to anyone!