It’s a welcome mechanism that introduces a thematic in-game timer.įortunately, the innovations don’t stop there. Heal yourself to negate their damage while slowly increasing your mastery is now a viable way to build your deck. This does mean that Mastery introduces a new method of winning without you resorting to constantly barraging your opponent with damage numbers. Slap down the Shard of Infinity and you only deal 2 damage but having at least 30 Mastery will lead you to deal Infinite damage. Pull out the Shard Reactor and you only get 2 Gems to buy cards, unless you have 15 Mastery which now makes that 4 Gems. Some of the cards in your starting deck and the common market deck will become more powerful once you reach a certain threshold. Mastery? Yes, it’s a new currency that isn’t spent but accumulated. For example, the green Undergrowth is focused on healing while the blue Order cards provide defensive measures as well as ways to generate Mastery. Each of the four factions, or colors, in this game are hyper-focused on a particular mechanism. The common market deck isn’t big as you would think, meaning the tools available to the players are easier to familiarize and balance against each other. However, the changes are subtle to a certain extent. It feels recycled, much like a revival of a 90s sitcom. The Body Of The OldĪlright, so this game isn’t treading new ground at this point. Like every other deckbuilder, your starting deck is crap and the first “arc” of the game is to improve your tiny little useless deck into an efficient murder monstrosity or point generating machine. You have your randomly drawn middle market to buy cards and you play all the cards in your hands to generate currency to do particular actions like attacking or buying. It is also based on Star Realms, a popular deckbuilder, but with some twists to refine the formula.Īnyone who spent some time with board games is probably aware of deckbuilders and the familiar tropes are all here. Unlike Ascension, this is focused on Player vs Player where the objective is to eliminate the other players instead of having the most victory points. Now the original crafters of this masterpiece have created yet another deckbuilder called Shards of Infinity. It was one of the first deckbuilders to be released as an app and it did so well that a good portion of the community resided there.
The app was so good that it made the physical version feel meaningless. My time with Ascension ended as soon as the official Ascension app was released. So much so that it was one of the first card games I have ever sleeved and a younger me wrote a review on BoardGameGeek. It was like a sexy new car at an auto show with sleek innovative features such as the random market row to buy your cards instead of fixed stacks. Ascension promised a quicker game with an easy setup that can be played within 30 to 45 minutes. Because of my negative experience, I avoided deckbuilders as a genre until Ascension showed up. Dominion convinced me that deckbuilders were boring and slow. Shards of Infinity sounds great on paper until you hit the messy bits towards the end.
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