Written by Archive Keeper

Chapter VI

Swing for the Fences; Passion Veers Towards Madness

Since 1993, when the first Mountain and Lightning Bolt came off the printing press, the ordinary card player has desired a clever deck of cards carefully gathered from booster packs.

Over the years, that ordinary card player has been beset on all sides, in every TCG ever printed, by game designs that discourage creative constructed deckbuilding, narrow competitive play to solved metas and well-studied matchups.

For over three decades, this ordinary player — casual but invested — has gravitated toward or created formats to achieve that dream. Limited formats, block constructed, and even the early days of Elder Dragon Highlander attempted to create a competitive environment that our ordinary player felt was a birthright: to play the cards they enjoyed with the intent to win, simultaneously and without compromise.

That player has been denied this experience, however, time and time again, by nearly solved formats that require significant time and skill for truly competitive play. Friends, no longer. Sorcery: Contested Realm (SCR) achieves this dream in a truly radical way, running in the face of conventional game design wisdom.

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One of the earliest lessons in game design, whether board, video, or trading cards, is to maximize depth while minimizing complexity. Complexity means the amount of mental processing required to understand what’s happening and to make a decision based on that information. Depth is a measure of how many experientially different decisions players get to make.

In SCR, there are at least two different “silos” for depth. The first is in each game, as players strategize where and how to play game pieces for maximum effect. The second is meta-game, deck building, matchups, etc.

The SCR designers intentionally made the game complex. I know of no other TCGs whose gameboard has an X, Y, and Z axis. Compiling the rules to know about how the four-by-five Realm works, including the keywords with no reminder text, various innate abilities on minions and artifacts, two completely different resource types to manage — the mental load is heavy, and that’s all before mulligans.

Yes, it may feel like a big wall at the beginning of one's SCR journey. Even after playing a dozen games, basic rule interactions that had not yet arisen arise. Players are likely to encounter one-off confusions in the first hundred games, which may, at times, cause frustration due to the complexity of it all.

But the pay-off in depth is worth it a thousand times over. In no other card game have I ever felt the variety of deck-building options available in Sorcery. It's an impressive feat considering only three sets in!

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This beautiful game, still in its infancy, boasts plains and craters, tunnels and waves, swamps and soaring skies as places for minions to explore and conquer, and as tools for building the Realm into something unique in every game. It boasts dozens of Avatars, each of which completely changes the way spells interact with the Realm; some turn magics into minions, some turn dead minions into deadly projectiles, they may encourage taking to the skies, or to gambling on the top-deck, they may charge at the opponent in memory of Leeroy Jenkins, or skulk in the shadows, waiting to strike. The whole Realm may flood, where every carefully laid plan has to be remade from square one.

If you’re the ordinary card player who likes constructed formats and wants to win without having to net decks and study matchups, if you like experiencing the first-hand feedback loop of playing and improving, of fine-tuning and then seeing it pay off, then SCR has the depth and quality you seek.

Thanks to this incredible depth, each game of Sorcery plays out wildly different from the last. The variety in deck building creates exponentially more unique gameplay experiences relative to other games. In SCR, the ordinary card player can finally be competitive with their creative homebrew. Their inner Spike, Timmy, and Johnny are not at odds with each other but rather working together to create something greater than the sum of their parts.

Through this ingenious use of complexity, SCR has achieved a gameplay so richly varied that it can’t be quantified or analyzed to the same extent as other games. The complexity creates a shield for creativity to hide behind, safe from over-optimization. While the complexity certainly creates some headaches, it also delivers a unique game experience that feels cutting-edge and nostalgic. It feels like you’re playing all 30 years of TCG history at the same time. It’s a game that has created a beautiful array of puzzle pieces for eager strategists to min-max without crushing the naivety of childhood whimsy and fantastical thinking.

SCR has achieved everything I never knew I wanted in a card game, and I couldn’t be happier to struggle with its complexity to be a part of its story.

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Featured image: The Round Table by Margaret Organ-Kean