Cabals: Magic & Battle Cards

As a lapsed player, I decided to give Cabals another go, to see the stuff they ironed out and the new things they added, so let’s check it out: PROS: -The theme is what makes this game great and awesome. Secret societies of mythical creatures and folklore beasties based around the 1920’s.Simply awesome in the variety and aesthetic identity of each of the cabals. -Beautiful art and art style. Also the main musical theme is haunting and awesome. -The gameplay is interesting, adding the depth of navigating, conquering, and controlling a board with the complexities of a mana-based CCG. -Different boards make matches feel quite different, as the resources available can change the approach you take to implementing your deck’s strategy. -Cabals divided into factions, meaning each cabal has another sister cabal allowing both to play cards from one and other. This, combined with the influence system and faction leaders gives interesting restrictions, as well as allowances, for deckbuilding. CONS: -Cabal identity, mechanic wise, is a little bit weak in some places. Just to give one quick example: At first glance you could say that the Danaan Covenant is a cabal based around buffing your units, which is great. But suddenly you are faced with Banshee, which is basically a walking AOE hard removal which seems to be meant as a zoning tool but doesn’t really seem to fit with the faction mechanic-wise. Nothing wrong with mix-and-matching mechanics, but Banshee is one of the strongest zoning tools available, and it is not in the cabal which favors defense (disregarding the name and art of the card, of course). -I have not played for a while, I will freely admit that, but some cards seems a little bit on the overturned side of the spectrum, to give a couple examples: The previously mentioned Banshee, while not having a terrible stat line for its ability and cost, it can win the board by itself if properly managed, and mostly has to be answered with action cards, as most units will just walk to their dead. Not really OP, but a bit overturned, as the risk reward seem to be mostly slanted towards the reward part of the equation. The infamous Gnome Hero, while it is true that it is not the end all be all, it is an extremely draw dependent card, meaning if you can’t answer it almost right away, it can snowball and end the game before you are able to play any sort of hard removal. Yet if it is drawn on the late game, it is almost impossible to buff it meaning it will generate little to no value. Drawn early can win the game by itself, drawn late doesn’t have much impact in the board. -In the deck builder, or anywhere in the game for that matter, there is no way to take a look at cards that you don’t own, and there are no tooltips that explains what the keywords on cards do. General speaking, it needlessly neglects to show a lot of information to the player.The information is available on the game’s website, but it should be included in game. -Deck builder lacks a lot of the staples: No card search function, no filtering, and as explained before, no tooltips explaining keywords and no ability to see cards not in the collection. Economy-wise: -Daily quests cannot be re-rolled and include the dreaded “Win X matches as Y”. This one is ok for people with big collections (I would hazard the guess that they are most of the people playing as of this writing), terrible for new players and people which “main” a faction. This issue is amplified by: -The boosters are divided by faction, which is not really a complete “con”. It is great if you have no interest in playing other factions and only want to play your favorite. It is terrible if you wish to complete as many dailies as possible to grow your collection. -No crafting system. You cannot craft cards you wish to use, instead you need to pull them from boosters. If you pull a copy of a card you already own, you are able to sell it for Influence (the Itchy & Scratchy currency of the game) or gather a couple of them in order to create: -Elite cards. The very concept is terrible. If you manage to get ten copies of a card, you can upgrade it into its elite form (just a golden frame visually). The problem is that it also reduces the required influence needed to play it. For the people who haven’t played to understand this I need to explain a little bit about the rules: During a match cards have two costs, resources and influence. Resources are your mana, and you get them every turn, while influence is given to you by the amount of cards of a certain faction in play, including your leader, which is always available influence-wise. If you have, let’s say, a card which costs 2 resources but also 2 purple influence, and you only have your leader (1 purple influence) the card resource cost increases by the number of influence your are missing (in this case +1, making it cost 3 resources). So far so good? Ok so let’s get to the crux of the issue with elite cards. They cost 1 less influence. Meaning they potentially cost one less resources to play. They only way to get them is by combining 10 copies of a card into one of these. Cards only come from boosters. Boosters can be bought with cash. To sum it up, you are able to purchase a statistical advantage over your opponent with real life currency, meaning is a pay-to-win mechanic. But to be fair, it is specified the reduction only happens in “classic mode”. As of right now there is only one mode of play, so maybe is a wait and see kind of deal. Draw your own conclusions. -Leaders are way too expensive, and they are a big part of the deck building part of the game, as well as the ability of the player of completing some daily quests. Some offer different abilities, some open a whole other world of deck building potential. Any way, if you read all that, you are a trooper. My advice is, if you fell in love with the theme of the game, try it out and keep a close eye on it during its journey through early access. But if you are expecting a refined card game, which feels like it rewards you fairly, you have other options in the market as of right now that you will probably enjoy way more. If anything major changes I will update my review. Until then, keep an eye on the game and let’s see if the devs manage to turn this awesome concept around.