Worlds Beyond is a reset of the original game that unfortunately misses the mark on a lot of key things the original did right and changes its strategy to cater more to a specific group of people to sustain itself. That group of the people is the young adult japanese person who wants to turn semi-pro, at best join a big competitive team and at worst make a bit of money through tournaments. [u] If you are a pure casual player, or a competitive player outside of Japan/Asia as a whole, the game actively rejects you [/u] by lifting up several levers that give life to the interest of playing CCGs, making the overall experience very frustrating.
The game fails the casual playerbase mostly due to a lack of new features and, more importantly, cards. This is due to a very poor usage of rotation where the design team dedicates more than half of all cards to be rebalanced reprints of cards that just rotated, instead of creating more new and interesting cards that move the game forward. With the lack of side expansions and the main ones having a standard size of around 80 according to Japan standards, this leads to Worlds Beyond having THE LOWEST AMOUNT OF NEW CARDS PER UNIT TIME ACROSS ALL CCGs AND TCGs ! This makes the game very stale and the rotation very cynical where its only purpose is to make some cards expire so they can immediately be resold to the players.
As a side note, just like its prequel, the game is f2p but not fully, it's hard if missing an expansion to come back to the game : the best cards are legendaries and it's standard for them to make up at least a third of every deck, which is pretty big. You need time to settle in and gather the resources to play as you please like in other CCGs, so I am not accounting that in my grading of the game despite the screwup of the returning card mechanic that failed because of pure greed : those free cards are actully useless in gameplay since they're not legendaries, and they cannot be vialed to help boost your way to legendaries, which also makes them clog your card collection. They should have merely given more packs to returning players to help them with getting cards from previous expansions. What I would account though if I had real evidence of it are the strange pull rates that prevent you from getting at least 1 copy of every card despite pulling more and instead getting a dozen copies of a specific pool, thus reducing the value of packs. An issue that was not present during the first expansions of the game. Again, I am only writing this paragraph based off my personal pulling experience and have no internal data to back up this claim.
There is also a very big issue with class identity, something actually exclusive to Worlds Beyond and that OG and Evolve did right. Dragon in Worlds Beyond is very frustrating and unfair to play against, leading to a lot of non-games (thank you Erntz). Abyss is very whack in design overall, being almost shadow-exclusive which is not the case in Evolve where the Abyss class in this instance feels complete and is a lot richer in design, and also has towers that are way too hard to out. A lot of classes are way too board-centric to the point of stealing Sword's identity (which also hurts the classes that took that identity like Forest who now looks like nothing, which is even more of a shame because we got that instead of good ideas like Thestae that are prototyped but underdevelopped inside the game). Did I also mention a good portion of the decks in the game are Solitaire decks ? The game overall is extremely conservative in design with printing a lot of tempo decks (which is also to some extent desired by the community, a good part of it hates quest decks, which is bad because the game's best mechanic, Faith, has a use as a quest mechanic and is thus severely underused), with a big refusal to implement new mechanics to keep the game fresh, and make decks stronger.
Decks should be stronger and also more consistent, and that is a big issue when dealing with the competitive playerbase. Skill expression is very low compared to other card games due to an insane variance in the decks themselves, as well as extremely polarising matchups. If you miss curve in mulligan, or if you simply face the wrong matchup, you cannot win against a decent opponent. This is also partly due to said Solitaire deck being Solitaire due to very strong and unique gimmick, and are actually meta, thus requiring specific, class-limited response to counter their gimmicks (which is sometimes not even enough [strike] right Crystal Rune ? [/strike]), which obviously lead to very one-sided interaction depending on whether you have the right counters in your playing class. This makes it way too difficult to win consistently because all those factors are out of player control and the design team does nothing to reduce those insurmontable gaps in gameplay.
The last issue with the game is tournament/esport organisation, something that went worse over time even in the OG era, and which keeps worsening to this very day. The organisation went to a 2 continent split at the end of OG to the current global setting, with most tournaments being on the asian schedule. Good luck competing in a high-stakes tournament that begins play at midnight (happened to me) ! This lack of representation, and lack of care, is so bad that THE AMBASSADORS OF THE ENGLISH/WESTERN COMMUNITY LIVE IN ASIA due to a lack of activity elsewhere and thus when they organise tournaments (which should be dedicated to the western community !), they use their home schedule for easier streaming, a justifiable decision that unfortunately screws over the target players of the tournament in the process. Basically, outside of 2 opens per year and one-time tournaments, there are no tournaments outside of Asia.
In conclusion, the game is largely banking on nostalgia to keep going, with very few improvements to the formula and a lack of self-identity to live beyond the original title, with its current state being a clown copy of the OG and even of itself at launch. In its current state, the game has huge sustainability issues with lots of players departing since rotations are in effect, and this is due to the issues mentioned above. Until at least the gameplay and card issues are fixed I am not touching this game anymore.
