Shardbound: Forge Your Path, Master Your Strategy

To put it plainly, this is not the shardbound it used to be. I was really excited when i saw that it was getting updates again and decided to redownload it and see what became of it. The game i knew is gone, almost completely. This is something else wearing part of the old game's pelt, Lets start with the good. All the cards appear to have new unique art/models now. That was a big issue with the old run of shardbound, a lot of the units were generic sword character. Alright finished with the good. The bad. 1. First as a person that spent over 100 hours in the old shardbound logging in again and seeing my entire history in the game erased sucked. No achievements, no earned cards, and while i hadnt spent any money if i had that looks like it would have just gone to nothing. 2. Shardbound has nothing to do with shardbound anymore, the game is named the way it is because of the old premise of moving to different shards and fighting over them. You used to fly a ship around to select your shard and thats what matchmaking was not this generic bunch of menu buttons like every other card game has. The game has lost its heart, the maps are the same and the very basic gameplay is but its now just another generic card game. 3. All the neutral cards as well as a number of others appear to be removed entirely in favor of the ability to cross class with 2 colors of cards by changing what relic you have equipped. Maybe the nuking of the card pool was meant to address the possible issues of overpowered combinations but that is a choice i would not have made. 4. Speaking of gameplay changes there are multiple changes that in my opinion drastically altered the game experience in a negative way. a) the mana system is a variation of LoR's escalating mana and banking system, except theres a hard cap on normal mana of 5, and you can bank a max of 1 mana a turn. You can attack randomly spawning mana crystals for an extra mana but that eats into your extremely valuable attack budget. Not only that but there are cards that cost at least 6 so unless you go out of your way to bank mana or waste attacks you cant cast them ever. b) the introduction of a unit cap. This is stupid for so many reasons, not because the concept is bad but because of its implementation. Non-minion units count towards a hard cap of THREE units. This might not be so bad if they didnt make almost every unit have haste so if you dont play super far back one of your very few units could get instantly killed because you tried to take on of the new objectives they added or move in to enemy territory to try to get at the commander. Minions however dont count towards that cap, they can be a little rockborn 1/1 to start with or they can be a thing that enters with damage shield that gives it to your leader as well and takes at least 2 attacks to steal the new victory crystals from them which you might only have 1 unit that can even reach them that turn cycle. c)Speaking of haste that means all those units that have super powerful combat abilities like the new card that flies, has 4 attack, and deals like 3 or 4 poison on hit can come out of nowhere and say hey this 6 mana minion you played, its dead now have fun with that. d) deck size has been drastically slashed to 15 cards, meaning you better be damn sure you get the most out of each unit you play because you dont get many others, oh sorry did your unit die because haste meant any attempt to move into enemy territory makes your units completely exposed to insta death? e) the commanders lost their identities entirely, General Vardan the new starting commander is just a tanky guy now, all the unique abilities the commanders had are either gone entirely or moved to cards, literally Vardan's ability to draw a random minor card got turned into actual cards you have to put in your freaking deck. Also the commanders can be upgraded entirely skewing the balancing of having the melee commanders have slightly higher attack to make up for the fact they have to be in the thick of it to do any damage. f) Speaking of Starting commanders, i really hope you weren't planning to play a Mori or Sebine deck when you get started, you dont get enough cards of their color to play a deck that focuses on their strengths, just a green deck splashed with their colors. This is true for all 5 factions that arent Vardan's. g) card upgrades - this is the stupidest ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ thing to put in a PvP game, its literally just pay to win. It just is, there are no arguments that can disprove this because you can only upgrade cards by burning extra copies of cards, and you cant burn any card, if the card your trying to upgrade isnt a common card you can only burn upgraded cards to upgrade them so you need to burn even more cards to upgrade them. And if you get paired against someone who's been able to upgrade their deck more by either slowly earning enough f2p cards to burn or by burning their wallets you just lose because all their cards are STRICTLY better than yours. Their rockborn is a 3/3, yours is a 1/1 congrats you always lose that fight. h) the victory crystals - they are there to encourage you not to hide in your territory i get that, but they are very poorly implemented at present. Armor and shields prevent you from taking them from a unit that has claimed them, and theres no restriction on ranged units being able to steal them from the otherside of the battlefield and then moving to an area you just can't reach at all. Not only all that they spawn randomly so they could prepare to spawn in a place where one player already has a bunch of units ready to take it then flee once claimed. i) Another thing about combat balancing i forgot to mention, not only does everything have haste but melee units no longer retaliate automatically when fighting other melee units, meaning attacking is completely free unless there is another unit that is able to survive to try to punish next turn. j) many units have had drastic changes if they survived the transition to newbound. not necessarily an issue but the changes aren't good across the board. For example, blightspore seedlings no longer generate expanding areas of damaging terrain, instead letting out a pulse of poison at the end of the turn, and then taking damage for doing so. This is completely unnecessary because the whole reason for the old ones taking damage was because you could let them expand safely from your starting area, now you have to place them right in danger to do anything so they're already gonna die from attacks anyway. I think thats all the gameplay issues I can think of at the moment. I cant be bothered to hop in another match to verify because i haven't been enjoying newbound. 5. Predatory as ♥♥♥♥ monetization. Look i get it oldbound died not in small part due to lack of funds. HOWEVER, you used to get a full starting deck for all the factions when you started playing the game, you used to be able to turn duplicates into a currency to craft new cards, meanwhile newbound says ♥♥♥♥ that burn every duplicate you get to make the cards you have better or you're gonna lose because your opponents did burn their cards. Free cards, sure you can get some free cards from the faction rotating shop, you want other cards? cough up the money, oh you didnt get the card you wanted? cough up even more because you cant turn your dupes into dust or wildcards for any others. TLDR - this isnt the shardbound you once knew. If you liked oldbound, its dead. And at present this new game is a predatory pay to win game that has serious flaws. Also sidenote, apparently there is talk about the game being some kind of crypto nft game? if thats the case i will never play it again no matter the improvements. I have to deal with enough people trying to scam me with bs calls and emails, i dont need my games to scam me as well.

This used to be a great game, but it shut down and was sold to a new company that made it into a pay to win garbage.

Save your time and look for something else. The game started out extremely promising with an active community and a solid foundation for gameplay. It had a fun mix of hex space miniature combat along with TCG deckbuilding. Game balance wasn't perfect but it was a solid start with a lot of viability and the devs were clearly active and constantly pushing out updates. In late 2023 / early 2024, there was a change in ownership and a good portion of the community ended up leaving for one reason or another. Miscommunications were aplenty and the new patch updates seemed to have little direction and reason to them. Fast forward to February of 2025 and the devs did a complete rework of the gameplay, UI, and Upgrade System and none of these were being asked for by the community. The project was rushed and bugs were everywhere. Matchmaking became horrendous and players could no longer hope to build their decks any further due to the onerous material cost for simple upgrades. There were also huge balance changes in the meta with clearly untested material being pushed that created unfun and unengaging gameplay for everyone. There was a loud and unified outcry from the community but it fell on deaf ears. I am writing this to hopefully save someone some disappointment as the devs have now abandoned the game. There is no maintenance, no roadmap, and no communication being put out. The devs have gone completely silent and the community discord has died. This is an incredible shame as the game had so much potential but it appears that the devs decided it would be best to force out one last change to force people into some last chance shop purchases to milk the last bit of money out of the game before abandoning ship.

All game progress has been deleted from the original game and now it is an NFT stupid game that has been bought buy a big game company. Never play this. The original idea has been butchered

new company wiped progress and purchases from prior version confusing crystal win dynamic has enemies stealing your crystals without clear way to defend/retake and keep them I bought this game to in the prior owners to not dead with pay to win, now its everywhere in this tried to force my way through the early stages but just really started hating what this game became/loss of prior purchase/progress/unlocked cards

I played this game back when it came out some 10 years ago and was really happy to see it again, I was happy to PLAY it again. Then I learned that the company who brought it back it teamed up with NFT companies and cryptocurrency, and I immediately uninstalled it. I'm disgusted to know that I played 52 hours of this game without knowing what pies they had their fingers in.

I remember playing this game when characters had placeholder models, to see that the progress has been erased from other people including myself is sad. Doing the "new" tutorial and noticing that it's already selling cards was enough to cement my feelings on the state of the game and to never touch it again.

Would be nice to be allowed to just play the game. It makes you play through tutorial missions at the start with random decks. If you lose the match because you are unfamiliar with the synergies of the deck, you cannot progress further and have to play the match again, and again, and again until you beat it. I have played for 1.5 hours now and would like to start playing the game but I still have 2 more tutorials left.

This game used to be completely different. After being sold to a new company the game has become your standard pay thousands of $$$$ to have a chance at playing the game. Don't bother downloading save yourself the time. I used to love shardbound, but this game is not shardbound. It has the Art and the same maps that's it. They should name it something different like paybound. The game play is also drastically worse to put a cherry on top of the disaster cake that is this game now!!!! :)