beyond-the-gates

After my first draft, I can confirm that even without any of its headline-grabbing innovations, Altered would still deserve to be a hit: the core gameplay is phenomenal. Where Altered exceeded my expectations was in just how tense some of the decisions were. I went into the tank on several occasions as to whether this was the target I needed to spend my one removal spell on. Do I need to advance this turn, or would I be better off saving my resources to make a push later? Deciding which cards to keep in your opening hand requires extra foresight due to the reserve system. ...

Today’s the day I’ve been waiting for since January! It’s been seven months since the Altered Kickstarter launched, and it felt amazing to finally hold the pledge rewards in my hands. ...

I opened another display today that ended up being a great one all-around. It had an above-average seven uniques, including a strong Red for Afanas & Senka, a stunning alt-art Shenlong in foil, and a Gulrang & Tocsin 2023 promo (not pictured since I’m leaving it unscanned for now). The only thing it was missing is Lyra uniques! I’ve looked over cards from the set more closely since my last writeup, so hopefully that helps with my evaluation of uniques: ...

My local game store started selling their shipment of Altered today, so I splurged and picked up one more Kickstarter display while I was there. When I got to the second pack and flipped the cards around, I knew what was happening the moment I spotted the first unique. Equinox really delivered on making opening a golden booster a special experience. As someone who loves trying to figure out each card’s potential, getting to do that ten times in a row for cards no one has ever seen before was an absolute thrill. ...

Today I got to crack my first ever Altered booster display! This was an order from a retailer; I’m still waiting for my Kickstarter order, Gamegenic accessories and all. Some thoughts after opening the box: I found opening a unique to be the most fun booster pack experience I’ve had across any card game I’ve played. On the other hand, unique-less packs are less exciting than the average pack from another TCG. I’m okay with this tradeoff. Scanning cards using the app was very fast. I appreciate that it displays the total number of cards scanned so you can verify that you haven’t missed any. Foils look excellent. The foil and non-foil features are customized for each card, and I didn’t notice any curling whatsoever. I’ve heard that boxes tend to have a high concentration of uniques from one particular faction due to pack collation. My experience supports this. Moreso than in other card games, opening uniques made me want to build decks where they will shine. It’s less like opening a chase rare and more like opening a bomb in a limited environment. How can you leverage an advantage only you have? Uniques Without further ado, here are the uniques I opened and my initial impressions of them: ...