The Arrival

Wednesday October 25, the day that I was waiting for had finally arrived. Most people in the World of Warcraft community were anxiously awaiting the release of the Burning Crusade, only to have their hopes and dreams crushed by the recent delay announcement. I however was sitting at home, gleefully opening packs of cards from the booster box I had preordered nearly 2 months prior.

Unfortunately Leeroy wasn't going to be wiping any of my parties any time soon.

I started shuffling through the cards, getting excited whenever I’d pull an Epic card. My unopened packs were growing smaller and smaller, and I had yet to find a single loot card in the box. I opened the last and final pack, hoping to find either a Leeroy Jenkins Epic card or maybe the turtle mount loot card. To my dismay, neither were found.

I packed up the cards and fired off an email to the local card shop owner letting him know I needed to order another box. I get one back a few minutes later, “Sorry man, I’m sold out and the distributor I order from is sold out”. I let him know when they can restock to let me know, I still needed 140 cards to complete the 361 card set. After I fired off that final email I sat back in my chair and realized something. Upper Deck managed to hook me the exact same way Blizzard had managed it. My wallet was going to be out of green paper rather soon. I quickly ventured over to the classifieds to find a second job.

Yes, I admit it. I’m a Trading Card Game junkie. I’m also a MMORPG junkie. Add those two together like Upper Deck managed to do, and well, there’s no hope for me in the near future. I’m officially enslaved to geekdom for the rest of my working life.

Reviewer Background

There’re a lot of reviews that are written about games where you don’t know the author and his like or dislikes. A lot of times an author may write a terrible review for a game and then you may later find out that he hates that genre of games anyway, is that really a fair spin?

I’ve been playing Magic: The Gathering for almost 10 years now. I really enjoy the strategy behind deck building and knowing when to play your cards to your advantage. Not only do you need to know your own deck like the back of your hand, but you need to know what your opponent is up to as well. I’ve tried other TCG games (Duel Master’s, Hecatomb, Yu-Gi-Oh, etc.) but none of them stuck with me. Magic had everything I wanted in a card game.

I’ve also been playing World of Warcraft since release, and before that I’ve been a huge fan of the Warcraft series in general. I spent hours on end playing Warcraft II and Warcraft II and the moment I heard about World of Warcraft coming out I was engaged in the game at that very moment.

The Starter Deck and Booster Box

I had pre-ordered a booster box and a starter deck. I don’t normally buy pre-construct decks in my trading card games, but I knew that if I wanted to learn the game that it would come with everything I needed to read up on it. I’m glad I purchased it and I highly recommend it for everyone else.

The starter deck is by far one of the coolest set ups I have seen for a trading card game. First of all it comes in one of those plastic box cases that look a lot like what a computer game would come in. The box itself has some nice artwork on the front.

When you open the box the first thing you’ll notice is the inside of the box is perfect for storing 2 game decks. A plastic piece covers and locks the decks inside, making this a pretty nice carrying case for cards. Inside this area is your starter deck of 40 cards and 3 booster packs which hold 15 randomly inserted cards a piece. Each Starter deck comes with a random deck inside. I received the Paladin deck.

Also inside the deck are a rulebook and 3 large Hero cards. The 3 oversize cards make up a mini-set of the larger cards which have 16 cards in the set. The rulebook I found very easy to read and simple to follow, but felt it left out a lot of advanced rules, I’ll comment more on that in the Game Play section.

While I was surprised and happy with the starter deck, I was very disappointed in the booster box. This is partly to blame on my part because I didn’t read the details of it. I’m used to buying Magic: The Gathering booster boxes with 36 packs of 15 cards, the World of Warcraft booster box ended up costing me close to the same price as a Magic box, but with 12 less booster packs in it. This is something I’m pretty disappointed in and think Upper Deck dropped the ball on.

First of all, this set is 361 cards. Out of the booster box I have about 140 cards left to get in the set. I got a copy of every single common, but I only pulled 3 epic

1 booster box and no turtle mount means a bad day in WoWville for me

cards out of 22. I still have 85 rares to collect and 34 uncommons. Considering you get 1 rare in each pack, I’d have to buy 4 more booster boxes to have a chance of collecting the entire set. But with only 1 out of 8 packs holding an epic card, I’d have to buy 8 booster boxes to get all of those. I haven’t even mentioned the fact I didn’t pull a single Legendary card (the ones that give you in game items). Needless to say, while the game itself is pretty cool, from a collector’s standpoint, be ready to dish out a lot of money to collect the set. Something I’m personally not willing to do.

Game Play

Now I’m a gamer at heart so gameplay is one of the sole reasons I’ll buy into a trading card game. If I don’t enjoy the game itself, I won’t buy the cards. It all makes sense to me at least. I’m a gamer first and a collector second.

Gameplay is really what makes buying the trading card game worthwhile. The rulebook is fairly simplistic and you’re able to jump into the game rather quickly. However, the rulebook itself is not advanced enough which became really frustrating later in the game. Me and the friend I was playing against had trouble midway through the game with questions on whether “can we do this or that?” and after spending several minutes looking up the rulebook we had to hop online and see if we could find any explanations. Sadly we couldn’t so we ended up making our own house rules on the subject.

I like the idea they incorporated with the game where you choose your hero and then focus your deck around that hero. I was playing a Paladin deck so I had Graccus as my hero who started out with 28 health points. The object of the game is to kill  the other person’s hero, how you do this is completely dependent on what you have in your deck. You can summon allies to attack and/or defend, you can do so with spells and abilities. With the Paladin deck I found out that the card game allows them to live up to their names of bubble boys as both games we played took well over an hour to play considering my paladin deck was loaded with prevent damage cards and healing cards.

I think the most interesting thing about the game was the quest cards. You could play them as a resource and use them as a resource (resources are what you need in order to play cards). And they have a certain requirement for you to fulfill if you want to get the reward (most rewards allowed you to draw more cards). I found the quests to be really handy in getting the cards I needed to win the game.

I also really enjoyed the fact that all of the cards I was playing I recognized from the actual game of World of Warcraft. Whether it was a spell, ability, talent, or NPC, it was all in there. While this is great fun for those of us who have played World of Warcraft, they also did a great job of making the cards easy to understand for those who have never played the game. Overall I think they did a pretty good job of making the game enjoyable for anyone who plays whether they understand the World of Warcraft or not.

Summary

World of Warcraft the Trading Card Game is a game I’m going to highly recommend. It has its pros and cons but what it comes down to is the fact that it’s a fun and enjoyable game that you can sit down and play with your friends without too much real hassle being involved in understanding the rules.

While the game play is fun, if you’re a collector of sets, be ready to dish out a lot of cash in order to get it. There’s a LOT of rare cards and even harder to find epic cards. The Legendary cards seem to be super hard to get as well. With only 24 packs in a booster box you need to buy several to have a chance at getting the set and even then you’re not guaranteed. The plus side of this though is once you do collect the set, the chance of it having a pretty high value is good.

Overall, I really recommend buying into this game, whether you’re a collector, a power gamer, or a casual gamer, this product should have something for everyone. They didn’t reinvent the wheel so to speak on card games, just like in World of Warcraft they have taken the best from everyone else and meshed it in to one product. It’s worked for WoW, so I’m guessing it’s going to work for the Trading Card Game community as well.