This article is my personal opinion and does not necessarily reflect the views of the whole team at the Altered Blog.

Now I love the game of Altered and pretty much most aspects of it are normally pretty spot-on.  However, there were some things that were not spot-on with the recent Gamefound campaign for Seeds of Unity. Whilst I will be discussing some of the things that I think that Equinox got wrong, I will also be explaining some ways I think that they can improve things in the future. Not all the things are bad and I think Equinox made some very good decisions also. I’m going to divide this into three sections.

• Improvements to the wider game
• Improvements for the Gamefound offering
• Improvements to the set features

Improvements to the wider game

Worldwide POD

This is an area where I think for the most part that Equinox did pretty well. There were a number of improvements announced right at the start that got pretty lost in the wider campaign that I feel are important to the game’s future. First amongst these is the availability of Print-on-Demand worldwide. It was an area that had caused great frustration for people who weren’t in Europe and North America. This will really open things up for everyone.

Adventure Pass

Next in the important things from my viewpoint of view is the changes to the Adventure Pass. Being able to qualify for more than one faction and being able to use a number of online games to help you rank your pass is going to hopefully get more people playing.

BGA Formats

Having other formats on BGA will be another big win. I think that the no unique format is already a popular one, and is easy to implement as they can do the checking in their own application prior to linking the deck to BGA.

Rotation

There were a few things that I think could have been done better here. Firstly, they announced on the AMA that there was a rotation system being planned. Whilst this was kind of expected as it happens to most TCG games in the end, I feel that the lack of certainty about when that would be coming in could mean that there is apprehension in the community around when their cards might become less useful. A known timetable and format breakdown might be a better way forward.

Tournament lack in Season 4

Whilst I understand that the change had a big impact on Equinox’s organization for the fourth season, not having a Tumult for players to get engaged in stores over the season and the lack of OP during this season, means top level players feel that there is a hole currently in the competitive game. This is a big dropping of the ball after the big high that Equinox had for the World Championships. I feel that the sooner that they can announce an ongoing competitive schedule the better at this stage.

Loss of Promo Packs

Replacing promo packs with the new special alt art cards from set one is not something I’m in favour of. People love the thrill of potentially getting a great unique and this is taking something away from the opening experience. Honestly I’d be less thrilled to get one of these now as a prize that one with the chance to get a fun unique.

Improvements for the Gamefound offering

Shrinkflation

Probably my biggest gripe with the Gamefound offering was the shrinkflation of the boxes. Whilst the claim that MSRP was the same for a similar sized box, no one I knew ever paid MSRP for a box of set 1-4. So being asked to pay the same money for a box 2/3 the size was not something that I appreciated.

To give my example. I was paying around £95 a box for a full 36 packs. Now I’m being asked to pay ‘around the same’ price,  (I calculate around £94.50) for 12 packs less. I always have lots of commons anyway, but its the rares that will be the big loss.

Old Booster Box (36 packs) – 1 hero, 360 common, 103 rare, 4.5 Unique

New Booster Box with 3 rares (24 packs) – 1 hero, 240 common, 68 rare, 4 Unique, 1 Exalted

New Booster Box with 4 rares (24 packs) – 1 hero, 216 common, 96 rare, 4 Unique, 1 Exalted

If you work out the number of rares you now get in a box for the same money, you are now getting considerably less for your money. This can easily be solved by including an extra rare in a box instead of one of the commons. This will cost Equinox no more money to print but will mean that players are still getting effectively the same value from their box.

Now I hear the argument that this will not help Equinox sell product as they are giving away more and thus selling less. However, this it actually not true. I will use an analogy so you can understand this. If the horizon is too far away, then most people will not bother to try and get to the destination. If you can see the horizon near to you, then you’ll want to get to the destination. When Magic the Gathering moved to a model where everything was special and you just couldn’t collect everything I just gave up on the game. You get people to play the game by having people have the ability to get the cards they need, not making it harder.

Starting Goal

I know that some people have criticized the low starting goal for the campaign at 50,00 Euros, but I don’t think that was the biggest issue with the campaign. Lots of crowd funding campaigns use a low early goal to pronounce that it was funded in minutes and achieved a 1000% of the goal. This is just marketing stuff and pretty much normal practice.

Honesty

I always praise the Equinox team for being very transparent and honest, but I think during this campaign they were a little too transparent and honest in the end, after having previously told us it was just a pre-order system. The expectation by the players that the campaign would be happening whatever was based around previous statements made by Equinox. Then announcing the needed goal mid campaign (between the Gamefound and stores orders) was definitely therefore a misstep. It alarmed a number of people who then became very negative and started to spread doom and gloom. Personally, I think it would have been better if the campaign had a tier for shop orders and the whole total would have gone through the campaign. Now this would have had an issue in itself as Gamefound would have taken its cut of the shop money, so perhaps there is another better solution to this that I haven’t thought of. Perhaps doing store orders first might be the way forward in future.

Store Offering

I heard a lot of negative views from stores of the new offering from Equinox, and we had several stores in the UK who used to support Altered that declined the new offering. I don’t know whether the offering wasn’t good enough or whether the explanation to stores wasn’t good enough, but I feel there is a big improvement needed in this area. Plus, I really would like stores to have an ability to reorder during the 4 months of the set. This will hopefully keep players involved in drafts and midterm purchases in stores that currently (with the single & buy print rule) is not available.

Stretch Goals & Campaign Length

The lack of stretch goals at the start of the campaign and the shortness of the campaign were other big missteps. Now I appreciate that Equinox got advice to do it this way from ‘experts’ but honestly, I’d have sacked those experts. The reason that the original Kickstarter did so well was that the campaign was long enough to attract enough interest AND it was an event. The stretch goals, voting and campaign surprises keeps people engaged and potentially new add-ons can give a mid-campaign spurt to funding when things start to stagnate.

Improvements to the set features

Collector Cards & Packs

The first thing that they did to the structure of the set was to introduce collector cards. I honestly have no issues with this and Altered did suffer a bit from not having the cards that collectors wanted to get hold of. Having these cards so that collectors can collect and players can play is just fine. As long as this doesn’t go too far (like MtG did) then I’m fine with this and I think it’s a good step. Collector boosters I’m fine with as well. People like nice art cards and a greater chance of higher rarities and they will sell to those people that love them.

Exalted Cards

Bringing in the new rarity as a idea I don’t have an objection to, but I have some issues with the implementation of it. Having the Exalted rarity being able to bring up underperforming heroes is a clever answer to the problem without just buffing the hero. However, I do have two issues with how they’ve been implemented.

Firstly, having Exalted cards taking the place of a common I think is the wrong move. They need to replace a rare or a unique slot to be able to keep the average power level of decks as lose to the same as possible. Replacing a common slot a) makes the deck both more expensive to acquire AND b) makes the power level skip up several rungs. I much prefer having half the deck as commons and making it replace a rare would actually make much better deck building choices which is one of the things that I love about the game. Exalted cards have been described to me as ‘powerful rares’ by the design team and this is where I feel they need to fit in the deck construction rules.

Secondly, having only one Exalted card per set per faction means that there is NO choice in deck building and thus it starts making the deck that it goes in have a compulsory card that you now need to own. The variety in deck building of similar hero decks is another factor I love about the game. Unique cards really encourage this, but Exalted cards do not. With more variety of Exalted cards available, this choice starts to become more important again. Having two or even three Exalted cards per faction per set would be my ideal, though I do understand it would be more effort for the design team to balance these.

So to fix these issues, I’d like at least 2 Exalted cards per faction per set. I’d also like the deck construction rule to change to have fifteen rares that can include a max of 3 exalted cards instead.

Hero Numbers

I’m not a big fan of having sets with 3 heroes only in. It seems to skew the card designs and I feel it breaks faction symmetry in a way I don’t like. I’d prefer it if we had two sets with single heroes and then the third set fleshed out the two heroes newly introduced. The way it is set up now, we have three heroes that get two sets worth of cards and six heroes with only one set of cards each. Maybe that’s just my love of symmetry between factions in games – I don’t know.

I also found it odd that with Seeds of Destiny we only had 2 starter decks from the six available heroes. This restricts faction choice for new players and I would have liked to have seen a full set of 6 starter decks, though I appreciate that there are extra costs involved in making six new products for market rather than just two.

Bringing Back Silver Boosters

This is another change I really like as it makes the feeling of opening a booster exciting again. There is always the chance that this booster will be the one that has those extra unique cards in it. This is a great way I feel to make pack opening exciting again.

Foilers Gone

Removing foiler cards takes away an unnecessary step in creating foils, and I am a fan of this change. Additionally putting tokens on the back of heroes means that getting excess heroes is never an issue going forward, so I think this is a big improvement.