Heartstone Steam Edition

I'm going to try to focus on what makes Faeria unique and stand out. The living board adds quite a lot of depth to your standard CCG, between fighting over the faeria wells, positioning your creatures, and placing lands to either pressure your opponent or defend yourself. Faeria feels like Chess: the CCG, where you have to look several turns ahead, thinking of what your opponent may potentially play, where your opponent's creatures can reach and how you should position your own creatures so that you can eek out a small advantage. One really nice difference between Faeria and most other CCG's is that your faeria (similar to mana) accumulates from turn to turn, so managing your faeria and keeping track of your opponent's faeria is critical in anticipating what your opponent can play and what you should be playing around.

Faeria has a reward system that actually feels rewarding! Every win in Battle or Pandora mode earns you 10 gold, with your first win of each day netting you 20 gold. Every day, you're given a new daily quest that will earn you anywhere from 60 to 150 gold. You're also given a free Phantom coin every day, which I think of as a mini Pandora run, ending at 6 wins or 2 losees, whichever comes first. You're rewarded with some gold at the end of the run, with people who make it to 6 wins leaving with 100 gold and a free Pandora coin. In addition to all that, every time you level, you earn a free booster pack and at the moment, it seems to only take a few matches to level. And if that wasn't enough, you also get special milestone rewards every few levels. It's really not difficult to earn 2 or 3 booster packs a day playing reasonably casually.

That's great isn't it? Surely with all these rewards, you should be able to earn the entire collection in no time without investing any actual cash, right? Yes but also not quite. Faeria booster packs follow a very familiar formula in that they contain 5 cards, one of which is guaranteed to be a rare or better. The majority of your packs will be 4 commons and 1 rare. Epics and legendaries will be much harder to come by. I've opened around 60 packs and I am still missing a good amount of cards, and only enough memoria from duplicates to craft 2 epics. You're likely looking at needing around 150-200 booster packs before you have a collection large enough to be able to build a variety of decks. This is reasonable but still a bit on the grindy side for casual players. On a good note, Faeria does have an option to purchase the full collection for $49.99, which is a really great value that I wish more CCG's offered. I have no problems spending money to support a game I enjoy, and after playing a lot of MtG and Hearthstone, having such a cheap option is more than welcome. The Early Access bundle feels a bit expensive (especially considering how easy booster packs are to come by) so unless you really want the exclusive avatar and orb, I would skip the bundle and just go for the cheaper option to see if you enjoy the game. If you do, then you can always purchase the full collection and invest fully into the game.

Ok i've spend more than 40hours on this, i guess i have to write a review now..
Keep in mind that the game is still in early access.

First: The price.
Since it seems to be the first concern about the review...
Right now, the game cost 8€, but it will be free on its release. So unless you want to play during early access (with its amount of bug and unbalanced gameplay), it's just your typical free to play game with a grinding/store system. You know, basically just like every other cards game. So let's compare thoses two systems with the most popular card game, Hearthstone:
Grinding is faster than Hearthstone. The idea is exactly the same, aka earning gold by winning or doing daily quest, and buying booster for 100 gold each. You can also craft cards using raw materials you get from unused cards you want to get rid of. The difference stand by the numbers: in Faeria, you earn 10 gold per win, while in Hearthstone it's 10 gold per 3 wins. Quest also give more gold (60-80 in faeria, for 40-60 in Hearthstone). You also win a booster each time you level up.
Crafting is also a lot cheaper in Faeria, since you need 400 raw material to craft a Legendary card (the rarest ones), while you need 1600 in Hearthstone for the same result.

If you don't want to lose time on farming, you can also buy boosters, just like in any other cards game. The difference here is you can buy all the collection for 50€, while it's usually 50€ for a large pack of booster (like in hearthstone, for exemple). So for the same price, you are certain to have every cards you need, instead of trying your luck with boosters and not even opening the whole collection in the end.

So i don't get why people complain over the price. This is certainly the cheapest or the fastest to complete card game right now.

Second: The gameplay.
This game reminds me of Pox Nora, another cards/tactical game that was quite popuplar back then. So you need to take the control of the map by literally building it, in order to defend your mana pool, defend your god or get near the opponent's one. This makes the game having two sides: is my deck strong enough to catch up with my opponent's one, and how am i going to take control of the map building lands?

Cards use some of the mechanics we see in all TCG, like haste, taunt, doing X when it comes in play, etc... but also have clever powers on lands you build, and introducing mechanics i wasn't used to, like doing damage to the player while fighting his creatures, wich i find very interesting since it open a whole new level of thought over the triade Control/Aggro/Combo we see in every god damn cards games.

Right now, i have to say the game is not well balanced, even if it's not awful. Even though i have all the cards, i cannot make every deck i want, because some colors or combination of colors are just way stronger and faster than others. But they are trying to balance it and in the end, it could lead to a very large variety of possibilities.

Did i mention how not random this game is compare to Hearthstone? Right now in Hearthstone, 50% of cards have random effects. This is so pleasant to get rid of that randomness.

Third: The communauty.
This game has a very large group of players, so you won't be bothered while looking for someone to play against. This game is quite new however, so netdecking is awful. Since meta is not 100% stable, you don't see a lot of variety when you play ranked matches. On the other hand, unranked match show some very different idea, and i love to chill playing my fun decks on unranked, while i play ranked with the serious stuff.

Fourth: The visual.
Yeah it's beautiful and original art design. But i really don't cary about visual.


Finally, i just have to say that this game feels like the best Trading Cards Game online right now. Of course, IRL nothing can beat the God of TCG, aka Magic the Gathering (even if it's also the most expensive one), but online this one seems to take the first place. To bad it wasn't designed by Blizzard, so it won't get as popular.

This is a card game where you are supposed to have a brain and cannot go face from the very first turn. It makes Faeria 10/10 to me.

A turn-based card game. From the little I know about card games, mostly standard, but the battlefield makes it unique: You place territory you can summon on each turn, and what type of ground you summon influences the cards you are able to summon. The normal part is cards with booster packs, energy cost, attack and defense, taunts, last words, and other effects. Apart from creature and spell cards also has production/building cards without attack values and static.

+ Great graphics
+ Great sound design
+ Great visual effects
+ Enough new stuff to make it unique and play-worthy
+ Free-2-Play
+ Lists real-money values alongside digital currency
* High quality hand-drawn-style graphics
* Tilted top-down view of 2D battlefield

If you're into CCGs, then my review is probably worthless and lacks any depth that would be useful to you. If however, you're just now venturing into CCGs, then I hope this might be useful to you.

Having passed on Hearthstone and only collected MtG cards (but never actually played it) I was a little wary of playing Faeria, a CCG. I didn't think it'd be interesting or grab my attention given my background. I'm mostly into FPS, rarely play the campaigns of most games, and already I've got an affinity for this game.

On first play-through, its easy to pick up the basics and they do a good job of getting you through the tutorials. From a superficial view, it seems to have plenty of strategy involved. In the mean time, the only thing I can recommend is to continue to play it and see how it pans out.

If you like hearthstone you'll like this.

Pros:
-Cheap cards.
-Easy to play.
-Nice art, music.

Cons:
-Cards need some animation and sound effect.(Just DLC, okay? I think some people just need minimum memory capacity)
-Only 1vs1 mode. (Actually, not needed, but the more the merrier. You know, board games is best when play with your family)

That's all.

Faeria

Pros:

• Very Nice Music Wish They Had a Downloadable Soundtrack!
  
• Very Calming
  
• The Art Style Is Very Original With The Game And Fits In With Music And Gameplay
  
• This Game Is Constantly Being Updated

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Cons:

• The A.I Sometimes Can Be Very Stupid At Times
  
• The Game (IMO) Is Very Slow Having To Wait For A.I To Pick Up Cards And Place Them
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  Accidently Reviewed

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  Steam Group: AccidentlyReviewed
  Reviewer: MrSpectre

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