As no-brainers go, they don't come much less brainy than picking Skyrim as the theme for the first full expansion for your Elder Scrolls card game. Not that I blame developer Dire Wolf Digital for pushing for the most obvious button one bit. Until last month, it's fair to say Legends didn't feel in the best health, with a stale meta and long queue times suggesting a slim playerbase. But June saw a series of substantial improvements, starting with the Steam release (previously Legends had only been playable through Bethesda's launcher) and followed by the launch of 'Twitch Drops', which handed players juicy amounts of in-game gold and crafting currency just for watching streamers play the game. 

I've written in detail about drops, but the short version is that they've probably saved Legends. The game always felt generous in terms of rewards, especially compared to Hearthstone, but partly that was out of necessity. Legends uses bigger decks (50 cards minimum versus 30 maximum in Hearthstone), and these can include up to three copies of many legendaries, meaning tier 1 decks are often expensive to craft. But honestly, right now the amount of free stuff being dished out is astonishing. 

Provided I have a stream on for a couple of hours, most days I'll get enough gold for six packs or be given a free legendary card. Bethesda has said the rates will likely be toned down now Skyrim has bedded in, but a healthy precedent has been set and I expect some form of giveaways to keep coming.

Drops were followed by the launch of Skyrim at the tail end of June, and as you'd expect from the source material, the 154 new cards lean hard on Dragons, Shouts and Werewolves as the main mechanics.  

In Legends you combine cards from two colours to create a class, and each colour has been given its own new legendary Dragon. There are also two powerful new neutral Dragons in the form of lore favourites Alduin and Paarthurnax, both of which have suitably spectacular effects. 

In combination with a bunch of smaller synergistic cards—like the Lookouts, each of which triggers an effect whenever you summon a Dragon—the critical mass of Dragon stuff now available means that playing a themed deck in almost all colour combinations is a possibility (though better in some than others, with Scout and Archer currently the best fits). 

Contrast this with Hearthstone's Blackrock Mountain Adventure, which also introduced a bunch of Dragon cards, but lacked enough support to really make the archetype viable until the arrival of The Grand Tournament a set later.

Shout, shout, let it all out 

Skyrim's real innovation is the new Shout cards. Again, each colour gets one of its own, and these are 'actions' (ie spells) which scale in power the more times you play them per game. For instance, the first time you cast Soul Tear, probably the best Shout, you get to pull a card out of your graveyard and into your hand. But on the third occasion you cast it, that card will also get a whopping +5/+5 buff. In fact, the use of the graveyard is increasingly becoming one of the main reasons to like Legends, adding another layer of strategic depth to long matches.

It should also be noted that, unlike the Quest cards from Hearthstone's Un'Goro expansion which were all legendary rarity, all the Shouts in Skyrim are commons, meaning it's cheap for players to experiment with them. And again there are support cards which enable you to draw and upgrade your shouts to ensure the concept doesn't whiff.

Of the new themes, probably the most undercooked are the new werewolf cards, which get a 'Beast Form' buff if they're on the board when you break one of your opponent's runes. Which isn't to say the werewolves are bad—Circle Initiate and Aela's Huntmate are strong enough to see regular play in Archer—but that there aren't quite enough of them to go all-in on a Werewolf theme (or indeed meme) deck. Or at least, there aren't yet. 

Elsewhere other key characters from the Skyrim universe make appearances as unique legendaries, from J'zargo the hapless Khajit conjurer ("Try to keep up with this one") to rebellion leader Ulfric Stormcloak. 

My personal favourite in terms of flavour is Lydia, whose signature ability is that she blocks attackers in both lanes, a riff on the fact the Skyrim character would impede players by getting stuck in doors. Dire Wolf's designers have really sunk their teeth into the setting and come up with some super-flavorful cards. 

Of all the unique legendaries, the most powerful in a vacuum is Ancano, which is another late-game threat for blue decks. A slightly weird choice, as blue already had the best-in-class finisher in the form of Supreme Atromancer, which brings me fairly neatly to balance.

For the most part the metagame which has emerged post-Skyrim feels healthy, with plenty of decks still to be discovered. If you're one of those Hearthstone refugees who hate aggro, the good news is that control decks are viable in Legends, but midrange is probably the most powerful archetype right now. That means you can expect a lot of grindy back and forth games, which may or not appeal depending on personal preference. It hasn't all been rosy though. 

I've held off on writing this because I wanted to see what Dire Wolf was going to do about three cards the community immediately decreed toxic. Two of these were cards which buffed your entire deck. Echo of Akatosh was a Dragon that gave every subsequent creature a random keyword, while Praetorian Commander buffed them all by +2/+2. Almost immediately the subreddit was in flames, with thread after thread complaining about how unfun these effects were and how Legends was supposed to be a safe haven from wild RNG effects. It didn't seem to matter that high level players soon figured out these cards weren't actually that strong, the pitchforks had been lit and would not be extinguished.

The other card causing uproar has been Bringer of Nightmares, which shows you a random creature from the entire pool of possibilities and lets you transform something on the board, including itself, into that card—complete with accompanying summon effect. Imagine Tinkmaster Overspark from Hearthstone, only with even more swingy outcomes and controlled targeting. Here I have some sympathy with the community, given that Legends has been marketing itself as a more serious-minded alternative to Hearthstone in which the outcome of games is less reliant on randomness. To which I would say: someone should have told the design team.

In any case, Dire Wolf interceded swiftly, nerfing all three cards into varying levels of unplayability this week. The studio has built a reputation for not being afraid to step in when it comes to balance, again in contrast to Hearthstone's developers, and though I think I'd have liked them to let these cards bed in a little longer, I can also understand why they didn't want to squander the goodwill the set was otherwise receiving.

Less forgivable are the number of bugs still to be squashed in the set, which are an understandable result of some of the complex possible card interactions, but also point to the power of Blizzard's big blue chequebook when it comes to QA testing expansions. 

Prophetic fallacy 

Longer term I think a far bigger problem facing Legends than the design of any single card is the Prophecy system itself. This is what enables certain cards to be played for free on your opponent's turn when one of your runes breaks. Now that we're three expansions into Legends' life, the density of Prophecy cards available means it's possible to stack decks with prophecies without trading off too much power. I've seen Battlemage decks running over 30 prophecies, which for my money makes the effect way too consistent, and again unfun to lose to. And to head off the counterpoint, trying to save up enough damage on board to OTK your opponent often isn't a plausible option. 

Unless Dire Wolf caps the number of Prophecy cards decks can include, or starts rotating sets out, the issue is going to be compounded with each expansion. Particularly if they keep printing Prophecy cards as powerful as Mystic Dragon. The Prophecy issue aside, I've loved returning to Legends—so much so that this month I actually bothered grinding back up to legend rank, which I haven't felt inspired to do for a long time. 

Back when I reviewed Legends in March I said it was a deep, satisfying game that desperately needed an injection of players. The combination of Twitch Drops and the Skyrim set has gone a long way to doing that, so if you're looking for a new CCG, I would recommend Legends pretty much unreservedly at this point. Now there's a good shout. 

The promise of playing big-ass dragons and magical shouts has lured me back to The Elder Scrolls: Legends this month. The new Heroes of Skyrim expansion contains over 150 cards, including unique legendaries for lore favourites like Alduin, Ulfric Stormcloak and J'zargo (pro tip: do not craft the hapless Khajit wizard). I’ll be writing something approximating a review next week, but right now I want to talk about the in-game economy, because Legends is doing something pretty remarkable that's going to have an effect on lots of games in the future. 

As with all CCGs, building a competitive collection can be a dauntingly expensive business, even though Legends has always been pretty generous about handing out gold rewards for buying packs and the soul gems used to make cards. With the userbase feeling somewhat fragile before the new set launched, I wondered how many players would be willing to spend big on packs, especially given that the game’s 50-card decks can run up to three copies of certain legendaries.

Bethesda and developer Dire Wolf Digital came up with a few solutions to the cost problem, including selling decent pre-built decks containing some of the new cards for 500 gold a pop. But the most interesting idea has been the introduction of Twitch drops. The way these work is simple: Link your Bethesda account to your Twitch one, then watch any streamer in The Elder Scrolls: Legends directory (doesn’t matter how big the channel is), and eventually you’ll be notified with a private message to say that you’ve been selected to receive a random reward which will then be credited to your in-game account.

Currently the rewards on offer are 600 gold (enough to buy six packs), 1500 soul gems (enough to craft a legendary card), or a legendary pack that contains a single random legendary card.

But here’s the nuts part: Provided you’re logged in pretty regularly—and there’s nothing to stop you going AFK while the stream is running—you can realistically expect to get one of these drops every 24-36 hours. Bethesda won’t reveal what the exact cooldown is, but did confirm to me that watching multiple streams at once makes no material difference to your chances. 

Obviously I benefit from having a job at which it’s acceptable to leave Twitch running on my second monitor for half the day, but I can confirm that since the drops scheme has been running I’ve received enough gold to buy dozens of packs, multiple legendaries, and the gems to craft plenty more. Combined with the fact that Skyrim’s initial log-in reward quest, which gave players three packs for winning three games, was bugged and kept repeating, I’ve been able to build an almost complete Skyrim set relatively quickly and cheaply, with only one 50-pack bundle paid for with cash.

Clearly flooding the market with gold and gems around the time of a new release is a good way to energise the playerbase, but I’m surprised at how generous Bethesda has been here. Less surprisingly, Pete Hines, vice president of PR and marketing at Bethesda, suggested that drop rates will change in the future on last week’s The Elder Scrolls: Legends stream, and presumably that doesn’t mean they’ll be going up. "We’re going to play with it and try a variety of things of different shapes and sizes," a Bethesda spokesperson told me. "The system gives us the flexibility to dial up or down the frequency of drops as needed. We’ll always strive to do what’s best for the community and the long-term health of the game."

The idea of free stuff in exchange for spectating is of course not new to PC gaming, with CS:GO pioneering Souvenir Packages as far back as 2014. “We’d seen a few other games do it,” Bethesda’s rep tells me. “AJ (LaSaracina, brand manager on Legends) is the one who came up with the idea and we kinda ran with it.”  What's interesting about the way Legends is handling drops is that the rewards aren’t tied to a one-off event or tournament, but are instead intended as ongoing support for content creators.

A dream for streamers

Since the system came into play, Legends' most popular streamers have seen their viewership jump dramatically. “Drops have, in short, been incredible," says Christian "CVH" Van Hoose, who runs one of Legends’ biggest channels. "Before Twitch drops, I averaged between 150-200 viewers and peaked at 300 or so thanks to the recent Steam release, which was another good move. The day after drops my viewership more than doubled, and has been on the rise even since then. As I'm writing this, my average concurrent viewership has been over a thousand for the past week, which is a number I had never even peaked remotely close to prior."

Van Hoose isn’t worried that the rewards are likely about to be dialed down either. "I wouldn't mind if they had to lower the value of them as long as they could keep their frequency and encourage streamers and viewers to check out the game on Twitch. I'm not sure if that would ever become necessary, but I'd be happy with reduced Gold, a single card pack, or other rewards as well."

I’m curious about whether these new viewers still engage with the channel in the way his regulars do, or whether the fixation with drops has led to a worse chat experience. “Overall chat activity is up," he says. "Granted, it hasn't seen a directly proportionate increase to the increased viewers, because of some leaving the stream on while doing other things, but it shows that many who come just for the "free stuff" wind up getting more engaged and start chatting. No one is required to follow the stream, subscribe, or even comment in chat to get the drops, yet I have seen a significant increase in all three areas."

Seemingly, then, it's a system without downsides. The players get free stuff that makes completing their collection significantly easier, the streamers get a substantial audience boost, and Dire Wolf and Bethesda get a game with a more viable playerbase (presumably at the acceptable cost of making slimmer margins on expansions). And even if you’re not a CCG fan, it’s easy to see how similar schemes could be applied to, well, any PC game that has in-game content. When Bethesda announced drops, they said the plan was to roll the idea out to other titles, though there’s nothing concrete the company is willing to talk about yet.

I also wanted to know if Twitch has similar programs in development with other publishers.

David Hoffman, senior manager for publisher & developer strategic partnerships tells me: “We are always evaluating new and interesting opportunities with our partners and hope to be announcing some additional drops partnerships soon.” Imagine getting weapon skins just for watching PUBG streams, to give one example off the top of my head, or Rocket League loot crates. It’s clearly in Twitch’s interest to make the process as seamless as possible. “Our drops integration process is fairly streamlined," says Hoffman, "and although it does take some work on the development side we have seen that the programs have paid off for the developers who have participated."

Hoffman also isn’t worried about an influx of grabby viewers who only care about freebies. "This was originally one of our concerns when we first decided to launch the program,” he says. "After monitoring the results closely so far we haven't seen this type of behavior. Folks who have tuned in, have not just tuned in for the reward, but have continued to engage even after receiving their loot. Additionally, the developer fully controls how they reward the viewers and are able to guard against exploiting the system as they see fit."

With integration in more games seemingly inevitable, the concept of Twitch drops in other games is clearly one to watch. After all, who knows what you might get?