It’s time for the first Grand Melee of the year! In this extra-special event, players clash with their best decks for a piece of one of the biggest reward pools in The Elder Scrolls: Legends – to include the chance to earn up to a whopping 75 Heroes of Skyrim packs and 2,000 Soul Gems!



As a bonus, all Grand Melee entrants will receive a complementary promotional playset of Piercing Javelin – complete with animated premium alternative art! This playset was originally featured in our first Grand Melee, giving players another shot at grabbing these exclusive cards. Players who already own this set of promo Javelins will also be able to Soul Trap their extras in a future update.

Entry into the Grand Melee begins Saturday, March 3, at 3:00 am EST and closes Sunday, March 4, at 3:00 am EST. We have extended the event entry time to 24 hours to better accommodate players from Eastern time zones. The cost to enter the Grand Melee is 1,000 Gold or 6 Event Tickets. Good luck, and may your favorite deck carry you to victory!

It’s time for the first Grand Melee of the year! In this extra-special event, players clash with their best decks for a piece of one of the biggest reward pools in The Elder Scrolls: Legends – to include the chance to earn up to a whopping 75 Heroes of Skyrim packs and 2,000 Soul Gems!



As a bonus, all Grand Melee entrants will receive a complementary promotional playset of Piercing Javelin – complete with animated premium alternative art! This playset was originally featured in our first Grand Melee, giving players another shot at grabbing these exclusive cards. Players who already own this set of promo Javelins will also be able to Soul Trap their extras in a future update.

Entry into the Grand Melee begins Saturday, March 3, at 3:00 am EST and closes Sunday, March 4, at 3:00 am EST. We have extended the event entry time to 24 hours to better accommodate players from Eastern time zones. The cost to enter the Grand Melee is 1,000 Gold or 6 Event Tickets. Good luck, and may your favorite deck carry you to victory!

A small update for TES Legends is live. Here are the details:

Premium Legendary Packs

For a limited time, you can purchase a Premium Legendary Pack from the Core set or the Heroes of Skyrim set for 1,000 gold each. Each pack includes one random Premium Legendary Card from that set. Begin completing your set by purchasing the Premium Legendary Packs within the Packs department of the Store.

Card Changes

• Journey to Sovngarde has been changed. Any Soul Summoned copies of this card can be Soul Trapped for full value until March 14th.

Journey to Sovngarde is a card that encourages the player using it to drastically extend the length of the game. While decks containing Journey were winning less than half of their games, those games were significantly drawn out compared to an average game. Combined with its recent spike in popularity, this was concerning to us. In addition, Journey has been used in combo decks that try to exploit the cost reduction element of the card. Removing the cost reduction element should reduce the regularity with which it extends games and avoid some combo cases, while still retaining its appeal as a tool to combat slower decks.

A small update for TES Legends is live. Here are the details:

Premium Legendary Packs

For a limited time, you can purchase a Premium Legendary Pack from the Core set or the Heroes of Skyrim set for 1,000 gold each. Each pack includes one random Premium Legendary Card from that set. Begin completing your set by purchasing the Premium Legendary Packs within the Packs department of the Store.

Card Changes

• Journey to Sovngarde has been changed. Any Soul Summoned copies of this card can be Soul Trapped for full value until March 14th.

Journey to Sovngarde is a card that encourages the player using it to drastically extend the length of the game. While decks containing Journey were winning less than half of their games, those games were significantly drawn out compared to an average game. Combined with its recent spike in popularity, this was concerning to us. In addition, Journey has been used in combo decks that try to exploit the cost reduction element of the card. Removing the cost reduction element should reduce the regularity with which it extends games and avoid some combo cases, while still retaining its appeal as a tool to combat slower decks.

Humans like to categorize and organize things. Our brains are wired to be really good at it. We experience a ton of information every day, and our brains process and organize a lot of it passively and instantaneously. At a basic level, there are categories of “don’t care about this right now” to “this is something I want to pay attention to.” This allows us to focus on the things we want or need to do without feeling overwhelmed by all the noise. For example, if we drive to work, we see thousands of objects but we automatically put some things into the “pay attention” category -- things like traffic signals, pedestrians, and other cars.

Perhaps as a natural extension of our desire and aptitude for organizing things, humans seem to like to rate and rank things within categories. For example, a cinephile might not just have a list of her top 10 movies of all time, she might use categorization to come up with numerous lists. “Here’s my top 5 cerebral Scandinavian tearjerkers!” One does wonder how much the internet and modern data collections have contributed to this inclination.

But hey, wait. How the heck does this relate to the Elder Scrolls: Legends? Actually, in a number of ways. Let’s walk through a few ways in which organization is a core part of the design of Elder Scrolls: Legends, and why that’s a good thing.

Organization allows for mechanical distribution, leading to asymmetric gameplay and player agency.

Distributing themes and mechanics across five attributes is perhaps the most critical form of organization in Legends. This method of categorizing cards coupled with the primary deck building rule spreads the game’s mechanics across the game so that no one deck can have access to all the mechanics. Thus, as a player, you have a really important decision to make in terms of which attributes to dip into when building a deck. What do you want to utilize and what can you live without?

Asymmetric collections also present fun ranking opportunities, and Legends is rich enough to present fun thought experiments even when you’re not playing. While your cinephile friend is listing her top 5 cerebral Scandinavian tearjerkers, you might be considering how you’d rank your top 5 Intelligence actions.

Organization helps players remember concepts and mechanics and leads to skillful play.

Once a game begins, the benefits of the mechanical organization mentioned above aren’t done. One of the first things you might do is look at your opponent’s attributes. Once you’ve played a fair number of Legends games, this visual cue can be quickly processed by your brain into some possible deck archetypes (another useful form of organization!) that your opponent might be playing, and you might even begin to form a plan to play well against those decks. Some players talk about “playing around” certain cards, meaning their decisions are sometimes driven based on the risk of the opponent having a particular card. This type of planning and reacting can begin immediately, with your mulligan decision!

Something to stress is here is that the card file itself must be organized well in order for players to feel these benefits. If designers throw mechanics around too liberally, these benefits can dissipate. Imagine if all attributes had some Charge creatures, or if all attributes had efficient support removal. While some amount of unpredictability is important for card games, that’s a world where games would feel too chaotic and unpredictable.

Organization of themes and mechanics can support lore and world-building, while also helping players remember concepts.

When Legends launched, the design team decided to allocate the ten playable Elder Scrolls races across the five attributes, each race to an attribute pair. For example, Nords were assigned to the Strength-Willpower pair, so each Nord was either Strength or Willpower (or in Tyr’s case, both). We knew this organization wouldn’t last forever, because we felt certain famous characters wouldn’t feel right in the initial pairing. But we knew that, as a new game, Legends was going to throw a lot of complexity at players, so we wanted to take advantage of organization to present some information in a clean and memorable way. As mentioned, humans are capable of processing a lot of information; but one of our jobs was to present game information so that players were spending less brainpower decoding information about the game, allowing them to focus on the more fun, strategic decisions.

Organization allows exceptions to create memorable cards and/or interesting flavor.

While organization creates standard rules to go by, designers are not always slavish to those rules. Breaking an organizational rule can be a powerful tool to call attention to something, especially as it relates to the story of a card. If all previous Orcs hadn’t been assigned to the Strength and Endurance attributes, Arcanaeum Librarian’s arrival in Clockwork City wouldn’t have been particularly interesting. The fact that he represents the first Orc card to veer outside of the normal Orc attributes is part of his charm. It also clearly is a call-out to Urag gro-Shub from Skyrim, who was quite at home amidst a library full of books. Neither Strength nor Endurance felt right for a card representing that character.


Another example of breaking the rules for a purpose can be found in Heroes of Skyrim. Because this set was based on the home of the Nords, the designers chose to allow Nords to bust out of their standard attributes in a big way, as a nod to the diversity of the Nord people as experienced in TES V: Skyrim. So, Nords were purposefully placed into all five attributes.

Organization of card sets leads to mastery and delight.

This one is a bit harder to talk about concretely, but when Legends designers create card sets, some of their discussions relate to how much of a particular mechanic to include and how to spread those mechanics across cards. It’s almost like making a soup or a sauce, where simple building blocks are the base and fancier cards are spice. If a soup doesn’t have enough spice, it might taste bland and boring; the same goes for a card set. But too much spice can be a turn-off, as well. Finding the sweet spot and figuring out a way of organizing the set’s information across cards so that players experience mastery and delight while playing with the cards is a mix of art and science.


Here are some examples of organizational decisions that we had to make when designing various Legends card sets:

• How many Slay creatures should be in the Dark Brotherhood set, and what attributes should get Slay? What do the other attributes get?
  
• Would naming a cycle of dual-attribute actions for Heroes of Skyrim help players remember the names of classes? We had observed a fair number of new players struggle to remember class names, so this naming convention was an attempt to introduce a mnemonic device.
  
• How many neutral cards should a set have? In the case of Clockwork City, we cranked up the number to reflect the nature of the setting. This presented us with discussions about how to design neutral cards and mechanics in a synergistic way so that they wouldn’t appear in too many decks.

Thanks for reading along on our journey through how design thinks about organization and its impact on the Legends play experience. By the way, we’ve got another organizational lens in store for our next expansion. Stay tuned… we think you’ll be excited!

Humans like to categorize and organize things. Our brains are wired to be really good at it. We experience a ton of information every day, and our brains process and organize a lot of it passively and instantaneously. At a basic level, there are categories of “don’t care about this right now” to “this is something I want to pay attention to.” This allows us to focus on the things we want or need to do without feeling overwhelmed by all the noise. For example, if we drive to work, we see thousands of objects but we automatically put some things into the “pay attention” category -- things like traffic signals, pedestrians, and other cars.

Perhaps as a natural extension of our desire and aptitude for organizing things, humans seem to like to rate and rank things within categories. For example, a cinephile might not just have a list of her top 10 movies of all time, she might use categorization to come up with numerous lists. “Here’s my top 5 cerebral Scandinavian tearjerkers!” One does wonder how much the internet and modern data collections have contributed to this inclination.

But hey, wait. How the heck does this relate to the Elder Scrolls: Legends? Actually, in a number of ways. Let’s walk through a few ways in which organization is a core part of the design of Elder Scrolls: Legends, and why that’s a good thing.

Organization allows for mechanical distribution, leading to asymmetric gameplay and player agency.

Distributing themes and mechanics across five attributes is perhaps the most critical form of organization in Legends. This method of categorizing cards coupled with the primary deck building rule spreads the game’s mechanics across the game so that no one deck can have access to all the mechanics. Thus, as a player, you have a really important decision to make in terms of which attributes to dip into when building a deck. What do you want to utilize and what can you live without?

Asymmetric collections also present fun ranking opportunities, and Legends is rich enough to present fun thought experiments even when you’re not playing. While your cinephile friend is listing her top 5 cerebral Scandinavian tearjerkers, you might be considering how you’d rank your top 5 Intelligence actions.

Organization helps players remember concepts and mechanics and leads to skillful play.

Once a game begins, the benefits of the mechanical organization mentioned above aren’t done. One of the first things you might do is look at your opponent’s attributes. Once you’ve played a fair number of Legends games, this visual cue can be quickly processed by your brain into some possible deck archetypes (another useful form of organization!) that your opponent might be playing, and you might even begin to form a plan to play well against those decks. Some players talk about “playing around” certain cards, meaning their decisions are sometimes driven based on the risk of the opponent having a particular card. This type of planning and reacting can begin immediately, with your mulligan decision!

Something to stress is here is that the card file itself must be organized well in order for players to feel these benefits. If designers throw mechanics around too liberally, these benefits can dissipate. Imagine if all attributes had some Charge creatures, or if all attributes had efficient support removal. While some amount of unpredictability is important for card games, that’s a world where games would feel too chaotic and unpredictable.

Organization of themes and mechanics can support lore and world-building, while also helping players remember concepts.

When Legends launched, the design team decided to allocate the ten playable Elder Scrolls races across the five attributes, each race to an attribute pair. For example, Nords were assigned to the Strength-Willpower pair, so each Nord was either Strength or Willpower (or in Tyr’s case, both). We knew this organization wouldn’t last forever, because we felt certain famous characters wouldn’t feel right in the initial pairing. But we knew that, as a new game, Legends was going to throw a lot of complexity at players, so we wanted to take advantage of organization to present some information in a clean and memorable way. As mentioned, humans are capable of processing a lot of information; but one of our jobs was to present game information so that players were spending less brainpower decoding information about the game, allowing them to focus on the more fun, strategic decisions.

Organization allows exceptions to create memorable cards and/or interesting flavor.

While organization creates standard rules to go by, designers are not always slavish to those rules. Breaking an organizational rule can be a powerful tool to call attention to something, especially as it relates to the story of a card. If all previous Orcs hadn’t been assigned to the Strength and Endurance attributes, Arcanaeum Librarian’s arrival in Clockwork City wouldn’t have been particularly interesting. The fact that he represents the first Orc card to veer outside of the normal Orc attributes is part of his charm. It also clearly is a call-out to Urag gro-Shub from Skyrim, who was quite at home amidst a library full of books. Neither Strength nor Endurance felt right for a card representing that character.


Another example of breaking the rules for a purpose can be found in Heroes of Skyrim. Because this set was based on the home of the Nords, the designers chose to allow Nords to bust out of their standard attributes in a big way, as a nod to the diversity of the Nord people as experienced in TES V: Skyrim. So, Nords were purposefully placed into all five attributes.

Organization of card sets leads to mastery and delight.

This one is a bit harder to talk about concretely, but when Legends designers create card sets, some of their discussions relate to how much of a particular mechanic to include and how to spread those mechanics across cards. It’s almost like making a soup or a sauce, where simple building blocks are the base and fancier cards are spice. If a soup doesn’t have enough spice, it might taste bland and boring; the same goes for a card set. But too much spice can be a turn-off, as well. Finding the sweet spot and figuring out a way of organizing the set’s information across cards so that players experience mastery and delight while playing with the cards is a mix of art and science.


Here are some examples of organizational decisions that we had to make when designing various Legends card sets:

• How many Slay creatures should be in the Dark Brotherhood set, and what attributes should get Slay? What do the other attributes get?
  
• Would naming a cycle of dual-attribute actions for Heroes of Skyrim help players remember the names of classes? We had observed a fair number of new players struggle to remember class names, so this naming convention was an attempt to introduce a mnemonic device.
  
• How many neutral cards should a set have? In the case of Clockwork City, we cranked up the number to reflect the nature of the setting. This presented us with discussions about how to design neutral cards and mechanics in a synergistic way so that they wouldn’t appear in too many decks.

Thanks for reading along on our journey through how design thinks about organization and its impact on the Legends play experience. By the way, we’ve got another organizational lens in store for our next expansion. Stay tuned… we think you’ll be excited!

Tomorrow the Legends servers will be down for a scheduled game update at 9am ET. Stay tuned for more information and patch notes.

Tomorrow the Legends servers will be down for a scheduled game update at 9am ET. Stay tuned for more information and patch notes.

This month’s card is a throwback from the long-lost Dwemer civilization. While the Dwemer are nowhere to be seen, their ingenious machines live on throughout Tamriel and have proven time and time again to be incomparable fighters. Many overconfident adventurers have met their end at the hands of a Dwemer machine. The Steam Constructor is one such foe. This piece of Dwemer machinery seems to have been designed with the goal of helping to fabricate an entire army of robots.


Steam Constructor needs some help to get up and running, but the payoff is significant. If players are holding any neutral cards in hand, Steam Constructor summons a free 1/1 Reconstructed Spider. Without considering any other synergies, a 2/2 and a 1/1 for two magicka is a fantastic bargain that can find a place in most decks, but Steam Constructor has even more to offer.

Both creatures are neutral Dwemer, which can be quite important in the right deck. Two neutral bodies in a single card is going to be very helpful for ensuring that you still have a neutral creature in play in a turn or two when you start playing your Fabricants or Dwarven Dynamos, and when you play this with a Halls of the Dwemer in play, you get a whopping nine power for just two magicka! Talk about a great value! Of course, the Steam Constructor will also play very well with any card that likes Tokens. It can be combined with Fifth Legion Trainer or Divine Fervor to boost up its power, or Lion Guard Strategist to spread wards around to a ton of guys.

Regardless of how you plan to use Steam Constructor, be sure to hop into the ranked queue today to earn your copies!

This month’s card is a throwback from the long-lost Dwemer civilization. While the Dwemer are nowhere to be seen, their ingenious machines live on throughout Tamriel and have proven time and time again to be incomparable fighters. Many overconfident adventurers have met their end at the hands of a Dwemer machine. The Steam Constructor is one such foe. This piece of Dwemer machinery seems to have been designed with the goal of helping to fabricate an entire army of robots.


Steam Constructor needs some help to get up and running, but the payoff is significant. If players are holding any neutral cards in hand, Steam Constructor summons a free 1/1 Reconstructed Spider. Without considering any other synergies, a 2/2 and a 1/1 for two magicka is a fantastic bargain that can find a place in most decks, but Steam Constructor has even more to offer.

Both creatures are neutral Dwemer, which can be quite important in the right deck. Two neutral bodies in a single card is going to be very helpful for ensuring that you still have a neutral creature in play in a turn or two when you start playing your Fabricants or Dwarven Dynamos, and when you play this with a Halls of the Dwemer in play, you get a whopping nine power for just two magicka! Talk about a great value! Of course, the Steam Constructor will also play very well with any card that likes Tokens. It can be combined with Fifth Legion Trainer or Divine Fervor to boost up its power, or Lion Guard Strategist to spread wards around to a ton of guys.

Regardless of how you plan to use Steam Constructor, be sure to hop into the ranked queue today to earn your copies!