Aura, Lady of a Thousand Names @millenomi@lily.network

A warning to those who have followed me recently: I am explicitly not professional in any sense here. This is my Personal BDSM & Queerness & Grumbles & Art Account. You have been Warned.

Labels are beacons, not fences.

It’s not whether you’re in or out, they’re just milestones by which you set your tent.

May we all get to live in quiet times.

"Aura why so much TCG talk" 1. card games writ large are my Special Interest and 2. I'm passing the time on lunch break waiting for job interview news.

(Netrunner is perhaps the reigning monarch in this niche, but there’s in my mind a distinction between games that require you to build an engine as a prerequisite to get to a victory state, like Netrunner, and games with a straightforward path to the victory state that have a lot of depth in their rules for constructing alternate paths to fast or uncontested victory, à la “early Magic” or current cEDH or Legacy/Vintage.)

I've backed Sorcery: Contested Realm (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sorcerytcg/sorcery-contested-realm-tcg) for the sheer curiosity of it, because 'old school' (aka, mechanically very crunchy) games are a niche that is underserved and could perhaps be built into in a novel way, so there's another one for this year. The Kickstarter rewards say September.

(Is Draft a thing in Pokémon TCG? I see that a draft format was built in 2019 but I hear literally zero about it.)

Pokémon continues to be the second biggest in a million ways, though now it's economically unsound to recommend at any level but the barest casual afaict.

In fact, perhaps the biggest winner in this area is the new Yu-Gi-Oh Arena-equivalent that just came out — which, surprisingly, got the _entire game_ on, not just subsets à la WotC. Kudos.

Online card games are the big losers in this whole equation. Hearthstone has stagnated — I do not see or hear a lot of excitement in that direction. Eternal is just What If Magic But Not Magic, and thus intrinsically much less interesting. Runeterra has dug into a more casual niche that I don't know they can ever build out of. All three are heavy on battlefield readability issues in a way that paper games are not.

FAB is now Definitely A Thing and the default non-Magic competitive CCG out there, which is impressive for something that is Not Online.

Of course Channel Fireball has put its weight into making FAB, Metazoo, and now the My Hero Academia (UniVersus variant) TCGs happen, so we'll see.

Digimon is probably going to be the cheaper alternative to Pokémon TCG in the vanishingly small 'simple but surprisingly deep' niche.

The Blaseball CCG is kickstarting next week.

The Gun & Gun expandable CG is finally delivering after 1+ year (!) and is arriving this week.

I've finally convinced another person to sit down and learn Netrunner with me (I got trounced by the runner starter deck lol)

This is shaping up to be quite the year for CCG spread outside of Magic that I can access.