Spectromancer is an expandable card game that is published exclusively as a videogame. The expansion cards are sold as fixed sets and there is no collecting, trading, or deck building in Spectromancer. The game was created by Richard Garfield, Alexy Stankevich, and Skaff Elias. Spectromancer is a refined version of Stankevich's Astral Masters.
The game plays as follows. It is a duel between two wizards who battle with spells and summoned creatures on a battleline of six slots. Each wizard has 60 hit points and games typically ends when one wizard is reduced to 0 hit points. There are five kinds of element cards and currency: Fire, Water, Air, Earth, and special elements. The special elements depends on the wizard's specialization. For instance Mechanician wizards specialize in summoning mechanical constructs for attack while Cleric wizards specialize in defensive healing spells. Every duel, each wizard gets five random cards from each element. To play a card you must pay the appropriate game currency, the elemental power points. Thus Fire card requires Fire points to play. Every turn, you gain one points across all elements, and managing the game currency and hit points are core to gameplay.
Spectromancer fixes a problem of Magic: The Gathering. In Magic, deck building is a cerebrally challenging project that often involves spread sheets and intricate balancing. However, during play, the correct move given available cards can be obvious. As Garfield said in an interview, "...it's exciting but in Magic often the cards play you...." In Spectromancer, you get a hand of cards, and it is up to you to set up combos and use superior resource management skills. As for deck building, Garfield says: "There are many benefits to having no deck construction, which may not be immediately apparent. You don't have to worry about running into the same degenerate deck again and again. You don't have to refrain playing with the 'fun' cards because they don't win. You have to learn to use the tools you are given rather than use the same tools again and again."
The Flash version of Spectromancer has most of the features of the full-featured client-server version, including a campaign mode where you fight wizards to get new cards, Pokemon-style.
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So, they took out deckbuilding because it was too hard to balance?
Next time
Garfield said in the Spectromancer forum that if they make another one, he would consider deck building.
deck building
I picked up Spectromancer in a Steam sale (last winter) and I was disappointed with the lack of deck building. It has it's advantages, but the minimal customization made the campaign feel hollow to me.
Magarena does more to remind me of why I liked Magic, on the occasions when I liked it, and the "cube draft" it uses is quite clever (a mode of play developed by players of the card game).
Of course, my day with Magic was antediluvian. My first deck was from the once-highly-collectable "Beta" print run and the last expansion I remember reasonably clearly is "Legends."
In a comment on the Magarena post, someone mentions Garfield's second CCG, "Vampire: the Eternal Struggle" (originally "Jyhad" but they changed the name for reasons of sensitivity). "V:tES" is a much stronger game (for one thing, there actually is something like card balance in it), but a lot of the strength comes from the way it works as a multiplayer game: designed for a table of about (and preferably exactly) 5 players.
I still like the deckbuilding mechanic. I lost more games of Magic than I won, but I got to see a lot more "WTF" and sometimes "oh wow" expressions than my more ruthless (and better funded) peers. In hindsight, I have to wonder if it is possible for a game to be balanced and have wide-ranging deck creation.
Maybe, if the set of cards doesn't expand or strict rules are adhered to in creating new cards.
Awesome game, and one that I
Awesome game, and one that I keep coming back to.
It was never designed to be a deck building game. You play the random hand that you are given, as the quote from Garfield in this article states. Moreover, you must attempt to play around the random cards which your opponent has been given. You both (almost) always receive a single card in the cost ranges 1-3, 4-6, 7-9, and 10-12, and you may never both have the same card (at least in 2 player); the low number of possible options means that you can guess which cards your opponent has from how he plays, and also play around certain spells which would be particularly dangerous to you *if* your opponent had them. This requires some skill.
I think it's worth mentioning for anyone who might consider buying that there's been some talk on the Spectromancer forums that the AI in the flash version is much easier to defeat than in the full version of the game.