I Learned 7 Trading Card Games in a Week, here’s what I got!

While getting ready to open our new store and hobby space, I put myself through a crash course: learn as many trading card games (TCGs) as possible, as fast as possible. In one week I picked up Digimon, Flesh and Blood, Lorcana, One Piece, Pokémon, Riftbound and Yu-Gi-Oh.

Sine I come from a Magic: The Gathering background, that's the lens for everything below.

With so many games on the shelves these days, it's hard to know where to start. Hopefully this gives you some ideas.

Of the seven, Flesh and Blood and Riftbound felt the most different from anything I'd played before, so I'll start with those.

Flesh and Blood, a duel not a war.

Flesh and Blood shares the classic TCG goal: bring your opponent's life total to zero through attacks, combos and interaction. What sets it apart is the combat chain, the way attacks and blocks play out.

Say you attack with a card that has 6 power. Your opponent defends by blocking with cards from their hand, say two cards worth 3 defense each, or with a piece of equipment. Then both players get a reaction step: you might play an attack reaction for +3 power, and they might answer with a defense reaction. Whatever damage gets through is dealt, and if your attack has "go again", you can keep the chain going with another attack.

Your hand is everything. The same cards you use to attack, block and pay for things are drawn from one pool, so every turn is a trade-off.

You don't build a huge board of monsters and swing with all of them at once. It feels more like a duel between two powerful fighters, each using skills, equipment and raw power to gain the upper hand.

Riftbound, control the battlefields.

Riftbound has a different goal entirely. There's no life total to whittle down. Instead, you fight for control of battlefields to score points, and the first player to 8 points wins.

Battlefields are shared zones in the middle of the table. You move units from your base onto a battlefield, and if your opponent has units there too, you fight. Taking control of a battlefield (conquering it) scores 1 point, and still holding it at the start of your next turn scores another. However, your winning point can't come from conquering a single battlefield unless you also scored every other battlefield that turn, so you can't just sneak the win at the last second.

You'll recognise plenty of your favourite League of Legends champions, each with their own abilities. Riftbound also asks you to bring more pieces to the table than most TCGs:

• Champion Legend: the face of your deck. It sets which two domains (colours) you can play and has its own ability.
• Chosen Champion: a champion unit matching your Legend. It waits in its own zone, ready to be played whenever you want.
• Main Deck: 40 cards (including the Chosen Champion) of units, spells and gear, max 3 copies of each.
• Rune Deck: exactly 12 runes in your Legend's domains. These are your resources, a bit like lands in Magic, and you channel 2 every turn.
• Battlefields: 3 cards you bring to fight over.
  

Lorcana, the Magic of Disney.

Lorcana felt like a simplified, family and kid-friendly, Disney-flavoured Magic: The Gathering. The gameplay is quite similar, with some key differences: instead of attacking your opponent, you "exert" your characters to quest, collecting lore and instead of making your opponent’s number go down, you try to make yours go up. The first player to reach 20 lore wins.

Your opponent can stop you by challenging your characters, clearing your board and hindering your progress, so it becomes a race to see who reaches their goal first. There's more tactical depth along the way than I expected.

I really liked the resource system: your cards are also your resources. Each turn you can put one card face down into your inkwell as ink, so every card is a choice: play it later, or give it up now so you can afford other cards.

Digimon and One Piece, cousins.

I found Digimon and One Piece to be quite similar. At the start of the game you set aside cards from the top of your deck: your security stack in Digimon, your life cards in One Piece. The goal is to break through your opponent's stack before they break through yours.

The cards in the stack add nice variability, because you never know which ones you'll be playing without. Both games also let some of those cards strike back: when they're revealed as they leave the stack, their hidden effects can trigger.

In Digimon you summon creatures and digivolve them into stronger forms to attack your opponent's security. In One Piece you have a Leader, the captain of your deck, and you're trying to defeat your opponent's Leader.

The biggest difference is how you pay for things:

• Digimon's memory gauge: both players share one counter that runs from 10 on your side to 10 on your opponent's. Every card you play pushes it toward their side, and once it crosses over, your turn ends. Spend big and you hand your opponent a big turn.
• One Piece's DON!! deck: you have a separate 10-card DON!! deck and gain 2 DON!! each turn. You can spend them to play cards, or attach them to your Leader and characters for +1000 power each, which turns every turn into a choice between developing and attacking.

 

Pokémon, a taste of nostalgia.

Pokémon is one of the biggest franchises in the world, yet relatively few people play the card game, even among those who buy the cards.

The base idea of the game is simple. You have one active Pokémon, with others waiting on your bench, and so does your opponent. Knock out their active Pokémon and you take one or more of your prize cards, depending on how powerful your opponent’s Pokémon was. Claim all six of your prize cards and you win.

To attack, your Pokémon need Energy. Once per turn you can attach one Energy card from your hand to any of your Pokémon, active or benched. Each attack lists the Energy it needs, both how many and which types, like Fire or Water, so stronger attacks take several turns to power up. Retreating your active Pokémon to the bench also costs Energy, which gets discarded. Since Energy stays attached between turns, a big part of the strategy is deciding who to charge up on the bench while your active Pokémon holds the line.

There's no attacking your opponent directly. All the battling happens between your Pokémon and theirs.

 

Yu-Gi-Oh: not the game I remember

Yu-Gi-Oh has changed a lot since I played it back in school. There are so many card types now: Pendulum, Synchro, Xyz, Link and more.

The game has evolved so far that many competitive decks can end the game within the first few turns. It's a fast, explosive experience with a huge variety of powerful combinations.

A typical modern combo goes something like this. You normal summon one monster, and its effect special summons another straight from your deck. You use the two of them to summon a Link or Synchro monster, whose effect pulls out even more cards. A dozen steps later, you've either built a board of monsters that can shut down everything your opponent tries, or, if you're going second, assembled enough attack power to win in a single turn.

The basic goal is simple: bring your opponent's life points from 8000 to 0, or make them run out of cards to draw. The most straightforward way is attacking them directly, or destroying their attack-position monsters so the difference in attack goes through to their life points. These days, though, there are so many other ways to get there.

 

So, which one should you pick?

• Want an easy game to play with your family? Pokémon and Lorcana are both easy to learn, with more depth than you'd expect.
• Want to feel like a martial artist in a one-on-one duel? Flesh and Blood is for you.
• Love One Piece or Digimon as shows? You won't be disappointed by their card games.
• Looking for something completely different? Riftbound should be right up your alley.
• Enjoy digging into rules, interactions and complex combos that shut your opponent down before they get going? Yu-Gi-Oh is for you!

Whichever caught your eye, come by the store as soon as we open and try out any of them with us. We're always happy to teach!