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The Card Game Is EPIC!

'EPIC' card game is fun, simple, and strategic.

By Autistic GeekPublished 6 years ago 6 min read
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I am John Moore, some call me Boo Boo. I’ve been playing tabletop games for about 20 years, mostly card games. I also design games for fun and love to break down games to the bare mechanics and analyze. Let’s take a look at an awesome card game called EPIC by White Wizard Games.

So It Begins...

Us older folks from the Magic: The Gathering community remember when the Magic Hall of Fame started in 2005. Darwin Castle was one of the first inductees in 2005, then the next year Robert Dougherty was inducted in the 2006 hall of fame. Not only were they great players, they were creative. They went on, but not always together, to help design other games like Ascension the deckbuilding game, Battleground: Fantasy Warfare, Vs. System, The Battle for Hill 218,The Battle for Sector 219, and Space Station Assault. Then creating the big hit Star Realms, they saw that TCGs are an expensive hobby and wanted a cheaper way to play and keep the fun and strategy. With the new age of card games not having to be in randomized booster packs, like the LCGs from Fantasy Flight, they thought it would be great to make a battling card game, but with production process to keep the game cheap for players like they did with Star Realms. With this in mind, comes the birth of EPIC the card game.

We are gods!

For those who like fiction behind games, in EPIC, we are gods. We limited our power to intervene in the realms of mortals, because well... we kept destroying the past realities by accident. The more powerful the action we have on the mortals we like to imagine paying 1 gold coin, but less powerful actions we can do freely. When I mean powerful I mean powerful! How does an 18/18 creature with “trample” sound? How about a 8/12 with “haste” and when it comes into play all of your opponent’s creatures “tap”? Maybe a 5/5 that when it dies it deals 5 damage directly to your opponent, then if it’s in your discard pile it automatically puts itself back onto the field? Our limit to the gold coin costing cards is that we only have ONE gold coin on our turn then ONE gold coin when it is not your turn.

The Good, The Evil, The Wild, The Sage

Top is Good. Right is Wild. Bottom is Evil. Left is Sage

Another thing they kept in mind, is casual players love trying different formats. They kept the basic mechanics simple so to have the wiggle room to be able to function in many different formats. They even encourage and welcome the community to develop different formats. Now since pretty much every card is powerful, a card’s actual power will vary depending on the format. Some cards are more powerful in general constructed and some more powerful in limited formats. Now since EPIC is still very new, the card pool is still quite small compared to more established games. When I hear someone say this, I like to ask them when you cut all the cards that are only used in the most casual of decks and even cards that almost never see use at all, just how many cards are actually left that can be considered “good” cards? With EPIC just about every card is a “good” card. So much so the meta of the game can shift with the same exact card pool. White Wizards definitely puts effort into the quality of the cards developed. As of writing this, there are 216 different cards in the game and the new Pantheons expansion expected to come out soon.

Can you dominate your opponents?

Helion, The Dominator

Now when I mentioned the base mechanics were simple, I don’t mean the game as a whole didn’t have depth and complexity. One of the things that new players I teach that have a hard time to remember is there is no “reaction” when playing cards, that means no “stack” or stack like mechanic. When a card is played it happens whether you like it or not. There is back and forth plays between players within a turn, but only during certain times, but I will leave that to instruction on how to play.

Another thing I simply love about this game is how combat is done. I have played many many card games and most come down to two different combat systems. First you have combat as a definite phase that can be used once or passed. Second, combat can be a “sub-phase” treated in a similar sense like the “stack” in MtG is. EPIC uses the second. You can have many combat phases as you want and/or have resources to perform.

Now knowing that there is no “stack,” many combats, and limited resources, I view MtG as more of a reaction type of card game, but EPIC is a proactive game. With EPIC, you either have to anticipate what your opponent is going to do or be able to recover. One game with a friend I messed up. I was at 1 life left and he was at 29, in EPIC you start with 30 instead of 20. In one turn I flipped it to where he was at 5 and I was at 21. You can almost never say it is clear to just give up until the final blow is done. This “keeps you on your toes” through the entire game.

In November 2016 was their first world tournament. What I find interesting is to become the world champ you had to be skilled in 4 different formats. That blows some people’s minds when I tell them that. For qualifying tournaments you had to be skilled in a format that is called Random 60. This is when you are given a list of 60 random cards with roughly even distributions among the 4 colors in EPIC. You pick 30 of those cards and build the singleton deck of 30 cards out of your personal collection to play. Once you get to Worlds, the swiss rounds were cube draft, then to the final cut. During the final cut players played 2 games of Dark Draft, then up to 3 games of full constructed for a score of 3 out of 5 to win the match.

Final Words

With all this said I absolutely love EPIC the card game. It is most definitely my favorite game. If you’re curious to try it, it's cheap to try with the base game is only $15 you can get it at epiccardgame.com, find it on amazon, or even better ask your local gaming store to order you a copy. Try it out and if you don’t like it then you’re not out much money.

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About the Creator

Autistic Geek

31 year old autistic guy, writing about various thing. Share my posts please.

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