Sorcery: Contested Realms

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Love Machine

Love Machine

I am the spirit that negates.
True & Honest Fan
kiwifarms.net
Joined
Sep 12, 2018
You know I think this game is really fun, but no one talks about it because the marketing director is out to lunch I guess. So I will try and make a thread for people who already like the game to talk about it, or to perhaps get people interested.

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What is Sorcery?
Sorcery is a collectible card game that is played on a 5x4 grid. The player controls an "Avatar" that moves along the grid by playing "Sites" to create a map on the grid that the game takes place on. Like many card games, it obviously takes a lot of dna from Magic: The Gathering. The Avatars are similar to commanders, and the Sites are similar to lands. The card's resource system is mana, with all lands providing colorless mana, but also have a denotation called "threshold" that is colored. The amount of threshold is what usually denotes the colors you can play at any given time. Think of the game sort of like a simple magic with a positioning game added on. I think it makes the game very fun.
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The aethestic of the card game harkons back to Magic prior to modern borders and Wizard's focus on digital art. With a lot of the artists being people you may recognize if you are familiar with fantasy art, or older Magic art. The game currently has 2 sets of cards. "Beta" which is about 400 cards, and Arthurian Legends being about 200 cards. As it stands it look like they are currently shooting for about 1 set a year. However they also seem to be wanting to put out very small specialty sets in between, one with dragons currently coming at... some point! The booster boxes come with a qr code on the box that you can redeem for "dust" to trade for thinks like promo cards, game mats, and tshirts.

How do I play?!

This video does a great job at introducing you to the rules of the game. The keywording is a minor learning curve, but after you get most of those down, then the game itself is mostly straight forward. But dont worry, there are cards that are interesting enough with their mechanics to make you actually think about the rules.

Where can I play?
Well, despite my opening to this thread being complaining about the advertising for the game being sub par, there are card shops that support it. So it is not a *complete* wast of time to look up related gaming shops in your area. However chances are a lot of your games are going to be done through tabletop simulator, which is a program available on Steam. Tabletop Simulator does exactly what it says on the tin and can simulate well... a lot of table top games, Sorcery has been pretty well implemented and you can get it here. I hope you all try the game, and enjoy it.

Other resources
Deck builder and card database: https://curiosa.io/
Event database and Dust renewal website: https://play.sorcerytcg.com/
The actual website for the game: https://sorcerytcg.com/
 
LolRaccoon said:
I might need to try this out at some point. The art is absolutely gorgeous.
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It really is fun, I do collect the cards and almost have both sets complete. Easier since I dont have a reason to make a paper deck unfortunetly. You should just grab a friend and learn together.
 
LolRaccoon said:
I might need to try this out at some point. The art is absolutely gorgeous.
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Buy the Beta Precon Box (at MSRP) as you get 4 decks to try out, but as I said earlier they don't meet legal deck construction. Of course it doesn't matter if all you are doing is playing with some friends to try it out.
 
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Endless Torment said:
Buy the Beta Precon Box (at MSRP) as you get 4 decks to try out, but as I said earlier they don't meet legal deck construction. Of course it doesn't matter if all you are doing is playing with some friends to try it out.
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Still need to buy a set of the precons just to have as a part game, earth deck will be banned however!
 
I played at SCG Houston, did the sealed event on Friday. Pretty fun game, arts great, and still early so cards are fairly easy to get a hold of. I played magic for years and the last few has soured my taste.

Yes the precons aren't legal decks, but that only matters at an event. They work fine to teach others the game and just duel.

Hope it picks up
 
farmer lou said:
I played at SCG Houston, did the sealed event on Friday. Pretty fun game, arts great, and still early so cards are fairly easy to get a hold of. I played magic for years and the last few has soured my taste.

Yes the precons aren't legal decks, but that only matters at an event. They work fine to teach others the game and just duel.

Hope it picks up
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Excited for the new set in a couple weeks. The spoiled cards already look cool. Get anything nice from you sealed packs?
 
farmer lou said:
River of Flame, nothing else really of note. Guy across from me pulled a Ring of Morrigan.
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Always nice to get a ring. I am thankful to have gotten my foil and play copy relatively painlessly. Though id be happy if something in gothic kinda makes the ring less playable.
 
farmer lou said:
I enjoy being excited for a card game again. For years magic was so bland and uninspired. Wish I knew about the Kickstarter
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I mostly play jap card games but i love the art. The current boomer fanbase is annoying and they are linda ran incompetently. Bit i am hopeful for its future. Its a fun game
 
Necro'ing this a bit, but keeping it relevant (pun unintended).

Went to a major Sorcery event over the last weekend. Amazing experience, very positive environment, almost no bullshit US politics. Most of the players were older (~30-40yo), and quite chill.

As a geriatric MTG veteran, I would say the environment reminds me of old Eternal (circa 2010-2013 Legacy, or any pre-2020 Vintage) MTG events, where folks were friendly and eager just to play. Not particularly cutthroat, but competitive in the constructed events. Several new players or very green players in drafting and sealed, but everyone was really friendly.

Judges and event organizers were a little chaotic, but overall corralled the event well. No major issues.

The artists were the most relaxed I've seen. Chill, talkative, and even hanging out after the event to learn how to play the game and chat with old fogeys about the good-old days of MTG.

For my personal experience with Sorcery thus far: I am not optimistic it can compete with the absolute monster of Hasbro MTG, but I hope it does. The gameplay is very organic, leads to fun stories. Two from my games: I almost got someone from midrange beaters but they pillow-forted on their back row, I had to corral them into a corner with everything I had, and it was a slug-fest of top-decks. Another game, I got nearly ran over by a really aggressive Fire land destruction deck that took the space in front of my starting square, but they took so much damage they were at DD before me and then had to run. I ended up losing to having so little realm control, but it was much closer than I expected while they danced around a couple of my minions.

It's easy to pick up with any MTG background, but it has an element of positioning (like Chess) that leads to a learning curve, and card advantage is MUCH more difficult to get. Leaves a lot to explore in a game I feel welcome in, mildly familiar with, but also having the brewer's itch with all the new toys that don't feel like cheap re-paints of other cards with random nostalgic 90s IPs on them. Cost-wise, it's much more approachable than fucking Standard is. If you wanted to play for cheap, you have a lot of options if you just don't take a few costly Uniques. You don't even feel that much disadvantage since the Uniques are only 1-ofs and searching is very restrictive. Middle-ground, you can get a set of beta nonfoil Cores and a Stone if you think you need them, but most decks really only need a Ring of Morrigan and a few pushed Uniques of their element, plus a couple busted Sites (like Colour out of Space). If you want to dump money in a high-risk game, there's Alpha Foils and Curios for the collectors. Seeing the push for physical art versus the AI options now very available, it leads the game to have a very distinct look that I expect will age very well.

The biggest flaws I've seen so far:
  • Gothic was basically sold out starting Friday for the weekend, and a lot of money was lost from potential sales. Availability of the product seems to be a recurring issue, both sealed and even finding singles for sale is tough. This will restrict how fast the game can grow substantially, but they seem to really push quality and I can appreciate that.
  • Some of the wording for projectiles vs ranged is clunky, but most everything else I've seen so far sometimes needs a rules check, but it's very intuitive how the card works from reading them. Their website has most FAQs posted, with hyperlinks to each relevant ability so learning a card is pretty easy.
  • I could also see 1x release a year losing some folks' interest, as the format could be stale for a long time before any major injections of cards comes in, but it gives you more opportunity to go and enjoy the cards before they could become less viable.
  • The starter decks have some solid Avatars, but they do need additional cards to be constructed legal. Odd choice from the designers, but at $50 USD for a set of four starter decks, it's really easy to forgive seeing MTG Commander deck pricetags.

If you were tired of Universes Beyond and want to feel like playing old MTG with a twist, this has been a great game. If you can find a place that offers it and has a group, it may be worth trying out. TTS has a mod to support it already, so you can try it online for almost nothing.
 
Man, I want this game to succeed so bad. The cards are great and the gameplay LOOKS fun. The creators obviously have fun making it so I hope it goes on for a long time. Maybe I should start up a play group in my neighborhood so we can get some organized events going.
 
There's no organized play around me, around 1-2hr drive any direction to find such. I've got a gaming group I plan to share this with and see it's reception. All of us are old MTG players that basically quit around COVID, and Hasbro has burned our interest out. I have the largest collection and hobby budget (not sure I can even call it a budget anymore, just good job and little debt), so trying to figure out a good way to have us all play on the same level without many stores to leverage.

If it's well received, my plan so far is a box of each set for everyone, a starter deck of choice, and we play with that for a few months. We're all older, most of us have families, so we can't just jam it every other night. That's where I think this slow release schedule could work out well: give us slow but quality products, and we will get a year to enjoy them before the next thing.

Of my little experience so far, I think if we really enjoy it, the absolute staples we will all want will be: a set of dual-thresholds from Beta, a set of double-thresholds from Gothic, a set of Cores and a Stone for each person. From there, it really gets vague what each player may want based on their deck, and I'm not even sure the Cores/Stone are good as much as they are iconic references. Spell card quantity seems to be king in this game.

My current brainstorming: I plan to try building an Animist deck. Not sure what elements, but heavy spells. Air seems like it'll be a given, if I want any Spirit tribal support. I think I'll either splash Earth for a Common Sense package, or Fire for stronger 2-for-1 spells (Poison Nova seems awesome). Not sure I want 3-element, and while I think Water is cracked it also doesn't play nice with other elements as well.
 
Haywire said:
My current brainstorming: I plan to try building an Animist deck. Not sure what elements, but heavy spells. Air seems like it'll be a given, if I want any Spirit tribal support. I think I'll either splash Earth for a Common Sense package, or Fire for stronger 2-for-1 spells (Poison Nova seems awesome). Not sure I want 3-element, and while I think Water is cracked it also doesn't play nice with other elements as well.
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I always go for playing tall water myself. Despite it mediocrity. Been trying to make Harbinger work.
 
I've been trying to force Magician. I built essentially red deck wins. I'm grabbing the pieces for the chaos wish version, but still don't have a ring and that's the biggest piece needed.
 
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