Was glaubt ihr worum es geht?

Roughly a month ago, I gave you a first preview of Carte. I hope you’ve been following the game ever since as a lot has happened in the meantime!

Basically, Carte has had quite the run ever since I first got in touch with the game. The developers worked day and night to ensure everything was ready for the big closed Beta Phase that is currently underway. You can still sign up for Carte, but the servers will be shut down come Thursday and everything will be reset. Then, a few more patches will be implemented, before the game will proceed with the public Beta. The big difference? Whatever you achieve during the public Beta, you’ll keep for the final release of the game shortly after!

Alright, the game is quite appealing and it will soon go live. So what’s that interesting news I kept mentioning? Well, OnNet Europe is exploring several ways to draw more players into Carte. One of them is Affiliate Marketing. In case you’re not familiar with the concept, here’s how it works in a nutshell: You can advertise Carte on your website. If somebody clicks on your ad and signs up, you’ll get a small reward! In other words: You do something for the game you enjoy playing AND you earn money at the same time!

If this sounds appealing to you, be sure to check out my company website where I’m explaining how to sign up for the Affiliate Program.

P.S.: I’m afraid we can only add German speaking websites to the program as we’re only responsible for the German version of Carte at this time. I’ll let you know if and when that changes.

Last weekend, the Yu-Gi-Oh! Championship Series came to Germany for the 2nd time. YCS Leipzig (or to be more specific: YCS Schkeuditz) attracted more than 1100 players and just as expected, we had quite a blast!

For the 8th time now, I’ve been able to do coverage for Konami’s official site. I was able to beat my own expectations and wrote 26 articles over the course of 2 days. I think that having shorter breaks between events (YCS Brighton took place just 2 months ago) helps tremendously to get into the art of doing coverage a lot faster after the event’s started. I now know how to make the most of my time and optimize my workflow and the result looks quite appealing. At least that’s what everybody who followed the coverage was saying.

The next stop of the Yu-Gi-Oh! Championship Series in Europe has already been announced; in a little less than 2 months, YCS Toulouse will take place and take us all back to France where Stephan Sluis, the winner of YCS Paris AND YCS Leipzig, started his incredible run. I’ve already received a confirmation that I’ll be serving as part of the coverage team again, so I’m looking forward to it and I’m eager to find out if I can beat my own record.

As always, feedback regarding the coverage is much appreciated, so drop me a message if you have anything to say about it.

WoW TCG – DMF Cannes

Alright, so much for the Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG. There are also some news regarding the other TCG I like to follow up: The World of Warcraft TCG. The weekend before YCS Leipzig, the WoW TCG premier event series, the Darkmoon Faire, stopped for the first time in Europe this year. Darkmoon Faire Cannes was a Sealed Event and if you’ve been following my past performances, you’ll know that I tend to do rather well in these events.

Lady luck was on my side once again and I made it all the way to the semi finals. Just like in Rotterdam before, I got paired against Duncan and unfortunately, I made a slight mistake which cost me the game. I had lethal damage on board twice and got decked out the turn before I could attack for game, so it was a rather weird way to get eliminated from the tournament. You can read all about it in the Feature Match, so go and check it out!

Jörg also reached the Top 16 and as you might expect already, we brought home a few prizes with us. All of them are up for sale, so get in touch with me if you would like a brand new iPod Touch 32 GB White 4G. I also got a couple of iPod Nanos in various colors. Oh, and if you’re looking for some loot cards, head over to BootcampLE.de/Store and check out all of our offers!

There’s more happening at the moment as I’m also starting to get into a third TCG. If you’re running your own website that’s somehow related to TCGs, I recommend checking back tomorrow. I’ve got some exciting news for you and you don’t want to miss this opportunity!

After more than 2 years, WoW TCG Sneak Previews came back to Europe! Cryptozoic’s European representative Matthias organized a fun event in our city of choice Berlin where 67 players showed up – most of them from Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and Poland! Not surprisingly, my team, the Bootcamp L.E., made a strong showing and we were able to claim 4 of the top 8 spots.

I was the luckiest guy of the bunch as I took down the whole event, winning an Epic Collection as well as a Corrupted Hippogryph Loot Card! All of these items are now up for sale at tcgmarket.eu. If you’re interested, go check them out. If you have any questions, feel free to send them my way.

Last Monday, OnNet Europe was kind enough to invite me over to their headquarters to take a look at their upcoming Online TCG Carte. The game has a lot of potential as it combines the advantages of a traditional TCG with the elements of a MMO. Let me break it down real quick for you:

• Gameplay:

  If you ever played a TCG, especially something resource based like Magic: The Gathering or the World of Warcraft TCG, you won’t have any problems understanding the core concepts of the game. Over the course of the game, you place more and more resources in a designated are to play stronger cards. This means games often start rather relaxed, but quickly pick up pace and culminate in exciting and game breaking turns a little later!

• The Resource System:

  There is no “Mana Screw” in the game, the most disappointing feature of Magic, as you can place every card as a resource. However, there’s a special card type called “Shards” (I only know the German name, so don’t blame me if this translation is a little off), which can be compared to Quests in the WoW TCG. You can place them face-up in a designated zone and they allow you to draw a card right away. The downside? They won’t generate resources right away – you’ll have to wait until the start of your next round to gain this benefit. Still, it often makes sense to place Shards face-up to draw into fresh cards even if it means you have to underdrop. They give the game a nice and unique feeling and might as well be the best solution to the typical problems resource systems have to deal with that I’ve seen so far.

• The Playzone:

  You can play creatures either in the Attacker or Defender Zone (once again, I’m not entirely certain about the English names for these zones). You can only attack with them if you play them in the Attacker Zone. You can choose freely what opposing creature / hero you want to attack, however, all creatures in your opponent’s Defender Zone can be used once per turn to become the Defender of your attack. So things can get tricky in no time and depending on if you play your cards in the right zone, you can have a lot of influence on the outcome of the game.
  There are also ways to move creatures from one zone to the other, so don’t rely too much on your creatures sitting in the Defender Zone.

• Damage:

  Unlike Magic, damage on creatures is permanent in Carte. That means even if your opponent is playing that 5 / 5 fattie, you can take him down with 3 2 / 1 creatures. This won’t always be the best possible move; maybe you should slam them right into the opposing hero to win the game fast before your opponent can gain the upper hand on the field. I prefer this concept as it always made for exciting games in the WoW TCG.

• Heroes:

  *You* are not some imaginary being in Carte. A hero is representing you and he can also play a major role in the game. Every single hero comes with 2 built-in abilities that you can use once per game (only one of them, not both). They also have different Life Points, so deckbuilding will be quite interesting with so many things to consider.

• Double Mulligan:

  Carte features the most interesting Mulligan that I’ve ever come across. Twice (!) per game, at the start of your turn, you can shuffle your hand back in and draw as many cards as you added to your deck. While your hero takes a point of damage if you do so, I would always prefer this to a dead hand that doesn’t provide you with some viable outs to turn the game around.

• Tarot Cards:

  Without Tarot Cards, I think Carte would be missing out on something. They are there to cause some chaos in the game as they represent the “randomness factor” of it. Every deck features 4 Tarot Cards and you’ll pick one at random before the start of the game. You can use this card once during the game; as soon as you can afford it’s resource cost. They all have rather powerful effects, so it’s a good thing that you can never rely on any particular Tarot Card – you simply don’t know if you’ll pick it at the start of the game (you can’t add the same card more than once to your deck). Without Tarot Cards, the decks I’ve seen so far might turn out way too consistent, making it almost impossible for starting players to stand a chance against more experienced players.

Impression so far

The developers left me with a very positive feeling. They made it perfectly clear that the game will be completely free2play – you’ll never have to invest a single Cent to unlock some item in the game. On top of that, they don’t believe in new players having to grind forever to stand a chance. So the starter decks will be quite useful and you won’t necessarily lose all of your first 50 games.

I think Carte holds a lot of potential. It brings enough new and unique features to the table to attract experienced players and with its dramatically low price tag, it should get picked up by plenty of interested TCG players and grow in no time. I’ll definitely give it a try once the game is out, so head over to the Carte website and become a fan on Facebook to follow the latest developments.

Over the years I’ve heard time and again that Yu-Gi-Oh! didn’t feature a proper “resource system”. Contrary to popular belief, I think there are quite a couple of things you have to take into account when it comes to making the best move possible in a Duel. In my weekly column, I’m talking about all of the resources that are present in the game: The Tale of the missing Resources.

I’m sorry I can’t provide you with more exciting content these days. I’m quite stressed as we’re looking for a new appartment and at the same time my company is undergoing some major changes. I’m still positive that this will all turn out great, however, don’t get mad at me when I don’t have time to get back to you these days.

Anyway, I still somehow managed to write a weekly column. This time, I’m trying to draw some conclusions between the workings of other trading card games and Yu-Gi-Oh!. It’s quite interesting what you can learn from playing a bit of Magic: The Gathering or the World of Warcraft Trading Card Game, so go and check it out: Lessons learned by playing other TCGs.

Happy New Year everyone!

After explaining how to become a much happier Duelist last week, I’m back with some more insights about a Duelist’s psychology. This week, I’m providing you with a rundown through the 7 Stages of Grief. I’ve experienced them after I realized I’m no longer a competitive Yu-Gi-Oh! player.

In the last article I’ve written this year (at least for eTCG.de), I’m trying to explain you how to become a happy Duelist. I did a rough estimation of the number of articles I’ve written this year and it turned out I must have written something like 216 articles. Alright, so much for self-adulation, now go and check out the article: Unter den Hut geschaut: Road to Happiness.

The past weekend, the Yu-Gi-Oh! Championship Series stopped in Brighton. Here’s a link to the coverage in case you’re interested.

After everything was said and done and the dust had settled, the whole community started to complain about the seemingly unbeatable Dino Rabbit decks that rocked the tournament. Are they really that broken and is it really a problem that a new deck claims the top spots? I’m trying to answer these questions in Unter den Hut geschaut: Rabbit Season.