Legends is the new free-to-play collectible card game in the Fantasy universe of The Elder Scrolls by Zenimax/Bethesda, produced by the experienced strategy card game developer Dire Wolf Digital.


Instead of explaining the rules systematically in their entirety, which you can read about elsewhere, I will point out some differences to the model archetype of the genre, Magic: The Gathering, which I used to play both with real cards and online in the past.

In general, deck building and duels are the major aspects of the game in both cases. Also, both ESL and MTG Online offer the alternatives of casual and tournament battles against real players or a competent AI. However, ESL adds stories that form the framework of series of AI battles, one of which comes with the base game and one („Dark Brotherhood“) can be obtained with real or ingame currency. I did not find the stories incredibly interesting, they give you good bonus cards though. Additionally, you can choose a profile picture from a lore-friendly selection, connected with a certain voice and way to express yourself during a battle. You receive rewards and card upgrades from „levelling up“ by collecting game experience, and your chosen race determines what kinds of creatures you are likely to receive this way - a nice touch for all those RPG fans who flock to ESL coming from Skyrim or The Elder Scrolls Online. So far, ESL offers slightly more than the genre dinosaur.

With regard to deck building, I have to mention that in ESL, there is no free card market like in MTGO, where I spent quite some time and real money to get the rare cards I needed for a competitive deck, and that was full of ugly bots as well. Instead, you can break down cards to receive gems, that can be used to buy cards, a simple and clean process and the reason why it is to be labelled as a collectible card game rather than a trading card game.

The developers of ESL also prevented abuse and spam by replacing the formerly common free ingame chat (as you can use in MTGO) with a selection of eight verbal expressions, like „Hello“ or „Good game“, which are voice acted according to your chosen profile character (see above). Even though this is somehow restrictive, I think it is an intelligent solution to a common problem in all multiplayer games. I found these „verbal emoticons“ to be quite sufficient to have basic and polite human interaction. You can still invite your friends from real life or from Steam if they tell you their Bethesda account name in order to play with them, which of course means you can use other chat channels for a nice conversation while you play ESL in a small window.

The most welcome feature in ESL that makes it impossible for me to enjoy MTGO ever again is the rune mechanic: As you lose health, „runes“ are broken one after the other, which lets you draw additional cards and in some cases („prophecies“) even play them instantly and without spending magicka. This creates a balancing effect to the benefit of a losing player and makes the game dynamic more interesting. It also makes the attacker think twice before dealing minor damage to his opponent that just might give him a tactical option that could turn the game in his favour.

In ESL, the „battlefield“ is limited in space, usually to eight creatures in total. In MTG, there is no such restriction, and more than once, I have been beaten by insane combos giving the opponent opportunity to summon infinite numbers of weak creatures who then overwhelmed my forces, which I did not enjoy. In fact, I quit MTG because of such auto-win combo decks, which made the whole game kind of pointless: Either they got it and won instantly, or they did not and lost, my own efforts did not really matter; not so here.

The magical resource that lets you summon troops and perform other actions is obtained in completely different ways. In MTG, you have to play land cards that give you mana every turn. This necessity means that approximately half your deck consists of land cards, most of which are quite bland and boring. In ESL, magicka is gained every turn without such lands, and your magicka pool is increased automatically. This has two effects: One, deck building is more interesting without such bland basic cards. Two, the battle escalates more dynamically, you cannot get stuck with good cards, but no resource to use them because you had bad luck with the distribution of land cards.

You have almost complete freedom in how to build your deck, however, focussing on a certain race of Tamriel has advantages, as you can gain buffs specific cards can give each other. Each race implicates its own playstyle: Imperials rely on collective buffs and numbers, Redguards mostly benefit from weapon and armor item cards, Argonians increase their magicka pool more quickly... Those playstyles and the free combinations of tactical choices guarantee a good variety of gameplay.

Until now, I have not become bored with regard to the outcome of the duels either. Even after making a lot of efforts to optimize my deck, I win three out of five games in average. Either the different common deck builds are that well balanced, or the player matchmaking process has been improved since the early reviews that complained about this aspect.


The graphics and the voice acting are of the same high quality as TES V. They even reused some of the voice actors (e.g. General Tullius' voice for the card „Scouting Patrol“; the voice for the card „General Tullius“ proper is female, which slightly confused me until I remembered Legate Rikke who might give orders in the general's name – just one example of how true this game is to the Elder Scrolls lore).

As you would expect, graphical and sound effects are designed to make you become addicted to the game. That's OK with me, as I am a gaming addict anyway, and it is done competently.

The stories are told in largely static images, which is not what I would wish for, but I understand that a free-to-play product can only use a limited budget for such a secondary part of the game.


The game is completely free. You can use real money to buy card packs and a storyline expansion, but even that is not necessary. You get random cards from winning duels, which you can exchange for those you need at a rate between 10:1 (common cards) and 4:1 (legendary cards), and the Dark Brotherhood story can be bought with ingame gold – which I achieved within three weeks of casual activity. I have not spent a dime on ESL, and I got a lot of fun out of it.


This game is a very nice addition to this legendary franchise. Building my Imperial deck inspired me to play Skyrim's Civil War questline once again. Apart from that, it can hold its head high among competitors of the same genre. According to my bias in favour of the Elder Scrolls universe, I call it an 8/10.




With "Heroes of Skyrim" out, rumours have spread that ESL would be pay-to-win now, which is complete nonsense:
1. Those cards were distributed for free on expansion release, a 50 cards pack for everyone and then, for a whole week, you could get HoS cards for free via daily quests, 18 per day. You didn't have to pay, you didn't even have to win, just attack opponents 30 times over an unlimited number of duels. Basically, HoS was given away.
2. If you got into the game later, you can still buy HoS packs with ingame gold, and single cards with regular gems, without any money involved. If you want to use dragons and shouts, just - get them and play.
3. HoS is not as overpowered as some sore losers want to make it seem. You can beat those decks with pre-expansion builds if your synergies are optimized. I do not see a p2w situation at this point.

The game continues to be fun for a completely free account such as mine, therefore the update does not change my rating.

The Elder Scrolls: Legends is a great alternative to Hearthstone, which is inevitably what people will be comparing it to. This game deserves to be judged on it's own merits, in which it excels in many aspects over many digital card games, but I'll personally be comparing it to Hearthstone because that's a base game many people here will be familiar with.


UPSIDES OVER HEARTHSTONE

Gameplay

Over Hearthstone, this game has many upsides. The gameplay itself is much more deep than Hearthstone. Rather than there being heroes representing classes, there is instead colors, and they are as follows: Blue (Intelligence), Green (Agility), Yellow (Willpower), Red (Strength), and Purple (Endurance). You can combine up to two different colors to make 50 card decks with three copies of most cards allowed. The colors synergize with themselves, so you have to consider how much of one color you're putting in a deck over another, usually making one color the primary color and the other the supporting secondary one. Overall, this makes for a more enriched and in-depth deck building experience.

The board is very similar to Hearthstone, but it has some differences that add a little more depth to the gameplay. There is a lane system consisting of two different lanes, one regular lane and one lane which gives every card "stealth" played in it, which prevents minions in one lane from interacting from one lane to the other. The stealth on every minion might sound OP at first, but there's plenty of removal to deal with scary minions that could be placed over there, and they can be targetted by spells when stealthed unlike in Hearthstone.

There is a "draw as you take damage" system in this game that helps alleviate some of the problems with draw luck, and there's even a keyword called "Prophecy", which allows you to play a card if it's drawn via these means, allowing you to actively counter your opponents moves. It also incentivizes you to be cautious with how much you attack your opponent, making decision making more complex. Also, unlike in Hearthstone you can run three copies of most legendaries, except for unique legendaries, which are a subclass of legendary cards which you can only run one of. You can tell these apart by the red jewel at the top of unique legendary cards

Free to play

It also has an infinitely better free to play system. You get rewarded with not just gold, but also a card for winning three games, and leveling rewards you with actual cards rather than just golden versions of cards, including epics and legendaries. Crafting prices are identical to Hearthstone, except for legendaries, which rather than costing 1600 of the card crafting currency it instead costs 1200, which helps make getting legendaries cheaper.

Gamemodes

The game's ladder system is similar to Hearthstone's rank system, but there are some notable differences as well. Unlike in Hearthstone, where if you win more times you gain bonus stars until rank five, Elder Scrolls has a thing called bonus rounds, which I will cover more in the downsides, as I prefer Hearthstone's bonus ranked system more. There are only twelve different ranks, but rather than you having to win a couple of times to rank up like in Hearthstone, you instead have to win several times, ranging from rank to rank. If you are about do derank from losing enough times, you will fall into a special rank where you have to fight your way out of it to continue progressing. You cannot fall out of this rank, though, so deranking isn't possible.

The game also offers an arena "draft a random deck" style game mode that costs the same as it does in Hearthstone. This game also offers a single player version of it, which rewards you less since it's easier, but is still worth the cost and makes for a more new player friendly experience. It does get harder the more times you emerge victorious, and become much less new player friendly, so keep that in mind.


DOWNSIDES OVER HEARTHSTONE

I do prefer this game over Hearthstone, but there are things that Hearthstone does better that can't be ignored. This game's presentation is good, but it's not as good as Hearthstone's on an objective level. Golden/animated cards aren't very collectable, as the difference is hardly notable, so I often find myself dusting them. There is alternative card art you can collect however, which is enjoyable and many of them improve over the originals. Also, the collection manager leaves a bit to be desired over Hearthstone's.

There are some gameplay elements I prefer in Hearthstone, such as the way Hearthstone rewards you for playing well with bonus stars, while Elder Scrolls: Legend's bonus system is random. Occasionally you'll come across something called a bonus round, where if you win rather than progressing once through the rank you're in you'll progress twice. It's completely random, though, so rather than rewarding your ability to win it just happens completely out of your control.

As previously mentioned, you are able to run three copies of most cards, including legendaries, and while the game lowers the prices of legendaries, they are still quite expensive. Getting to a point where you feel like your collection is robust can feel like a daunting task. I've found myself focusing one color specifically to offset this and make sure I can compete at high levels of this game, which is fine, but can also get repetitive only playing a few decks. Go about this any way you please; buy packs (the prices are fair and there's special offers for new players), grind arenas, focus only one color, etc., but I'm sure you'll notice this as a new player.

Also, while I love the ES:L community, it's quite small when compared to Hearthstone. If you're like me, you love watching Twitch streams possibly even more than playing the game. There are some great ES:L streamers out there, but compared to Hearthstone it's slim pickings. Since this game is new to Steam and communities often see growth when exposed on Steam, I believe this will become less of an issue over time, but it's still worth bringing up.

CONCLUSION

TL;DR The Elder Scrolls: Legends is a great game with many mechanics to offer over Hearthstone, a game people will inevitably compare this to. It has a better f2p system, better and deeper game mechanics, and a better arena system with a single player option. There are downsides, such as the presentation, collection completion, and a small (but growing) community, but this doesn't take too much away from the game. It's definitely worth checking out, and I'm sure you'll find yourself enjoying it as much as if not more than you enjoy Hearthstone.

I played this game a lot before it was released on steam. It is a fantastic card game. It is somewhere between Magic and Hearthstone in terms of gameplay. Here are a few pro's and con's:

Pro:
+easy to understand, yet a lot to learn
+very generous, you get lots for free by just playing (F2P viable)
+daily quests and many level rewards
+Cool, mature artwork
+many decks viable, not just aggro
+monthly new card as well as frequent events
+new expansion coming soon
+vs-mode, 2 arena modes and story mode (and story expansion)
+most important: fun

Cons:
-design of the board a bit boring
-card animations not super exciting (some are good, others not so much)


Honestly I can't think of many downsides, I really like this game. If they polish and extend some of the animations it is top notch! You should give it a try!

This is a standard onling TCG with a nice Campaign (which is free to play).

Following the campaign (which is fun) there is only vs mode, solo arena and vs arena (standard stuff). Playing 2-4 hours a day after beating the campaign you'd quickly (or slightly slower if you have amazing at TCGs) run out of gold for arena and hit a deck wall where others with optimised decks which you cannot get on freemium will generally beat you.

This point which happens in all f2p vs tcg games and is when you need to make the decision. To continue playing do I want everything now or am I happy to sit winning 50/50 initally at rank 5-8 and slowly over months collect everything as opose getting rank 3-5 if I spend 50 $ on packs or 1-4 if I spend 200+ $ right now.

If you don't want to pay or endure the slow grind the other two choices are

One: treat it as having been a single player game and just put the game down having enjoyed the free campaign (or buy the Dark Brotherhood campaign (again a good 7-8 hours of challanging solo card battles)) then put it down. maybe write a nice review saying that you got your moneys worth from the solo experience.

Two: Rage and write a negative review stating how the game is pay to win and sucks. Then move onto the next free to play tcg game, enjoy the first few free hours there, hit that same f2p wall and writing another negative review.

Edit: Still playing and enjoying. Still seeing plenty of reviews raging and claiming its p2w. Awesome.

Really fun and addictive

I am not giving this game a thumbs down because its bad, quite the contrary really. Its a solid card battler with interesting, original mechanics, as well as fresh takes on old ones. Combine that with fun game modes, stellar art and the Elder Scrolls flavor and you get a damn good game. I'm passing up the recommendation simply because it isn't in development anymore. Due to a combination of poor advertising, or rather a lack thereof, a half-hearted effort at a competitive scene, and what some may just call bad luck, the game just wasn't making enough money for Bethseda to justify paying for development. I still come back from time to time to screw around with a meme deck or do arena, a small part of me holding out hope that it will get picked back up, but honestly, this is a pipe dream.

Can't recommend investing time and potentially even money into a dying/dead game. R.I.P. Elder Scrolls Legends, you will be missed.

It is clear that from the beginning few in the upper echelon of Bethesda management, except for Pete Hines, saw any long term potential in their foray into the ccg market. Nevertheless through a complete development team switch and a ground up rebuild of the game client, the core design team behind TESL managed to create something which rivaled and at times exceeded the products of their largest competitors.

TESL is dead, there will be no more tournaments, there will be no more expansions, most of its players have moved on. However, the advancements in ccg design theory made by its designers are critical for anyone with an academic or professional interest in the genre to study.

TESL's defining design choice in my mind was to allow its core game mechanics to shine. In almost all ccgs, cards are designed such that they become the centerpieces of games, the gameplay is defined by the game components, in tesl the gameplay is and always was defined by the core ruleset and the cards were tools to subtly influence broader strategic goals within this ruleset.

This was and still is a bold design decision. Most ccgs want to grab the attention of players with big flashy effects even if there isn't much to dig into once you've played with that effect once or twice. Not TESL, in TESL the more you played the more interesting the game was.

TESL's designers displayed a mastery for the cultivation of emergent gameplay, the kind that allowed for simple premises to warrant hours of study and discussion. Where Hearthstone supplies the bursts of unexpected color and excitement of a Slot Machine or a WWE match, TESL allowed for deep, beautiful interactions and movements to emerge from its play like in Go or an Aikido match.

While I understand that short lived dopamine rushes are easier to market on a mass scale, I think that there is still a lot to learn from this design philosophy. TESL showed the potential of a low-power card pool, in a way that absolutely can and should be applied to future games within and of related generes. With few exceptions TESL managed to avoid the classic problematic ccg play pattern of "race to the game winning proactive play" by not releasing card combinations able to be consistently assemebled early in the game that threw the rule book out the window. In TESL every turn mattered because for the most part there weren't explosive combos that invalidated the standard play pattern, for the most part the combo decks that existed within TESL really fall under an archetype category known as combo-control, that is an archetype which primarily aims to tread water and prolong the game through careful management of its opponents threats and ultimately end the game in the late game with a powerful combination of cards. I believe that this emphasis on the interactive phase of the game with combo as a source of inevitability should be a blueprint for designing combo archetypes in future ccgs. For any scholars or designers, please spend some time studying the play pattern of Nix-Ox Telvanni from the summer of 2018.

TESL's emphasis on fostering and highlighting the fun and depth within its core ruleset can be especially highlighted by the joy found in playing Aggro decks in it. The failure to make Aggro fun is, in my mind, emblematic of core flaws in the design philosophy of many contemporary ccgs, LOR in particular comes to mind. This failure in so many ccgs is largely rooted, in my opinion, in that they do not emphasize an inherently fun core ruleset, but instead focus on supporting fun cards in un-fun games. TESL didn't need shocking or exciting cards to be fun, you could play a game with nothing but vanilla X/X creatures and the game just was fun. The 2 lane system while conceptually simple is unbelievably complex in practice, it produces an immense amount of emergent gameplay on its own and TESL's designers knew this and not only did they stay out of its way and allow it to create fascinating gameplay, they designed cards which highlighted its strengths and added more depth and joy to discovering its play interactions.

My plea to ccg designers moving forward is this:
Make sure that your core game mechanics are fun, I don't care how interesting your cards are if playing your game with vanilla components isn't fun and interesting.
Design cards which emphasize your core game mechanics and build upon them. There is no need to build mini games into your cards if you intend for players to use them many times, these distract from the beauty of your game, allow your cards to support and amplify the wonder that arises from exploring your game.

As a final note, there were many designers who all contributed so much to making TESL what it was, but I want to give a special shoutout to both Paul Dennen (Merakon) whose creative vision and passion for the game played a huge role in making TESL what it was, and Josh Utter-Leyton whose consistent presence from early in TESL's design to the very end fundamentally shaped and defined the games execution as well as its industry exceeding mastery in Game Balance

-Alex (EndoZoa)

Edit: I would like to recognize that TESL's final expansion unfortunately exhibits many of the sins that I identified TESL as being unique in its absence of. Yes TESL's designer's were likely ordered to design a cash grab final expansion which lacked the emergent depth of all of its prior expansions, however this should not define its legacy. As the player who premiered combo invade in a tournament setting, and won the tournament where I did so, believe me when I say that I understand how uninteractive the mechanics introduced in TESL's final expansion were, but please to any scholars and designers out there, do your best to learn from what came before Jaws of Oblivion, it's existence does not warrant dismissing the game entirely.

Sadly, Bethesda has ceased development on this game. It used to be a decent game -- the first CCG that ever grabbed my attention, actually. Unfortunately, the latest expansion pretty much ruined the game and shortly after it was announced that the game was entering maintenance mode and would no longer be actively developed. Don't waste your time, and especially don't waste your money, on this game any more.

Best game they ever quit working on.

I loved the Game. Play it a long time. But now its just a brew of random crap and whoever have the most luck and have ring wins. There is no Balance in this game at all. It lost the Identity. And the new developer Sparkypants are amateurs. No clue from CCG`S and they don`t care about the longtime player base. They promised 100 things and hold maybe 5. Still no Gauntlets still no functional friendlist. And so on.... All they want is Money for "beauty" stuff for a huge amount of money. And with 4 expansions this years is it not f2p friendly anymore.! This guys deserve not 1 cent more for theyre pocket. And the good thing is they can`t delete this post :P Take that suckers