Recent reviews by Malcolmo

I'll preface this by saying that normally I don't go out of my way to write reviews about games but the latest set of decisions by Cygames has been bad enough that I'm inclined to write one.

To start with, Cygames decisions about the art, the straw that broke the camel's back for me. I started playing this game because when I tried it out I saw the evo art for some of the cards during the tutorial and actually enjoyed the fanservice. So I went and looked over what the other art in the game was like but noticed something strange in later sets, in that the fanservice was substantially less then in earlier sets. It was at that point that I found out that while art was still being taken from Rage of Bahamut, one of Cygames's other games, it was now being censored. And in more then a few cases the censorship was rather ugly like with the card Runie Resolute Diviner (examples here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/186388945@N08/albums/72157715626082656/page1 ) Aside from fanservice, crosses would also get removed sometimes in spite of being in artworks of priests who one would assume would carry such things. At no point in game was there any indication that this was being done, why it was being done or was any choice given to use the uncensored and better looking art. However up until the the update on the 27th of October, Cygames had never gone over old artworks and censored them. Now it has done so and gutted some 150+ artworks in the process. The art I joined this game for is dead and with it any remaining reason I have to stick around.

The gameplay meanwhile has been on a downhill slope of extreme powercreep where a new Rotation expansion wipes out the bulk of the decks from the previous expansion before it too gets powercreeped into oblivion. As a result the cost of decks has gone up in both formats, be it the formerly cheap format that was Unlimited and in Rotation. Once expensive decks used to be the sole remit of ramp dragon with even that class having a cheap alternative deck but now even a "cheap" deck requires 2 sets of lengendaries, the most expensive rarity of cards in the game and the average deck will run many more. The closest to an attempt to reverse the trend in price increases was temp cards allowing you to make a copy of a single legendary and it comes nowhere close to succeeding. It's also substantially changed the character of the game, with gameplay from even as far back as Chronogenesis not even having a passing resemblance to how the game plays this expansion in my opinion for the worse. Old archetypes like Ramp Dragon or Midrange shadow in unlimited are dead and practically impossible to revive due to the extent of just how badly the game has been powercreeped.

Transparency about balance is practically non existent, the only time the devs actually share statistics on which decks are doing well is when nerfs come out (and even then you'll only get the statistics of the decks being nerfed) otherwise you get a canned statement about no decks doing outsizedly well or having a high play percentage. This leaves the only way to attempt to gauge the meta being to keep up with tournaments as these are the only place where one can get some idea of what's good and the picture these paint is far from encouraging. This would not be so bad were it not for the fact that unlimited has for a good deal of time been functionally abandoned when it comes to balance in spite of there blatantly being decks that saw an oversized play and winrate throughout it's existence such as midrange shadow and artifact portal and warped the format around them.

In game events meanwhile are lackluster and in some cases more of a source of frustration then anything else. Grand Prix, the most common in game event consists of of playing 5 matches with the same deck often in the exact same format against the exact same decks as you would in a regular game, rendering the event effectively glorified ranked just with some extra rewards. What few other grand prix formats exist are crippled by bad balance resulting in certain classes being blatantly stronger then their competitors and rendering them unplayable as a result due to the in game cost to actually play the format making it a net loss to attempt to play them while worse yet being heavily dependent upon RNG, such as in the case of the Gems of Fortune game mode wherein the cards one has to work with from game to game are entirely different but the mechanics by which one gets said cards blatantly favors certain classes.

Bluntly I would not recommend this game unless you are willing to tolerate being given deliberately worse versions of art that Cygames can and will decide to make even worse later down the line while also having gameplay that is both extremely repetitive and progressively getting both more expensive and less enjoyable.