"Secret Battle" review: Not losing Hearthstone and Quint's TCG masterpiece

lead

Card games have long been battlefields where players compete with each other for cards, wisdom, judgment, and a modicum of luck.

At present, the two card games that players pay the most attention to are Hearthstone, which has been in public beta for nearly four years, and this year's new wizard: Quint. This fall, the TCG game "Secret Environment Duel" developed by NetEase seems to be setting off a new wave of enthusiasm among players.

(From top to bottom are "Secret Battle", "Hearthstone", "The Witcher: Quint Card")

As a player of these three popular card games, the author will analyze this game from multiple angles.

Game mode

The ladder and leisure mode in the PVP content of secret environment duel are much the same as similar products, and the main difference and feature lies in the "open" and "wheel draw" in the competitive mode. The player uses the system to temporarily build a set of 30 cards in four colors to fight against each other, somewhat similar to Hearthstone's arena; The round draw is a more competitive reflection, four players need to pick their own cards one by one in the given card pool, and eventually build a four-color group of 25 cards to carry out a BO1 and a BO3 ranking and settlement of rewards accordingly, it can be said that the intellectual game and intrigue between players has begun from the card selection stage. These two modes provide new points of fun for players who are not satisfied with the regular card-building gameplay, as well as the opportunity for new players with incomplete cards to accumulate cards and play with more cards they do not already have.

(Secret Battle now open mode interface)

Game mechanism

If you are a Hearthstone player, I believe you will be able to quickly learn the secret world duel.

There are many of the same core elements as Hearthstone: card cost Settings and mana crystals that increase each turn, victory by being the first to reduce your opponent's health to zero, and basic rules of creature exchange and spell use.

However, there are many new gameplay mechanics that Hearthstone does not have.

Delay system

The emergence of the delay mechanism, after thinking about the basic problem of all card games, "whether to play this card or not", raises a new question for players: "Whether to choose to play this card directly or delay this card".

The delay system allows players to use the cost of the current turn to place an arbitrary card into the delay area located to the left of the hand and play it at zero cost on the next turn.

It is worth mentioning that when doing this operation, the opponent can only see that you delay a card, but know nothing about the effect, type, and cost of this card, until the end of his round, your round begins, you put the card into the delay area in the last round and turn to zero fee, the opponent can know which card you delayed in the last round.

(One of the functions of the delay area, ambush)

The existence of this mechanism makes it possible to play a multi-card combo that cannot be played due to cost restrictions, and can hide your tactical intentions for the next turn to some extent.

At the same time, a series of card mechanics (delay, resonance, overdraft, ambush) derived from the delay area also ensure a richer interaction between the delay area and the main battlefield, and also make the game between players appear a new dimension. You need to guess your opponent's intentions based on the situation on the field, and judge the cards your opponent is delaying, thinking about more possibilities.

A simple example is that the opponent has taken the advantage of the scene, and in our seven-fee round, he thinks that his hand and cost are not enough to reverse the situation in this round, so he delays a seven-fee creature, releases the destruction trial to clear the field after the opponent chooses to continue to lay the field in the next round, and then releases the delayed creature to occupy the field before the zero fee to regain the scene advantage. (as shown in the picture below)

(Delayed Bio + Clearing + Occupy COMBO)

But once the other person guesses your intentions, it's a different story. The opponent uses the Guardian Wind to add a curtain effect to two of his creatures, allowing them to survive the destruction Judgment, or to delay one of his creatures so that it is not affected by the destruction Judgment.

The delay mechanism is similar to the ambush card in Quint and the mystery mechanism in Hearthstone, but the difference is that the function of the mystery and ambush card is fixed, and any card in the secret battle can be delayed, you can even delay a card that can be played directly to deceive your opponent, so that it is afraid of the ambush effect of this card in the next round. This means more possibilities and intrigues.

Active skills and artifact cards

When manipulating a creature card in a Secret Realm showdown, you can not only choose the target for it, as in Hearthstone, but you can also use active skills (if any) with varying effects to change the course of the battle. These active skills will cost you as much as the hand, some with additional conditions and costs, but these skills can be a way to save valuable hand resources.

In addition to the same spell and creature categories as Hearthstone, there are also artifact cards and an "artifact area" separate from the creature battlefield. Like the active abilities of some creatures, most artifacts require additional costs and other conditions to activate in the placed artifact area, and have a durability limit, which can be approximately understood as a hero skill with a durability limit.

(Secret Land Showdown Artifact card example)

The emergence of these mechanics has enriched the mode of interaction in card games. Players can change the course of the battle in a variety of ways other than by playing hand cards, unlike Hearthstone and Quint in particular, who rely more on hand cards for interaction.

other

There are a lot of mechanics that are different from other card games, and I won't go into them here, just a few important ones.

I. Empty card library is directly judged negative. This directly threatens many closed card groups by quickly brushing empty card libraries to achieve stable tactical purposes, while providing the possibility for many function cards and fatigue card groups to directly attack the opposing card library.

Two. Cemetery. When a player's creature or artifact is destroyed and leaves the game, it does not disappear from the game, but enters the graveyard and can be pulled back to the battlefield or your hand by certain card effects.

Deck construction

Hearthstone has nine class plus neutral cards, while Quint has four camp plus neutral cards. This 9+1 or 4+1 mode is abandoned in Secret Battle, with a five-color setting similar to Magic: The Gathering, using the color point limit as the basic rule of the deck.

(The five-color wheel of the Secret battle)

(Magic: The Gathering's Five-color Wheel)

Each card has a specific color attribute (one of red, blue, green, and black), and cards of the same color also have points differences, most of which are one point, while some of the more powerful cards have two points. When constructing the card group, the total color points of the cards in the card group should not exceed three points. For example, a set of cards is limited to two green points and one white, meaning that only single green, single white, and double green cards can be used in the set. That's a total of 40 possible combinations of five colors.

I think this is a genius design. Hearthstone's set of card rules limited our thinking, and more than once I thought about using the mage's magic blast to match the paladin's birth equality, but I knew it was almost impossible.

Under the restrictions of the rules in the Quint card, I can not put the Squirrel Party and the Niffgaard Empire card group into the same card group at the same time, coupled with the current Quint card pool is still shallow, making the problem of routine solidification become quite serious, the opponent will play what kind of routine, we even just look at the opponent's choice of the leader card can guess the approximate.

The rules allow players to add almost any two colors of cards to the construction (except for two two-color cards, such as double black and double blue in the same card group is not allowed), which gives players more freedom to match cards and build their own unique card groups. This allows more interesting card sets and winning routines to be developed by creative players.

At the same time, the color point limit also limits the balance between card strength and deck strength, if you want to use some powerful cards with 2 points, the cost is that only two colors of cards can be used in the deck, and the other color of double point cards can not be used. This makes the process of building cards need to consider all cards, rather than just the class cards plus neutral cards.

Sum up

In general, the game mechanics are more complex than Hearthstone, which is not good news for casual gamers and newcomers to card games, as more complex game mechanics necessarily mean more difficulty to learn.

But here I have to praise NetEase in the novice tutorial under the effort. The tutorial can be viewed as a number of independent small levels, all of these mechanics and card special effects keywords (overdraft, ambush, detection, delay, dead touch, charge, etc.) will be reflected in the tutorial, the player can only use the corresponding mechanism when prompted to pass these levels. These mini-levels give new players concrete, typical examples of what these different mechanics mean and how to use them. Unlike many card games, Secret Realms also allow the player to experience ladder and competitive modes directly after learning the basic rules, and then to return at any time to continue these tutorial levels. The choice is up to the player. The level of detail in the tutorial is far superior to that of Quint and Hearthstone.

These richer mechanics ensure that the matches in Secret battles have a level of interactivity that Hearthstone and Quint cannot match. In Hearthstone, you can only change the course of the battle by using hero skills, controlling attendant attacks, and using hand cards, and Quint can only change the points of both sides indirectly by using hand cards to directly affect the points on the field, or by influencing the effects of other cards, with a few exceptions. In addition to using hand cards and creature attacks, you can also use delay, active skills, and artifacts to interact with the opponent. This is bound to bring more fun and a richer gaming experience to card game veterans and core players.

(The latest expansion "Jing Hu Vientiane" Chapter 3)

In addition, richer mechanics at the level of basic game rules and card deck construction rules will provide a greater stage for the design of new cards and game content in the future, and will also become a greater test of the balance of these new content. This January's update has launched the first expansion "Mirror Lake Vientiane", how do these new cards perform in real combat? Let's wait and see.