Is force of will a fun game?

Seems really fun. The community is just literally the unbathed virgins that got rejected from MtG because 'Muh price point' or 'Muh waifus', tis a shame really.

Art is definitely way too overboard on the more recent sets.

I agree some of the art is suspect. While I loathe censorship and the like, there is a point where fanservice winds up driving people away.
Then again it is a Japanese game for a Japanese audience, and they perceive card games very differently over there. Though one of the main differences between FoW and other nip card games is it hasn't died inside two years and they seem to actually care about balance and put some thought into what they're doing. There are some definite mistakes, but they're learning.

FoW stole so many of magic's mechanics WotC came close to winning a court case against them. After playing MTG for about five years now and FoW for three months, I gotta say I much prefer FoW.
The three biggest difference are you can attack as many times in a turn as you want, provided you have untapped creatures. Blocking creatures have to tap to block as well. Lastly, having a separate land deck means you make a decision every turn if you want to play a land or not - you can only screw yourself, though not hitting the colors you need is still a possibility.
At my LGS the owner advertises free days where people can get cards and learn how to play. So far we've got a steady group of eight-ten people, but unfortunately they're all very casual. Lately I've been shitting on them with the new Pricia, so I'm going to have to bring a new deck soon. Supposedly once one or two people start playing more powerful decks the others stop showing up.
Which is a shame because I want to get decent enough to have a shot at winning the tournament they host at GenCon. The winner of that gets a WGP invite.

Honest answer: Is it dying? I love the game, but I dropped it a few months ago because there was just no one playing it.

Those demographics already moved to shadowverse in droves. It's 'free-er' and the art is actually good for once.

I quite like it. The basic rules are quite similar to MtG, but the design philosophy is different enough to make it its own thing, and it has some aspects that make it much more enjoyable to me.
Mana bases are very consistent, you run out of cards much slower, and combat has a lot more lines than in magic, where it's counting attack and defense and then matching correctly.
A thing that might put off some people is that a lot of the card synergies are explicitly spelled for you in the cards, so many engines come already made. That's not to say there's no brewing, but it's just that instead of considering playsets of specific cards, you consider the whole engine.
About art, well I'm a turboweeb so I like it, and even if some of it is bad I mostly see cards as cardboard with numbers on them.
I wouldn't know how it's doing in the US, in Europe it's doing fine. Consider that two of the latest sets ran out because of the demand, and singles are hard to come by online. Does high demand mean it's doing well? I'd say so.

Struggling in the US, though there are pockets with strong metas. If you're going to buy in, do so AT the weekly casual FOW night, and start by observing the people you're going to be playing with. Do you want to play with these people? Do they look like they're enjoying the game? If so, by all means go for it.

In my area, Force of Will is pretty weak. While I never bought into the game myself, my understanding is that it generally isn't very successful at attracting converts from Magic, but it's too much like Magic to really carve out its own niche. Magic players just stick to Magic since it's so much like the game they already love, and people looking for something different from Magic often want something MUCH different, which FoW isn't.

I've also heard that there have been questionable design decisions in some of the more recent expansions, but I hear a lot of things. I don't know for sure.

I like it but the power creep is palpable.

I hate the card design for this reason. It's not easy to tell things about the cards at first glance. card art should never obstruct mechanical elements of a card.

>The art is consistently better than MTG

This is a joke. I am a huge weeb and the art is 5/10 times deviant art tier. Its no Duelamsters/Wixoss/ZX art.

How expensive is a halfway competitive FoW deck? I feel the urge to play an animu TCG and I heard FoW is one of the best.

I like it for the most part, but the game feels horribly broken if you're used to playing MTG. I've oneshotted with that pricia several times.
That said, I have no idea what the game is like now because my locals died shortly after CFC came out.

its just MTG, play vanguard or another bushigame desu

FOW is cheap as shit, T1 decks cost like 150-200 dollars last I checked.

That and it basically has trap cards.

Is the stealth mechanic even remotely relevant nowdays?

For a period there was a significant drop off in play which is likely due to over-printing. Prices of singles dropped to nothing, boxes were available at half MSRP online which meant no one bought them at a LGS, so the LGS would stop carrying the product, there was no exposure to bring in new people, and so on.

It's coming back, but like any newer game you can't just wait for a scene to appear - you have to put in the effort to develop one. My local LGS is owned by a guy who likes the game, but understands it's not very profitable so he's reluctant to put much focus on it. I've been working with him to donate my own cards and money for prizes and events to generate interest.
So far it's been working, in two months we've managed to secure four or five regular players. May not seem like much, but gotta start somewhere.

That's like saying people left MTG for Hearthstone. They're completely different games and often played in conjunction. Besides, I've yet to meet anyone in person who plays Shadowverse.

They've gotten better about that, but their font choice and such is still pretty bad.

Cheap.
Something to consider is that you have a very good chance of getting complete playsets of every card in a set by purchasing three boxes. This is possibly one of the reasons singles can be hard to find online - it's very easy to get everything you need.

I'd say $150 is the high end, depending on which ruler you use. I lucked out and got an uber Pricia from the latest set, so I've been using her. Unfortunately I think I may have bullied the casual folks too hard, there was a very low turn-out today. Last week the talk of the group was how to beat my deck.

It's been a while since I checked, but there was a relevant stealth deck a while back. I was mostly referring to Chant - Standby cards though.

Pricia is dominating the tournament scene pretty hard from what I've seen lately, so it's no surprise. She's looking to be more oppressive than Fiethsing Turbo at this rate. Alhama'at is putting in some work as well, but not as much as Pricia.

This

It has a lot of fun and interesting mechanics. The only downside (besides finding people who play) is that every now and then they accidentally push cards way too much. Pic related. Overall, the game was still more fun for me and less expensive than standard MTG.

I don't play much any more, but I had a lot of fun playing Grimm, Valentina 1.0, Sylvia, and Vlad.

R/R was a big mistake in design that they let slip through the cracks, but it looks like they've learned from that mistake at least.

Funny thing is, Fiethsing is still winning the tournaments.
Pricia, Fiethsing, and Alhama'at are the top 3 for sure, but there's still the possibility of doing well with other rulers. Fox is kind of funny as he comes back whenever the meta forgets about him and stop running hate.

At the last few big events, Fiethsing is still taking the top spot, but overall Pricia has had a bigger showing in the top 8 or so. I'd rank them in order as:
1. Fiethsing
2. Pricia
3. Alhama'at
Fiethsing is really strong, but more and more people are catching onto Pricia and it's showing. Maybe after the hype wears off she'll see less representation than Fieth, but she's going to stick around for a while. I think Alhama'at's use will gradually rise as more people start to figure him out. And as you said, Lilias Petal is a pretty good deck that can come and swipe wins once people aren't paying attention to it because it demands sideboard board and answers.

One of the games biggest problems is that the "competitive" side is quick to jump on the band wagon. Look at the decks that are actually topping and you'll see that the so called hands down best decks are not completely edging out competition. While 6/8 decks being the same with over 50% tournament representation is pretty bad, it pails in comparison to yugioh's multiple 32/32 occurrences.

While Pricia as a character has been around too long (along with many others), I like her abilities since it allows an aggro deck to keep on the gas and switch to more of a mid-range style if needed. Or you could even go more mid-range from the onset. At my local events I actually only won using the OTK twice, ever other time I just kept on the pressure from T2 and never let off. It's fun.

Once the regalia fall off and the turn 2 OTK potential vanishes, she won't be quite so oppressive.

I don't know about that. Pricia alone has three styles of decks built around her. Feithsing has a couple as well along with Alhama'at. I think the meta is much, much healthier and more diverse than MTG's.
Though I do agree the limited player base means we may not be seeing the most optimal decks, kind of like what you saw early in magic's history.

I wasn't trying to say that the meta wasn't diverse, although there are events. I was more trying to talk about how a lot of people are very quick to point to something and say it's the best deck and nothing can stop it.

The rulers serve as a smoke screen to how diverse the meta actually is, it might be a 5 deck format but if 4 of them are R/R not a lot of newer players will notice.

Ah.
I'm actually really new to the game, I got into it just after Legacy Lost was released.
So far I like it quite a bit, but sadly I'm going to have to wait until GenCon to be able to play in a tournament.

Once Laev is gone, I don't know what's going to happen.

very fun game, have a bundle of cards I'm keeping around for my LGS. No current playgroup but one day hoping for one. It's seeing a pick up after the Youtuber Alpha Investments gave them a nice rating.

i've never played FoW and i actually thought this was a joke

Never played, but like four people in my tiny ass hometown play it.
Seems alright, but around the time they started up, I was in the middle of quitting MtG and didn't really want to just switch over to another game.

Huh, Rudy said he likes FoW? I thought he was a MtG/Pokemon speculator only.
Dunno if I like that, I want the game to get bigger but speculators might ruin the game.

Wait, I thought Rudy hated it because you always lose money on buying due to singles being so absurdly cheap so it's not "economically sound" for (((investors))) or some shit?

>is force of will a fun game?
yeah, its pretty fun especially if you're an edh guy
is it good? not really, the power level is all over the place
i wouldn't drop a lot of money on it especially since its hard to find people to play with

He's getting back into it because they're doing extremely short print runs now with chase cards. Look at Vingolf 3 prices.

>EDH FoW
Sounds absolutely retarded, what's the fucking point in a game full of tutor effects?