With a new set getting closer and closer to release and Alice Cluster and Regalia cancer rotating out, let's have one of these to talk about the current state of the game and how the meta is looking.
What are you playing?
Have you been looking at the game, but are unsure how to get into it?
What are your thoughts on the new spoilers for Advent of the Demon King?
Bring all of your Force of Will discussion here.
I mostly run Water-Darkness Reiya control these days. Mystery Counters are a fun archetype. I am pretty interested in Advent, and will be attending the prerelease, but I kind of wish that mystery counters would get more support.
I've been hesitant to touch any of the starter deck Rulers until the Sealed Items got revealed. Reiya looked cool, but her having two different ones seemed odd. Her first one that got leaked is good, but it's weird that they didn't reveal her second one on her J-Ruler side with her second print. Gill and Taegrus both got way better with theirs though. Kirik is already good, so I can't wait to see his. I like Shaela's weather, but she feels really weak, so I hope hers makes a big difference.
Thunderstorm was definitely kind of lame. It needs more synergies for it to work. I agree that the starter deck rulers sealed abilities was kind of a crapshoot, but I am a sucker for these sort of mysteries and reveals. Flavorwise it is great IMO.
Yeah, it had great flavor applications and the new art for the leaked rulers are sweet. My problem is that it seems terrible from a marketing standpoint. They could all be really good or just mediocre and you won't know until after you've probably bought them.
As for what I'm rolling with, I'm between decks at the moment. Been thinking about picking up Pandora because golems seem cool, but they don't seem fun to build because there aren't many good ones and it feels like it'd be Atmos turbo. Maybe they'll get better support, but looking at the list of golems has really put me off, which is a shame. I'll probably end up going back to Kaguya 4.0, either Myths or Treasury Item control.
I figured as much. I'll try again later. Maybe after spoilers finish. I really wish this game had a bigger scene.
FoW threads rarely get off the ground on Veeky Forums. Sometimes it comes up in TCG generals.
I also run a Reiya deck, but I run it mono-black and sort of tempo-y. Throw out a few solid 2-drops like Abdul and Rinka and support them with kill spells and discard. Admittedly I do love the idea of splashing blue for Flute's but most of the time I feel good with the Mystery counters I have. Especially now that she gets two more to start with.
That said, I only picked the game up around with ACN's release and play casually and infrequently, so my opinion is probably worth jack shit.
Both of the new Rulers shown look fun though, so I'll probably pick up an ADK box and see what I get. I just hope either the starter deck Ruler reprints don't show up in packs or the Ruler rate is high enough that I don't have to worry about only getting a reprinted Ruler in said box.
I really wish the ACN rulers got a bit more support. Pandora and Frayla seem really sweet but just don't have good enough cards in their tribe. It looks unlikely though since Frayla is dead in ACN. At least Faerur has all the elves from Lapis.
I'm thinking of making a Gill deck with the leaked sealed item. Hopefully I'll get enough of the new cards to do so. The new pull rates really screwed me since I can't justify buying more than a box per set and there is nowhere to buy singles without importing.
Frayla might still get more support from ADK. It's not like the four new Dark Elves we've seen are going to be the only four in the set.
I run Alhamaat control with every color but green. It does pretty decent at locals, when people bother to show up.
Perhaps, they were pretty lackluster though and if those were what they chose to spoil then it feels kind of unlikely that we'll get decent dark elves. Plus we've seen what, 2 golems so far? And one of them is designed for a different ruler. I'm hopeful that you're right but it doesn't seem likely to me.
I am making fox memerange and gill control.
The golem theme has been expanded a little in the previews but we haven't actually seen Pandora depicted on or even referenced by any other cards or flavor texts, but since Reiya cluster is a prequel and Pandora is not a new character I think it's a safe assumption that her role in the cluster isn't done yet.
So I'm thinking more golem support is more likely to be coming in Time Spinning Witch or the set after than more Dark Elf support, since Frayla dies in this set.
I do hope your right and they just haven't spoiled the good dark elves. They seem to be doing a good job with the starter deck rulers though so at least that is something.
Do people think there is going to be a 3rd ruler or are the unsealed starters going to take that slot?
Unfortunately, the latter. The playmat shows Welser, Ayu, and the new art for the three unsealed starters.
Well its not all bad if they don't take up the ruler slot in the box. I still don't have all the rulers from Ancient Nights.
I think leaks for the third set confirm that Pandora has a bigger role there.
Speaking of the three unsealed rulers, what do you think Reiya's other sealed item will do? I've seen people coming up with crackpot theories about how she has some connection to Zero, so maybe it's some kind of ability removal thing like Zero's ruler ability. It looks like a little sunburst as well. It's a stupid theory, but it's all I've got to go on. I hope it's not true though because I'd hate for her Mystery counters to just get dropped.
>That said, I only picked the game up around with ACN's release and play casually and infrequently, so my opinion is probably worth jack shit.
OP here, I'm in the same boat actually. I'd been looking at getting into the game for a while and learned about it, but I was already heavily involved in a couple of TCGs and didn't need to add another at the time. I've since found time for it and it's pretty nice. One thing I can tell you is that the game is very local meta-dependent. There are some overall best decks, but this game is great for playing with homebrews. I don't know if that's because of the nature of the game or because of the amount of people playing it, but I enjoy it all the same.
Tempo Reiya seems pretty neat though. This game is great for control builds and killspells.dek sounds fine to me. The additional Mystery counters definitely help her because from the games I've watched I've noticed that she has trouble building Mystery counters.
I'm unsure if I should get into this or DragoBorne for casual play. What are some fun things to do in FoW?
You can run hard with some themes and generally have a blast with the game. Dragoborne isn't bad, but FoW has more to it right now.
What kind of themes are there? Tribal? I love themes in games, so that's a big plus.
Tribes in the current cluster are a big deal. However there are others, especially in the previous cluster. You can run Ahmat and a bunch of Ancient Magic chants, or the new Dragonoid ruler and his focus on midrange with strength counters. My current favorite is Reiya's mystery counter focused control archetype, which is great if you are the sort who loves doomblading guys in MTG.
I like attrition style decks the most honestly, and interesting cards. Not just raw power, but if it's interesting, I like it. Am I too late in terms of clusters (I'm guessing sets/expacs?) for any of those to be available?
We still haven't had any reference to the mystery chant subtype yet. I'm hoping its something to do with that.
Clusters are just collections of sets like blocks in MTG. At any time the two most recent clusters are legal in New Frontiers, which would be the equivalent of Standard. Honestly Gill Ahmat control sounds like a good deal for you, as the cards are certainly interesting and you can run an attrition focused deck.
Ah, icy icy. Should I just buy singles for those, or is it fine to get a starter deck or two to learn about the game through playing it?
Buy singles to build Ahmat, but you may as well pick up one of the new starter decks to get your feet wet. The darkness one has useful chants that you might use with Ahmat. One thing you can grab is Vingolf 2. It is a box set that has a lot of cards that aren't legal anymore. However it comes with two of each dual stone, which are very useful if you ever want to run any deck that uses more than two colors. Get two Vingolf 2's and you would have a playset of every single one.
Alright then, thanks for your advice. I hope they have some at this new LGS i'm going to.
In addition to Alhama'at, Dark Yggdrasil is really cool and unique as far as rulers with a theme go. Whenever you take damage, you mill cards instead. This means that you can effectively have 6000 life while your opponent will only have 4000 to start. It allows you to spend your actual life points however you want on normally costly cards and it provides excellent grave setup. It has wide build variety, but lends itself well to slow control and attrition.
Oh, cool. I'll check that out as well then. Thank you.
Just buying playsets of the dual stones as singles is probably cheaper than buying two copies of Vingolf 2 most of the time.
Do you think Mosasaur will be an acceptable substitute for Hook now that he's banned? Not just in Lumia, but in shit like Mercurius combo?
I think he's neat, but I doubt he'll be a 1:1 replacement for Hook. Hook was just way too good. This guy having a bigger body is nice, but not returning the Magic Stones is much weaker.
Eyyy a Force of will thread!
We've just started up playing, few of us asked our FLGS if they could stock it, and we've now got a weekly event started. What's blue like? I've heard people imply it's underwhelming but not really seen a reason for why
Don't play bushi road games. you'll regret it.
Imagine playing Blue in Magic but not running any counterspells.
I'm still running my old Sylvia deck, so I'm technically in Wanderer format. Gotta take out my Laevs...
isn't that all blue does in magic? never really clicked with mtg honestly
Why?
So is the draw of blue in FoW just throwing control magic onto dudes and drawing then discarding cards + card advantage?
Because the majority of counterspells are actually in GREEN. Blue is more... deck stacking, I suppose. Lots of Top-style effects.
Okay, that's weird but interesting.
The majority of the time I was able to play (I still love the game but lack any players near me anymore) was the Alice Cluster, where my group saw a Wind/Light Kaguya deck going out of control because no card cost less than 3, and everything could counter or bounce everything.
That's the big claim to fame, but they also get stuff like preventing cards from untapping, stealing your opponent's shit, and big card draw, which FoW Blue keeps. And creatures that are hard to block.
The upside is that FoW Blue does at least get some good beaters, as well as some fairly aggro build options. The new Ruler coming out in ADK looks made for a form of blue aggro.
The downside is that the best counterspell in the game right now is free to cast if your opponent has played two or more cards this turn.
Which Kaguya was it?
Bushi is awful at supporting and stocking games. They had supply issues with Vanguard which made everyone stop stocking it. They straight up killed Luck & Logic after less than a year in favor of Dragoborne. They just don't have the attention span to really support a game well.
Don't die yet.
Is it possible to grab the limited rulers separately? I really liked using them during the Echoes of the New World prerelease, and wanted to do more drafting with the game.
>Implying Luck and Logic wasn't cursed to fail outside out Asia since it is yet another game that has similar mechanics to Duel Masters and we know how Duel Masters managed to die twice and Dragoborne will probably follow suit
I occasionally question why Bushiroad even bothered to release Luck and Logic in English in the first place since most weebs (for a lack of better term) would rather play Weiss instead
Isn't L&L more in line with Weiss than Duel Masters? I can't claim to have ever played the game so I wouldn't know. Though you are definitely right that both L&L and Dragoborne were doomed to fail from the start. It's a shame as I thought that the new L&L anime was pretty good.
Duel Masters got fucked over by Wizards of the Coast purposely running the English release into the ground.
The ones that come packed with the basic stones in Ancient Nights boxes? You can probably find them for sale individually on any site that sells FoW singles.
>Remembered a bunch of people started playing Force of Will around two years ago
>Game suddenly collapsed out of nowhere
Can someone actually explain what went so wrong in such a short period of time and confirm my suspicion that very few people in Japan actually plays the game? And shouldn't Force of Will the company pull their shit together instead of releasing yet another card game?
Well, L&L shares the main goal of "break all of your opponent's whatever" to win the game and watch BSR trolls us by releasing the Hina Logi Weiss set in English
>Any Year
>Ever expect WotC to not screw over anything that isn't MtG
The Dead Games thread a few months ago proved that WotC being bought by Hasbro was a mistake
I am not sure if anything really went wrong. The current rotation is pretty good though and a decent amount of people play it near me. I do like that FoW co. made Caster Chronicles, as it is actually a good game.
Japan is actually good about having multiple card games alive at a time. The west only supports 2-3 at once while Japan actually has a decent scene or several games. Duel Masters had a good following for quite some time, Yugioh is big, Magic started getting popular, FoW has actually been increasing in popularity from what I hear, and even more games have been doing well.
I'm going to talk out of my ass and say Regalia killed the game even though I didn't even know this game existed when Regalia were a thing.
That was part of it. I think that Reflect Refrain didn't help either. Thankfully that stuff has since rotated out, and they don't seem intent on having another go at them.
It was the suddenly downturn and slow recovery of the game that had me puzzled and how someone mentioned one of the guys that manage the game in North America was a real piece of work in a Pokemon TCG thread in /vp/ a while ago
I wonder it is due to cultural differences and a lower barrier of entry in Asia, and as someone who goes back to Asia every few years the choices is actually a sight to behold. I guess my main concern with FoW (both company and the game) is whether it will be substainable in the long run since I have probably seen way too many card games have come and gone over the years.
Can anyone explain the appeal of this TCG to me? The whole tittymonster thing just seems vaguely creepy to me.
They seem to actually have their distribution sorted out at least. The game offers something for weaboos and guys who like MTG's mechanics, of which there is a big overlap. I personally quit MTG in favor of FOW just because standard and set design in general is just so shit right now, along with the prices.
It's anime Magic with a slightly better resource system. And it's cheap.
>And it's cheap
This is actually really relevant. I think the most expensive regular card (so not counting rare promos or the uber rare versions of Rulers) is something like $28. You can build a functional deck for $12 and have fun because the buy-in price is really low compared to Magic or Yugioh. The mechanics of the game are familiar but fresh and concise with some of the more fun aspects of Magic and Yugioh. You've got trap cards, commanders, several viable deck archetypes, a consistent resource system that makes it easy to play whatever color combo you want, and easy to understand mechanics with symbol skills. It's basically like if Magic was more concise and didn't get out of control with its basic mechanics.
Also anime tiddies for those who want them. The art quality is generally good with only a few stinkers here and there (why Severing Winds has to be both ugly and OP is beyond me).
That doesn't explain why Force of Will card art is posted everywhere though?
It isn't though. I don't often see FoW get posted at all on Veeky Forums. The art is pretty decent on most cards though, anime boobs aside (of course a lot of people are into that).
Most of the artists seem to post most of their art on Pixiv so it's pretty accessible.
I'd say the same. What I like is that a lot of the good cards ar printed as commons as well.
I like that with FoW, Wixoss, and some other Japanese games you can easily follow these artists and see what else they work on. It's always fun to see doujins that they make.
>The art quality is generally good
I think I could give some objective faults in the art. The goal of art is to communicate and so I would rank the following factors as key:
1. Strength: the art strongly and clearly communicates a concept.
2. Specificity: the art communicates a detailed and specific concept.
3. Universality: the art communicates to as wide an audience as possible.
I may not personally like the message communicated but if it is objectively clear to its intended audience then the artist has done the job they were hired to do by the card game company well.
It is not necessarily "wrong" to sacrifice specificity for strength if you want to make the message more impactful. Explicitly writing the concept as words would probably make the message very clear but it would lack impact. However, art that has exactly the same specificity and universality but more strength would be objectively better.
Likewise, the same goes for specificity and universality and other trade-offs. There are a great many culturally specific symbols used as a shorthand for concepts. Using a symbol to better communicate a message to your specific audience isn't "wrong" but if you can communicate your message without the symbol it'd be better.
Not sure what art is best representative of FoW in general but I'd say that much of the art fails in terms of strength, specificity and universality.
For example, there is the whole tittymonster thing. Big boobs are very attractive to many men and easily and obviously convey in a pretty universal and strong manner sexual appeal. However, big tits do not necessarily convey the same message to women (or gay men I guess.) Furthermore, big boobs can only convey a message of sex appeal. By limiting characters to big titted anime waifs FoW can't easily depict messages other than sex appeal. Big tits conveys a strong, specific and universal message but it only conveys one message.
>However, big tits do not necessarily convey the same message to women (or gay men I guess.)
It's a good thing that both groups in question don't really play FoW or TCGs in general.
FoW has quite a bit more than just big titty animu girls. Sure there are plenty of them, but it has its fair share of pretty boys, lolis, and big dragons.
What good sites sell singles and ship overseas? I'm currently using coretcg but they don't have everything in stock. Are there any better ones?
You're forgetting the bishie fuccbois that FoW has going for it too you know. And in the current set you have entire tribes made up of buff lizardmen, overweight panda-dwarves, vaguely anthropomorphic elementals, and largely featureless golems. Though this is Veeky Forums, so I imagine that people here have fetishes for all of those.
Adding on to this guy, what are the best sites to get FoW singles from in general? I wanted to build on the starter deck I got so I can have a fairly solid deck.
In the US I use TCGplayer.
I personally have a fetish for golems (mostly flesh golems, but I doubt we're getting golems in B). It's too bad that their support is lacking at the moment. Here's hoping for more good golems in Time Spinning Witch. Reiya cluster has actually been very tribal, hasn't it?
>implying Veeky Forums doesn't entirely consist of faggots
Anyway, so the OP image is the image for the 2nd Reiya cluster set named Advent of the Demon King. Now this may just be a miscommunication between Japanese and English audiences but the symbolism in the picture is a bit off.
Stuff which matches:
- Solar eclipse=scary and stuff
- Horns=demon
- Claws=wild beast
- Black&Red=Hellish
- Red eyes=evil creature
- Jagged spiked plate armor=demonic,nobility
- Cape=nobility
- Gold trim=nobility
Japanese specific symbols:
- Wild hair=Japanese symbol for dishonorable Ronin guy or similar
- White,Pale=corpse
Stuff which doesn't match:
- Pretty face=beauty,good
- Armor=civilization,order
- Red diamond on chestplate=heart,eye
Moreover the art is bad on grounds of clarity:
- The art is overdetailed and overbusy
- The art has no clear point of focus
- The character's armor and cape does not stick out from the background well
Anyway, when I think demon king I think Melek or Baal but there doesn't appear to be any of that kind of symbolism.
It seems to be a very tribal set. That said the namesake of the cluster seems to be bucking that trend, as she focuses much more on mystery counters and their non-vampire support such as Dark Riding Hood. There is always her dad if you actually want to concentrate on vampires. Shaela isn't really restricted to tribes either, as rain and thunderstorm abilities are attached to plenty of non-mermaids.
Going off of that, how are Dark Elves right now? Are they worth running, and if so, with what?
Some colors have stronger tribal themes than others. Green has strongly-defined tribes, as does White. Black has Dark Elves for Frayla but nothing for Reiya unless you want to count Mystery chants. Though I guess Reiya does seem to have a slight dark Fairy Tale theme.
>Implying that the best champions of evil aren't sexy mofos
I mean, that guy did post Gil who is one of the bigger reoccurring villains.
Dark Elves are kind of weak but that 1-drop with Swiftness and pseudo-Deathtouch is really good. Red Frayla in the next set looks promising as well, and Jeanne looks good for the kind of black Aggro that Frayla (Ruler) wants even if she isn't actually a Dark Elf.
There might be promise with the next set, especially if they get some good support in Red.
Also spiky horns are wrong for a demon. Demon horns represent bull or goat horns and not deer horns. This is because European demons were demonisations of proto-indo-european gods which were often agricultural animals.
This art blends into the background too much. Also, funny colored hair is bad because it means one loses the ability to symbolize old age. Also, the only indicator of badness is red eyes (and possibly pale clothing which could symbolize death but it doesn't seem like that was what they were going for.)
Evil pretty villains does make for good stories. Nonetheless beauty never symbolizes evil in stories. Also, that card hardly looks like a BBEG.
I think that you are entirely misunderstanding the thing. He is supposed to be a sexy JRPG demon king, not yet another firey goatman. It's a good change IMO, I would rather have attractive people in the game than ugly grannies like MTG.
That Gill is part of a cycle of reprints with alternate otome game inspired art. Regular Gill Lapis art does a lot better job of making him look like a bad guy.
And you totally can make a guy look old with funny colored hair. You just have to rely more on facial features, like in pic related from the same reprint cycle.
I think you are making more of a deal about the prettiness then I was. The heart diamond and the spiked horns are bad design though.
>is part of a cycle of reprints with alternate otome game inspired art
Okay. Maybe you can show me some Gil cards which are more in character? I don't play FoW so I wouldn't have known that.
>And you totally can make a guy look old with funny colored hair.
You can, but it is more difficult. And keep in mind that this art needs to fit on tiny cards.
This is the original art of Pure Youth. In Italian because that was the biggest version I found on google.
The art comes out fine in my experience. The cards are all full art which helps really make them work. Spiky horns are standard these days, though I do agree that old school demons are cool too.
And this is probably my favorite art on a Gill Lapis card.
I also should point out that the rarest variant of these Ruler/J-Ruler cards are monochrome.
Speaking of Gill Lapis, his Lapis cluster card seems really fun to build around. Any idea on how he usually plays? I'm imagining darkness control with lots of remove from play to take your opponent's stuff.
This art is unclear and the character blues into the background too easily.
This card is better for explaining a message but the main body blurs together too much.
Symbols:
- Rebel = change
- Crossed legs + cross pose = cross, change
- Flight = above earthly things
- Red = blood
- Black = night, darkness, supernatural, mystery
- Fire = civilization, passion, change
So Gil is a rebel who is pushing forth a bad change. But I'm not really sure how to square that with the civilization aspect of fire and how flight signifies being above earthly things. Maybe if I knew about the plot that would explain that.
I imagine you could play it with up to three colors. Black, White, and Red all have some good RFG cards.
>- Fire = civilization, passion, change
Fire as a symbol for civilization is a lot less common than fire as a symbol for destruction.
>Fire as a symbol for civilization is a lot less common than fire as a symbol for destruction.
The Promethean fire, Zoroastrianism fire temples, the common identification of fire with the sun and gold all disagree. In fact in Proto-Indo-European mythology it was usually the sea that symbolized chaos. That said probably Japanese symbolism is more relevant and I don't know much more about that.
If the fire is controlled and used to benefit that makes sense, but if it's an uncontrollable inferno that's portrayed as it is in the card it's a destructive sense. It has two sides like a lot of things do, its not purely an aspect of civilization.
Fair enough.
Anybody pull an Uber off a single booster? I got a Sylvia, and she's been my commander since then.
...
Fuck, looks like I missed out. Nothing wrong with wanting to move a lot of sealed product on Black Friday.
Link? I want some cheap cards.
I fucking wish that happened here
We can't die before that Vanguard thread.
Just bought into Caster Chronicles by the FoW guys. Its a better game, too bad it is completely DOA. The arts cuter as well.
Cant see FoW lasting long if bushi keeps pushing Dragoborne as much as they have. Since Dragoborne is basically the same kind of art as FoW, just better.
I play MTG, Vanguard, FOW, and Dragoborne right now. I can only hope more niche games get some followings
this. Duelmasters basic rules/mechanics are amazing and any game ripping off it is doomed to be a amazing game. Too bad WOTC suck cock.