Sword Girls

It's a TCG with the premise of a school of teenage girls. Essentially each and every single card (including spell cards) is a anime girl. So you know how in the popular TCG's you have different races, well here you have things like: armored girls, maid girls, vampires, tsunderes, lolis, witches, etc. :heh: This is a korean game with art from 20 or so artists from both korea and japan.

And it's really god damn good art,

. . . . .

Basic mechanics,

• you have a "Character" card, and you can only have 1 and you must have 1 per deck (your life is in this card, when she dies you die)
• spell cards are pretty much the same as everywhere, you cast it does it's thing and it goes to your graveyard; there are no artifacts, as far as I know
• monster cards are called Followers
• your followers have 3 stats: Attack, Defense, and Stamina (listed on cards in this order).
  • Stamina is basically HP, when it reaches 0 the follower dies.
  • Def is essentially subtracted from attack. So if a card has 2 def and 11 stam then an attack of 4 removes only 4 - 2 = 2 stamina
• each card has a SIZE (including spell cards), ranging from 1 to 5 generally.
• even though you have 5 slots on the field, you can only place cards up to a cumulative size of 10.
  • there are many abilities that increase card size
  • there are also abilities that decrease card size
• you can't remove a cards from the field. So if you have 8/10 field and a card of size 3 well tough luck you can't do jack
• the field slots of 1 to 5 will be occupied in that order; and you can't move cards—other then as a consequence of a spell; some spells target specific field slots
• your "Character" has two way to get damaged, and die
  1. when a follower card dies it's SIZE is deducted as damage to the Character
  2. if there are no Followers on the field the enemy Followers will attack the Character directly and the damage they do is equal to their size.
• yes you can also get decked (ie. inability to draw a card because you've used them all = loss)
• there is things like infinite buff stacking, pretty much there is nothing outside of special spells that doesn't just continously stack and stack on itself; and the game is designed around it
• the game doesn't keyhole you into one faction, there are benefits to focusing on one faction but it's very easy to do multi-colored decks as it were
• there's no "resource" system
• there's a really really extensive card upgrading system; outside actual games

Okey, that's almost everything. One last thing you need to know, and what in pretty much every other game that has done it has ticked me off, is that cards act on their own.

Basically,

• you place a spell on the field, but you can't specifically target a unit with it, it's going to target what it wants, or
• you place a follower on the field but it's going to attack what it wants, or
• you have a imba Character ability but you can't just target that pesky overpowered card on the enemy field

Now what I would like to say is that I've played a lot of other game like it but unfortunetly my try-and-drop timings are in the range of 15min to 1h when it comes to this system. It just comes of extremely casual and boring and the inner Magica fanboy in me just screams blasphemy. To be perfectly honest while I enjoy the artstyle and premise I was still skeptical. I wouldn't say I saw it as good, but didn't really see it as that bad either. Arguably the other games I've seen it in have also had a lot of other crappy stuff stuck in them to help make them terrible.

But I've found a interesting series of videos and while I still think RNG is kinda iffy, I have to say I really enjoyed watching in play with some semi-competent decks and the game's "balance" (in particular the SIZE dynamic).

Here's one of the more interesting ones...

It's part of a english dual-comentary inhouse tournament: Day 1 playlist Day 2 playlist

Anyway, enough babling, I'm not sure where you find the korean original but the english port is here: http://www.swordgirlsonline.com/ At the moment it seems to be a sort of CBT where everyone can get in :heh: lol

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So, what does everyone think of it?