A Deckbuilding Look at Mystic Vale

Mystic Vale CoverIt’s now been almost eight years since Dominion changed the face of gaming by introducing a dominant new style of play. Long gone is the day when a semi-clone could be released that just moved Dominion into the dungeons or the scullery. Instead new deck builders must have dramatically different styles of gameplay … or even dramatically different styles of components.

And that’s an intro to Mystic Vale (2016) which features transparent cards made of plastic!

The Game

In many ways, Mystic Vale is a pretty traditional deckbuilding game. You buy cards that can generate money (mana), then use that money to buy new cards. The most valuable cards are worth victory points, while some cards also generate victory points when played.

The big innovation of the game is that the “cards” are actually plastic card sleeves that are used to hold transparent cards. You can slide up to three transparent cards into each sleeve, provided one shows its powers at the top, one at the middle, and one at the bottom. So, you’re not exactly “deck building”, but you’re “card crafting”, since you’re improving the cards already in your deck. But, it really amounts to the same thing — especially when you consider that some card sleeves are empty at the start of the game.

The Good

Mystic Vale CardCard Crafting & Transparency. Transparent cards hit the gaming scene with Gloom (2005) and they’re a bit gimmicky, but they also have some interesting properties. Unlike Gloom, the layering of cards in Mystic Vale is quite simplistic: you can only layer three cards in a sleeve, and they have to have powers in three different places. The only variation is a super-special power, which very occasionally appears in a stripe on the left, which limits a card to having one super-special power.

Despite this simplicity, Mystic Vale’s transparent cards have interesting properties too. That’s because you can build  a sleeve to contain a multitude of powers that work well together. If a card has (bad) decay then you’ll often want to pair it with (good) growth — or any number of special powers that can help with decay. If a card has one spirit symbol, then you’ll want to add other cards with spirit symbols, and if a card has guardian powers, then you’ll definitely want to power it with guardian symbols on other cards.

The whole premise of deckbuilding games is to craft decks that work well together, but Mystic Vale brings that to the next level by letting you craft cards that work well together, and that’s an interesting, intuitive, and worthwhile innovation. (If you were going to apply it to the deckbuilding genre beyond special transparent cards, you’d ask the question, “How can you aid a player in drawing cards that work together?”)

Mystic Vale PermanentFormulaic Resources: Spirit Symbols. Closely related is the fact that Mystic Vale has some formulaic resource costs, where you pair together particular combinations of spirit symbols to buy permanent cards. The idea of formulaic costs goes back to at least The Settlers of Catan (1995) but it’s always been pretty tricky to integrate into deckbuilders because of the fact that it’s very hard to guarantee that a player can get all the necessary cards at the same time. Consider Thunderstone (2009), where drawing your characters, their weapons, and any needed light sources at the same time can be an exercise in frustration — and is probably why the game has a high hand size of 6 cards.

Mystic Vale gets away with it because of the aforementioned strength of the transparent cards. Players can improve their odds of getting sets of spirit symbols by putting them all in the same sleeve. However, the formulaic resource mechanic still feels a little rocky because a player can have a strong set of spirit symbols and get unlucky if purchases requiring that precise set of symbols don’t appear. (A wild symbol helps.)

Press Your Luck: Spoiling. A couple of years ago, Flip City (2014) turned a deck building game into a card drawing game with a press-your-luck mechanism. Mystic Vale almost exactly repeats this innovation: each turn you draw cards until get three decay symbols. If you continue on, you take the chance of spoiling your whole turn, because a fourth decay symbol spells doom … but you also may get the extra mana you need to make an important purchase.

The mechanism was interesting and worthwhile in both games, but it works better in Mystic Vale. That’s in part because you’re not forced to continue drawing, as was often the case in Flip City. Instead, you get a singular, tough decision every time you reveal a card. However, the mechanism also works well because a loss isn’t as terrible. Sure, you lose your turn but …

Continuing Resources: Mana Tokens. A number of deckbuilding games have introduced continuing resources: coins or other tokens that stick around from turn to turn, and make the game about something more than just decks. Mystic Vale does so in a very simple but meaningful way: if you spoil a turn, you get to flip up a mana token, which can be expended on a future turn for a point of mana. This is a nice strategic resource, but it’s also a good offset for spoiling that doesn’t make you feel like you totally wasted a turn when you took a chance.

The Other

Three Decks to Rule Them. Even though it’s now exactly bad, one element of the game feels a bit awkward: players buy cards from three different piles, containing cards that are low cost, medium cost, and high cost. It’s a good way to keep the game fair and balanced without running into the unevenness that can result in other randomized purchase games, like Ascension (2010), but it feels inelegant and clumsy.

The Bad

Mystic Vale CursedSimplistic. The play of Mystic Vale is surprisingly simple. It’s like Dominion (2008) if most of the cards just gave you victory points or coins, but nothing more. Oh, there’s some variation, but it tends to go toward the same few gaming elements: mostly earning mana, earning victory points, or decreasing decay. There’s not much wider variety and no player interaction. The most interesting play comes from the guardian symbols, which tend to increase the power of special abilities, but that’s largely a card crafting element, not an interesting gameplay element.

(The simplicity of the game also means it may work better for beginners, which is own advantage.)

Information Overload. When you play a card, it’s sometimes hard to really assess what all it does, because you have to read text from three different areas. The mana and spirit symbols are pretty easy to count up, since they all appear on the margin, but when you have more information than that, you can feel lost. For some reason, other players and I have had particular problems keeping track of the cards that roll back decay.

The issue of information overload is a pretty natural result of building up sleeves that essentially have three different cards in them. It’s also probably why the game itself was kept pretty simple, so it all ties together — from the component decision to the play problems.

Annoying Tear Down. Putting away the game is a bit troublesome because because you have to remove all the cards from all the sleeves except the cards that originally came in sleeves. Expect it to take time, when you’d rather be moving on to the next game or closing up for the night.

Conclusion

Mystic Vale makes a big expansion to the deckbuilding field with its introduction of transparent cards, and it puts them to good use by allowing you to create complementary cards, just like you create complementary decks in more traditional play. Mind you, it also shows off some of the issues of this new component, since its cards either end up too complex or its play too simple. I enjoy the innovation and I think the game plays well, but I also think there’s opportunity for a better balance if anyone returns to the transparent well.

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