'Keyforge' Could Be The Next Huge Card Game

Keyforge, a brand new card game by the maker of Magic: The Gathering, hopes to bring a totally new experience to tabletop gaming.

Twenty-five years ago, Wizards of the Coast released Magic: The Gathering, the first trading card game. Most trading card games are built around the premise of purchasing packs of cards and using them to create decks. As certain cards are more powerful than others, competitive play in Magic (and almost every other trading card games) tend to focus around variants of the same few decks.

No matter what trading card game you play, you'll typically run into the same few barriers of play. Almost all skilled players have the same superior decks, and in order to build an actually competitive deck, you need to spend a ton of money either buying packs of cards in the hopes of pulling the cards you need or purchasing individual cards for high prices on the secondary market.

Richard Garfield, the designer of Magic: The Gathering, is looking to turn that dynamic on its head with Keyforge, which was released today by Fantasy Flights Game. The most intriguing part of Keyforge is that you purchase decks instead of booster packs, and that each deck is pre-constructed and totally unique. There's no deckbuilding in Keyforge - instead players learn how to best utilize their personal decks to maximize their effectiveness.

Keyforge feels deliberately irreverent - each deck is named using a random name generator, which results in a ton of goofy (and occasionally extremely inappropriate) names. Plus, the artwork seems to be inspired by Mars Attacks or Asterix, with mischievous looking aliens, robots, and giants shooting laser guns or wielding oversized weapons.

At the heart of Keyforge are seven houses of cards, each of which have their own specialties. Each deck is made up of cards from three of those houses, which gives each deck a variety of different potential uses and synergies.

The goal of Keyforge is to be the first to forge three keys, each of which require a certain amount of Aember to construct. At the start of a turn, a player crafts a key if they can and then declares a House, which is the only type of card they can use that turn.

Players can use their cards to either reap Aember (thus collecting Aember that can then be used to forge keys), attack the other player's cards, or complete a card's action that can either boost your own abilities or somehow impede other players. Play tends to move quickly, although there are times that matches become wars of attrition due to the various abilities that some cards impose on their opponents.

Of course, the big question involving Keyforge is whether the game can foster any sort of wide competitive play. After all, some decks are naturally better than others, and those decks would likely dominate tournaments.

In order to help level the playing field, Fantasy Flight has released a companion app that tracks the relative strength of a deck in competitive play. If a deck seems to be consistently dominating its opponents, Fantasy Flight can handicap it using chains, a mechanic that requires a player to draw less cards when replenishing their hand at the end of their turn. It'll be interesting to see how Fantasy Flight manages the competitive aspect of the game, especially if Keyforge really takes off.

Interest in the game seems to be high among gamers. Anecdotally, I've seen several stores note that they've run out of their initial Keyforge stock either during pre-release parties or when the decks first came on sale today. We'll see how Keyforge performs in the coming months and whether its unique take on card games can find a fanbase in an increasingly crowded field of trading card games.