Ascension: Darkness Unleashed has the same energy mechanic as the prior iteration; on that, it layers a second kind of energy (“dark energy shards”) that let you banish cards in your discard pile (and occasionally trigger other card-specific effects), and a transformation mechanic whereby many cards permanently become more powerful if you’ve acquired a specified amount of energy in a turn before playing them. Which you’d think would make the game more unbalanced, but actually I had a lot more fun with this version: Steve and I played a ton of games with it, and while they were frequently wild ones, they often ended up pleasantly wild on both sides. I guess what was going on was that the dark energy banishment and the transforming cards both ended up accelerating the speed of improvement of your deck, which meant that you got to the fun stuff faster but that both sides ended up enjoying it?

Anyways: good expansion. And it’s great to see the expansions coming so quickly now that the licensing situation has gotten settled.

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