malvasia bianca

Ascension: Realms Unraveled showed up hot on the heels of the previous expansion, and, like its predecessor, it turned out to be surprisingly fun to play. I actually was not sure about it at the start: for one thing, the art style changed dramatically, to the extent that it wasn’t even immediately obvious what class of card something was. And, for another thing, they basically took every mechanic they’d previously had except for the energy/shard mechanic and applied them all everywhere. In particular, the prior mechanic of certain lifebound heroes having special effects if you played multiple lifebound heroes in the same turn got generalized: now all classes had cards that behaved like that, which meant that focusing on classes (with all the randomness that comes from combining classes with the small number of cards available for purchase) became super important.

And, honestly, I’m really not sure that was a great idea: I think I preferred having that as a special lifebound mechanic over having it show up everywhere. So I’m hoping they step back from that in their next expansion; but trying it out once wasn’t a bad idea. It meant that some decks would cascade into overwhelming victories (which was helped by the fact that a few individual cards were overpowered); but I ended up generally basically enjoying games even when I was on the losing side of those situations, and I played a surprising number of games where both sides seemed to be building up very powerful decks.