Is it Alpha and mega, as we put the Azuki Trading Card Game through its paces?
With the Cyberpunk TCG breaking crowdfunding records, firmly establishing itself as the newest member of the trading card games club, we already have all the TCGs we need, right? Wrong. There’s a new player in town, quietly building up a head of steam after a successful Alpha Deck launch ($570,000) and follow-up Pre-Sale ($1.12m). This wasn’t a Kickstarter, it was a private sale, and you’ll see the new set Gates Awakened in stores from June.
We’ve been lucky enough to get our hands on a set of those Azuki Trading Card Game Alpha Decks – and they are stunning. From the shiny coloured boxes to the silvered cards themselves, the production values are impressive across the board. And every card is hand drawn by artists. Think about the plushest crowdfunder you ever received, as stretch goals kept pushing those production values up and up, and that’s what we have here in a non-Kickstarted product. The game draws its art and lore from the Azuki Manga universe created by Arnold Tsang, the acclaimed designer behind Overwatch. If some of those cards look like stills from an anime, that might soon be the case. Studio Azuki plans to produce high-end anime, including a three-part series titled Enter the Garden that fits the Azuki TCG perfectly.
Beyond those good looks is a game that plays well, too. Azuki Trading Card Game is a two-player strategy game where each player uses a 50-card deck. Those decks are built around a Leader and a Gate. The goal is to defeat your opponent’s Leader by attacking with Entities and using tactical card effects. The battlefield has two rows: the Garden (front row), where combat happens, and the Alley (back row), where cards are protected before moving forward. Each row can hold up to five Entities.
At the start of the game, players draw a hand, place their Leader and Gate into play, and may take a mulligan to redraw unwanted cards. During your turn, you go through phases that let you ready cards, draw, play Entities, Spells or Weapons, and move cards from the Alley into the Garden through your Gate. Most newly played Entities cannot attack immediately unless they have a special ability like Charge.
Combat is central to the game. Entities in the Garden attack opposing Entities or the enemy Leader, while players can respond with effects and abilities to influence battles. Managing positioning, timing and resources is key to winning matches, which typically last around 20 minutes (although our earliest tussles went way beyond that!).
As mentioned, each player leads a unique faction, guided by a formidable Leader and empowered through the mystic power of their Gate. Each Gate synergises with the Leader to produce a powerful effect. Raizan’s Gate combo gets Entities to the frontline, hands them a weapon and gets them into combat immediately; while Shao can reduce an opponent’s attack as a Response using mana untapped by the gate.
Speaking of mana, hands up if you’ve played Magic: The Gathering and been mana-screwed? We know every MTG player’s hand will be raised, because that’s a staple of the game. Not in Azuki, though. Every turn you add a new IKZ card to your pool, ramping mana up. Brilliantly, the player going second gets a one-use IKZ token that could allow them to drop a two-drop card immediately, balancing things up.
The two decks in the Alpha package play really well against each other. And we went a long time before we had to look something up in the rules, which is a win for the information included on the cards. Some of that text is tiny, though, while also being slightly hampered by the shininess. And why aren’t the life total dice spindowns? Who’s got time to search for a number on a regular d20!
Review by Matt Chapman
A confident opening for the Azuki Trading Card Game, which promises further goodies this summer.
SHADOWVERSE: EVOLVE
A similar strategic TCG with an anime style, based on the popular digital game.
Category: Card Games
Designers: Arnold Tsang, Jon Chao, Tim Guo
Publisher: Chiru Labs
Time to Play: 20m
Players: 2 Players
Age: 13+
RRP: £70
2 50-card decks
20 IKZ tokens
2 Alternate art Leader cards
16 Alpha booster packs
2 d20 dice
2 Playsheets
2 Quickstart guides