Hey everyone! I am a big fan of Shadow Era, the online collectible card game, and so I wanted to share the game with you all and a few reasons why I really like the game so much. As a disclaimer, I am currently on the Shadow Era Volunteer Design Team, which basically means that I discuss balance issues and help create new cards for the game with the other volunteers. I’m not paid or affiliated with Shadow Era beyond that.

Shadow Era was created in 2011, and is primarily an online card game. A physical version exists, but it flopped for a variety of reasons unrelated to the online game. The Dice Tower rated the physical game a 1/10, saying that the tabletop hobby would be better off if the physical card game never existed. So… yeah, the physical version was not well received, to say the least.

That being said, the online game rocks, and I’m addicted. To give you a better idea of this, I’ve been playing competitively in online tournaments for over a year, and this December I got to participate in the 2018 World Championships of Shadow Era. I placed 9th overall, which I was pretty bummed about, but overall had a ton of fun (you have to place 1st-8th to get full foiled decks).

1. Completely Free

That’s right, Shadow Era is completely free to play, and you can create an account right now if you wanted to! There is an app on the android and apple store, and you can download it for the computer as well. That being said, you don’t immediately get access to all the cards: you have to earn gold to buy cards by playing. You can pay a small amount of money to get Shadow Crystals, which will help get your collection going faster, or people may donate Shadow Crystals to your account. All cards can be purchased with gold though, and Shadow Crystals simply help you get gold, so it’s extremely free to play. I personally am completely free to play, mostly because it is so easy to get gold that I never felt the need to buy anything. At this point, I have unlocked every card in the game.

2. Strong Community

So, the leadership behind Shadow Era is pretty much all volunteer based, which is very unusual for a card game. I don’t know how it got to that point: apparently a lot of drama between the creator of the game and the rest of the community. But basically, all the tournaments are being run by the community. Also, all of the cards are currently being balanced and created by volunteers like myself. I think that speaks to how much people love the game: they are willing to sacrifice their time to make it better for everyone involved.

Another element of the community is the Telegram group chat. This is where you can talk to all the other players in the game and organize things like tournaments. Many people have joined guilds to share deck building tips and make friends. I am part of the Black Templars guild, and our guild leader actually ended up winning WC2018! If you end up playing Shadow Era, joining a guild is a must in my opinion.

3. Very Strategical Gameplay

I’ve played a lot of collectible card games, from Yu-Gi-Oh! to Magic the Gathering. And I have to say that Shadow Era is by far the most appealing to me. Apparently, the game is functionally identical to the World of Warcraft TCG. But, that was discontinued by Blizzard so that they could go make Hearthstone, which in my humble opinion, was a downgrade.

Anyway, the basic idea behind Shadow Era is that you are a hero with some amount of health (between 26-30) and when you reach 0 health, you lose. To deal damage you need to summon allies, which have an attack value and health value. They can attack once each turn. You summon these allies by exhausting resources. You start the game with 0 resources, so in order to get these resources, you must choose any card in your hand and place it facedown on your resource pile at the start of each of your turns.

This is extremely neat! Because of the fact that you are sacrificing cards in your hand for resources, you have to be very aware of the matchups and have a clear idea of your goals. If you sacrifice the wrong card, you won’t ever be able to get it back. You can obviously not sacrifice anything, but then you won’t have enough resources to summon your cards. That creates very interesting trade-offs in the game. One other decision I really enjoy is the decision between going “face,” which is short for attacking the hero or going after control of the board by attacking your opponent’s allies.

4. Variety

Alright, so it is time to go over the massive amount of variety in the game. There are 32 different heroes in Shadow Era, which can each be one of 7 classes, and further split into either shadow/human classification. Every hero has access to all neutral cards, all of their class cards, and all of the shadow or human cards. This means that every hero plays extremely differently because they are given different card pools. In addition, each hero has a unique ability that further gives them individual identity. That is a lot of different potential decks that you can build!

You might be thinking, so what? There probably are only 1-2 heroes in the “meta” and the rest are probably terrible, right? Wrong. Balancing the game to make every hero viable is really important to the design team and the Shadow Era community. That means that every so often, the heroes that aren’t doing as well get supported and the heroes doing a bit too well get nerfed slightly. And while I admit there are a couple terrible heroes, the meta overall is incredibly diverse. For example, in the world championships of 2018, the top 8 was made up of 8 different heroes, 5 different classes, 5 shadow and 3 human heroes. That’s unheard of for any collectible card game.

Now, not all variety is great though. For example, there used to be a ton of stall decks running rampant and almost everyone had to tech heavily against stall. However, the game has recently been pretty anti-stall and banned a bunch of cards that promoted that play style. Stall still exists of course, but games generally are very engaging and there tends to be a lot of back-and-forth.

Overall

Shadow Era is a great online card game that you need to check out if you enjoy collectible card games. I prefer it to Hearthstone for the strategical play, and also because it doesn’t break the bank. Obviously, the game isn’t perfect, and there are some leadership issues that have stalled development. That being said, the community has really stepped up and we are currently working on creating a new set of cards for the game. While the community seems small, there are usually a lot of people playing at once, and waiting times for ranked play is generally under 10 seconds. So, I would definitely recommend giving Shadow Era a try!

Do you play Shadow Era or want to try it out? Anything I missed in the review? Let me know in the comments below! Thanks for reading.

P.S. Oh, and by the way, I finally figured out how to add a “like” button as well as social media sharing buttons to my blog posts! So now I finally get to say the following, “Feel free to share, like, or subscribe if you enjoy this kind of content. Thank you!”