The Road to GP Gold: Primer

What's up nerds, I'm a lifelong card gamer living in Fukuoka and I started playing Shadowverse Evolve to practice Japanese outside of school/work and to scratch my competitive TCG itch. I'm writing to no one in particular but if you're reading this then either I won a GP and blew up or you're Jeremy Ball.

Shadowverse is a really popular Japanese ripoff of Hearthstone (this is a joke, don't sue me I'm nearly broke) that got ported to paper earlier in 2022. The paper version is called Shadowverse Evolve. It's only two sets deep so the meta is fresh and constantly evolving, and the card pool is quite shallow.

I won't go too deep into the rules, but it's a Hearthstone (fuck I did it again) style game where players get +1 max play point (PP) every turn which can be spent to deploy Followers to the board or play one-time spells. At the beginning of every turn you increase your Max PP by 1, and restore to max. 

Some spells are "Quick" meaning they can be played at the end of your opponent's turn or when a Follower declares an attack. There are also Amulets, which stay on the board but don't attack/can't be attacked. Followers tap when they attack, and can attack your opponent or tapped enemy Followers. 

There's also a bunch of Followers that can "Evolve" (Shadowverse EVOLVE BABY), which means you pay a cost and take the evolved version from your preconstructed extra deck of 10 cards and place it over the evolved Follower. Kind of like Yu-Gi-Oh's extra deck? It adds a pretty unique aspect to the game and creates deckbuilding challenges as well. 

There are six factions, here's my hot take on all of them:

Dragon: The faction that ramps by using effects that add "Max PP" points to be used from the following turn onwards. Then, their cards get better once they hit a certain Max PP (7?). At the moment this is one of the premier decks of the format, ramping and then stabilising with the Dragon below before dropping huge fucking monsters and board-wipes that require too many resources to deal with.

Nightmare: The faction full of demons and ghosts and stuff like that. Has the coolest art imo, and lends itself to being very aggressive. Its unique faction mechanics are that a lot of cards get bonuses if you've lost life the turn you play them, or if you have a certain number of cards in your Graveyard. Currently the premier aggro deck of the format. Really popular. You can also play it as a Midrange/Control deck but it feels like based on the top tier results that this deck is a few slices short of a loaf.

Bishop: If you want to read from the Gospel of Mark while you remove your opponent's only threat for the 9th turn in a row, before gaining some more life to ensure the games takes the full 25 minutes allotted, then Bishop is for you. At the moment the only way people have worked out how to make this deck work is with a hard permission deck, but I think it's outclassed by the aggressive options.

Rune: Still waiting for your letter from Hogwarts? Grow up. Play Rune instead. Spellchain_X means the effect on a card escalates if you have X or more Spells in your grave. The other half of the faction also cares about Golemancy (is that a word? As in, making a bunch of Golems out of Earth material tokens?), which for some reason has no synergy with the spellchain stuff.

Royal: An unrelenting onslaught of knights and maids (Japan thing I guess) that tutor each other and buff each other. Currently a slightly more midrange version is popular though it started out as the premier aggro deck, only to be royally (ha) put in its place by the faster sexier Nightmare deck.

Elf: Originally described to me in Japanese as "a faction so difficult to pilot that a genuine concern when bringing it to a tournament is being too hungry by the end of it" which sounds a lot better in Japanese. Spoiler alert, I'm a massive nerd so obviously I was immediately interested. The deck's difficulty comes from its faction mechanic "Combo_X" which unlocks certain abilities as a result of having played X cards in the turn (Storm Lite). Combine this trait with a bunch of bounce and etb abilities and getting the sequencing right will have you ordering uber eats while on the train home.

Anyway, my favourite tournament try-harding card in MTG is something like Snapcaster Mage which actually kind-of exists in this game, in the Rune faction, so I went with them to start without really knowing anything. The rest of the blog posts will be tournament reports and my journey playing this game, but hopefully this is enough of a primer for those who can't be bothered translating the rulebook.

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