#wyvern ccg

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Wyvern: Tatzlwurm

[the-bonehoard]

Wyvern CCG

So my second article. Here we go! I know I said my next article would be about Ophidian’s gameplay, but in trying to learn to play I found I actually didn’t know anyone who liked card games enough to try their best to learn this one... Wyvern though. I have things to say about Wyvern.

Wyvern was a CCG initially released in 1995, designed by Mike Fitzgerald and published by US Games Systems Inc. Now I think its safe to say Mike Fitzgerald isn’t exactly a household name in the gaming community, but surprisingly he did work on other games after Wyvern. Most notably a couple games for WOTC and Dragon Hunt (more on that shortly). He also helped design the starter decks for the early Pokemon TCG, which when I found out about I was genuinely in awe a little bit. 

Allow me this small tangent, but this is someone who had a very small impact on all of our childhoods even if it was in an extremely minor way. A starter deck can really impact how you respond to a TCG, so this was obviously a really interesting job for someone to have and how he decided what cards to put in them is something I’d love to find out, or just generally how these things are decided and who actually designs these things.

Anyway, back to the article. US Games Systems Inc were largely a tarot and playing card publisher, and also a publisher of Wizard Trump cards (I’m guessing in the vein of Top Trumps, but I couldn’t tell you exactly how the game plays). And they still are. Wyvern didn’t put them under the same way other TCGs/CCGs buried their publishers. But again, more on that later.

So Wyvern. It was a game about dragons and dragon slayers, with a unique gameplay style I quite enjoyed (more on that in my gameplay article), with art that ranges from “Legitimately good” to “Comically Bad”, which is odd considering all the cards I’ve checked from the Limited Edition were illustrated by the same artist. It also has the coolest card back I’ve ever seen on a trading card. It has a real fantasy tome vibe, with a gold that really pops in person. There’s a reason I made it the icon for this blog. It would probably fit in well among CCGs today if it lasted. Alas, it did not.

Wyvern lasted two years (Ah the two year curse... Check out Kohdok’s Seven deadly Sins of TCGs for more on that), with five total releases; the Premiere Limited Edition, the limited edition, Phoenix, Chameleon and Kingdom. Limited edition largely consisted of Premiere edition reprints and a few added cards, while Phoenix and Chameleon both added 90 new cards each. Kingdom was similar to the limited edition, in that it was reprints from previous sets, but this set also errata’d several cards and fixed certain errors on others.

While I wasn’t able to find any information on Chameleon’s cancellation, my best guess it ended for the same reason so many card games are cancelled, it didn’t make a lot of money. And it didn’t make money because it wasn’t popular. While I do enjoy the game, the current score on BGG is 5.2, which is pretty bad even for a CCG. Besides that, you can generally get boxes or starter decks of Wyvern on ebay for ridiculously cheap prices. I got my box for £30. Thirty. Pounds. That’s almost the same price of buying each individual booster from when it was originally available, and that’s not accounting for inflation. If that’s not a sign that this game wasn’t popular I don’t know what is. 

On a side note, Limited Edition does seem to be the most widely available and from what I can tell Chameleon and Kingdom seem to be a lot harder to track down. I wouldn’t be able to tell you why, but I can tell you that the Premiere edition is almost impossible to track down due to a printing error resulting in a lot of Magic the Gathering cards being printed on Wyvern backs in the premiere edition, resulting in them being extremely rare collectors items now.

So what happened after the game? Well there was one more Wyvern adjacent release. Dragon Hunt.

Dragon Hunt, from what I am able to tell, was a set deck game using Wyvern cards and the Wyvern ruleset, but simplified and more streamlined. The BoardGameGeek rating for this game is a 5.7 so maybe it was slightly better received at the time, but I can guarantee this isn’t an item you need to track down if you can find regular Wyvern product any easier.

So that was Wyvern. Sorry for the odd structure of this one. I might take another pass at the story of Wyvern one day, but for now, that’s the story of a card game that maybe didn’t stand a chance in the flooded CCG market of the 90s, especially with its wide range in art quality and less eye-catching product design.

I’ll see you soon with my gameplay review. 

Until next time friends,

Kay, Keeper of the Bonehoard

[azoriusfilekeeper]

Genie Out of the Bottle: Mahamoti Djinn

I started playing Magic at the tender age of fifteen. Like most teenagers, I was a snotty pain in the tuchus, but I was not yet the know-it-all pain in the tuchus that I am today(okay, yes I was, but I’d like to think that I wasn't as snobbish as I am now). But one thing that has not changed from then to the present day is my desire to soak up and learn things unknown to me.

Not only did Magic expand my way of thinking by showing me a new game that had a new way of playing(it engrossed me into the world of CCG’s: from Vampire to Spellfire, Wyvern, Mythos and even the SimCity CCG), but also fully immersed me into the world of fantasy that I had tiptoed around up until that point. “Orc,” “Goblin” and “Merfolk” became regular parts of my vocabulary. I started reading fantasy books that hadn't really interested me before. I even started peaking into D&D sourcebooks, wanting to soak up as much of that knowledge as I could.

But it didn't stop there. Early on, Magic cards would have snippets of literature as their flavor text. It is proof of Richard Garfield’s intelligence, as well as of the many people who got a hold of the game at Wizards, that you could read the names, Chaucer, Tennyson and Shakespeare on a Magic card. It is my sincere hope that someone read a piece of flavor text from an author unknown to them which led them to discover the works of that author and expanded their love of reading.

And the reason I say this is because I fell down a rabbit hole with a story introduced to me by Magic cards and flavor text. I had heard about The Arabian Nights, and of course, seen Aladdin(I also played a piece of “Scherazade” for cello in eighth grade); I was vaguely aware of the stories, but had never read any of them. But suddenly I had Ali Baba, the Bird Maiden, City of Brass; all these cards exciting my Vorthos and referencing a classic piece of literature. I went out and purchased said book, devouring the stories. And my Vorthos self ended up focusing on beings referenced in some of these stories.

And being a blue player, I had one already in my possession. Sure, it was a mid to late game card; but if you still were alive and had enough life left to make it, casting a 5/6 flyer was a pretty good sign that your opponent was in trouble.

Yes, I am talking about the Mahamoti Djinn.

We know them more commonly as “genies,” but they are referred to as djinns in more recent translations. These creatures are spirits; neither good, like angels, but neither bad, like demons. They are powerful yet independent, as capable of enslaving humans as much as they could be called to serve a master. And they can represent many different elements, which is why they come in all five colors in Magic.

The bad thing is that, in Magic, they mostly come from the plane of Dominaria, so djinns are few and far between in card sets from other planes. I can only hope that Magic will do for djinns(and ifrits) what they have recently done for elementals in the game. Maybe a visit to the plane of Rabiah, where the Arabian Nights expansion was set, is in order.

Thank you for coming to read my article. It is greatly appreciated. I will see you all again next week. Until then, may Svyelun and her tides favor you.

[madeintahite]

Hype Train: Age of Rivals: Kongregate to Steam!

http://ultrafiles.co/cocgames Okay, so I’ve spent almost two decades of my life playing CCGs of all sorts. From Wyvern, to Star Wars, Magic to DBZ. But when I saw that Age of Rivals was part card game, part board game, I was pretty excited. I just figured I’d go in and start wrecking everything, because I’ve played […] http://www.onrpg.com/news/articles/hype-train-age-of-rivals-kongregate-to-steam/

[totally-real-magic-cards]

The Intro Post --or-- High School Fossils

Hello, fellow Magic: the Gathering Tumblr Friends!

Ever since I first held Paul Dutton’s copy of Artifact Possession at a Quiz Bowl event, Magic has been just encoded into my DNA. It was not my first CCG-- that honor belongs to US Games’s Wyvern-- which means it was also not my first try at writing my own cards. A couple of my Wyvern ideas ended up in this set too.

High School Fossils was little-me’s own attempt at writing fanfic for Magic. The story is that of the mad king Nabrond. In his quest for ultimate power, Nabrond spends his kingdom’s gold to construct a machine that will harness all the mana of the plane directly into him. He cannot stand this and becomes, essentially, mana itself. The process also awakens the plane’s sleeping dead, introducing-- wait for it-- dinosaurs, you guys.

That’s right. I like to think I predicted Karona AND Ixalan in 1996-1998. WOTC can start sending those checks any day now.

What follows isn’t...good. It’s not. It’s the scribblings of a 16-18-year-old nerd. After years seeking my own kind, it took Rich Kramer bursting thru the door of my LGS, cracking a pack of Mirage to find that group (Kramer proceeded to ooh and aahh about...Burning Palm Efreet). 

Back then, the color pie wasn’t a thing, and the internet was barely a thing-- and only at school! In that soup, it only stands to reason that a kid who started playing around Homelands would be able to write cards better than Richard Garfield and Peter Adkinson. I had a three-year subscription to InQuest for God’s sake! I knew what I was doing.

42-year-old me will be mercilessly mining nuggets from dirt here, rewriting, and attempting to balance this crap. I’m mean to myself so you don’t have to be :-D 

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Wyvern: Gargouille

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PK Cards: Wyvern

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Wyvern: Heatwave

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Wyvern: Knowledge