Eternal Card Game

I've played Magic on and off my whole life and spent at least 1000 hours playing Hearthstone. I had MTGO since the very beginning, and Hearthstone since late 2013 near the end of the open beta. Eternal is the best online card game I've ever played. It combines the best aspects of Magic's strategic depth and Hearthstone's fast-paced accessibility while avoiding their flaws. F2P Magic will always be expensive because it's a tradable CCG with a reserve list of cards that can't be reprinted and expensive booster packs. Most cards lose tons of value when they rotate out of standard. MTGO is less expensive and more liquid than physical cards, but still expensive. Recently, Wizards have added features similar to other digital CCGs like treasure chests. Hearthstone is "F2P" in name only. New players need to spend lots of money or time to earn a viable deck. Otherwise, enjoy scraping out wins with a crappy pile at rank 17. Rewards for winning games are meager. You can get big payoffs in Arena (...

[h1]Overall Score: 8.5 / 10[/h1] [table] [tr][th]Quality[/th][th] 8.7/10[/th][th]High quality for a F2P-CCG[/th][/tr] [tr][td][/td] [td][/td][td][/td][/tr] [tr][td][i]Performance[/i][/td][td]9/10[/td][td][i]Great performance overall, but crashed once in ~70h[/i][/td][/tr] [tr][td][i]Utility[/i][/td][td] 8/10[/td][td][i]Requires internet connection & 3rd party account[/i][/td][/tr] [tr][td][i]Controls[/i][/td][td] 9/10[/td][td][i]Good controls with kb+m; Weird pad controls[/i][/td][/tr] [tr][td][/td] [td][/td][td][/td][/tr] [tr][th]Gameplay[/th][th] 9/10[/th][th]A nice MtG clone with some unique ideas[/th][/tr] [tr][td][/td][td][/td][td][/td][/tr] [tr][td][i]Challenge[/i][/td][td]10/10[/td][td][i]Good AI; Ranked¹ & Draft with leagues; Even draft vs AI, yay! [/i][/td][/tr] [tr][td][i]Content[/i][/td][td]10/10[/td][td][i]Big card pool and easily 30h+ free single player fun; No p2w![/i][/td][/tr] [tr][td][i]Diversity[/i][/td][td] 8/10[/td][td][i]Tons of possible decks and 5 different gam...

Eternal Card Game initially comes across as being quite a solid redo of Magic the Gathering. It has some very interesting mechanics that build upon previous concepts from other card games, and has made some effort to reduce the common issue of variance. Eternal uses a number of mechanics seen in MtG and hearthstone (such as trample, flying, death-touch etc), as well as a very similar mana system and turn structure. Eternal moves on from there though with a slightly different take on hearthstones weapon system, and some interesting mechanics that make good use of the digital format. Unfortunately I cannot recommend this game, and instead recommend 'Magic Duels' instead. There are some flaws that hinder Eternals current potential, and 'Magic Duels' is simply a more balanced and newcomer-friendly environment. To explain, I will list the pros and cons below. Pros: - Eternal makes good use of being a digital card game. There are a number of mechanics and unique card abilities (namely 'ech...

Quick Review: Great Magic: The Gathering inspired digital CCG. Amazing UI, loads of features, brilliant draft system, and some truly awesome cards. But... as an MTG derivative, you have to be able to accept mana flooding/screwing. Long Review: I wanted to put some good hours into the game before reviewing (18 as of this post). I've completed the Tutorial Quests, four Forges, one draft and a ton of ranked games. Oh, and I've been playing Magic since Arabian Nights and Hearthstone since Beta. To start, this is NOT Hearthstone. It is Magic the Gathering. Everything you know from Hearthstone doesn't apply here. You have to play "power" cards (mana/lands), so you need to know how to balance a deck. The system will try to do it for you and they start you out with a full set of 40 "dual stones", but to be good at the game you'll need to understand how to get the proper ratios. You also don't choose how you attack. You choose WHO attacks, and the opponent chooses blocks. Once you accept th...

The power flooding/screwing, how you mulligan, and how inconsistent your decks play ruins what is a competent online CCG. Magic the Gathering is already an exercise in frustration with its 60 card decks. Eternal has 75 card decks -- Why?! This just increases the odds of drawing a streak of cards you can't utilize resulting in many games where you literally lose the game without playing a unit. This, combined with the game's harsh mulliganing where you can only mulligan once to which you have to dump your whole hand, results in a crap shoot that often ends up with these wildly polarizing hands. If you somehow manage to make a game more inconsistent than Magic the Gathering, then you're doing something very wrong. It's really fun when you get a reasonably balanced hand, but too often your options are to draw power for 10 turns in a row or not draw power for 10 turns in a row.

A UI as good as Hearthstone with cards and a resource system more similar to MTG and a surprisingly competent AI makes going through the long tutorial worth it. As of writing this review game is very generous giving out commons and uncommons for simply completing quests and building up enough f2p coins to draft doesn't take very long either. I would say Eternal has the most consumer friendly model on the CCG market.

I don't normally write reviews but I feel I have to for this game. It has everything, you would think to be a great CCG: great collection of cards, fast swashbuckling gameplay and opportunity to make meaningful combos, all of it uttery ruined by the terrible RNG that is the power system. For so many games, turn after turn after turn, you get stuck either with loads of units you can't play because RNG has screwed you of power, or the reverse - all the power in the world but no units to play. I enjoyed this game greatly for the couple of months I spent with it, but the power issues and pitiful mulligan system have worn me down to the stage where I can no longer bear to even have it on my Hard Drive. I'm uninstalling. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

This game got everything Hstone got right wrong but this game also got everything Hstone got wrong right you won't understand unless you tried it. good game!

I'm an ex MTG player. I played hearthstone for quite some time before moving onto other ccgs and I'm currently enjoying shadowverse. This review may come off extremely critical, but with so many f2p online ccgs to choose from, I feel it's warrented. Your power (resource) cards are drawn from the same pile as your other cards. This leads to flooding and not getting enough power far too frequently. Since this is a digital card game there are several better options and there is no need for this serious problem to occur. If they wanted to have players draw the power cards, they could have just made two seperate draw piles for resources and non-power cards and let the player choose what they want to draw to avoid this. Going first has a large advantage. The only thing you get for going second is you draw first (firs player skips their initial draw). That's not enough to make up for being the player that's constantly reacting to your opponent's plays since you're basically a turn be...

Fun game overall. I'd call it a deeper Hearthstone for lack of anything more original. The one major flaw, and it's a big one, is what prevents me from recommending this game. The resource system is terrible and incredibly binary. Way too many times I've had games where I've been mana screwed or flooded. Not an insurmountable fix to this either, but until that's done I don't think I'd care to throw any money at the game. Here's hoping that the devs use the EA time wisely.