Twitch Prime convinced me to check out Eternal, a fun CCD
Because I don’t currently have any games to play (this is a lie, I have a zillion games I should be playing), I decided to spend a couple of hours on Sunday morning checking out Eternal, the collectible card game from Dire Wolf Digital. I’m a sucker for a good CCD, and I have played Plant vs. Zombies Heroes to the point where my deck is rarely defeated, so it is time for a new game.
Dire Wolf Digital is the company that recently took over Elder Scrolls Legends after Bethesda…uh…shifted ESL from its original developer. Twitch Prime has a pretty sweet giveaway for Eternal live for the next couple of weeks. When you link your Eternal account with your Twitch account, they donk you over the head with 35 card packs (which seems like a lot). Drawn in by the siren song of free stuff (and the fact that I could share an account across my PC, my iPad and my Android phone), I downloaded Eternal to see what was going on there.
I was pretty happy with what I found. Eternal starts out with a set of tutorial rounds that use a gobbledygook story line to introduce the game’s various mechanics. The layout is clean, and the flow of the game is easy to wrap your head around after a couple of games. The cards are plentiful, and have a lot of cool powers to mix around and explore. While a lot of these card functions will be quickly familiar to players of Hearthstone and ESL (spells, weapons, combos, etc), there are a few interesting wrinkles.
The most obvious change is the need to play “power” cards to increase your power each turn. Where most games gradually ramp up players’ ability points automatically each turn (allowing more powerful and higher cost cards to come into play), in Eternal players must have “power” cards in their hand and play them at the beginning of each turn. No cards = no power increase, which can leave players scrambling to put together a decent strategy with lower cost cards.
There are five different starting decks, each of which has their own strengths and weaknesses. The way the game walks players through each of the starting decks reminded me a lot of the way Gwent introduces different deck mechanics, giving you a taste of each deck type in order to allow you to choose a starting deck that matches your play style. I settled on the “Time” deck, and had some moderate success.
After the tutorial, the game guides you through your first “Gauntlet”, which is an enjoyable set of seven matches played against an AI opponent. This is a great way to test out your deck and start to hone in on some of the mechanics and combos at play. After the Gauntlet, players are free to jump in and get clobbered by human opponents.
I had a pretty good morning futzing around with Eternal, and I am definitely going to download the game to my phone to become my new lunchtime “don’t talk to me” game. It is going to take a while for me to sort through all of the cards that I got in those 35 packs (seriously, it’s a lot of cards to get all at once), so that should keep me busy for a few weeks.
Twitch Prime continues to a be a source of gaming goodness. I know a lot of folks were irritated recently when Twitch Prime announced the elimination of ad-free stream viewing, but that didn’t bother me too much. With all of the other goodies they regularly toss at gamers, Twitch Prime is one of my favorite Amazon Prime bonuses. If you have never checked it out (and you have Prime), you should do yourself a favor and start paying attention. It’s like getting a monthly Humble Bundle, but you don’t have to pay anything extra for it. Pretty cool stuff.
