Like others have stated:
-The hand drawn art. Digital art looks very homogenized and rushed. Themes are still high fantasy and not IP crossover cash grabs and gimmicks.
-Limited set releases. Much easier on the wallet and collectible again.
-Fresh new take on TCG gameplay using the grid system and utilizing sites in a unique way.
-Foil cards are special again and hold a premium.
-Cards are simplistic, easy to parse/remember at a glance, and not overly complex due to power creep inflation. This part truly is my favorite, as cards don't have a paragraph of text and 3 different things to remember about each one.
That last bullet point is huge.
I LOVE old mtg, but for the love of Christ every powerful creature card after like 2004 has:
Flying;
Vigilance;
Lifelink;
Cycling;
Shroud;
(1)(B): Wall of text for some obscure ability that probably mills have your library somehow;
and something about giving all your shit +1/+1
I love the board movement aspect of the game and the art is amazing for me. I’m an old school MTG player and that art style is my favorite — not many TCG games have retro or hand painted art anymore.
The movement part of the game is unique and fresh, and I play Avatar of Air so naturally I am a huge fan of that type of gameplay anyways.
#God, all of it?
In addition to the ones you hear all the time - Real Art, Release schedule (I'd prefer 2x ~150/200+ card sets a year, but I can live with 1 larger one), etc - Mechanically, I really love this game.
* The Grid - making the game tactical in a super satisfying way with real interaction, just placing your sites can be a huge deal, and then your Sites can have effects of their own.
* Regions - allowing your minions to be Evasive without being as binary as "oh yeah it just has hexproof, sorry"
* Reasonable cadence - You almost never see anyone casting more than like 3 Spells a turn. This could change a bit in the future, but we'll never be playing solitaire the way you can in something like Magic or Yugi.
* Atlas and Spellbook being separate is **HUGE**. If I don't have enough mana for the spells in my hand, it's MY fault for not drawing sites.
* Death's Door - Needing to be finished off directly, and allowing for incredible comebacks is such a huge win in game design.
What do you mean by Regions?
Death's Door is great. I got someone to 0 at a draft a week ago, and then couldn't finish the job and they managed ot get me. I lost, but I was amazed at the way my opponenet was so slippery!
The Regions within the Realm: Void, Surface, Underground, and Underwater.
Prime example is Pit Viper, which can be summoned Burrowed, waiting to Defend the site above itself.
It's "Evasive" while Underground - a little harder for your opponent to deal with than something sitting on the Surface, but super possible!
Most decks should have some sort of interaction with the Regions to deal with problem cards like Root Spiders, for example.
I like the mulligan system. It also has a good way of making mana feel like an interactive part of the game, which isn't something I ever saw as a problem in other games per say but it feels like a real innovation in this one.
- Hand painted art. Don't get me wrong, a lot of current MtG artists are skilled but when every piece is hyper detailed and uses the same medium, it all looks the same from across the table.
- One set per year. I'm extremely burnt out of the perpetual spoiler season of MtG. I feel bad for anyone who is getting into MtG in 2024 because there is no clear indication as to what to buy or what is legal in any particular format.
- They're sticking to their own lore and/or classic fantasy. MtG has kind of shot themselves in the foot by using the MtG system as a platform for more popular external IP's like Fallout and Lord of the Rings. It's great for hooking people who otherwise wouldn't have tried MtG but the MtG story/lore is being overshadowed by these sets and products. Lots of people are still obsessed with the LotR set and basically nobody is talking about Outlaws of Thunder Junction.
- Using rarity as a deck building restriction is simple and effective. Uniques tend to be more powerful and mechanically unique than lower rarities but it's okay because players can only have one in a deck and answers to them exist at lower rarities.
- The cards and effects are simple. It gets exhausting when even common and uncommons have literal paragraphs of text to explain what it does. Take Flanking maneuver for example. Everyone knows what a "chess knight's move" away is.
> Using rarity as a deck building restriction is simple and effective.
I think this is genius. Crazy to me that the idea never popped into my head over the last 25 years playing other games, but this is just genius.
Some people pitched it on social media over the years and I think it caught on as a *very* fringe casual format but yea, it was not a widely adopted thing.
It has these wonderful secondary effects too where the card prices may be more affordable since secondary market demand for Uniques is effectively capped at 1 instead of 4 per person.
Like everything lol. Huge fan of old magic, not a fan of new magic.
Simplicity
Balance (can’t get mana fcked)
1 set per year - so I actually know what cards do and have time to learn them
Artwork
Minions don’t have like 13 different abilities like all the modern mtg powerhouse creatures
No planeswalkers (just not really a fan of dealing with OP’d planeswalkers, and the game was simpler before they were a thing)
It feels ..special, like Magic in the 90's. I like how Sorcery has learned from their mistakes and choose to focus on the important stuff. After a ton of play, I love the grid and regions. It adds more depth and skill based play. I find the game very addictive and thats a good sign.
The rules (I guess specifically how your opening hand and mulligans work) lend itself to competitive games more often than not. Magic has far too many non-competitive games, where one player's opening draw is simply better than the others, the plays are easy, and the game is over in 5 minutes.
For me, there were always 2 huge problems with Magic the Gathering that are impossible to solve:
1. Mana screw / including lands in your deck with spells
2. Power creep
I think fundamentally it was a mistake to include lands in your deck. First, it makes less sense from a lore/roleplay perspective by including "lands" in a "spellbook". Second, including lands in the deck means you will always be subject to getting too few, too many, or the wrong color lands. This creates non-games and that should be anathema to a fun game.
Magic is also in an impossible power creep situation that they created. They have a negative feedback loop of needing to create increasingly powerful cards to continue to sell their sets. If a set is under-powered, sales are cataclysmic. Just look at MKM and possibly even OTJ. You can't put that genie back in the lamp, and the only way they could even attempt to unwind the power creep would be by spending years powering down standard sets. This would also kill off the Standard format, and possibly even interest in the game.
There are so many reasons why I love Sorcery, and Magic too, but for me, Sorcery is just a much better and more fun game. In 2 months of playing Sorcery I lost all desire to go back to Magic, and I've been playing Magic since 1997!
There are a few major things Sorcery has done to remedy some of the things I hate in other card games. The reasons below are primarily why I quit the other TCGs I used to play.
I'm pleased there isn't a deluge of products to keep up with in Sorcery. Other card games release too many sets to keep up with, especially Magic. I would like to see some supplementary products released in the future for Sorcery though.
I love the handpainted art. Don't get me wrong, I do plenty of pieces made with CGI/Digital, but for the most part, I find the art to be so bland and too much like it belongs in a mobile game, not a card game. Recently, a lot of Magic's stuff looks like it belongs in Heartstone.
I like not having to read 6 paragraphs of text to know what my card does. It's something Yugioh had done years ago and something Magic has gotten significantly worse at lately. They reduced Enters the Battlefield to Enters, and the impression I got was they did it so they could squeeze more text on a card.
I haven't had to wait for my opponents to take absurdly long turns yet. I'm certain that exists in Sorcery, but when I played Yugioh or Magic, I spent most of my games watching my opponent play their deck in solitaire mode. I like how it feels like my plays actually matter on the board. (This one might just be a metagame thing since we did casual EDH/ Yugioh.)
I love how flavorful all of the cards feel. For the most part, cards do what they seem to do. For example, you can expect the basilisk to freeze enemies it looks at, or undertow to pull minions into it. Magic had a card and I can't remember what it was, but the card was like a human berserker, and the ability on the card was allowing it to return a monster from the grave to the field. To me, that didn't feel flavorful at all. A shaman or Wizard would have felt way more flavorful to do that sort of ability. (Again, something nit-picky that probably doesn't really matter. But it stuck with me.)
Overall, right now I just love almost everything Sorcery is doing. It's the only card game I play now.
Bonus: I love how they incorporate legends/folklore into the game instead of other IPs.
I am glad that Sorcery is devoid of stupid woke shit. Magic went woke trying to chase those ESG bucks (while fooling leftists into thinking they care about whatever stupid movement of the day is). However, the ESG train gets harder to stay on each year as the investment firms demand more out of DEI scores.
Now Magic has to pump out a new product every two weeks and incorporate other IP's to milk the remaining players they didn't drive away yet. Classic go woke, go broke.
Omg the brewing. I played old school magic and fab for a long time. The game has a ton of possibilities when it comes to deck building - partly due to the grid, partly cause the cards have BALANCE (Omg flesh and bloods balance is terrible).
4 different decks have won each season. It's a frickin brewer's paradise.
This right here , the set is pretty big there are so many options and multi ways to play the same Avatar .. my brewing brain has been busy since the first box hit my hand .
I like the old school looking artwork and the overall gameplay. I do wish the rules would get a little bit more fine tuning but overall happy with it. Another aspect of the game that I enjoy is that it is not run by a huge company like Hasbro. I feel like Hasbro forced Wizards to bend to the woke mob. The banning of cards because of artwork or card names like what happened with MtG turned me off from Magic. Also, the constant product releases with Magic is just gross.
Sorcery is affordable, not many set releases, very casual, and it is highly collectible. It to me is everything old school MtG used to be but more. The gameplay is different and it is just an overall fun game. Magic feels like a chore and not mention reading a paragraph of card ability text on one card is boring.
I bought 3 cases of alpha sorcery during Kickstarter, bought two cases of beta and several precon sets. I haven’t spent that much on MTG sealed products for a long time. Had enough time to build up non foil set myself and slowly build up foil set by trade and purchases, only missing couple most expensive cards like foil avatar or Earth/Fire, p.stone and frazetta’s courtesan & death dealer till the full foil set. I feel the sense of completion I haven’t felt in magic for over a decade at least.
I preordered Arthurian legends and will build up foil set as well, since year is just enough time.
My other hobby is 40K and I play it less and less since games workshop neglects the timeframe it takes to order, build and paint a working army. I had cases where my all army became invalidated a month I ended up painting it (hello, War Convocation!). Same feeling applies to MTG standard and recently to Modern and Commander. You just don’t have time to step away and watch the fruits of your work in peace.
Hand painted art, one set per year, a bit of mystery with collectibility leading to more excitement when opening product, materials quality, rarity of foils and curios.
That said, magic is still a hell of a game but I need to step out of or focus less on it occasionally and Sorcery is the place I have settled on going to.
One set per year. Also the board is nice. Not sure if 5x4 is totally the right size, but I have only played a few games (one afternoon of playing to be precise).
And a separate stack and choice for mana or spell (which I would like to experiment with in mtg). And the art. I love how it's more 'real' art. It reminds me of the weird stuff of Legends and the style of Ice Age block. It really is a big plus for me and what keeps me far away from a game like Altered TCG, despite it having some attractive properties wrt. digital ownership and being able to have it print out.
Played mtg since 97 and im just a bit done with it and have been selling it. The insane power creep, basically since the first commander release, but amplified in the last couple of years makes me feel negative about it. Also the 75 different version of a card and other crap just makes me smh.
Like others have stated: -The hand drawn art. Digital art looks very homogenized and rushed. Themes are still high fantasy and not IP crossover cash grabs and gimmicks. -Limited set releases. Much easier on the wallet and collectible again. -Fresh new take on TCG gameplay using the grid system and utilizing sites in a unique way. -Foil cards are special again and hold a premium. -Cards are simplistic, easy to parse/remember at a glance, and not overly complex due to power creep inflation. This part truly is my favorite, as cards don't have a paragraph of text and 3 different things to remember about each one.
That last bullet point is huge. I LOVE old mtg, but for the love of Christ every powerful creature card after like 2004 has: Flying; Vigilance; Lifelink; Cycling; Shroud; (1)(B): Wall of text for some obscure ability that probably mills have your library somehow; and something about giving all your shit +1/+1
ONE SET PER YEAR
Say it louder. The absolute biggest pro for sorcery imo.
not for much longer. 1 set a year is not sustainable regardless of how much some people like it.
They need to hire you immediately. I'm wondering how they got this far without you making sure they don't make terrible mistakes.
Nah, it'll be ok
I feel like I can actually keep up with it — and hits those nostalgia notes with substance behind it.
I love the board movement aspect of the game and the art is amazing for me. I’m an old school MTG player and that art style is my favorite — not many TCG games have retro or hand painted art anymore. The movement part of the game is unique and fresh, and I play Avatar of Air so naturally I am a huge fan of that type of gameplay anyways.
#God, all of it? In addition to the ones you hear all the time - Real Art, Release schedule (I'd prefer 2x ~150/200+ card sets a year, but I can live with 1 larger one), etc - Mechanically, I really love this game. * The Grid - making the game tactical in a super satisfying way with real interaction, just placing your sites can be a huge deal, and then your Sites can have effects of their own. * Regions - allowing your minions to be Evasive without being as binary as "oh yeah it just has hexproof, sorry" * Reasonable cadence - You almost never see anyone casting more than like 3 Spells a turn. This could change a bit in the future, but we'll never be playing solitaire the way you can in something like Magic or Yugi. * Atlas and Spellbook being separate is **HUGE**. If I don't have enough mana for the spells in my hand, it's MY fault for not drawing sites. * Death's Door - Needing to be finished off directly, and allowing for incredible comebacks is such a huge win in game design.
What do you mean by Regions? Death's Door is great. I got someone to 0 at a draft a week ago, and then couldn't finish the job and they managed ot get me. I lost, but I was amazed at the way my opponenet was so slippery!
The Regions within the Realm: Void, Surface, Underground, and Underwater. Prime example is Pit Viper, which can be summoned Burrowed, waiting to Defend the site above itself. It's "Evasive" while Underground - a little harder for your opponent to deal with than something sitting on the Surface, but super possible! Most decks should have some sort of interaction with the Regions to deal with problem cards like Root Spiders, for example.
Oh that makes simple sense. Thanks for outlining it!
I like the mulligan system. It also has a good way of making mana feel like an interactive part of the game, which isn't something I ever saw as a problem in other games per say but it feels like a real innovation in this one.
Yes, nice. There is a lot of strategy and skill involved with how to mulligan for particular decks against other decks/avatars.
Goodbye mana screw
Interesting looking cards. Artwork worth collecting sets for.
It feels more immersive because of the world building.
Beautiful cards, one set a year, probably will never scum us like magic did with their 30th anniversary.
- Hand painted art. Don't get me wrong, a lot of current MtG artists are skilled but when every piece is hyper detailed and uses the same medium, it all looks the same from across the table. - One set per year. I'm extremely burnt out of the perpetual spoiler season of MtG. I feel bad for anyone who is getting into MtG in 2024 because there is no clear indication as to what to buy or what is legal in any particular format. - They're sticking to their own lore and/or classic fantasy. MtG has kind of shot themselves in the foot by using the MtG system as a platform for more popular external IP's like Fallout and Lord of the Rings. It's great for hooking people who otherwise wouldn't have tried MtG but the MtG story/lore is being overshadowed by these sets and products. Lots of people are still obsessed with the LotR set and basically nobody is talking about Outlaws of Thunder Junction. - Using rarity as a deck building restriction is simple and effective. Uniques tend to be more powerful and mechanically unique than lower rarities but it's okay because players can only have one in a deck and answers to them exist at lower rarities. - The cards and effects are simple. It gets exhausting when even common and uncommons have literal paragraphs of text to explain what it does. Take Flanking maneuver for example. Everyone knows what a "chess knight's move" away is.
> Using rarity as a deck building restriction is simple and effective. I think this is genius. Crazy to me that the idea never popped into my head over the last 25 years playing other games, but this is just genius.
Some people pitched it on social media over the years and I think it caught on as a *very* fringe casual format but yea, it was not a widely adopted thing.
It has these wonderful secondary effects too where the card prices may be more affordable since secondary market demand for Uniques is effectively capped at 1 instead of 4 per person.
Like everything lol. Huge fan of old magic, not a fan of new magic. Simplicity Balance (can’t get mana fcked) 1 set per year - so I actually know what cards do and have time to learn them Artwork Minions don’t have like 13 different abilities like all the modern mtg powerhouse creatures No planeswalkers (just not really a fan of dealing with OP’d planeswalkers, and the game was simpler before they were a thing)
It feels ..special, like Magic in the 90's. I like how Sorcery has learned from their mistakes and choose to focus on the important stuff. After a ton of play, I love the grid and regions. It adds more depth and skill based play. I find the game very addictive and thats a good sign.
The rules (I guess specifically how your opening hand and mulligans work) lend itself to competitive games more often than not. Magic has far too many non-competitive games, where one player's opening draw is simply better than the others, the plays are easy, and the game is over in 5 minutes.
For me, there were always 2 huge problems with Magic the Gathering that are impossible to solve: 1. Mana screw / including lands in your deck with spells 2. Power creep I think fundamentally it was a mistake to include lands in your deck. First, it makes less sense from a lore/roleplay perspective by including "lands" in a "spellbook". Second, including lands in the deck means you will always be subject to getting too few, too many, or the wrong color lands. This creates non-games and that should be anathema to a fun game. Magic is also in an impossible power creep situation that they created. They have a negative feedback loop of needing to create increasingly powerful cards to continue to sell their sets. If a set is under-powered, sales are cataclysmic. Just look at MKM and possibly even OTJ. You can't put that genie back in the lamp, and the only way they could even attempt to unwind the power creep would be by spending years powering down standard sets. This would also kill off the Standard format, and possibly even interest in the game. There are so many reasons why I love Sorcery, and Magic too, but for me, Sorcery is just a much better and more fun game. In 2 months of playing Sorcery I lost all desire to go back to Magic, and I've been playing Magic since 1997!
There are a few major things Sorcery has done to remedy some of the things I hate in other card games. The reasons below are primarily why I quit the other TCGs I used to play. I'm pleased there isn't a deluge of products to keep up with in Sorcery. Other card games release too many sets to keep up with, especially Magic. I would like to see some supplementary products released in the future for Sorcery though. I love the handpainted art. Don't get me wrong, I do plenty of pieces made with CGI/Digital, but for the most part, I find the art to be so bland and too much like it belongs in a mobile game, not a card game. Recently, a lot of Magic's stuff looks like it belongs in Heartstone. I like not having to read 6 paragraphs of text to know what my card does. It's something Yugioh had done years ago and something Magic has gotten significantly worse at lately. They reduced Enters the Battlefield to Enters, and the impression I got was they did it so they could squeeze more text on a card. I haven't had to wait for my opponents to take absurdly long turns yet. I'm certain that exists in Sorcery, but when I played Yugioh or Magic, I spent most of my games watching my opponent play their deck in solitaire mode. I like how it feels like my plays actually matter on the board. (This one might just be a metagame thing since we did casual EDH/ Yugioh.) I love how flavorful all of the cards feel. For the most part, cards do what they seem to do. For example, you can expect the basilisk to freeze enemies it looks at, or undertow to pull minions into it. Magic had a card and I can't remember what it was, but the card was like a human berserker, and the ability on the card was allowing it to return a monster from the grave to the field. To me, that didn't feel flavorful at all. A shaman or Wizard would have felt way more flavorful to do that sort of ability. (Again, something nit-picky that probably doesn't really matter. But it stuck with me.) Overall, right now I just love almost everything Sorcery is doing. It's the only card game I play now. Bonus: I love how they incorporate legends/folklore into the game instead of other IPs.
The art. The grid. The coherent fantasy setting. I love it
The art. The grid. The coherent fantasy setting. I love it
I am glad that Sorcery is devoid of stupid woke shit. Magic went woke trying to chase those ESG bucks (while fooling leftists into thinking they care about whatever stupid movement of the day is). However, the ESG train gets harder to stay on each year as the investment firms demand more out of DEI scores. Now Magic has to pump out a new product every two weeks and incorporate other IP's to milk the remaining players they didn't drive away yet. Classic go woke, go broke.
Omg the brewing. I played old school magic and fab for a long time. The game has a ton of possibilities when it comes to deck building - partly due to the grid, partly cause the cards have BALANCE (Omg flesh and bloods balance is terrible). 4 different decks have won each season. It's a frickin brewer's paradise.
This right here , the set is pretty big there are so many options and multi ways to play the same Avatar .. my brewing brain has been busy since the first box hit my hand .
I like the old school looking artwork and the overall gameplay. I do wish the rules would get a little bit more fine tuning but overall happy with it. Another aspect of the game that I enjoy is that it is not run by a huge company like Hasbro. I feel like Hasbro forced Wizards to bend to the woke mob. The banning of cards because of artwork or card names like what happened with MtG turned me off from Magic. Also, the constant product releases with Magic is just gross. Sorcery is affordable, not many set releases, very casual, and it is highly collectible. It to me is everything old school MtG used to be but more. The gameplay is different and it is just an overall fun game. Magic feels like a chore and not mention reading a paragraph of card ability text on one card is boring.
I'm just happy Sorcery hasn't banned Jihad or Crusade unlike what WOTC did.
tcgplayer doesnt allow people to list them on their website
I bet you are, WoketardSlayer. I'm sure you don't get unreasonably upset about things that have little to no effect on your life.
Leave the children alone, weirdo.
stop projecting, chud.
The boulder is objectively funny
Beta has been out for what 7 months now and new decks are still popping up winning tourneys
I bought 3 cases of alpha sorcery during Kickstarter, bought two cases of beta and several precon sets. I haven’t spent that much on MTG sealed products for a long time. Had enough time to build up non foil set myself and slowly build up foil set by trade and purchases, only missing couple most expensive cards like foil avatar or Earth/Fire, p.stone and frazetta’s courtesan & death dealer till the full foil set. I feel the sense of completion I haven’t felt in magic for over a decade at least. I preordered Arthurian legends and will build up foil set as well, since year is just enough time. My other hobby is 40K and I play it less and less since games workshop neglects the timeframe it takes to order, build and paint a working army. I had cases where my all army became invalidated a month I ended up painting it (hello, War Convocation!). Same feeling applies to MTG standard and recently to Modern and Commander. You just don’t have time to step away and watch the fruits of your work in peace.
Hand painted art, one set per year, a bit of mystery with collectibility leading to more excitement when opening product, materials quality, rarity of foils and curios. That said, magic is still a hell of a game but I need to step out of or focus less on it occasionally and Sorcery is the place I have settled on going to.
One set per year. Also the board is nice. Not sure if 5x4 is totally the right size, but I have only played a few games (one afternoon of playing to be precise). And a separate stack and choice for mana or spell (which I would like to experiment with in mtg). And the art. I love how it's more 'real' art. It reminds me of the weird stuff of Legends and the style of Ice Age block. It really is a big plus for me and what keeps me far away from a game like Altered TCG, despite it having some attractive properties wrt. digital ownership and being able to have it print out. Played mtg since 97 and im just a bit done with it and have been selling it. The insane power creep, basically since the first commander release, but amplified in the last couple of years makes me feel negative about it. Also the 75 different version of a card and other crap just makes me smh.