Faeria.net
Play.faeria.net
Faeria.net/forum

I'm curious if anyone else is playing right now? It's currently in Closed Beta, likely until around June/July next year according to their site. It's in Steam's Greenlight section and has a Kickstarter going as well (a $15 or $20 Kickstarter donation is required to get a Beta key at this point). It's a bit high as a pricetag for a closed beta, but it's worth a look if you enjoy both TCG and TBS games. Notably, it's also a browser-based game in its current form, which means no downloads required.

The game itself is a hexagon-tile turn-based strategy game, with trading card game elements (you have a deck of 40+ cards that determine what units, events (spells), and structures you can build). The map starts out as an empty lake, with each player expanding their territory towards their opponent or towards whirlpools that produce a resource called Faeria.

For a Closed Beta it feels pretty well balanced - as in any TCG there are decks/strategies that dominate the meta (currently blue rush (using fast, cheap, efficient creatures that synergize well) and red structure/burn (heavily defensive while using structures that slowly damage the opponent)) but the degree that these decks stand above others in Faeria is marginal.

I've seen:

control decks, combo, aggro...basically anything you could expect in a traditional TCG has a variant here. There are some noteworthy exceptions, but given that the game only has 250 cards so far, it's understandable to not have graveyard interaction or milling cards right now. With that said, it feels like there are far more than 250 cards in the game right now, and almost everything is useable in some way (there are very few "strictly better" cards).

Card rarity is not necessarily a measure of strength, and the developers are strongly against "pay to win" setups. The highest rarity of cards (Legendary) are not necessarily more powerful than others, and in many cases are simply niche cards that help fill out specific strategies (ie, cards that prevent the morning/day/night clock from rotating). There ARE strong Rare/Legendary cards, but there are also plenty of strong Common/Uncommon/Exceptional. To give an example, my current deck of 40 cards only uses 3 copies of one Rare and 2 of one Legendary (3 is the maximum of any card in your deck).

The developers are pretty involved with the community and actively communicate via their forums, including "design a card" contests, bug reports, balance discussion, etc. Most bug reports (whether deemed an actual bug or working as intended) are answered promptly and courteously.




If anyone is looking to get started in Faeria, my IGN is DownsideUp. I can help you get some of the early commons/uncommons that make a difference in deckbuilding and in general offer advice for deck construction/strategy. The active community right now is fairly small and a large portion of that group are players that have been involved for a while - it needs more new/low level players to keep the game healthy.