With Hearthstone dominating the digital collectible card game scene like some sort of giant card-discarding dragon, it must be daunting trying to compete with Blizzard’s barely limited resources. But I like a lot of what SolForge is trying to do to stand out in the CCG space. The game’s sci-fi setting is interesting and the lane-based system used to battle your AI or human opponents is smart and deep. These things alone probably aren’t going to be enough to distract Murloc fanciers for long, but a new feature being added to the game today might: unlike Hearthstone, SolForge is going to allow its users to share almost any card.
The servers go down around 1pm PST today to apply a patch that will enable the free Imprisoned Heralds update, which includes 60 new cards. (You can read the full notes here.) Once that’s live, the majority of cards which can be purchased using in-game gold will also be shareable. Effectively what that means is you can share each card once with a friend, who will be notified when they next log-in and then be able to add it to their collection. Significantly, you don’t lose your own copy of the card.
The upshot is you’re effectively getting two copies of each card you buy, one for you, and one to send to a pal, which should make it much faster for groups of friends to build a viable collection. Card-trading without losing cards is certainly an interesting idea, and one clearly designed to bolster the game’s audience. It also gives SolForge at least one selling point which Hearthstone doesn’t have. Whether that’s enough time will tell, but I’ll be dipping back in to to check out what else the expansion brings soon.
