Buy Shadowverse Champion's Battle You Cowards
I was born in 1994 so the height of Pokémania was tied up in my youth. I was one of those kids that wanted anything with a Pokémon on it. Pokémon walkie talkies, Pokémon calculators, Pokémon tabletop roleplaying games (I loved you and I do love you and I will always want more of you). Maybe the most popular facet of Pokémon madness, at least where I was from, was found in cards. Everybody, and I do mean everybody, collected the cards. Even if they didn’t care about the show or own a Game Boy, odds are every kid in your class would have at least one Pokémon card hidden away somewhere. They were like a currency. Do somebody a favor, get paid with a card. Actually, now that I think about it, collecting cards like that was probably the most video game like experience of my real life. Well, besides romance dialogs of course.
Card collecting is part of my DNA. I moved from game to game like a crackfiend looking for a new fix. Yu-Gi-Oh!, Magic the Gathering, the fucking Xiaolin Showdown TCG. If it had cards to be collected, I was bound to buy at least one pack. This really came to a head at one point in high school when I started—hold on let me just take a look at the statute of limitations on petty theft… okay cool, we are way past that now—I started shoplifting Magic boosters just to keep up with my friends who were constantly on the meta. This is not the proudest fact of my life but I only stole from Wal-Mart, and they don’t even pay a living wage so fuck ‘em.
That desire to find new cards and opportunities to use them never went away, even as my borderline addiction to actually getting packs faded. There was always something in the back of my brain, deep where the lizards live, that wanted new cards. A new fascination. That’s when, on a dark and stormy night, I came across what looked like a shovelware kids’ game based on a TCG I’d never heard of: Shadowverse Champion’s Battle.
Despite the 60-dollar price tag and all better judgment, I took the plunge. And boy howdy, was it a good one.
Shadowverse Champion’s Battle is an anime-like adaptation of a digital-only TCG called Shadowverse that I guess you can play on your phone if you have a mental illness. Despite that game having its own distinct and diverse lore ala Magic, this game is set in a wholly different fictional world where the card game itself is the most popular thing in the world. The chefs play Shadowverse, the teachers play Shadowverse, I wouldn’t be surprised if the final boss is a Prime Minister and his government-themed deck. Despite this, however, the club specifically dedicated to Shadowverse and the playing of it at your new school? Well, they’re not doing so hot. Even though every student in your school plays Shadowverse and most of them can even be directly challenged for experience and new cards, nobody wants to be in your li’l club. Which puts you in unenviable position of drawing the school council’s ire. You are reminded that clubs need a certain number of members and some kind of demonstrable proof that the club is beneficial or else you’ll be forcefully disbanded.
Simple enough story! Your job is to get a band together and then take on the various tournaments at the local Shadowverse arena (again in the town where the school’s Shadowverse club is under threat of being cut) until you’ve become a Shadowverse Grand Master. Because nothing will prove to the fifteen-year-old girl in charge of enforcing this that you’ve had a good club experience than attaining the highest possible recognized status in a children’s card game.
Shadowverse is utterly mad and that is most of why I love it. At no point does the plot stop being absurd, even once the club is in full swing. Side stories see you investigating local rumors and legend, playing Shadowverse as you do in order to get to the bottom of mysteries. One sees you helping a friend overcome stage fright to become an actual teen idol, part of which involves playing several matches of Shadowverse with her. The most famous entertainment icon in the world happens to live in your town and meets you, while disguised, only to bond over your mutual love of Shadowverse. It is pure insanity and it’s fantastic. Every stretched reason to play a match of this card game is better than the last.
Which would be fine enough on its own, but the game that actually sits at the core of all this—the card battling—is fantastic. Those who have ever once encountered a match of Hearthstone will immediately recognize the basics. Cards require certain resources to play and have special effects that allow you to take advantage of similarly themed cards. Unlike Hearthstone, the resources in Shadowverse are designed to get matches going from the first draw and maintain solid momentum throughout. Even pensive wait-and-see type decks allow players to make some early game moves to establish the foundation of their strategy. There is very little downtime when playing Shadowverse.
Character progression takes advantage of this as well. Aside from the main story and defined side quests, the game’s world is littered with NPCs who can be challenged at will, regardless of your ranking in relation to them or your experience gained. Winning against higher-ranked opponents means bigger rewards to equal the challenge of facing them in the first place. Once you progress a bit through the narrative and unlock more parts of the city to explore, players of end-game rank can be challenged at any point. They’ll wipe the floor with you, but you can try it. And that is something I absolutely love. This game has the freedom of those funky li’l Yu-Gi-Oh! RPGs on the Game Boy Advance but with all the crisp fidelity of… well graphically speaking it still beats out much larger contenders like Pokémon. What disappoints me most is that in being limited to releasing only on Switch, the possibilities of a PC Shadowverse Champion’s Battle will have to live on only in the recesses of my mind.
There are multiple types of deck in Shadowverse, from the life draining and restoring “Bloodcraft” to the minion-focused and spell-flinging “Runecraft.” Each type has its own level that you will increase by playing with a deck of that type. If you main a type like I did with Bloodcraft, you may come up against an opponent whose strategy just counters yours perfectly and requires you to take a minute to consider either building a new deck of the same type with your card collection or trying out a new type altogether. Challenge is the name of the game in Shadowverse and, after the first few hours, matches get really challenging. Before finishing the story, I encountered multiple points where I just had to rethink my deck entirely to continue on or hope I could brute force my way through on lucky draws. The latter is rare enough to make the former feel fulfilling.
While the voice acting and narrative bits are on par with an anime aimed at kids, the core mechanics of Shadowverse Champion’s Battle make it undoubtedly the greatest digital version of a TCG on the market right now. If you, like me, have this caveman part of your brain that requires little bits of cardboard to satisfy, a turn with Shadowverse will not be a wasted one.
Buy it you COWARD. Buy it and enter a world where even the most serious of issues can be solved by a children’s card game.