Recent reviews by _beeks

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I spend multiple hours a day, every day, thinking about how to build custom draft formats (aka cubes) of Magic: The Gathering. I've put hundreds of hours into roguelike deckbuilders, including Slay the Spire, Balatro, Hellcard, and Cobalt Core.

None of those things have made my brain buzz in quite the way My Card is Better than Your Card does. The core concept of having abilities tied to stickers than you can move from card to card, stack, reorder, and synergize is such a fantastic idea that I can't believe nobody has done it before. It negates so many of the small downsides of other deckbuilders with one simple, easy to grasp concept.

While some of the balancing is a little rough around the edges, and there is a seeming lack of features, those are completely forgiven, considering I'm basically in on the first wave of public early access.

As for the theme, the team knocked it out of the park. The game is beautiful, bright, cheery, and positive, start to finish. There are some fantastic touches, like having the decks be themed toward common childrens hobbies, having a "sudden showdown" instead of a "sudden death," having your "enemies" emote positively when you play a card, and even down to the fact that the gameplay is not particularly interactive! Sure, there are ways to play control decks or resource denial decks, but it's all done on your turn, which makes the game easy to learn, to boot!

My only gripes are incredibly minor and I'm sure will get fixed with time. Things like my sticker text not rearranging because I'm making my stickers look layered correctly, making the stickers from the last few unlockable sets play a bit better in other decks (less parasitic), not being able to change stickers/cards midday, etc.

There is one actual point of criticism that I do hope the devs address at some point. In general, an amount of randomness in games is good. But that randomness is already handled by the encounters and opponents you face, as well as the randomness of your deck. In my opinion, there are too many cards that rely on random number generation (e.g. GOAL! cards, that card that "produces a random effect that is generally good," etc.). I know that games made for children typically have more RNG than games for adults, but the amount of RNG here has me wondering whether the devs really aimed to make this game for children? I just avoid the sports deck, but in any case, things like that, and to a degree, the claw machine and gatcha machines, all can feel bad when you're deep in a run on hard mode.

But that one point aside, I truly I can't believe that I got this game for as cheap as I did. This is the best roguelike deckbuilder I've ever played, and I really hope MCIBTYC gets the acclaim that it deserves upon full release. Great job, folks <3

As a person who spends most of their time thinking about and playing Magic (99% not on Arena), take it from me--Arena is fantastic for two things: 1) teaching new players how to play Magic, and 2) extracting money from people. I've never seen such a hostile economy in a game, but I'm sure others have covered that, so I'll keep it short and sweet.

I don't normally like hack and slashes or base builders but this game was awesome. I'm not sure what was so special about it, but I really loved it.

It's been 1/3 of a year since they released this annual pass and they haven't released a single piece of content for it. Literally nothing. And no communication on when any content might come. How is this allowed to be in the Steam store?

Fun for literally 30 minutes if you have someone else to play with. Not sure why this game even costs as much as it does.

A great thought-provoking game with tons of difficult choices. Somehow doing mundane tasks kept me on the edge of my seat. Poses a lot of questions on authoritarianism, bureaucracy, exploitation, human nature, etc. Not too long but with enough different endings to make you want to play through again to find more. Definitely worth the price.