The new Shadowfist owners were at Essen and did a short interview with OneTableTop on the plan for the game. Watch it here.
Don’t feel like watching? Here is the core info:
- Architects will have a preconstruct deck along with 3 other factions (not sure which but you can probably guess)
- There will be a kickstarter relatively soon.
So yep, until that kickstarter launches, Shadowfist is still dead, but the moment it does hit, let’s see what happens. I backed the last kickstarter on account of the archies being back in the game so the new one will be no different.
We will be watching this closely!
Hey, I’m someone who got into Shadowfist in the past year, and really only know Modern. I don’t see any problems with the game, and still find it to be one of the most fun games ever made. Care to elaborate on where it went wrong? I’m just glad to see people talking about SF in any capacity, because it was effectively dead as of the last kickstarter already.
The things that older players notice are not things that you would even notice except for the counter-spam which is just annoying. They removed an absolute favorite faction (Architects) and I think that was when a lot of people dropped the game. Rules wise, they removed damage redirection from the game (it has since been put back in place with the Year of the Goat era rulebook) which irked me because that is a critical mechanic to a lot of my decks.
What went wrong is mostly marketing the game and making the switch to the LCG format rather than keeping it like it was in preconstructs and booster format. I liked the first Inner Kindom expansion (Kowloon) but not much after that.
Back in the day you had to win a major tournament to get your ‘face’ on a card (or even design a card) but when they were fishing for money with the kickstarters you could buy a card. One of my friends has a card with their face on it because they won a tournament (Jade Willow) and then bought one, so there are two separate cards with her face for two different characters– I don’t think this was good art direction as the Jade Willow character could have appeared in another card. Otherwise a lot of the use of the people that bought cards could have been on other cards– like bystandards or on event cards instead of hitters. I believe they were all hitters–so you had a bunch of milksop nerds (like myself) on cards that were supposed to look like Bas Ruten or Jet li. This may not matter to other people but really bothered me– 1) didn’t pay the IRON PRICE and 2) poor use of the art for the wrong cards.
Anyway, a new day has dawned on the game and we’ll see if these Spaniards can merge the split player base. I for one am 100% on the next kickstarter for them at this point already.
Ah yeah… But mechanically, it’s still good. I’m on board for whatever brings people in.
Mechanically, Shadowfist is a masterpiece. I was both a casul and tournament player during the classic period, so a lot of the frustration with Modern outside of the removed factions came from what others would certainly view as minutiae.
I feel the game got nerfed. The higher cost for cards like final brawl and shadowy mentor and the amount of new characters that weren’t effected by events caused the game to shift. Those changes made characters with huge fighting and super characters the focus of the game; the added mobility, and loss of damage redirection adds to this focused style of play and deck building.
In the classic version, you really had to watch out for shadowy mentor stealing your brand new 8 fighting guy, or having that 8 fighting guy get his damage sent to another character, and getting a chi card played on that guy and the card going back into your hand with all that power wasted, and you had to watch tapping your self out and not being able to protect yourself.
Modern fist, in my opinion was basic, fistfighting Shadowfist with counter cards that shouldn’t have been in the game. I need more; I need classic.