Spectromancer

Overview

Spectromancer is an online fantasy card game. As with Richard Garfield's famous fantasy card game, players participate in a magical duel against other mages by strategically summoning creatures and casting spells.

Mage Specializations

Core Specializations

• Cleric – Holy/healing magic and tanky creatures
• Mechanician – Artifacts, constructs and dwarven craftsmen. Specializes in winning through monsters on the field.
• Necromancer – Good at clearing waves of weaker enemy monsters
• Chaosmaster – Powerful spells with the disadvantage of being based on random chance.
• Dominator – Messes with spell cost to lock down the enemy
• Illusionist – Shenanigans. Contains direct counters to certain tactics as well as ways to make the opponent hurt himself .

League of Heroes Expansion - Note that the League of Heroes expansion was released as a free "update" to the base game.

• Demonologist – Demon summoning. High concentration of creatures that, when killed, will "return" as a different version of themselves.
• Sorcerer – Classic spellcasters. Fireballs, lightning, mana disruption, etc. Notable lack of monsters
• Beastmaster – Comprised of monsters so powerful that only one of each can be in play at once. Each one has an activeatable ability that can only be played when they are on the field.

Truth and Beauty Expansion

• Goblin Chieftan – Low-cost goblin creatures, most of which have abilities designed to disrupt (read: annoy) their opponent
• Mad Hermit – Based around a magic rabbit that passively puts itself into play and does increased damage every turn. Has a general theme of cards the grow more powerful as the game goes on.
• Chronomancer – Allows the player to do more in less turns

Game Modes

• Single Duel – Exactly what it sounds like: a one-off duel with the AI.
• Campaign – Takes the player through the "story" behind Spectromancer, as the land of Revnia is once again plunged into chaos and infighting as shards of the prison containing the demigod Dorlak have begun to corrupt their keepers. Players "earn" cards by winning duels against opponents. Most duels will have some strange extra elements to take into account. In some cases, the player must simply "survive for 10 turns." In others, they must contend with monsters or structures in play that will disrupt standard strategies.
• League of Heroes – A sort of tournament played against the AI
• Custom Decks – With the Truth and Beauty expansion, players are able to construct custom decks, removing/mitigating the random element of the start of the game.
• Draft Tournament – Similar to the League of Heroes, except players must select from a common pool of cards to construct their "deck"
• Multiplayer – 3 different ways to play against humans: Hotseat, LAN or in the Online League
• Replays –You can save replays of games and then re-watch them later to see where you went wrong.

Gameplay

Unlike many other virtual card games, Spectromancer downplays "deck building" as a core gameplay mechanic. Players are given a random selection of "cards" from the common 4 elements (Fire, Water, Air and Earth) as well as a random selection from their chosen specialization. For each element, they have a pool of magic that will increase every turn (unless otherwise affected.) Playing cards will consume those magic points. As opposed to other fantasy card games, where players can cast anything they have the proper resources for, Spectromancer only allows one card to be played per player turn.

Attacking: Creatures are fixed in "channels." They can only attack something directly across from them, though some creatures may move between slots, depending on their abilities. Creatures cannot attack the turn they are summoned (unless otherwise stated on the card.)

Advice button: When playing against the AI, there is the option to ask for advice from the game. There doesn't appear to be any penalties for doing this.