1481: Faceoffs are Magic

Picked up a copy of the My Little Pony Collectible Card Game the other day, and Andie and I gave it a shot tonight. After some initial confusion over some of the rules and how it all worked, I think I’ve grasped how the flow of play goes now, and I’m interested to try it again.

I haven’t played a CCG since the name Portal was primarily associated with Magic: The Gathering rather than Valve. I never really got hugely into Magic (or the game I half-heartedly started collecting but never once played before, the Star Trek: The Next Generation Collectible Card Game) but recently, with some attempts at Netrunner (not technically a CCG, but it was originally) and now this, I’m interested to play more.

Being based on My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, the My Little Pony CCG isn’t based around direct conflict. Rather, it’s based on the rather family-friendly premise of solving problems and giving “troublemakers” the boot before they cock up your plans to solve the aforementioned problems.

The mechanics are relatively straightforward, though not introduced massively clearly in the rulebook. Essentially, each turn you have a certain number of action points to spend, which is determined by the player with the highest score. Consequently, a trailing player has the potential to catch up somewhat by the fact that they’ll still have the opportunity to play more cards.

During your turn, you can play “Friends” either directly to one of the two Problems in play, or into your Home, from which they can later be moved at a cost of two action points per card. Cards often have prerequisites and costs in order to play — for example, in order to play one card, you might need to spend two action points and already have two yellow Power points on the board.

Once you’ve spent all your action points, you check to see whether you’ve amassed enough Power of the appropriate colours to “confront” a Problem and score a point for it. If two players both have enough power to confront a Problem, after you score a point, you have a Faceoff over it, where you compare your respective Power levels, replace the Problem and score bonus points. On the off-chance you’ve scored from both Problems in play at once, you have a Faceoff, even if your opponent doesn’t meet the requirements for either. Again, this replaces the problems, sends all the Friends home and discards any other cards, meaning both sides then have to start building up Power again to confront the next Problems.

What’s difficult to judge from just one play of the game is how the different colour decks play. It seems apparent that the Fluttershy starter deck is concerned with amassing strong amounts of Power very quickly — the Caretaker ability that pops up quite often allows certain cards to boost the power of other (“Critter”) cards, for example, which means you can quite easily muster an unassailable force of Friends to hoover up Points nearly every turn — while the Pinkie Pie starter deck is more concerned with fucking over your opponent by reducing their power or removing certain cards from the board.

There’s a couple of aspects of the game that appear to be fairly key to strategy — firstly, how you “flip” your main character card, and secondly, how you use Troublemakers.

To the first point, “flipping” your character card involves meeting a specific condition, after which you can turn the card over and use its more powerful “Boosted” side for the rest of the game, which generally has a higher base Power level, a special ability and fewer restrictions on the cards you can keep in your Home area. Fluttershy seemed quite easy to flip, since she simply needed to confront a Problem with another Critter in tow, whereas Pinkie Pie seemed significantly harder to flip — she has to confront a problem unopposed by any of her opponent’s cards, which means she probably has to make a bee-line for her own starting Problem before things get too hectic.

To the second point, Troublemakers are cards you play and flip over on your next turn, which then block your opponent from being able to confront a problem, since they first need to beat the Troublemaker at a Faceoff. The flip side of this inconvenience you give them is that if they do beat the Troublemaker in a Faceoff, they score points for doing so, then can potentially pick up some points for the Problem too. With some Troublemakers worth 3 points, that’s potentially a gain of 4 or more points in a single turn, which has the potential to completely swing a game from one way to another — you play to 15.

Anyway. To cut a long story short, I won, 15-3, though I’m not sure it really counts since it was a training game. I’m intrigued to try it again, and potentially to try out some of the other character decks and see how they work. Looking at discussion of the game online, its apparently simplicity appears to be somewhat deceptive — there’s a fair amount of deep strategy possible to incorporate, as with any good CCG, though naturally there’s always the question of who has the “better” cards if you’ve started delving into the world of booster packs.

There will be more ponycards in the near future!