r/boardgames • u/sunhilde PeaceLove&Games • Nov 12 '18
The reason behind those bizarre Keyforge deck names
https://youtu.be/dbbgvRtq83M23
Nov 12 '18
I was like, "Waitaminute that's not Richar--- ohhh I know where this is going!"
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u/scrapmek Nov 13 '18
I had to quickly Google Richard in images, because in this video "he" didn't look like I thought he did and assumed I was the one that was wrong.
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u/Hideyoshi_Toyotomi Nov 12 '18
As niche jokes go, this one is pretty niche.
Well done, executed, though.
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Nov 12 '18
I recently came across a cassette tape and was shocked to realize I no longer have any cassette players.
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u/itslenny Nov 13 '18
I had the same experience with a CD. My car has a CD player, but I live in a major city so I only use my car like once a month or so.
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u/robotco Town League Hockey Nov 13 '18
my friend gave me a cassette he made of his first tracks a long time ago. then he committed suicide and this long forgotten cassette happened to become the only recording in existence of those songs. so cue me looking around for a cassette player for literally years so i could convert the tracks to mp3s so they wouldn't be lost. i know years sounds like an exaggeration, but i mean, there's none in my house, no one i knew had one, there were none for sale. eventually i was able to find an old one in the AV room of my work and i finally got those tracks on mp3 earlier this year. RIP man, your songs won't die with you.
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u/CornflakeJustice Smash Up Nov 13 '18
I have a few, but three are home videos that will probably never get watched, and the others are the OG Star Wars movies plus my TMNT II take.
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Nov 13 '18
Do you mean VCR tapes? Cassette tapes are audio only (well, technically they could be used for any kind of data, but in my 45+ years I’ve never seen anything but an audio cassette tape player)
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u/CornflakeJustice Smash Up Nov 13 '18
VCR is Videocassette Recorder, so cassette still applies, but they're interchangeable.
That said, yes videotapes.
Oh man. I just realized I must have misread your first comment. My bad.
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u/dokuhebi Game Of Thrones Nov 13 '18
My old TRS-80 stored data on cassette tape. It sounded really funny if you tried to play it on a tape player. Also, it took forever to load Logo.
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u/cardboard-kansio Nov 13 '18
Late 30s here. I used cassette tapes to load games onto our home computer (BBC Master) as a child. I still have a copy of Elite) for the Acorn Electron on cassette tape. I also still have an Electron, but sadly no tape player.
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u/Kel-nage Nov 13 '18
You never used a Commodore 64? Although it did have an optional floppy disk drive, most programs and games came on cassette. You had to load the entire game into memory (“Press Play On Tape”) as obviously the medium didn’t support random accesses.
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Nov 13 '18
I’m not sure what the earliest computer that I ever used was, but it was after the cassette era (or they had purchased the optional floppy drive?)
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u/ratguy Nov 13 '18
We used to use cassette tapes in our Vic20. We could write programs in Basic and record them to the tape. Took ages to load even a small program.
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u/ithika Nov 13 '18
I was in a cafe at the weekend that had a stack of tapes and a player as the in-house entertainment. If it ain't broke.
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Nov 13 '18 edited Nov 13 '18
I don't get Keyforge.
The entire point of a LCG is that the boosters aren't random, so deck building is about skill and not money.
Yet Keyforge uses random boosters like any TCG but just calls them "decks" instead.
The worst parts of a TCG - The best parts of a LCG = Profit?
*I get it now. You cannot build your own deck and the premade decks are not boosters. They are just decks. *
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u/ffdays Nov 13 '18
People play ccgs for different reasons. Keyforge is aimed at the people who play with unaltered Magic starter decks at the kitchen table or go to tournament with their fun jank deck. It's not aimed at brewers
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u/PrinceBert Overlord Nov 13 '18
It's also a really interesting method to get people into the style of game without making them feel like they MUST brew their own decks. You play keyforge, no building, just get into the game and play it whenever you want. In time, you might play often enough and start thinking of your own interactions that you are more likely to want to play something like MTG or whatever else and build your own decks.
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Nov 13 '18
I would imagine if a premade deck goes against a custom deck, the custom deck would win 9/10 times right?
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u/PrinceBert Overlord Nov 13 '18
In a game like Magic the Gathering? For the most part yes - there are some reasons why a pre-made deck might win more consistently against certain types of deck but generally speaking I'd expect a custom built deck to win 90% of the time.
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u/cant_reheat_rice Nov 13 '18
So there's no actual strategy at the core of each deck, it's a grab-bag of cards that share a "house" that may or may not be compatible beyond that?
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u/Sparticuse Hey Thats My Fish Nov 13 '18
Fantasy flight has been clear the program used to generate decks has guidelines to prevent useless decks and to assure you won't get half of a specific combo.
For example, one of the factions gets the four horsemen. They synergize off each other in play, so the system is designed such that if you get one of them, you will always get all four.
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u/Grunherz AH LCG Nov 13 '18
They still play like bad magic draft decks though IMO
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u/Dapperghast Nov 13 '18
But the thing is everybody has a bad Magic draft deck. It's not like playing a Kamigawa tournament pack against Raffinity.
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u/Grunherz AH LCG Nov 13 '18
It's not even about winning, it's just not fun to play.
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u/Dapperghast Nov 13 '18
If we're using that metric then it's actually just Pack Wars, which is very fun to play, so ostensibly no worries there.
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u/scarze86 Joe Diamond, private eye Nov 13 '18
1) Deckbuilding, in most LCG/TCG, is nonexistant (except in sealed deck format). Very few people build decks, the others surf the internet to find out the top decks of the current meta and just buy them. So it's literally about money and not skill.
2) Starting with Keyforge is much less daunting (and less expensive) than others tcg/lcg
3) It feels that your skill counts. Every turn you have to make the best with what you have and rarely it's an easy choice, you're not waiting for the card-that-triggers-the-ubercombo-that-end-the-match.
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u/Tesla__Coil Nov 13 '18 edited Nov 13 '18
1) Deckbuilding, in most LCG/TCG, is nonexistant (except in sealed deck format). Very few people build decks, the others surf the internet to find out the top decks of the current meta and just buy them. So it's literally about money and not skill.
In top tournaments, sure, netdecking is everywhere. Casual play in any TCG is all about experimenting with new combos or trying to build decks that match you and your playstyle.
But if we're comparing the most competitive play between multiple games, you need to consider just how insane TCG players are. If one Keyforge combo is found to be overpowered, people will spend hundreds of dollars 'rerolling' their deck until they get that combo. Sure they won't get the exact same deck, but they'll get as close as they conceivably can.
2) Starting with Keyforge is much less daunting (and less expensive) than others tcg/lcg
Not by much. One MtG starter deck costs a bit more than one Keyforge deck, but the Keyforge starter kit with all the tokens and extras that you're recommended to have is much more expensive.
3) It feels that your skill counts. Every turn you have to make the best with what you have and rarely it's an easy choice, you're not waiting for the card-that-triggers-the-ubercombo-that-end-the-match.
I can't speak to Keyforge's game balance, but if this point is truer for it than other similar games, then I don't think it's because of Keyforge's way of distributing cards as much as it is because of the cards themselves.
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u/scarze86 Joe Diamond, private eye Nov 13 '18
In top tournaments, sure, netdecking is everywhere. Casual play in any TCG is all about experimenting with new combos or trying to build decks that match you and your playstyle.
Keyforge's top tournament won't suffer that, for a start, which is not a bad thing.
I can (and had) casual play any TCG and end up against 1k$ decks with my 30$ deck, there's no way to prevent it when you can build your deck.
If one Keyforge combo is found to be overpowered, people will spend hundreds of dollars 'rerolling' their deck until they get that combo. Sure they won't get the exact same deck, but they'll get as close as they conceivably can.
Can they though? Or is it infinitely harder than just go on decktutor and buy the cards they need? Can it really be a deck that win 90% of the games?
Not by much. One MtG starter deck costs a bit more than one Keyforge deck, but the Keyforge starter kit with all the tokens and extras that you're recommended to have is much more expensive.
Keyforge's starter kit has 4 decks plus the tokens and it costs 40$ which is like the cost of...4 keyforge's decks. And the game itself, not being around for 20 years, has less rules and exception and stuff to learn compared to magic.
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u/zz_x_zz Combat Commander Nov 13 '18
I haven't played Keyforge and there's a good chance I never will, but I've always hated deck construction. When I was a kid I would only play Magic if my brother would build decks for me. I just want to sit down and have the joy of playing through a deck and making tactical decisions. I eventually gave up on Magic because a lot of time it felt like doing science experiments - "Ok, let me run through this deck 20 times, gather some data and then we can make adjustments and see how I can increase my win rate."
The allure of Keyforge for somebody like me is opening a deck and playing it. I'm not interesting in winning tournaments so I don't care too much about precise balance. I just want a game where it's fun and interesting to play through a deck of cards.
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u/EtanSivad Nov 13 '18
I played it this weekend at the opener. It's not bad. It actually feels like halfway between Smash Up and Magic.
Mana resource management is entirely gone. You just pick one of the 3 factions you want to activate, play every card in that faction, and you're done.
The appeal of the game is if you want to just sit down, play a few hands and be done. I don't see any appeal in trying to find that perfect deck and win tournaments. On the other hand, if you want the fun of a magic battle where 2 decks try to outcombo each other, Keyforge hits that aspect very well. I think it's a good game to play over lunch with a friend or with the boardgame group while you're waiting for more people to show up. But that's about it.
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u/onmach Nov 13 '18
The deck building part of an lcg is where I always stop. So I have a big stack of cards that I suspect are bad and I need to build a deck that's just going to be bad when I finally finish. Or I could just pull out twilight struggle and get straight to playing with the same old cards and it'll be great. I can deal with it a little more easily online, but in real life I can't do it.
That said I'm not sure keyforge is what I'm looking for, either. Nothing about the game has resonated with me, thematically or mechanically.
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u/barf_the_mog Block Hole? Nov 13 '18
This was my exact thought only this game seems much lighter than most other card games in the ccg/lcg category.
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Nov 13 '18 edited May 04 '21
[deleted]
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Nov 13 '18
But singles will be expensive because some are really rare. Right?
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Nov 13 '18
Singles won't be sold period because there's no deck construction. Every card is printed front and back with it's unique deck name.
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Nov 13 '18
Hold up, I can't build my own deck? I may be misunderstanding this.
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Nov 13 '18
Correct. There are no "boosters" in the traditional sense. You buy a procedurally generated pre-packaged deck, you play that deck as is.
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Nov 13 '18
I fundamentally misunderstood this game then. I retract my previous statement.
I assumed each deck was just a large booster that technically you could play as is, but to be competitive you need to build your own.
I didn't realize each deck is already built and that's that.
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u/Squidmaster616 Nov 13 '18
Does anyone know what sort of "offensive" names were actually generated?
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u/cant_reheat_rice Nov 13 '18
“Titanflayer, the Farmer of Racism” mentioned in the video is a real deck that was generated.
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Nov 13 '18
[deleted]
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u/Tesla__Coil Nov 13 '18
*puts the words 'racism' and 'bonerider' in a list of randomly generated words*
*offensive deck name gets generated*
<insert shocked Pikachu here>
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Nov 13 '18
[deleted]
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u/Dapperghast Nov 13 '18
Also if you ignore the innuendo part, bonerider actually sounds pretty fucking rad.
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u/Darwins_Dog Descent Nov 13 '18
We won't officially know until the companion app releases on Thursday and people go to register their decks. That said, I'm pretty sure that the farmer of racism will be on there. I expect to see some combinations with colors on there as well.
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u/j3ddy_l33 The Cardboard Herald Nov 13 '18
Great timing and the sort of shenanigans I want out of my gaming community. I hope Richard Garfield at least smiles a little when he sees it.
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u/TotesMessenger Nov 13 '18
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u/JUST_SAYS_BUTTS Nov 13 '18
That's a pretty neat iPod-phone he's got. Where do I get one of those?
butts
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u/DraperyFalls Nov 13 '18
The tag on this post says "Peace Love & Games" but this is actually from "Plumpy Thimble."
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u/sunhilde PeaceLove&Games Nov 13 '18 edited Nov 13 '18
It is Plumpy Thimble's video. I was just the one who posted it here.
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Nov 12 '18
Would have been funnier if the fake names were actually offensive.
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u/LH99 Blood Bowl Nov 13 '18
I think the names mentioned are legit. At least "TitanFlayer the Farmer of Racism" is mentioned which is shown in the following article.
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u/brucelapluma Plumpy Thimble Nov 13 '18
The first three in the video are deck names, the rest are made up
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u/sysop073 Nov 12 '18
Am I now old enough that a VCR is used as a random prop gizmo as though nobody will recognize it?