Solforge Cards
SolForge, the collectible card game co-created by the original creator of Magic: The Gathering, is shutting down at the end of the month.
Solforge is an online trading card game that I've been playing on and off since it first launched. I use the Steam version on my computer, and there are Android and iOS mobile versions as well. Gameplay in Solforge is very different from most of its peers. Many creature cards have three levels of power. When you play the card at its 1st level, the game puts the 2nd level of that card into your discard.
To find your new CCG, check our list of the best card games on PC – from which we’ll have to remove SolForge. Sad times.
The news comes via the SolForge blog, where Justin Gary, CEO of developers Stone Blade Entertainment, made the announcement.
“As of today, we are ceasing development of new content for the current implementation of SolForge. We will continue to maintain the servers through the end of January 31, 2017,” says Gary. “This isn’t the way any of us wanted SolForge to end. Unfortunately, we bit off more than we could chew trying to build a digital game of this scope and have learned many hard lessons along the way that we will apply to future games (including future incarnations of SolForge).”
Those last parentheses might offer some hope to SolForge fans. Gary says Stone Blade are “speaking with potential partners who may be able to take over the SolForge IP and remain hopeful that SolForge will return one day, better than ever.”
But, as of the end of this month, the game is going offline. Reflecting on the game’s journey since its launch, Gary says:
“Thanks to backing from fans and years of hard work, we launched SolForge in August of 2013, and continued to support and build this amazing community for more than three years. Thousands of players have enjoyed millions of games. That is an amazing milestone that few games will ever reach. Our community has always been incredibly warm, welcoming, and one of the best I’ve ever seen in my 20 years in the gaming industry. Everyone here at Stone Blade is honored to have been a part of this journey. Unfortunately, that journey is coming to an end.”
The team behind SolForge know CCGs inside and out. They took consultation from Richard Garfield, the original creator of Magic: The Gathering, and include Hearthstone and Magic personality Brian Kibler. Justin Gary is himself a former Magic pro who won the Houston 2002 Pro Tour event.
SolForge was unique among CCGs in many ways. It removed the concept of card advantage by forcing players to draw a new hand every turn, and was uncommonly generous with card drops. It’s a loss to the genre and will no doubt be missed by its dedicated community.
SolForge is free to play on Steam, if you’d like to get in a few last games.
With Hearthstone dominating the digital collectible card game scene like some sort of, it must be daunting trying to compete with Blizzard’s barely limited resources. But I like a lot of what SolForge is trying to do to stand out in the CCG space. The game’s sci-fi setting is interesting and the lane-based system used to battle your AI or human opponents is smart and deep. These things alone probably aren’t going to be enough to distract Murloc fanciers for long, but a new feature being added to the game today might: unlike Hearthstone, SolForge is going to allow its users to share almost any card.The servers go down around 1pm PST today to apply a patch that will enable the free Imprisoned Heralds update, which includes 60 new cards. Postknight bonds. (You can read the full.) Once that’s live, the majority of cards which can be purchased using in-game gold will also be shareable. Effectively what that means is you can share each card once with a friend, who will be notified when they next log-in and then be able to add it to their collection. Significantly, you don’t lose your own copy of the card.The upshot is you’re effectively getting two copies of each card you buy, one for you, and one to send to a pal, which should make it much faster for groups of friends to build a viable collection.
Card-trading without losing cards is certainly an interesting idea, and one clearly designed to bolster the game’s audience. It also gives SolForge at least one selling point which Hearthstone doesn’t have. Whether that’s enough time will tell, but I’ll be dipping back in to to check out what else the expansion brings soon.
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