ELESTRALS FIRESTORM Set Blazes a Trail for Upcoming Sets
Earlier this year, the team at Elestrals launched their new TCG set, Divine Champions: Firestorm. This brought a couple of new ideas to the game such as the Champion tags and I’m very excited to see how this plays out.
The Elestrals team was kind enough to send me a package that came with lots of Firestorm goodies including a Flurrmine plushy, a Firestorm booster box, the dual decks, and a couple of extra packs. You can check out my opening of all the packs and decks below, but for my full thoughts, I encourage you to read on.
I genuinely love Elestrals and am so sad that I don’t have a local place to play the game. That said, I do think in my limited experience playing that Firestorm is a very well planned set.
For starters, the starter deck bundle is genius (and there are two versions!). It’s an easy way for you and a friend to go in together and then immediately start playing your first game. The decks are well constructed and fun out of the box and the double-sided play mats have a ton of great and useful information to help you get through your first game or two.
My only complaint is that it doesn’t explain Foretell (a keyword) and as this was a new mechanic for me, it took a bit of digging to actually find any information on. Dear Elestrals team, please make this information more easily accessible.
Outside of the dual decks, the cards in general just seem nicer. In past experiences I’ve had some small complaints about details on the cards not being very easy to see. The team has really addressed this and iconography is much easier to see and the types of runes are also named on the card by the symbols.
The team definitely appears to have taken feedback seriously and is striving to improve the player experience which is more than can be said for many other TCG companies at the moment. Combine that with some genuinely strong cards like Lycavoid, Hibearnation, and multiple Champion cards and Firestorm has a lot of reasons for Casters to get into this set.
One aspect of Firestorm that I found weird (and frankly don’t like) was that some cards appeared to be reprinted with completely different abilities and sometimes stats without a title.
For example, Vysceris. There’s a new one in Firestorm just called Vysceris and the stats are the same, but the ability is completely different. This is something that I had to look up and honestly, I don’t think that this is a smart move.
This is going to lead to confusion among the player base and judges, especially since cards of the same name from different sets can have different restrictions on them when deckbuilding. I really liked how Elestrals was handling things with the implementation of titles, and I’m not a fan of them seeming to arbitrarily decide that some cards can be the same but different and not have a title.
All that said, I still think that Firestorm is a fire set (pun intended) and it makes me really excited for the upcoming set Divine Champions: Lifestream (pre-orders open now). I really like the idea of honing in strategies through these Divine Champions.
I do hope that the team doesn’t fall into the same pitfalls of other TCGs where they get too pigeonholed into archetypes where other strategies or styles of gameplay don’t work. As long as they keep an eye on things, I think Casters are in for a fun time for these next few sets.