Review: ELESTRALS is an Exciting TCG That Wears Its Inspirations Well

Elestrals is a lot of fun. In case you missed it, Elestrals is a new trading card game (TCG) that piqued my interest. The team was kind enough to send me a couple of starter decks and a ton of booster packs and I’ve spent the last week or two trying it out.

If you want to see me open up all of the booster packs, you can check out my pack opening video at the bottom and keep reading to hear my thoughts about the game. While all the cards were provided to me for free, all the thoughts below are my own.

Let’s start our discussion by talking about one of the first things you become acquainted with in Elestrals: the art. It feels very cartoony. It’s playful and bright. It feels imaginative. Of course, some won’t like it, but I think it’s good and very inviting.

Many of the Elestrals have cute designs like Kryoling and the spirits, but there are also plenty like Arctaurus and Emperowatt that look cool.

My next point of discussion is the card design. Overall, I think the cards are very well designed. The name is up top with the picture directly below. Then, in the middle of the card is the cost of the card.

Then, on Elestrals you have the attack and defense stats on either side of the cost with symbols clearly outlining which is which. Then you have the effect of the Elestral.

The bottom of the card has information about the set it came from, the rarity, and the subclass. Runes are the same, but instead of having the attack and defense stats on either side of the cost, the type of Rune is indicated with a symbol. Overall, it’s mostly easy to figure out how to play a card and what it does.

I do have two critiques about the design of the cards though. First, the symbols for the different types of Runes are not very intuitive. I’m sure as I play the game more it will make sense, but for now I’m constantly having to reference the reference card that comes with the starter decks to make sure I know what kind of Rune is being cast.

Second, the subclasses are hard to see. Really, the symbols for Runes and the stat symbols on Elestrals could also use some help, but they’re bigger and therefore easier to see. The subclass icon is really small and just a lighter shade of gray. I wish the coloring was higher contrast.

If it was just flavor, that would be one thing, but there are strategies that can utilize subclasses such as if you want an Ursa deck. I imagine more of those strategies are going to happen as the game evolves too. I think a nice gold would do wonders or a bright white would be nice. Just a thought.

I’m not going to explain how to play the game completely, but I do want to talk about gameplay. My number one TCG at the moment is Yu-Gi-Oh!, but I’ve also played Magic: The Gathering, Pokémon, Digimon (definitely in my top three), Harry Potter back in the early 2000s, Naruto in the 2000s, Duel Masters, and probably a couple others that I’m forgetting.

The quick and dirty is that to me, Elestrals feels like it took about 65% inspiration from Yu-Gi-Oh!, 10% inspiration from Pokémon/Magic, and then added its own 25% to create a really solid game. I want to breakdown where I see each inspiration.

Honestly, if you just look at an Elestrals board, it looks like Yu-Gi-Oh! with one fewer column. You also draw five cards at the start of the game, can only Cast once per turn unless you use a Special Cast, combat is almost identical, and you can set Runes face down to be used on your opponent’s turn.

Meanwhile, the spirits act a lot like Energy in Pokémon and Lands in Magic by serving as a cost to play your cards. Another similarity to Pokémon is that you can Ascend your Elestrals which is similar to Evolving.

The beauty is that Elestrals took many of these concepts though and did make some aspects their own. For instance, I mentioned that Ascending is like Evolving. However, when you ascend you are not having to go through a specific line.

You can Ascend your Kryoling into any Elestral! You can use any Elestral to Ascend into Emperowatt. There are lines and cards that guide you to specific ones such as Penguwatt whose ability specifically Special Ascends into Emperowatt, but most tend to be more like Snowattle which searches for a Frost/Lightning Elestral which could be used to get Penguwatt but gives you more flexibility.

Another way that Elestrals is its own is that your main resource for playing cards (spirits) also serve as your life. In Pokémon, you can run out of Energy and then just wait to get cards that let you cycle them back.

In Magic, you can have all your Lands destroyed and the only problem is that your tempo is lost. In Elestrals, you will lose if you run out and have to spend one, just like how you lose if you can’t draw anymore cards from your Main Deck. It definitely makes resource management feel a lot more crucial.

I also appreciate how spirits don’t have to match the Elestral cast, but it does mean that the Elestral doesn’t get their ability. This means that if you just need a body out for one reason or another, you don’t have to worry about not having the right spirit typing.

Returning to combat, I like the way Elestrals handles damage a lot. As I already said, combat overall is identical to Yu-Gi-Oh!. However, damage is based on the number of spirits that each Elestral is enchanted with.

This means that there is a reason to play bigger Elestrals as they will typically result in more damage, but it also means that something with a huge attack stat won’t just wipe out half of your spirits in a single attack unless your opponent has put a lot of resources into that Elestral.

Another design feature that I appreciate and hope they maintain is that cards do not have novels of text on them. Some Elestrals have quite a bit of text on them, but you don’t need a magnifying glass and their abilities are usually kept to about one or two things.

As a Yu-Gi-Oh! player, this is fantastic and should not be changed. A card should have at most three effects and only in rare circumstances. The text size should be uniform across all cards in my opinion and if it has to be shrunk to fit in the box, there’s too much.

It is things like this that make Elestrals feel unique and at times more fun than other games. There are still some areas that I either want to see happen or am just curious if changes will happen.

In my previous piece about Elestrals, I mentioned that spirits seem to all just provide a single resource with no abilities or anything. I do wonder if special spirits will be made that provide more than one type, have an ability, or something else.

I don’t think that would be a good way for the game to go, but I am curious about it. I do hope that better Stadiums are made. Right now, the Stadiums all appear to be the same, just for different types. This means that in a mirror match it at best serves as a tool for Nexusing (aka moving) spirits around which in my opinion lowers their value overall. That said, there are some cards that do require a Stadium to be enchanted, but that doesn’t extend to all types.

I’ve really enjoyed playing Elestrals and my wife enjoyed it more than I imagined. I’ve tried getting her into other TCGs, but the only ones that she appears to actually enjoy are Pokémon (which she played as a kid) and Elestrals.

I’ve tried tweaking the starter decks and I think I’ve been fairly successful with Kryoscorch (last time we played with the edited decks, my wife walloped me) but I have been having a hard time with Emperowatt and I think that I want to bring in more non-Frost cards which is hard with Frostfall because it was the introductory set for Frost.

Guess I need to either rethink my deckbuilding or get more sets. I do hope that Daybreak is the last set for a long time to introduce new types so that more sets can be a bit more balanced for the different types.

I would definitely recommend trying out Elestrals for yourself. They have a very active Discord community and a free mobile app in case you are concerned about the investment. They’re also constantly looking for game stores to work with, so if you’re a fan you should talk to your game store about possibly carrying the game.

I think Elestrals is off to an incredible start in terms of being a fun TCG. Hopefully, it can continue to grow and be a much bigger presence in the TCG space.