Getting Land Screwed is the Worst Part of Magic: The Gathering. Luckily, this Hidden Gem of a TCG has a Better System
Would you prefer a TCG with less variance, and more chance to interact with your opponent?
It’s that day of the week. For some it’s Monday, for many it’s Friday, but for all, it is a day of new opponents & new challenges. It’s Magic: The Gathering Draft Day!
The room is full of cardboard warriors, shuffling about, squeezing between chairs and scooting past each other, all heading for their assigned seats to begin the first round of the draft.
I sit down across from my first opponent. We lay out our playmats, shuffle up, roll to see who goes first, and draw our opening hands. With varying levels of excitement, we both decide to keep our hands, and the game begins!
At least once over the course of the next 50 minute Best-Of-3 round, one of us has that thing happen that has been plaguing Magic players since its earliest days… Land screw. Whether that come in the form of flooding out, drawing land after land for many turns, or in the form of never hitting that other color, or never getting that fourth land needed for all the bombs in your hand, it never feels good.
I’ve been in this situation countless times, but these days, there’s something different.
I know there’s another way. I have seen it. It’s glorious.
I can’t help myself, and I just have to say something about it. “This has always been my least favorite part of Magic: the wild variance created by the lands and the mana system. Recently, I’ve been obsessed with this other game Universus, and the way costs & resources are handled is one of the elements that they really got right.
The funny thing is just how often their first response is something along the lines of “What, another new TCG?!” to which I chuckle a bit and just shake my head. Nothing new about this one, Universus has been around since 2006 (it was originally called UFS, the Ultimate Fighting System.)
Inevitably, their interest is piqued, and over the next couple of minutes, I give them a brief run-through of what Universus is, what IPs it has in the game, and how it’s played – especially the parts that I consider to be distinct improvements over MtG. The two biggest ones are the way that Foundations & Difficulty Checks work in Universus, replacing Lands & Mana Costs, and the way that everyone actually gets to interact during their opponents’ turn, with every card in your hand having a Block value, and during any attack, players alternate back and forth using their Enhance abilities..
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Lands vs Foundations
In MtG, 40% of each players’ deck is Land cards, which each tap for (generally) one mana, and can only be played one per turn. While there are also Mana Rocks, artifacts that can be played out and also tap for mana, this system effectively limits players to a Mana base that increases by 1 each turn, to play their spells out.
In Universus, there are instead Foundation cards – most decks run 60-70% Foundations, but the thing is, they almost ALL have abilities of their own, and each of them can be used to block attacks from your opponent. You’re also not limited to playing only 1 per turn. Oh, and you don’t necessarily have to tap them to play cards from your hand, just when you need help passing a check.
Every card in your Universus deck has a Difficulty rating (in the top left) and a Check value (in the bottom right.) When you go to play a card, you flip the top card of your deck into your discard pile, and compare it’s Check value to the Difficulty of the card you are attempting to play. If it “checks” (the flipped card’s check value is higher than the difficulty of the played card), then you successfully play the card. If the Check value is lower than the difficulty of the card you are attempting to play, then you can Commit (tap) a number of your foundations equal to the difference, to make the Check pass.
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Interactivity, Blocking, and Enhancing
In MtG, each player does 1-3 things on their turn, and generally does nothing on their opponent’s turn unless they are playing a control deck or tossing out a kill spell. If you have a creature out, you can block an opponent’s creature’s attack with it. Mostly though, I do my things, you do yours, and we pass turns back and forth like that. Oftentimes, a game’s outcome is clear turns before it ends, because one player simply doesn’t have any way to interact with the other’s big threat(s) or win-con(s).
In Universus, the Combat Phase takes up most of each player’s turn, and as you are playing an attack, you and your opponent take turns using the Enhance abilities on your attack, your character, your foundations & assets, or even action cards played from your hand. Once you’ve both passed, having played all the Enhances that you want, it moves to the block step, and every card in your deck has a Block Zone (high, mid, low) and a Block Modifier (add the block modifier to the attack’s speed to know what difficulty you are Checking against to make the block.)
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It’s kind of crazy that this game has been around, available and played globally, for just shy of 20 years. They’ve collaborated with tons of widely recognized and extremely popular IPs like Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Mega Man, Critical Role, Solo Leveling, and Godzilla – just to name a few.
I’ve yet to have this conversation with a single person that didn’t come out the other side intrigued and curious, just that they had also been unaware of this game, but also at the mechanical improvements I described.
If you’ve looked around my channels at all, you know that I’ve so enjoyed Universus, and fallen in love with the game so much, that it actually got me back into creating content after something of a hiatus.
If this game sounds intriguing to you, head over to uvsgames.com to learn more, or over to uvsultra.online to poke around the card encyclopedia and deck builder, and be sure to give me a follow here, and wherever else you take in content – most of my content is and will be Universus focused, with a nice helping of general geek stuff, and a variety of other games as well.
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PS: Just yesterday, I was actually at a 2HG Battlebond draft with a good friend, and this happened to us. In our first game, I drew a 1-land hand, took the free mulligan, got another 1-lander, and took the mulligan to 6… 5 lands and a 2-drop creature that would let me scry… At the end of our game, I had 8 basic lands in play, 2 more in hand, and had only seen a total of 3 nonland cards. Battlebond was the best situation for this of course, with Assist cards allowing me to pay my mana to help my partner cast his spells – getting out some big bombs very early, at least on his half of our board.