Livestream for Fire Emblem Trading Card Game: Cipher --- sneak peek at "if" cards

[Randoman]

I'm really looking forward to the release of the TCG. Sure, I won't be buying them, but I really want to see all the new artwork they give to classic characters, especially from FE1/2/3/11/12. I'm really liking the card artwork they have shown so far, especially the Marth, Caeda, and Navarre artwork.

[Book of Ereshkigal]

I would hope we get both his manakete and earth dragon forms.

Tiki's dragon form would be cool too.

Oh, and Nagi.

...Oh! and Bantu!

[Hardin]

I was even thinking that they should make a couple of cards for Anri and Cornelius. They do technically appear in Shadow Dragon...

[eclipse]

do card games sell well at all outside of Japan?

They seem to be doing well enough. My local card stores are always busy.

It would be really amazing if they released the card game outside of Japan, and included a promo card or three with FEif.

[Kirie]

I'm buying a bunch and would be happy to make HQ scans for those people who aren't interested in importing. I'll probably Ebay duplicates, too. I don't really see Cipher being localized sadly (since I'd love to play!), but I'll be happy with importing and collecting the Japanese ones.

[Kaoz]

Will repeat some stuff that has already been said, but rules wise, it seems to be like this so far:

There are two rows for units and units either attack at 1 range or at 2 range. So far Mages have been the only units with 1~2 range, but maybe they'll reveal 1~2 range attackers for physical classes later on. When all units in the front row have been defeated, you're forced to move all your back row units to the front row. You probably lose when you run out of units?

For attacks, the number in the bottom left circle is a unit's base power. Furthermore, when you attack you get to reveal/draw a card from your deck (there's some sort of support area on the board, so it might go there) and the attacking unit's power increases by the drawn unit's support (bottom right circle). If you attack and discard the same unit as the attacking unit from your hand, the attacking unit's power is doubled. On the flipside you can do the same when your unit gets attacked and avoid the attack completely. There doesn't seem to be an HP value, so chances are that the unit with lower power is simply defeated.

Next, there seem to be two main costs for using a unit's effect so far. The first one is turning the card sideways (might prevent the unit from attacking that turn? Apparently they get moved to a different area on the board, so this seems likely), the second one I can't make out the symbol very well, but since there's a number next to it, you might have to discard that many cards in order to use the effect (could either be from your hand or from the top of your deck, hard to tell).

Finally, there's the values in the top left circle. Those seem to indicate a unit's rank and you can promote them. Now this part is pure speculation, but I would assume that if a unit only has the coloured circle, you can play it directly - however, if there is a white circle as well, it's a promotion. From what we've seen so far, the coloured circle's value is always one greater than the white circle's value, so in order to promote to Rank 3 you need that unit as Rank 2 etc. If this theory is correct, there should also be a Rank 2 Cain card that promotes from Rank 1 at some point for instance.

That's all I've been able to gather so far. There's at least one more area on the board that I have no idea what it's for though.

[Ayra]

I joined this forum mostly to offer what I could understand about the rules of Cypher, but you beat me to it... I guess I can still offer my theories! It's too bad that the rules we were shown were so incomplete. Hopefully we'll get a more complete presentation eventually (and maybe even a complete match?) The only concrete information I can add to what you wrote is that your deck is always composed of 49 cards + 1 commander.

Theories:

- I assume you win by decking out your opponent. There doesn't seem to be any sort of "hit points" in the game, so deck damage would make the most sense. Choosing to use supports makes you go through your deck faster, so there would be a risk-reward involved. Units that are on a column facing no enemy units causes the opponent to lose one card from their deck (I assume the playfield is limited to 4 columns).

- I probably misheard, but I heard mentions twice that were basically "There's only characters in Cypher". I assume I misunderstood what they were saying but... maybe it could make sense, considering that supports are basically "spells" and/or "equipments", on top of every character having multiple abilities.

Questions:

- Can anyone translate the ability on Wrys' card? If it's something like "put cards from your graveyard back on in your library", that'd give a lot of credence to the "win by decking" theory. I'll try translating it myself, but my kanji knowledge is way behind my spoken japanese knowledge (which is pretty darn poor in the first place), but I'm extremely slow at it and my accuracy isn't exactly sterling.

- Can you use a different level of the same character for critical hits? They used the example of a Chrom card + using the same Chrom card to double the attack power for one round, but can you use a different Chrom card for that? For example, if you have a level 2 (class-changed Chrom) with 60 attack, can you play the 40 damage level 1 Chrom to do a 100 attack power attack for the round? I think the answer's yes, but I'm not positive...

It's unfortunate we are missing a lot of the very basic elements, like turn order, resource system (if any beside cards), ect... I'll try watching the relevant section of the stream again just in case I manage to catch more. I have a few friends that are interested to play with the starter decks plus maybe a few other cards (They love card games, most at least played a Fire Emblem game or two and the artwork we were shown impress them a lot), but since I'm the only one with any sort of Japanese knowledge and by far the most interested in Fire Emblem, it's up to me to get all the rules straightened out (and have translated card abilities)... It's not looking too good so far!

Edited April 15, 2015 by Ayra

[VincentASM]

If I recall, you win be defeating the opponent's leader.

But I'm not really sure what counts as HP in this game. Maybe the bottom-left number, "battle strength"?

When I have time I'd be interested in figuring out the rules too. Not sure if it helps, but I was looking around earlier and some Japanese fans tried to explain the rules, like here.

EDIT:

Dengeki Online has an useful page here.

Edited April 15, 2015 by VincentASM

[Book of Ereshkigal]

- I probably misheard, but I heard mentions twice that were basically "There's only characters in Cypher". I assume I misunderstood what they were saying but... maybe it could make sense, considering that supports are basically "spells" and/or "equipments", on top of every character having multiple abilities.

I'd be very okay with this. If we're understanding right.

[Ryo]

If I recall, you win be defeating the opponent's leader.

But I'm not really sure what counts as HP in this game. Maybe the bottom-left number, "battle strength"?

When I have time I'd be interested in figuring out the rules too. Not sure if it helps, but I was looking around earlier and some Japanese fans tried to explain the rules, like here.

EDIT:

Dengeki Online has an useful page here.

Wow so many nice arts in there! :O

[Dan]

I'm starting to read that link Vincent provided for the rules. The way you win is by defeating the other player's Lord character (so it's like Fire Emblem, where you lose if your Lord is defeated). There is an "Orb Area" (maybe this is like the 5 orbs on the Fire Emblem or something?) - I believe the cards here will be discarded when your Lord would die the first 5 times, and the last time he/she dies you lose.

You discard cards (from your hand) to play other cards. It is possible to have a multicolor deck, but the cards you use to play a card must be the same color. If you try to use both red and blue cards, you cannot play either color of card. There is some sort of system to turn cards over and make them colorless, but if they all get turned over you can't play anything (I'm not very clear on this part).

To set up the game, you choose your Lord and put him/her into the forward attacking area, facedown. Then you play rock/paper/scissors to decide who goes first. Next you draw a hand of 6 cards. You can use 1 mulligan (shuffle your hand back into the deck and draw a new hand of 6 cards). Then you put five cards into the Orb area (from your deck). Turn your Lord face-up and start the game.

EDIT: forgot to mention, this stuff above is done by both players at the same time, then the Lords are flipped simultaneously and the game begins.

Turns alternate between the 2 players. Phases are:

Opening Phase - Draw one card and "untap" all characters

Bond Phase - Set aside the cards you'll use to play other cards

Deployment Phase - This is when you'll play cards or Class Change

Action Phase - Attack, Move, and use Skills

End Phase - Your turn ends and the opponent's begins

I'll post more later.

Edited April 16, 2015 by Dan

[Ayra]

Wow, that's amazing information! Thank you very much!

I'm reading through the fan post Vincent linked and I'm seeing a few things not mentioned in the Dengeki article (or that are present and I'm not understanding). I'll let Dan gives the proper ruleset since he's definitively understanding things better than I am, but here's the few additional details I saw in the fan post:

1) Class change details. Take Sully's card for example (attached screenshot, top right). Her normal class has a cost of 1. Her promoted class has a cost of 3, with a small 2 next to it. This means that if you want to play the card directly, it "costs" you 3 Blue bonds (I think). If you have non-promoted Sully already on the battlefield, you can instead "pay" 2 bonds of any color to replace her (So you could play her one turn earlier and require one fewer discard to reach). You also draw a new card, so it encourages you to have both promoted and non-promoted cards in your deck

2) Correction about the orb pile (according to the post anyway). When your hero gets "killed", you DRAW one card from your orb pile. Run out of orb cards, you lose. The neat thing about this mechanism is that you effectively get one free card when you take damage, so it gives you a chance to come back once things start to go badly for you.

3) Critical hits and dodges. If you have a copy of your unit in your hand and you are attacking, you can discard them to double your attack power. Similarly, the defender can discard a copy of the defending card to avoid any damage, no matter what the battling units attack power are.

4) Can the defender kill the attacker? I'm not 100% on this one, but that's what I'm getting... If the attacker + support attack value is greater or equal than the defender + support value, the defender die. If the defender wins, they live but the attacker does not die either. I hope someone can deny or confirm that, as I'm not confident on this point and it sounds a bit unusual. It would make for simpler rules regarding range though (Since your range would not matter at all on defense). You can also see that some character abilities only trigger on attack (Like regular Sully) or defense (like Maribelle).

It looks extremely likely at this point that the game has only characters (glad I at least got that one right!) Your hit points are face down cards, your casting resources are characters you put in the bond area, ect. I'm definitively fine with that: The characters are Fire Emblem's greatest strength, and I'm pretty sure most people are more excited about getting a new Lucina card than a Steel Axe card.

I'm a bit miffled about the lack of mention regarding the weapon triangles. It would make a lot of sense to get attack bonuses depending on the weapon of the attacker and defender, but I'm not seeing any mention of that.

Edit: I'm looking through the revealed card from the Dengeki post and there's some unusual stats out there. Example: While regular Lissa has 30 attack, 20 support, her class change has 60 attack, 10 support (the lowest it seems to go). I know it's for the Battle cleric promotion, but it's still 10 support for an healer. Maybe it's designed this way so that you can have Lissa as an offensive unit vs a defensive unit based on the promotion card used? Vaike has 30 attack, 10 support, same a Kellam. That's the lowest I've seen out of any cards. Even other "offense first" units like Sully are 40 attack 10 support. Maybe their skills compensates? Frederick has the best quality-price stats for the cost at 70 attack, 20 support for only 3 "bonds".

Edited April 15, 2015 by Ayra

[Party Moth]

These all look absolutely glorious. I hope every game in the series gets this level of love and care put into them as expansions.

[Dan]

It's uncertain whether you can Class Change to a lower level or sideways.

When you change classes you draw a card from the deck.

It is uncertain whether there is a specific order to the Action Phase, but if there is, it probably follows the order it was written in the picture: Attack, Move, Skill (although it does say that support skills are used during attacking).

Attacking:

First choose the attacker, then an enemy that is within range. Both players turn over the top card of their decks and put it into the support area simultaneously. Add the Support Power to the attacking/defending character's Attack Power. Support Skills can be used at this time. Now compare Total Attack Power (after adding the Support Powers).

If the attacker has a higher Total Attack Power or if they are equal, the defender is destroyed. If the defender is the Lord, instead of destroying it the player whose Lord would be destroyed chooses a card from the Orb Area and puts it into his/her hand. If there are no cards left in the Orb Area (before or after putting one into the hand is not specified) the Lord is defeated and the attacking player wins.

A Critical Attack can be performed during the Attack by discarding a card of the same name as your Attacker to double your Attacker's Power. It is currently unclear whether it must be exactly the same card or if a different class version of the character can also be used. It seems like it probably has to be the same exact card because the page normally uses 名前 for name when talking about Class Change, but uses 名称 when talking about Critical Attacks.

There is also something called "God Speed Evasion" that works similarly to Critical Attacks. The defending player may discard a card of the same name as the Defender. In this case, however, the Attack Powers do not matter, the attack is simply nullified as if it had not happened and both characters are safe.

If the Defender's Total Attack Power is higher than the Attacker's, then neither is destroyed and both are safe.

An Attacker can never be destroyed as a result of combat, but a Defender may be.

As has already been mentioned in this thread, when the Front Line becomes completely empty, all Rear Guard characters are moved to the Front Line. When this happens it's called a "March."

After the Attack is the End Phase and it becomes the next player's turn.

This is about as much information as there is right now.

[Ayra]

Thank you very much Dan!

I might have something to add regarding bonds based on the fan blog post.

Each turn, you can put into play up to 1 card in the Bonds area (Never more than 1). These are basically your resources and are permanent. If I understand well, you do not need to pay anything to put your character cards into play: All you require is enough Bonds of the right color to play the characters (For example, the attached Maribelle card requires you to have 1 blue card in your Bond area). The post says that this allows you to basically play your entire hand very quickly (If your highest cost card is 3, you could basically dump your entire hand on the table on turn 3), but that this is generally a bad strategy.

So what use would your bonds be then past having enough to play all your cards?

Theory time! Look at the attached Maribelle card and her first skill.

There are two costs: The red tap symbol is most likely needing to tap her card (So she could not attack during this turn and not use the skill again until untapped next turn). The second tap symbol is probably how many Bond cards you also need to tap to use this skill (Some characters have skills that only have the self-tap, others have the numbered gray taps).

This would be consistent with the game's design. Your cards are your lifeblood since they are literally everything in this game: If you decide to put more cards in the Bonds area, you can play more skills in a turn and put into play more expensive characters, but you are effectively discarding cards to do so and you only draw 1 card per turn.

Putting this together with Dan's explanation would basically explain all the basic rules someone would need to play this game..... Except for one thing:

The hero card. Is the hero card a regular unit on the board? It would make sense except for two things: 1) Isn't the bottom right area of the playfield reserved for your hero? 2) If both heroes are regular units that can attack, what is stopping the person with the strongest hero to just smack the other hero each turn starting from the very first one?

I believe the hero card is kept separate and cannot attack, but can be attacked. The question is: What are the conditions that let a player decide to direct their attack on the enemy hero? That's the biggest question remaining in my opinion.

Edited April 16, 2015 by Ayra

[Dan]

I've made a topic that attempts to put all of the rules information into a single, straightforward post. Please read it here and leave your feedback: http://serenesforest.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=53219

The hero card. Is the hero card a regular unit on the board? It would make sense except for two things: 1) Isn't the bottom right area of the playfield reserved for your hero? 2) If both heroes are regular units that can attack, what is stopping the person with the strongest hero to just smack the other hero each turn starting from the very first one?

I believe the hero card is kept separate and cannot attack, but can be attacked. The question is: What are the conditions that let a player decide to direct their attack on the enemy hero? That's the biggest question remaining in my opinion.

I put all the information about this into my other topic I linked above.

I did not get all that information about tapping however. I'd appreciate if you could post it in a reply to the new topic so we can have all the information together.

Edited April 16, 2015 by Dan

[Ayra]

Well, since we now have a proper rules topic (thanks Dan!), I figure I might as well ask about the art in this one!

1) Is it possible that the new Dark Mage art represents what dark mages will look like in IF? I know this is an original character for the card game, but if you look at the icon for the new dark mage on the Nohr side, it looks to be pretty much a match clothing-wise. If they are going to put the card characters as einherjar-like characters in IF at some point (Probably once the IF sets launches in Cypher), it'd make a lot of sense that the original characters are going to be based on the generic class models. So the same would probably apply for the generic pegasus too.

2) In the first post, there's some "split art". For example, the Camilla-Hinoka art. Are those going to be the art for those characters? For example, the left side will be a Camilla card art and the right side will be an Hinoka card art as is? "Yes" sounds like the sensible answer, but I'm "concerned" regarding the Marx-Ryouma one.

All the other cards would look decent in their split form. For example, you can see part of Hinoka's naginata on Camilla's card and part of the axe on Hinoka's cart, but it doesn't detract much from the cards at all. The "purply bits" creeping on Archer Boy's card looks a bit strange, but they don't take too much place on the art.

But look at Ryouma's card. You have a huge purple beam covering a large portion of him. You basically see more of Marx's sword in Ryouma's artwork than Ryouma himself. Cover the Marx side and just look at the Ryouma side: Would this actually make for acceptable art for a card, especially for an important character like him?

Edited April 16, 2015 by Ayra

[Hardin]

Well, since we now have a proper rules topic (thanks Dan!), I figure I might as well ask about the art in this one!

1) Is it possible that the new Dark Mage art represents what dark mages will look like in IF? I know this is an original character for the card game, but if you look at the icon for the new dark mage on the Nohr side, it looks to be pretty much a match clothing-wise. If they are going to put the card characters as einherjar-like characters in IF at some point (Probably once the IF sets launches in Cypher), it'd make a lot of sense that the original characters are going to be based on the generic class models. So the same would probably apply for the generic pegasus too.

2) In the first post, there's some "split art". For example, the Camilla-Hinoka art. Are those going to be the art for those characters? For example, the left side will be a Camilla card art and the right side will be an Hinoka card art as is? "Yes" sounds like the sensible answer, but I'm "concerned" regarding the Marx-Ryouma one.

All the other cards would look decent in their split form. For example, you can see part of Hinoka's naginata on Camilla's card and part of the axe on Hinoka's cart, but it doesn't detract much from the cards at all. The "purply bits" creeping on Archer Boy's card looks a bit strange, but they don't take too much place on the art.

But look at Ryouma's card. You have a huge purple beam covering a large portion of him. You basically see more of Marx's sword in Ryouma's artwork than Ryouma himself. Cover the Marx side and just look at the Ryouma side: Would this actually make for acceptable art for a card, especially for an important character like him?

1) I think that's a safe assumption. The original characters are probably jazzed up a bit like any other character, but it's probably a good benchmark.

2) Those are the cards for those characters, but as we've seen with other characters like Marth, there will probably a few versions of the characters which don't have split art.

[Xem]

Well, Kid icarus uprising had its cards even in europe, i know it's not the same thing, at all, but if you bought the game you also know that cards were along with the box, and then sold in stores; if they randomly did it with kid icarus, why don't do the same with fire emblem cipher? Especially now that's the series is "famous" thanks to super smash bros, and maybe, if Roy returns, or other characters will be added, maybe this would be the best moment.

(i'm just hoping)