Way back in the yesteryear of 2002, Wizards of the Coast released Magic: The Gathering Online. This digital implementation faithfully recreated Magic in most ways, save one extremely important factor: The players’ existing card collections.
Rather than developing a method to allow players to digitize their collections, Magic Online asked them to buy a brand new collection of digital cards. Needless to say, this limited Magic Online’s reach into the Magic community.
Now, over 20 years later, a new challenger in the card-battler genre has approached to try its hand at making a combined digital-analog hybrid card game–and this one also has Richard Garfield’s fingerprints on it.
Solforge Fusion (2022) is the latest game from Stone Blade Entertainment, the developers of Ascension (2010) and Shards of Infinity (2018). Rather than being a deckbuilding game like those entries, Solforge takes a similar approach to Keyforge with algorithmically constructed, premade decks. To start a game, you take two of these decks and shuffle them together, so there is some element of customization.
Keyforge included a QR code on each of its decks, but this only allowed players to register their decks online. Solforge is taking that idea one step further, enabling the QR code to upload the cards in deck itself onto the company’s online client, which launched on Steam earlier this year. There, they can play with the exact same deck against online players.
“If you have a great local Solforge Fusion community, then you’re gonna be playing weekly at your events. And if you don’t, you can still now take your decks and use them to play online. We have an active Discord community, we have tournaments we run online, and those tournaments still feed into the same system.”
Justin Gary, CEO of Stone Blade Entertainment and co-designer of Solforge.
Solforge’s entry has a few other differences from Keyforge. For one, it takes the form of a more traditional card battler, with the opponent having a number of life points to take down. Secondly, the details of each card in Solforge are algorithmically generated, rather than just the decklist of existing cards.
If you played Keyforge, you may remember that new sets had to take a hiatus of several years because of corruptions in the game’s deckbuilding algorithm. Stoneblade has an innovative technique for avoiding this problem.
“So there’s this really crazy technology called backups, and we’re using them.”
Justin Gary
Interested players can buy Solforge decks and immediately use them online through a Steam implementation. A starter kit for the game has an MSRP of $20, but the Steam client is free.