WoW TCG Fundamentals, Lesson 0

Hello all, and welcome to the first setup installment of WoW TCG Fundamentals, in which I teach you enough to hold your own in the World of Warcraft Trading Card Game.*

Important note: If you see a term you do not recognize, keep reading. It may become apparent to you or it may be explained explicitly further on in the post.

This is Lesson Zero: Of Terms, Tabletops, and TCGs

I am making no real assumptions about your level of knowledge going into this. If you are an experienced player of TCGs, you’ll find much of this trivial. If you’ve played Magic: The Gathering, you can pretty well safely skip this entire post and wait for lesson 1. If, however, you’re new to all this, please, keep reading! It’ll save your sanity in the long run.

I apologize in advance for the fact that it is bone, desert, martini dry, and may be tough reading.

What I Mean When I Say ‘Always’
I will frequently, throughout the course of this series of post, use the words ‘always’, ‘never’, ‘must’, ‘will’, etc- implying that a given condition, action, or thing is absolutely required by the rules. This is a Trading Card Game, however, so there’s a rule that takes precedence. Here it is, in brief:
There are cards that break the normal rules; when this happens, cards take precedence over the rulebook.

As an example, I state in the post on Heroes that a player has only one Hero and it’s not considered part of their deck. This is not always true. However, the cards that break this rule are outnumbered thousands to one, so the safe assumption to follow is that a player, indeed, has only one Hero, which is not considered part of their deck, unless (insert vanishingly small probability here).

Short version of this note: When I say ‘always’ it actually means ’so close to always that it’s statistically insignificant to go into the niggling little details, I have a headache, get me a coffee’.

Of TCGs
The acronym ‘TCG’ means “Trading Card Game”. The official title of the game I’m introducing here is “The World of Warcraft Trading Card Game”. A lot of people just abbreviate that to “WoW TCG” or “Warcraft TCG”.

A Trading Card Game differs from a traditional card game such as Uno, Poker, or Solitaire in a very important way: Rather than all players having a common pool of cards to draw from (the deck in a normal card game), each player owns their own cards, from which they construct a deck.

Inevitably, you will own cards that do not fit in your deck(s); equally inevitably, so will other players. This is where the Trading part comes in. Rather than just purchasing the cards you want one at a time, you can purchase either a Starter Deck (guaranteed to have an immidiately-usable deck that follows the deckbuilding rules) or, more commonly once you have a deck built, booster packs containing a set number of random cards. You can also trade your unwanted or unneeded cards to other players for cards you do need or want. Some players find as much entertainment in trading and constructing decks as they do in playing the game itself!

Looking at Cards
In the language of a TCG, “Looking at” doesn’t literally mean ‘to have in your field of vision’. It means ‘to observe the obverse of a card’ (the ‘face-up’ side; that side printed with an image and text) that is to say, not the background (reverse) side. When I say “you cannot look at” a card, what I mean is that it is required to stay face-down (the side with the Warcraft Logo facing upwards)- you can’t look at its face-up side.

Collections and Decks
Your collection is all the cards for the game that you own. A deck is a grouping of some of those cards, built according to certain deckbuilding rules, that you can use to play the game.

The Basic Way Things Work
Each player (minimum of two, though there can be more, in some cases many more) brings a deck to the table. You use your own deck, your opponent(s) use his (or her, or their) own deck(s). You never use more than one deck during a single game.

The players randomly determine who goes first if they have not played each other recently (for players who have played recently, the loser of the most recent game is allowed to decide who goes first). Each player shuffles his deck and presents it to his opponent(s), who may shuffle or cut it.

Zoning In
Cards that are part of a deck involved in a game being played can be in any of several Zones- this refers to a combination of their physical location and their ’state’ within the game.

Cards in Hand:

• Each player has their own hand.
• Cards in hand are, as the name suggests, held in your hand.
• You may look at all cards in your hand.
• You may not look at the cards in other players’ hands unless they specifically reveal them to you.
• The only ‘public’ knowledge about your cards in hand is how many cards you have in your hand.
• You can freely re-order the cards in your hand.

A Deck (while a game is in progress)

• Whilst a game is in progress, a deck stops being ‘a grouping of cards’ and starts being ‘a game zone that cards can occupy’
• Each player has their own deck.
• You may not look at or re-order the cards in any deck, yours or an opponents’; it begins the game facedown and stays that way until the game ends.
• The rules and cards will tell you when and to what extent you are to draw cards from your deck into your hand.

The Graveyard

• Each player has their own graveyard.
• The graveyard is where ‘dead’ cards go, thus the name.
• Graveyards are face-up; any player may look at and reorder the cards in any graveyard at any time.

Removed from Game (RFG)

• All players share an RFG zone.
• Cards never go here ‘naturally’- they are placed here only by specific cards.
• The rules for observing and ordering cards in the RFG zone are covered along with the effects that remove them, but the default is face-up and freely reorderable.

In Play

• All players share the In Play zone.
• Cards are put into and removed from this zone based on the gameplay rules. It is here that the meat of the game takes place.
• Cards in play can be face up or face down. Face-down cards can be looked at only when the rules specify.

Ready and Exhausted
Cards in Play (but not the other zones) can be either ‘Ready’ or ‘Exhausted’. An ‘Exhausted’ card is something that has temporarily depleted its potential; for example, a card representing an elven archer would have to Exhaust itself to fire its bow; a card representing a shield would have to Exhaust itself to block a sword-strike.

Ready cards are oriented normally, which is to say “so you can read the ones you control”. Exhausted cards are oriented at a noticeable angle (usually 90 degrees, or at a right angle) to normal orientation. To exhaust a card, therefore, is to rotate it 90 degrees, and to ready a card is to rotate it back in the opposite direction by 90 degrees. You can’t ready a card that’s already Ready, and you can’t exhaust a card that’s already Exhausted.

Flip
To turn a face-up card face-down, or to turn a face-down card face-up.

All Done!
This concludes today’s lesson! I’m proud of you for wading through that. I’ll see you next week for a description of Heroes- what they are, how they work, and why you need one!