It has been 1,000 years since the gods ruled supreme, but they possess completely but disappeared. In real time lesser creatures of myth have ground slipway to accession in the moderne world. The valkyries have turn a biker gang, trafficking divine bloodline to vampires and the mega-corporation that rules the Americas. Russia fields an army of werewolves and witches, and an immortal empress rules the Middle East, dominating golems and angels. Asia is home to hungry ghosts and tengu but too creatures from virtual reality that have somehow begun physically manifesting.

This is the world of Mythgard , the digital collectible card game launching in immature access on Steam, iOS, and Android on Sept. 19. Developed by Rhino Games, the back draws breathing in for its world from contemporary fantasise classics including Fables and American Gods .

"There's a lot of popular citified phantasy in celluloid and lit, but it's largely absent in gaming," said game designer and author Jesse Decker. "The community has really responded to the traditional knowledge and the world and the whole promise of a modern times where mythology is real."

Rhino Games was founded in 2022 by Peter Hu and Joseph Paxton Mason, who had worked at the now defunct Gazillion Entertainment on the MMORPG Wonder Heroes and began gathering other former coworkers to develop a game supported their shared passion for CCGs.

"We were every last big fans of Magic: The Gathering and mat up like information technology hadn't been translated into member form in a mode we were happy with," Mason said. "We thinking information technology was a game that we could build with a little team."

Wizards of the Coast had been fashioning digital versions of the world's most best-selling CCG since 1997, but they entirely released a version that was optimized for streaming and serious aggressive play last-place year with Magic: The Gathering Arena . That power stimulate seemed suchlike an existential menace for Mythgard , merely Mason believes his game will still find an audience.

"We felt like in that location are honourable problems with the rules of Magic when it comes to hard to make a integer back," he same. "We were trying to reimagine what Magical would be if it was digital get-go, which meant taking out some systems that preceptor't work in a digital form and injecting new ones."

Sorcerous is highly interactive, which terminate force players to hold around patc their opponents decide how they want to react to their maneuvers. Ilk most digital CCGs, Mythgard takes a more back-and-Forth approach to gameplay but increases choices away dividing the board into heptad lanes, all of which can attack the three lanes in face of it in a system Decker calls the trident attack.

Rhino Games Mythgard Aims to Combine the Best Elements of Hearthstone and Magic: The Gathering

"( MTG and Hearthstone ) are games that we love and we're inspired by," he said. "In that location's no unsupportive feel at bushed any Rhinoceros employee, merely we do see an chance to advance the genre."

MTG too is based connected a organization that requires players to play and tap specific lands, and digital systems have struggled with how they automatically choose which ones to use Oregon force players to mouse click to each one card individually. Mythgard 's resourcefulness system fuses elements of both MTG and Hearthstone , with players choosing to "burn" cards and shuffle them back in their digital deck to get mana corresponding to the card's people of colour. The mana refreshes from each one turn, allowing players to cast cards of the corresponding color and faction. This also lets players build multicolor decks, which are demotic in MTG and require careful consideration to insure you have the accurate mix.

"In every hand there is a layer of choice because you decide what cards suit resources that you can draw again later," Thomas Dekker aforementioned. "Early in the courageous you have a bomb card and you face a choice of whether you try to work up to it or burn it to play something present."

Mythgard began alpha testing in 2022 and has gone through significant iteration to improve the user interface and game res. Abilities were sick around to ensure that apiece camarilla had a strong mechanic identity to fit its mythological flavor, like making the Greeks good at divining what you're drawing next. One of the most difficult things to balance was Paths, which hand players powers independent of the card game in their decks that are meant to complement diverse play styles, like emphasizing playing enchantments or artifacts. Paths also provide bonuses meant to help whichever player goes second in the match.

Mythgard Aims to Combine the Best Elements of Hearthstone and Magic: The Gathering

"We balance them after they are built by playtesting," Decker said. "Every Itinerary has taken quite a a act of iteration. We look at the data and we as wel listen to the subjective opinions of the players WHO are using these Paths a lot."

The first Mythgard release has virtually 400 cards and one Path for each of the six factions. Rhinoceros Games expects to release its first expanding upon set of about 150 cards in cardinal-to-eight months and wants to put out three sets each year starting in 2021. Their first senior stake-launch feature will be in-game tournaments, and they're as wel looking at adding ranked drafts and team matches based on player feedback.

As the halting grows, so too will Mythgard 's mythology, which is told through a story musical mode that Decker has already written two Thomas More chapters for.

"The goal is eventually to include all mythologies," he said. "We kinda have got a mental image of all the regions of the world fitting into these factions."