Mistborn: The Deckbuilding Game

D. Clair is a relatively fresh presence, but he has already put in plenty of miles with deck building. He does not necessarily land every time, yet he almost always brings a fresh, different mechanism. The theme helps here too: the Mistborn—yes, lol—come from a favourite book series, with heroes who swallow small amounts of metals to gain different magical properties. That is a massive simplification, but it does the job for the game.

At its core, it is a classic deck builder and it resembles Ashes of the Singularity quite a bit. Each player gets a hero with a different starting setup and abilities, while victory comes either from defeating your opponent or from outpacing them in gaining experience across the various tracks. That double direction gives the contests something beyond simply “I build the better deck.”

The twist is that, in order to play cards, you consume tokens of metals that you have in limited supply. It is thoroughly thematic and, more importantly, it meaningfully affects deck construction: it pushes you towards using many different “colours,” rather than going all-in on one and farming that colour's affinity bonuses, as you can in Ashes or Ascension.

I liked it a lot. It is a very nice game for the genre, and its metal-based limiting system is not just decoration placed over a familiar framework. I would play it with three players at most, though, because it runs long.