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Previously, I talked about Elestrals when I covered the Elestrals Clash! Kickstarter a while back ago. Now, the highly anticipated digital client for the TCG is finally in early access and available to the wider public. It’s still rough around the edges but it shows a lot of promise and now that I’ve had a bit of time with it, I’m excited to talk about it.
Elestrals is a unique creature focused card game developed by YouTuber aDrive (Known for his long career of streaming and making videos about Pokémon) and his talented team. The TCG saw massive success on Kickstarter, where it obtained enough funding to start production and begin making its way into the world. It has since continued to grow and find its way onto shelves in stores across the country. As of this writing, it’s become big enough to have official tournaments in major cities such as Dallas, TX and more.
Elestrals Clash! entered early access on Steam quite recently but first I want to talk about the card game itself for a minute. Having now actually had a chance to play it, I have to say, it’s pretty fun. Each player has two decks: a main deck that consists of 40 cards and a spirit deck with 20 cards in it. Where this game gets really interesting is that the spirit deck functions as both resources and your life pool. If a player's spirit deck would go below 0 cards, either due to damage or being forced to expend spirits, that player loses. With that in mind, the spirits in the spirit deck are also used to play cards. For example, to play an Elestral(creature) like Clovie, you need to enchant it with a spirit. That Elestral can then be cast in either attack position or defense position. This goes for runes too, which are the games non-creature cards that come in a variety of types such as counters, invokes and stadiums. It’s worth noting that runes and Elestrals need to be enchanted with the right element of spirit or their effects won’t go off. At present, there are 8 different elements of Elestral to check out and experiment with.
There’s also a respectable card variety with undoubtedly more to come. Which brings me to one of the big promises of Elestrals Clash!: Every usable card is available from the start. That’s right. No opening packs and hoping for rare pulls, it’s all there. They really delivered on an accessible digital version of the card game. This means you can build whatever decks you want without needing to grind, which is admittedly pretty nice. Instead, the game’s monetization revolves around cosmetics. In-game currency can be used to buy keys for Pandora’s Boxes, which when opened, can give the player things such as alternate card artwork, statues, and more. There's even a system for unlocking foil treatments for cards. It’s a pretty ambitious approach and has my respect.
As much fun as I’ve been having though, the digital client itself is still in need of some polish. I’ve seen this brought up in some reviews already and I’m inclined to agree that the in-game tutorial isn’t great. It does give you the absolute basics of how the game works: turn order, playing Elestrals and runes, attacking etc. But it doesn’t explain anything beyond that. A lot of the nuances and mechanics of the game are left for the player to either figure out or look up. Like Ascend, where you can cast an Elestral by sending one on your field to the underworld and re-use its spirits or Nexus, which is a mechanic on some cards that lets you move spirits around. That being said, it’s already confirmed that that’s something they’re going to be working on. There’s also the occasional bug and it doesn’t always run smoothly but again, that’s gonna be fixed with time. There’s ranked play, a casual play mode and even a few single-player puzzles and a practice mode. Keep in mind that the practice mode just amounts to you playing cards uninterrupted. Good for testing out mechanics and possible combos but I do hope to see some sort of AI implemented down the line.
The potential is there and the bones for a really great digital card game is there. If you can get past the quirks, Elestrals itself is actually pretty fun and pretty well fleshed out. The game isn’t difficult to learn at all and I personally actually got some enjoyment out of learning and figuring out the more nuanced mechanics. If you’re interested, the website has a full downloadable guide on how to play as well as a glossary for terms.
Elestrals Clash isn’t perfect, but it’s functional and with continued support, I can definitely see it becoming one of the staples. I certainly am excited to play more and I love the adorable artwork on the cards. As I said, it’s in Early Access on Steam and I do recommend checking it out. It’s also completely free to play. Just keep an open mind since it still has a long way to go. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some casting to do.
