Hello! This is Jacob from Final Round Game Shop!
This is the start of something new we will be doing on our website: articles from us and our community members! A way for us to discuss the games we love to play and more!
Our first article comes from our local UniVersus/MHA player Zach Richards (known in the online community as jacetheace517) about his opinion of the changes coming to UniVersus and the company itself.
On to the article!!
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Greetings Fighters!
My name is Zach Richards, you may know me in the online community as jacetheace517. I’m coming to you today with my hour-zero/initial thoughts on a number of changes coming to the Universus CCG. This is purely an opinion piece and does not represent the thoughts the Final Round Game Shop or anyone associated with Final Round.
Today UVS Games released a slew of new information about the future of the Universus CCG. We’re going to go over much of this information at a high level and cover our thoughts on some of the major changes.
First things first, Jasco Games has been officially rebranded to UVS Games, with the flagship game being the Universus Collectible Card Game. You can check out the official video from the owners of the company, Paul and Luohan, here. This change makes sense given the history of the name Jasco, but it does hurt to see the original name recognition going away. It will take a long time to stop saying Jasco. It also means we’ll never see another episode of “The Joffice”, which…to be fair hasn’t existed in a while, but I think a lot of folks were hoping it might return one day.
With the company name rebranding, we also have a new logo. They debuted the new logo and what it would look like on booster packs with this image.
Source: https://uvsgames.com/all-news/the-future-of-universus
Including the logo at the top of the booster pack to make it stand out on LGS shelves is a fantastic addition to that pack wrapper. But let’s go on to the juicy parts.
New card back
The design article talks about wanting to merge the old card back and new card back to create something new for the future. Does it do this? Not really. It certainly combines the colors of the old card backs. But the new logo having a minimalist white text, the swirls leading to black hole blank spot and no border evokes Windows Media Player animations to me. Eliminating the border from the card back is a strange design choice.
Source: https://uvsgames.com/all-news/the-future-of-universus
Card design changes
In addition to the new company name, new company logo, and new game card back, we also have a new set of the My Hero Academia format for the Universus CCG.The 6th set in the MHA block, Jet Burn, started preview season today with an article from Bill Stark. With this new set comes a whole new card design.
Source: https://uvsgames.com/all-news/jet-burn-sneak-peek
Now, you can look at these and analyze them 100 different ways. Here’s something to think about though. Where’s the resource symbols on Hawks? Oh, you don’t recognize those resource symbols? Surprise! New resource symbols! Do they look good? No. Are they highly visible on the card? No. Are they going to be easier to identify for new players and more evocative to help teach them the game? No. Do I like them? Also no. Do they look like emojis? Absolutely. They have a ton of different designs for these set symbols shown across the 3 articles posted and many of the prototype designs are much better than the final versions. Life, Order, and Good in particular have prototype designs that still give the feeling of the old symbol, while being updated to the new wireframe models.
Moving on, we’ve completely revamped where the card name is, where the “keywords” on the cards are, for characters we’re moving the hand size and starting life total to the right, and for attacks we’ve shifted the speed and damage numbers down pretty much into the text box. Presumably this is to give the card art a bit more room to expand to the edges. Looking at Hawks’ Feather though, everything feels very cramped. The speed and damage numbers are so close to the control check number that I honestly feel like new players are going to start getting the numbers in the bottom right confused.
The colors on these preview cards, specifically on the words “Enhance” and “Response” (we didn’t get a preview of a card that has a “Form” ability) look washed out and bland. Since introducing the colored text for these abilities with the DLC 2020 cards they’ve had a very cool gradient that stood out from the backgrounds and text boxes. It was a very cool way visualize the card’s abilities and it “popped”. The new colors being a solid, semi-washed-out color feels like an overall negative change. It doesn’t help that the only attack we’ve seen is the Hawks attack above with the full orange text box makes the yellowish-orange color of the “Enhance” ability very hard to read.
Now I have a question for you. Where does Stun, Powerful, EX, Combo, Echo, etc go on the new card frame? Is it at the bottom? They posted a prototype version of the frame for “Tape Lash” with the keywords still more or less where they have been for years. I also can’t help but feel like this design is overall just better than the (assumedly) final versions we got.
Source: https://uvsgames.com/all-news/card-frame-update
However, from the Hawks’ attack, the keyword traits are at the bottom. So, will stun be there too on a theoretical new version of Tape Lash? Will it inexplicably be at the top of the text box? Will it just be an Enhance written on the card and not really a “keyword” (this seems incredibly unlikely).
I think all in all, the design changes are almost universally bad. The new logo is boring, the new card back (while you’re never going to see it) feels cheap, the new card frame is cluttered, and moves things into an organizational structure that makes the cards hard to read and information hard to find from across the table. The booster pack change looks cool and I’m hopeful it’s translate to real life the way it looks in the prototype image.
Final Thoughts
There was actually more revealed today, that we’ll cover in a different article on another day. None of the design changes we discussed here today affect the gameplay of the Universus CCG (apart from needing to know where stuff has moved to now). The gameplay for UVS still looks incredibly fun, skill expressive, and interesting. The card design changes are, for lack of a better word, baffling. Very few of these things feel like positive changes at first read. A lot of the changes evoke other games, but worse. Time will tell if we’ll have a better reaction once we see them in person at GenCon. Time will tell if we’ll see another redesign in the future. What I can say, is that we will grow accustomed to it eventually, we will continue to play the best CCG on the planet, and we will be even more excited for the future of what’s to come.
What’s to come you ask? New IPs. Check out our future articles for our thoughts on the newly announced Trigun: Stampede and Cowboy Beepop “Challenger Series” decks.
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