Pros

The 6 pre-built decks feel a LOT different. There’s one that focuses on playing cards from your hand, another to feed a giant viper, and one that encourages you to empty your opponents’ deck to win! The mana dice even have asymmetry of their own, where you frequently pick 2 colors per game.

There is also luck mitigation everywhere in Ashes Reborn. You choose your starting hand. Countless ways to change the dice faces. Only drawing at the end of ROUNDS, not turns. Oh — that leads into fun mind games with round passing! Who will be forced to pass first and let their opponent take actions uncontested? (Edit on 08/29/2022 for clarification: If you pass, you can still take actions if your opponent does not pass. But the mind game comes in if you pass, then your opponent also passes, leading to an end of the round!)

The name of Ashes Reborn is having a solid board presence while making sure not to overspend on mana. You gotta think really hard about every card’s cost and how it fits into the big picture of rounds.

Only 2 actions give these agonizing decisions:

1. Should you mitigate your die rolls with a side action?

2. Should you spawn more Monsters, or focus on getting Spells ready?

3. Should you exhaust units for their ability, or should you attack with them?

Cons & Nitpicks

We are definitely irritated with the pre-built deck balance (ahem Noah). Their asymmetry is really cool, but the problem is their strength level is not tuned evenly.

The game doesn’t tell you which of the 6 decks to start with, so if you end up picking the wrong matchup of decks, first games can go really badly. There’s no quick start guide to each faction, so if you don’t figure out the combos quickly enough on a first playthrough, that’s some bad planning that means bad match for you.

For your first game, start with Coal, who is the most straightforward. Then, Aradrael, then Moeni.

As for more nitpicky stuff, the game can run quite long, especially on first games. It’s not surprising that you just ponder a LOT and have each turn take a long time. This is just the nature of the nuance in a competitive game. Sure, you only get one main action, and one side action, but can do them in any order. Then the dice. Then your cards: your spells, your units, and your hand… not to mention all of your opponent’s stuff…

Final Thoughts

We’re not going to give a score, because there’s just so much we don’t know about deck building yet, and of course the huge scope is barely just scratched with an introductory core box. Like, our only glaring con with the game are some of the preconstructed decks, which won’t matter if you deck build, which is how Ashes veterans play the game anyways. Plaid Hat even addressed themselves that preconstructed Noah is hot trash.

We can stay that we’re impressed though! Ashes eliminates mana screwing with its dice, keeps turns pretty snappy with its 2 actions, all while still being that familiar package of a mage duel. For being a card game, of which historically rely on some sort of top decking, Ashes doesn’t have much of that, and constantly feels fair as a result. But Ashes is so different feeling than other competitive card games, that this isn’t a no-brainer luck mitigated replacement of magic.

Ashes is a dueler where the overhead of managing dice AND cards is SO CLEAR off the bat. Choose your hand. Get 10 mana. Plan for rounds. The back and forth gameplay ensures that one guy isn’t ever gonna keep combo-ing, so make sure you stay true to the fundamentals of spending dice well. You mess up on these fundamentals, and you’ll find that your opponent just will have a crushing board advantage over you that you can’t really come back from.

To really reduce that comeback potential, the game doesn’t have a big payoff in hand advantage, because you always draw back up to 5 cards every round. Instead, the game has a focus on playing with the right tempo: killing your opponent’s units for cheap, setting up your later die rolls, and using actions that don’t cost dice when the time is right. The fact that there’s dice abilities to mess with your opponent dice should tell you how focused you need to be.

Yeah, actually sounds pretty intense, huh? Some of you card game veterans might be taken aback on how much this system asks from you! The planning is very detailed, and it is punishing.

We also had a lot of talk about consistency and interesting game states… but we actually never talked about anything BIG happening did we? No big combos the game is leading up into, because… it can’t with the restrictions. There is nothing in this box that just dropped our jaw, and said WOW that was a ridiculous combo when THAT happens!

Compare it to other card duelers, like Yugioh where you can have turns where you combo like crazy to summon crazy monsters from different sources. Or Magic: the Gathering, where you’re guaranteed late game craziness with some decks, as they spend a ridiculous amount of mana for a HUGE monster that dominates the board. Or even in Android: Netrunner, which is filled with mind games, and comeback potential, where you can attack your opponent’s deck for a 3 point agenda suddenly!

Ashes in comparison doesn’t have these possibly zany, swingier turns, but its crucial moments are a bit more measured, like pushing for a final attack with a tons of units, and hoping your opponent doesn’t drop a reaction spell with their leftover dice.

It can be outright frustrating to some used to those combos. What if you want freedom with your turns to do more than 2 things? You can’t. Instead of easily dropping an engine for an unbeatable late game, or auto-piloting once you draw a certain card, you gotta be in it slower, and deeper with Ashes. Do your tit-for-that with micro-turns, almost like a chess dynamic thrown into a deck building card game.

There is a 3 and 4 player mode in the box, where the game gives you enough components to play with a bunch of homies! Now we haven’t tried this, so we can’t speak much on it, but we are concerned on how that type of gameplay would even be balanced, or even end in a reasonable amount of time. It’s probably not a priority though, if you’re looking into something like Ashes anyways.