POWERSTORM: TOP COW CCG LAUNCHES THIS MONTH

[MattBrady]

<img src="http://www.newsarama.com/Top_Cow/Veritas_Powerstorm_image.jpg" align="right"><i>Press Release</i>
<blockquote>March will mark the highly anticipated release of Powerstorm: Top Cow Edition in stores. Powerstorm is a non-collectible, customizable card game that focuses on replicating comic book battling action. The game's core mechanic is a blow-by-blow boxing match-style approach where every blow against your opponent's characters counts. Powerstorm is two games in one: starter decks can be played using the casual, Euro-style Training Wheels rules, or used with the advanced, tournament-oriented Comprehensive Rules.

The Top Cow Edition of Powerstorm features characters from Top Cow Productions, Inc. The inaugural set of Powerstorm features characters from Cyberforce and Strykeforce comics, in celebration of the 15th anniversary of the creation of Cyberforce. The Darkness is being released simultaneously as an exclusive promotional character to Powerstorm fan club members. Witchblade, Hunter/Killer, The Magdalena, and other Top Cow titles will be featured in future expansions to the game.

This represents the first time in almost a decade that Top Cow has been part of a licensed card game, and the first time ever that a customizable card game has launched with Top Cow's characters as the marquee licensed property.

Lee Valentine, President of Veritas Games Company said, "We are very excited about working with Top Cow. They have some of the very best art in the comic business and a great stable of interesting characters to work with. We are proud to launch the game as our flagship product".

"When Lee first approached me about Powerstorm I was interested but not incredibly excited," commented Matt Hawkins, President and COO of Top Cow Productions, Inc., "In less than a year he's converted me to a true believer. This system is very exciting, captures the core differences of all these characters and adds innovation to a growingly homogenized market."

Inquest Gamer proclaimed that Powerstorm is "a bit flashier with more chrome" when compared to Upper Deck's Vs. System, and Scrye Magazine calls Powerstorm "an intensely strategic game that favors decision-making over luck" and proclaims that Top Cow fans will be "enraptured" by Powerstorm.

Powerstorm is available through finer hobby game and comic book distributors as well as via direct sale from Veritas Games Company and Top Cow Productions, Inc.. Powerstorm was designed by Lee Valentine, the President of the Veritas Games Company.</blockquote>

[JDooley]

I noticed on the press release on this site and another, why does it say Non collectable card game?

[Speedball93]

Wouldn't it have made more sense to go with UpperDeck and have this be part of the VS trading card game? I would think it would have gotten a lot more exposure and would already have a base gaming audience. As a card flopper you tend not to try out new systems. Also I have never understood what the meaning of NON collectible means. They will still have rarity and some cards will be more expensive and harder to find. The game will not be any cheaper because it is non-collectible. I would like somebody to try and explain this.

[Jeff Bohn]

From their website...

http://www.veritasgames.net/

"We advertise that Powerstorm ™ is customizable, but not collectible. What does that mean in practical terms? Players love building their own deck of cards to play with, but hate spending hundreds of dollars on every set of every new game that comes out. The solution is to offer a customizable game that is packaged so that players don't have to chase down rare cards.

To that end, we have non-random starter decks. We also have Draft Packs. Draft Packs may seem like booster packs, but there is a big difference -- if you buy draft packs by the display box then you get one to two copies of every card that is in the draft set. The packs are randomized within the box, but every box of Draft Packs has the same contents as every other Draft Pack box of the same type (making them non-random at the box level). Draft Packs are sold by the pack to allow players to buy individual packs with unknown contents so that they can play sealed pack and draft game events. Draft play is important to the profitability of a customizable card game, because it encourages players to continue buying packs of product even after they have a complete set of cards."

So, because you are guaranteed the whole set of cards out of the Draft Pack box (about $90) they say it's not "collectible". Plus the card from the Player's Club (another $8 for six months), and who knows what else.

They also have two expansions on tap for this year, Supergroups (August 2007) and Mystical Forces (December 2007).

[Speedball93]

From their website...

http://www.veritasgames.net/

"We advertise that Powerstorm ™ is customizable, but not collectible. What does that mean in practical terms? Players love building their own deck of cards to play with, but hate spending hundreds of dollars on every set of every new game that comes out. The solution is to offer a customizable game that is packaged so that players don't have to chase down rare cards.

To that end, we have non-random starter decks. We also have Draft Packs. Draft Packs may seem like booster packs, but there is a big difference -- if you buy draft packs by the display box then you get one to two copies of every card that is in the draft set. The packs are randomized within the box, but every box of Draft Packs has the same contents as every other Draft Pack box of the same type (making them non-random at the box level). Draft Packs are sold by the pack to allow players to buy individual packs with unknown contents so that they can play sealed pack and draft game events. Draft play is important to the profitability of a customizable card game, because it encourages players to continue buying packs of product even after they have a complete set of cards."

So, because you are guaranteed the whole set of cards out of the Draft Pack box (about $90) they say it's not "collectible". Plus the card from the Player's Club (another $8 for six months), and who knows what else.

They also have two expansions on tap for this year, Supergroups (August 2007) and Mystical Forces (December 2007).
In theory this may be true, but I have never seen it work out this way. There are always cards that are better play wise that you can never find. It just seems fishy to me.

[veritasgames]

I would like somebody to try and explain this.

Sure, see below.

Also I have never understood what the meaning of NON collectible means.

To us, non-collectible means "no rare chasing", that cards aren't particularly hard to find, and that their value in the secondary market will only be slightly higher than the cost of the product divided by the number of cards in it.

Non-collectible means the back of every draft pack and the front of every draft box tells you how to get a set.


They will still have rarity and some cards will be more expensive and harder to find.

Why will our cards be harder to find?

If you buy 2 starter decks and a box of draft packs you'll have 1 to 4 copies of every card in the set. We even have a guarantee on the front of the box. The only time you won't get a full set will be in the odd circumstance where our collation was delivered by the printer as we requested in, in which case we'll stand by our guarantee and make sure you get a set if you bought a sealed draft box (instead of buying pack by pack).

Our best cards are limited to one per deck and after two different starter decks and a box of draft packs you'll get at least one copy of those cards.

The game will not be any cheaper because it is non-collectible.

Actually it will be fantastically cheaper in terms of overall per player expenditures than most collectible games in that you don't get umpteen copies of commons and uncommons in an attempt to chase down rares. We designed our collation to give you what we thought you'd want for a tournament card play set designed for reasonable versatility.

Since cards are guaranteed to be in the box, you'd be foolish to pay a lot per card to try to track down extras for your third or fourth simultaneously stacked deck, since you could always just split a box between friends to guarantee you get the card you want if you want more than we provide for in the play set.

Secondary market value for our cards should be only very slightly more than the cost of taking the set and dividing it by the number of cards in it.

We did this on purpose since most players we talked to before our game launch said that they were just sick of chasing down rares.

Arguably the only thing you will chase down is promotional cards from our players club and even there, it's not a question of IF you will get the cards, but how fast you will get them. Starting next month, tournament players who join our player's club will get cards from a fixed list, in the order of their individual choosing, for playing in events). Some players will get player's club promos faster than others (by playing more frequently), but everyone can definitely acquire a full set of promos. It's possible in half a year to have all our promo cards by paying $8.00 to join our club and playing twice a week. That's shipped straight to your door for less money than you'd actually pay for the cards if we had packaged them in a deck and sold them over the counter.

Wouldn't it have made more sense to go with UpperDeck and have this be part of the VS trading card game?


Not for us. We are the publisher of Powerstorm and we don't own the rights to the Vs. System. We went after the Top Cow license aggressively, and Upper Deck didn't even seem interested at the time.

In terms of game play, except for one reviewer who felt otherwise,our game is consistently rated by most people who have tried it as equal or better than the Vs. System. Is Powerstorm a better game? I think so. But I don't think that's why people perceive it to be better. Powerstorm is not a generic mechanic with superhero pictures on it. Powerstorm is a comic book fight game, designed start to finish to capture the feel of a comic book. So, comic book fans tend to like the feel of Powerstorm better, since Vs. system was designed more as a generic house system for Upper Deck that a variety of different properties could be applied to.

In our interview with the Ogre Cave Audio report (I don't know if they've put it up yet), Chris Hanrahan, owner of End Game Oakland said our game was vastly superior to the Vs. System. Inquest says we have "more chrome" than the Vs. System. We've got more trappings of a comic book fight.

So, in short, we thing the game is better than other comic book games you've tried, it's got two levels of play, it's non-collectible and therefore it's just plain cheaper to buy a play set of Powerstorm than to try to rare chase cards from the leading competitor.

Your mileage may vary, but that's how we feel over in our neck of the woods.

[Speedball93]

Sure, see below.



To us, non-collectible means "no rare chasing", that cards aren't particularly hard to find, and that their value in the secondary market will only be slightly higher than the cost of the product divided by the number of cards in it.

Non-collectible means the back of every draft pack and the front of every draft box tells you how to get a set.




Why will our cards be harder to find?

If you buy 2 starter decks and a box of draft packs you'll have 1 to 4 copies of every card in the set. We even have a guarantee on the front of the box. The only time you won't get a full set will be in the odd circumstance where our collation was delivered by the printer as we requested in, in which case we'll stand by our guarantee and make sure you get a set if you bought a sealed draft box (instead of buying pack by pack).

Our best cards are limited to one per deck and after two different starter decks and a box of draft packs you'll get at least one copy of those cards.



Actually it will be fantastically cheaper in terms of overall per player expenditures than most collectible games in that you don't get umpteen copies of commons and uncommons in an attempt to chase down rares. We designed our collation to give you what we thought you'd want for a tournament card play set designed for reasonable versatility.

Since cards are guaranteed to be in the box, you'd be foolish to pay a lot per card to try to track down extras for your third or fourth simultaneously stacked deck, since you could always just split a box between friends to guarantee you get the card you want if you want more than we provide for in the play set.

Secondary market value for our cards should be only very slightly more than the cost of taking the set and dividing it by the number of cards in it.

We did this on purpose since most players we talked to before our game launch said that they were just sick of chasing down rares.

Arguably the only thing you will chase down is promotional cards from our players club and even there, it's not a question of IF you will get the cards, but how fast you will get them. Starting next month, tournament players who join our player's club will get cards from a fixed list, in the order of their individual choosing, for playing in events). Some players will get player's club promos faster than others (by playing more frequently), but everyone can definitely acquire a full set of promos. It's possible in half a year to have all our promo cards by paying $8.00 to join our club and playing twice a week. That's shipped straight to your door for less money than you'd actually pay for the cards if we had packaged them in a deck and sold them over the counter.



Not for us. We are the publisher of Powerstorm and we don't own the rights to the Vs. System. We went after the Top Cow license aggressively, and Upper Deck didn't even seem interested at the time.

In terms of game play, except for one reviewer who felt otherwise,our game is consistently rated by most people who have tried it as equal or better than the Vs. System. Is Powerstorm a better game? I think so. But I don't think that's why people perceive it to be better. Powerstorm is not a generic mechanic with superhero pictures on it. Powerstorm is a comic book fight game, designed start to finish to capture the feel of a comic book. So, comic book fans tend to like the feel of Powerstorm better, since Vs. system was designed more as a generic house system for Upper Deck that a variety of different properties could be applied to.

In our interview with the Ogre Cave Audio report (I don't know if they've put it up yet), Chris Hanrahan, owner of End Game Oakland said our game was vastly superior to the Vs. System. Inquest says we have "more chrome" than the Vs. System. We've got more trappings of a comic book fight.

So, in short, we thing the game is better than other comic book games you've tried, it's got two levels of play, it's non-collectible and therefore it's just plain cheaper to buy a play set of Powerstorm than to try to rare chase cards from the leading competitor.

Your mileage may vary, but that's how we feel over in our neck of the woods.
Thanks for addressing some of my concerns, but you still have to throw down $100 dollars a display box and casual gamers who are interested and want a starter and some boosters to experiment will still have to go through the whole "collectible" part to find the cards that in terms of gameplay will have a higher price in the singles market due to playability. I have played everything from Pokemon to Magic to Star Wars to Lord of the Rings and the retailers know which cards are the "power cards" in a set and charge prices accordingly. In the real world, there is no such thing as NON collectible.

I hope that your game does well and can find a place in the current market.

[veritasgames]

Thanks for addressing some of my concerns, but you still have to throw down $100 dollars a display box

$88.80 at full retail for a box of draft packs. $9.95 per starter deck.


and casual gamers who are interested and want a starter and some boosters to experiment will still have to go through the whole "collectible" part to find the cards that in terms of gameplay will have a higher price in the singles market due to playability.

Anyone dabbling with the game should just buy 2 starters. Anyone serious about the game should either buy an entire box of draft packs at a go OR should find a friend or two to split the entire box with. Draft boxes are designed to be fairly easy to split between 2 players (heroes and villains in about equal number).

Most of the highly playable cards actually tend to be packaged with in the same draft pack with the character they are associated with. A character normally only has 6 cards associated with him, and 4 of those will be with him when you open the draft pack. The other 2 are in the rest of the draft set somewhere to ad some skill and diversity to the draft. But a lot of the core stuff required to make the character useful is in the pack you are opening, even if you buy by the pack.

There won't be really high priced priced cards unless people are foolish. Since all cards are guaranteed in 2 starters and a display box, if someone is charging you more than 50 cents to a dollar per card you are getting robbed since the cards are only worth about 26 cents each at full retail. If someone charges you much more than 26 cents a card, you can end run price gouging -- just find a play group, buy a box, and draft what you want, and you'd get the cards you need at 26 cents per card. Since the draft boxes are the same, you should (if our printer did their job right) have the same experience with any old draft box.



I have played everything from Pokemon to Magic to Star Wars to Lord of the Rings and the retailers know which cards are the "power cards" in a set and charge prices accordingly.

The "power" cards in the set are packaged with the characters you need to play them. Without the characters, the powerful cards they can play are moot. And if you open a pack with a specific character his high utility cards are packaged with him. Typically more obscure cards are the ones separated from the character and are not in the same pack.

We built the game to have a very limited secondary market at low prices.

We also built the collation so that among players who buy by the pack for some reason other than draft play, that they can easily trade with friends on a character for character, card for card basis, since there isn't a whole lot of difference in card rarity in the set.


I hope that your game does well and can find a place in the current market.

Thanks. We appreciate the sentiment. Right now we are offering free decks for anyone who can pass our judge's tests, so it's an easy game to get on board with.

There's therefore really no excuse to try it, if you like superhero card games!

Have a great weekend.

[tommygun]

Man. So I heard about this Powerstorm game and I was pretty skeptical. I looked at some of the pics and it totally looked like an overpower rip off too. But I tried it this weekend and I'll give you my two cents.

So my buddy likes Darkness and Witchblade, and he bought the two starter decks. The base game is pretty much the same mechanic as Overpower was, but when you get into it it has so much more. You throw attacks at each other, but the thing that I thought made this game kick ass was that it actually paid attention to the fact that it's super heroes. One of the guys above asked why VS. didn't just make this one of there sets, but I hate VS. It's basically like playing UNO with super hero pictures. It could have pictures of Puppies on it and be the exact same game. This game felt like super heroes. Here is the example.

So I bought a few packs and I got like 4 charecters to play with. One was this psychic girl who was bleeding through her eyes. Pretty bad ass looking. And I got a card for her that when a guy charecter tried to attack me, it made the attack on one of his team instead. She was psychically confusing him so he hit his friend. That sold me. All of the cards she came with were like psychic attacks.

The Pros:
Great comic book feel.
The art kicked total ass. Every card except one that I saw was art I would stare at for days.
The game had a TON of rules to learn, but after two games we were flying.
Very Very fun.

The Cons: Not many.

My friend and I had to look up some of the rules. A little heavy. But the rule book had a ton of references and was really easy to use.

I didn't know most of the characters. I thought this would bug me more, but then I thought, you know, I didn't know what a Shivin Dragon was either before I played magic. It's a comic book game, it was pretty easy to get that one girl was like the Flash, one guy had mettle skin and was super strong.

I thought I was just going to see how this game was, but after one day I'm going to pick up a box.

Great job Veritas! :)

[veritasgames]

Tommygun, I'm glad you like the game. Anyone who passes our judge's tests either get free starter decks or free store credit, so if you like it well enough to judge you can get some decks for friends.

The Darkness and some of his cards are available as promo cards to anyone who joins our player's club (you get a bunch of cards for joining). That'll probably launch next week.

Within about 2 weeks we'll have a Flash movie that'll teach you how to play the training wheels game. You'll be able to use it to teach people the game quickly.

Re: similarities, all of our design team and most of our investors were Overpower players. I liked OP but it had way too many rules problems. I built a game that feels like OP but many things work with substantially different rules. I didn't want to just be a carbon copy of the game. Since we're all comic geeks here we wanted to design a game that felt like a superhero vs. supervillain fight. I'm glad you think we accomplished that.

Let us know if you'd like to write up a full review of the game. Whether or not you do, we'd like permission to quote from your post here. Let us know, and thanks for your kind words.

[Speedball93]

It sounds like you have addressed all of my concerns on this game. You may have talked me into trying this out. I will see if my game store carries this and pick up the starters. Now I just have to explain to my wife why I am playing another TCG. Thanks.

[veritasgames]

Speedball, remind her that if you buy by the box that it's non-collectible, and you'll get a complete set! It's cheaper than playing most other collectible games.

Enjoy. If your local store doesn't have it you can get it online from us AND if you pass our judge's tests you get free starter decks. So you can learn the game and play it for free!