Battle Spirits Review

Welcome To Battle Spirits

It has taken 14 years, but the incredibly popular Japanese card game Battle Spirits has made its way out of Japan. Rechristened with the name Battle Spirits Saga, or BSS for short, the 50-set-strong card game has had its first European and American releases trickling out since April this year. With so many cards in the Japanese version to choose from these first products are a who’s who of popular and staple cards from the 14-year run that’s presumably picked with the hindsight of how the releases of each set has gone and Bandai Namco, the publishers, having the chance many designers and publishers dream of to do it all again from the start after learning from the game’s past.

Why Not Play One Of The Big 3?

Battle Spirits Saga offers a pair of mechanic that makes the game unique. Whilst it is easy, and rather accurate, to claim it is the love child of Magic the Gathering and YuGiOh! that wouldn’t be entirely true. The first unique mechanic is that of the life system. Whenever a player takes damage from combat, they gain a Core for each point of damage, which they can then use next turn to play a more cards in a bit of an underdog system. These Cores, like land and mana in Magic, are a currency system however BSS has a second currency in the form of cost reductions. Every card in BSS that stays on your field permanently can provide a reduction to the cost to play cards, from your hand, of the same colour. These two mechanics make the game its own unique game with unique strategies and a system that prevents one player from immediately demolishing another player with a bad starting hand.

Where To Start Collecting & Playing

As with the big three TCGs, Magic, YuGiOh! and Pokemon, the best place to start is with the advertised starter product which in the case of Battle Spirits Saga is handily named Starter Decks. Like both Magic and Pokemon, BSS has a colour/faction system where every card has a colour (Red, Purple, White or Yellow) and having multiple cards in play of a given colour will typically make the cards you play of that same colour better. As such, each starter deck only contains cards of their given colour. Unlike other TCGs however, that will have a handful of cards in their starter and structure decks that are at least initially unavailable anywhere else, BSS’ starter decks contain 16 unique cards, none of which are currently available anywhere else. Each of the 16 cards in each deck most often come in multiples of 3, with the occasional full playset of 4, except for the holographic X Rare cover card of each deck, with only 2 copies, which does mean you would need 2 of each starter deck for a playset of everything (which is better than YuGiOh! in which you need 3). All in all, the starter decks have 50 cards, making a valid, but minimum size, playable deck, as well as the 30 core and 1 soul core tokens that are needed per player to play the game (of course any tokens would do the job).

With each starter deck being wholly unique, the starter deck of the colour(s) you want to build, and play will be the best start point for a collection. Every starter deck has desirable cards for their colour as well as a few less desirables that you would likely want to swap out when you got the chance. In addition, most of the better cards have a less-good variant in the current series of packs, “Dawn of History”, and most of the worse cards in the starter decks have better variants within those same packs. As such, just a starter deck of a given colour and a few lucky packs can get you all you want and need to improve the deck to a desirable standard.

Perfectly Balanced, As All Things Should Be

Unfortunately, the starter decks are not all made equal. Red and White are definitely the colour of choice in tournaments at the minute, but the same is true for the starter decks. Whilst Yellow was initially the most popular strategy with a lot of the high tier Yellow cards being guaranteed in the starter deck, Red appears to be the most balanced and strong out the box, followed by White, although both would require upgrades, as mentioned, before being ‘competitive’. Meanwhile Purple, whilst okay out of the box, definitely tries to do too much at once and needs the most fine-tuning of any of the four structure decks.

In terms of their Battle Spirits competitive ranking, ignoring the staple Red and White cards that make it into almost every competitive deck, the results seem to be Red > White > Yellow > Purple. The starter decks out of the box would likely be ranked White > Yellow > Red > Purple in terms of power and Red > White > Yellow > Purple in terms of complexity, but there is very little between them.