Cards From The Abyss #6: Universal Fighting System

the world of trading card games is a ruthless one many hundreds have met their fate and died however the remains they leave behind never truly vanish from this world welcome hey everybody this is kodak here and welcome back to cards from the abyss today we're going to be taking a look at uh an interesting new game we are actually going to be talking about a mega license game now what is a mega license game now last time we looked at the card game yu yu haku show which is a licensed game that is they rather than making their own from scratch brand new intellectual property they instead take a brand or like you know like a movie a tv show some kind of series that already exists and develop a game based on it there were a ton of these back at the turn of the millennium however licensing games are pretty difficult i made a whole video on the subject and these days you won't see a game based on like a single franchise unless it's like already a huge hit or the franchise itself was developed to promote the card game although those are also becoming increasingly rare um on the other hand a mega license game such as why schwartz is a system where instead of developing a game based on a single franchise they instead are able to base it on multiple franchises they make a system and they kind of shop it around to brands who maybe don't have enough going for them to make their own game and offer to make it for a set it gives you know fans new merchandise gives them the game to play gives uh the actual brand you know a way to make a game without having to take like a lot of the investment and risk a lot of these can be done fairly cheaply because they might only exist for one set they might only get one sets worth of content out of each franchise and it does create a bit of insanity for instance why schwartz is a system where you can have both uh you can have an anime character from the anime fairy tale versus a video game character from persona 4 versus editing software with vocaloid um yes that's it's it's music editing software so you can have just this crazy uh this crazy mashup of characters made possible by simply having a system that can handle all of it the idea is that it's a more flexible system where each setup can have its own special win condition you guys are probably familiar with why schwartz because there's a good chance that a franchise you like had a set based on it there have been a few games that have been as successful as white schwartz in this regard it helps that why schwartz is out of japan where a lot of the anime and stuff a lot of those sorts of cult hits have uh a better way a better opportunity to uh get going somewhere however we're not actually talking about why schwartz today because why schwartz is still in print instead we are going to be taking a look at universal fighting system or ufs this is a this is another game from the uh from the early 2000's from the arts although it's from the late odds it's more around uh more made it's uh itself known around 2007 2008 that was when it uh it had it's had its big heyday 2006. if fairly after a lot of the surge happened but before a lot of uh before a lot of uh what we see today so sort of the tail end of that big rush and it is uh a game that is based on fighting games such as street fighter so of course i'm using my man dan here so what this is is it's called universal fighting system because what it does is it takes fighting game mechanics and puts them into card form and this is different from the exceed fighting system that i showed off before i honestly think ufs is a lot better at doing that because exceed if you remember had like that weird movement system where the characters had to move around and there was range and stuff and that was you know to sort of superficially simulate a fighting screen but having to move the cards around on a map like that i've i've explained how that's a problem in another video um in this case it does borrow a lot i know there's a lot of stuff to look at on this card um but one thing that helps is if you are familiar with fighting game terminology a lot of that vocabulary then you will have a much easier time understanding how this game is played for example if you are familiar with the terms low mid high combo engage you'll have a pretty easy time figuring this out but anyway let's get down to brass tags now ufs is a game where you play as a character it's a game with an avatar card so this is my dan avatar card and what you do is you attempt to reduce your opponent's health to zero from a starting total that actually depends on each character this dan actually has 24 health which is actually considerably below average um they also have each character also has a designated hand size which again again this dan is lower than average dan is the joke character from street fighter which makes sense but his uh big shtick is that he can he has a lot of card flow he has an ability that he can use on his turn that allows him to draw a ton of cards into his hand and refill himself back up to seven and it's a it's a it's a very good ability um now that's great that's your main character card that's pretty straightforward and easy to understand but what is your deck made out of well your deck is going to be made out of two different types of cards attack cards and foundation cards now these cards have a lot of similar mechanics but they do also do different things now attack cards are what you're going to use to try to damage your opponent in case that wasn't fairly obvious from the name attack and foundation cards are cards that they are your resource cards attacks are the moves you perform during the fight the uh foundations are the experience the abilities that your character essentially brings to the fight that they're tapping into in order to help them win for example we have dan here in this picture he is the world champion so on your turn what you do is you have a bar you have a bar that you uh play attacks onto and you can play several attacks and foundations on your turn in order to try to get them into play for example if i start with still dragon and i successfully do that then i can attempt to play world champion and if i successfully do that i can do saikyo ryu and so on and so on and so on what happens is on this chain each attack and foundation has what is called a difficulty stat you can see here still dragon has a difficulty of four and world champion has a difficulty of two and this is the uh the number that you have to nail your check on in order to make the attack actually perform so this says this is sort of the game's resource system it's this combined with the use of foundation so what happens is if i were to say already have world champion in play let's just say it's down here and i play still dragon what i do is i then flip the top card of my deck in an attempt to see if i make the check so this is similar to the destiny system seen in a lot of games made by decipher so you folks familiar with like the star wars game and that probably familiar with the destiny mechanic and if i were to flip up the card i then make my check so this number down here is the check this number up in the top corner here is the difficulty this number down here is the check or our destiny and i need to check and see if my check is higher than the move difficulty uh oh i'm in a bit of trouble because escape the island's check is only a three versus still dragon's difficulty of four now normally this would mean that the attack fails and my turn is over however i can take the foundations that i already have in play and do what i think is probably one of the better replacements for the term tap and commit they actually use the term commit to denote when you are turning a card sideways i like this it also works for um for fighting game terminology because what happens is uh in a lot of these games a lot of it is you know frame by frame that sort of thing so when your character commits to attack that means you're going for it you're not going to try to move or do any blocks you're committing to that attack so i like the idea that you are committing a foundation to get that attack through so for each card that i commit i increase my check by one i can actually check my hero card as well so you basically start the game with one free foundation in play and thus that brings the check up to four which means that still dragon is now successful um there are also cards that allow you to block now what happens is with still dragon this is the attack speed it is a speed of 4 which is really really good um and it deals 4 damage now what my opponent can do is they can attempt to play a block now a block oh there are cards that have a block value here and what these cards these uh there are there are other games that i've seen that do fighting games that have like their own determined block cards and those in my opinion just kind of clutter up the deck in this case some cards have block values and others actually do not the dan's fireball actually does not have a block value for it although it does have special rules meaning that it can cancel out a ranged attack basically he shoots the fireball at the ranged attack to make it stop but what happens is if my opponent tries to block then they take the speed of the card and add it to the value here listed on the block you notice that uh that dan here actually has a block here of plus zero now wait isn't this guy not in my deck why do these cards have stats i'll get into that later um but what happens is he then has to make a check against my four speed plus his one he would have to get a check of five and let's say he flips up saikyo ryu which gives him a check of four versus my difficulty of five how so he would have to now commit foundations in order to make this block successful now what happens is after i play still dragon it doesn't go away it actually stays in they call it the card pool but you could also call it the combo string so i can now play another card i can now attempt to play the world champion card which has a difficulty of two now that seems like it would be super easy to get off but here's the thing for each card in my card pool the difficulty of the next card goes up by one so even though world champion's listed difficulty is two because still dragon is in play its difficulty now becomes three so if i flip the next card of my deck and i get boxing ring which has a check of three hooray i have played world champion successfully so basically i can do this until i either fail a check or i choose not to play anymore so if in this case i choose not to play any more cards i end my turn now at the end of my turn these two cards actually go to two different places and surprisingly they do not go to the discard pile any any attack that you successfully perform instead goes under your character into their gauge as momentum this is similar to another fighting game mechanic which is known as gage where what happens is if you perform a successful attack you gain some gauge which you can then spend to do more fancy tricks later there are cards that use uh that use gauge to either increase the power of an attack or some even create multiples of an attack like you can like there are moves like where you like spin or like do a jump in the air which like hit multiple times this uh you can turn these momentum into basically copies of that card to try to hit multiple times and foundations like i said before go into my resource area foundations have abilities that you can use to commit rather than rather than committing them to pay costs they have some useful abilities as well so you can build these up for a while these all have a lot of really useful things and the balancing mechanic i'm sure you have caught on is that some cards have higher difficulty or lower check so the tendency is attacks tend to have a high difficulty and low check while foundations tend to have low difficulty and high check so you need a good combination of both having foundations not only can you get them into play to make it easier for you to play attack cards but their high check makes it easier to play cards in general so usually the stronger the card the higher the difficulty and the lower the check so for example the card beefy has the same difficulty as still dragon despite being a foundation because its effect is just that good you commit it to pay for basically anything and then it stays down and it increases your maximum hand size which is what you draw up to at the start of your turn um it's actually uh let's get back to character cards because i'm sure you've noticed the character cards also have the difficulty and the block and the check and that is because you can include more character cards in your deck you can use it to play a new version of your character which gets the best stats from all of them however because they also provide low block uh they provide a plus zero on your block so they don't increase the difficulty to block at all and they have a check of six this is true across all of them in fact most starter decks tend to include two copies of every hero card so drawing this card is not a dead draw it has its uses as a cheat block and as uh and as a good a good check um some more things about hero cards hero cards also have the disciplines they have these three icons here which tells you what cards this character is capable of using so for example there's a big red spot on dan here so all the cards i have in his deck also have that red spot on him so he's always guaranteed to be able to use them a rule is that you must build a combo string out of cards that share the same discipline at least that's what i remember so that's why i built a deck that was entirely 100 consisting of red cards so this affects what a character can do so each character has their own list of talents this is the mechanic that allows them to open up the ability to include more franchises such as soul calibur is each character has a set of disciplines that they can use and that affects this affects deck building there are there are lots of disciplines out there but the ability to just easily identify them based on these icons here is what makes deck building plausible now i'm sure you've already seen them because i flipped them up but there are also two more types of cards in this game there are asset cards and action cards now these uh behave similarly to the attacks and the foundations before the asset cards basically behave like foundations they go into play in your area with all of your foundations however the only difference is you cannot commit an asset to help pay for a difficulty cost so they tend to have stronger abilities that you can use to offset that for example boxing ring allows you to create smash tokens becky let me smash and you can remove a smash token to ready any other card so this has some abilities of allowing you to reuse your foundations multiple times and then there are action cards which behave like attack cards in that they go away at the end of the turn however they are not considered attacks and thus cannot be blocked although you can see down here that uh by the end of ufs they actually went kind of nuts and had cards that had multiple abilities so you can also play this card as an attack so just a bit of a bit of fun madness there anyway i remember this game being a blast like i said i had this dan deck here because he had his uh his high his his ability to just keep drawing into more cards which meant he could do a lot of really good combo abilities however because of how the system worked you could do ridiculous things such as you know paying for the ability sardines beach special with dan's foundation of squirrel school girl innocence so that's an image i don't know if i want in my brain but now you have it in there too so it's it's a really fun game the fact that they could be so flexible with it and the fact that it actually really does make much better use of fighting game terminology is why i personally fell in love with this game so what happened to this game well they implemented a little thing called set rotation and i have a whole video about set rotation if you want to know about it the pros and cons but the thing is with a sort of mega license game like this if you rotate out the older cards not only are you rotating out the older cards you're also rotating out like the characters and the franchises that people bought your game for to begin with and that's that's kind of a big no-no for a game like this this this game it was doing pretty well until it implemented its first rotation and then it just kind of fell off the face of the earth it's uh it's kind of a poster child for rotating because it's what the big boys do it's it's it's the reason it's the game that i largely cite as an example of set rotation done wrong although uh i'm sure a few of you have already noticed and written in the comments that uh even though it is the end of ufs it's actually not entirely gone because uh it rebranded itself as universes yeah all of you guys who didn't bother to watch the video and uh are posting comments furiously you may uh pause the video freely to go and wipe the egg off your face so yeah it's uh kind of weird isn't it having a game on my cards from the abyss series that technically still has uh a modern iteration i guess maybe this is the spooky sequel to carts in the abyss it's return from the abyss extra scary so anyway this is uh universes by jasco games and uh in this my hero academia two player starter set we will find that it is in fact exactly the same game it has the uh the same numbers i'm sure you recognize uh the placement of these by now although they've moved the hand size and health limit but i'm sure by now you recognize how a lot of these cards go together although i have to admit this box is uh kind of unwieldy it has this big ol like hinge flap design but it it uh it's not thick enough to hold the cards on edge and it's it's a bit of a messy box if you ask me i like my boxes to be uh practical as uh to be to be functional along with being attractive um but you know that's just me i'm the guy who who always talks about the boxes you know me the boxes so this is a uh this is the uh my hero academia they label it as the my hero academia trading card game but on the back you can see it says universes so i've talked a little bit about my hair academia i think i gave it some lip service in my uh in my birthday video where it's uh basically a world where nearly everybody on earth has superpowers um so they're they're called quirks in this universe uh izuku midoriya is our main character technically and he actually received his powers from all might who is basically superman um superman as written by somebody who actually understands superman as a character i have to i can't stress that enough people complain about how what kind of character superman is go and watch use some my hero academia watch what all might does and understand what the character of superman really means and over here we have katsuki bakugo who is his rival he has the uh midoriya basically has super strength as his ability although his uh his power is hard to control and he winds up hurting himself almost as often as he winds up hurting the bad guy bakugou has uh power over explosions which is uh which is uh his ability can use that you know like for rocket boosting and for big heavy punches and he's you know he's kind of a rage machine although like i said before this game functions exactly the same comparing ourselves with the old dan cart again we still have the difficulty the block and the check all in the same places although the hand size and heart and disciplines have all been rearranged on the card but you can pretty clearly read this and tell it from the same game no no no no this time it's on purpose without being lazy it's a reinvigoration of a game that had pretty much fallen away it's it's a rebranding not just a not just a lazy knockoff um one thing i do notice about here is they do have a bit of a mismatch of the fonts i'm sure i'm sure some of you any of you layout students out there know a thing about that like there's like it looks like there's like three different fonts for the numbers whereas over here it's all the same font um it looks a bit cluttered honestly but i guess they're going for like these big flashy numbers and stuff to maybe make it look a little bit more like a comic book i don't know i'm call me old-fashioned actually kind of like how these old images look it is another game that uses stock pictures but as i detail in another one of my videos the one on licensing um use of stock assets is only a crime when it is done poorly if you manage to use your stock assets wisely and well then you know that's that can be about as good as uh as any old good fashion artwork is um i just realized something i forgot to mention was i was talking about like the uh the direction so izuku you can tell his his stats are all about um you can discard your hand to increase your damage by ten that's that sort of self-harm for power i was talking about one thing that uh i forgot to mention about these attacks is that they have a hit zone and the cards also have a block zone so remember when i said like at the very beginning of this video low mid and high that refers to low attacks middle attacks and high attacks so a high attack is like a blow to the head middle attack is a punch to the gut and a low attack is a sweep of the leg so all very very valid uh fighting styles and what happens is each attack which is a bit more clear to see here compared to the uh the older cards with the older cards the direction of the attack is determined by a little x over here here it's actually a straight up arrow so you can tell a lot more clearly where each attack is going that's the zone that it hits so um aspiring punch is a middle hit card so in order to block it i would ideally want to use a card with a middle block so yoga strong punch is um a middle block here so what happens is we do the uh the five speed of the aspiring punch plus the one to the block to give me a difficulty of six to overcome if i succeed on this block since it's a middle attack being blocked by a middle block that actually nullifies all of the damage if however i were to block it with turn it on which is uh a high block then i would take half damage so you can block with adjacent zones you can use a high block to block a middle block to block a middle attack um you could use a low block to block a middle attack but you could not use like a high block to block a low attack that's just you know protecting your face when they're kicking your shins so that is why cards that give a middle block like most character cards is useful because it will always block at least half of the damage although the uh combination of makeup mix-ups and attacks like yoga strong punch is a a high hit that that mix-up of different attacks in order to get through an opponent's guard is another thing to consider like i said i love how ufs and universes really captures that essence of fighting games that back of force that strategy without having to do something dumb like having characters move all over the place this is a a lot more simple a lot easier to understand um bakugou actually has a different ability uh izuku can dump his hand uh to to deal increased damage bakugou actually has an effect that after you're blocked fury attack resolves you can discard it from your card pool now you might remember how i was uh talking before about the card pool and here's a here's a nice character sheet a nice mat here so we have the card pool and you see it goes plus zero plus one that's how much each additional card adds to the difficulty so what bakugou does is if you were to miss with his attack he discards it so he can play another attack without the difficulty increasing so that makes him kind of uh more relentless bakugou seems like he'd be a scary really scary character i mean izuku has these big big powerful hits although i think most of them are mid attacks oh we have some high ones in there like determined victory smash smash becky um so there's a couple of high ones mixed in for good measure although i guess because he uses nothing but punch attacks in this iteration he doesn't have any low oh he does have some low he has velocity punch so this is one this is what a card that hits low looks like um like i said it is literally the same game it's it's uh we have the our foundations here we have our attacks here although there's a lot of foundations in this deck i guess that's because the the game you're going through a lot of cards you know you're you're drawing back up to your hand size each turn you're flipping cards to to determine your checks and what happens is these cards um if you if you run out of your deck you actually shuffle your discard pile back into your deck and then you mill the top 10 cards of your deck for each time you have reshuffled so basically the first time you run out you mill the top 10 the second time you build the top 20. um the third time you might have so many cards floating around in in limbo like foundations you have in play or cards attacks that act as a momentum that your third time through might actually be enough to deck you out because if there are no cards left over after that mill then you lose by deck out so yeah it's possible to cycle through your deck multiple times in this game i guess that's the idea here by having so few attacks and so many foundations in in the midoriya deck although you only get one copy of the character card like i said the starter decks used to used to come with two uh character cards because they are both a high check and perfect block card also maybe to have one to spend and one to land so you can have one that you can trade with a friend who bought the other starter deck um but yeah along with the it's a like it's a much flashier design although like i said you could easily tell like the bright orange for the attack and the gray for the foundation it's exactly the same as what we had with dan so i literally could take my old dan deck from 2008 and play it against the midoriya deck if i felt like showing off i guess that's possible uh i don't know if these characters do they have any discipline it looks like uh looks like both bakugou and dan have the the skull discipline on them oh and izuku and uh dan have this sort of halo over here i actually can't remember what these are called these disciplines actually have names i i don't think they included a list of them in the uh in the instruction book but they actually have names to them although thanks to their use of symbols that's largely unimportant but yeah that is a look at uh universes they actually sent me this the the jasco games actually uh sent me the starter deck and that's not all they sent me they actually sent me a booster box as well a uh 24 pack my hero academia booster box and i will definitely be opening this on camera i i i hope i get yaya rosu she's my favorite character that natural leadership that the fact that she's a literal toolbox she's cool um so yeah that is uh ufs now known as universes and uh until next time this is kodak signing off join us next time on cards from the abyss

Channel: Kohdok

Views: 16,186

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Id: vJgUJk-A7fw

Length: 28min 37sec (1717 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 01 2021