THE WORST STARTER DECK EVER?! How Beast Clans Tries To Get You To Buy Their Starter Decks.

hey everybody this is kodak here i'm still hard at work on that duel masters video i have a whole ton of other games i want to talk about but this one aggravated me so much that i just really couldn't wait to talk about it so uh this is a game called beast clans it is an indie game made by uh oh it doesn't say on the box who made it but it's an indie game that uh similar to like exodus redemption some of those other games i've looked at but uh it does a number of things that uh with its product design that i'm not really a fan of now the game itself is a bit like we cross in that it uses the size mechanic now a lot of you might be more familiar with the size mechanic through buddy fight but it goes more with we cross because as we cross as you level up your character you can see there's a the level and then the limit down here their level goes up and as their level goes up their limit how much they can stash actually does the same thing so this game is similar to that only rather than using the life cloth system which is basically the shield system they instead use a hit point system um they're all based on animals the cards have blurbs on them they have some pretty neat artwork but what i'm doing today is i've done this before where um in the the series where i've said you know how so and so gets you to buy their card games where i've taken a look at the product themselves to see how it does because it's important to really nail how your product looks how it looks on a shelf how it can appeal to somebody your game needs to be able to sell itself and i've talked about how other games sell themselves and this is um one that gives us some interesting examples so a quick breakdown on how it works the the way a game needs to sell itself is first it needs to have a strong front one with you know strong graphics a lot of pull something that really grabs attention so this game does that really well this this box definitely does that super well it has it has a very large box a huge box implies that there is a lot of value it's very fat as well it implies that there is a lot of value there has been a move for a lot of games to shift over to smaller boxes that take up less real estate but don't underestimate the way a large box can convey a sense of value a larger box has a much easier time drawing attention um it still plays a role for people to if they spot something at a convention if they spot something at a store a lot of selling is done online these days so it's maybe not quite as important but it's still not a bad idea to keep this in mind you can also stash like a bigger rule book in there you can stash like nice big old game mats in a larger box like this really really give the players what they've paid for um it has really nice big artwork on the front it has a pair of very shiny cards uh i don't know how well you can see that from here they're foil cards it's a basic a basic sort of glittery kind of foil but still it's it's foil they've put the big shiny cards in a prominent position as they should and of course these magical words down here dual decks it straight up says i mean it uses the word it is there's dual there's also dual it doesn't matter which way you spell it it kind of means the same thing this is a dual as in you know a mono amano fight there's also you could also do duel spelled with an a to explain that there are twin decks in here either way it gets the it gets the statement across that this is a deck designed to be two players they even have this neat little feature where the artwork of the cards are facing each other like they're like they're getting ready to have a showdown and almost you know it looks like like a like a boxing or like a wrestling like promo poster with how it's designed here so i have to say the front is really well done here there's also the way that this is at an angle here i'm i'm guessing that this is so that you can always you can easily see like from a 45 degree angle if you look at a whole like case of these which i assume would be sold in assortment if you look at them you can easily see what's in there you have prince stronghorn and prince dark sting so you can you can see the characters a bit what they're about um you can see some of their powers you can see it like i said it's definitely an attractive box the front of the box is supposed to draw you in and make you want to look at it and it makes you want to look at the back part two of uh of what these games are designed to do is the back the front needs to convince me to walk over and pick it up and like i said this thing gets an a plus on that what the back needs to do is convince me to make the purchase this is on the back is where you want to put the pitch it's where you want to put information lore pictures of the cards all that great thing i'm i'm tensing up on this but what's on the back of this thing oh a whole lot of nothing if we're being honest here we have the art again but it's the same art as we see on the front here and it's kind of haphazardly placed um there i i've emphasized that i have a problem where a back just looks like haphazardly placed artwork it looks like it almost looks like a counterfeit of itself it's just a basic texture with some stock art slapped on it and not to mention i mean it says right here two player starter kit a rule book six rare hologram cards two starter decks that's fine but then we have all of this dead space here i mean i'm not even seeing copyright information on here like like i know the final fantasy community got really upset when i pointed out how boring the starter deck box designs for their game was but at least the back had like relevant like copyright information and stuff this is it's so absent of text that it looks fake and this is this is real estate this is where they need to put information about the games i go talk about the the struggles of the world or emphasize you know each each of the characters and what they're capable of instead it's just some stock assets like i said this is not gonna sell me on your game you're basically telling me to take take uh take the word for it on what the front showed off and that's not really gonna work for me i don't know i mean i know the literal contents of the box but i don't know what this game is i cannot tell what this game is from what i have been presented i don't have a clue as to what it is it's almost like you give me like a like a plain old cardboard box and say hey there's a there's a blender inside it definitely works let's uh you have to to trust me on this so like i said the front is great the back is terrible this one gets an f um it it also doesn't help that they recycle the same artwork from here uh these characters like with we cross they level up and when they level up their artwork changes so if they were going to use artwork on the back they could have at least used some artwork of the other characters or they could have done that on the front as well they could have used artwork of the or actually no it's it's fine to have the matching artwork on here but they they could have done some different artwork on the back here because like i said this is just stock assets floating in space it looks terrible it looks like something a counterfeit would make it well it's bad but anyway let's take a look at the inside now the contents as i've stressed before the contents should make the buyer feel like they have made the right decision on uh on what they did and and let's point out about something that does all three parts really nicely and we have the digimon card game i've done a look at this as well it uh it the front you know it's got it's got the cool cards got angemon doing his hand of fate maneuver it's got uh it's got his partner from the show says starter deck heavens yellow it says includes a booster pack and for a 10 box that's pretty nice it has a card list on the side but the important stuff's on the back so it talks about you know talks about the four types of cards so we're getting some rules here we're getting a look at some of the cards that are in the game we're learning a little bit about the rules we have you know a deck list here or or contents list up here but it's it's really unimportant of course they also have the disclaimers here bandai tends to put a lot of disclaimers on their uh on their things like like bandai does not assume responsibility for the future value of the cards they have that disclaimer here some more info here there's text all over this box except like on the very bottom there's text information all sorts of cool stuff everywhere and uh yeah they're the big boys but i've pointed out how indie games do this just as well redemption is a game i pointed out before it's another one that's that's pretty low key doesn't run on too much but you know it has the the eye catching front but on the back look at that get pictures of cards we have a blurb on on how the game is played we have the company makers we have information we have ways that people can pull out their phones and take a further look at what's going on here and there is just no information on the back of this box no useful information like it talks about how it has a rule book and two starter decks but it says they're everywhere two players started at two starter decks dual decks tool starter decks there's no useful information on the back of the box and this is this is where you got to put your pitch it's free real estate that is being wasted so finally we have the contents and like i said the content should make the the buyer feel like they made the right decision when buying this thing i pointed out in digimon how it contains a bonus booster pack so the starter deck is actually essentially only six dollars because you also get some free cards i like it when games include a booster pack i've talked about this before how it gives players a sample of the possible depth and complexity and if if that booster pack contains a rare card i know ragin cajun one of his starter deck booster packs contained omnimon which as the name implies is the is the chase card for that set if if if they get like a really cool card in their booster pack that's a fan that that that's a fan that you've made for life so back to this what are the contents of the box so like i said it's a big it's a fat package it's a big fat box it's thicker than pretty much any other starter deck box i have seen so that implies there should be loads oodles tons of awesome stuff in here and here's where we also see our first sign of trouble you can see oh yowza look at that look at that look at the back there you can see like some ink has rubbed off on the back of the box and this thing's not that old this thing is from 2017 that's uh three three and a half almost four years now but you can yeah you can see how where it's it's rubbed off the ink has rubbed off on the on the back of the box here this has been sitting in somebody's warehouse for a while but also we have the the rule book here i mean it says beast clan's rule book that works the back um the back should probably have turn order on it it has just the icon again i mean that's not too bad but like i said a the back of the rulebook is also a great place to put information i personally prefer to have turn order put on here it's like what's what's the turn order what's the order of operations because that is the information that players will need the most we're gonna get into this rule book believe me this is this is uh this is another rule book that i'm gonna gonna be tearing apart um but we just have the twin decks in here and a whole bunch of wasted space so yes a large box can convey a sense of value but your contents need to support the idea that yes the value was very much that the value that was implied was very much earned uh this game i think falls a bit short on that it like i said it it it's all bravado this this box here it has a really well designed front but so far everything else has fallen pretty flat on its face um i'm gonna emphasize it again don't do this this like i said this makes it look like a a cheap like almost counterfeit item especially since the the the stock art is just floating there that doesn't look good at all you want to use like either a piece of contained art or like i said um have a bunch of a bunch more boxes with information and and cool lore and stuff people you know like like like this is like the hype is what you get the rest of the the rest of the program anyway we have our two decks here we have prince stronghorn the rhinoceros and prince dark sting the scorpion although they made it stronghorn they made it one word on this version i'm not entirely sure about that um i did already look at the prince dark sting that deck the prince stronghorn deck is uh a bit of an oddball so here is our prince dark sting deck we'll take a quick look inside uh the cards themselves they feel they feel cheap they're they're made out of a pretty thin and wobbly material uh it doesn't it doesn't feel too good to mess with but something i have uh i remember i actually went on this whole uh on physical product i went on this like whole big tirade on video games and how like big companies are trying to shift away from physical copies in an effort to save themselves money not actually impose a service but i included a caveat in that discussion that i said hey if you're a small studio that's just happy to be a part of the medium i won't fault you for not putting out a physical copy and i will say um i will say that the same applies to card games to people who make card games i'm not as critical of games that uh cheap and have that cheap in their uh their stock perhaps out of necessity although this is really bad like it's a good thing this isn't a card that that rotates into the deck because it's not like it's not like a curl it's not like what you typically see with holographic cards for some reason this thing is like like it's almost like inflating like a balloon like it's curled on the inside but it's also curled here it's like form this odd convex shape and keep in mind these cards were printed in 2017 and that is quite an odd thing to say not to mention the uh the framing on these is kind of imperfect this is this is definitely something that needs some revision and some work um like i said these cards were basically unopened until recently you can see how prince stronghorn is still in his wrapping so this is just the result of it sitting in its uh in its box for a while so these are our ruler cards these uh what we do is we have our starting biomass this is our size um we use this to pay costs and we use it to summon creatures as well as pay that creatures maintenance costs so basically if you want to keep another beast in play it eats into your ability to perform other actions on your turn so there is a risk and reward from there definitely um discarded card put a desert card from your discard into hand that doesn't change throughout its evolutions but yeah you can see how the size went up he got a new design although his ability didn't change in some cases their abilities will change as they level up and then we have the final form which looks like something out of fallout new vegas it looks like a straight up robo scorpion yeah this is probably the card i would have given the most blinging out i mean it's nice that prince darksting got the blinging out but this probably should have gotten more than parallel foil it's his final form this is the thing that people are aspiring to reach this should have gotten like some some probably should have gotten the fancy the fancy foil treatment um although something odd is that uh this is another thing that i have to point out that's a problem with this product as it is this is just a standalone problem not even compared to other things it has 13 max biomass and the game comes with a stack of biomass cards but how many does it actually come with count with me one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve yeah um i assume it's the same with the prince stronghorn deck but it is exactly one card short of having enough biomass to actually play with i assume that's because this deck is 52 cards one two three four five six seven eight nine yeah um it's a 40 card it's a uh it's a three card ruler deck a 40 card um regular deck and a 12 card biomass deck now printing something at a scale of 52 is a pretty common way to get these kinds of cards from print shops because again 52 is the standard size for a deck of cards although you could also argue that it's 54. um it's weird why would they not include enough biomass to play the deck all the way through um that's that's going to be a difficult question to answer um so let's take a look so we have we have uh we have some creature cards we have a cactus clubber we have commando camel dive uh civ i think i think it's called a civet right um slice stallion t butcher a lot of a lot of very corny names i kind of like it uh heatwave desert oasis pharaoh's headpiece so these are supposed to be based on the yeah there we go the the pyro force based on the desert um so they have a lot of items there's weapons which costs uh would they cost biomass to play but not to use so the idea is you want to have some characters that are ready to go pretty much right away and then we have the rebel beasts these are the ones with the the black background these are basically the universal ones but there are a lot of those in here aren't they i mean i guess it's not bad to start a collection but the deck the deck is uh this is the biomass the deck is half rebel cards and that's that's that's pretty bizarre um but this flub on the biomass kind of overshadows all of it um i mean i get some of the some of the idea of how this deck works you're supposed to um you're you're mostly supposed to use a lot of equipment it's clear that it's clear that equipment is the uh the emphasis of this deck it's um to have let's see how much equipment does it actually have it has one two three four so it has so out of the deck it has four pieces of equipment it has so this deck is is nearly a quarter equipment so one two three four five six seven eight nine ten yeah it is one quarter equipment which uh yeah that seems about right for a deck with a center on equipment um i assume that they they do kind of emphasize the term starter deck on here i'm seeing what look like some staple cards in here i do kind of wish it came with a bit more of desert so we could get more of a feel of how desert works um and to my understanding prince stronghorn has this exact same thing where it's only half of the cards that it needs um but anyway we'll look at the cards later i'll tell you why in uh in a few minutes here but uh let's uh let's talk about the thing that i was uh having big issues with and that is the rule book so i've talked about rule books in the past i've talked about things that some rule books do that cheese me off and this rule book does a number of those things so like i've said many many times what should your rulebook start with it should start with telling players how to win because identifying a game's win condition informs everything else about the game it's like okay here's the thing that i need to do in order to win this will push me towards winning so section one the basics oh the big rule so is uh i mean is the big rule how to win if at any time while playing beast clans a card contradicts the rules as they're described here the card text is always right whatever a rule card or ability says it is says it can do the big rule says it's allowed to do so no this isn't the win condition here uh the kingdoms this isn't the win condition this has like oh it has like a breakdown of how the different kingdoms work and uh i thought this was kind of cute at first the rebel kingdom at first i thought this was like oh they're they're rebels right i was like oh we're rebels we have no king we are a bunch of kin working together unfortunately this is a typo i thought it was something clever but it turns out it was an accident because it's referred to as the kingdom for the rest of the rule book and you know this is kind of jumbling up this is jumbling up the front of the book it's not like like i said the the what you need to do is the people is one person's gonna be reading the rules the other person's gonna be messing around with the cards haha all the stuff inside and you need to get these two playing a game as quickly as possible always introduce your rules in the order they are needed and this isn't it in fact i'm looking at these and i can't help but think you know this is exactly the kind of information that needs to go on the back of the box this uh where it talks about you know it gives some lore about the the thing it also talks about the uh what they what they do how they're how they play what their strategies are this should be on the back it's like oh prince stronghorn so he's a savannah the savannah kingdom is one of the larger terrestrial kingdoms and it's home to a wide variety of people and you know it talks about talks about that ample time to make their necessary preparations to contend with whatever their enemies have in store this should be on this should be written here it's like oh that sounds like a cool play style same with the desert kingdoms like it should be written here underneath this guy's artwork it's like oh that sounds cool that's the kind of artwork that's kind of thing i want to play so then it goes on to reading a card talking about how the cards work so this is the the upkeep i was talking about so you're supposed to like assign those cards to the the beasts you want to keep in play to determine it and then we have the the board set up here but the okay so we are okay here it is beast clans is played by setting up the board and then taking turns until all but one royal involved is reduced to zero life points or a player must draw a card where there are no more cards left in their deck if either of those occur that player loses okay so page 22 is where i finally found the win condition 22 out of 36 so nearly two-thirds of the way through the book we finally have our win condition never do this always make sure that it is done first not to mention if either of these occur that players loses does that include all but one royal involved is reduced to zero life um does the the the player with with the one royal that isn't zero life is that the one who loses it's it's not well written um like i said this is the v1 rule book they've since put out v2 but i i took a look at their website and the rule book they have the pdf they have is exactly the same as this so it's not like this is this is some kind of new some kind of new thing and not to mention this is set up at the the setup rules are here and yet for some reason the field the the description of the field and how it's supposed to look it's five pages away why have they done this this rule book needed some serious serious revisions i'm i i got pretty confused reading it because they talk about you know things like oh like spending spending biomass and leveling up and all that but it's like i i have no context for how those things work i mean are royals and beasts the same thing i mean i've looked it up later no they're not if something says it targets a beast so for example prince stronghorn his ability lets him deal 20 damage to a beast he cannot do that to prince darksting a royal because he's not a beast um then we have you know the the the turn step order here that should be on the back um oh boy and then we have that most lovely of sights timing rules that's that's a lovely thing about these games is we have timing rules timing rules should be something put like a bit further back um they get really really hyper technical with how this is done this is more for people who are like like rules lawyering who really want to figure out the game what it should it should be a pretty simple breakdown it's like you can play a card on your turn your opponent then has an opportunity to respond and then later in the rules like in the big faq have like official priority designations for casual play for first time play you want to confuse people as little as possible you want them to have as smooth as quick and as fun a first play experience as um as they possibly can have the proper the proper introduction to how fun your game can be and while it is a dual deck game it has two decks that allows uh one purchase allows two players to give the game a try the actual rules as they are written are not great um i might have produ i would have at the very least rewritten the rule book or packed in some quick start rules or something like that there needs to be a method to get players going right away um like i said you can look at pretty much any other game uh except except yu-gi-oh for some reason yu-gi-oh's rule book is really really bad i imagine that's because they are hoping that the show will be carrying a lot of the uh doing a lot of their heavy lifting but uh this this ain't it chief this is uh not a great way to get people started there's a lot of confusing terminology the win condition is two-thirds of the way through the book um like i said the the that's what really frustrated me a disappointment is worse than something that's bad all the way through and the the front of this box is just so so stellar i was hoping that it would uh it would uh be able to you know sell itself with everything else but it has no information on the back the contents are disappointing and in fact incomplete like i said uh this guy gets up to biomass 13 but they only included 12 biomass cards it's like i said it's a mess and why am i talking about this now and that's because in the mail recently i was able to get my hands on this so this is um a booster box for beast clans although can you see something about it do you notice something it has no text on it no information no nothing not even publisher and distributor information and certainly not what's actually in the box how many booster packs are in here how many cards are in each booster who knows i mean never mind that uh every other game out there pretty much make sure that you have all of this information like look at look at look at the the the digimon card game here it talks about the types of cards it has the booster list it has uh 12 cards per pack 24 packs per box box promotion each box contains an alternative art card and a special box promotion pack and it has it on the side here as well it talks about how many cars there are this is the disclaimers and information how many different car types there are another one about the the boxes and stuff like everything but the bottom is just loaded down with all the information people need to know what's inside that box you need information people need the information to know what they're getting into and this beast clans booster box just has none of it and as you can see it's a seal booster i mean even the even the the the half booster box i got for mitos on the back uh it had a nice large picture but it had the information about the contents on the bottom there as as well as you know the developer information and all of that beast clans just doesn't have any of that i'm not sure what they're going for if they're going for like oh like a clean design or something but the the the sheer lack of important information on this box is just really disheartening like i said it doesn't it does a really bad job of trying to sell itself and uh the reason i'm showing this off i got this box crazy cheap i i i don't it's scary how inexpensive this box was and i'm showing it off because we're gonna unbox it let's take a look at what's in the booster packs we're going to see if the royals come in the booster packs we're going to see if they're like a once per pack thing or if there are or if they are like genuinely rare cards so getting a full set is an incredibly difficult and annoying thing to do we're going to see if the packs contain you know additional biomass cards that we might need or how well the things are presented that's another thing i noticed is you have to register damage in this game but the game didn't include any kind of damage tokens or mention that damage tokens were needed and that's kind of weird i mean i said yeah you should know that you uh you need dice but that's another thing to put on the back is like you know additional counters and tokens necessary to play and adding tokens to your your game isn't that difficult like i said i've shown off this card before this came from uh cross master it's it's actually a board game a miniatures board game and they include you know like a a uh the singles packs include these cheap little sheets of uh punch-out tokens and they're just you know a cheap a cheap standard playing card with a bit of extra die cutting on there you know you just throw one of these in with each of the starter decks and everybody has the tokens they need in order to play it's weird to me that these haven't received you know been been more adopted maybe they need to put out a die cutting machine where it's easy to just go and just you know get those cards ready to go for any game that needs them and with the big push to uh to shrink the box size that might be uh that might be something worth observing so yeah that is a quick look at beast clans we are going to be unboxing this booster box next and uh yeah until then this is kodak signing off

Channel: Kohdok

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Id: xP_hdbhLg5k

Length: 30min 59sec (1859 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 31 2021