Philip

Recent I’ve been getting stuck into The Eye of Judgment (EoJ) now that the Set 2 expansion cards have made it out, expanding the 100 odd cards from Set 1 to over 200 cards. If you don’t know, EoJ is played by putting cards down on a 3×3 grid which are read by the PlayStation Eye to summon creatures and cast spells. Winning the game means either summoning 5 creatures down, or depleting the opponent’s library of cards (max 30) which is quite rare but possible.

Where EoJ shines is that a very high level of strategy is required since you are constantly fighting on several fronts which include:

1) Mana - you only get 2 points per turn, the more powerful the creature the more it costs to summon, turn or activate. Top level creatures can take up to 9 mana points to do anything!

2) Direction - sure, your creature can be powerful as anything, but once it’s pointing the wrong direction thanks to an attack or spell, it’s going to cost a lot of mana to turn around again. Also, if you get attacked on your blindside, it’s an extra +1 HP of damage.

3) Hand - you can only have 7 cards in your hand, and get one extra each turn. However, using spells can rapidly deplete your hand of creature cards to summon, or you have only creatures that need high mana to summon (5+).

4) Health - each creature gets anywhere from 1 to 9 HP. Usually, most attacks can take at least 1 to 2 HP off.

5) Field - each of the 9 fields has an element, such as Earth, Wood, Fire, Water and Biolith with a flip side. Summoned creatures get a +2 HP on their element, and -2 on their opposite element, or even can be destroyed if the element is flipped. Careful planning needs to be handled to avoid summoning a creature that is wiped out as the opponent flips elements on you.

6) Specials - depending on the creature and what field they’re on, you can get special effects like forcing the opponent to discard cards, invisibility, decoy, mana steal and so on. Some range from annoying to downright evil, especially if they start stealing your mana or forcing you to discard cards.

7) Finally - your opponent. Let’s just say they’re out to make sure they win.

Lately I’ve been unable to play ranked games since the new Set 2 included some very powerful Zealot cards, but I’ve been playing some unranked games with the local Japanese and Italians online, still not many English players in +8 GMT…