I’ve got a handful of old decks left from high school, and reviewing this one is strange because I’m not really reviewing a fixed set of rules the way I would any other game on this list, I’m reviewing thirty-plus years of expansions, format shifts, and a collectible economy that shapes the actual experience as much as the card text does. Setup for a single game is nothing, sixty-card decks, shuffle, go, but getting to the point where you actually have decks worth playing is its own much longer project.

The core design is still genuinely excellent, and I don’t think that gets said enough underneath all the complaints about cost. Building your own deck from a card pool this deep, tuning it, adjusting it after a loss teaches you something, is a kind of out-of-game activity that I haven’t found replicated as well anywhere else, Dominion included, and Dominion is the game I’d point to as the closest spiritual descendant. When a game actually works, when both players are reading each other’s mana development and bluffing with open cards in hand, it’s still the best two-player card experience I’ve had, full stop.

Where it wears on me, and where I’ve mostly stepped back from active play myself, is exactly the thing every long-time player complains about, the collectibility. Trading value warped the whole hobby around it eventually, a player with a bigger card budget carries a real structural advantage that no amount of skill fully closes, and mana screw can still steal a well-played game from you through no fault of your own. I’ve still got decks I won’t shuffle without wincing a little, knowing what some of those commons are worth now compared to what I paid for the pack. Four stars for the design itself, which remains remarkable, with a real asterisk for what the collectible model does to the actual experience of playing it regularly.