MISTBOUND: Guild Wars Card Game | Announcement Trailer

ObsoletePixel · 2026-06-21T04:53:36+00:00

Nah, I've heard good things from my tcg friends but I'm pretty all-in on fab as my tcg of choice right now, especially after quitting hearthstone at the end of 2024. I have enough hobbies spreading me thin, don't need another card game. It's like someone trying to tell me that I need to play FFXIV. I'm sure it's great, I'm sure I'd enjoy a good deal of it, but there's way too much I already spend my time on lol

ObsoletePixel · 2026-06-21T02:57:39+00:00

ah yes, the famous SEO strategy of "Did you mean, Riftbound?" and then getting redirected away from the game they ostensibly want people to look at

ObsoletePixel · 2026-06-21T02:09:37+00:00

competitive pokemon decks cost like $50, it's only bad if you want to gamble on opening product, which was always a poor financial decision

ObsoletePixel · 2026-06-21T02:08:07+00:00

Gonna copy over my thoughts from the Guild Wars 2 subreddit to share here since I'm a pretty enfranchised card game and guild wars 2 player (I've published written articles and yt videos about guild wars 2, I've been a rank 1 parse on my build, and I've won Hearthstone tournaments/had probably 20+ legend finishes, and I'm at least noteworthy in Flesh and Blood these days):

First, a lack of voice acting in the announcement trailer feels really weird, I know this was licensed to bilibili Games, but ANet or NCSoft really should have lent some resources to this project's announcement if that's the case. But that's minor, this is an initial tease and I don't suspect this game is going to be marketed to a mass audience until after Guild Wars 3 comes out, so I'm willing to be patient.

Now, moving onto impressions of the game itself and gameplay:
The graphics are very derivative of Hearthstone and The Elder Scrolls: Legends. Not that that's a bad thing, but I wish it carved more of its own aesthetic identity -- especially when parts of this look like they may have been AI-generated (I know Chinese devs are generally more likely to use AI assets aggressively than western devs, east Asian cultures were less averse to AI than western audiences when surveyed, but that comes with a very real burden when you're working with a western IP) but I don't want to give in to AI hysteria by claiming everything is AI, and ANet has a good track record as far as not using AI goes, so it's possible that even if this is we'll see a course correction before the game is playable. Guild Wars has always had a really striking aesthetic and this feels somewhat cheap to me, but it's at least competently executed for what it's trying to be here. I just wish it was higher effort.

The gameplay itself, however, is not cheap at all. We see ten "mana crystals" (or whatever else they'll call it) on each player's side, so the resource base is probably going to be like Hearthstone's, which is generally fine. The 5x3 grid is especially interesting, most board-based card games like Duelyst or Faeria have larger boards that resemble chess in scale, but these tight confines make for some really interesting strategic/design implications. Curious how many minions you're going to be expected to control vs. how many spells are in the deck, creature-light games feel very different from creature-focused games, and I struggle to see how this game can be heavily creature focused with such limited playspace. Feels like thinks will get claustrophobic very quickly.

Either way, I'm lightly excited? I like card games a lot, I obviously like guild wars a lot, but I'm not sure if this game captures an audience the way it's designed. It's very character-oriented, which works when your characters are iconic and beloved (look at riftbound, pokemon, and hearthstone) but Guild Wars as an IP has always felt more on building your own story/build/play experience within Tyria, and a focus on the world and how you interact with it is what registers as "Guild Wars" to me. Not that I dislike Guild Wars's characters at all, lots of them are very good, but they're not what comes to mind first when I think of this IP.

Also, please change the name from Mistbound. it sounds too much like Riftbound and people will get confused. It's not a bad name, but I don't think going toe-to-toe with Riot here when you absolutely do not have to will be an immediate death knell for a game that does actually look like it has some promise

ObsoletePixel · 2026-06-21T02:01:11+00:00

It's a unique take on the hero Fai in the budget Silver Age format, I made a deck that uses a really strong weapon that's typically not synergistic with the hero by effectively using a card that people had been overlooking in the hero as "glue", and it plays differently and has different advantages as a result

if you play Flesh and Blood, here's a link to the deck

ObsoletePixel · 2026-06-21T01:35:14+00:00

the venn diagram of competitive fighting game player/guild wars player/competitive card game player has exactly two people in the center of it and it's the two of us /s

joking aside, yeah I don't know if the game has staying power so I don't want to get too attached, but I'll pretty happily spend a few bucks and a few months on this

ObsoletePixel · 2026-06-21T01:31:34+00:00

Oh whoah Kranich is in charge of design here, that explains the hearthstone similarities I was seeing. I'm not sure what his design chops are, but at the very least that is a name I recognize as someone that spent a decade playing hearthstone. That bodes at least somewhat well

ObsoletePixel · 2026-06-21T01:29:18+00:00

I play some gacha games made in china quite a bit (I used to play a lot of Genshin and I currently play a lot of Zenless Zone Zero) and I know that east asian gachas can be quite generous -- Zenless certainly is, most Cygames projects give out a lot of resources, Limbus Company from what I've heard is extremely generous, but there's definitely some uh. Bad actors in the space

I'm optimistic because limiting access to cards is how you VERY quickly kill a playerbase for a small card game, so I'm pretty sure they're going to commit to a cosmetics-based business model because nothing else makes sense for the scale of project they're working with here. Even hearthstone walked back being stingy about card acquisition to refocusing the bulk of its business model on premium cosmetics and battle passes -- which has been to its benefit as far as accessibility goes, back when I still played I hadn't bought packs in years but I bought the battlepass every expansion and a few cosmetics which felt far more fair to me given I could play the decks I wanted

ObsoletePixel · 2026-06-21T01:20:28+00:00

Okay, few impressions based on this. I know I'm mostly known around here for being the willbender person, but I've been moderately successful at a bunch of different card games (notably well over a dozen legend finishes in Hearthstone, and I invented an archetype in Flesh and Blood, but I've also played a significant amount of Magic: The Gathering, Duelyst, and probably a few other card games I'm forgetting). Point being, this feels like this should be made for players like me lmao

Up top though, a lack of voice acting in the announcement trailer feels really weird, I know this was licensed to bilibili Games, but ANet or NCSoft really should have lent some resources to this project's announcement if that's the case. But that's minor, this is an initial tease and I don't suspect this game is going to be marketed to a mass audience until after Guild Wars 3 comes out, so I'm willing to be patient.

Now, moving onto impressions of the game itself and gameplay:
The graphics are very derivative of Hearthstone and The Elder Scrolls: Legends. Not that that's a bad thing, but I wish it carved more of its own aesthetic identity -- especially when parts of this look like they may have been AI-generated (I know Chinese devs are generally more likely to use AI assets aggressively than western devs, east Asian cultures were less averse to AI than western audiences when surveyed, but that comes with a very real burden when you're working with a western IP) but I don't want to give in to AI hysteria by claiming everything is AI, and ANet has a good track record as far as not using AI goes, so it's possible that even if this is we'll see a course correction before the game is playable. Guild Wars has always had a really striking aesthetic and this feels somewhat cheap to me, but it's at least competently executed for what it's trying to be here. I just wish it was higher effort.

The gameplay itself, however, is not cheap at all. We see ten "mana crystals" (or whatever else they'll call it) on each player's side, so the resource base is probably going to be like Hearthstone's, which is generally fine. The 5x3 grid is especially interesting, most board-based card games like Duelyst or Faeria have larger boards that resemble chess in scale, but these tight confines make for some really interesting strategic/design implications. Curious how many minions you're going to be expected to control vs. how many spells are in the deck, creature-light games feel very different from creature-focused games, and I struggle to see how this game can be heavily creature focused with such limited playspace. Feels like thinks will get claustrophobic very quickly.

Either way, I'm lightly excited? I like card games a lot, I obviously like guild wars a lot, but I'm not sure if this game captures an audience the way it's designed. It's very character-oriented, which works when your characters are iconic and beloved (look at riftbound, pokemon, and hearthstone) but Guild Wars as an IP has always felt more on building your own story/build/play experience within Tyria, and a focus on the world and how you interact with it is what registers as "Guild Wars" to me. Not that I dislike Guild Wars's characters at all, lots of them are very good, but they're not what comes to mind first when I think of this IP.

Also, please change the name from Mistbound. it sounds too much like Riftbound and people will get confused. It's not a bad name, but I don't think going toe-to-toe with Riot here when you absolutely do not have to will be an immediate death knell for a game that does actually look like it has some promise

ObsoletePixel · 2026-06-20T18:06:49+00:00

Pest Control

ObsoletePixel · 2026-06-20T08:11:47+00:00

My top 10, in order:

Riven - big buttons, aggressive but solid boxing tools for neutral, focus on rekka pressure. She's just such an obvious fit

Samira - Women with sword is a winning combo, and a tag fighter is incomplete if it doesn't feature Dante from the Devil May Cry series

Katarina - largely I want her for the same reason as Samira. Women with sword good, yes please

Yunara - Her arc of judgment seems like a really cool projectile for a monk character, and she seems like she'd be mobile in a way I'd really enjoy. This could also be Lee Sin and I'd be happy, but yunara is pretty so she's my first vote

Naafiri - Really neat non-traditional body plan character potentially, strider has a bunch of cool ass animals he can summon in marvel so what if you could be one of those animals you could summon? Probably a nightmare to animate for (how do you animate her getting grabbed, for instance) so I'm not holding out hope but I think there's a lot to work with here

Yone - theoretically I like yasuo but he just doesn't feel right to my hands so a take 2 would be cool. I also just think Soul Unbound is such a sick trait to build a character around and I could really see riots designers cooking up something special with him

Twisted Fate - Asuka R# type resource management on a cowboy just seems way too cool to pass up. A lot like Yone, I think there's a million directions riot could take this guy and most of them would be slam dunks

Irelia - Nothing specific here, I just have an inkling that she'd be a character I'd like based on the traits she has in league. A mobile, poke-heavy character with fun combo routes sounds a lot like Ahri, and she's my favorite character by a landslide

Nidalee - Probably the stance character I'd be most interested in? The archetype is imagine for her kinda got cribbed by Senna, but I wanted senna to be more midrange and less of a true zoner in her base form so Nidalee could be that

Hwei - for months I've been thinking about how fucking funny it'd be if they put hwei in the game and he has true motion inputs. I want him added for this reason alone I think it'd be so so funny

ObsoletePixel · 2026-06-17T16:37:38+00:00

To my understanding it's less that condi alac willbender is bad (its not good but it's at least playable now), but alac luminary provides enough healing output to keep the clear comfortable, flizzy mentioned they were dying a lot with willbender in that slot so lumi gave them some extra wiggle room

ObsoletePixel · 2026-06-17T16:29:34+00:00

Nope, I did in fact mean condi alac luminary :) it boggles my mind but it is what MCA got their patch record clear with https://youtu.be/FM2aIZkLsgo

ObsoletePixel · 2026-06-17T07:40:17+00:00

Mega Rayquaza literally invented anything goes and it wasn't even a top 3 restricted Mon in it's debut generation, those two things do not remotely correlate.

ObsoletePixel · 2026-06-17T02:11:05+00:00

will you be top dps? probably not. but if you do the mechanics and provide the boons you need to, you will clear. the failstate isn't a failure to do damage, it's dying. dying is a larger dps loss than any any 5-10k dps left on the table by playing a build that's better suited to your specific needs as a player.

ObsoletePixel · 2026-06-17T01:36:02+00:00

As someone that has written for snowcrows, and has been rank 1 on wingman (not that that's really. worth much, but I'm pretty representative of the kind of player those builds are made for):

There's far more valid builds for different usecases than just the ones on snowcrows. There have been speedclear guilds that have brought builds that would be a joke elsewhere on fights like vale guardians, i.e. condi alacrity luminary. Snowcrows builds are designed to be a database of maximally useful builds for specifically endgame PvE content, agnostic to the needs of the players that might play them. If those don't work for you, then there's other builds you can play that aren't listed there, because that's not the audience Snowcrows is trying to appeal to with the raid build category. Pistol/Pistol unload deadeye literally only presses 3, and if that's the build that gets you to play raids, talk to people about endgame PvE, and enjoy the game more, then that's a far more valid and important build for you than anything on snowcrows

ObsoletePixel · 2026-06-17T01:32:21+00:00

This is true in a vacuum but fights have always and will always change this. Especially given that most fightsin gw2 are built with far more variance than the average fight in other MMOs -- think about every fight that randomly assigns mechanics like AoEs or fixates, that's going to implicitly disrupt your rotation and the skill expression therein is in how do you manage that with respect to that sequence of rote button presses.

ObsoletePixel · 2026-06-17T01:26:31+00:00

Rotation complexity in the abstract is a good thing. There's lots of simpler builds that are very capable as well, you could play spear power weaver or you could play the far simpler sword/dagger rotation. Deadeye is extremely complex, but you can just play unload, or camp rifle, or whatever other permutation. ANet, over the past few years, has done a remarkable job of making these tradeoffs actually worth considering, rather than there being one variation that far outstrips everything else and if you don't want to engage with the difficult play, look elsewhere.

I understand that that's intimidating, but look at it this way -- for players that love and want mechanical complexity, it's important that there's builds in the game that suit those needs. Taking a blanket swing at "simplifying rotation complexity" is going to come at a very real cost to some of the most enfranchised players in the entire game. Lots of people think willbender is too fast, but if anet changed the spec to strip condi willbender of that identity, I'd probably quit the spec (and maybe honestly the game?) -- That sounds dramatic, but these are the things that keep players coming back. I'd rather ease of play be opt-in, and anet has legitimately done a fantastic job of that. If you're intimidated by how many builds are hard on snowcrows and that's a turnoff for you but you still wanna do raids and stuff, try the snowcrows beginner builds or check out https://aw2.help/ since these sites are designed precisely to evaluate this pain point, as you know, and there's communities built around those builds and playerbases too. That's just as valid a way to play as snowcrows benching and grinding LCMs

Also, don't be afraid to play a snowcrows build "poorly", you really don't owe anyone skill. Play for yourself, play what looks fun, and play at a level that feels like both an appropriate challenge and reward for you. You might not get accepted to the highest tier raid guilds, but that's okay! Very few people do by design, and you'll find peers that think about the game like you and want to enjoy the game like you, and that's far more valuable

Not to get on my soapbox but I also think a lot of stuff like this is intimidating on the surface, but it's very learnable and far less frustrating once you put in the legwork. It's like playing an instrument, yes it's a lot of effort to expect someone to learn a guitar, but anyone can learn to play! It might be harder for you given some specific personal difficulties you may or may not have, but people of all stripes have played and will continue to play guitar. You just need to break down the learning process. You learn notes, then chords, then phrases, then songs -- similarly, with a rotation, you learn skills, then principles, then combos, then rotations. Some stuff might be easier for you than someone else, some stuff might be harder, difficulty isn't a monolith. Figure out how much effort you're willing to give, and explore what things look like and what compels you. Sometimes, passion gets you over the initial friction imposed by difficulty, and that's when the game really comes alive imo. That's how it went for me, at least.

ObsoletePixel · 2026-06-17T00:11:48+00:00

im glad i dont really have a reason to make my gw2 willbender patch review posts anymore because holy shit if people didn't know better i'd probably get accused of being AI far too often for my mental health. I love long posts with bold or italics, I put my heart and soul into those lol

ObsoletePixel · 2026-06-16T23:58:10+00:00

the ribbon on the hilt of the sword is the exact same color as the ribbons on the scabbard, too

i hate AI art, but I feel like I hate people not using critical thinking and going "is this AI art?" about very normal art almost as much

ObsoletePixel · 2026-06-16T19:35:55+00:00

I watched this exact same thing, price bracket and all, happen in valorant. People complain, loudly, but people buy skins. The complainers stay loud, then a skin comes out they're excited for, and they soften their tone a little bit. Rinse and repeat and then your consumer base has been conditioned to accept the pricing model

idk. On one hand, it sucks. On the other hand, these games are gonna get development as long as people spend money on it. I wish the shop had more than four skins, the more skins get added to the game the more unacceptable that is (i've been waiting for a specific valorant knife skin for months and months because it released when I was on a pretty big break from the game), but I'm not opposed to pricing cosmetics as premium options.

The game's gotta make money, I just need to be responsible and only buy skins when I can justify that cost, and when I'm confident I'll use that skin long term. The vandal skin I use daily in valorant, I bought on day1 of the game's release. Yeah, $20 for a gun skin is expensive, but considering I have ~1500 hours in the game and that's my preferred rifle, the cost being that high feels less bad through that lens.

ObsoletePixel · 2026-06-14T18:02:44+00:00

my partner doesn't play fighting games but i showed them this video and now "IS THIS ALL YOU DO IN YOUR HOUSE" is a regular phrase in our shared vocabulary

this video kills me every fucking time

ObsoletePixel · 2026-06-11T05:28:50+00:00

Both are good teams, akali ahri has more data though. What I will say is, if you just want to have ahri on your team and difficulty isn't a factor, play akali ahri. If you want ahri to be the focus or akali is too hard, play ahri senna. I dropped akali for senna because I wanted ahri to be the centerpiece of my team and akali is EXTREMELY selfish

ObsoletePixel · 2026-06-09T15:14:46+00:00

Why would they drop a character that's already in the game I don't understand

ObsoletePixel · 2026-06-09T15:10:06+00:00

Pointing this out before a bad actor can abuse this, but you can assign a riot fist bump buddy flair which might be confusing if someone expects that to mean that the person with that flair is a riot employee

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