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Pox Nora is about opening packs of cards (Runes) that you construct into a 20 item deck. The only randomness in the game is WHEN you reveal what runes you have, it is virtually impossible to play a game where you do not get to see all your runes. When I opened my beta-test pack I was at first bummed that I didn’t get some of the cards I had wanted, but quickly changed my tune after some play testing with various units. Each pack comes with a bunch of commons, a few uncommons, and a rare. Each rare has a 10% chance of being “exotic”.

I was happy to see I managed to snag an exotic fellow who would be my lifeline- Elder Garu. He’s big, he’s fast, he does incredible damage… and costs a fortune to deploy. He is, in essence, the quintessential mauler, and I use him like a battering ram. After a few games of getting my rear end toasted by veteran players I realized most people have items to deal with such “high cost, high power cards” – they come in the forms of spells. Spells have long cooldown times but can be used to do a variety of things, from damage to letting your units attack twice to simply pacifying everyone on the board so they can’t fight for a few turns.

Lucky for me I realized I also pulled two “Backfire” spells. With them in my deck and in place when I summon Garu on to the field I can usually negate whatever they plan to use to get rid of him. Garu, you’re still my hero! Alas. A single hero can’t (usually) do it all by himself. So I had plenty of backup units. Then there’s Dominate and Sacrifice, another brutal spell combo I ran into. Basically you take over an enemy unit (say, Garu for instance) use his action to beat the crap out of a nearby unit, and then sacrifice him to your false god… completely destroying him. Oh backfire saved me sometimes, but not often enough. Still, my win rate was climbing from the depths of despair.

I said it had a dash of role playing, remember? Well, each time your units fight they gain experience. Experience can be used to upgrade their stats or add new abilities. The downside is with each new upgrade the unit costs more to deploy. Even a well upgraded unit may have trouble bringing down two units that are half the cost, so there’s some balance in there to keep things even. So I got to thinking; there’s only one defense against Dominate and that is Iron Will. It is also the only defense against Pacify. I have two Pacify cards already. What if I made my entire deck out of Iron Will units and used Pacify.

So that is what I did. My strategy is revealed to you all. It works like a charm. Against an opponent without Iron Will the result is their units can move and heal, but not attack my units. If they don’t get out of my way I demolish them. If they run I simply advance on their castle. Unfortunately it isn’t a perfect combo. I’m not undefeated by any means, but I seem to win enough to keep me ranked in the top 25. There’s PLENTY of similarly powered combos people have designed. I’ve even seen decks with no units at all!

Now, there were two problems from the beta Pox Nora will be forced to overcome. The first is balancing this whole XP gaining process. Some units and spell combos are obviously WAY out of whack. They’ve got some time to get this under control, but I think the XP system, while really neat, is going to be torture for them to balance. I consider this minor, but worth mentioning if you hate CCGs where the rules are constantly being updated (possibly making your decks obsolete).

My biggest concern is will this game get enough people to spend enough money to make purchasing cards worthwhile. CCGs are expensive and Pox Nora is no exception. They gave me 75 bucks worth of cards to open and I still don’t have a lot of the ones I wanted. Yes, you could trade for them, but the high demand cards are going to be hard to come by. 75 dollars was a lot of cards and, with trading, plenty to keep you occupied for a LONG time, but I worry if that is going to turn off users so much that finding opponents of your own skill level will be impossible. I can’t imagine their free starter deck competing against my deck. It would probably never win, barring some fluke miracle. If new users are relegated to being beaten to death by veterans with cards then the game will never reach the popularity it should. This game is quality stuff and great fun- totally worth trying for any strategy fan.