Explore the Twilight Host, judge your opponents, and find them wanting.

Discover the all new Heartsworn, and use your charges to further their ends. Some of the keywords that are equivalent to ones in Magic have differences in how they work in various game states, and there are several original keyword powers as well.As the battle for the Frost Ring Arena wages on, Lixil and Hogarth retreat to rally their forces. Non-targeted effects don’t use the chain. There are gem sockets allowing for cards to change their functionality substantially over the course of a match. Cards interact with cards in deck or hand without having to reveal the cards that are interacted with. Temporary modifiers can persist past the end of turn. Cards can transform into other cards, modify cards in decks, make duplicates of themselves, etc. Cards created by another effect are “real” cards for all purposes rather than ephemeral “tokens” that vanish when they leave play. No system of attaching a card to another card. Card attributes are permanent across all zones, with a separate mechanic of “Revert” to remove any changes. Other mechanical changes include a number of adjustments that make it more at home in the digital realm: There’s also a whole parallel resource system of charges that go along with shards most of the time but not always, and a whole new mechanic in champions with powers that use those charges, which has no equivalent in Magic. Certainly the result winds up being similar in many practical circumstances, but the way it gets to that point is distinct. The equivalent of mana color is made global rather than attached to each point of mana. Resources are handled numerically rather than with cards. As far as I can tell that’s the only mechanical change at all. But the patent is so broad that it could be used against the vast majority of TCGs ever created, and in any case its 17-year term expires this September, so any damages based on it would have to be pretty limited. Really the only claim that I can see having a good shot is the third one. And the same goes for the game UI screens, with nearly every UI element arranged differently than its equivalent. But this looks really shaky, as the “physical layout and ornamental elements” are one area that is actually quite different, as if you look at the side-by-side comparisons there are dozens of points of distinction in the card templates, with similar information laid out and presented differently.

If you read the complaint, the second claim is based on a theory that the trade dress is too similar and will confuse potential players. But they only made changes where they could actually be true improvements, not where the way Magic did things turned out to be the best way to implement that mechanic.įrom everything I’ve read, game mechanics aren’t protected by copyright, just specific expressions of those mechanics. Hex obviously used the Magic core rules as a base to build from and improve on, and there are certainly places where they could have made things different for the sake of being different to give some insulation against a lawsuit. I really doubt that this will go anywhere, for the simple reason that it has always been such an obvious risk that there’s no way Cryptozoic would have proceeded with the project without making sure that their legal arguments are completely airtight.

Hex shards of fate keywords