April 2017

Lightning Epic Variant

Only read the bullet-point lists if you just came here for the rules themselves. My ramblings are not necessary but provide some insights.

Epic Card Game is a pretty wonderful game and has proven that it’s willing to change over time. But one of the things it seems to encourage pretty heavily is extra variants. They add a lot of replay value to the game while we wait for additional sets. Lightning Epic is a variant that came about by pure accident. Back when I first obtained my original copy of base set in 2015 and read the terrible rulebook, we were pretty confused on many of the rules. Thus, it led us to playing several rules slightly incorrectly for some time. The game seemed to be charged with lightning and amazingly deadly—packed with strategy. When we finally learned the real rules about 10 games later, Epic flopped around like a cold, dead fish. See, the problem was that Epic always favors the defender, by allowing them the last word on practically everything. If you play a card and attack, the defender can respond. If they block and you play a card, they can respond. If they pass and you play a card, they can respond. No matter how you try to wiggle in some extra aggro, the defender can always play the control game perfectly.

Lightning Epic changes this. After playing Epic for two solid years with several hundred games under my belt, I’m confident in saying this is my absolute favorite variant of the rules. Only a few changes were made to the core of the game, most of them extremely play tested for compatibility and balance. After seeing the damage that stalling forever until you win is doing to this game, I think Lightning Epic is needed now more than ever. Let’s eliminate the slog! Full Article