Authors note: Got a bit inspired when watching Yugioh vids and reading Pitchouli's Omake. I don't think this is balanced enough to be considered canon in any way shape or form, but what do the card players of the forum think?
Omega Heroes: A Metahuman Trading Card Game
By SolarGemX
Unleash the Power of your favorite metahuman's, in this long standing TCG online game! My name is StardustTCG, and I welcome you to the channel! Here at STCG, we peruse and review different types of Metahuman Media including powerset analysis, dream team-ups, nightmarish fight scenarios, funny skits and of course, games. In todays, episode we will be speaking of the long-standing heroic trading card game, Omega Heroes. The hero TCG scene has been around for a very long time and has had its fair chair of IRL products, tournaments, and events, but thanks to recent developments in the las few years, Omega Heroes has joined the echelon of online simulators and games like Meta
XChasers. Why don't we go over the rules of the game for any new time players or people that want a refresher? Let us start with the board and the rules.
There are a couple of rules here and there, but the main thing you need to know is that each player starts with 5 lives and both players begin with 5 cars in hand, and compared to other TCG's both players are not Allowed to launch direct attacks in their first turns. This little set up round as coined the unofficial term of "preparation phase" by the player base. As for those lives, each time you take a direct attack you may lose 1 or more of them and if you lose all 5, you're out. There are other win cons depending on what type of deck you use, but well cover some examples later. Like any card game, Omega Heroes has its own board to play at, with different zones to place your cards. These places are you're deck zone, the base/location zone, the contract zone, the equip zone, the K.O zone and the dead zone. A lot of places huh? Don't worry, let's go step by step.
The deck zone is just that, the place where you place your deck. A standard deck in Omega Heroes is composed of 40 cards, although you can go for 50 if you're feeling adventurous. In a deck you will find Hero cards, Equip cards, Base cards, and Contract cards. Hero cards are just that, your metahumans. These cards may have a lot of text on them so let me pick an example. Hmm… aha! Here's a favorite of mine Lady Leizi from the Unlimited Hero Works set, honestly, I still don't know how they manage to get permissions for so many heroes, seriously that Rider team in Japan has some insane lawyers. Where was I? Oh yeah, hero cards. A standard hero card kind of looks like this:
Lady Leizi- The Thunderous Martial Artist
6 stars
(A picture of the Hero)
Hit-5 Def-4
Esp 8 Ops 4
Effect: When summoned, search for a Hero, Equip or contract card and add it to your hand. Once this effect has been activated, place this card in the equip zone, as long as there are Hero cards in the Hero zone this card can't be targeted for attacks, if there are no heroes, place this card in the Hero zone. You can activate the first effect of Lady Leizi, once per turn.
Oh boy, more info, let's see. At the top of the card is it's name, of course. The stars are an important mechanic, we haven't mentioned it yet, but Omega Heroes has a resource system. You get 1 fund each time you start your turn, and you need to use funds to summon your heroes, or you can use them for other advantages, but at its most basic: no funds mean no summons. Thankfully since Omega Heroes is online, we have a nice little counter that tells you how many funds you have, we will speak more of funds once we head to the contract section. The stars in a hero card go from 1 to 10, and depending on the amount is how much a hero costs to summon. 1-3 are worth one fund, 4-6 are worth two funds, 7-9 are worth three funds and 10 stars require special conditions to summon them, but they usually are capable of ending a game then and there once summoned.
Since LL is a 6-star hero, I would require two funds to bring her out. Next is the cards stats, Hit, Def, Esp, and Ops. Hit correlates to a card's Attack power and Def to its defense. To defeat a Hero card, you need to have a card with higher Hit to your targets Def; so, if LL fought something with 4 def, she would beat it, but if she fought something with let's say... 6 def, it would survive and if the enemy Hero had more HIT than your attackers DEF, your Hero gets defeated. But there's a benefit to attacking with lower atk Heroes, defense also could be considered a Hero card's life points. Because LL attacked the 6-defense card and didn't destroy it, the target has been damaged, lowering its defense by the amount of LL HIT, so it now has 1 DEF, making it easy to take out with another attack.
Esp or espionage is a resource manager, if you have enough Esp on the field and some proper cards in the Equip zone you can do a lot, you can steal your opponents resources like funds, make them discard cards or even evade your opponents heroes entirely and attack directly. Esp is the counterpart to Ops or Operations; this stat acts as a source of defense against Esp tactics as long as its higher than Esp. Finally, some cards can have extra effects if summoned or if its in a particular zone, LL can stash herself in the Equip zone to keep herself safe and lead her team to victory or get more resources each turn using her first effect.
Next let us talk about the Hero and Equip zone, these zones are where we place most of our cards. There are 5 Hero zones and 5 Equip zones, a player can only use two hero zones to summon Heroes unless they have Base cards in the Baze zone (Up to 3), each base card unlocks a Hero zone to summon. Meanwhile, the equip zone can use all its spaces from the beginning. Equip cards are equipment, events or powerups that help you get more funds, modify stats, hinder your opponent, or help you protect your base or funds. Next, let us see the Base and Contract zones.
Bases are a very important part of any deck, you can place up to 3 bases in the Base Zone, not only giving you more Places to summon Heroes, but it can also grant bonus effects depending on the card. An example of this is New Dawn's Headquarters the Zenith, this card lowers the cost of summoning any New Dawn Hero by one.
Meanwhile, Contract cards are your Fund generators, the formula for fund collection is the sum of the values displayed in all contract cards plus one. So, if you had 3 base cards that give 1 fund each, you would get 4 funds every turn. Most Contract Cards give 1 fund, but there are ones that give out two or even three funds per turn. Funds are interesting since they have more advantages than just summoning heroes. Once per turn, you can use 3 funds to search for a Base or a 1 fund granting Contract card. This little mechanic was implemented to help players if they start with a "bricky" hand. Useful in a pinch.
Finally, lets talk about the K.O Zone and the Dead Zone. The K.O zone is where Hero cards go when defeated, once in the K.O zone you can pay twice the amount you previously used to summon a Hero and put them back into the field, Heroes never quit am I right? But if they are defeated again after that; they are placed in the Dead Zone, where they are lost forever… unless you have some VERY specific cards that interact with said zone. Additionally, one thing you need to know is that you can send a Hero card directly to the Dead Zone, if a Hero card is defeated by an opponent with twice the Amount of HIT to the defeated Heroes' DEF they automatically die due to OVERKILL Damage, so be careful.
Well, that's the board established now, let's see our deck again. A standard 40 card deck of Omega Heroes has a balance of cards. Most decks have around 10-15 Hero cards, 10-15 Equip cards, 3 Base Cards (With duplicates) and 10 contract cards; mind you, players may add or remove cards to their preference; so, these totals may differ from deck to deck, and with that you should be set to play. Before we let you go, why don't I show you some different decks and their win conditions?
Some players don't like to go UNGA BUNGA with their decks, instead focusing on defeating their opponents via deck out, these players will stack their decks with plenty of Esp cards to let them out resource their opponents, remove their contracts or shuffle their bases to the deck. Another type of playstyle is resource Turbo, where a player will use cards to generate as many resources as possible and try to avalanche into a victory.
I've seen players prefer to circumvent the opposition wholesale, so a deck with cards from the Irregular Vespids pack like the Entomons, are their cup of tea. These cards specialize in swarming the field and if they have 5 Hero cards at the same time, they can ignore the opponents Hero field and attack directly for game.
An example of a 10 star… "hero" is Scarlet Maturity, who has a set of conditions to summon him. You need 3 or more "Powers" Heroes on the field and need to use 15 funds to "pay" for his contract. After that you need to use 4 funds every turn to keep him in the field. Expensive huh? Theres a reason for that, this card has 10 HIT, 10 DEF, 5 Esp and 5 Ops, making it one of the highest stated cards in the game; not only that, but he also regenerates 4 DEF every turn. Making it the king of Beat sticks and Walls, making it very costly to remove him.
Finally, there's probably the most… controversial deck currently in the game… Behemoth decks. An alt condition/ necromancy deck, Behemoth decks have a special win condition in the form of their Base card: Leviathan's Corpse. Every time a Behemoth card sends a hero to the Dead Zone the Base gets one counter, and if the counter ever reaches 10, the Leviathan wakes up and the behemoths win, in exchange for that, Behemoth cards take an additional point of damage from ALL Hero monsters and any Behemoth cards that get defeated are killed instead; although they have some cards that let players fish out more behemoth cards from the Dead Zone by using Leviathan corpse counters. Some Hero cards can do even more damage to behemoths. An example of this are, Hero Cards-Like Blood Fang or General White from the Bloody Fable set, who have effects that deal additional damage to behemoth cards, making them quite popular during the game's story mode.
Its kind obvious why people would find this type of deck controversial, it originally was a CPU exclusive deck for events in the game, but it was recently released about 2 years ago. Although, its use has lowered drastically in recent months, due to the "Leviathan Incident." And that's that; hope you are now interested in the game, and I hope to see you all again, next time. Take care!
Authors note 2:
What the hell am I doing… Hey SGX here and I made a thing! Say hello to the Metahuman TCG Omega Heroes' inspired by other card games like Yugioh, Magic,and Digimon TCG , I have made a horrific blend that is probably as bad as modern tcg's (I'm a casual Master Duel player).
This is probably insanely unbalanced. But I think I managed to translate some of the quest's mechanics into a TCG pretty well...
Some additional cards that may come to the game (in world) would be Project Prometheus (If the truth of that ever comes out,
hopefully never) being capable of searching for any hero on the deck, probably a Justice Unlimited exclusive. As for the rest of the team… Menagerie Witch could slot in as either needing 1 or two funds and have an ability to summon tokens that act like her creatures, Handyman could be a 1 fund creature with a regen effect so it can "tank" enemy hits and also have an effect that lets him change his name to another Hero Carda name (If that little secret comes out), Opale would probably be a 6-7 star with a defensive effect and Black Swan would be 10 Stars (Don't know what her summoning condition would be… maybe having 3 or more JU heroes in the field plus and having The Apiary in the base zone? IDK.) And Scarlet Maturity is getting an Errata after a certain set of documents got leaked into a certain other game site, he probably would get the OG Yubel treatment, requiring you tribute a Hero in the field or the K.O zone to keep him around.
