Epic Cards Battle 3: an unreadable Steam page hiding two genuinely good card game ideas

Let me save you some time on this game's Steam page.

Inside its mechanics descriptions it contains the names of several very large games this one has nothing to do with. You will find a combat system qualified by the name of a famous action RPG, a battlefield designated by the name of a legendary strategy game, decks named after a Japanese saga, and strategic gameplay associated with the name of yet another game.

This is search engine work. Keyword padding inside text that should be describing a game.

And it is a shame, because scratch the surface and underneath there are two ideas that deserve considerably better.

The game is announced for early access, with no firm date. No score today.

First good idea: mana that carries over

The game introduces a mana system where you retain a portion of your pool for the next turn.

That sounds tiny. It is not.

In the overwhelming majority of card games, unspent mana is lost at end of turn. The consequence: every turn is a race towards optimal spending, and playing small is always a mistake. The game punishes you for holding anything back.

Allowing carry-over changes the economy fundamentally. You can deliberately half-pass a turn to hit harder on the next one. You can bluff. And your opponent has to count what you set aside.

That is a real strategic lever, and few games have attempted it.

Second good idea: position

The board is a small 4 by 7 grid, and cards act as pieces on it. The studio makes a point of this: choosing your placement is crucial.

With six creature classes each having their own talents, warrior, tank, shooter, assassin, mage and warlock, you can guess the logic: a front line that absorbs, a back line that hits, and units that go looking for whatever is hiding behind.

There are also spell cards for immediate effects, and trap cards you deploy in advance, which adds a layer of anticipation.

And the combat types replace the old attack and armour systems with three categories, simplifying without losing the idea of a strengths triangle.

Third point, and this one will land: no rotation

The studio announces that you build decks freely, adding any card you own, with no rotation restriction, no class-specific cards, no faction constraint.

For anyone not following the subject: rotation is the practice of periodically removing older sets from the competitive format. It keeps a game breathable and it makes your collection unusable every couple of years.

A game committing to no rotation is committing to your getting something today that still works in five years. That is a strong promise, hard to keep over time for balancing reasons, but it is the right promise to make.

Eight factions are announced, and a card exchange mechanism between players is planned for later, which the studio presents as the return of an essential element of trading card games.

What worries me

The store page, again. A studio that fills its page with other games' names is a studio chasing traffic rather than players, and that says something about how the rest will be presented. That is not an accusation about the game's content, it is a signal about how it is being sold.

The card packs. The text mentions rarer hidden cards found through enhancement or in card packs. In a collectible game, that is the sentence that decides everything, and its worth will only be clear once the shop opens.

And the series. This is the third Epic Cards Battle, and the previous two are still on Steam. A studio that releases a new entry rather than evolving the previous one fragments its own community, and in a competitive online game the community is the product.

I will be frank: without those two mechanics, I would not have stopped on this game. There are too many card games, and the page gives you no reason to read to the end.

But carry-over mana and a 4 by 7 board are two design decisions that genuinely change how you play a turn, and that has become rare in this genre. If the studio can foreground them better than with a list of keywords, it has something.

Playing a card game where holding mana is possible? We want the name on the InsertCoins Discord.