Spells of Genesis Additions Arriving Soon

Spells of Genesis (SoG) is a blockchain-based trading card game (TCG) being developed by Switzerland-based EverdreamSoft. The company recently announced a September 2016 launch date for the game’s full release.

However, players won’t have to wait until fall to test some of the latest developments surfacing out of the company’s Geneva headquarters.

Shaban Shaame, founder of EverdreamSoft and the conceiver of Moonga, one of the first online trading card games, was excited to announce three significant additions to SoG, two of which, guilds and custom level creation, will be arriving this month, while the third, blockchainization, is slated to arrive with the September release.

“When you feel that you belong to a group then you have social liabilities to other people. You are more likely to come back and see your friends.”
— – Shaban Shaame, EverdreamSoft Founder

This is where the idea of guilds comes into play. The concept is simple. A player can join with a group of other players, not unlike teams or clans. Guilds will further increase gold-earning potential, especially if you are part of an active guild with strong players.

While the guilds expansion is currently complete and developed, it is yet to be tied to the leaderboard, said Shaame.

Further rewards were set to arrive with the launch of Season 6 on Jun. 6, but there are finer details still being ironed out, according to game designer, Jasper Damman.

For instance, Damman talked of rewards – gold, cards, or other in-game assets – being received by each player involved in a guild battle or showdown, which could last a couple of days.

However, whether it will be evenly distributed or based on multiplayer ranking is yet to be decided, according to Damman, and would need to be ironed out as the expansion unfolds.

When fully launched, players will have to use the game’s online application via a web page to access guilds. Players will be able to simply log-in to their SoG account and the option to either create or join a guild will be displayed. Players will also be able to view the leaderboard, and more, from the online interface.

The game’s final version will provide access directly to this feature, in-game.

The level creator is an entirely different animal, and the upcoming release will just be providing the tools, according to Shaame.

The vision, Shaame added, is to have a full campaign creation system so any game creator good enough will be able to create a set of levels, chock full of customized enemies that could feature the creator’s own face if they wanted. That’s the level of customization SoG is aiming to allow.

“Players who create their own levels will potentially earn gold if others play their levels and lose. [Conversely,] they won’t earn anything if [the challenger] wins. The gold will go to the winner.”
— – Shaame

Spells of Genesis established four milestones last year, self-imposed by the EverdreamSoft development team.

Milestone #1, which marked the end of the token sale, was completed last September. Since then players have been yearning for the final addition of blockchainization to the game, something most innovative across the mobile and gaming spectrum.

Blockchainization refers to cards summoned in-game, which are then leveled up and fused to attain their final evolutionary state, not only creating a more powerful card but also one that’s of more significant real-world value.

Aside from the asset-attaining facet, an interesting aspect is the way in which the feature innovates the duplicate card scenario, a common run-in for trading card gamers or collectors.

Damman explained, “If you get a duplicate — normally you would say, ‘I don’t have any use for this card’ — but in Spells of Genesis you can fuse the same cards together once you level them both up.”

Essentially, a player must first invest in what are called crystals to level two of the same cards up to their maximum level and then you can fuse them together to create a stronger card.

“Once you do this again, that would need four cards in total, you will get to the final fusion — the strongest card — and this card you can blockchainize and then trade.”
— – Jasper Damman, Game Designer

These blockchainized cards are automatically converted to a blockchain-based asset, and is transferred to the player’s account address, explained Shaame.

A blockchainized card is the pinnacle evolutionary state of a card; there is nothing above it. Blockchainized cards are still open to levelling up, they cannot be fused into a new card, however.

The built-in necessity to obtain cards already possessed in order to advance one’s own deck is an added layer of complexity to a pretty substantial trading card game. And it only grows more challenging — and exciting — by the development team’s decision to continue operating in “seasons.”

According to Shaame and Damman, following the end of a season, which will run roughly for a half of the year approximately and be leaderboard-based, the cards in-game will change.

“The cards you get now, in one year for example, you won’t be able to get them anymore. So right now while you play, you receive some free cards that at some point you can blockchainize them but after the end of the season those cards won’t be available.”
— – Shaame

In other words, there will be a new lot to take their place, parallel to what happens in physical card games and collections.

“The cards that are not “printed” anymore will gain value,” said Shaame, who added the older editions, or collections, will thus also increase in value given the heightened rarity of the items.

“Right now we have pure blockchain cards,” said Shaame. “Those cards are sold only on the blockchain, but we also have off-chain cards, cards that are stored in our database — in the game database — the old-fashioned way.”

There are 100 different blockchain cards alone, a number that increases to 300 when the possibility of fusing enters the fray.

Damman added, they will also be continuously adding cards as time passes so even after the release the game will evolve and new features, creatures and cards will come into play.