The Game Wasn't the Problem...

With the release of Cyberpunk, there has been a renewed discussion in the store's Discord about Kickstarter and Altered. Previously, Altered was one of the largest-funded TCGs in Kickstarter history—a title Cyberpunk now has.

I want to talk a bit about Altered because it's the rare case where I can say, without much hesitation, “this is a genuinely great card game” and “the company fumbled it in a catastrophic way” in the same breath.

Both things are true.

And that's what makes Altered interesting.

This isn't a “the game is bad, we messed up” post. It's more of a “this game was great. What happened?” post. 

The game was genuinely good

If you played Altered, you probably already know this: it plays well.

The faction identities feel genuinely different at the table instead of being reskins of the same colors or factions. That's harder to pull off than it sounds. A lot of new TCGs promise that every faction feels unique and deliver “every faction has one signature keyword.” Altered actually made the factions play differently. The influence-style “combat” system was also a really interesting idea. It's one of those mechanics where I kept thinking that Lorcana or My Little Pony could have done something really interesting with the concept thematically.

But where Altered really shined was draft. I think Altered had one of the best Set 1 draft environments I've played in a new game. Boosters opened into real choices instead of one obvious bomb and a pile of filler. It was rare for a card in a draft deck to feel like a complete dud. The ability to combine three factions meant that decks could end up being genuinely unique combinations. You weren't just drafting “the blue deck” or “the aggressive red deck.” You were actually building something. That's a big deal for a new TCG.

I also had a love/hate relationship with the Unique cards. Positively, I really liked the constructed restriction of only having three Uniques in a deck. The bulk of the game was still built around commons, uncommons, and rares, which is exactly where I think a healthy card game should have its foundation.

The Uniques could be swingy, certainly. But casually, I thought that was part of the fun. Finding some bizarre card that did something nobody else at the table expected was an interesting wrinkle rather than the entire game.

So no—this isn't a “the game was bad” post. It's a “this game was good, and that's what makes the rest of this so frustrating” post.

Altered wasn't just a TCG

One of the most ambitious things about Altered was that it wasn't really trying to be just a physical card game. The physical cards were paired with a digital layer. You scanned a physical card, unlocked a digital version, could play online, and established digital “ownership” of the card.

Neat idea in theory.

In practice, every single card in your hand has a QR code permanently printed on it, taking up real card-frame space that used to be art. I understand why they did it. Digital integration is an increasingly important part of the games industry, and I don't fault a company for trying something ambitious. But a QR code is not art direction. It's a barcode. And it sits on the card forever whether or not you ever scan a single one. 

Most of the players I talked to didn't use the digital layer to actually play. They used it to lock in ownership of their cards, because if someone else scanned the card first, it could affect who digitally owned it. That gets at a larger issue with Altered.

I don't think the digital layer was just a fun bonus. I think the company was trying to rethink the entire ownership and secondary-market model of a TCG.

And that's where things get really interesting.

They weren't just building a card game

With unique cards and individual digital ownership, Altered was fundamentally trying to do something different with the secondary market. A normal TCG has a pretty straightforward ecosystem. You buy a card. You own the physical card. If you want to sell it, you sell it through a marketplace. Stores and marketplaces facilitate that transaction, and the publisher primarily makes its money when new product is sold.

Altered had an opportunity to change that.

If every card had a unique digital identity, the company could potentially stay involved in the ownership and trading of those cards. Instead of the secondary market being something that happened around the game, it could become part of the game company's infrastructure. I can understand why that was appealing. 

I also think they underestimated how difficult it was to actually build.

They were a game company trying to take on a problem that was partly a software problem, partly a marketplace problem, and partly a logistics problem.

They weren't just building a TCG. They were trying to build the platform around the TCG at the same time. 

And you can see the consequences of that ambition on the physical cards themselves.

The QR code is almost the perfect metaphor for Altered. It was a technically interesting solution to a problem that the average person playing cards at a table didn't necessarily care about—and it permanently occupied space on the physical product to make that solution possible.

Altered may have been ahead of its time

The irony is that I think Altered was actually ahead of the curve in some ways. A trend I've been seeing with non-IP-based games or smaller games is an acknowledgment that they don't have the built-in advantage of an established IP. They aren't Pokémon. They aren't League of Legends. They aren't One Piece.

So instead, they ratchet up the complexity and depth of the game to create a dedicated player base. You can see that direction in some upcoming and newer games like Hellbreak, Hubworld, and Neuroscape. I think that's a strong pivot for the modern TCG market. Altered was already doing something similar.

To a lot of traditional card-game players, Altered felt a little bit like playing a board game. That's not a bad thing. In fact, I think it's one of the reasons the game was so interesting. But it was different from what a lot of players were used to. And being different is both a strength and a weakness when you're trying to establish a new TCG.

The game wasn't perfect

Of course, none of this means Altered's actual game design was flawless. Some problem cards lived a little longer than they should have. Some permanents were too strong. Some bounce loops created unfair card advantage. Those are normal game-design problems. Every TCG has them. The bigger problem was what happened in Set 1 constructed, when it became clear that Waru Bureaucrats was overly oppressive, with Robin Hood leading the charge. Eventually Robin Hood was nerfed, but some of the damage to a young game had already been done.

This is important because I'm not trying to make the argument that Altered's designers were perfect and the business people ruined everything. There were gameplay mistakes, too. But gameplay mistakes can be fixed.

The much harder problems were structural. The real problem: the Kickstarter was too big

Here's where my perspective as a game store owner comes in. Altered's original Kickstarter didn't just fund the game. It was enormous. And it sold product directly to consumers at prices we could never realistically match at retail, with Kickstarter-exclusive rarity bumps, shipped directly to backers, weeks before many local stores had meaningful allocation to sell. I understand why they did it. A huge Kickstarter gives a company the capital to actually make the game. Without that campaign, maybe Altered never exists in the first place. So I'm not arguing that Kickstarter was inherently a mistake.

The problem was what the Kickstarter did to the ecosystem around the game.

A TCG isn't just a box of cards. The local game store is not simply another place to buy that box. A TCG needs opponents. It needs organized play. It needs drafts. It needs people teaching new players. It needs somebody sitting at a table on a Saturday who says, “Hey, want to play?” The store isn't merely a sales channel.

For a TCG, the store is part of the product.

And Altered's Kickstarter effectively pulled a huge portion of the most enthusiastic early adopters out of that ecosystem before local stores ever got a meaningful chance to build around them. A Kickstarter backer already had their cards. They already had decks. They had friends who had cards. They had months to play the game with those friends on TTS.

By the time the game showed up on our shelf and we were trying to build a community around it, a meaningful chunk of the people most likely to become that community had already been served directly by the company. We were happy to provide a place to play. But some people were actively telling other players not to buy retail and instead to buy Kickstarter boxes off eBay.

That's an incredibly difficult environment for a local store to build a TCG community in.

I had a small amount of Kickstarter product that I purchased for the store specifically to use for draft. Once those boxes were gone, people stopped coming to draft because the economics didn't make sense anymore. Why pay retail prices to draft when you could get the Kickstarter product for the same price? The campaign succeeded at creating customers. It just didn't necessarily create local customers. And those are not always the same thing.

You can sell a million boxes without creating a community

This is, to me, the biggest lesson from Altered. A TCG is a network. If you sell someone a box of cards directly, you've made a sale. If you get ten people buying cards from each other, showing up every Saturday, bringing their friends, drafting together, teaching new players, trading cards, and talking about the game in Discord, you've built a community.

That community generates sales for years.

That's why stores matter.

And that's why I'm skeptical of business models that treat local stores as simply another retail channel. A company can optimize its first-year Kickstarter number and simultaneously make it harder for the game to survive its third year. Those aren't necessarily contradictory outcomes.

Then things got even stranger

The Kickstarter alone would have been a rough patch we could have worked through.

What made it worse was the way the company seemed to approach its relationship with the community and the stores. After the initial Kickstarter, the company went back to the community asking for substantially more support to continue the game.

From our perspective, this was difficult to understand. Local stores had already had to cut back or drop the game. We were trying to figure out how to maintain a community around a product whose most enthusiastic early adopters had largely already been supplied. And then the messaging around the next funding push felt, at least to me, tone-deaf.

There was a sense that players should feel fortunate that this particular development team was spending its time on Altered, and that continuing the game required another €2.5 million.

Whatever the intention behind that messaging, it was a difficult pitch to make to a community that was already struggling to keep the game alive locally. If you're asking your customers to save the game, you probably shouldn't make them feel like they're lucky you're making it. That isn't a game-design problem. That's a relationship problem.

The thing that frustrates me most

The frustrating thing about Altered is that I don't think the company failed because nobody wanted a sophisticated new TCG. They had the game. They had a genuinely interesting mechanical foundation. They had a fantastic draft environment. They had a unique approach to card ownership. They had a massive Kickstarter. They had people who cared enough about the game to spend a lot of money on it before it even reached retail.

Those are all things a new TCG would kill to have.

But they kept trying to solve problems that weren't necessarily the problems players or stores needed solved. They wanted to reinvent card ownership. They wanted to build a digital ecosystem. They wanted to participate in the secondary market. They wanted to maximize Kickstarter funding. They wanted to sell directly to players. And somewhere in the middle of all of that, they seemed to lose sight of one very simple fact:

A TCG needs people sitting across from each other. The local game store is one of the places where that happens.

Where this leaves us

I don't want this to read as “don't play Altered” or “don't back the next giant Kickstarter.” Altered is genuinely a good game. I enjoyed playing it when we were firing events. I still think the draft environment was excellent. I still think some of the design ideas were genuinely innovative.

But I think Altered is a useful case study for anyone interested in the future of TCGs.

A great product can still be a bad retail proposition. A massive Kickstarter can still be bad for the community that has to sustain the game afterward. A clever digital ownership system can still make the physical card worse. And a company can make an enormous amount of money selling cards without necessarily creating the ecosystem that makes people want to keep playing them.

The game wasn't the problem.

The problem was everything the company built around it—and the degree to which those decisions sometimes seemed to work against the very ecosystem the game needed to survive. I'm personally interested to see how Cyberpunk TCG turns out. As a store, we decided to pass on it, but I'm always excited to see new games enter the market. And, of course, that's probably a future post: how we decide which new games are worth betting on.

If you backed Altered, no judgment. I did too - Yzmir for life.