Mystic Vale Review
Spring’s great right? All those green trees. Summer too. Yes, green trees are what we like to see. Not those red trees. No, Autumn is bad, just think of all those little old ladies slipping over on piles of wet leaves. The Mystic Vale must have a lot of piles of wet leaves because it is full of red trees. But no little old ladies are falling over on our watch! We’ll probably fall flat on our faces though… 
Players: 2-4
Time: 45-60 mins
Ages: 14+
Designer: John D. Clair
Artist: Storn Cook, Andrew Gaia, Katherine Guevara, Heather Kreiter, Kiri Østergaard Leonard, Matt Paquette, Kiki Moch Rizky, Martin de Diego Sádaba
Publisher: Alderac Entertainment Group (AEG), Pegasus Spiele
Mystic Vale may have had a full year of shuffling cards and passing around victory point chips like the bowl of nachos at a Mexican restaurant but if anything now might be the time to get to know it. With two expansions available, Mystic Vale is finally coming into full bloom.
If you go down to the woods today
Like some sexy siren trying to lure a weary traveller to their doom, Mystic Vale flutters its transparencies at you and whispers, “aren’t I clever? Look! You can build your cards! Forget about old, bloated Dominion, set aside your cooperative Legendaries, come play with the exciting new game on the shelves.” But should you!? Surely this is just one of those gimmicky mechanisms. And you’d be right… But also so so wrong.
Equipped with a starting deck of luxuriously huge cards sleeved by necessity in glistening plastic, this already feels like a premium product. Ooo oh they shuffle so smoothly! No I don’t usually spend money sleeving my cards, yes that makes me easily impressed, shut up! These cards are, as always in deck builders, utterly pants. You have the suspiciously dirty sounding Fertile Soil, source of Mystic Vale’s round, blue income, Cursed Lands and its dreaded red trees and, finally, MOST EXCITINGLY…. blank cards.
From here, rather than worrying about trashing cards or making your deck larger with new ones, your deck is a canvas upon which you’ll paint something new. Each transparency you buy features a single element that covers a third of the card. You choose a free space on one of the cards you drew this round and slide it in, forever improving it.
Without knowing anything else you see how that alone increases the space of interesting decisions compared to your common or garden deck builder. It’s no longer a case of just what card do I buy, but where do I place it? Should I add something to an empty card, or build up one or two super cards that bring the blue balls bouncing in? Can I try to make those cursed lands a little less painful by surrounding them with bright and colourful seedlings and laughing centaurs and oh don’t mind about the terrifying dead forest, everything is JUST FINE!
You’re sure of a big surprise
As you may have suspected all is not well in the Mystic Vale and little old ladies aside those red trees covering a significant number of your cards are the sickening curse that gloops up your deck. Each turn ends, like most deck builders, with you drawing a new hand of cards, but here you keep drawing cards until you get a third red tree, which you leave teetering on top of your deck face up like one more dirty dish.
But you’re not necessarily done yet. When your turn comes round again you can choose to draw more cards, bringing them down into your pool of usable cards and flipping the top card of your deck BUT if you reveal a 4th tree at any point you spoil, that tower of plates collapsing with a shattering crash and the splodge of leftover curry. Your turn is over, a paltry one extra income stored in your flippable token to console you as you run to get the carpet cleaner.
Naturally spoiling too often is going to lose you the game, but grabbing a few extra cards when you just need that boost for a big purchase can make all the difference. That is where knowing your deck can be hugely valuable.
Plus it makes for great theatre, as in any good push your luck game. When someone announces they are going to push you look up, praying for that red tree. If they spoil it’s funny, if they succeed it’s scary as you feel pressured to push just as hard to achieve just as much. It’s great and, honestly, a relief that it’s there as otherwise the game would have no player interaction at all. Even if you’re mostly swept up in your own deck, you can appreciate what your opponents are achieving.
The game then is in optimising this battle with your deck, minimising the effects of the red trees with the cards you buy. Either making each draw better, or collecting green tree symbols to directly counter a red tree, and let you draw on further in safety. Either move builds your economy so that you can afford higher value transparencies, which might be worth end game points, or might let you collect little point chips from a communal supply, which also acts as a clock on the game.
Who knows where these cardboard shards first appeared from, but the sorcerers of the Mystic Vale covert them like nothing else. They’ll sit there untouched for the first half of the game and when someone first reaches for them, you know you are probably half way through. Before you know it the pool is running out and you are potentially down to your last turn really upping the tension on those push your luck deck draws!
A further source of end game victory points are vale cards which must be sub-vales of the Mystic Vale because Vales can apparently be nested like Russian Dolls. Just wait till we get to the expansions. These wonderfully colourful cards sit separate to your deck in a mixed up landscape all of your own, giving you ongoing powers or just points. These, however, are bought with their own special resources only available from the transparencies you buy, making them initially much harder to get hold of but still a viable strategy to pursue in and of themselves.
While a lot of this game is a question of counting symbols, there are plenty of powers printed on the cards themselves. Some may be a small box of text squeezed on top of the art, or if more complicated may be on a strip that runs vertically the entire length of the card adding an extra consideration on which cards can be placed where, although in the base game you won’t run into too many of these.
The mass of symbols and powers, coupled with the ability to draw through a ton of cards with a good deck, can make certain turns feel long but at the same time they are your reward for crafting a powerful deck and you feel good for it. It makes you the centre of everyone’s jealous attention for that little bit longer but the game never takes this to extremes. They are rare rewards, and the game stops just as soon as things start firing regularly.
I realise while writing this that I never give any named examples of cards and that’s because I simply don’t remember them! The one thing you do lose from having small card segments is eye catching artwork. So while I remember the card that earns money for every helmet symbol on that card, I can’t remember it’s name. The gameplay, as with most deck builders, is hardly a thematic triumph. Heck, the aim is supposed to be to heal the cursed lands but any cursed cards in your deck are never removed, just worked around. Hiding that permanent stain on the carpet with a carefully placed rug.
Ultimately none of that really matters to me as it is the simple joy of playing that has me looking forward to sitting down with it. The push your luck deck builder has been done before (see Flip City) but uniting that with the card crafting mechanic (its unique selling point) was a brilliant move. I love how it reframes the classical deck building puzzle into something entirely of its own. While it still falls into the same traps of those older deck builders, a limited degree of interaction, a need for expansions to really innovate on the simple core and provide variability, for those who love deck builders this is a must buy. And for those who’ve been put off over the years, but who once loved their Dominions and their Legendaries, Mystic Vale might bring that nostalgic magic to the fore again!
Rating: Mystical
My copy of Mystic Vale was provided for review by Esdevium Games. You can buy a copy for £41.99 RRP from your local hobby store!
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