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When playing cards, your deck pieces each fall into a certain Game Zone, which are the Ally Row, the Hero Row, and the Resource Row. Simply put, Allies typcially go in the Ally Row, while Weapons, Armor, Items, and the Hero go in the Hero Row. Your resources, deck, and graveyard (discard pile) go in the Resource Row.

Once you get all your cards played, you can propose a combat with the other player. You pick out your proposed attacker then pick a defender from your opponent to fight against. Your card becomes "exerted" and you deal any damage to that defender. You can propose as many attackers as you want during your combat, but remember that your cards won't become active again until your turn, so make sure you have some defenders ready to protect your hero. After you've dealt your damage and discarded any card that is "dead," the combat concludes and your Action Phase is over.

Woohoo!

After I'd played out a game with my starter deck, I then proceeded to open the rest of my booster packs. There were certainly a number of good cards in the packs (no loot cards unfortunately) and I sorted them by class. While there are generic cards that can be played with any alignment, race, or class, most of the cards are separated by class. After opening a few packs, I started to worry. Even though I'd purchased a large number of booster packs, I was in serious danger of not have enough cards of similar alignment/class to put together a second deck! Luckily, I ended up piecing a second deck together, but I'd recommend to new players buying at least two starter decks, which will help you get at least two decks put together.

As with any trading card game, players have an enormous amount of options available to them when creating decks, strategies and ways to play your opponent. With two factions, nine classes and ten races to choose from, the World of Warcraft TCG is almost more complex than most of the other games available. Upper Deck is also hell-bent on creating as many expansions as possible for the extremely popular game, with two expansion and two raiding sets already released in the United States since the game's initial release on October 25, 2006. Deck strategies abound in the WoW TCG, with enough players interested in creating a winning deck that it has spawned a number of web pages specifically for that purpose.

Even with the number of options given to the player, the complexity of the actual gameplay remains relatively simple. It's only when a player wishes to be competitive will he see the true nature of the card game and have to devote his time to learning card strategies before he could ever become a legitimate contender for a tournament placing.

With my packs all busted and my cards laid out before me, I couldn't help but stare - mouth agape - at the tremendous variety of art found on the WoW cards. While Magic may hold the title for the best "realistic" fantasy artwork, the WoW TCG certainly captivates with its cartoony, true-to-form style of artwork. Upper Deck spared no expense in the card creation, with artists like Penny Arcade's Mike Krahulik, Todd McFarlane and Boris Vallejo lending their talents to the art. Cards range from the apparently humorous to the distubingly serious all in one fell-swoop. If I were seriously collecting cards, WoW would certainly have enough appeal for any consumate collector to want to get them all. That said, there are a few cards in each WoW set that made me cock my eyebrow and go, "WTF?" These cards were either so cartoony that they looked like something straight out of a Sunday morning comic strip, or were simply devoid of any redeeming artistic value. These cards were few and far between, but you almost have to be perfect in a marketplace that holds the MtG behemoth.

The aftermath of the booster pack opening.

Finally, I was a but disappointed with the nature of the cards I received with my $50 purchase. While I knew that I would get one deck with the starter deck, I assumed that there would be more than enough cards in 10 boosters (150 cards) to create another 60 card deck. I was able to construct another 60 card deck, but the cards certainly didn't have as much cohesion as the starter deck did. This was evident when I played the two decks against one another, and my ramshackle 60 card deck was ran-ragged by the modified starter. Thankfully there are a number of guides on the Internet to making strong decks, and if you pick and choose your cards, rather than simply buying boosters, you may have a better chance of fielding several strong decks.

In the end, the numbers don't lie for the WoW TCG. With two expansions and two raid decks released in less than a year, Upper Deck the popularity of the game must be high enough to be creating a profit for Upper Deck Entertainment. On top of that, thousands of players world-wide have been playing each other in tournaments, hoping to break their way onto the national - and eventually the world - WoW tournament scene.

Frankly, their is little in the game to complain about, aside from the ever-growing cost of maintaining a competitive deck. If you're a gamer and interested in some hearty competition, have a few extra bucks lying around, and are willing to learn a new game based off of an already popular MMOG, the WoW TCG is the right place to look!

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Ten Ton Hammer is your unofficial source for World of Warcraft news and features!