Chapter 163: The TCG Craze Spreads Offline
Chapter 163: The TCG Craze Spreads Offline
“Then should I open them?”
After returning home, Billus stared at the packs placed on his desk and enjoyed the pounding excitement in his chest for a moment.
Physical products were definitely better than opening packs inside the game, even without all the flashy effects.
Billus reached out and picked up one pack. After tearing open the glued entrance, he carefully peeled it apart so the cards inside would not be damaged.
“Oh...”
There were no dazzling effects like in the game, but the identical card-back design immediately caught his eye.
And the stiff texture he felt at his fingertips somehow made it feel much more real.
Ras had paid considerable attention to the quality of the cards as well.
Partly because he wanted to stimulate people’s desire to collect them, but more importantly because if people were actually going to play games with them, they needed to guarantee at least a certain level of durability.
In any case, Billus flipped through the cards one by one to see what he got.
“Mmm.”
Perhaps naturally, the cards Billus wanted were nowhere to be found.
At least he pulled Fire Pot, a card highly rated on Spirit Space, but since he had never considered using a Fire Deck, the feeling was somewhat mixed.
Billus set it aside and opened the rest of the packs as well.
Opening them really had been enjoyable. The anticipation felt like receiving birthday presents as a child.
But it also carried the same feeling he used to get when the birthday present inside turned out to be study materials.
Fucking garbage pulls.
Naturally, things like Death Knight and Flowing Corpse did not appear, and he did not even get any second-tier cards.
He had been disappointed when Fire Pot first appeared, but that had actually been a lucky pull. After all, it was still considered about a 1.5-tier card in Fire Decks.
As for Darkness Deck cards, only third-tier cards appeared.
The kind of cards that merely showed you had played the game and bought card packs.
Of course, their effects were still clear enough, and they were far better than having nothing at all, but disappointment was unavoidable.
“Damn it.”
But there was no point regretting results that were already decided.
But where’s the code on these things?
Since he had to use what he got anyway, Billus separated only the Darkness Deck cards. Then he searched for the code according to the information he had learned beforehand.
“Ah. Here it is.”
He did not struggle for long. It was a small card, and the silver coating at the bottom immediately caught his eye.
Billus pulled a coin from his pocket and scratched it off, revealing the code hidden beneath.
Originally, Ras had not intended to cover the codes at all.
Since they were inside sealed packs anyway, there was little chance of the codes leaking.
However, after remembering one of the core elements of this game, he changed his mind.
Trading.
Of course, even after using the code, the physical cards could still be used offline. But considering that the main battlefield was online, the codes accounted for a large part of a card’s value, so Ras judged that protecting them was necessary if he wanted trading to flourish.
Of course, players in this early stage still did not fully understand that value yet.
Fortunately, Billus had no interest in Fire Decks and found it annoying to scratch and input codes one by one, so he left Fire Pot untouched and tossed it into his desk drawer.
“Oh. It really worked.”
He already knew how to input the code. Since the game had launched first, and although not yet fully implemented, the code input feature had already been opened, he had been staring at it while impatiently waiting for the card packs to release.
Billus entered the code and checked his deck afterward.
A registration confirmation had appeared when he entered the code, but he checked anyway just to be sure.
Then he stared in fascination as the exact same card he held in his hand appeared inside the game.
There still were not many things that connected online and offline worlds like this.
The illustrations on the computer version were definitely slightly inferior.
Hardware limitations made it impossible to reproduce colors and resolution exactly like reality.
But because of that, it instead felt even more strongly as though a real-world card had entered the computer world.
In any case, after confirming it worked, Billus started registering the rest of the cards as well.
Then he built a deck using the new cards, and unlike earlier when he had grumbled about only pulling third-tier cards, he now felt fairly satisfied.
For one thing, he had spent the past few days using the same cards repeatedly, so simply having new cards already felt nice.
And even if they were only third-tier cards, some strategies had been impossible to use without them. Fundamentally, they were still slightly better than the default cards.
And once he entered an actual game, he could immediately feel himself becoming stronger.
“This survives now?”
The original basic Hell Bug would have been swept away immediately, but the Skeleton Warrior, which had the same cost, endured and bought him time to gather cards.
Then after wiping out the opponent’s field with Black Flames, dealing damage directly to the opponent’s player using a Skeleton Warrior barely clinging to life felt incredibly exhilarating.
The difference was truly subtle, but in Magic and Creature, where fields could be wiped out in a single turn, such differences decided victory and defeat.
“Damn it!”
Meanwhile, the opponent playing on the other side slammed his fist onto the keyboard.
He had delayed going to buy card packs because he expected crowds, but now he was getting overwhelmed not even by rare cards, but merely by a few third-tier cards, and rage surged through him.
He had already lost several similar matches, so he finally reached his limit, shut off the game, and stood up from his seat.
To go buy those damned card packs.
After the card packs released, Spirit Space became incredibly noisy over the topic.
<There were seriously tons of people there.>
<But aren’t these card packs a scam? Why do they only give trash cards?>
<Seriously. I didn’t even get a single first-tier or second-tier card.>
There were certainly posts from people excited about obtaining new cards, but the main topic was naturally the cards people pulled from their packs.
So it wasn’t just me...
Usually, people complained about not pulling good cards.
People like Billus found emotional comfort from reading those posts.
But if there were people complaining, there would naturally also be people bragging.
<Heheheheheheheheh. I pulled Salvation.>
At least blatant bragging like that was tolerable.
But indirect bragging was truly infuriating.
<Man, my luck sucks. Only got four second-tier cards.>
<Yeah, that’s a first-tier Darkness Deck card.>
<He’s obviously not asking because he doesn’t know.>
“Fuck...”
Since it was still the early stages, strategies centered around overwhelming opponents with powerful creatures worked very well, so this type of card was what people wanted most.
Billus was the same, and because Death Knight belonged to the Darkness Deck he used, his jealousy was especially intense.
<If you’re not using it, sell it to me.>
And as people discussed which cards they pulled, naturally others began wanting those cards and attempting trades.
That was only natural.
<How’s one card worth 10 Del?>
<Seriously. I’ll offer 15 Del!>
If this had been purely an offline game, fixed prices would probably have been difficult to establish.
But because Spirit Space already existed, famous cards quickly started developing prices like this.
Of course, real trades would still involve bargaining between individuals, but even having approximate market values helped activate trading.
Some truly popular cards even reached prices of 30 Del.
Of course, on Earth there were cards worth over a million won each, but considering this was a newly released game in this world, that was already an incredibly high valuation.
“It’s a huge success!”
The Magic and Creature development team cheered as they observed the market reaction.
Meta Soft was a company seemingly incapable of failure, but this development team belonged not to Meta Soft headquarters but under the IP Management Team, and since it was an unfamiliar online-exclusive game format, they could not help feeling anxious.
But with the Server Management Team starting to complain about the exploding number of connections, and endless calls demanding more products despite the printing company frantically printing cards nonstop, they could not help realizing the game had succeeded.
“Hehe. Sinkhole.”
“Ah!”
Ras grabbed his head after seeing the card Ella played.
He had been using the recently popular creature-building strategy, but a board-wipe card appeared before he could attach Magic Resistance.
In the end, Ras exhausted all his points from Ella’s follow-up attack and lost.
“Ah. It’s definitely more fun playing with real cards.”
“Really?”
Ella organized her cards with a satisfied expression.
Rather than battling on the computer, the two had sat facing each other at the mansion’s large table and played using actual cards.
When Ras released the card packs, he also sold Starter Deck Packs simultaneously.
Since he was already selling real card packs anyway, he intended to target the offline market too.
Since the Starter Decks contained the same cards already freely given online, he did not include registration codes in them.
However, because people might feel cheated paying money for something given free online, he added exactly one random card and sold them as 61-card packs.
Unlike Ella, Ras seemed somewhat indifferent.
Not because he lost.
Even back on Earth, he had never enjoyed TCGs offline.
Perhaps because of that, physically touching cards did not particularly move him.
And honestly speaking, turning cards sideways and calculating points was somewhat annoying.
But that did not mean it was not fun.
Sitting face-to-face like this, chatting while eating snacks, Ras felt he finally understood why people played card games together in person.
He would probably continue enjoying games like this from time to time.
And Ras was not the only one who felt that way.
“The Starter Deck sales are extremely high.”
Ras received this report from Georg, the leader of the IP Management Team.
He had not held great expectations for the offline side.
The Starter Decks had merely been released because it felt wasteful not to and as a sort of service for players.
Yet within just one month after release, 100,000 sets had sold.
“Could it be because of that one random card?”
“Ah, that certainly had some influence, but more importantly, demand for offline play was far greater than expected.”
On Earth, physical card games had come first, and only after becoming popular were computer versions developed.
Ras had never held much interest in offline card games and only knew computer TCGs, so he had not truly understood the popularity of original TCGs.
But this TCG genre possessed far greater potential than he expected.
For one thing, simply porting it onto computers had already made countless people enjoy it, proving how inherently powerful the gameplay itself was.
And another major strength was that as long as people had cards, they could play anywhere.
Furthermore, computer penetration in this world was still low, and the proportion of poor people was high.
And it was not only the poor.
Computers themselves were too unfamiliar to older generations, so people over forty generally did not play games even if they had money.
But card games were different.
Moreover, the fact that this was a game popular on computers further increased the appeal of this TCG.
Even if people could not use computers because they lacked money or familiarity, that did not mean they lacked interest.
And among those who actually bought decks and played, quite a few genuinely enjoyed it.
People who had no intention of playing online still started buying card packs.
An offline market had formed.
Even Georg, currently giving Ras this report, was one of those people.
After all, he was originally a Dwarf who enjoyed gathering with friends to play board games and card games.
Footnotes:
Glossary reference checked against uploaded project glossary.
Translator’s Notes:
TCG (Trading Card Game) — Collectible card game genre where players build decks using randomized card packs and battle using rule-based systems. Real-world examples include Magic: The Gathering (1993, USA) and Yu-Gi-Oh! (1999, Japan).
Board Wipe — Common TCG term referring to effects that remove or destroy most or all creatures/cards currently on the field.
Starter Deck — Preconstructed beginner deck sold as a ready-to-play product. Usually designed to introduce new players to a game’s mechanics.