Vintage Beef's goal for Hermitcraft Season 9 is simple: to create a Trading Card Game, pure Minecraft style*!
At the time of writing, Hermitcraft Season 9 had well progressed to its 10th month. That's almost a year. Our Canadian Minecraft YouTuber, Vintage Beef has been working hard on his beloved cards since then... and it's now complete!
P/S if you already know everything about TCG and are just here for matches, then I have the YouTube playlist just for you! :D
This blog post aims to summarise everything you need to know about TCG. For the sake of simplicity, I'll cut out all the nerds/technical aspects... anything that deals with numbers and spreadsheets.
This article is organised as below:
What is a Trading Card Game (TCG)?
If you're familiar with Pokemon card games, then imagine TCG as it, but with the Hermits and trivia. If you're like me, who has no idea that Pokemon card game even exists...
TCG is where the Player plays their card according to their strengths and weaknesses to defeat the Opponent's cards!
Sounds confusing? Don't worry, keep reading...
The Characters of TCG: the Hermits!
There are 26 playable characters of TCG... all of which are the 26 hermits in Hermitcraft Season 9.
Yes, TFC is still a hermit and forever will be.
According to Beef, there are 10 types of Minecrafters among the Hermits: builder, balanced, explorer, farm, miner, prankster, PvP, redstone, speedrunner and terraform.
Each Hermit will be assigned to one of the types, which is decided by Beef's YouTube community polls set up early in the season.
The fans are pretty accurate with their votes because Grian is assigned to... surprise... a Prankster! The type is indicated at the top right corner, represented by a certain Minecraft block. For a prankster, it's the obsidian block.
"On the other hand, Beef probably doesn't need a poll on this one; I'm very certain it's a unanimous poll... haha!"
Each Minecrafter type will have strengths and weaknesses against other types, resulting in either doing or receiving additional damage every round. For example, a prankster is strong against the PvP type, but is weak against the Speedrunner.
What do the Hermits do?
Each Hermit has 2 common and 2 rare attack moves.
Beef further personalised them by asking his audience for the Hermit's attack names.
For instance, one of xBCrafted's attack names is "Aww Yeah"... And "Shreep" for none other than BdoubelO100. The names couldn't be any more intimate than they already are!
Each Hermit has a unique combination of Health Points (HP), Attack Value 1 and Attack Value 2.
For the sake of fairness, Beef decreed to have the hermits decide the numbers themselves. He invited them to his... mega-base(?)... to push some buttons.
He even managed to lure Mumbo back to the server even when he was on hiatus... legit!
Let's study the design and composition of the cards, using Keralis' (and its real-life model) as an example:
Look at the top right corner: Keralis is a builder type (timber stair block) with 270HP. His first attack move is called "Looky Looky", causing 40 damage), which means deducting 40HP from the opponent's health. His second attack move is called "Nononono" at 90 points.
"How come there are different symbols in front of each attack move?"
Each Hermit requires certain items to activate their attacks.
Remember earlier Beef asked his subscribers to categorise each Hermit into a Minecrafter type? Referring to Impulse and Gem's cards below:
Gem is a terraform type, represented by a leaf block (or booshes :P). Gem needs one terraform item card to activate "It's Fine" and two terraform item cards to activate "GeminiSlay".
Impulse is a redstone type, represented by a redstone dust. Now look at his second rare attack: one redstone item plus one BLANK item. The player can fill the BLANK using any other items: builder item, prankster item, you name it.
Continuous similar attacks are boring. To spice things up, introducing...
The Effect Cards!
Effect Cards are... effect cards (duh). Their primary function could be the following:
Do extra damage to the Opponent, recover some HP for the Player, or perform certain actions to the Hermits.
There are single-use and permanent Effect Cards. This is pretty self-explanatory: single-use Effect Card could only be used once per round and then discarded. Permanent Effect Cards could be attached to the Hermit until it ran out of use.
For instance, the Lava Bucket Effect Card. As hinted by its intended function in vanilla Minecraft, the affected Hermit will suffer from burning.
"Is there an option for counterattack or healing?"
Yes! After all, a game's no fun if there's an overpowering/plot armour component. One of them is the Water Bucket. Which is, you may have guessed it... neutralises the Lava Bucket.
What Happens During a TCG Round? How to Win a TCG Round?
The deck is designed to accommodate a maximum of 5 Hermits. However, only 1 Hermit is active (and therefore could attack), the rest are the "backup" or "benched". Beef creatively termed the latter as AFK Hermits... kudos!
In each round, a player can attach 1 Item Card and 1 Effect card (if applicable). Next, land 1 Attack towards the Opponent and end the turn by pressing a designated button.
Xisuma had redstone-d this to automatically dispense 1 card to the Player while passing the turn to the Opponent.
Have a look below, where JoeHills' turn is indicated by the switched-on redstone lamps on the floor:
There are multiple ways to win:
When the Player has KO'd THREE of the opponent's Hermits
When the Opponent ran out of active Hermits to continue the game
When the game somehow ran out of cards (meaning the game's been going for far too long, which is almost impossible but still possible)
We all know most games are akin to pay-to-win. Beef realised this rather quickly while setting up his TCG shop, considering some hermits are just... filthy rich. So here's what Beef did:
The only time a Hermit could spend diamonds is when the Hermit buys a Starter Pack... at a mere 5 diamond blocks.
"FIVE diamond blocks for all the work he's poured for the last 10 months, what???"
Yeah. The only method to buy further packs is via TCG tokens, which can only be obtained by playing the TCG. The winner gets 3 TCG tokens, loser gets 1 TCG token.
Note: every player's first round will be a "practice round". Both sides will receive 2 TCG tokens each regardless of the results.
TCG sounds very competitive...
It sure is! Beef has launched TCG for less than 1 week and we already have multiple streams featuring just. TCG. Matches.
"The hermits have a gambling addiction and Beef takes advantage of it... haha!"
Now, the most important question:
Where can I watch all the TCG matches????????
As usual, me doing what hermitcraft.snippets usually do... I've created a YouTube playlist whenever a hermit uploaded videos featuring their TCG matches:
Note: Live stream replays are not included.
Want to geek out on TCG? Let's gossip!! :D
Editor's Note
What do I mean by *Trading Card Game, pure Minecraft style*?
Beef created these cards using Minecraft maps. You know how tedious one map is, let alone 100++ cards??? From designing to resource gathering to placing the specific blocks to... you get the idea.
Hermitcraft has a unique data pack that allows hermits to customise anything to everything. Like Scar's Jellie merch in his Scarland. And also Tango's Artifacts for his Decked Out 2.
In a way, Beef could have designed everything in Photoshop and assigned a random item to reflect the cards. But no, he decided to spend 10 months mapping out the cards, block per block.
The best description of his efforts is sheer dedication, and even that I feel is an understatement.
Following this game's development is a humbling experience. Its initial release and the immediate craze that followed are very well deserved, making its achievement beyond heartwarming. Congratulations, Beef!
Disclaimer:
hermitcraft.snippets is a Hermitcraft fan blogger and is not associated with the official Hermitcraft in any form. Kindly contact me for any queries. The in-game scenes are screenshots from VintageBeef's video, as credited in the captions.
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