Exclusive Kaijudo Dojo Edition Preview — Vikorakas
Sure, it’s Magic Week here at Robot Viking, but sometimes Magic is a little too complicated for the younger gamers in your life. You need a gateway game to teach them the fundamentals of card advantage, hand-quality, and creature combat. How about Kaijudo? The upcoming Dojo Edition will feature this creepy squid creature, Vikorakas.
Kaijudo is essentially like Magic, with a few key differences. You still tap creatures to attack and tap mana to summon creatures and cast spells. However, you can put any card into your “mana zone,” giving the game a perfect, predictable mana curve, just like Upper Deck’s defunct Vs. System. Cards are divided into five “civilizations, ” Light, Water, Darkness, Fire and Nature. Cards have levels, and you have to tap cards in your mana zone equal to a card’s level to play it. To cast a spell or summon a creature from a particular civilization, one of the mana zone cards you tap to play it has to be from the same civilization as the card. So to play Vikorakas here, I’d have to tap five mana cards, one of which must be a Water card.
Instead of one attack step, creatures attack individually, and their owner decides who they attack. You can either attack your opponent directly or attack a tapped creature. Instead of life totals, each player has five “shields,” face down cards drawn from the deck at game’s start. A direct attack removes a shield and puts it into the defender’s hand (so dealing damage generates card advantage for the player on the losing end, a sort of built-in handicapping system). A direct attack when there are no shields left ends the game. Creature on creature combat is simple — highest power number (found in the lower left) wins, loser is destroyed.
What does that mean for our squiddy friend?
He’s a level five creature with 3,000 power (a bit low for a level five, from what I can see). He comes with a decent enters the battlefield effect, your basic Merfolk Looter hand-shaping. If only it triggered whenever he attacked, and not just when summoned.
Apparently there’s a TV show and video game version of Kaijudo that are all the rage among kids these days (note: I have no idea what the level of actual raging among kids is). A set of Kaijudo Battle Decks has already been released, but the Dojo Edition, which releases next week (July 24) will feature the first random booster packs. giving kids the first opportunity to build their own decks.
