Greetings, Archons! This is Blazing Archon again bringing some more content to you on Cosmic Crucible. Despite my relative lack of time to play KeyForge and create content, I am pretty proud of the content stream gradually increasing so I would like to keep it going.
After The Glorious Few by Sanctumonius it was proved that the KeyForge community had the potential to organize a world class tournament, including most of the best KeyForge players in the world. You may want to have more information on this epic event, which you can do here in Zach’s article. That was a clear symptom that our favorite card game was in great shape, which inspired me to describe the way in which this is shown So, the goal of this article is to go through the different aspects that reflect how KeyForge is evolving along the social distancing period.
From the developer’s point of view: Mass Mutation
At the beginning of April, Mass Mutation release date for US was modified showing a delay until July. This could have been expected to kind of cause a general disappointment between the community, but, spoiler: it did not. As far as KeyForge players are concerned, it has done nothing but to increase the eagerness to have it released. On April 16th antasy Flight Games made a very interesting move: they provided us with 4 different Mass Mutation decks to print and play with during the social isolation. If you missed it, you can find them here. This made it feel like the time remaining for the release was not that long while also showing more new cards in the unique way of featuring its gameplay. It is definitely an awesome way to tackle the current situation!
Content creation during social distancing
Content creators – specially those who do it on a regular basis – are in charge of a very big responsibility regarding the maintenance and development of the KeyForge community. They generate discussion, show decks in action and create micro-communities as well as playgroups. What is more, they prove KeyForge’s vigor day by day, and there are several proofs for that:
Written content, i. e. articles from people like Aurore, George Keagle on Team Reapout site, Blake from HFFS podcast on Archon’s Corner, Kurt’s Forging Keys and The Epic Quest add up to a great list which is also increased by sites such as this one if you like less strictly competitive content. These articles cover a wide variety of points of view related to the game: from competitive concepts (Aurore’s Timeshapers and Team Reapout are great competitive references) to deck analysis and tournament reports, as well as diverse personal experiences, some of them from the very beginning of KeyForge. More recently, FFG has also been giving content creators the chance to express themselves in their own site. That, if you ask me, is a master move in order to keep KeyForge fresh during the quarantine. In case you would like to read one of those, Blake’s one on the FFG site is a great option.
As far as podcasts are concerned, there are many English-speaking options: Sanctumonius, Help From Future Self, Call of Discovery, The Wild Wormhole, etc. They cover many different aspects, from the game evolution and hot news to competitive discussions and deck analysis, all of that with the lively touch of conversation, which makes it way more dynamic for those who, like I do, enjoy a good KeyForge conversation.
Audio-visual content completes this situation: streams, gameplays and commentaries are vital for people who just do not have enough free time to play as much KeyForge as they wish. Sadly, that is currently my case more often than not, and I am pretty sure it is a frequent situation. TableTopRoyale, 1StarPeeps5stargames Mortivas and Wharerata are just examples of English-speaking streamers that have their own Twitch channel in which they play KeyForge. Checking the KeyForge category on Twitch is always a good idea, because there you will find not only English streams, but also French streams such as AssoAFK or KeyForgeur, Italian like Afankulto, or even Polish like Koslaz. Regular KeyForge content in Youtube includes Wossy Plays and Jean Claude Van KeyForge, as well as TTR, The Wild Wormhole and others we have mentioned as streamers.
In my opinion, audiovisual content is very important because it allows that those who cannot keep up with the game from the player’s point of view (isolation prevents can still enjoy it, so thanks to these people the bond between occasional Archons and KeyForge is stronger, something that can be considered as a pretty good strength indicator in the long-term, specially taking into account the gradually increasing solid side of players and content creators that are thirsty to get back to physical KeyForge when possible.
The well-known UK-based content creators Crazy Killing Machine have formed an interesting content creation network that includes content creators from Italy, Poland and Germany, an awesome strategy towards KeyForge community reinforcement and creation. Apart from having their own site, they are on Facebook, YouTube and Twitch. Spain is also part of it, not as an affiliated content creation channel but as Crazy Killing Machine Spain, a passionate project that intends to create KeyForge content on a regular basis in Spanish, currently involving the effort of a decent amount of Spanish Archons, including myself!
Last, but not least, dear Archons, I would like to highlight Tournaments and leagues. Yes, not only KeyForge is being discussed during the social isolation, it is also being played very often. What is more and way better, since social isolation prevents all kinds of physical gameplay outside home, in so doing it actually removes every boundary, multiplying our ability to register in high-level tournaments and / or leagues. The most outstanding examples of this are KOTE 4, Quarantine Daily tournaments and The Glorious Few.
KOTE is an Online Team Event managed from Facebook (and currently part of CKM Network that creates leagues of different formats with 3 people teams labeled as Captain, Blue and Red players. Each Round is played within a week, and then the next round pairings are announced in their Facebook page. They work with a very useful Google forms-based system to submit everything needed to participate: team info, decks and game results. Quarantine Daily tournaments are organized by The Wookie from Archon’s Corner, featuring the use of Challonge and the introduction of different stipulations that grant the tournament a theme while also limiting the decks that can participate. Organized by Sanctumonius, The Glorious Few is the most exciting KeyForge invitational tournament I have had the chance to see so far, with the top KeyForge players in the world proving their skills. You can watch the awesome games in different Youtube channels such as TableTopRoyale, The Wild Wormhole and Call of Discovery.
KeyForge and social isolation: the case of Local Game Stores
Local Game Stores are also making their moves. Mine, Empire Games Sevilla, has been running weekly events with usual entry fees using Discord and Challonge. Additionally, it has hold a 16 players online event with a 65 SAS limit which was so fun. At a local level, there are many factors to consider towards the maintenance and development of a KeyForge community. Those include available time to play KeyForge, dedication to other games, whether or not you have the ability to get to the Store, and of course, promotion of events by the store itself. Although there are good exceptions to this, I think we can safely assume most Local Game Stores are not doing that much to collaborate with KeyForge players to organize tournaments, which is why active Local Game Stores should probably see their activity rewarded after the pandemic with an increased participation in KeyForge tournaments of all kinds!
Shadow Worlds
With over 64 teams and 200 players and organized by Team Knowledge is Power, Shadow Worlds is the perfect follow-up for an online-intensive KeyForge season. It consists of a 2-days international event – fairly called unofficial Worlds- with 3 players squads, each playing a different format: Archon solo Bo3, Triad, and Adaptive. Day 1 happened last Saturday and Day 2 is happening next Saturday. Awesome KeyForge streamers will surely be covering games, and many of them will be on KiP Gaming’s YouTube channel. As I see it, despite the official Worlds being cancelled due to the pandemic, Shadow Worlds represent the will of the vast majority of the KeyForge community refusing to miss the chance to play an international event. Make sure to watch those top 16 world-class teams fight for the glory!
Wrap-up
As you could see, considering the lack of physical play (that can potentially harm a game seriously) in general KeyForge is almost as healthy as always. We, as a community that I am proud to be part of, have wisely taken advantage of the good part of us staying at home in order to keep a great stream of content and online play game. I am really glad that the pandemic is far from stopping us, and on behalf of Cosmic Crucible encourage every person reading this to have a look at these amazing content creation channels and, if you have time, take part in epic events like these. I would like to thank so much the people who make all this online KeyForge possible, including all the content creators – mentioned here or not. Special thanks to those who, in the absence of an officially endorsed App for online gaming, make these events possible; in particular Grant Titus and JusticeBlinded from Knowledge is Power, responsible for creating the awesome KiP Tournaments, as well as The Crucible Online development team. You guys all rock!
That was all for today’s article. Thank you so much for getting this far, I hope you have enjoyed the read and I am so glad to share with you my eagerness to keep bringing you content from time to time as much as I can. If you like this content, it would be amazing of you to follow me on Twitter: @blazing_archon , and like Cosmic Crucible’s Facebook page. Hitting the blog’s follow button in WordPress will also keep you informed whenever an article goes live. See you in the Cosmic Crucible for the next article, and until then, Keep Forging and take care!
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