First Dimension after the Trading update, woo hoo!

Let's start by celebrating the sheer increase of matches played by our community since then. The amount of feedback we have received was awesome, and a lot of improvements (UX, visual, organization) will be hitting the servers soon, based on your suggestions. Thanks!

As most of you should know, I usually stream SkyWeaver on Wednesdays and Saturdays on our official Twitch channel, and I love to bring you little teasers of things to come in these videos. Here's a small Mana Wheel Rework teaser that I've shown in past streams:

As our community grows, we have more people (from all over the world) talking to us and creating content about SkyWeaver. Let's check some of them out!

NickDemon may be the first Greek-speaking streamer we have, and as a veteran card player, he provided a cool breakdown of cards and the game as a whole. He also deals with other TCGs, so check his stuff!

bruhsaurusrexx is a streamer on a mission: reaching Prophet rank, and beating her Discord mates to a pizza competition. Her streams are always high-energy and entertaining, check her out!

blondie_420 is a variety streamer that has also entered the SkyWeaver fray, playing the game with her community. Even I show up in this video (as an opponent, bwaha)!

Beta Tester Interview - summerflame

In this Dimension, we also want to celebrate our first GM, for posterity and as a just reward. summerflame, our First Disciple of the Cube Church, played fast and played hard, and was the first getting to the top our new Rankings! Let's have a few words with him, and maybe read a tip or two to up our game ;)

1 - How long have you been playing SkyWeaver?

Let me check - searches in SkyWeaver discord - joined the discord in April - got to play starting June, so its been almost 6 months at this point, wow. Feels like just yesterday I too was waiting excited for beta access.

2 - You are the first Discovery GrandMaster. Any tips on how to win Discovery matches?

A bit of these are mildly deep and general intuition things - the recent dev blogs are good for beginners and I recommend reading those.

Beyond that: Before you can start making effective decisions, one needs to be aware of all the information available to them. To start, make sure you know what everything does: whether on the board, in your hand, or attached to anything on board, if you don't know what it is - read it! Sometimes the explanation of what it'll do can be difficult to fully understand early on, but as you gain more and more experience on what things do (either by asking people how stuff works or finding out first-hand) one gets a better understanding of how things are typically worded.

Without knowing what things do - things will happen that you didn't plan for (but could've). There will always be unknown elements, such as your opponents hand/deck contents; however, everything on the board is knowledge both players should be aware of.

Understand that a spell attached to a unit (especially a small one) is not safe. Any spell that can be cast on the board is vulnerable to being replaced or having the holder removed from the board. This can prevent you from getting the most value from your cards, a key element to staying ahead over multiple rounds.

Face is (sometimes) the place. Early in the game is typically not the time. If there is nothing else to do, go for it. However, board control - especially early on in the first few turns - can really help you do what you want. Ultimately every card is some sort of commitment - you pay a card to achieve some effect. The more control over the board you have, the better you can deal with what your opponent does efficiently.

This isn't directly a gameplay element - but have a good mood going into each game. I'm sometimes guilty of this - putting a lot of pressure to win every match just to get more points, feeling every loss is a waste of time and energy on my journey to a specific ELO score.

But each game has a lesson to be learned - no two are exactly the same, especially with the singleton nature of the game. Look for key moments where something could've been done differently (sometimes it takes looking back to fully understand how the rest of the game played out). May some small example of efficiency not matter in this instance? Sure, you might win this game, but there's another game (potentially in your future) where it will matter.

If one isn't trying to get better at the game - at least try to have fun :)

3 - What's your strategy when you play Constructed?

Typically aggro/mid-range, although admittedly I don't play much currently. It's hard to find a match and thus refine how I want to build/play a deck.

Once things get more consistent (as well as finding a bit more time in my schedule for deck interaction testing), I would love to build something a bit more complicated. My favorite type of deck (I've found from other games) is one that plays midrange and has the potential to burst lethal if the opponent is playing slow, otherwise just tries to outpressure the other deck if they are a bit more responsive.

4 - What's your favorite and least favorite Prisms, and why?

From an entirely random Discovery perspective, Strength is always core to my choice of Prisms when trying to succeed in Discovery. It has several early units that help you fight for board, as well as several good removal options 3c or less to help control the board. I try to avoid the long games in discovery as card quality is often hard to guarantee, so early game pressure / board control is important to me.

Conversely, I've found Wisdom to be less consistent, with several high cost and/or highly specific cards (often requiring the deck control found in Constructed), like Sky Phoenix and Entwail. Wisdom still has some high power midrange/aggro cards that I do enjoy (Quadra <3), but a bit high variance in performance for me.

5 - What are your favorite cards right now?

Xythe has been creeping up on me, didn't expect him to stay after losing banner. But Wither is quite useful when one really likes to bump enemies with their Hero (like me).

Two Bees is a cool card, taking one of my first loves of SkyWeaver - Yellow Jack - and giving me two of them. The way how "random" prioritizes non-hero targets was something I've always wanted in a game.
(note, this was written before the new change to 2/1 wither - Jon how could you)
(jk this is probably cooler now - still has the important element - the smart random)

I'm a big fan of low impact interaction between players, and some of the cards that do this best are Amalgam, Luna, and Quadra. They all have death effects that your opponent typically gets to respond to first. There's a fun element of control your opponent can have over how much value you get out of your cards, either drawing you a card with Psyche to put your handsize to even to negate the amalgam draw, wait out the Luna or even clear the Luna to protect something else that needs to stick around to use its attached spell next turn, or clearing stuff in a way to negate how much Quadra damage goes face.

(also - art on Taykus is lovely, I like the amount of purple in this game)

6 - What are the things you'd like to have known when you first started playing SkyWeaver?

I take it for granted now, but the drawing rules for this game are really confusing. It took me at least a month to full get a hold over drawing cards from outside your deck, especially after running out of cards. It went against a lot of intuition I had built up from previously played card games and led to a lot of frustration at first.

This goes for several mechanics for SkyWeaver, (Guard, Lifesteal, Stealth, "random"), where people are familiar with the terms as other games use them, but SkyWeaver does them differently (read about them here!). Biggest thing is to know where your expectations don't match the actual gameplay, because without knowing the true consequences of your actions, you can't really be informed about what action you should correctly take.

Community Fan Art Madness!

This Dimension's Fan Art Madness is a throwback to the vector graphic days. If you have never played a Vectrex, congratulations, you are much younger than I am! This piece was brought to us around August, and I love the skillful tracing. Jakintsu would be proud, too.

Join our Discord server to chat directly with us, subscribe to our subreddit to share your ideas, and follow the SkyWeaver account on Twitter if you just want to say heya! Thanks, Weavers, and see you soon in Sky!

Marcelo Suplicy, SkyWeaver Community Manager and International Black Belt of grilled ham-and-cheese sandwiches.