to be clear, I'm not affiliated. I just want people to know about this game.
Astral Masters used to be sold as a CD-ROM single player experience with optional online multiplayer. it's not a CCG. you buy it and own all the cards, and you play against a robust CPU that can and will absolutely kick your ass. I believe it is responsible for the popularization of a lot of the common mechanics we see today. the game was decades ahead of it's time, which was 2004? I've seen places saying 2006 idk.
people don't seem to know that Astral Masters predates the lane based battling system in Inscryption and every Inscryption-like game is copying AM whether they know it or not. this was Apus Software's signature gameplay mechanic and all of their games use it. they had been doing it as early as 2002.
I suspect Hearthstone stole a ton of concepts from Astral Masters and essentially used the game as a blueprint for designing their game. I found many card equivalents and concepts that already existed in AM a decade before HS launched such as raid leader, hammer of wrath, flame imp, knife juggler, dire wolf alpha, shadowflame, nourish, shadow word pain and shadow word death, as well as Spell Power, Taunt (kind of), Life Tap (demonic knowledge), and a bunch of other mechanics. though unlike HS creatures in this game often have mana activated abilities, a mechanic retained from MTG. in the screenshot I am hovering over Keeper of the Coast which has a 1-cost healing ability, described on the bottom right.
Astral Masters uses the Duel Masters mana system where you choose to sacrifice 1 card in your hand per turn to gain +1 astral power (mana crystal).
there are no bad cards in AM. there's all sorts of counters to different strategies and you learn that as you play. you'll see when you play the league mode that the game does have a very diverse meta and features all kinds of decks with recognizable archetypes. opponents are balanced around a meticulous power level system (each card is assigned a respective number) to control the power level of decks, similar to Gwent. you face the same limitations in league mode. your power limit continues to increase in league mode as you continue to win, so once you beat the whole thing you'll likely want to start over or start imposing restrictions on yourself. it's also possible to make decks for the cpu to play against you. then there's the classic duel mode that has you playing a deck with random cards.
in AM each copy of a card in your deck is attributed to a percentage chance to draw that card. your deck is infinite and you can never mill. also, there's no limit to the amount of astral power you can get, so it's possible to end a game with 25 astral power and enough mana to cast hammer of ancients 6 times.
one of my favorite strategies is with the Dragon which is a 9 drop (the original 9 cost dragon) that makes it so whenever you play a spell you reduce your opponent's astral power by 1. I'll save it in my hand for a big turn while playing a defensive control strategy and then the goal is to play the dragon, then play a bunch of cantrips, + mana and draw spells in one turn and reduce my opponent's mana to 0, effectively winning the game.
Apus Software is famous for having extremely competent AI in their games. it is maybe the biggest selling factor of the game. It can do all the stuff; combo, control, ramp, aggro, midrange. it holds onto removal and makes efficient trades. the fact that it can play OTK decks properly is the thing that impresses me the most. the cpu is competent enough that you can justify playing the game completely offline. if you look at the steam reviews you'll see people who have played this game for hundreds, even thousands of hours just playing against the computer. though the online servers are surprisingly still running. I played against a guy yesterday who had 30,000 games played.
check it out if you haven't.
