On Wednesday I managed to get my hands on a starter deck of the World of Warcraft trading card game. The game is based off Blizzards insanely popular MMORPG, World of Warcraft (and not an anime for once.)

To win a match, all you have to do is deplete your opponents health. Fortunately for all of you WoW fanboys (and girls) Upperdeck is taking care in making this game. The card art is done by famous artists, such as Todd McFarlane, the creator of Spawn, and Gabe from Penny Arcade. The first thing that struck me was the impressive carrying case that the starter decks come in. These babies are made out of plastic instead of cardboard, and open up like a book to reveal clips to hold the rule book and on the opposite side are depressions with a plastic cover to hold your cards in. Inside each starter case is a rule book, three over sized hero cards, a pre-constructed deck based off of one of the nine classes, and two booster packs. Unfortunately you don't know what deck you've got until you open the case. I was fortunate enough to beat the 1/9 odds and get a shaman deck, but my friend wasn't as fortunate. another thing is that since the giant cards are random, you only have 1/3 chance of getting the over sized counter part of your deck's hero.

Another problem is that the decks are for "starters" and only contain 30 cards plus a hero, half the tournament standards. This is where the booster packs come in. Each pack comes with an impressive 15 cards, and times that by two, you have 30, and 30+30=60, the tournament amount right? Wrong. There will only be a few cards in the pack that match your hero's faction or class, meaning you'll have to buy more packs before you can even think about tournaments. A cool thing UDE is doing is that they're throwing in "UDE points" cards into each pack, and you can redeem these cards online to gain cosmetic upgrades to you're WoW character.

The cards themselves are well made and are rater thick. UDE is also releasing "raid" decks, the first being Onxia's Lair. These decks are incredibly powerful, and require more then one player to defeat. The next expansion, "The Dark Portal," will introduce cards from Burning Crusade, such as Blood Elves and the Drenai. And finally, yes, there is a Leeroy Jenkins card.

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