In the latest episode of the Blockchain Gaming World podcast, editor-in-chief Jon Jordan talks to Justin Gary, who’s the CEO of Stoneblade Entertainment.
A long-term player and designer of card games, Gary is the co-creator alongside Magic The Gathering‘s Richard Garfield of TCG SolForge – now advanced into SolForged Fusion.
Primarily, Gary explains why this hybrid deck builder is using assets on Solana, how its NFTs are generated, and what makes SolForge Fusion a refreshing addition to the TCG genre.
BlockchainGamer: Can you tell us more about yourself and give us some background to SolForge?
Gary: I’ve been working on the original version of SolForge for 13 years. Prior to that, I got into the gaming world as a Magic the Gathering US National Champion. I was the youngest champion, aged 17. I paid my way through college playing Magic, and traveling around the world. It transformed my life.
Eventually, after an ill-advised stint at law school, I dropped out and moved across the country to become a game designer. I started working on games for Marvel, DC, World of Warcraft, and a whole variety of really great brands before starting my own company.
I launched a building game called Ascension, which was a big hit. It’s available on mobile and PC, and even a VR version, believe it or not.
Because of that game I got an opportunity to go to a developer conference in 2011, where Richard Garfield, the creator of Magic the Gathering, was giving a talk. At the end of the talk there was a Q&A and somebody asked him, “what’s your favourite game right now?”, and he said my game Ascension, and I literally jump up in the back of the room like a kid.
After that we talked for about three hours and we were in sync on exactly the game we wanted to make, which was the original version of SolForge. It’s one of the first digital TCGs that was designed to be native before Magic Arena or Hearthstone or anything like that.
And now we’ve been able to reimagine that game and the new version of SolForge Fusion, which is what we’re calling the world’s first hybrid deck game. It exists on tabletop, in web2, and now in web3.
TCG is a much loved genre that appeals strongly to a certain group of people. They don’t necessarily go enormously wide. Why does that appeal to you?
I think there’s something magical about TCGs. I’ll also point out there are some subtle differences between like Ascension, which is a deck-builder without tradable collectible cards, and SolForge Fusion, which is a hybrid game where you are collecting the cards. But they’re not the same cards that everybody has, your deck is unique.
In a sense, what I’ve tried to do with SolForge Fusion is recreate the magic that I felt from my early days of playing Magic when I would open up a pack of cards and I would see cards I’d never seen before. Nowadays that magic is gone, like every spoiler is out before the sets are released. But with SolForge Fusion that’s not possible because every single pack you open is unique to you. And you have to make the strategies with what you have.
That experience is what drew me to TCGs in the first place and what Richard and I have tried to reimagine and bring into the modern era.
What is algorithmically generated decks and how is the uniqueness created?
Imagine if in a normal TCG, you have a typical set of 300 cards. What you do is you take those sets of cards, say it’s a 60 or 30 card deck, and build the deck you want.
With an algorithmically generated game like SolForge Fusion, we build the deck of cards for you and we algorithmically create those cards. So in our very first set alone, we already had more cards than Magic had in 30 years and we’ve had three card releases. We have what we like to say more deck permutations than there are atoms in the universe, so you will never have the same deck twice.
The way you customize your deck is unlike a traditional TCG where you take a set and pick the cards used most often. You’re just gonna copy what other people did. In SolForge Fusion you’re gonna use any of the two decks we give you, shuffle them together and you’re ready to go. So you still get to customize, but the difference is you can’t copy.
We use technology that didn’t even exist a decade ago to be able to create these unique concepts and unique cards. It’s the fun of collectible games without all the work of having to build a custom deck or look up the exact thing online. You just find the ones you have, shuffle, smash them together and you’re good to go.
That means there’s much more possibilities because you need some broad skills, but there’s an element of surprise in your deck, and certainly in your opponent’s deck.
Yeah, and it’s really fun to play. All the cool technology, algorithmic generation, and web3 aside, the basic gameplay itself is just a really fun, simple experience.
You draw a hand and five cards. You and your opponent alternate playing cards. Creatures get played in five lanes. At the end of the turn, creatures attack whatever’s across from them. They’ll either kill each other or do damage to the opponent. Pretty standard stuff for a TCG.
What’s interesting is that whenever you play a card, that card levels up. The levelled-up version goes into your discard pile, then every three turns you shuffle your deck. When you play cards in this game, there’s no mana or cost to the cards. They’re all balanced and they evolve through play.
And you actually discover your game, your own deck, even just playing your own deck over and over again. You’ll learn a lot because which card you choose to play early will choose which cards are available to you later.
An important part for us is that at the heart, SolForge Fusion is a great game. All of the bells and whistles and web3, why does that stuff exist? It has to serve the gameplay experience.
When I started playing Hearthstone, I found it was a bit interesting, but suddenly I got overwhelmed. There’s so many cards and I’m getting bashed all the time. Does this make it easier for me as a newbie or not really?
Yeah, that’s the idea. On one level, you don’t have to look at the whole set of cards and figure out which ones to build. You just pick any two decks that seem appealing to you, shuffle them and play. Now, is this game still gonna be skill testing? Are you still gonna get stomped if you’re not good? Yeah, you are.
But we also do a couple of things to make the game more fun for people like you who maybe want to dabble and have a good time but don’t necessarily want to go swimming with the sharks right away.
We created an algorithmically generated campaign mode inside the game so you can take your decks and battle against bosses, gain XP and level up your deck, get custom upgrades and powers and have this deep experience that’s very evolved, without worrying about getting beaten.
In addition, every player gets what we call Phantom Decks, which are new decks that refresh every month. So you get the experience of playing and trying out new strategies. We’re working on what we’re calling Phantom Deck queues, where you’ll be able to just paddle against people, so everybody’s trying out new decks all the time. It’s constantly refreshing.
We’ve tried to build a wide tent to appeal to people who want to just have a cool solo experience, and the people who are super competitive. We also do storyline events both online and at events and conventions where you will influence the lore.
We have our writers writing custom stories that gets permanently connected to the NFT of your deck. So your deck has the lore status to it, and you can evolve and be a part of our world. Some people think that’s the coolest thing ever, while others don’t care about that at all.
Now you talk about NFTs, were they always there from the start or something that came in later?
So I’ve been interested in blockchain technology for quite a while now, at least since 2017/18. I actually designed a web3 game called Block Brawlers just for fun. The ability to create systems that allow communities to come together, collaborate and share resources in ways that are fair and don’t require a middleman and having trust in a centralized authority, I think that is the future.
So there was definitely talk of blockchain and using NFTs from the beginning, but it was not a definitive. It comes down to what serves the players best. I started researching what it would take if we wanted to provide all the services that we’re doing now through Solana. Having that infrastructure and having all that done, would have cost me as a developer way more than using the technology that already exists on blockchain.
As a developer, there was a clear question of what can I build? How can I offer more to my players? Then as a player, I was thinking, what would I want? And I would want to have complete ownership of my game. And over the long-term, not only do I want to allow people to trade their decks, but I want to be able to transfer more and more ownership to the community.
SolForge Fusion has not really been promoted as a crypto game or blockchain game. Some people would have been interested in it just as a web2 game. Did you get any feedback on your instigation of web3?
Some feedback is a polite way to put it. There’s a lot of ill-will and distrust of blockchain in the gaming community, and to be blunt, it’s well-deserved. Rug pulls and people who would make a lot of promises and start selling a token and not have a game at all, right? And then there were those that had a game, but they would just shoehorn in NFTs just trying to get cash out of the players.
You need to have something that actually demonstrates real value to the players, so when we announced that we were doing web3 and NFTs, we got a lot of hatred. My strategy from the beginning was to be very upfront. I’ve been in this industry for a long time, and built a reputation. I’m not about to destroy it for some quick buck.
I was doing AMAs, I was active in our Discord, I was posting articles about it etc, and I think I was able to allay a lot of the fears. Like it’s bad for the environment. I’m like, nope, Solana is very good for the environment. It doesn’t make any sense.
We educate them about security and how you opt in and opt out. We made it so web3 is entirely opt in for players. If you don’t want to turn your decks into NFTs, you do not have to. And you never have to scan your decks into your online account, you don’t have to play a digital game, you can play it as a tabletop.
Also, with the way we’re doing our tokens and deck collections, we’re just airdropping the token to everybody. Not just to our players, but to people in the Solana community, to players of other games like Axie Infinity and Parallel and a variety of places. We’re just giving the token away so you get a chance to try the game for free.
When it comes to the NFTs, we thought about exactly the way we built the physical game. So if I have a physical deck of SolForge Fusion, I scan it into my account, it’s locked in my account, and I can play it in tournaments or whatever. If I want to trade it, I can unlock it from my account, I hand you the physical deck, you scan it into your account and it’s yours.
We did the exact same thing for the NFTs. You can take your digital deck and use the token to mint it into an NFT. You can unlock it from your account, give it to somebody else who locks it into their account, and now it’s their deck.
A lot of games have used NFTs and blockchain in a way that makes no sense whatsoever, but this makes perfect sense.
What have you thought about the financial value? One of the big problems is someone selling an NFT for $1,000 and it goes down to $10. That’s an immediate pinch point for the audience.
First of all, this is the kind of thing that is not in my hands and I don’t want it to be in my hands. Players choose what they want to value, just like they did with Magic cards.
A couple of things that have happened that I think are really interesting, because every deck is unique, it can be a little harder to evaluate than a traditional TCG. And so what we’ve done is the individual cards have rarity scores, and we give you a deck rarity score to help people evaluate the decks. But we’re not telling you about the power level or how you should value it.
In fact, what’s been really cool is even before the web 3 element launched, a fan ranked the decks’ power level based on how they perceived it in their own scoring system. So you can log in with your account and plug in your collection and they’ll score your collection for you.
Then of course we have our tournaments, if your deck succeeds in a tournament, it gains rankings, or go from bronze to silver to gold to platinum.
So we give you the tools to evaluate decks however you want. Maybe you just want a deck with a bunch of zombies in it because you love zombies, then that’s valuable to you. It’s about the players being able to make those decisions. All we want to do is give them the freedom and information.
So the cards are not NFTs, it’s the deck that’s tradable, but would all the cards be unique?
No, so many cards will get repeated. Because we algorithmically generate the cards, there’s around 50,000 unique possible cards you could get. But the common ones will show up all the time. If every card was a one-of-a-kind all the time, it would just be too hard to process.
Whereas a super rare card like a Scorchman Dragon, you hope to get it, and it could show up in your deck, but you have to evaluate it in the context of the deck. You can’t just evaluate it as its own card. It might pair really well with another deck that has a card that lets you level up a card for free, so you can level up the egg part and not have to play it, and that way get yourself faster to the dragon part. There’ll be different combos and strategies you can do based on how the decks all pair together.
You’ve currently got a PC version on Steam. How are you dealing with Steam not officially allowing NFT enabled games?
Yeah, we’re live on PC and Mac now, and plan to move to mobile next year. We’ve been very attentive to what the rules and regulations are and we’re abiding by those rules. So in the Steam game itself, you can’t sell or buy NFTs or the tokens or anything like that.
On our website, you can connect the NFTs to your account and then we give you the digital version in the game. If you take your digital deck in the game, you can mint it to an NFT on the website.
NFTs are a long-term core part of the game, but would it have been much easier if you had just done it as a tabletop web2 game? Because you’ve not raised money off the back of selling NFTs or tokens or anything like that.
Well, we’re recording this in an interesting window, right before the launch of the token. So we’re going to learn very soon whether or not I’m right or wrong about where this value is going to be. I think that there’s a community of people that will be very passionate about this kind of game, that we’ll see returns from it in the growth of our player base. I could be totally wrong.
If I wanted to do something easy, I would have just made another basic tabletop game. We advanced algorithmic printing technology. We are the only game that does this kind of one-to-one correlation between your physical collection and your digital collection and then bringing it all to web3.
The original version of SolForge wasn’t easy to make for mobile TCG. This is the first hybrid TCG that lives on all those things, that’s not easy to make. I like to push the boundaries of what technology allows us to do to make great games and build great communities.
That’s the heart of what I’m passionate about.
Finally, in terms of your roadmap, you’ve got a token going live, you’ve got the NFTs going live, you mentioned tournaments too. What’s the plan towards the end of the year in terms of features and community?
We’ll be running tournaments both in the app as well as through our Discord with token prizes and a bunch of cool exclusives. We have an in-person event coming to PAX Unplugged, which will be in Philadelphia in early December. We have storyline events and a bunch of cool celebrations there.
We also have new content coming. These kinds of collectible games live and die on content, so we just released our last set, called The Last Winter. In June, we have new card releases coming.
More features are launching for the game itself, including a mobile version. We’re gonna allow the ability for you to print cards on demand, so your digital assets can be turned into physical assets.
We’re also working on leaderboards and more advanced encounters that can happen in the campaign mode.
Find out more at the SolForge Fusion website.
