Mystic Vale is a deck-building game where the cards in your deck never change.

Well, not in the traditional sense anyway.

A curse has been placed on the Valley of Life. Hearing the spirits of nature cry out for aid, clans of druids have arrived, determined to use their blessings to heal the land and rescue the spirits. It will require courage and also caution, as the curse can overwhelm the careless who wield too much power.

Mystic Vale Game Play

You start with a deck of 20 basic cards and some are so basic they are literally blank. A turn is split into 4 phases but I’ll start with phase 4 first as it helps to make things make sense.

In this phase you prep your next turn by putting the top card of your deck, which is turned face up, into your ‘field’. You continue until 3 red curse symbols show in both the Field and the on-deck card. That’s it.

There are effects here such as these certain green symbols that cancel out red curse ones.

Back to phase 1 which is the Planting phase. Here you can reveal cards one at a time or stop but if you reveal a 4th Curse symbol, you’ve spoilt.

If you spoil, discard the cards and end your turn. You get to flip over a token that shows you have one Mana (or whatever it’s called) to spend on a future turn.

Harvest Phase

Assuming you didn’t spoil yourself then resolve all of your cards. Some give you point tokens while others give you Mana to spend.

You can spend the mana to buy Advancements to improve your cards. Each card in your deck is sleeved and the advancement is inserted into that sleeve. As you can see they are clear so you can see through them to the other abilities on that card.

Some of the cards contain different symbols and if you have enough of them you can buy Vale cards. These are cards off to one side that gives you end-game points and/or a game-long ability.

Now the next player can start their turn while you discard the revealed cards and start your phase 4 ‘Prep’ phase.

At the end of the game you add up points from Advancements and Vale cards as well as any point tokens you’ve earned, most points win.

Theme

There is a theme and as you’re playing you see the Druidy, spiritually, curse-y stuff. There are a lot of animals and trees on the cards.

But, while I didn’t know or care what the theme was, it felt nice to play. It felt calm.

Setup

Looks simple enough based on what I saw. Layout the cards into piles and flip over a few. Now, I’m not sure what happens if you have a bunch of expansions and things how awkward sorting is but with just the base game it looked ok.

Components & Artwork

The cards are really nice. The see-through plastic works really well although when you have 3 in a sleeve the one at the bottom looks a little blurry. You can still read it but it looks a little off compared to the crisp, clear text on the rest of the card.

The art is nice, especially on the Vale cards.

Ease of Teach & Accessibility

Teaching is very easy, especially if the player already knows deck-building games. A few symbols, a bit of terminology and the odd rule, that’s it.

Cards are revealed one at a time face up so it’s all open information. You can easily talk people through their options on their turn.

Mystic Vale Summary

I don’t know where to put this. It’s not a true deck builder but more of a pool builder with a tiny bit of pushing your luck. It’s quite unique really.

But it’s as far from Hero Realms as it is Port Royal which makes things awkward when looking at comparative games. 🙂

The push-your-luck bit is fun though. I really enjoyed the prep phase where you revealed cards, especially on turns where you’ll reveal 8-10 because you built your deck well.

Turns are quick, especially as the next player starts their turn before the current player has finished theirs.

The upgrading of cards works well and it’s really satisfying to build a really good card, and then see it come out.

One issue is there are currently six expansions and I’m a completionist so a £200+ buy-in is off-putting. Worth considering though 😀

Jesta Tha Rogue