Summary

A redo of the PSO TCG to be more playable; based in the Phantasy Star Online world with cards from Skies of Arcadia.

Status

Half of the reasoning for the redo was that the old game looked really bad, had important cards as rares, and was generally unplayable. The other half was that PSO Episode 1 & 2 had just been released for Gamecube, which caused a lot of rebalancing game-wise. It seemed appropriate that I redo the card game as well. As my interest turned to Skies of Arcadia, I added Skies of Arcadia expansions to the game. I eventually lost interest, and the game has been retired, although it did plant the seeds for RPG Get!.

Gameplay

Gameplay is almost identical to the original PSO TCG; players fight each other with armies of characters and monsters, and the goal is to kill all of an opponent's monsters. This game (and the related RPG Get! CCG) are unusual in that they were released without ever having been played.

Rules

Cards

There are eight types of cards: Character, Monster, Area, Event, Spell, Trap, Equipment and Item. No Trap cards were ever created, so there are effectively seven types of cards in the game.

Eleven sets (ten expansions) were planned. Of those, Forest (base set; 46 cards), Caves (7 cards; 45 planned), SoA (40 cards), SoA2 (40 cards), and Looper (12 cards; 43 planned) were all that were completed. (There are also six promo cards, three of which were designed for specified people for their birthdays.) The Skies of Arcadia expansions had their direction driven by the SoA World message boards, where posters asked for Looper cards.

Although cards are assigned rarity, all commons and uncommons were available for download on the website. While the PSO TCG website was separate, the rare cards were only available to winners of a trivia contest. Therefore, the cards really only had two rarities.

The card design is based off of the Episode 1 & 2 interface, and is similar to the Mines expansion template in the original PSO TCG. The card design was redone for the SoA2 expansion to better fit with that game's asthetics.

Cards

A sample Character card, "Gilder", from the SoA expansion A sample Monster card, "Booma", from the Forest base set A sample Event card, "Small Explosion", from the Caves expansion A sample Spell card, "Electri", from the SoA2 expansion A sample Equipment card, "Cupil", from the SoA expansion A sample Item card, "Monomate", from the Forest base set A sample Area card, "Looper's Nest", from the Looper expansion

Site

The PSO TCG Version 2 had a basic website with card downloads, deck tips, and a trivia contest to win rares.