In the late 90s and early 2000s, there was a huge boom of trading-card games. While it's very easy to pin a lot of this on Magic: The Gathering - and many show no small amount of Magic DNA or even feature "Magic clone" mechanics - it was obviously because of the rampant success of the Pokemon TCG by the late 90s. Duh. Pokemon TCG was much more of a phenomenon - which I suppose is bound to happen when you target a wider age demographic and have the financial backing of the biggest children's media franchise of all time. Many of these games wanted to be a little more all-ages-friendly than Magic, a game that still was mostly appropriate for ages 12 and up1, so a lot of them were based on more child-friendly media franchises or otherwise had a very cartoony look if they were original content. A small amount were aimed at a different audience, such as Marvel OverPower or Ani-Mayhem, but those felt a lot more merch-y than a lot of other counterparts. Which I suppose was true of most of the tie-ins anyway; very few of them felt like serious games. In fact, the seriousness of a lot of the other TCGs was frequently questionable.
Then one company had a different idea: "What if, instead, we make a game... aimed at players first?"
In 2006, Tenacious Games launched The Spoils, an original TCG that carried with it one hell of a pedigree and some truly wild amounts of support. The team at Tenacious had spent several years working on it, and it featured some names that were pretty impressive in the field - most notably pro Magic player Jon Finkel in an advisory role. People with more interest in game devs would also spot Josh Lytle in the credits; he was a designer on Magi-Nation Duel, a very mechanically-sound game that at one point could be considered borderline-popular once you apply a particularly long list of qualifiers.
Of course, the target market with just this would be a bit... narrow, so The Spoils preferred to advertise itself with bombast (insofar as you could say it was "advertised"). The biggest thing I remember about any of The Spoils' presence at GenCon the year I saw its Open Beta at the show was that they were already pushing how big their tournaments were and how much they were offering up in prize support. Wikipedia cites a thousand free tournaments with US$60,000 in prize money, which ends up sounding weirdly unimpressive because that reads like "$60 prize pool per event." Yeah, okay, sounds like my local FNM. But considering the amount of sealed-deck events involved there, and there was definitely a lot printed up for this - and also assume most of these free events were not offering cash prizes, only cards. But the really notable one was what they called "The Spoils Tournament Experience" - a big league, with an overall prize pool of one million dollars (US). I also seem to remember an event on a cruise ship.
In retrospect, I think I hate events on cruise ships. They have an atmosphere of trashiness by default. But it sounds big, right? These mysterious newcomers came out of the woodwork, swinging their dicks around like they were the biggest thing since powdered milk, and it definitely made them catch people's eyes. There were a lot of other reasons why they caught people's eyes, but I'll talk about that later. It's probably also no surprise that Tenacious Games went under; The Spoils had a narrow target audience for many reasons, and with them splashing the pot so hard in terms of that early prize pool, they were practically bound to implode. Another company, Arcane Tinmen (who mostly make TCG accessories - I think they're a distributor for or perhaps even manufacturer of the very popular Dragon Shield brand of card sleeves!), picked the game up in 2009, and The Spoils continued under them until about 2016, slowly but surely releasing a few sets at an average rate of about one a year. Considering where Magic is at right now, that sounds comparatively dreamlike. However, the game once again died off, and has yet to be revived. Personally, I suspect there isn't much of an audience for it at this point because, while it's good (mechanically), it's not special, which is a bit of an issue in a world where one is spoiled (ha!) for choice - not to mention, flavorfully, it might be a bit of a hard sell for many people nowadays.
The first thing I want to talk about is The Spoils as a game. On paper, The Spoils is an incredibly solid TCG. With that pedigree, I suppose it had better be.
While a lot of The Spoils is very similar to Magic, there are some notable differences. The first is that each player has a Faction card to represent them. A Faction card determines your starting hand size, your starting life total influence, and what lands resources you start with. Yes, this is one of the ways the game wants to fix one of the problems of your average TCG of the era; to help prevent mana screw, you get to search your deck for two basic lands staple resources and start with them in play. Yeah, no surprise that I like that a lot. (Physical note: resources are horizontally-oriented cards, at all times. Instead of tapping them, you attach them to your faction, placing them the same way you would an attached card in any other TCG. Tapping exists for other card types, but it's called "depleting" in this game.)
Resources in general are a lot different from lands in Magic. See, you never have to pay resources with a specific icon on them to pay colored mana costs. Effectively, all costs are generic, and instead you have to have enough icons of the right trade. So for example, you can play Jackmove using any four resources, provided you have five Deception icons (I think the technical terms are different, but just call these by the names of the staple resources). Each resource card only counts for one resource, so the "dual land" equivalents, such as Violence, only make threshold costs easier. The amount of things that need that high of a threshold are not that many, so these feel surprisingly weak in this game. Additionally, non-Resource cards that provide icons, like the crests, can't pay for the "real" cost of cards. Interestingly, you can also play any card in your hand face-down as effectively a "blank" resource, worth no icons but still usable as effectively a generic mana. This is another way the game tries to make getting mana screwed and losing due to tempo harder if not impossible.
However, saying that, the game is also designed to be a lot slower. Sure, you start with an eight-plus-card hand, but that's out of a bigger deck than Magic, and the "development phase" means you can only either play a resource or draw on any given turn. If you want more of either, you gotta pony up. Usually, your faction has a way to do this, but obviously, other cards have some ways of pulling this off.
The last big thing I can mention here is that combat uses three stats to most games' two; a strength stat to determine how hard your characters hit, a life stat to represent how much pain they can endure, and a speed stat, to represent when they deal damage; faster characters deal damage earlier. You don't have an individual combat phase and can attack multiple times during your main phase provided you have non-depleted characters. Blocking also depletes characters, I guess to prevent shenanigans.
See, pretty good on paper. But over time, the cracks start to appear. The first and most severe for me is the use of faction cards. This is an interesting idea, but somehow I feel that any serious TCG would really like to avoid a "turn zero" type of mechanic - even Magic has only referenced mulligans on the effect of one card ever2 - and that's not nearly as much of an issue as The Spoils' factions. Because factions are revealed at the very start of the game, using any of them other than the highly generic Tournament Faction reveals a lot of information about your deck. The other five each tell you to get one specific type of staple resource, and they all have fairly revealing abilities. Even aside from the fact that the five trades have relatively narrow mechanical identities and no multi"color" cards were ever printed, this may as well be you handing your opponent your deck list in some circumstances. In the early turns of Magic - and really, most TCGs - there should be some mental work of trying to figure out what exactly your opponent is playing, and this accelerates things a bit, meaning that as long as you know the strategies to use, there's less thinking involved. It's probably pretty understandable that, regardless of the fact that The Spoils didn't last, Arcane Tinmen didn't make any more after the first set of starter decks that included them.
Additionally, the overall handling of combat is very clunky, and I tend to forget how it works. Cordoning it off into its own phase is a pretty good idea. Additionally, I don't find speed adds that much to the game other than frustration. The thing is that First Strike is actually extremely powerful in Magic because of how much combat happens; adding what are effectively layers of first-strike just makes the speed stat so much more all-important that it skews what can be considered playable.
I last played The Spoils around 2010, for reference, and the game was pretty good, but the endgame felt like it dragged on pretty severely.
Now, as I said, The Spoils had many reasons why it didn't achieve lasting popularity. Targeting primarily the narrow audience of card gamers wouldn't have helped, but also, hoo boy are these vibes rancid. You can tell by the staple Resources of the five trades, for a start. "Obsession." "Greed." "Elitism." "Deception." "Violence." Yes, this is a game explicitly for edgelords, targeting people who delight in being the villain. Follow this up with the overall tone of... everything, and it feels like this is made to target the worst teenage boys you've ever met. Perhaps they figred that the mean TCG player was older than the floor on Magic's target age rating and also male (this being the early- to mid-aughts, when I say this and when they think it, cisgender, heterosexual and white are always implied.)
So let's follow this up with a gallery of some... choices. A "Rogues' Gallery," if you will, which I say only because quite a lot of the cards I've chosen here are from the Rogues.
Every once in a while, I have considered becoming one of those YouTube folks (or possibly even streamers) who opens packs of TCGs, but for long-dead games that I cannot imagine anyone seriously being interested in. As much as I love this game as a series of mechanics, because of its flavor, I think it would be something I would avoid, just because a lot of it is so goddamn rancid.
I don't think there's zero place in the world for works containing sexuality. Obviously. I just find The Spoils' use of it to be especially trashy and targeting primarily an audience of edgy older teenagers that makes the whole thing feel very tasteless and grotty. As much as I enjoy the game for its gameplay (aside from the parts that are problems), I would never recommend it even if it was alive because it's just embarrassing to discuss. Every once in a while I worry that my tastes come off as bad. Then I look over at this... This is not satire, this is not parody, this is not pastiche - hell, this is barely comedy. This is a bunch of giggling yuksters who haven't matured past the age of 17 throwing everything they love into a blender and pretending that appealing to the lowest common denominator with boobs and pop-culture references makes you Saints Row. (Although, much like one of the most infamous levels in that series, the game does include something that could be referred to as a hooker assassin.)
By the way, the most bizarre of the many pop culture references to show up is this one - referencing the Magi Nation Game Boy Color game, which is something probably only Magi Nation fans would know off-hand. Well, I guess it might make sense if one went to this game from MND because of Josh Lytle's involvement...
On the other hand, I absolutely understand how this could work, because when I was a teenager, I thought there was something refreshing about how edgy it was. Perhaps I believed it to be "honest." It isn't, not anymore than anything else, and I suppose its dishonesty is just a rather different type. Or perhaps I just had edgy tastes as a teenager and I was glad it appealed to those. I like to think I have gotten a bit more taste since then (and admittedly, even at the time, I thought some of this went too far).
For those of you who want to call this satire, that's fair, but then what I'm saying is, in addition to everything else, that it fails as satire. Satire is hard! We already have one major fantasy franchise that's a satire of over-the-top grim darkness, and it frequently feels like it is simply playing the idea straight. Saying you're poking fun at something is not a defense from me telling you that what you have created is shit!
Nevertheless, I might not go so far as to call it "shit," because there are a few aspects I like about the setting even among how tasteless I find it; I do think the fact that everyone sucks saves the game from something that Magic struggled with early on. In its earliest days, Magic frequently seemed to default to the idea of White being the color of heroes and Black being the color of villains, with an absolute minimum of wiggle room. It took until Kamigawa to invert this, and until New Phyrexia for them to actually properly arrive at White's strength as villains. And sure, Magic still lends itself heavily to White-Red being the most heroic color pair (being the purview of brave rebels fighting for their people), and many villains still include some Black in their color identity (because most of Magic's main villains have big ambitions about ruling the world - Jace in the Reality Fracture saga feels like one of the best counterexamples in a while), but they've more or less broken out of the idea that these are required in the identity of either side or that characters of these color alignments should immediately be considered either the hero or the villain. In The Spoils, everyone sucks, so you have half of this idea covered. Every trade is already dominated by trash people, so you cannot immediately look at a story arc and pick out where the villain would land. The amount of body horror that shows up is frequently kinda interesting. And sure, a lot of the jokes are weak and overdone, but even some of those are still funny.
From a pure presentation perspective, while there are issues (Warlords have blue card borders with red threshold icons; Rogues have red borders and blue threshold icons), it's still quite pleasing to have cards with two flavor text spaces, in a way. Though, they used the one under the card name for artist credits and card concept credits on some cards, which you could perhaps put at the bottom of or below the text box like a normal TCG, but hey! (Also, the pattern on the back of the cards looks neat. I have a couple packets of card sleeves with this pattern that I occasionally use for stuff.)
Ultimately, this leaves The Spoils in a fairly complicated position. As a game, it was one that deserved to go far. Unfortunately, I think due to vibes, it was simply destined to die very young. In fact, the fact that it lived as long an afterlife as it did is kind of a wonder. The final Spoils release, as far as I'm aware, is what seems to essentially be a prebuilt "cube" called "Decade of Decadence," featuring a smug dude fanning out a bunch of card packets on the package. This person looks like he might be a dev, based on the more realistic artstyle than usually seen on The Spoils products. I thought it was money he was showing off in this case. As ever, with the title, it seems they want to lean on the spectacle behind The Spoils (and as such, the guy showing off a bunch of paper money would be fitting in itself). Yes, I suppose the world is also a place of runaway decadence on the part of, well, everyone. But also, The Spoils itself was openly over-the-top in every way. Jon Finkel. Open sexuality. Million-dollar prize pools. This game was made to grab attention; it's the sort of thing that would hear rumors about the medium corrupting youth and say, "Well, we're sure tryin' our damnedest, ‘cause at least when we do it, it's fun, unlike you fuckin' Jesus freaks." As a result, regardless of quality, I could only recommend The Spoils with great trepidation - because I assume that if you dislike this tone enough, The Spoils will turn you into Jack Thompson.
1. ↑ (by US standards, which means that in a civilized country it would have been fine as long as the players were literate)
2. ↑ There’s also a conspiracy that deals with this, but Conspiracy was a weird pair of sets. I’d love to see another one, but that’s a story for another time.