I figured out how much Shadowverse: Worlds Beyond actually costs to play: it’s $50 per season

I previously mentioned taking up Shadowverse: Worlds Beyond and having a pretty fun time returning to trading card games after frauding my way up to the top ranks of MTG: Arena way back during the pandemic. I had played the original Shadowverse— which is modeled after Hearthstone, with more Magic-like cards and obviously an anime aesthetic— but ultimately found after a hundred hours that the high-end cards I needed to run a decent deck were desperately out of reach.

The sequel to Shadowverse takes a different approach: rather than gouging every player a lot for the very best (and competitively necessary) cards, it allows reasonably dedicated players who pay a bit to get what they want, then creates a much higher pay level for serious whales who want fancy cosmetics. In the interest of better understanding the free-to-play money extraction machine, let’s talk about the stages that Worlds Beyond sets up for different types of players.

The Gamesoft Robo Fun Club is a solo labor of love that depends entirely on paid subscriptions from readers to exist. If you enjoyed this piece and you'd like to see more, I'd love to see you become a regular or paid subscriber. Paid subscribers get exclusive posts and keep me fed. Thanks for reading the pitch and hope to see you subscribe!

Free play

As is standard, the game starts off by raining free currency upon you, with which you can buy card packs (rupees) or create cards you’re missing (vials). This flow slows but never truly stops for as long as you’re playing the game, and there are a couple hours’ worth of daily missions to accomplish if you want every scrap the game gives out in a day. (Some of the best freebies deliberately force players to make use of the superfluous 3D lobby system; the same one some of you might have seen in Granblue Versus Rising.) When you start out, or when a new set releases, you’ll even have the opportunity to get a free deck that plays one of the basic archetypes… but not at full power, of course.

The game needs to work this way, or free players wouldn’t be able to play at all. After all, it’s only through that initial grind that you get enough cards to assemble a deck and play against other people. It’s totally free! You don’t need to spend a dime! Just make this game your job.

My free-play deck was Portalcraft Artifact, a very fun and relatively high-skill deck that revolved around “assembling” material cards into parts of a super robot (of course I picked this deck): you had to prepare for every situation at least a turn in advance and defend against your opponent while you waited to get the robot, your win condition, ready. Catch the opponent open with 10 mana, play the robot, and game over.

Robot Artifact was really fun, but it became apparent as I blasted through the low ranks that it just wasn’t strong enough to hang with the real competitive decks. Every beginner will have this realization.

And the ongoing deluge of free cards doesn’t really help, after a point, because you’re not getting the right cards.

What do I need to pay to keep up?

That’s basically all hung up on Legendary cards. The cornerstones of the engine that makes your deck work, your mid-game MVPs, your finishers, and all the most fun cards tend to be of the highest rarity. A Legendary must show up every 10 packs you open, to keep you going, and otherwise has microscopic odds of showing up in a pack at random. A viable deck might have five or six individual Legendary cards, with the useful cards showing up a maximum of three times. That’s a lot, and when you’re just starting out it’s not really feasible to buy them for free.

So Cygames sells a $40 “deckboost” bundle with the release of every set, and that’s what you actually buy. You get enough pay currency for 10 packs and a battle pass that dumps rewards on you: stay active during a season and you’ll get the cards you need, or enough free currency to create them.

After being fairly active through two seasons of Worlds Beyond, I have all the Legendary cards in the current set and enough free currency to build whatever deck I feel like. I’m content with my $40, perhaps $50, a season. In fact, I would say that due to my newfound freedom to try multiple decks and thus styles of play, I am having more fun with the game than I have in any of the seasons before. I don’t believe I’d need to spend too much more to have the full range of cards in my possession, everything I would theoretically need to compete seriously. (Though I should say, I’m not competing seriously; I have my mahjong after all.)

So, wait… how do they get people to whale?

The whale zone

When you’re buying cards, the game tells you you’re ten packs away from getting a Legendary card, and then 250 packs, or something crazy like that, away from getting a Lucky Chest. I’ve never gotten a Lucky Chest, because it’s not something you get if you aren’t a whale. I wondered for a while what the hell the Lucky Chest was, if I already had more than enough cards and yet would still need to buy 100 packs more to earn it.

In short, it’s cosmetics. Players who want to make a very flashy entrance have to pay up. For example, all cards can be upgraded to animated versions with a scarce item (I have never once noticed these animations when in-game.) Each deck type has a Live2D animated figurehead “leader” character, and the game is constantly introducing new leaders via battle pass and other means.

And you see, the flashiest animations and the rarest leaders are buried deep in the card pool, much, much rarer than any Legendary card. You can only get them by opening packs, and I’ve only gotten one of these prizes in the entire time I’ve been playing the game. (For a card I don’t play, of course.) Players who must have these extras must also pay sums of cash so exorbitant that offering one of those cosmetics after buying 300 packs is considered a mercy system.

Couldn’t be me. Nor is it meant to be.

Free-to-play exploitation, tuned to your personal comfort level

I am comfortable with Shadowverse: Worlds Beyond. I couldn’t get into trading card games because of the amount of money they tend to cost, but Worlds Beyond found a tolerable point. The funny thing is, as a paying player, I am still not the guy keeping the lights on. I’m low-tier. The maniac who paid $500 to play as the girl who plays in a zombie rock band or something, that guy’s keeping the lights on. May we all find something to love that much; recently I paid $30 to be able to use Pop Team Epic emotes when I play mahjong, so clearly I'm not immune.