Brandon Sanderson is one of my favorite authors. He has written series like the Stormlight Archives and The Reckoners. But one of his series that I enjoyed but didn’t love as much was Mistborn. But when a deckbuilding game was announced, I knew I was going to want to try it. And then with the RPG campaign as well happening for a Cosmere universe RPG, I got more interested in the books again. So let’s look at and see how the Mistborn Deckbuilding Game from Brotherwise Games works.

How To Win the Mistborn Deckbuilding Game?

There are two ways in which you can win the Mistborn Deckbuilding Game. The first is fairly simple, knock out your opponents. If you take them out and are the last one standing, you win the game. The other is a bit more work, but gives you benefit as you go, you need to complete three missions. Each mission will give you rewards as you go up the tracks, but when you complete all three you win the game.

How Do You Play the Mistborn Deckbuilding Game?

This is a standard deckbuilding game in some ways. You get both attack and purchase power on your cards that you play about. And you use that attack and that funding to buy new cards and attack the other players. But how some of the cards work is very different than your standard deckbuilding game. So let’s look into some of those unique things that Mistborn does.

Game Play Highlights

Burning Metals

Yup, we’re already onto the highlights. Mainly because the basis of the game is that much of a standard deck building experience. But let’s talk about activating cards. I think that it is one of the most unique elements of the game. In Mistborn the characters burn metal that allows them to use abilities. They do that in the game. You are able to burn metal and that then let’s you activate some of the cards. Some are just basic funding that don’t require anything. But others you need to burn metal to activate.

And while you are limited in how much can burn, there are ways around it. I’ll talk about one in a second, but you can spend cards to burn additional metals. Each card has it’s ability, but there are pairs of metals that it has that you can burn. So it’s a way, if you can’t spend all your cards otherwise, to power up cards and play out as much or more than you could in the first place.

Finally, you can always burn an extra metal. But that metal is burnt out until you discard a card of that type to get it back. It’s nice mechanism to let you push early game, but it has a cost. Do you want the benefit now to need to refresh it later?

Unlocking New Powers

You also unlock other things. Each player starts out pretty much the same. The metals in the base deck vary, but that’s about it. As you go up in turns you unlock powers. And generally these powers are passive. If you burn something, you get a benefit. So as you go, you get more powerful, but also become more unique in what you can do or what you might want to focus on. And you gain access to Atium, something even more powerful to burn.

And the game scales with the burning of metal and unlocking powers. At the start of the game you can burn a metal per turn. But at the end of each turn you bump up on a track. That track gains you access to several things. But the biggest is that as you improve your deck of cards, you can burn more metal. So you go from one all the way up to four. It builds a great power ramp into the game.

Permanent Cards

I talked about how some cards, or most cards are ones you play out and burn metal for. But you also gain permanent cards. These cards go into play in front of you. I say permanent, but more so that they don’t cycle at the speed of others. They can be defensive cards that need to be taken out first. Or they can add offense or other abilities as you burn metals. It’s a nice way to potentially thin out your deck for a period of time before someone decides it’s too annoying at targets them over you. And it can even give you the benefit of burning additional metals.

Combat

Combat is pretty simple and I call it King of Tokyo style combat. There is one player who has the target. All the other players attack that player. If that player wants, after any attack, they can then pass that target off to another player. But if you attack while you have the target, you attack everyone. It makes it so that sometimes it’s worth it to hang onto it and have the damage in order to deal out a bunch of damage to everyone.

What I Want To See More Of

So we talked about a lot of highlights. In reality a lot of those highlights are how you play the game as well. But they work so well thematically that I wanted to cover them. I chose to end on combat, though, because it’s an area that I want to see more of. When we ended our demo, we had one player knocked out and the rest close. I like that balance of it being close there. But the winner won via going up on the mission tracks.

To me, it felt like it was more likely to end with someone going up on the mission tracks. I want to see someone win via combat and via knocking everyone out. It is going to be tricky, unless one person never the target in combat. Otherwise, everyone loses life so consistently. And there isn’t an immediate benefit, besides being closer to winning, of knocking someone out. In a two player game, I think it’ll happen often. But three or four players, it is likely better to go up the tracks and complete missions.

I also want to see how many people remember or how long it takes people to remember to move up their power level each round. So each player has that track that unlocks burning more metal and elements like that. It is a bit of extra house keeping that is going to take a bit for some people to remember. I don’t know how you’d make it easier to remember. I just know that it wasn’t always the easiest to remember.

Final Thoughts and First Impressions on the Mistborn Deckbuilding Game

I really like this game. I think that it adds in some fun additions to the game and to deckbuilding. The elements of the game like burning the metals are also very thematic to the books. I appreciate the attention to detail put into it because it offers something different that makes sense. And it’s an element of the game that is easy to teach and explain to people who know the game.

I say that, and I also want to talk about how the game is pretty fast. We got through basically the whole game in an hour and a half. That is with the rules teach and with a few rules questions. Not to say the rules teach was bad, I think it was quite good, but we wanted to ask questions and clarify things as we went. And generally our interpretation was right, but it is good to clarify. So I think if people knew the game, a four player game could take an hour or so. Which is nice because it feels like the streamlined the game just enough.

Is the theme one that interests you? Do you like deckbuilding games? If so, I recommend Mistborn Deckbuilding Game.

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