Altered: Trial by Frost review - "Satisfying enough to offer highly varied gameplay"

Altered: Trial by Frost is the first expansion for what is fast becoming one of the best card games, and it helps solidify Altered as an excellent option for trading card game players fed up with Magic: The Gathering’s Universes Beyond push or those who don’t have any passion for Disney Lorcana. The new set bolsters the game’s weaker heroes and helps smooth some of its issues with card drawing and mana acceleration without adding too much complexity, ensuring gameplay remains fast.

The original release made it easier to hop into the game thanks to a set of very well-balanced preconstructed decks, but Altered: Trial by Frost takes an alternate route. It requires players to craft their own decks from booster packs, and unfortunately, the promised marketplace and print-on-demand features have yet to manifest. That makes it frustrating when you want to be playing three of a rare card and don’t have enough.

However, for casual play, there are plenty of ways to get creative and craft new strategies with the cards you have.

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Altered: Trial by Frost features & design

• Every faction is well supported
• Can provide a nice introduction to TCGs
• Lots of fun variations on the idea of ice and cold

Altered distinguishes itself among TCGs by framing the conflict between players as a race rather than a battle, and in Trial by Frost the rival expeditions head into hostile frozen terrain. The set comes up with many clever ways to mechanically portray the idea of cold. A new type of card, called gear, is carried with characters on their expeditions to provide benefits like boosting stats or letting them stay on the board longer. Altered doesn’t take itself too seriously, so these can take the form of brightly colored parkas and cartons of milk. They are carried around by an eclectic cast of characters from mythology and public domain ranging from the Norse goddess of skiing to Ebenezer Scrooge.

Good gear isn’t enough to resist the toll the cold takes, and the set also builds on the exhaust mechanic that keeps cards in the reserve — which acts as a sort of on the board hand of cards — from being played that turn. It’s a clever way of calibrating the power of new cards. For instance, a spell with cooldown goes to the reserve exhausted, so it can’t be played again until the next turn, giving it more of a lasting impact on the game than a card with fleeting (which can only ever be played once) but avoiding the swings that could happen by playing the same card twice on the same turn. Similarly, exhausted resupply provides a way to get more cards in the reserve for future turns without the potential to impact the current expedition.

Packs contain tokens useful for new and older cards — I loved the winterized versions of staples like Ordis Recruit. But I was disappointed that the cards meant to be exchanged for foil versions of a card of your choice of the corresponding rarity aren’t useful yet because the promised print on demand hasn’t manifested. I love the variation in art between common and rare versions of the same card and I’m looking forward to seeing how some of my favorites look when shiny.

Altered aims to keep things relatively fair by limiting players to having 15 rare and three unique cards in their deck, and one of the biggest challenges in deck construction is how to manage that restriction. Rare cards can be essential if the common version comes from another faction and gives you access to an effect that is harder for your faction to produce. For instance, Bravos is great at acceleration, so while their version of Geyser is a solid removal card, the kicker of having it become a mana orb is much more powerful for Ordis players using Gulrang & Tocsin, who desperately wants to get eight mana orbs on the board as soon as possible. Sometimes a rarity change isn’t even a strict upgrade — a card can become both cheaper and weaker or more expensive and more powerful and you have to figure out what tradeoffs are right. Some rare cards would just be nice to have and others are so good I wish I had a full set of three.

Gameplay

• Race across different terrain
• Carefully manage your cards and mana
• Figure out what expeditions are really worth fighting for

Trial by Frost can be played without having any other Altered cards, but you’ll certainly get the best results if you can combine staples from the initial set with the new cards. Still, I took the challenge of mostly focusing on new cards when building decks for all six factions and was very pleased with the results, which felt mechanically distinct while being well balanced.

It seems like Trial by Frost could have easily had a new set of preconstructed decks given that each faction’s new cards seem focused on enhancing one of the heroes that hasn’t gotten the star treatment yet. Luckily games just don’t take that long, so when I did make mistakes when crafting decks and got caught with cards that didn’t wind up being useful, I could quickly make alterations and do a rematch.

TextEvery faction has its own strategy that’s enhanced with Trial by Frost. Ordis favors coming from behind, playing a defensive game early and then seizing the advantage with hordes of tokens. Axiom favors steady card advantage by adding cards to its reserve, while Muna finds supremacy in the forests. The nature of the game’s race across expeditions ensures things almost always keep moving, even if some decks do favor strategies based on buildup and disruption.

You’ll need to pay careful attention to all the cards your opponent has on the board, and you’re even better off if you’d got a solid knowledge of the game in general and can predict what tricks they might have up their sleeves to change the course of an expedition. Proficiency in other TCGs is definitely an advantage, but the learning curve isn’t so steep to make Altered intimidating. Most games tend to be close, which also makes it easy to feel like you’ve put up a good race even if you lose.

Should you buy Altered: Trial by Frost?

If you already have played some Altered or are considering getting into the game, you should definitely pick up a few packs of Trial by Frost and try crafting some decks. The mechanics aren’t so complex to deter players who lack much TCG experience, but they’re satisfying enough to offer highly varied gameplay based on the factions you’re playing. Trial by Frost shows that Equinox is taking a very smart approach to expanding on their game, adding depth to their design space while providing plenty of the fun flavor that makes the game so charming.

Ratings

Buy it if...

Don't buy it if...

How we tested Altered: Trial by Frost

Our reviewer ensured that they played with different card combinations and made their own decks over an extended period of time to get a better sense of Altered's gameplay. They also considered how it related to other, popular TCGs in the market.

For a more thorough look at our process, see our guide to how we test board games, or the wider GamesRadar+ reviews policy.

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