You don’t know this card game

Do you want to get into a new trading card game? It has a ton of characters you might know…

I’ve played a good amount of card games in my life. I started with the Pokémon Trading Card Game back when it first came out in middle school. In High School, YuGiOh was the hot new card game. I also tried the Original Digimon Card Game when it came out, but I didn’t see it around enough to collect. I also bought a starter deck for Magic The Gathering. But I never met anyone who played that either. Very recently a new Digimon Card Game came out and I jumped in hard. It had this different mechanic to it that I had to try. But there was one game that looked amazing to me, but was also a bit mysterious. Originally it was called UFS, Universal Fighting System. I think I first saw it around 2005 at an anime shop that sold a lot of card games. UFS had a few booster packs at this shop, Street Fighter and Soul Calibur 3. Fighting games! A Card game that uses fighting game IPs and you can play them against each other!? I could play Voldo from Soul Calibur against Ryu from Street Fighter?! This is what we dreamed about in actual video games. A cross between worlds. I bought a few boosters and one starter deck. I read the rules but it seemed difficult and no one wanted to try it with me. Then I never saw packs for it again, for years.

I still have those cards 20 years later. I would come across them when I go dig through Pokémon or Yugioh cards. Sometime in 2021 I wondered if they still made cards or if I could still find older cards. Turns out they were still going and had gone through tons of other IPs. They had Mega Man, Darkstalkers, Mortal Kombat, Tekken, Samurai Shodown, Cowboy Bebop, KOF, and a few others. All this has been happening this whole time and I’ve missed out. When I rediscovered them they had just started doing Yu Yu Hakusho and Soul Calibur 6. I had to jump in. Yu Yu is one of my all time favorite anime. And Soul Cali 6, I’ve been playing that since it came out, we started doing Hammer stuff with that game. I told Will about that game, I can’t remember if he found out on his own and didn’t know I played or if he started looking into it because of me. Either way we both started getting into it and I finally learned how to play the game. The game has gone through some changing of hands, they got bought out, then they got sold to someone else and I think they got bought themselves out. They renamed themselves at one point and became Universus and started doing other IPs like My Hero Academia. Actually that’s all they did for a while, it was working for them. They also changed their card logo on the back of the card every time they switched companies. All the original mechanics of the game still carry over, but the backs of all the cards are different. Just need to have good card sleeves to black out the back of the cards and you’re good.

The game seems to be based on fighting games. They use a lot of those mechanics like attacks that can hit high, mid or low. To block you have to correctly guess high or low if you don’t want to take damage. Some characters are faster than others and some have more or less health. In some games you can build up a meter that will allow you to do more damaging attacks. UFS puts a lot of this into the card game.

You start with a character. The character has a certain number of health. It could be as low as 19 or as high as 31, maybe higher or lower. I haven’t seen anything outside those ranges yet. If your life reaches 0, it’s game over for you. Your character also has a hand size. At the beginning of your turn you draw cards until you reach the hand size. I’ve seen low hand sizes of 5 and highs of 7. Could be more or less, again haven’t seen it yet. Your character sits outside of your deck always on the field, it doesn’t move. Your character also has abilities you can use during game play. Your deck has 60 cards or more and are mostly made up of Foundation and Attack cards. Attack cards are what you use to attack your opponent. Foundations are cards that help boost your attacks or defend against your opponent. Every card has a cost called difficulty and a check value. To play a card you place it on the field and check it to see if you can successfully play the card. You check cards by discarding the top card of your deck and if its check value is equal or more than the difficulty of the card you are playing then it is successfully played. If your check isn’t enough, then the check fails and the card you played is discarded and your turn ends. The cards you successfully play are not active until your turn ends. If you want to play another card, the difficulty keeps going up by one for every card you played previously. For Example, if you already successfully played 2 cards and now you are playing a third with a difficulty of 4, it will now cost 6, 4 plus 2 for the 2 cards before it. This goes for all cards throughout the game. If you played foundation cards, when your turn is done, you bring down all the cards and they stay face up on the field and become active so you can start using their abilities. 

Attack cards are played the same way. They have additional stuff like damage, speed and zones (high, mid or low). When successfully playing an attack card, you can enhance it with your foundation cards. The foundations that already exist can boost the attack, speed or do other fun stuff like pull cards from your discard pile or exhaust your opponent’s foundations. Your character might also allow you to do stuff to help your attack. Your opponent can also use their foundations and their character’s abilities in preparation for defense so they can lower your attack or speed too. Some abilities and foundations can be used once for every attack (many times per turn) or once per turn, so you have to be careful how you use your foundations. If your attack did damage to your opponent then the card becomes momentum or adds to your meter. Some attacks will allow you to use your meter to power up an attack. If your attack did not do damage then it is just discarded at the end of your turn.

Almost all the cards have a block speed and a zone. If your opponent attacks with a card that does 5 damage with a speed of 4 and a high zone, then you must play a card from your hand to block it with a high zone block and you must pass a check equal to the attack speed plus your block speed. Example, the attack is high with a speed of 4, you have a card with a high block speed of 3, so you must check a 7 (4+3) to successfully block it. Then you won’t take 5 damage. If you can’t block it or you fail to check it, then you will take 5 damage. If your opponent fails a check or they decide to pass their turn, then the turn passes to you.

That’s basically it. The unique baseline mechanics of the game. There’s tons of other things like reversals, throws, combos, assets, action cards, and they just introduced backups. There are also 12 different symbols in the game. All cards have 3 of these symbols, all your cards must match one symbol with your character. This is like choosing a typing or color in Pokémon or Magic – Fire, Water, Air, etc. Symbols represent a style of play – aggressive, tricky, gambling, defensive, controlling, etc. So this will dictate what kind of cards you can have in your deck and how you might play your deck and character. 

I’ve wanted to write this because I’m so hyped for what they have coming out soon! Recently they’ve added “Attack on Titan”, “Tekken 8”, and “Godzilla”. This year they plan on “Street Fighter 6”, “Guilty Gear” and “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles”!! I would like this game to become a bit more popular so we can see more fighting games and anime in this TCG world. Maybe more classic anime like “Evangelion”, “Gundams”, “Power Rangers” or some less heard of like “The Slayers”! I’ve been saying they should go to EVO or other big fighting game tournaments. Imagine an exclusive EVO card! The game can be hard though, or maybe that’s just me. I don’t get to play often so when Will and I play (like twice a year), the games are slow because we’re trying to remember how to play and I’m trying to re-learn the deck I built. But if more people play, I get to play more and won’t forget to play.