Chaotic: The Very Basics (Creatures)

Creatures!

Creatures are the most important cards in the game! They make up the core part of your deck. You can't play without 'em!

Creatures have some very important stats on them, so let's jump into that first and foremost.

Frafdo, an Overworld Creature

Here is a Creature, Frafdo to be precise. You can see the name of the creature at the top of the card. Also at the top of the card is the tribe symbol (on the left) and the card's rarity and the set it cam from (on the right).

Next is the picture of the card, it's pretty, but it doesn't do anything.

Right below the picture is a bar that gives the creatures... type? I guess would be the best way to describe it. You might not be able to read it, but Frafdo's says "Creature- Overworld Caretaker. This can affect many things, attacks, battlegear, mugic, even locations.

 The most important stuff is at the bottom of the card. On the left side are 4 numbers, each number is this specific card's value for the 4 different disciplines. In order from top to bottom is the

Courage (a red heart)

Power (a yellow lightening bolt)

Wisdom (a blue eye)

Speed (a green arrow... thing)

These attributes affect and are affected by a LOT of different things, battlegear, mugic, attacks, locations, other creatures.

Nauthilax, an Underworld Creature

Next to the stats is the box containing all of the creatures special abilities (the specifics of which will be talked about later)

Next to the abilities box is the elements which the creature possesses. Frafdo has no elements (none are colored in) while Nauthilax has the element of water, meaning water attacks do more damage when he uses them.

*Important*

Under the elements is the energy box. This is that specific scan of the creature's health. That means that 2 of the same card (2 Nauthilax's for instance) may have different energy and discipline scores. This is one of the coolest parts of Chaotic! You can have 2 cards that are the same creature, but one is vastly superior to the other. 

Right of the energy is the code that you use to get that specific card into your online collection, pretty straightforward.

Lastly is the mugic counters. This is how many mugic (points, sorta) the creature can use to pay for certain abilities and mugic. We'll get into that later.

Mahrrant, a Danian Creature

Their are 5 different tribes that a creature can come from that each have their own strengths, weaknesses, and strategies.

1. The Overworld: Shown by the blue colored cards, like Frafdo. The Overworlders are generally considered "the good guys" which is kind of unfair, but whatever. Overworlders tend to use the elements of water and earth more than anything else and tend to favor high wisdom and courage discipline scores. There are obviously Overworlders that use fire and air and there are Overworlders that favor power and speed. I'm just saying that most seem to follow that trend.

2: The Underworld: Shown by the red colored cards, like Nauthilax. The Underworlders are generally considered "the bad guys" because they are more confrontational than the Overworlders. Underworlders tend to favor the element of fire and tend to favor the discipline of power.

3: The Danians: Shown by the brown colored cards, like Mahrrant. The Danians are basically an ant hive. they are very reliant on being in a group, an ability called the Hive (more on that later) The Danians are like the Overworlders, tending to favor earth and water and courage and wisdom (courage especially).

Ailav, a Mipedian

4: The Mipedians: Shown by the sandy yellow colored cards, like Ailav. The Mipedians are the lizard creatures. They tend to favor the element of air and tend to favor the discipline of speed. The Mipedians are more reclusive creatures that tend to be fairly strong by themselves, but more on that later.

5: The M'arrillians: The fifth and final tribe are the M'arrillians. They are shown in greyish boxes and have a spiral icon in the top left corner. M'arrillians are interesting in that they focus a lot on controlling other tribes (Brainwashing) to achieve victory. Aa'une, the M'arrillian posted here, is the leader of the M'arrillians and one of the rarest cards out there.

The next blog will go more in depth on attack cards.

Chaotic: The Very Basics (The Types of Cards and Apprentice Rules)

The actual game of Chaotic could be played in more than one way with different amounts of cards.

There was both the Apprentice Rules, pretty simple, easy to start with.

And then there were the Master Rules, which explored the vast complexity that Chaotic could be.

Classically, you could play in either a 1v1, 3v3, or 6v6 situation. I'll explain what that means in just a second.

An example of a Creature card.

There were 5 different types of cards.

1: Creatures: Think monsters from Yu-Gi-Oh, but MUCH more important to each game. Each player would either get 1, 3 or 6 creatures, depending on the game.

2: Attacks: Imagine what each creature would do to damage

An example of an Attack card.

each the other. Each player would get a deck of 20 attack cards, with some other restrictions.

3: Battlegear: Each creature would get an item that they could use to help them win the battle gear, hence, battlegear.

4: Locations: The place where each other battles

would be fought. Each player got a deck of 10 cards

An example of a Location card.

An example of a Battlegear card.

An example of a Mugic card.

5: Mugic: Lastly, there were Mugic cards. The name combines magic and music (crazy right). You would have as many as you had creatures. They were cards you could use to do all sorts of things.

With all of the different kinds of cards, there was an almost endless possibility of combinations and decks to try.

Apprentice Rules: 

These rules were fairly simple. There were no mugic cards, or the Burst (which I'll get to later) in apprentice, It was just a straight fight between the creatures with only the battlegear, attacks, and location to help them.

Basically, to set up the game, you would place your creatures out in a pyramid shape facing your opponent, so that that the setup looked like this: (Sorry for the quality, it's the best I could find)

Imagine that annoying textbox wasn't in the way and quality was 100x better

You can imagine how a 1v1 and a 6v6 would look, just add or remove a diagonal line of creatures.

Each creature's battlegear would be placed faced down under the creature it's equipped to, and you would only reveal and use the abilities of the battlegear once a creature has started combat You would place your attack deck and location deck face-down to the side and draw 2 attack cards. At that point, you'd be ready to start the game. Decide who gets the first turn and it's time to begin!

Starting Combat

The player who's turn it is (we'll call them the active player) will start the game by flipping over the top card on their location deck. This location is where the fighting for that turn will occur. We'll get more in depth on Location cards in another blog, but the important part is that location's decide which creature gets to throw the first attack, the Initiative. The active player will select 2 creatures, one of their own to attack, and one of their enemies to defend. These creatures will participate in the fighting (most of the time) for that turn. The players will look at the Initiative to see who gets to throw the first punch.

The very basics of combat are that when it's your turn to attack, you will draw an attack card (so you have 3 in your hand on your turn) and then play an attack card. Deal however much damage the attack will deal and then it's the next player's turn. The creature that reaches 0 energy (the creature's health that's printed on the card) is destroyed and moved to the discard pile. Then the surviving creature, if it was the attacker, takes the defender's spot on the map, and if it was the defender, get's to stay in it's spot.

Those are the very, very basics of combat. Decide who's fighting, see who attacks first, draw a card, play a card, repeat until someone's dead. Very simple, not not even close to what the game has to offer in terms of strategy.

Once that fight is over, the active player may move his other creatures into open spaces before ending their turn. Then the other player flips over a new location card and the process continues until only 1 player's creature(s) are left on the board.

In the next blog, I'll talk about Creatures, the most important part of the game!

Chaotic: A Different TCG

Hey! So, have you ever heard of a trading card game, or TCG, called Chaotic? No? That's not a surprise. The fact is, Chaotic died out about 3 years ago. Not because it wasn't popular or anything, it was very popular, but because of lawsuits involved in royalties and ownership of the rights.

Chaotic was owned by 4Kids entertainment. They kind of sucked, or did suck, back when they were still a thing. After they declared bankruptcy, Chaotic collapsed. How unfortunate. This left loads of fans, like myself, without anything to do. The amazing website (that really was what the whole game was about) shut down a little over a year ago.

I would like to bring it back.

I know this really isn't anything most people care about, I mean, it was just another random kid's card game, right? Wrong. It was original, it was fresh, it was dynamic and interesting and fun and easy to play. Why did it die out when many of the more popular card games (that are almost all just carbon copies of Magic) get to live on?

Let me tell you a little bit about the game.

Each and every card you got would be given it's own unique code at the bottom. This was the lifeblood of Chaotic. You could use those codes to upload your own, exact copy of the card to the chaotic website (chaoticgame.com), where you could use it to play against other people online.Now a days, they have Pokemon and Magic and all sorts of online card games, but Chaotic was the only one that did it really well.

It, honestly, was genius.

Imagine, Yu-Gi-Oh, a really popular TCG. You love the game but there's never anyone around to play it with. So you buy the cards and then what. Nothing. You can't do anything with them if you don't have another flesh and blood person sitting in front of you playing with you.

Chaotic was different. You could hop online and play against thousands of people around the world. Isn't that pretty great? Your cards would never be useless!

Besides, the art was always beautiful! Anyways, I'll talk more about the specifics of the game in the meantime.