Is Parallel the Web3 Game We've Been Waiting For?
CRYPTODAY 124
Almost exactly 10 years ago, I was jobless, depressed, and bored out of my mind. My last startup hadn't worked out, and I had nothing else on the horizon. With 2013 drawing to a close, I had one thing to look forward to: I had been accepted into the Hearthstone closed beta. Blizzard’s innovative take on the online card-game genre saved me from the worst rut of my life by giving me something else to think about. For the next 3 months, I threw myself into this young card game, playing 10 hours a day, 7 days a week. By early 2014, my friends and I were forming a guild and theory-crafting daily. I finished in the top 3 in several online and offline tournaments, and soon we had our first team sponsor. Of course, this was the same time that I discovered Bitcoin, and my eSports dreams quickly took a backseat to the ongoing financial revolution that I am obsessed with to this day. (Also, I really needed a steady job, and the professional eSports road was a long one.)
I say all this because I've been experiencing serious deja vu this last week playing Parallel, a new web3 card game that has more than a passing resemblance to Hearthstone. I'm also in a similar spot career-wise as I was 10 years ago, having just exited from YGG … although thankfully I'm no longer depressed! Parallel could not be further from Hearthstone in terms of theme and vibe — it's a spacefaring sci-fi with aliens, clones, and intergalactic conflicts — but the gameplay mechanics are so similar that the average HS player could learn it without going through the tutorial. And there are enough similarities between those mechanics and the ones popularized by Axie Infinity (and its many clones) that the average SkyMavis fan should probably fit right in as well.
Just like Hearthstone, both players choose a race and put together their decks composed of both universal cards and race-specific ones. These cards can be bought in randomly-assorted packs of 5, or won as rewards for completing various missions. You need glints — an in-game-only currency — to buy those packs, and you can buy glints using either cryptocurrencies or your credit card. I haven’t touched crypto at all during the week that I’ve been playing Parallel, and it’s refreshing to play a web3 game that works regardless of whether you are a crypto person or not. Cards have various levels of rarity; the rarest “Legendary” cards have powerful, potentially game-ending effects and can only be included as a single copy in your deck. All of the other rarity levels can have up to 3 copies.
The most interesting gameplay mechanic — and the thing that differentiates this game from Hearthstone — is that you need to discard a card from your hand in order to create a energy generator, which in turn allows you to play any of your other cards. In HS, this is automatic — a player is simply given a new mana generator each turn. Generally speaking, the way to win in HS is to simply play the most expensive card in your hand as soon as you can afford it. (We call that “playing on curve,” and in high-momentum HS matches sometimes it’s all that matters.) In Parallel, you have to make tough choices even on Turn 1, because you can’t play anything without first sacrificing something else. It also means that you can wind up in a very tight spot if you play out all your cards in hand. With empty hands on both sides, a late-game race becomes a real nail-biter.
There are 5 races in Parallel, and each one has their own specializations. Marcolian is the most aggro race, and plays a lot like Pirate Warrior in HS. It has lots of cheap fast units and some decent face-damage options to close things out in the midgame. Kathari is a little slower than Marcolian and uses an overwhelming number of token units to gain board control, and is very similar to Hearthstone’s Token Paladin or Murloc Paladin builds. Augencore is a midrange race that focuses on Upgrades — a type of card that you can use to buff your existing units. It’s the most flexible of the 5 races, and can be played as aggro or control, although it isn’t the best race in either of those scenarios. Earthen is a mid-to-late-game race that will be very familiar to players who like Hearthstone’s Ramp Druid (or played Green in Magic:The Gathering). It’s one of the only races that can generate its own mana with its units, and excels at cheating out big defenders early. Lastly, Shroud is a late-game race that plays a lot like Control Priest, and is the trickiest class to pilot correctly. It is the only class that can remove units without destroying them; instead, they get imprisoned in a holding area from which they can later be resummoned using other cards. This “second graveyard” is what makes Shroud so different from the other classes, and my Shroud mirror matches are amongst the most fascinating duels I’ve played so far.
Now, Parallel is a web3 game, so it does have both NFTs and play-to-earn mechanics. It’s a fairly simple system: every Parallel card has both an NFT and non-NFT edition. If you’re buying packs, you’re getting the non-NFT versions. Predictably, you can only earn from your match victories if you’ve bought and are using the NFT versions in your deck. The rewards you receive are directly proportional to how many NFT cards there are in your deck, and the rewards token is called $PRIME. The NFT cards are also tradeable of course, and the marketplace is a straightforward way to acquire the specific cards that you want for your build. Of course, if you want to go pure non-NFT, that works too. As you open more packs, you can recycle cards you don’t need anymore and create the cards that are missing from your collection.
Parallel is still in a closed beta as I write this, so if you want to give it a try you’ll have to do what I did and get the attention of the game developers on Twitter/X. Once you’re in, you get 5 free pre-constructed beginner decks that will familiarize you with how each race works, and you’ll be pitted against other beginners until you’ve won at least 5 games with each of them. I sped through these beginner games in half a day, mostly because my Hearthstone and Magic:The Gathering background gave me an early advantage. However, as soon as I started playing in the normal Ranked mode I found that neither my beginner set of cards nor my understanding of the game was enough to make me a serious contender. I’m currently still punting in Gold league with my Shroud and Marcolian decks, but it’s been a blast so far.
GLHF, cryptofam!