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I’ve always like the idea of getting into a trading card game or a collectable card game. In my younger days, I played and collected a lot of Yu-Gi-Oh until I moved away from people who played it and couldn’t find a group to play with so I eventually gave up my collection and instead played the video games to get my fix. As I’ve gotten more and more into the board gaming hobby, I’ve ended up trying a few other card games, such as Magic and Lorcana, and not really feeling the same love as I did for Yu-Gi-Oh back in the day.
During a stream I was watching, someone mentioned the My Hero Academia CCG, and I was intrigued. I’d been getting more into anime in general, as I’m currently preparing for a trip to Japan. I reasoned watching anime in Japanese would be a good way to get my head into the language. So I started watching My Hero Academia and boy, I love that anime! The characters are so personable and it feels like genuine stakes. Yes, I know it’s all fiction, but it’s really good! I reached out to the streamer and asked if they could teach me the game, which they did, and from there, I dived into a rabbit hole.
One of the first things I did was purchase a few of the starter decks, and this is a review of one of them – the Clash Deck of Ochaco Uraraka – otherwise known as Uravity.
Diving into The Deck
The box contains a handy playmat and the deck itself, built up of 51 cards, including the key Character card of Uraraka VI, and various copies of 17 other cards. As is fitting for her gravity-based powers, a lot of her foundations involve flipping cards over to get the most out of their powers. However, the character card allows you to Ready and Un-flip foundations, which means you can build a very solid combo and repeat and reuse as much as you need throughout the game. I’ve had a lot of fun looking through the cards and playing with this deck because I recognise the scenes from the anime they are based on and I love how thematic it is in comparison to other card games, such as Magic. Yes, Magic fits in within its own lore, but it’s difficult to break into if you’ve never really played. For me, that makes the UniVersus system, which My Hero Academia uses, far superior. You can put any IP on there and make the game fit for what you want.
The artwork is, as pretty much all the artwork is, lifted straight from stills in the anime, with a few exceptions for things like the character cards, drawn to best show off the character in question. The only knock I’d give to the artwork is the icons seem to have changed from previous generations (more on that later) and the frames seem to be slightly less sharp as the previous sets.
One last thing. There is something a bit weird with UniVersus. For some reason, they changed both the card backs and the formatting of the cards from series 6 of the My Hero Academia collection, which means two things. One: if you want to mix cards from previous series in your deck, you need to sleeve the cards to hide the backs (a personal pet peeve of mine) and two: you have to be really careful to match the symbols. If you’ve not built your own deck before, you have to ensure every card has a matching symbol, which is tricky when the symbols change between generations of cards. They’re… recognisable, but it’s annoying. This quirk though, (pun unintended), is just a factor of the game though, and doesn’t really apply to the deck here as sold. I figured it’s worth mentioning though, just in case you fall into the pit as I have!
