Building the perfect deck in SPAM is only part of the job. Once you actually take it into battle, the cards you started with aren’t necessarily the ones you’ll finish with. Several times during a match you can visit the Tox Shop and upgrade what you’re carrying, giving you a chance to change the deck as you learn what your opponent is doing and, ideally, find a combination they’re going to have a much harder time dealing with.
Ticroco Entreprise’s free-to-play card battler launches today on Steam, bringing turn-based PvP, card collecting, deckbuilding, and a competitive ranked ladder together without charging anything to get started.
Your Collection Keeps Getting Bigger
Cards are at the centre of SPAM, and winning battles gives you more of them to start working into your decks. There are different rarities and talents to find, along with hidden synergies between cards that give you something to experiment with as the collection grows. Rather than handing everyone the same fixed selection forever, the idea is that your available options gradually become more specialised around the way you like to play.
That also means collecting a new card isn’t necessarily useful just because its numbers are bigger. Finding something that fits with the cards you already use can open up another combination, while a card that doesn’t make much sense now could become far more interesting once something else joins the collection later.
Eventually, the deck you bring into a match should say quite a bit about how you prefer to play before either side has even started making moves. Of course, your opponent has been doing exactly the same thing with theirs.
The Deck Can Change During the Fight
Taking your collection into PvP is where SPAM adds something unique to all that preparation. Matches are turn-based, giving you time to work out what the other player is trying to do and decide how much you want to interfere with it. You’ll need to make your own strategy work while adapting when the cards across the table start suggesting that your original plan might not survive much longer.
The Tox Shop gives you another way to respond. It appears several times during a battle and lets you upgrade cards, so your deck can become stronger while the match is still happening. That creates opportunities to lean further into a combination that’s already working or improve something that needs a little help before your opponent gets too far ahead.
A good starting deck matters, then, but so does knowing what to do with it once another player starts pushing back. That should also give repeat matches some extra variety, particularly when two familiar decks can develop differently depending on which cards receive upgrades along the way.
There’s Ranked Play if You Want to Get Serious
Most of SPAM is built around playing against other people. There’s a competitive ranked ladder for anyone interested in seeing how their deck holds up against players around the world, while direct challenges let you skip matchmaking and play against friends instead.
The free-to-play model should make that second option particularly easy. Nobody in the group needs to buy a copy before joining in, so convincing somebody to try a match mostly comes down to getting them to download it.
There are in-game purchases, including chance-based purchases according to Steam’s disclosure, but the game itself costs nothing to download and start playing. SPAM launches free on Steam for PC. Bring a deck you like, just be prepared to change it once the other player starts ruining your plans.