Tempo Storm’s CEO Brings Pro Design Insight to New Deck-Builder Game
Professional Hearthstone player and Twitch streamer Andrey “Reynad” Yanyuk has announced that he’s developing his own digital card game, titled The Bazaar.
Reynad made the announcement yesterday via YouTube alongside the launch of an Indiegogo campaign.
A 26-year-old born in the Ukraine and raised in Minnesota from the age of six, Reynad got his start playing the Magic the Gathering tabletop card game. After being suspended from competitive Magic in 2013 by Wizards of the Coast’s DCI for playing a deck containing an unregistered card, Reynad retired from the game and started streaming Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft. A respected player and caster in the Hearthstone community, Reynad has competed in tournaments like DreamHack Austin and the Hearthstone Blizzcon Inn-vitational. He currently manages Tempo Storm, an esports team with rosters competing in major video games like Hearthstone, Overwatch, and League of Legends.
In his initial campaign video, Reynad explains that in addition to playing card-games at a competitive level, he’s been designing games of his own “since [he] was a teenager.” Given his expertise as both a pro player and a passionate designer, he feels uniquely qualified to create a card game of his own.
He goes on to describe The Bazaar as a deck-building game. As opposed to games like Hearthstone or Magic The Gathering, which are focused around pre-built decks, The Bazaar starts players off with a small deck of weak cards and tasks them with adding more powerful cards as the game goes on. Think Slay the Spire or even Hearthstone’s “dungeon run” mode.
Unlike Slay the Spire or dungeon run, however, The Bazaar differentiates itself by being a deck-builder that’s PvP in nature. Set in an intergalactic marketplace where humans and aliens come from afar to trade and barter, The Bazaar pits players against one another in a rush to strengthen their decks while looking for opportunities to whittle down each other’s health. Cards can be used to either buy additional cards from the bazaar, deal damage to the opponent, or cast spells to weaken the enemy’s deck. The Bazaar also features MOBA-like enemies on the game board that players can defeat to earn valuable rewards for their deck.
Reynad also stresses that The Bazaar looks to circumvent the pay-to-win business model that plagues other online card games. Unlike games like Hearthstone, Gwent, or The Elder Scrolls: Legends, which require players to buy card packs to build their collections, The Bazaar makes all cards available to players from the get-go. Instead, players will work to unlock the different “classes” available to them, either through microtransactions or in-game currency.
While Reynad looks to be serving as the game’s principal game designer, he assures his viewers and potential backers that he has a dedicated team of programmers, engineers, and artists working on the more technical aspects of the game as well. The fundraising from Indiegogo will be going directly to The Bazaar’s development, with Reynad asserting that “every single dollar is going to pay” those working on the game.
As of now, The Bazaar has already raised $32,631 USD of its $150,000 goal, with 2 months remaining for the campaign. The game has an “estimated delivery” date of July 2018 and is targeting a release on PC and mobile.
