MissaurusRex's Complete Beginner's Guide to Skyweaver - Part 1

Complete Beginner's Guide to Skyweaver - Part 1

Hi! My name is MissaurusRex and I’m here to give you a long-awaited beginners guide to Skyweaver. I’ve been playing and streaming the game since October of 2019, and while I do not have any tournament wins and am far from being the greatest player, I do climb to Master/Grandweaver every season and can certainly help you learn to play!

This series of guides will be a very in-depth beginners guide, and I will assume you have very little knowledge or familiarity of card games and how they are played. If you have more experience with card games my guides will still be useful to you as there are some mechanics that are unique to Skyweaver. I do recommend you read this post first if you have never played a card game before: Official How to Play Guide, but this guide will also review these topics. If you need assistance with account creation, please read this. My guides will also be available in video format. My guides will cover the following topics:

⦁ Overview of the Skyweaver interfaces, cards, and game modes

⦁ Overview of Heroes/Prisms, Elements and understanding card phrasing

⦁ core game mechanics

⦁ The attachment system, enchantments, and “out-of-decking”/conjuring

⦁ Playing the game and turn order

⦁ Deck building for beginners

This guide will go over the menus and card types. If you already have that information, I suggest you move onto part 2. Let’s get started!

What is Skyweaver?

Skyweaver is a free to play digital trading card game much like Hearthstone, Legends of Runeterra, and Magic the Gathering. Currently you can play in your browser, on mobile, or there is a downloadable file for computer use. Some of Skyweaver’s mechanics are similar to that of other card games and I will provide comparisons for easy reference throughout these guides. Skyweaver, in my opinion, plays most similarly to Hearthstone in the sense that each player has a hero and players alternate turns. There are no ways to play on your opponents turn, and no spell speeds such as “burst” or “fast” in Runeterra, or “instant” and “sorcery” in Magic.

I’ve made my account, now what?

Welcome to Sky! Let’s first take a look at all the menus before we get into what this game is all about:

1: Your profile/wallet

2: Your library of cards/items

3: Your decks

4: The rankings

5: The market

6/7: Game mode picker

8: News

9: Twitch live channel feed

Let’s look at your profile:

Here you can see an overview of your card collection and your account statistics.

1: Settings. You can change your display character and flag, and some other general settings.

2: Your level

3: Summary of all the items you own (cards, conquest tickets, and wallet currency)

4: Link to your wallet

5: Your ranked statistics

6: Your match history and stats. If you click on matches, you can see what opponents you have played and check what decks they are using.

This is the library, here you can see every card in the game, even if you don’t own it yet:

1: Filter and sorting tools

2: More filters and a search bar. You can search for pretty much anything including card names and card text.

Clicking on any card will bring you to this interface. You can see basic information about the card, market information (more on this below), the full art, and related cards. If you scroll down you can also see popular decks that use this particular card.

This is the ranked leaderboard. There are two leaderboards, one for players and one for decks. The deck leaderboard shows you the decks with the highest winrates, and allows you to view and build those decks. The colours of usernames are based on the community crystal they have received. Community crystals were rewards given to alpha/beta players, more on that here.

1: Filter between player and deck leaderboards

2: Filter between Constructed and Discovery game modes

3: Player search bar

4: Filter by global or regional ranking

5: Filter by rank

6: Weekly reward (more on that below)

7: Your ranking

Finally, the market. Here is where you can acquire silver/gold cards if you wish. Clicking on cards brings up the same interface as from the library. My guide will not cover using the market or trading cards. If you’re interested in learning more please read this and this.

1: Filter by buying or selling, and sorting options

2: Filter between cards or pre-built decks on the market

3: Filter between silver/gold cards, card attributes, and a search bar

4: Card price at a glance, in USDC

Those are all of the menus! Let’s move on to card types, and how you can acquire cards and start playing the game.

Acquiring Cards & Card types

At the time of writing this guide there are 600 cards in Skyweaver. You may have noticed from the menus that there are different card types. In Skyweaver, there are 3 card types: base cards, silver cards, and gold cards. There is no difference gameplay-wise between the card types and the card type does not indicate how good or bad the card is. Base cards are simply cards that can be unlocked for free by playing the game and are untradeable. Silver and gold cards, however, have their respective coloured borders and can be bought, sold, traded and transferred between other players. Unlike other card games, there is no crafting system and no card packs. Also unlike other card games, Skyweaver is a singleton format meaning your deck can only have one copy of a card (with exceptions that will be explained in future guides). If you want to buy a card or a particular deck you simply buy them directly. There are no rotations or limits to cards you can play. All cards are permanent and can be played in any game mode. The devs only plan on adding cards to the game so you don’t ever have to worry about cards being unplayable. The only changes that happen to cards are balance changes. Below is a summary of how you can acquire each card type:

Base cards: Are unlocked for free by playing Skyweaver! Every time you level up you receive a base card dependent on the hero you were playing. There is no other way to acquire base cards other than leveling up. Every time you finish a match you receive 20 experience and if you win a match you receive a bonus 30 experience (for a total of 50 experience!). The required experience to level up depends on your current level, please click here for an explanation. There is currently no level cap in Skyweaver. You do not need any cards (base, silver or gold) to start playing Skyweaver since there is Discovery mode (more on game modes below). If you want to know how long it takes to unlock every card, read my prior post on that here.

Silver cards: Silver cards can be obtained in a few ways. You can buy them directly from the market, or maybe a friend is nice enough to gift you some (please don’t beg players in discord for silver cards). You can also make trades or purchases with other players. If you rank in the top 250 players, you receive a weekly reward of silver cards depending on how high your rank is. Skyweaver seasons are 4 weeks and after each season the ranks are reset. Please note you need to rank in the top 250 overall, not within a particular rank such as scholar or prophet. Lastly, you can obtain silver cards through the Conquest game mode (more on game modes below).

Gold cards: Currently, gold cards can be obtained in two ways. You can buy them from the market or other players, or from the Conquest game mode (I promise game modes are next!).

To reiterate — it is absolutely not necessary to purchase any cards and every card can be unlocked for free by simply playing Skyweaver.

Game modes

At the time of writing, there are currently 2 game types: Constructed and Discovery, that are described below. There are 2 game modes: Ranked and Conquest. You can play Discovery or Constructed in Ranked mode, similar to other card game competitive modes where you are matched against other players of a similar rank and climb the ranking system. You can only play Constructed in Conquest mode, described below. There is currently no casual mode.

Constructed: Pretty self-explanatory. Much like any other card game, you pick a deck that you have and play against another player of a similar rank. You do require cards to play this game mode. If you own at least one card and make a deck with it, you will still be able to play Constructed. The remaining cards in this saved decklist will automatically and randomly fill with unique cards depending on the hero the deck is built with every match.

Discovery: This is a random game mode. When you play a Discovery game, you receive a randomly generated deck dependent on the hero you chose. Your opponent also receives a randomly generate deck dependent on the hero that they chose. You do not require cards to play this game mode, and it is recommended that new players play this game mode first. The randomness is not a true random, it is more of a smart random meaning that you will not receive decks that are all 1 cost cards, for example. Decks are generally generated to have cards to play in the early game, mid-game, and late game, more info on that here. This game mode is also balanced by tweaking the appearance rate of certain cards, you can read more about that here.

Conquest: This is a win-streak game mode for the purpose of winning gold cards. You can only play the Constructed game mode in conquest, and it plays the same way as described above. In order to play, you need to pay an entry fee of either 1.5 USDC or a conquest ticket (which can be bought directly, or you can exchange a silver card for a conquest ticket). When you begin a Conquest run, you receive random rewards depending on how many games you won (see picture below). When you lose, you lose your run and have to start over. If you lose your first game, you receive no reward. If you win once, you receive one silver card effectively breaking even. Every week, a new rotation of 8 gold cards are available to win, and at the end of the week those gold cards will never be available again. This game mode is very difficult. It is not recommended that you play this mode until you have a high winrate and a very advanced understanding of the game. This game mode is not ranked and you could end up playing against top players. For more information on Conquest, please read this.

Cards

There are two types of cards, spells and units. Spells have a mana cost and their printed effects trigger as soon as you play them. Units also have a mana cost, a power and health stat, and also other effects that we will get into. You can play as many units or spells as you have mana for. Below is a guide to demonstrate the different parts of a card:

Can I play yet?

Now that you are familiar with the menus, know all the card types and game modes, it’s time to start playing! If you are new to card games, I would recommend playing the tutorial. If you have played card games before I would still recommend playing the tutorial since there are some mechanics that are unique to Skyweaver that are introduced. After that, I suggest that you head into practice mode and play against the bot. When learning any card game, the first thing you should do is gain familiarity with the cards and there is really no easy way to do this other than repetition through playing. In practice mode there is no turn timer, so you can take your time reading cards carefully and learning to recognize them. When playing you can simply hover your mouse over any card and tooltips will appear with explanations.

That’s all for this guide! Let me know what you think, and if you have any questions. In the next guide, we will be diving into heroes, terminology, and core game mechanics.