Millennium Blades: Set Rotation Expansion Review

Millennium Blades is a special game. It's messy, prone to awkward card interactions, and not at all streamlined. People like to throw around the word elegant to describe certain designs, and Millennium Blades is anything but. However, what this game lacks in grace it makes up for in sheer ingenuity. It's a brilliant concept that's well executed and it concluded 2016 as one of my top games of the year. It's no surprise I tore the shrink off Set Rotation like a toddler beneath a Douglas fir on Christmas morning.

This expansion is all about more. More expansion, master, and promo sets for you to mix into your base game. More promos to boost tournament participation prizes. And more characters and starting decks to hike setup variety.

Those latter two are the big dogs. You'd have to play Millennium Blades every week to really assimilate all of the different sets making up the original release. However, you quickly run through all of the starting characters and the desire for more approaches swiftly. The new personalities on offer are interesting and feature more wild abilities. You get crazy nonsense like forcing a swap of friendship cards and then later battling the person you befriended. Another lets you pull random sets that are out of the game into your deck for maximum trickery. My favorite is the literal card shark who can sell an unlimited amount of cards to the box at $2 a pop, although his victory points from money at end game is halved. We're dealing with interesting, not mundane effects.

Jawesome.

The infusion of many more starting decks is arguably the bigger add. They dictate a large degree of starting tempo and the existing decks get repetitive over time. It's great to see this area was focused on as a weak point and given a great deal of consideration in the design process.

Beyond the two shakeups in starting situation the rest is really a one step forward, one step back waltz of sorts. All the additional sets to mix up the main deck are nice, but the inclusion of a bevy of new Core cards kind of gums things up. The ratio of core to non remains the same as you add an additional set of each type to the mix, but the deck is fickle and sometimes prone to longer stretches of core-only output. This is a relatively minimal problem but worth noting.

The larger foible is the new cooperative mode of play. Set Rotation includes several new bosses and a fresh team-up mode where players collaborate to save the world from encroaching chaos. It's a splendid idea and one I was initially excited for, but that buzz pulled off its best Andy Dufresne impression and quickly evaporated into thin air. At least the warden was left with a poster of Raquel Welch.

The problem is that this coop mode is a neutered, stripped down version of the system. It guts out much of the magic as collections, the meta, and friendship are all tossed in the garbage bin. It loses that double-layer Inception game within a game element, and instead re-purposes itself as simply a mediocre card game.

New Coop deckbuilding powers! Too bad you won’t ever use them.

This misplay isn't too egregious as it makes up only a small portion of the entire offering. You can drown your sorrow in the included standalone mini-card game Pocket Pro Tour. This is kind of an oddball inclusion but it remains close to the theme of Millennium Blades while straying far mechanically. As a small feature and addition to the expansion it certainly works, but it's not spectacular enough on its own to warrant a separate buy. It also forces the consumer to make the awkward decision of either storing it in the Millennium Blades box-reducing its likelihood to receiving attention-or storing it separately even though it’s tethered to its sibling. Including it is not a miscue, but the question is whether it really adds any value to the proposition.

Millennium Blades is phenomenal. Set Rotation is a step below that descriptor. That's not to say it isn't a worthy purchase because it does add quite a bit of additional cards, including some really humorous sets. The word mandatory doesn't really enter the picture though.