2010 Topps Attax Baseball Product Review
Good:Creating a strategy trading card game is definately a step in the right direction, the cards look cool, the online features are cool, the games are short.
Bad: The strategy is pretty weak, too simple, it's more like playing war with a deck a of cards than an actual strategy game, the cards ratings are limited and often wrong.
The Bottom Line: PLEASE, BRING BACK STRAT-O-MATIC BASEBALL!If Topps wants to challenge non-sports trading card games like Yu-Gi-Oh, they've got to do better than this. The strategy is far too simple, both batters and pitchers have 3 ratings on each card: Fastball, Change-Up, and Speciality. Basically whoever has the higher rating in an category scores a run, it really doesn't resemble baseball as much as I expected.
If Topps were to use the Strat-O-Matic baseball blueprint for Topps Attax, every kid on the planet would be playing it. What people don't realize is that Strat-O-Matic baseball was the forefather of games like Magic, Dungeons and Dragons, Pokemon, and Yu-Gi-Oh.
Design: 3/5
The design is sharp, crisp, and the foil cards are pretty cool.
Checklist: 3/5
The checklist is fairly deep. I liked the addition of Nolan Ryan, Mickey Mantle, and other past greats. I like it when a product teaches kids about past greats. The only problem I had with the checklist was that many players were on their 2009 teams and I think that might dampen kids enthusiasm for the game, especially if it doesn't have a player that is on their favorite team.
Value: 2/5
I really don't see any value to these, I feel like I am playing with a deck of cards, not trading cards. It's also hard to determine the value of a product like this. If they expand and fix the flaws, their could be value down the road.
Enjoyability: 1/5
When playing this game, I kept wanting to play Stratomatic Baseball. After a few games, it got pretty old. It's too simple for it's own good and really doesn't involve much strategy whatsoever. I think that companies often underestimate the baseball intelligence of kids, and such is the case with 2010 Topps Attax.
Box Break
The highlights of my box break:
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Mike
Uh, Strat-o-matic had nothing to do with role-playing. And as I recall, did NOT have a level advancement system. So, to say it was the forefather of Dungeons and Dragons is a significant stretch. D & D developed / popularized level advancement (skill improvement system, “power-ups” from item collection, etc.) and role playing. Thus, D & D is really the foreather of most roleplaying games today (Yu Gi Oh, Magic, even Modern Warfare). Just using stats to run a game has been around for a lot longer… In that limited aspect, Strat-o-matic may have had a role.
Brett J. Lewis
@Mike: The creator of Magic on several occasions has credited Strat-o-Matic as the forefather of strategy based card games. There’s no leveling up in Strat-o-Matic, as it plays more like a self-contained, non-progressive version of games like D&D. I’m not taking anything away from D&D, as my favorite videogames are RPG’s. But at the same time, you can’t discount the fact that Strat-o-Matic was the first ever game to use a dice roll combined with a comprehensive set of attributes that determined the outcome of a each play and each game. Strat-o-Matic isn’t just a game that uses stats, as you make hundreds of choices during the game based on the afforementioned attributes. It also came out in 1961, which was far before D&D.