For those of you still playing The Elder Scrolls: Legends card game, and I have to confess I've lapsed for the last few months, a new expansion is on the way, and might finally make your dwemer-based dreams come true. Return to Clockwork City will be released on 30 November, and will add 55 new cards plus 35 story missions to the game. This is the second PvE expansion Legends has received, the first being The Fall of the Dark Brotherhood which launched in April this year.
For those not familiar with the Clockwork City, which first featured in the Elder Scrolls III's Tribunal expansion, here's what Bethesda's equivalent of a tourist brochure has to say about it: "The Clockwork City is the grand workshop of the late god Sotha Sil, who was obsessed with crafting his own forms of life, reconstructing and building on the work of the Dwemer artisans."
There are three main additions coming with the expansion, and we'll start with the most interesting: a new creature type called Fabricants. There will be five of these Fabricants in the set, (one per class colour), and they'll gain a powerful benefit from being played in conjunction with neutral cards. The idea here seems to be to encourage more players to experiment with cards like the Dwemer, which until now have been relegated largely to meme status.
Next up is Treasure Hunt, a mechanic which sounds confusing when written down but is probably quite simple once you play with it. As far as I can make out, you play the card with Treasure Hunt on, and then if you draw the card type that it's hunting for—Bethesda gives the example of a weapon—then that card will be buffed accordingly. It sounds pretty inconsistent unless you build the deck around the effect, so the payoff will need to be powerful to make it worthwhile.
Finally we've got another new mechanic called Assemble. This is based on the idea of the Clockwork City's automaton inhabitants having to repair themselves using spare parts. When you play a creature with the Assemble keyword, which are called Factotums, you'll get to pick from one of two bonuses (a bit like the Druid's 'Choose One' effects in Hearthstone). However, the big difference here is that the same bonus will be applied to all the Factotums in your hand and deck. So essentially you're committing to a particular line of play.
As someone who never really loved the Dwemer stuff in Skyrim, I can't say I'm in love with the mechanical theme of Clockwork City, but new cards are the lifeblood of any CCG so I'm glad to see Legends receiving some love. Below you'll find a gallery of the first cards revealed from the set. We'll be unveiling a card exclusively later this week, and I think we snagged a pretty decent one.
