Gameplay

Lost Portal is played with a customized deck of cards which includes resources called aeons, creatures, spells and magic items.

Casting Spells

To cast spells in Lost Portal, you must have aeon energy (i.e., mana) of the proper color in your aeon field.  Your aeon field is refreshed at the start of each turn.  Some ways you can gain aeon energy:

– You gain a number of starting aeons based on your Wisdom ability score (score/5).  These aeons are randomly chosen at the start of each duel, but you will always gain one of each color before you gain a second of the same color.

– You gain one aeon at the start of each duel based on your color affinity, which is chosen when you create your character.

– You play Aeon cards to gain aeon energy; your deck should always have a decent percentage of Aeon cards, or you will have trouble casting spells.

– Creature abilities can provide additional aeon energy.

Targets

To cast a spell, you drag it from your hand to a location on the screen,  depending on its target, if any.  Some cards have no target, in which case they are cast by dragging the card to the discard pile. Creatures are cast by dragging the creature to an open slot in the middle, on your side of the board.  Magic items can also be cast onto an open slot in on the board or can target one of your creatures, if it isn’t already equipped with a magic item.  Spells can target a player, a creature or even a card in the opponent’s hand.

Combat

Your creatures attack at the end of your turn, dealing their damage to any blocking creatures or the enemy player. They do not take damage back from defending creatures.  Damage carries over from turn to turn, although some creatures have regenerate which can restore life to the creature at the start of each turn.

15 thoughts on “Gameplay”

    1. When you drag a card you want to create into the middle of the forge, you will see rarity symbols all around it. You must drag cards from your library that match those rarities. When you double-press a card to see the large version of the card, you will see the rarity of that card near the bottom middle of the card.

  1. Not of import, but I’ve often wondered why the Orc Neopyte is tougher than the Orc Captain.

    1. Their stats are pretty similar, with the Orc Captain having more agility and the Orc Neophyte having more intellect. Their decks are very different (black/red vs red/blue), so perhaps you are finding the red/blue deck more challenging. I can take a look at making the captain a little tougher. He did just gain a new Avatar card (Turn to Ash).

      1. The new avatar cards are cool. In hard mode the neophyte has one more special ability than the captain.

  2. What determines which cards drop from a defeated opponent, appear as dungeon rewards, can be bought, or forged?

    Maybe I am just being unlucky but I’m playing a blue deck and can count on one hand the number of really useful cards that have dropped for me or I’ve bought or forged.

    I’ve seen my enemies use cards I’d love to have and they never appear for sale or in the forge (I’m not talking about Avatar cards although I’ve never won one of those either).

    I have received some multi-colour aeon cards which might be useful if I had enough of them to guarantee being able to cast other coloured spells. But I’ve no idea how to acquire useful ones… the ones I’ve gotten are too broad in their colour choice to work for me.

    Am I missing something?

    Thanks

    Matt

    1. Hi Matt,

      Great questions, let me see if I can answer them all for you!

      Loot from opponents
      At the end of a duel, the winner pulls 2-3 cards randomly from the opponent’s deck. There is a chance that it gets converted to gold based on the value of the card that would have been stolen. So if a rare or ultra-rare card is selected, you lose (or win) more gold than if a common aeon card is taken. Since cards are from the player’s deck, if you are facing an opponent who plays black cards, you can expect to win a black card or gold.

      Dungeon Rewards, Card Shops and Forges
      The cards that appear in dungeons are generally random, so they could be any color. Card Shops and Forges have a certain number of cards of each color/rarity, chosen randomly. So if you are playing blue, you should see some rare blue cards in the Card Shop and Forge. By the way, if you press the Library label in the deck editor you can see all cards in the card pool, so you can find out which cards you haven’t found yet.

      Avatar Cards
      I don’t know how far into the game you have played, but almost every enemy has an Avatar card. The drop rate for an Avatar card is around 33% if I remember correctly, but if you defeat the same enemy three times you will definitely get their Avatar card. Since you can’t easily face the same boss multiple times (until the end game Ancient Portal opens), you generally won’t get all of the Boss Avatar cards each time you play.

      Dual-Aeon Cards
      These cards are valuable for splashing other colors, especially if you increase your Wisdom so you have more starting Aeons in your Aeon Pool. An example would be if you were playing Red and splashed Logic Storm to gain more card draw. Eventually when you get enough dual-aeons, you can easily play a two color deck and it can be extremely powerful. You can also play with many Gold cards that require Aeons of all colors to cast. Dual Aeon cards are also very powerful with Gray (colorless) cards that can be cast with any colored Aeons from your Aeon Pool.

      If I had to guess I would say you need to keep playing and get through more dungeons (which all have a Card Shop hidden somewhere within) and get to new towns (that also have Card Shops and new Forges). Speaking of Forges, keep in mind you can make duplicates of cards that you already own using the Forge, although it isn’t a cheap option.

  3. Thanks, I should say I am generally enjoying the game very much.

    I’m on the third town so I’ve no idea how far through the base game I am. I’ve found the difficulty to be very variable so far.

    It seems like Blue is a poor choice for a deck since you fight very few good Blue oppononents, at least to this point, and hence get very few blue card drops. I guess I’ve been unlucky in terms of shops & forge too.

    I’ve had pretty good success until I’ve met an Ogre Shaman in Tryndel who seems to have a deck with a large number of rare and ultra-rare cards. For reference I have two rares in my deck (and a couple of copies in my library) and no ultra-rares at all.

    I’ve run this guy a couple of close battles but he always has some great cards I can’t match and I can’t beat him. I’m also thinking I am now stuck since there is nowhere left for me to farm XP to gain an extra advantage or to pick up extra cards that might give me some kind of edge.

    I’d welcome any advice.

    Thanks.

    Matt

    1. Hi Matt –

      Sorry to hear you are struggling with blue; I usually consider it one of the stronger colors, between the card draw, armored, and disruption spells. By Tryndel you must have seen some blue rares available for purchase/forge, so it is a little surprising you only have two rares in your deck at this point. There are eight card shops between Boradir (and nearby dungeons) and Miradyl (and its dungeons) and all of them have at least one blue rare. Perhaps you just didn’t like what you saw?

      I just looked in the code and actually you’ve helped me uncover a mistake – that Ogre Shaman is out of place in Tryndel, which is why he is tougher than he should be. I’ll fix that in the next update, but it will only help new campaigns that haven’t already made it to that location. You can try changing the campaign to ‘easy’ (if it isn’t already) to help get through him. Eventually, he’ll get a bad draw…

      Mike

      1. Hi Mike.

        After grinding a lot of battles I did manage to put him down. Part of the problem was that he was sporting essentially the same style deck as me only with a lot of considerably higher powered cards. I tuned to counter him as best as I could then then grinded losses until I got a break 🙂

        It’s less that I’m struggling with blue so much as it seems that the blue player get a rougher deal because very few opponents use blue and therefore blue drops are far less frequent. Whereas I have picked up a huge number of black & red cards and, to a slightly lesser extent, green.

        I do have some rares but I’ve seen several cards played by opponents (e.g. that Ogre Shaman) that I’ve not seen dropped or available in any of the shops or in the forge. It’s a bit frustrating.

        Two further bugbears while I am thinking about it:

        1) when you are forced to discard because you are drawing with a full hand it would be great if you could pick the card. Often I’ve forgotten to move the card I want to the left slot and accidentally lost a card I would keep.

        2) There are many situations where you need to click through with some kind of pause (e.g. to enter a town, or after a victory). I often find myself clicking over and over either because I am not sure where to click, or I feel like I was supposed to wait longer. Please can you just provide a button?

        Again really enjoying the game and I will definitely pick up the expansions. And thanks also for your gracious replies.

        Thanks.

        Matt

  4. Without wishing to go on about it too much, but I just reached the card seller in the Ogre mound lvl3 and he has exactly the same blue cards as have been for sale in the other sellers. I was going to report back what he had but – I’m not sure if I’ve hit a bug – but he doesn’t seem to be back in town?

    Matt

    p.s. if there’s a better way to communicate than leaving comments please let me know.

    1. Yes, you can email me at lostportalccg@gmail.com
      To answer your question – the cards from that shop keep merge in with the shop keep that is already in town.
      There are approximately 10 rares and 10 ultra-rares in each color (more added with the expansions), so you will see duplicates for sale as they are chosen randomly. By the time you are done with the campaign you will have seen most rares and ultra-rares.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *