As I took some more steps, the metal and wires started trembling. A bit closer, and the tremors evolved to jerking and spasms. That, naturally, didn’t stop me. Not because I am a brave man, but because my cowardice was second to my indignation for the afterlife to be so boring, so… tepid. Milquetoast.

Eventually, one of the mounds revealed deep, bejeweled eyes until then hidden by the rubble. No, not eyes adorned with jewels. It was actually playing the game on them, matching diamonds and rubies and whatnot. Doing the little dopamine-spiking sounds, too.

A hand jerked out of the metal and wires. It was a half-human, half-dog extremity. Built for neither speed nor giving hand-jobs on a dark alley, which is probably the reason why our hands evolved such prehensility. The best masturbators would reproduce, with the lesser ones being left to die without descendants. That is, until someone discovered the new mouth with reduced teeth that we had evolved due to our new cooked meat diet was fantastic for more than chewing on well-done steaks.

Then, another hand, and with both the Warden heaved the burden of his body, rearranging the remaining plates and wires to compose his torso and legs, which he had crossed , remaining in a sitting position before us.

“A new face visits The Warden.”

“Warden of what? What are exactly you guarding?”

“This house. Your house. I am but a figment of the one who should keep you imprisoned here.”

Eh, so I was a prisoner. I took it calmly. There weren’t others around to teach me to pick up the soap, so, as far as being held prisoner went? I was absolutely Gucci.

“If I refuse to play card games, will you leave me die from starvation?” I inquired further.

“Those who forfeit the divine task of generating energy for the goddess are sent to an afterafterlife where they are forced to play T.E.G. to survive,” The Warden informed with his heavy, mechanical voice.

Putting it in perspective, playing card games was not the worst of fates possible.

“Fine, I will play the fucking card game. Maybe it’s better than the ones back on Earth. And less addictive.”

Several points of light waltzed in front of me, and soon enough, each one became a card. Ethereal, transparent images of my base collection floated before me. I tried to touch a card with my index finger and it expanded. It showed a German shepherd-ish dog sitting, depressed, next to a hammer and some empty bottles of liquor. Above the card image there was the title: Past Thor’s Ale-Man.

I grunted. The pun was terrible.

In the top right corner there was a red diamond, representing the card’s health points: four. On the top left corner, a white three inside the black silhouette of a gun. This had to be the attack, or how stripped the pooch was. Given it was a German and not an American shepherd, I inclined myself for the former. The text box, in the inferior part of the card’s body, only had flavor text:

“When Present Thor’s Ale-man took his job, he almost takes his life!” it announced, probably cheerfully or in a concerned tone. I don’t know, I don’t read tone into badly-written flavor text.

“I see, a lot of vanilla beaters…” I commented as I skimmed through my collection.

“You have some cards with walkies effects too,” pointed out Blacky.

“Do I assume that is how play or summon effects are called here?”

The Warden nodded.

“Fine, so… how is this game played, at all.”

“You will learn by playing”, informed the Warden.

Grunting, I sat in front of the gigantic half-dog- half-person robot and began browsing my collection. It was useless: without knowing the basic ruleset of the game, making a coherent deck resulted impossible.

“There is a default deck that you are given on the tutorial, right?”

“No. You need to make one with your base collection,” answered Blacky.

“Without knowing the rules of the game,” I said, matter-of-factly.

“Just grab fifty cards, no more than four copies of each card, and start a match against The Warden.”

I gave up in my attempts to reason with a bunch of dogs, and just picked the fairest curved shit I saw. Cards clearly had a cost below the textbox, and I imagined mana was not main-decked like lands in Magic the Gathering or sigils in Eternal. Cards had different icons besides what I assumed needed to be the cost to play them. Judging by the low variety of symbols and their positions, I assumed they were equivalent to the colors in MTG.

I decided to make my deck with only two factions or types or attributes or whatever of cards. I chose the ones with a little symbol of a purse dog and the ones with a Golden Retriever on them. Assuming the game played somewhat like the aforementioned, or maybe Legends of Runaterra or The Game Who Shall Not Be Named.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

What I ended up making was an attempt at aggroish-midrange, based on the few information I had. Pick the shit with aggressive statlines, pray to god the keywords were what I thought they were, have a few big beatsticks for late game, and in to the duel.

“I am ready, Warden.”

“Choose a deck.”

I choose my deck of dogs and the room began to shake as the Warden got into position. He shifted his weight from leg to leg, and the shapes around us started wavering, as if hot air currents were rising from the floor and going towards the ceiling because that’s what hot air does. Very simple life, that of hot air. Enviable life, even.

Reality around us began shaking, and the form of The Warden, shrinking. Pugteors shot around us, struggling to breathe in their eternal drift through an empty space were every star was caricature-bone-shaped. The Warden’s cards came out of the crevices of his plates and formed a deck to a side. Then, a giant coin was cast between us, one side with my face, the other with the warden’s image. It landed with my face face-up.

“You go first,” The Warden informed with his jackalesque smile.

My cards popped out of my interface and floated to my side, shuffling themselves into a deck. A white platform rose from black nothingness, and the deck rested upon it.

“At least I can blame the auto-shuffler if I lose.”

A watery, azure circle floated out of the darkness below, and seemed to break through a veil of nylon to finally emerge under our feet.

“Is this whole scenario building cutscene thing skippable?” I asked Blacky.

“Only after you have seen it once.”

I groaned in annoyance as spirals of winged collies ascended around us, painting the sky orange with their tails. I get it, world, you are retarded (With all the intention of it being a slur against reality) and absurd, now let me play the fucking game!

After a succession of events that included earthquakes, shining lights, a charging hippopotamus, a guy riding a rock while manipulating reality to lit a cigar, and, last but not least, a sled pulled by Golden retrievers spreading fluff all over us and the playstage, The warden ordered me to draw.

“How many cards?”

“Draw!”

“How. Many. Cards.” I asked again.

The Warden kept barking orders. So I tried to look at how many he had drawn. Five. Okay, looked like a sensible amount for a starting hand. I had a couple of 1-drops, a single 2-drop, and two draw spells I had included because they seemed useful for refueling.

A sphere of a blue, hard, porous substance that gave off smelly powder when touched floated by my left.

“Blacky, is this a resource?”

“Omnikibble, sir, the way to summon most cards in the game.”

The return of the painful groan.

“Do booster packs include means to suicide?” I made a minute of silence. Were I seriously considering playing T.E.G? “No, forget it, this is marginally better.”

“They do include bath tubs and toasters, sir,” he answered anyway.

I summoned one of my one drops, “Scorned Chihuahua”, a simple 2 attack, 1 health creature. The ominkibble disappeared with a chomp sound, the dog dropped into the battlefield and, seeing my new friend had summoning sickness —he was snoring like a motherfucker— I looked around for the end turn button. It was nowhere to be found.

“Blacky, how do I end my turn?”

“You draw your next card, thus concluding your actual turn.”

“Oh.”

I did exactly as I was told, and a message in red letters floated in front of me. “TURN ENDED” It read. In all caps. Why? What has language done to you, Goddess?

The Warden raised his hand-paw, touched the omnikibble and it lost its shine, becoming darker, as if its internal light had died off. Then, he drew a card, his turn concluded.

I stretched my hand towards my deck, used to the start of turn draws of other games, but I luckily stopped at the last moment. Then I noticed I had only one unit of omnikibble, again.

“Blacky, doesn’t omnikibble increase naturally along the course of the game?”

“Omnikibble refills up to current maximum at the beginning of every turn. You may invest one unit any turn to increase this maximum by one. This is done by gently tapping the omnikibble. This spends the omnikibble. Alternatively, you can run up to three kibble cards, in their special deck, which are used to the same effect, without any cost, and you can choose to draw instead of a card from your main deck any turn. Your current deck includes no kibble cards.” He explained with his usual, plain tone, his card spinning in the air as he pointed at the different parts of the game board.

“Thanks, Blacky.”

I decided to invest my omnikibble, doing the same that the Warden had done. I drew a new card to end my turn. It was a brick. And, considering I could either play my cards or gain mana, that made a 5-cost unit even slower to get out. I’d have to extend on the board by playing my low cost drops to have enough left over to invest, however, as otherwise my hand was very likely to brick.

Too late I realized I had forgot to attack with my Chihuahua.

The Warden invested one omnikibble and passed his turn. The chances were his first decks had horrible curves, or I had gotten lucky. Anyway, I couldn’t afford myself more mistakes, or I risked him playing something I could not beat over. My deck was a finely tuned machine of death. That is, its only purpose was to fail catastrophically and cause my defeat. I was sure it would soon produce enough bricks to solve the housing crisis of all of Asia.

With my turn arriving, I invested one omnikibble and used the other to play another one drop: Peckish Ness, a small dog disguised as a plesiosaur with an impressive 3/2 in stats and Anxiety (Which means it will attack the turn it is played.) This all, of course, couldn’t come without a downside: the next turn, Peckish Ness would consume one unit of omnikibble.

I swung with both my dogs, and they ran towards my enemy. Fist the Chihuahua, who barked furiously at the Warden, reducing his health by two points. Then the Peckish ness attacked, a barking, fluffy tornado that jumped straight at the warden’s face and lunged at him, colliding with an invisible wall it, nonetheless, tried to chew off. Now the warden was at nineteen health points, from his starting twenty-four. I checked mine. I had twenty-six.

“Blacky, explain to me why did I start with more health than him.”

“Well, sir, it depends on the card categories you are using. Your deck uses two different categories: small and big dogs. His is using three, therefore, he starts with slightly lower total health. It’s done for balance reasons. The more you use, the less starting health.” Blacky explained as The Warden goldfished.

“So, aggro can use all categories to better go under control, and control is best served by playing one or two categories only?”

“Yes, but there are aggro decks that use less categories to have a better match-up against other aggressive decks. There also are low-life control decks, but we don’t talk about those.”

“How do they deal with burn decks?” I scratched my chin, pensive.

“Scooping.”

The game seemed not only complex, but exponentially more stupid with every bit of information revealed to me. I feared that this could be only the tip of the iceberg. I was wrong. The game wasn’t an iceberg of stupidity.

It’s the whole Antarctica.