Faeria

somehow the game is not dead yet, and that's great because the game is great

THE best "card" game ever. Though it is much more than most tcg's. The art, the sophisticated and genuinely funny and witty lore, the music, and most importantly the gameplay. ALL on point/ top tier. It is older now, but still as relevant as ever imo. Play it now! :)

Great card game, really cheap on sale, easy to gain cards, really solid single player mode.

The servers are up, and the game is great!
Enjoy one of the better digital CCGs out there. Easy to build a deck, and you get a 'booster pack' of cards after basically every win. The player base is small, so finding matches takes a few minutes, but there's also TONS of PVE content with missions, puzzles, challenges, etc, to do. Definitely worth the price of admission.

Yes, the game does not receive new content or updates anymore and yes the game requires an internet connection. But if you like anything you see you should still buy and play it!
For me it is one of the best PC tcg like games I've played. Everything is unlockable by playing. Many cards seem decent enough to be played, the card designs are great and the rules are easy to learn yet still deep enough to be satisfying.
As for the internet connection: the enemy AI is calculated on their server and I think this is a good thing. You just don't want a card game where an AI enemy takes a minute to calculate their turn that is then so bad that you question why you even play against it.
The singleplayer content is very fun so far. Puzzles where you need to win in a turn, epic battles where the enemy has some extras to make the game different etc.
Conclusion:
If you like tcgs/ccgs and want to play a game where you can actually acquire a collection without spending more than the game costs you should go for it and have fun! I can't speak for multiplayer yet but there are still people playing.

Faeria is fun. Okay, I can see myself spending 10 more hours on fighting AI on Pandora Mode. I already spent 28 hours. The rest of the game depends if I can push myself over the skill cliff of deckbuilding, because it's really hard. I can recommend this game very easily. I get to max out the utility of every monster, every decision, and win a lot.
But let's go into the reasons why this game isn't successful. NOTE: I go against AI and don't really compete.
- Faeria looks like a typo to a lot of search engines. It's very close to Fairy.
- You don't get to walk around. Like every other trading card game, you battle and these battles can get lengthy. There's no rest stop besides staring at the card collection.
- The campaign mode is fighting random NPCs with one-liners and that's it. There's no story, no satisfying closures besides winning, no secrets to unlock beyond the loot boxes of cards. The boss battles do have that unfair advantage, but there's no extra flair to them so they still look like normal NPCs to fight. While you are building a card collection, most people won't feel the dopamine of progress.
- In a fair match, the tension is not there for a lot of mid games. You either steamroll or get steamrolled. This might be because I play very defensively and haven't touched the aggressive cards. This might also be b/c I don't play competitively. I like steamrolling, but variety is the spice of life.
- Most of us will never ever beat this game, because the hard challenges are really hard. Many games can split the difficulty into Easy Mode, Normal Mode, and Hard Mode. This game doesn't split those modes, it blends them all together (easy stuff first ofc) and you know, not everyone wants to play Hard Mode. Like I said, my next 10 hours are probably going to be Pandora Mode and ignore the rest of it.
- I've fallen into playing very defensively. Like I ALWAYS go for the faeria well on the first turn. This might be a me problem, but I feel like it's the strongest strat.
What is Pandora Mode? You build a random deck 1 card at a time and play 6 random NPCs in a FAIR match. And there's rewards for it.
But again, I like the game. But again, I like utilizing every card to the most of its ability, being very goal-orientated when I place new land, and then steamrolling my AI opponents.

This is a really good game that was unfortunately killed due to bad microtransaction management. Absolutely fantastic and unique gameplay, and it's super pretty.