For those of you who haven't, I've been following the Warcraft trading card game since it came out and I've deemed it, as most other Warcraft media tends to be these days, a mixed bag. On the one hand, the card game is good and fun, as far as card games go, the loot cards are usually nice touches, it introduces characters with cool design, and even for those of you/us who don't buy it, it's a venue for a lot of cool art (some of you may have noticed I've incorporated a number of TCG characters into my fanfiction). On the other hand, it's become somewhat self-indulgent to some artists, it's given official legitimacy to in-jokes and game mechanics (Leeroy Jenkins, Dudefella, Battle Preparations, etc), and the loot cards can come off as obvious cash grabs.

Servants of the Betrayer is the most mixiest bag of them all. When it first came out, we learned that it would offer players the chance to play "traitors," these are hero character who are not aligned with the usual racial factions. On top of that, these traitor characters have the ability to ally with some of the more notable villains of Warcraft. Now while this is, in all practical application, preposterous (you could have a party led by a leper gnome who's allied with the Aldor, with an Aldor marksman, Tyrande Whisperwind, Katrana Prestor, Kael, and Lady Vashj) I still thought it was fun to propose that these heroes and villains, y'know, still go out and do stuff every once in a while, and I'm willing to gloss over the wacky group makeup as a necessary game mechanic (which you kind of have to do for the computer game, as well). Not to mention that we get cool new art for these iconic characters (I particularly liked Katrana's, it gives her much more personality than her in-game avatar).

However it seems that every hero character has two versions. A "good," or perhaps more specifically, standard-aligned character, and a "dark mirror" version of that character. For example, there are two versions of a blood elf mage named Vor'na: Vor'na the Disciplined, and Vor'na the Wretched.

While most of the game can be rationalized into sort of "real" representations and symbols for something else, I can't really excuse this one. Ostensibly one could claim that these are "before" and "after" cards. However some of these are characters who don't transition quite so easily. Remba, a dwarf priest, for example, has a normal version, and a Dark Iron version.

I feel like this was a wasted opportunity. What could have been a unique opportunity to allow us to play as and with characters from one of the other races of Azeroth and beyond (gnoll, naga, centaur, furbolg, Broken, etc. characters) not only does this simply take the traditional races and change their allegiance, but it does it in a way that, in my opinion, doesn't really work from a story perspective, when the rest of the game feasibly does. I don't even see why the "good" versions of the characters were necessary. The game's got four sets out already, you could always play as one of the heroes from those sets if you wanted something more traditional.

Anyway, I'm interested in seeing what everyone else has to say about the TCG because I realize that mine isn't a perspective that everyone may share. I'm sure some may write it off completely, while others might legitimize everything it does. And also I felt like venting.