Power, as an alternative currency, is now an established feature of the TFW. We use Power in order enter to leagues and tournaments and we gain it from placing 1-3 in Expert Clashes.

But what is the real point of Power? I must admit that I never really understood the need for a second currency besides Gold and now when it is pretty firmly established that 1 Power = 9 Gold, I find it even harder to understand why we need it.

Maybe I am just missing something obvious here... At any rate, I think it would be better - from a marketing point of view and from a newbie's point of view - to have only one currency.

Perhaps someone could be nice enough to enlighten me on this
(Hm... Have I posted about this before?)

A lot of games have multiple currencies, it's a way to simulate more activity. However, in these games, the two are not interchangeable and in most, one of these isn't even tradable or convertible to another.

I think the implementation of power is wrong in this game. One shouldn't be able to buy/sell/trade power and tournaments shouldn't allow both power and gold as entry fees.

Gold should be the result of paying $. Power should be the result of playing/winning.

Gold should allow you to buy singles or optimized packs (based off expansion and/or domain) as well as enter gold-only tournaments that reward more gold. Power should allow you to buy less optimized packs (drawing from the entire card pool or packs having less benefits than gold packs: less chance for odds/rares, less uncommons, less cards) or join in power-only tournaments that reward more power, unoptimized packs or less gold than gold-only tournaments.

You've also forgotten about the third, mysterious currency... Acorns. I think acorns should be awarded instead of phantoms, these would allow you to buy cards off the market at the current gold price, but you pay acorns instead of gold. You don't get the card from the market, though... you get a phantom. Then, phantoms would not be allowed in gold and power-only tournaments, only free tournaments, like the EC.

Just what I think...

Anyway, the reason behind multiple currencies is giving non-paying players a competitive chance in the game without taking away the benefits of the paying players who directly contribute to the game's exisitence. A paying player gets cards more easily than a free one, but that does that mean that a free player can't get all the cards for himself without more effort.

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Atahualpa, nice post.

You are of course right that many games have multiple currencies and this is obviously more frequent in those games that are advertised as 'Free to Play' yet having a real-life currency as well (such as TFW), than in subscription based games such as, say, WoW.

The reason behind multiple currencies must surely be that they have different, if overlapping, functions. There might be many reasons for this, and one important one is surely, as you say, to differentiate between paying and non-paying players, As we both seem to think, however, Power and Gold are only superficially different (except for how they can be obtained), making it unclear why both are needed.

As for the Acorn story, I think similar ideas have been suggested before and I think that something like it should work. A Ladder System that can't be abused would be a great help in implementing ideas of that kind.


I wonder if there perhaps are plans for Power that we haven't seen implemented yet. Perhaps jed can enlighten us

Erm... Just realized now why there are two currencies. Slightly embarrased, I confess that the reason is a bit too obvious and I can't see how i failed to notice it before....

TFW, in order to be financially sucessful, obviously needs the continuous input of real money from its players. Also, it needs something that drains the economy of that gold (so as to create a need for more investments). TFW does this by the tax- and entry fee system.

If the EC gave gold instead of Power, there would be less of an incentive for players to invest real money.