I’m still very much enjoying Elder Scrolls Legends (ESL), having purchased the final piece of the Dark Brotherhood expansion and collected its cards. I still have a few of the missions to beat on Master difficulty, but no rush on that as all you get is some crafting materials.

The number of viable ladder decks is really nice. Granted, I’m not talking from experience about the top leagues, but in the middle of the pack, I face plenty of variety, and tinkering with a bunch of different decks, the results are generally positive. I also like the different themes of the colors, and how you can mix them to create some nice complimentary decks. My current favorite is a yellow/purple creature spam deck, with multiple cards the buff incoming creatures, with the ‘win condition’ being siege engine that gets stronger the more creatures you have on the field. It’s far from a perfect deck, but it’s fun and so far seems to work.

One thing I could do without in ESL however is the partnership with Twitch, where if you watch a stream that is showing ESL, you have a random change to get in-game rewards such as currency or crafting mats. In theory this sounds like a nice tie-in, where if you want to watch someone play a game you enjoy, getting a reward is a fun little bonus. In reality it just means that if you are at all serious about ESL, you always have a tab of a Twitch ESL stream open, running in the background and getting you passive rewards. Sorry to anyone who has a bandwidth cap, or internet slow enough that one continuously running stream will be noticeable.

Sure, you don’t HAVE to do this, but again, if you are somewhat serious in progressing, not collecting what is essentially a free reward over time is very sub-optimal and ‘feels bad’. I’m really hoping this isn’t an upcoming trend and more games don’t start doing this. Imagine if you are playing 3-4 different games at a time, and since each has a Twitch partnership, you have 4 background stream tabs? Ugh… that’s going to happen isn’t it?