SolForge Fusion: decks that never repeat, hemmed in by four fixed cycles

From the designers behind Magic: The Gathering and Ascension, the game is still getting sets and battle passes two years after release — and players who put time into its earlier incarnation don't always see the comeback as a step forward.

Two half-decks, one combination that never comes back

The store page promises more possible deck combinations here than there are atoms in the universe. A player who logged only a few hours, then came back after years away, tells it differently: four deck cycles per match, and plenty of the higher-level cards never get drawn in time to matter. Both accounts describe the same machinery — the only question is where the promise stops holding up.

You arrive as a Forgeborn, fuse two half-decks pulled from different factions, and learn what the combination does by playing it rather than by reading rules. No card sits idle in your hand: play one and it levels up into a stronger version of itself, which changes what the match can become a turn later. You can play solo, face someone else online, or take on a campaign that rebuilds itself every run, along a different path each time.

The world is called Solis, and its story events shift with the choices players make — a rare touch in a competitive card game, where the next duel is usually the only horizon. A fully voiced tutorial means the first match needs no manual at all.

From Wizards & Warlocks to Axes & Allies, without a pause

Released on April 16, 2024, the game keeps piling up update after update on the board the studio itself maintains on Steam. In March 2026, the Wizards & Warlocks pack landed with new spells and tightened the mage faction's synergy; in January 2026, Axes & Allies brought in fresh warriors and opened the battle pass's second season alongside them. The June 2026 update left the cards untouched: it trimmed loading times and cleaned up visual glitches behind the scenes.

Open the game in March and there is new magic to try; open it again in June and nothing in your hand has changed — it simply loads faster. That is the cadence of a studio treating its own game as an ongoing service, and the same cadence keeps the season pass alive months later, the one some players read as a second bill.

Three thousand hours on one side, nineteen on the other, the same verdict

You come in with no idea how the factions work and, a few hours later, you are already testing impossible fusions. And on Steam, where the game is sold, the players who vouch for it clearly outnumber those who warn you off, even if it is far from winning everyone over. One player past three thousand hours, writing in March 2025, still points to deck fusion as the thing that holds Magic: The Gathering fans. A newcomer — nineteen hours, in April 2024 — calls the game easy to pick up and that year's release a pleasant surprise; another player, seventy-seven hours in as of September 2025, lands on the same surprise in their own words.

Some play it for the machinery rather than for Magic nostalgia: almost eighty hours were enough, in August 2024, for one player to call this very nearly the perfect card game — buying a ready-made deck off the internet to win gets you nothing here, because victory rests on how creatures interact and on what you decide, not on luck. The same player adds a caveat: serious bugs still surface, and the interface could have used more visual care.

A player writing in Russian, in May 2026 and six hours in, describes matches that wrap up in under 25 minutes and deck generation that runs almost on its own. The same write-up flags the flip side: the luck of the draw in each half-deck can hand you a lopsided set of cards from the start.

Returning players didn't recognize what came back

Not every session ends in a thumbs up. You buy an extra card expecting to customize what matters and find that only the trimming moves — the main deck stays locked. Three hours in, in January 2026, one player sums up that very practical frustration: the store sells extra decks and cards, yet nobody is allowed to alter the core ones. The bigger complaint is pacing: too much work for too little back, and a game that drags even with the play animations sped up.

The harshest take, though, comes from someone who played the earlier version years ago and took it hard when it went offline. Two hours into the relaunch, in August 2026, that player calls the comeback worse than remembered: the monetization draws fire — a battle pass plus an extra deck sold separately — and so does the detail that grates most, the cap of four deck cycles per match. Cards built for the endgame may never be drawn once the deck runs dry, and the fusion system still forces you to haul them along for the whole match. It is the same rule this article opened with — except that, seen from the predecessor, it doesn't set the deck free: it narrows it right in the middle of the road.

Twenty-five minutes decide who stays

A Magic: The Gathering fan curious about what Richard Garfield did next, or an Ascension player who followed Justin Gary, will find in deck fusion the same itch to build the next combination the moment the last one ends. Anyone with a thin slice of spare time between obligations gets a card game that fits into a break: under 25 minutes a round, according to the people playing it.

Anyone who wants a grip on their own main deck instead of taking whatever the fusion hands them, or who distrusts a battle pass inside a card game, hits the wall early — the two toughest accounts here gave up at two and three hours, not at two hundred. The cap of four cycles per match is the exact point where the promise of a deck that never repeats meets its ceiling: generous for an afternoon's curiosity, tight for anyone who wanted to carry every high-level card from the first turn to the last.