Victors Verses: The Hidden League of Legends TCG?

Tonights box is one of those I bought just so I could say I had one of everything. If you shop around AliExpress for cards you will keep running across “League of Legends” cards… but they don’t seem to be based on the PC game we all know and love. Or maybe they are? If they are it isn’t clearly marked or branded. Instead these share a branding of “Hero’s Glory, Victors Verses” which maybe that’s what League of Legends is called in China? Something tells me this isn’t the hidden League of Legends TCG you’ve been looking for, but maybe they will still turn out interesting?

The Box

I’m not seeing any League of Legends artwork or characters here. These look like pretty generic Chinese mythology characters like you might see in a mobile game or something. Maybe these are mobile game cards like those Identity V ones I keep hating on? This is a 2-yuan box, I got it for 18$ from Anime Card Store, I even showed the package arriving in this Mail Call post. I can’t remember how I picked this one, that vendor still has 5 different boxes available – 3 of which are 2-yuan boxes. Are they all the same set? Who knows, but this one is labeled WD1Z as the set number, maybe this is the first set?

The box art is fairly pedestrian here, just flat color printing on cheap coated cardboard. No foil, or emboss or anything fancy like that. These are just 2-yuan boxes, but there also doesn’t seem to be a 5 or 10 yuan level in these sets. Maybe these are just cheaper product designed to fill low-end shelf space? Or maybe the gaming aspect of this is what removes the need for higher end product – game players would need multiple copies of cards anyway.

And that is what makes this product so interesting to me, this is an actual game, or at least it comes with actual rules and a board. This is the first box I’ve opened that has had a little pamphlet folded into it. Just like the Pokemon TCG booster boxes, this comes with a little foldout player mat and rule guide. From the little of this I can make out there is a full on gaming system here, maybe slightly more complex than Pokemon, nothing like MTG, it definitely relies on that rock-paper-scissors design.

Other cards, like the Demon Slayer ones, have HP and defense values printed on them and even more breakdowns on the pack. But I think those are more like a way to mimic the stats you see on baseball cards and give the designers something to add to the cards beyond just the artwork. But these come with instructions and a clear system for all the icons and values printed on them.

That’s just 1/2 of the rules, the other side then has the player board showing you how to set up your various card piles to start and play the game. This seems to be going over what the values on the cards mean and then what each color represents. You see those three bars on the lower left of each card? Those cane have different colors for different types of attacks/defenses. These colors then make up the rock-paper-scissors balance philosophy if I had to guess.

The Cards

The packs share the red color from the box but feature a young girl in a Santa hat maybe as the artwork? The labeling is about how the gathering of heroes is about to happen and this the first set. That matches the WD1Z designation. I’m unsure how many sets of these exist and I don’t think I’ll buy another box unless the cards are seriously impressive. The back of the box features a set list, but it’s just words so I scanned it and added it to the database here if you ever need that.

As for the cards, well each pack contains 6. I’m unsure the default rarities, but the pack I opened had 4 R and 2 SR. I know the set includes SSR and higher tiers to so I suspect that one or both of the SR slots could upgrade with luck. And look! The cards have a real TCG back, this implies that this is a real hidden-information level game. They have a cheap feel like those Naruto cards did, but they all have at least some level of coating on them. This rare have a holographic foil pattern overlaid on it that looks pretty nice.

Then you see the card has all those stats for the game, like the type icon in the upper left. The star ranking is a cost-type thing for how many can be in the deck and how much to play, how powerful they are. This one has 8 stars, but it looks like 12 could fit, and I’ve seen pictures online of cards with rainbow stars, that might be an even higher rank. Then the atk/hp values and some kind of special skill. The empty box on the lower right usually has some rules in it but this card doesn’t have any special rules.

These other 2 rares I almost thought were dupes at first, but they just have similar colors. If you look one is just 4 silver stars, while the other is 7 gold – I have no idea what those mean beyond 7 > 4 and gold > silver. I also have been trying to translate these or figure out the names but no luck so far. This is making me more sure that this is some kind of Chinese market mobile property or something like that.

The two SR cards look blue in the scan, both because they are kind of blue but also because they have another blue metallic foil coating on them. They also have embossed patterns in the background behind the art. They do look much better than the R cards, but still nothing even close to the 5-yuan My Little Pony cards in quality or complexity.

But oh boy, did one of these cards finally break the case on what exactly these are! So that blue demon looking card has those two silver characters in the upper left – that’s the cards name. They all have a name but none have helped me figure anything out yet, this card is called “Mozi”. Type that into google and you won’t get much, but you might get a video thumbnail that kind of looks like this blue demon – that’s what I saw. When I clicked on it I figured out these cards are from a mobile game called “Honor of Kings”!

So like I was suspecting for a bit now, these are mobile gaming cards just like those Identity V ones – but with a bit more actual game structure around them. This game is published by Tencent and pretty old in China, but new in the global markets, in fact currently only playable in Brazil as a test market. You can see why everybody advertises these as league of legends cards – this game is a literal copy lol. But these are not league of legends cards and have nothing to do with that property.

Conclusion

Well, mystery solved I guess. It is a TCG, and a fairly complex one, but the art is all taken from a mobile MOBA game published by Tencent designed to compete with League of Legends. There are actual League of Legends cards available and I will go and find some, but these are not it. So if you see “Victors Verses” on a box – ignore the marketing, unless you are actually looking to play this likely insanely obscure TCG from China.

I’m going to leave this article as is, with the mystery narrative, I think it’s more fun to read that way and I’m too lazy to go and re-write everything. I literally figured all this out as I was writing the post, you are seeing that all in real time. I promise I’ll pick something more exciting for the next post.