Cold One Riders - Warhammer: Invasion

Welcome to Jurassic Empire!

This time I'm going to take a lot at an older card game, but not too old. It's called Warhammer: Invasion, which is like W40k except with the sci-fi trappings replaced with fantasy ones. It's one of the LCGs the Fantasy Flight Games has stopped printing new expansions for, but the game lasted for quite a while, having even more expansions than its space-based counterpart that was released after its retirement.

So I'm starting off with a card that is aesthetically awesome. What's so awesome about it? It is an elf riding a dinosaur! It gets even better. When you look at the name "Cold One", along with the icy backdrop in the art, the implication is this is also an arctic dinosaur! It is really difficult to cram this much awesome into one card.

Another thing I really like about this card is a little harder to explain, but it comes down to statistics. Say you have a two mostly blank cards, one with a bunch of 1s printed on it and another with 4s and 5s. Now say you have two pieces of art, one depicting a turtle and another depicting a dragon. On which card would you put the turtle art, and on which would you put the dragon? Naturally, the dragon would go on the card with the higher stats, because dragons are bigger, better, and more special than turtles are. When you make a game card with high stats, you have to make sure what you put on it feels worthy of those stats, and this card succeeds with that.

One final thing to mention is a strange quirk with the Core Set. While the game acknowledges that it has six main races, there are only decks printed for four of them: Dwarf, Empire, Orc, and Chaos. The other two, High Elf and Dark Elf, and left to stew until they get their own full decks in the next deluxe expansion. To tide players over though, there were a handful of cards belonging to these races printed in the set. I only mention this because that means, in the box, this card would have felt even more special, since it's a member of a rarer race.