Warlords CCG

Warlords is a late-1990s fantasy CCG from the era when every publisher was trying to stake a distinctive mechanical corner of the Magic-dominated landscape, and Warlords' corner was mass-combat and multiplayer politics.

The game

Published in 1998 by AEG (Alderac Entertainment Group), Warlords CCG is a multiplayer combat duel (two to six players) where each player commands a Warlord with an army of troops across a shared Realm. Mechanics use a Unit-count attack system where armies of cards fight as blocs rather than individual creature combats, setting it apart from most Magic-descended designs.

The context

AEG had already built L5R into a multiplayer CCG community and used Warlords to test whether the multiplayer-first design could succeed outside a branded setting. It shared design DNA with Deadlands: Doomtown and Legend of the Burning Sands as a sibling product in the AEG 1998-2000 stable.

The collector angle

The base set and the Epic Edition expansion are the main AEG runs. A later revival by an independent publisher (the Warlords: Saga of the Storm re-release, which is its own separate catalog item) is often confused with the original AEG Warlords, but they are distinct product lines with incompatible card pools. Original AEG Warlords cards are genuinely scarce today because the print run was small and distribution lacked the coordinated hobby-store push L5R received. Multiplayer-format players looking for out-of-print mass-combat designs sometimes buy into Warlords specifically for the format novelty.