Historical Card Development - Diluvian Kraken

The roots of Sorcery: Contested Realm's early development in printed card form trace back at least as early as 2018 as profiled in Collector Arthouse's article "First Cards Ever Printed in Sorcery: Contested Realm TCG". Many cards are traceable to a category referred to as the "Early Development Playtest Cards". This includes raw development cards home-printed and used for playtest, Spellcraft cards, and creator-made cards printed by Erik Olofsson, and cards printed by one of Erik's Curiosa's first game developers. These categories are profiled in the article titled "The Most Rare Cards in Sorcery: Contested Realm TCG" at Collector Arthouse. Not all Alpha cards are mappable to this era since at this nascent stage of Sorcery development, the full ~400 card Alpha Set was not fully developed yet.

The story of 'Diluvian Kraken' begins with the 1st print playtest cards printed by Erik in NZ

and used for early playtest.

This is a photograph taken by Mike from Collector Arthouse. The card is an early playtest

card printed by Erik and given to Daniel Franzen of Sweden in 2021. The card was auctioned at the Sorcery: Contested Realm Community Facebook Group and Collector Arthouse Discord in April 2026.

We find that in its early form the resource cost was 7 with 4 water threshold, and the Kraken had 7 power.

The type line text reads: 'An Elite Monster of far-reaching terror'; later changing in Alpha to 'An Elite Monster of benthic horror'. Otherwise the mechanic and key details of the card are quite similar to its final Alpha form.

A May 2022 Table Top Simulator (TTS) digital card update shows our first gameplay tuning.

Here we see that the 4 water threshold from its earliest playtest form was reduced to 3 water threshold.

Aside from this change, there are only minor adjustments to the way that the gameplay mechanic reads.

"kraken" is capitalized as "Kraken"; and the word "simultaneously" is removed and allows the text to more cleanly wrap in the text box with just two lines. Although a fairly minor detail, there were many such changes in the early Alpha era, demonstrating Erik's attention to detail and importance placed on aesthetic presentation of each card.

In September 2022, an update in TTS revealed the first significant change for Diluvian Kraken. The card casting cost and power were both changed to 8; seemingly in a homage to MTG's Force of Nature with 8/8 attack and defense stats. As such, Diluvian Kraken earns the moniker of "Force of Nature of the Sea" in Sorcery: Contested Realm, and becomes instantly iconic in the early lore of Sorcery.

Notice also that the key word of "enemies" was changed to "minions". This was a very significant change that narrowed the utility of the Kraken, being able to target only the "minion" sub-type. It was appropriately expanded to state "unit" in its final form...