Ask any serious players of collectible card games, and they'll tell you that the hobby is an insidious one. Card games, such as Magic: The Gathering and its various copycats, are a lot of fun to play, and the cards themselves feature varied fantasy artwork. However, the hobby can drive you into the poorhouse. The money you spend keeping up with your fellow players, through the never-ending purchase of booster packs and theme decks, almost seems as though it would be enough to keep you fully supplied with champagne and caviar instead.

New "pale" creatures come with impressive spell effects.

As such, budget-minded gamers everywhere should celebrate the fact that Nival Interactive is putting the finishing touches on Etherlords II, the sequel to its underrated 2001 strategy game. The game's open beta test shows that the turn-based strategy series is moving forward with more of the same quirky game mechanics that combine tactical combat elements from Magic: The Gathering with epic role-playing strategies borrowed from Disciples and Heroes of Might and Magic. Like its predecessor, it seeks to provide the next-best thing to real collectible card gaming because you get everything you need in one box--for one affordable price.

But Nival isn't just rehashing the original game. The Russian developer is also planning some major changes to various aspects of the game design. While the collectible card-gaming features will remain mostly intact, the role-playing- and adventure-influenced storyline is being made more accessible. It's a change that both players and critics have asked for, and, according to the project manager, the company is glad to cooperate.

"Etherlords II is both an expansion of the combat and multiplayer aspects of the original game and a complete overhaul of the strategy portion to an RPG-like adventure," says Andrey Yemelyanenko. "Before we even finished Etherlords, we already knew where we wanted to take the sequel. And not only did we get the chance to make a sequel, but we found out that most of the fans and critics wanted the same things for Etherlords II that we did--a very rare coincidence in computer gaming. We knew that the game's strength was combat tactics, so we're making a lot of changes that add up to more tactical freedom and give you more options than the first game."

Despite this seeming overhaul of features, the basic premise of the sequel remains more or less the same as that of the first game. Etherlords II is set in the same fantasy land as its predecessor: the etherworld. The chaot, kinet, synthet, and vital races are still dueling with one another for control of the ether, also known as magic. Each continues to specialize in certain types of ether, symbolized by colors. The black synthnets, for instance, still rely on half-flesh, half-mechanical magical creatures, while the green vitals still depend on enchanted insects.

Close-up cameras make Etherlords II seem more like an epic role-playing game.

Where the original game focused on the time of changes that were caused by war and the displacement of the white lord--who is ruler of the Etherworld--the successor deals with the white lord's disappearance. According to Yemelyanenko, the races will once more be "at each other's throats" amid this chaos. There will also be a mysterious new race creatures known as "the pale" to contend with. Your quest to resolve this conflict will take place over the course of five campaigns. You'll guide the lord of each race in these episodes, along with Diamanda, a central character who possesses the power to use ether from all four nations.

Even though the sequel's story and background seem similar to those of the original game, just about everything else will be new territory for Etherlords veterans. While Etherlords featured a combination of turn-based strategy and tactical card-combat, somewhat inspired by Magic: The Gathering, Etherlords II will be more story-based. Judging by what we've seen in the beta, similarities to Disciples and Heroes of Might and Magic look to be more pronounced this time around. Each race now features a single main hero, instead of the four that led each faction last time, so you can better identify with the combatants. A more intimate atmosphere has been emphasized by moving the camera closer to the protagonists. You can't see as much of the map in the new game, but the character detail is much greater, and the general appearance of the game seems much more similar to something like Disciples than the distant tactical view favored in the first Etherlords.