Games Like Skytear: Drafting a Team or Building a Champion

Skytear is a card-driven miniatures MOBA with a smart structural idea: you draft your heroes from four asymmetric factions in response to what your opponent picks, and drafting a hero brings that hero’s cards into your deck. Team selection and deck construction happen in the same motion.

If you want games like Skytear, the axis that matters is where your preparation goes: into assembling a team, or into building a single piece.

What Skytear does

Two to four players, around forty-five minutes, diceless. You push waves of minions down side lanes toward the enemy Nexus, bringing down towers on the way, or you enter the central Dome to tame the Outsider, a large neutral monster you can direct at your opponent.

Combat resolves through Power Cards rather than dice, and those cards can be played at any time, including during your opponent’s turn, which keeps both players engaged throughout.

The cleverest part is the win condition. Three victory cards are drawn at the start of the game, and completing any one of them wins. That means you can feint toward one objective while quietly setting up another, and it makes reading intent a real skill.

Other team-drafting games

Guards of Atlantis II is the other major tabletop MOBA, dice-free and built to scale to large groups, where mastery comes from learning a wide fixed roster.

Super Fantasy Brawl compresses team selection into three heroes and fast, clean turns.

Godtear builds warbands from champions in four scoring classes, so your team composition determines how you intend to score.

The other direction: build one champion

Trials of MAYA, out on Gamefound September 8, 2026, puts the same preparation into a single piece instead of a squad.

What is Trials of MAYA?

Trials of MAYA is an expandable card-driven arena combat game. It combines three genres: MOBAs, classic 90s tactics games, and TCGs without booster packs. It plays 1 to 4 players in 60 to 180 minutes for ages 14 and up, with nine asymmetric champions across five game modes.

You bring one champion. Its identity is three traits, one species and two classes, and those traits define which cards are legal in its deck. Any card sharing a trait, plus signature cards naming that champion, can go in a 24 to 40 card list drawn from a shared pool of 340-plus. So instead of drafting heroes to assemble a deck, you are constructing a deck to express one hero.

Three other points of comparison for a Skytear player.

Diceless with a different engine. Trials of MAYA also avoids dice, but its tension comes from timing rather than from card modifiers. Each round every player commits a card face down onto a three-slot action mat and reveals simultaneously, with the number setting initiative now and returning as energy two rounds later.

Minions change hands. Skytear’s minions are waves you push. In Trials of MAYA they start hostile and can be captured: damage one and its health chips bank into your pool, land the kill and you can spend from that pool to respawn it under your control.

Champions grow mid-match. Open objectives pay XP toward maximum health, permanent energy income, extra trait symbols and skills that branch into one of two second-level versions.

Rulebooks and public metadata are on BoardGameGeek, the full breakdown is on the official page, and there is a Tabletop Simulator build.

Which to pick

Skytear is faster, scales to more players with expansions, and its hidden victory conditions give it a bluffing layer nothing else here has.

Games like Skytear that concentrate on a single champion trade that breadth for depth per piece. If the part of Skytear you enjoy most is the drafting, stay with team games. If it is the moment your hero’s kit comes together and does something, the single-champion route will suit you.

Follow or back Trials of MAYA on Gamefound.