Never really got past the first day of my Hearthstone beta experience. It just kind of annoyed me a bit and came across a bit superficial. And I'm someone who utterly loathes MTG's resource system; that magical moment where you just win or lose 20% of your games because of mana draws. Always liked how they won't let you talk to other players: "People who play Blizzard games are terrible! Don't talk to them."
The Pokemon TCG will actually give you (non-tradable) assets for logging in daily, so you don't have to grind mindless PvE to make a little progress.
Honestly the worst thing I can say about the genre is the booster opening experience: opening a chest with random stuff inside should be
fun as hell. But the games are set up so that, no, it's not. You have to sell the booster or use it in a 2 hour long tournament that may or may not start when you'd like it to. Then you just buy the cards you want.
Boo.
The financial aspect of it disgusts me, to be honest.
I know that feel. Guys hovering the Hex auction hall, desperate for cards or foul flippers, incrementing one single currency unit at a time like the most passive aggressive dick in the universe. Spending hours over something worth a couple cents.
At least in MTGO, you can get some commons from hand-out bots and eschew raw exploitative capitalism by playing pauper.
Seeing things like today's news about
"free alternate art card for creepy furries for logging in in the next 10 days" and then reading that the actual qualia necessary is: spend some platinum and boosters on a tournament...
I actually do have the assets to do it if I really wanted to from not paying money, and I know they have to limit supply if the cards are tradable, but still it feels kind of wretched.
drunkninja24 wrote:One of the things I like about it is, being a fully PC-based game, allows it to have some interesting mechanics that would be difficult to enforce or implement in a more traditional TCG
Yeah, that's one thing I like about Hex. Cards are being permanently modified all the time always. "Draw cards off the top of an opponent's deck. It has blood threshold now!" is such a black philosophy of card advantage - you don't have another thought, you steal them from someone else. And cards are created mid match all the time as well - tokens and graveyards interact together perfectly fine.
That doesn't even get into pets, or arbitrarily complex transformation chains. They can make dudes that digivolve with multiple paths to any depth (though they only have triple-sided transform dudes so far. The game's two sets in, gotta do the basics first.)
The ever popular Storm Cloud is a decent representation of something that would take too much text:
The stormlings being flying 2 mana (it matters for stuff like Inspire) 1/1's with a self sacrifice effect: Draw a card, deal 2 damage to tapped troop, or tap a troop.
If you have a deck dedicated to gaining charges and have say a pyromancer
It will make an absolutely enormous amount of threat for a turn 2 play and some time invested.
