If you have a pro account and this game shows well if they go to a convention, I willing to bet that you'll be able to sell it for double the money come release or right before release as the crazies will looking for more lifetime free drafts.
Hex: Shards of Fate TCG - Set 7: Frostheart 6/29/17
- Thread starter Draegan_sl
- Start date
I'm curious how the PVE portion will play out. As i likely won't pay much more than the captain level, i wonder how they will balance the difficulty of the singleplayer portion for players with little or no investment while more generous backers will start with many additional cards and other boni. It will be hard and grindy OR many people will breeze through the dungeons.
Either way, i'm very interested in this game, it seems so much "more" than scrolls or heathstone (i will buy those 2, too).
Either way, i'm very interested in this game, it seems so much "more" than scrolls or heathstone (i will buy those 2, too).
- 11,091
- 2,281
Well you can't buy the PvE cards as far as I understand. You can use the PvP cards(which are the ones you buy in boosters/starters), but there's at least as many PvE cards which can only be obtained in PvE. So most likely, it won't be much of an issue to play the PvE only with a minimal investment, if anything at all(you get a free starter to start with and that'd probably be enough).
Like Pyros said, PvE is an entirely different set of cards, almost as large as the base PvP set (~300 in PvE, ~350 in PvP). Obviously, having a ~650 card set to work with is going to give you more combo opportunity than a ~300 card set, but it's not like you're going to be facing down dragons with just a starter. I'm hoping that they balance the raid experience around being possible, but require lots of cross-player synergy with just PvE cards, while still being difficult with people who've invested heavily in both PvE in PvP (investing time in the case of PvE and money in the case of PvP). All of this is just wishful thinking until we see the PvE experience live though.
Maybe raids should be duoable with playsets of PvE and PvP. I don't know. Balancing is going to be sort of a nightmare for them. It's bad enough in an MMO where everyone is constrained to their class abilities. Balancing a raid experience in a TCG has got to be orders of magnitude more difficult with all the options for deck building. I never actually played the raid decks in WoWTCG. Bought them and ogled the cards and thought about them some, but didn't have any local friends who were interested. Can anyone chime in with how well those were balanced? If you went back with a deck from a couple of years after they were released, were they completely faceroll?
Almost all the rewards that the higher tiers get are PVP cards. You can use them in PVE, but they are much weaker than real PVE cards, especially with no equipment. I don't think it will be a huge deal. Obviously this doesn't apply to the $5k+ deals that get a complete set of all cards, but I doubt they will be balancing the game to make it challenge for those guys at the start.
Yes, I'd imagine they are pretty close once they have equipment, but - you can only equip maybe 3 cards out of your deck, and the kickstarters won't have the equipment for the random PVP cards to start with ( other than the dungeon crawler bonus items ).
Well, stretch goals mean that all of the kickstarter exclusive cards come with their gear, which is pretty nice, that and the 860k stretch gave everyone at king+ 2 random legendary pieces of equipment. But yeah, with 1300+ pieces of equipment, it's going to take a while to gear up your PvE deck. That and a lot of trading. Even with the dungeon crawler bonus, you still only have 22 pieces of equipment to start(plus all the gear for the exclusive cards)
If you're only getting a couple of pieces of gear every dungeon run, and dungeons can take hours... that's a lot of grinding. And with 4 months between sets, it seems like unless you play ridiculous amounts, you're always going to be chasing missing gear if you're trying to complete your set. Of course there's still lots we don't know. We don't know exactly how loot from dungeons works. We don't know how the treasure chests you get from opening PvP boosters works, etc.
Did anyone else listen to the gamer all stars podcast? Cory mentioned a couple of interesting things. First off, he did scoff at the notion that people seemed to think that they'd end up with all of the equipment over time, and he alluded to raid bosses being reaaaally hard, but the main thing that caught me is that it's flat out impossible to own every card on one account. Several cards are going to be locked behind exclusive branching choices. The example he gave was one of the arenas that lets you pick a faction to back. For the first season it's giant firebreathing squirrels vs. dinosaurs. When you start the season, you pick your faction. They give you a deck of that faction and as you win battles you can customize it (sounds sort of akin to how the modern Duels of the Planeswalkers games work). Get all the way through the season and you get a card of that faction, and you're prohibited from ever getting the other faction's card on an account wide basis. Next season (which sounds like it would be every year), new factions join the arena. I've got to admit, I'm a little torn on this. The collector in me is weeping silently to himself, but I've always loved having choices that matter in games. As long as you don't get a year down the line and kick yourself because the giant fire breathing squirrel champion is in every top raid deck, I think there's a lot to be said for this approach, though I expect this to be a giant drama bomb waiting to happen.
With that said, I'm definitely keeping two separate accounts open now just so I can try to see both sides of these branches, even if I can't trade everything to one account so I can "catch them all" down the line.
I'm trying to be Zen about it. I never had a black lotus either (though I did have all the moxes and lots of the other power 9), and it didn't ruin my M:TG experience at all. I just hope there's some easy way for them to reflect how close you are to collecting all of the cards you possibly could collect given which choices you've made that have locked you in one direction or the other for the exclusive cards. If there's just virtual blank spaces that you can never ever fill, that's going to drive my OCD tendencies up the wall. As long as I can bask in the knowledge that I've gotten everything I could, I'm good.Collector in me is weeping as well. I hate shit like that.
Also, just to be clear, all of this stuff is PvE only. PvP players will never have to deal with this.
If someone wants to upgrade their King (early bird special) account to a higher tier, please chug me a message, would like to get the Lotus Garden, but am parsimonious.
Kuro
Naxxramas 1.0 Raider
- 8,419
- 21,450
The first couple raid decks they did were pretty all-over-the-board in regards to difficulty, but that was understandable since it was the first foray into such a product. After that, most of the raid decks were rather well-balanced for the cards that were legal when they were printed. If you went back and did a couple-year-old raid deck, it was generally face-roll with newer cards, but that was largely due to the game not having "blocks" for a long time, so power-creep was a prevalent fact of life in order to get new sets to actually sell (part of the reason rotating blocks are good, you can "reset" or "fix" power level issues and still sell product). But for several of the raid decks, they were damn difficult to beat during the year they came out unless you brought decks to the table tuned specifically for that raid deck (And could even then still be problematic).
WoWTCG's Raid Decks and Resource system were the best parts of the game (with the resource system being largely lifted from VS, which was also fabulous resource-wise).
Sounds like they have the tech to enforce it if every card has its own cryptographic signature. At least as far as duping and the like goes.
I hope they've got some good DBAs on their team. The game hasn't even launched and there's already tens of millions of cards (or will be once people start actually opening their own packs). With all of those needing their own unique entry in the database (as opposed to WoW or the like where there's only really one Thunderfury, and every character just has a pointer to its itemid), it seems like there's a ton of information that needs to be tracked. I suppose they can optimize away cards that haven't actually been used in a deck and gained statistics that differentiate them from all other instances of the same card though.
Selix
Lord Nagafen Raider
- 2,149
- 4
Went ahead and picked up a Dungeon Crawler to go with my Pro Player but I am hoping to snag a Grand King tonight or tomorrow and the let my pro player go.
Also summary of new stuff from stream. Stolen from Reddithttp://www.reddit.com/r/hextcg/comme...twitch_stream/
I look forward to Keep Defense.
Also summary of new stuff from stream. Stolen from Reddithttp://www.reddit.com/r/hextcg/comme...twitch_stream/
I look forward to Keep Defense.
I personally do not like the idea of reprints and hope they don't consider it. I find reprints devalue the original cards, sentimentally and monetarily.
Really disappointing to hear this. That is the only thing i really hated while playing MTG.
Wouldn't grabbing a Grand king + Collector be the better choice? Does the 100% more loot stack up?
Laura
Lord Nagafen Raider
- 582
- 109
I hated that too. Especially when there's a lot of control to support the strategy; it's basically playing against someone who doesn't want you to play the game (dispell, counter..etc) and wants you to stay and play against them for ~20-40 minutes so they may win, eventually, with a very anti-climatic conclusion.... yay...