Well, they're bringing back blocks. Was never a fan of blocks. Having my cards valuable, then useless later on is pretty annoying.
Hex: Shards of Fate TCG - Set 7: Frostheart 6/29/17
- Thread starter Draegan_sl
- Start date
They'll presumably have extended formats you can still use them in. And of course there's always PvE. Blocks make a lot of sense though. It's practically impossible to keep a CCG balanced in the long term with an ever increasing pool of cards to work from.
I think that depends mostly on if it's a success or not. If it isn't, then you'd be completely right, but if it is a big success, then the number of people who were not part of the kickstarter will be considerably higher - the kickstarter has what, 5k backers ? Even 100k players would mean the kickstarter contributions would be heavily diluted. Also depends if they keep the set 1 stuff available indefinitely, they seem to be waffling still on whether they will be putting things 'out of print'.
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Ah yeah it reminded me of necropotence but I guess after checking necro was a fuckton more powerful, thought it was 2life per card. The ressource system I don't think is a huge issue, maybe it was just bad luck or maybe he had too few lands considering his deck strength I don't know didn't watch the 3rd game to see how it went, but I kinda liked in MTG those games where you had no lands for multiple turns and shit was really dire. Now a lot of the time you'd just die and blame the lack of lands, but the few times where you'd finally hit a land streak and start reversing the game, I liked that.
Anyway overall while I'll probably do stuff like booster drafts and shit like that cause I found it fun back when I played MTG, I'm mostly looking forward to the pve experience, I really like the idea of building a deck along with a hero and clearing dungeons and what not with I assume permanent effects and such plus specific boss decks where you have to find weakness or the right strategy, sounds fun. I'm not in it for the competitive aspect so I think I'll stay with my 120$ pack which is already great value, the 250$ 3boosters a week sounds great but I don't wanna go through the hassle of finding a buyer for it if I don't want to play the game again and all that shit.
Yeah, I'm definitely in it for the PvE as well. I like what they did with the WoW TCG raid decks, so I'm confident that they'll be able to pull off some interesting effects in this as well.http://wowtcg.cryptozoic.com/article...king-destroyerhas some spoilers from one of the more recent raid decks. You can tell they're willing to mix things up with raid only cards, and I like everything I've been hearing from them about traps and puzzles and branching paths in PvE dungeons. Should be a really good time. All of that along with what seems to be a fairly robust and interesting PvE leveling system (they spoiled an early version of the warrior talent tree here if anyone missed it:http://hextcg.com/creating-and-geari...our-character/) That spells all kinds of fun to me. Shandalar ate up a ridiculous chunk of my free time in college, and this looks to improve upon it in every way.
The ability to do the stray draft or tournament is just gravy on top of that.
As for resources, yeah, it really looked like his deck was resource weak. I'm willing to forgive it, it's just infuriating that it seems a significant portion of all of the games I've played of Magic were mostly decided by either me or my opponent getting mana screwed in one direction or the other, and I don't want that to be the case here as well. Hex does at least encourage multi-color decks thanks to the threshold system, and the addition of the charge mechanic helps you not mind getting resource flooded so much, because at least it's boosting your charge abilities.
The ability to do the stray draft or tournament is just gravy on top of that.
As for resources, yeah, it really looked like his deck was resource weak. I'm willing to forgive it, it's just infuriating that it seems a significant portion of all of the games I've played of Magic were mostly decided by either me or my opponent getting mana screwed in one direction or the other, and I don't want that to be the case here as well. Hex does at least encourage multi-color decks thanks to the threshold system, and the addition of the charge mechanic helps you not mind getting resource flooded so much, because at least it's boosting your charge abilities.
Holy shit, I didn't think the stream was all that good, but obviously a lot of people disagreed - pro player tier is completely sold out and it's over 725k.
Selix
Lord Nagafen Raider
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This surprised me a bit to. It was only 620k this morning I think and the twitch.tv cast was ok but not mindblowing. Now that Pro Player is sold out maybe it will slow down significantly.
Kuro
Naxxramas 1.0 Raider
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I am just befuddled that they went with Magic's land-system when their company has the rights to a vastly superior resource system. VS/WoW's resource system is pretty much the best standardized progression* resource system in the CCG-sphere.
*=resources accumulate at a fixed rate (or have the capacity to do so at your option). There are a variety of other resource systems in CCGs I've enjoyed more, but out of this category, WoW/VS stand head and shoulders above the rest in terms of ease of use and reduction of frustration. The potential customer pools of "People who love balancing mana bases during deck construction" and "People who loathe mana-screw" are nowhere near equal in size. While I find the math and play-line considerations in Magic's mana-base construction intriguing as a deck-builder, its actual impact on quality and enjoyment of play is one of the few negatives the game's base mechanics face when dealing with new players.
*=resources accumulate at a fixed rate (or have the capacity to do so at your option). There are a variety of other resource systems in CCGs I've enjoyed more, but out of this category, WoW/VS stand head and shoulders above the rest in terms of ease of use and reduction of frustration. The potential customer pools of "People who love balancing mana bases during deck construction" and "People who loathe mana-screw" are nowhere near equal in size. While I find the math and play-line considerations in Magic's mana-base construction intriguing as a deck-builder, its actual impact on quality and enjoyment of play is one of the few negatives the game's base mechanics face when dealing with new players.
Amen. Their excuse for not using it (that it was hard for new players to decide when to use a card as a resource instead of as itself) is pretty weak also. It seems like the Call of Cthulhu system would work well for this. It's essentially the same as WoW, but instead of everything being colorless, each card provides the faction resource it's associated with. So a blue card could be used as a blue resource. They'd run into problems once multi-colored cards inevitably start showing up though, I guess. Anyway, it's what we're stuck with. I don't like it, but I'll live. Especially if its similarity to magic helps pull more players in.
Looks like we went through a lot of Dragonlords today also, strangely. Those upper tiers haven't been popular since people realized you could double bid on lower tiers. I'm kind of interested in seeing how the backing proceeds from here now that Pro Player is out. Wonder if there will be a spike at grand king, or if people are just going to settle for king and lower. By the way, there was a blurb on the forums that we've already blown through the next stretch goal also. That and the next two are meant to be revealed tomorrow at 720, 790 and 860. After that, we're into the "uncommon" and "rare" stretch goals, assuming those colors actually mean anything, instead of just being booster pack thematic.
Get rid of colors and lands altogether, just sacrificing a card to get generic mana is so much simpler and less RNG dependent. It also widens your options since you don't have to worry about segregated cards. If they want to appeal to a broader audience, that isdefinitelythe way to go. I honestly just don't see this game funneling off enough people from mtgo to be a hit while they are trying to make it as much of a clone as possible.
The best thing to hope for would be for the competition to spur mtgo into adopting all their ideas.
The best thing to hope for would be for the competition to spur mtgo into adopting all their ideas.
From what I have read, having it RNG dependent is pretty much the point. It's to counterweight skill, so that bad players still win often enough to keep playing. There's also the whole random positive reinforcement gambling thing going on.
Mr Creed
Too old for this shit
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The colors having different strengths and weakness is incredibly important for MTG though, whenever they diminish that in various multi-color blocks the result is usually a top deck thats just "the best of every color", mostly a control-oriented deck. That's no fun in the long run and without the colors every deck would be too optimized. TLDR: color segregation creates more deckbuilding possibilities and challenges. I didnt like the resource system of the WoW TCG that much, you basically just build a deck to curve out and that's it.
Re: MTGO adapting... Wizards generally sucks at realizing their internet gaming potential. I have tried several times to get into MTGO but god does their software blow. If they paid some good money to a competent dev team they could be making even more money hats with MTGO then they already are.
Mist
Eeyore Enthusiast
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It's a lot more than that. You've got it at the low end of play, but at the higher ends its even more important. If you always have every resource available, you can just solve the game and build a deck that is mathematically optimized to use every available resource each turn. Magic is, over a large enough set of games, about who uses the resources they have available to them the best, and what resources you have available, be it mana or spells or creatures, changes from game to game. Games that don't have enough random elements end up just being a math problem to be solved at deckbuilding time, where Magic is a game where the optimal play changes each time a card is drawn. Yes, in a very small subset of games, you might not get to play your cards at all due to mana flood/screw, but over a large set of games, it actually helps the better player win more often and not the worse players.
Some random elements are fine, but complexity coming from the interactions of various cards seems a lot more interesting than "Sorry, you won't draw mana this time. Goodbye". When people are awful, you can frequently push through some bad luck and win 2 of the 3 games. However, at the higher levels of skill it basically seemed like winning came down to 2 things: 1) How is your matchup with the other deck and 2) Are you going to get fucked on mana (screw or flood) this game? Maybe the higher frequency of online stuff will reduce the frustration, but for paper MTG I top 8'd 2 of the 4 tournaments I went to and still dropped out of the scene after a while because losing to mana nonsense was sooo frustrating.
I get that randomness is good because it makes idiots feel like they can win (and they do sometimes), but if I wanted shit to be that random I'd go play poker which has a LOT more money in it. I just wish the bridge scene (waaaay more skill intensive than MTG) had more people under retirement age in the US
Right now, every movie for this game makes it look like a super dumbed down version of MTG, with less complex interactions and swallowing the faults (RNG mana system) without adding a whole lot. I really hope they have some demos of PvE content soon, so we can see what it looks like when they try to innovate.
Now, I don't know much about Magic, since I haven't played in over a decade. But to me it looks like a direct copy. They just haven't really shown a lot of counters and other crap that is typically in a Magic game from what I gather.
Also, I'm now up to the GK level.
Also, I'm now up to the GK level.
OU Ariakas
Diet Dr. Pepper Enjoyer
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I think we can all agree that having cards with flying actually float above the board is pretty awesome. How many times have you misplayed because of a flier?
Selix
Lord Nagafen Raider
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Lol watSome random elements are fine, but complexity coming from the interactions of various cards seems a lot more interesting than "Sorry, you won't draw mana this time. Goodbye". When people are awful, you can frequently push through some bad luck and win 2 of the 3 games. However, at the higher levels of skill it basically seemed like winning came down to 2 things: 1) How is your matchup with the other deck and 2) Are you going to get fucked on mana (screw or flood) this game? Maybe the higher frequency of online stuff will reduce the frustration, but for paper MTG I top 8'd 2 of the 4 tournaments I went to and still dropped out of the scene after a while because losing to mana nonsense was sooo frustrating.
I get that randomness is good because it makes idiots feel like they can win (and they do sometimes), but if I wanted shit to be that random I'd go play poker which has a LOT more money in it. I just wish the bridge scene (waaaay more skill intensive than MTG) had more people under retirement age in the US
Right now, every movie for this game makes it look like a super dumbed down version of MTG, with less complex interactions and swallowing the faults (RNG mana system) without adding a whole lot. I really hope they have some demos of PvE content soon, so we can see what it looks like when they try to innovate.
Yeah, I haven't seen any counters yet either. They have quick actions, so they have the potential, but maybe they want to avoid going that route. Blue seems more about sneaky tricks (booby traps, the stalking assassin card, etc) than about blatant "No. You can't do that. Nope. Can't do that either. Also, no. Repeat for 50 turns until you plink them to death or they run out of cards" And while I haven't played Magic seriously since Urza's block, I still follow it and occasionally splurge on some cards, and Hex is definitely an almost direct copy mechanicswise. Mana system slightly improved, the addition of champions, and the ability to do far more things with the digital design space, but other than that, direct copy, down to several cards being identical (which is actually almost impossible to avoid with how long Magic has been out).
I'm really banking on the PvE being fun and liking PvP enough to do a couple of drafts a week and maybe doing some constructed though, because I'm up to a dragonlord, a pro-player, and a king account. Started at grand king and have been steadily adding and upping since then.
Was a little bit surprised that nobody has posted about the new goals they announced today yet.http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/...e/posts/484413
720k got us 10 new dungeons, and a new merc, which much like the 3 new raid stretch goal doesn't mean much without knowing how many were already in the game. 790k is increased sound and particle effects for cards, which people seem wild for, but I really don't care much about. I don't need to see a fireball fly across the screen to get a warm fuzzy. The only time I really want animated effects is if they help me keep track of the game state, like the flying cards hovering above the table, so if they add more stuff like that, great. 860k gets some sort of deck construction AI, which is interesting in direct proportion to how useful it actually ends up being. If it's decent, it might help prevent horrible players from bringing completely laughable decks to the table, but I doubt most skilled players will care that much once they get a feel for the metagame. There's also stray card and equipment rewards spread through those tiers.
Really hope they show more about the PvE system soon. It's what I'm most interested in, and while the blurbs we've gotten so far are nice, I'd like to see them go into more depth about how many dungeons, how many encounters per dungeon, how unique dungeon decks are, how branching works, and to what extent they branch,but mostly how loot actually works. Beating a boss and getting a completely random PvE card or pack for my troubles isn't very interesting. Beating Zoltoth the flame mage and getting his staff once I beat him, or beating him within x rounds, or with these sorts of special conditions and getting his actual card is way more interesting. I'm always in favor of tying mechanics more closely to theme.
Yeah, not a lot to talk about really without knowing the context - they have kind of dropped the ball of PVE stuff, which is pretty obvious from the pledge distribution. The legendary dragon card is pretty neat though - if they have no removal available that's going to be game over in short order. I'd rate the grand strategist card higher in terms of outrageousness though, a passive that turns all your creatures into Master Decoys makes my blood pressure rise just thinking about it ;p