Hex: Shards of Fate TCG - Set 7: Frostheart 6/29/17

I imagine in PVE anything goes and you'll have team mates with good decks and bad decks if you play with randoms, regardless of the amount of money the invested.

In constructed deck PVP the situation is similar, you could build some pretty cheap but powerful decks at various points in time in MTG, so it really comes down to how the current block is designed. Obviously we dont know if the initial set will allow for cheap strong decks or if most of the strong cards are rare (more expensive to get).

Then there are PVP games where everyone starts out with a fresh and equal card pool no matter how many cards they otherwise own. Thats technically 100% fair until you open your card pool, then you might get lucky or not with what you have to work with. Draft limited formats mitigate that and inject more player skill because everyone essentially picks from the same pool of cards. Both of these do require packs of cards for each tournament/match/league or whatever they do, so they arent free. In MTGO you can play alot with little investment because of prize boosters, I expect it'll be similar here, but as total newbie to TCGs in general that's not something you can count on really.

Abefroman_sl said:

A couple of things. Excuse my ignorance I've never played a Tcg before. Am I basically screwed playing this game if I don't buy in at one of the upper tiers? Sounds like pay to win. How deep is the gameplay? Does it come down to whoever plays the Card of surprise buttsechs and you are screwed if you have inferior cards? Or is there more strategy then that?

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Other people pretty much covered the pay to win part. As for how deep the gameplay is - Hex is built very much as a clone of magic the gathering, and the gameplay and strategy on that is *extremely* deep. For an example, Duels of the Planeswalkers is a 'dumbed down' version of MTG where the decks are a fixed 90 cards which you can customise by picking your 60 favorite out of those 90, and the arguments and theorycrafting about the best way to do that often goes on for 100+ pages.

http://community.wizards.com/go/foru..._Planeswalkers

Also as far as disadvantages to not having huge numbers of good cards - one of the most popular pvp modes will be what they call 'draft', where each person goes in with unopened packs, and constructs a deck on the fly by opening a pack, taking a card, then passing the rest of the pack to the next person, repeat until all cards gone. In that format, your existing card collection doesn't matter at all - but your skill at deck building and playing matters an awful lot.

Next 3 stretch goals are up but it doesn't look like the website is updated yet. The email I received had them listed:

Well, hell. Now I need to go to Gencon.

Anyway, new stretches are sort of shrug-worthy. The Keep Defense mode they already talked about in passing. It's potentially a nice feature, but it's not new and shiny if you've been scraping the kickstarter and forums for information. Hopefully they release an in depth article about it soon. Playback support is nice for encouraging an esport like environment, but they'll need spectator mode and the like on top of that if they really want to go that route. And an intro sequence is a couple of minutes that we probably watch once and never again. *shrug*

As for the rewards, 50 packs of set 2 is 100$ value. It's certainly a nice perk if you're already at one of the big tiers and might motivate some of the people sitting at pro-player to step up now that the delta is only 150$. We don't know how crafting mats really work, so I have no idea how much I should care about that. The new merc seems potentially really potent, even not knowing what the Guardian card is. Raid bosses really better be just ridiculously tough given how butch all of the champion powers/mercenaries/equipment combos already are.

Speaking of new cards, the ninja-training is pretty interesting. Persistent stalling manuever until you blow it to draw a boatload of cards once it's bulked up (and if you've got its legendary equip, drop a gigantic monster along with them).

The Gabe merc is interesting also. I'm not sure how much I like the gold boost ability though. On the one hand, it's a cool design space, but on the other hand, now you feel that if you aren't using Gabe, you're potentially nerfing yourself if you're in grind mode. I guess 10% that you need to play in a different way for isn't really that bad though, so I guess overall, I like it.

Anyone here sad that they missed out on pro-player? I think I'm going to update my spare pro-player tier to grand king (might as well, 90 more boosters from guild master and now 50 set 2 boosters from the stretch goal is 280$ of value for 250$ of cost, plus the collector bonuses). Can't hand it off to anyone directly, but if you're interested, PM me and I'll let you know when I upgrade my pledge, hopefully you can get it before one of the people chain-reloading the kickstarter page.

Be interesting to see how funding goes after grand king sells out and the attractive 250/500/1000 options are gone... it doesn't seem like there'd be much reason to go above King which will probably slow things down.

To bad you can't save some of your packs for set 2. No way I can afford Grand King, unfortunately.

Vilgan_sl said:

Be interesting to see how funding goes after grand king sells out and the attractive 250/500/1000 options are gone... it doesn't seem like there'd be much reason to go above King which will probably slow things down.

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Yeah, it's definitely going to slow down once those are out. I'm hoping that we get a strong focus on PvE mechanics in some of the updates from here on out. That might push Dungeon Crawler and Raid Leader a bit. Dungeon Crawler is a straight up grind accelerator, and if the raids are actually *hard* (and boy do I hope they are), raid leader is a really nice boost. Everyone starting with an extra card in their hand and a card in play that at the very least gets you a one turn reprieve on being knocked out of the game (barring non-damage alternate win/lose conditions). That's not shabby. Depends on the level of constant removal though, I guess.

I am up to 500$. A pro player spot opened up.

Hrmm, saw a pro player spot open up and snagged it. Can always drop down to King (my likely landing spot) later.

Looks like they ninja posted a new article in the middle of the night:http://hextcg.com/the-guild-experience/

Not very interesting, but the two spoiled cards are:http://hextcg.com/wp-content/uploads...s_Gear_Web.pngandhttp://hextcg.com/wp-content/uploads...t_Gear_Web.png

I don't much like Head Games; It's a cute Princess Bridesque "So I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me" scenario, but you're essentially paying mana for something that's just as likely to hurt you as help you. Meh.

General's Tent is thematically similar in that it creates a mind games scenario, but it's a more interesting one. Once you've got a fully armed General's Tent, can they really afford to send all their troops at you, knowing you might have Trap waiting? Can they really afford not to attack knowing you might be able to alpha-strike them with an assassination? Invasion seems like the least interesting from a "surprise!" perspective, but this is an artifact creating more artifacts and that spells "Put me in a dwarf deck for fun and profit". It's a little slow and spendy (9 mana over 3 turns), but it might be a fun thing to put in a longer term control deck.

Fealorn_sl said:

Well I went up to Grand King from Pro.I don't know what happened. How did I start with wanting to spend $120 and end up at $500? I'm hoping sanity prevails before the end and I can downgrade..

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I did the exact same thing.

a_skeleton_03_sl said:

With the PayPal funds added we are pretty much at $1.16M so they need to unveil that last slot bad.

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The update today said they'll unveil it tomorrow. They also said it would be pretty awesome, but ... enh. I'm trying to keep low expectations.

Goldenmean_sl said:

The update today said they'll unveil it tomorrow. They also said it would be pretty awesome, but ... enh. I'm trying to keep low expectations.

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Maybe they will send us physical cards when you collect a whole set!

I bumped my donation up to $85, which should be okay as long as I don't spend a bunch of money in the next few days.