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

Starter Decks are $10 for pre-built 61 card decks. Packs are $2 for 15 cards ( 11 common 3 uncommon 1 rare or legendary and a bonus treasure).
Everyone gets a free starter of their choice for signing up, but all the cards are no drop. Purchased starters are trade able.

Murked_sl said:

One thing I never understood is why can't they make the cards produce a 3D model of the monster when the card is played and have them actually attack each other...that would be sweet.

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They *can*, but they shouldn't. It would increase the time required to generate art assets incredibly. A 3d animated figure is way more difficult to create than a flat 2d image. And that's just to have the 3d models pose in some generic way and not interact with the opponent. If you actually wanted something like old school battle chess levels of interaction you'd need a different animation for every combination of creatures (or broad creature types at least). I'd much rather have the current ~650 different cards spread between PvP and PvE than 10 really good looking cards that can fight each other.

Looks like they ninja-edited their stretch goals on the main page. Probably an update incoming.

Anyway, looks like they dropped the primal pack stretch goal from 540k to 490k. They added a new 540k stretch goal, which is a subscription model. Everyone at Champion (the 85$ tier) or above gets a free 3 month subscription. The subscription seems to be 4$ a month for a free booster pack per week. So basically, 4 booster packs for half off. Not a really big deal as currently printed, but I guess it means they'll get some free revenue out of people who forget to cancel. Heaven knows I've paid for enough months of MMO subs after I stopped playing.

With all of these new stretch goals, they're essentially giving another 32 packs to everyone at the higher tiers (12 free from the subscription goal for everyone above 85$, 5 free to everyone above 50$ from the 490k stretch, and functionally 15 packs from the primal pack you get at 65$ or above, because let's face it, if you're buying that much, you don't care about commons and uncommons)

OUAriakas_sl said:

Love the subscription because it puts 4 boosters per month at $1 per pack. That price will make me sub and keep buying packs. It is crazy that WOTC never caught on to how big this could be.

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Yeah, the subscription model is good in general. I don't really understand it as it currently stands though. 4 boosters per month is a pretty small amount. Just slightly more than enough for their draft format. Anyone playing seriously is going to want to spend more than that to supplement their collection. I'll sign up, because you might as well, but it seems like they might want to add larger subscription tiers. My only thought is that they're going lowball just because 4$ is such a negligible amount that it wouldn't even register as spending money to many people (especially most serious CCG players). That or because it's handy marketing. "For just the price of a booster in some other card games, you'll get a subscription to blah, blah, marketing hype, blah"

You know what I wish would add a subscription? Fantasy Flight's Living Card Games (Netrunner/Game of Thrones/Call of Cthulhu/etc.). If you're not aware of the model, they release mini-expansions every month that have a playset of cards in them. It's a good deal. 15$ a month keeps you on top of the metagame without any of the usual rare-chasing you have to deal with in TCGs. The problem is they come out so frequently that whenever I'm in the game store I tend to forget which ones I already have. Really wish they'd just automagically show up on my door every month.

Oh, looks like the update just went out. There's more to it than was obvious from the front page update:

At 540K, we're going to introduce a subscription feature to HEX. Remember, HEX is free to play, but you'll have the option for $4 a month to get 1 booster pack a week free, access to a monthly tournament just for subscribers that features juiced prizes, and access to a "goldfish" feature so you can test out your deck's initial draw and first few draws after that.

I wonder how rare legendaries will actually be. Given the insane amount of packs people will be getting, will the legendaries be all that rare? Part of the fun of MtG is the value of cards and how they trade.
If the cards are not that difficult to aquire then part of the fun kind of fizzles out.

In for the $35 warrior tier.

Mahes_sl said:

I wonder how rare legendaries will actually be. Given the insane amount of packs people will be getting, will the legendaries be all that rare? Part of the fun of MtG is the value of cards and how they trade.
If the cards are not that difficult to aquire then part of the fun kind of fizzles out.

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I'm going to guess they go for the Magic mythic model. I haven't played seriously since before they introduced that rarity tier, but I think it's 1 in every 8 packs has a mythic? If that's the case then all of the big tier rewards should end up with around 20ish of them on average. That's probably enough to trade for a set of them, assuming the rarity breakdown falls along M:TG lines (and most everything else has so far, so seems a safe bet)

The thing is, that's only an issue for the first set. After that, everyone is back on even ground (ignoring the pro player tiers free draft a week). It's also not like every person is backing at the ridiculous tiers. Looks like about 2/3rds of the current backers are below king level. And, hopefully there will be plenty of other people who play who aren't backing it at this point. Assuming they get a decent marketing push, there should be several people who play it in the style of a facebook free to play, but maybe buy the subscription or just a couple of packs here and there. Everyone at king or above is the "Mr. Suitcase" style of gamer, and will end up with the whole set easily enough regardless. We're outliers, though.

Another thing is we have no idea what the PvE card distribution is going to look like. With the exception of Dragonlord tier and above (who get sets or playsets of all cards) people are only going to be starting with the kickstarter only PvE cards and whatever PvE starter decks look like. It's possible that they'll tie unique cards to difficult raid bosses, or specific achievements. Those might have a certain amount of rarity and glamour, in the way that achievement bound mounts do in WoW and other traditional MMOs. Hopefully they release more info about that soon. I hope it isn't just "You beat the dungeon, you get a random PvE booster pack. Yay"

Well after a small discussion with the wife, I went the Pro route. I am kind of flustered at spending $250.00 for a game not even out yet, but this game looks really good and appears to be what I wanted MtGO to be. I am still concerned about the power of some of the cards. A few of the equiped PvP cards would be "Broke" in an MtG environment, but perhaps given all the new rulesets might not be the case in this game. as an example the 1/1 creature for one resource(Mana, but might as well get used to the new terms) that puts 4 more 1/1's in your deck that adds +1+1 for every one you have in play, gets outrageous with it's legendary equip of "Draw a card" everytime you play one. Even the lessser equip of "Put 6 instead of 4 into your deck" is fairly powerful.

The other reason I decided to do this, besides the fact that I do play MtG, is because there just is not much in the gaming world that excites me coming out this year. I love Online games, but I am sick and tired of the WoW model and never really liked the GW2 of everyone has an equal weapon(Also I prefered the triad over thier solution)model. Sad to say but the only game I am watching for the future is the next Everquest game and that certainly is no guarantee of success.

So this will be the one game I get excited about for the year. Thankyou Draegan for pointing this one out. This game has a ton of potential and at least looks like it will be fun until the company gets bought out by Activision and everything goes "Capitalism" instead of fun.

So, did they ever talk about how dungeons and raids will work? I'm pretty curious and excited about that.

And I agree with what was said here. They're going to have to add an auction house or something, or some seriously shady places will pop up.

If all equipment is PVE only that'll make me sad. The number of permutations Equipment looks to cause in card effect/deckbuilding seemed to promise a ridiculous amount of deck customization and unique approaches. A 350 card base set may sound like a lot, but it really isn't enough to make that diverse of a game on its own. Most base sets in the rotating games are girded by 650-1300 (depending on the game) other cards that are legal when the base set comes.

Still, with a 350 card pool, the best deck is going to be found pretty quickly I assume.