debated going to bed early or doing a draft. obv went with draft and got my first 7 winner after four 6s. 2-2 before winning out. grabbed a terrible yellow legendary too

beat: still in silver

Just got a notice that servers are going down for maintenance, looks like the adventure is coming out today

:O

nice! definitely an upgrade to the 3/3 warcry Ive been running

That guy and the purple sweeper look really strong. The 3 mana ramp guy is probably good.

The power level of the expansion seems p low

Good games have mechanics that let you mitigate those RNGs so they turn in opportunities for more decisions.

Duelyst has a replace mechanic, where each turn you can take one card in your hand and ship it back in for a new one, so after a turn or two, you are nearly guaranteed to have something playable, or you can strategically choose to hold onto an expensive bomb for later.

ShadowEra (and "Mental Magic") removed the card type of lands, and let's you play the drawn cards (summons, spells, weapons, etc.), as lands, so you are deciding which resource to use as another resource, preventing mana screw or flood.

Race for the Galaxy lets you use cards in hand as printed, or alternatively, lets you use them as payment for other cards.

Other games get rid of resource costs, or make them all (basically) cost the same to play, like Epic or Solforge or the DBGCs....

Others have scheduled ramping over time, like Hearthstone, Lord of the Rings LCG, Duelyst. And while RNG "curve screw" exists in the latter group, it's arguably better than mana screw, and objectively WAY better than getting both curve screwed AND mana screwed.

I'm liking idea of ShadowEra already. World of Warcraft TCG (Hearthstone is like Wow tcg lite) also had "rowing", playing a card from your hand facedown as a resource. In addition to that, there were also resource cards that could only be played as a resource, but most of them let you later draw a card one time by paying mana. Wow TCG was GOAT tcg, unfortunately Blizzard ended the licence so it wouldn't compete with Hearthstone. The original versions of HS were actually carbon copy of the game.

Epic TCG also has pretty interesting mana system. You have 1 mana/turn, all your cards cost either 0 or 1.

When we play casual mtg, we also use the rowing rules. We have huge stack of cards, both players draw 7, you can play anything as facedown 5-c land. Way more fun than regular mtg, partly because the "Stack" (that's what we call the format) have ton of fun and interesting cards. The only lands we have are rav bouncelands and some manlands since bouncelands
interact nicely with rowing


EDIT: Oh yeah, now I remember. Shadowera was that complete ripoff of Wow TCG, even the heroes are identical (Wow tcg heroes had 25-30 health depending on class, each had 1-time acticated ability.)

Since Epic was brought up, there is a kickstarter for the online game through February. Early access, which is apparently extremely well polished already, starts in March for all kick starters.

I love the idea of $30 for a full playset and unlimited free drafting / sealed.

I don't really think the mana system in Eternal is a problem

Having mana availability curves go on some random walk like 1-2-3-3-4-5-5-5-6 is strongly preferable to it going 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8 every game. The non-games you get is a real price, but I think the Hearthstone refuges in this thread can attest that avoiding Curvestone is a real benefit.

learned that throne warden is a promo card and I cant get it in packs. was going mad at never opening up the one uncommon i wanted!

Aha. I assume that's also why I don't have any of the banners for off-color combinations even though they're commons (Praxis, Xenan, etc.)

Spiking a legendary in draft you were saving shiftstone for feelsgoodman

Lol yeah. I was trying to not craft any commons and was pulling my hair out about how I could have 0 of so many banners still.

I think there are 10 factions and they are rotating 5 in and out at a time per set. Hence a bunch of banners that you currently need to craft if you want them.

Gotta say Jek's Bounty is pretty boring. The cards should be fun though.

Alright so I started playing, finished the campaign, what do I do from here? I've been getting smoked with my self-created deck, for starters. I haven't played a game like this since MTG 20+ years ago so I'm pretty lost - so far I kind of like it but too many games seem to snowball and be over before they are more than a few turns in.

are you playing the gauntlet AI or ranked?

do the free forge and the gauntlets to get some cards. it happens pretty quick, i had a viable deck for low ranked levels in a day

Play Gauntlet until you hit Diamond/Master or whatever the final rank is. Any of the preconstructed decks you get should be able the manage it, the two-color decks just blast through it.

Then you can do the same with Forge. Then move on to draft. By then you should have the cards to play constructed.

Thanks guys, this is perfect, will focus on Gauntlet for now. Also I'd like to throw the devs a few bucks as well, what's the best use of gems?

starting out use them to enter draft since you get to keep all the cards you draft. 10 bucks gets you two drafts from which you should get enough gold from for another.

Drafting. As long as you can average 2 wins per draft you are "profitable" over simply opening packs. If you can manage some good runs the rewards are significant. There is also of course the benefit that you are hand picking cards from packs and not just getting a totally random pack.

Forge is also good while you're learning, and don't be afraid to spend gems there if you want to. As soon as you pick 2 different colored cards you are locked into those colors, so consider forcing picks of colors you want to build your first decks in to start getting the necessary commons/uncommons.

It's a bit disappointing that adventures are just using the Hearthstone model. Blast through some not-that-challenging AI fights in a few hours, collect cards, never have any reason to touch again.

It would have been cool if they embraced the Gauntlet format and made it so buying an expansion unlocked a new Gauntlet to ladder up on. Perhaps give the cards up front or give a batch of cards at the end of each rank, and give people who like to grind AI fights an alternative gauntlet to run to earn their bronze/silver chests.

So I have started this as well, running some forges (seems extremely hard to lose at the low ranks, no matter how bad my draw the AI just throws every game).

What kind of deck should I start building? Don't have any legendaries yet except the starters, I like control decks better but they probably cost a lot of dust?

Damn you are already so much smarter than me. Seems like I'm earning a ton of coins in gauntlet that will allow me to draft at least once for free - I would have even more if I hadn't spent them on packs like a fish. I'm sure other CCGs have similar mechanisms, but having never played any of them I really love the idea of drafting/forging versus buying ransoms packs of cards - I don't think I'd be into the game otherwise.

The deck that is probably the least reliant on rares/legendary's would be Rakano Warcry. The Warcry mechanic has a tendency to snowball when unchecked. I'm pretty sure you could get Master in gauntlet with this deck without a single rare used.

Control decks are obviously more expensive, yeah. You could always try replacing the end game bombs with whatever you have in your collection though and hoping for the best.

I've played a lot of MTG when I was young and recently hearthstone, so drafting-type formats are much easier for me to get used to in a new game.

Never buy packs in F2P games as they are always the worst value because of the instant gratification.