I had heard about this when it was being kickstarted and recently found out that there's an open beta (Steam, iPad): http://solforgegame.com/game/how-to-play/

I'm still deciding what I think of it. A battling card game with no resource system sounded awful at first, but I'm already finding it has more play than I expected. Most of the strategy I'm seeing comes from the fact that playing a card adds its higher-level version to your deck, meaning you have to decide between optimizing for the best immediate board position vs. leveling the "right" cards for later in the game (there's actually a kill card in my deck that I'll sometimes point at one my own creatures just to level it).

It's F2P and it's really easy to get free cards (you get in-game currency and boosters just by logging in, as well as playing games including against the easy AI bots) I'm "ItsNotXhad" if anyone wants to try it and friend me.

I've been playing this since the open beta release (more or less).

It's fun but doesn't have enough depth to really hold you for a long period of time. I do like the generosity of the free to play rewards though. It can take time because you are limited to what you can get in a day rather then grinding, but you can quickly get your max rewards each day and build up your deck's without a huge time or money investment.

You mentioned killing your own cards to level up and I want to point out that you don't need to do that. Playing a card will immediately put the levelled up card into your deck after your reshuffle.

ie: You can get 1 card into play multiple times if your shuffle / hand deals work out that way.

He might be talking about dreadbolt or cull the weak which you can't play without targets, so you sometimes have to target your own creature if you want to level it. Done it multiple times, mainly to trigger savants though.

Oh, I meant to level the kill spell. It comes up a lot with my deck against Alloyin; e.g. the opponent reduces a creature's power to a negative number, and they're pumping their own creatures above 4, so I play my level I Cull the Weak in the hopes that the level II version will let me kill an important creature later.

EDIT: And yes, Savants definitely make that easier to justify. As soon as I saw a Savant in action I thought it was the most powerful thing I'd seen, and glancing at the official forums it sounds like there's likely an impending nerf. I know as soon as I got a Deathshaper Savant I started warping the rest of my deck around it (with good results)

The savants example makes sense... but as far as just to level the kill spell, you should never need to kill your own creatures. There is a "discard" button on your right side to let you level cards you don't want to put into play. Even though those negative power creatures are useless they can at least plug a lane and block until you are ready to play something better there.

Oh, cool. I do however think you want to kill/replace useless creatures asap if you dont have boosts or effects requiring sacrifice. They block your mobility and might boost their grimgaunt devourer or predator for free.

Id echo this. I had fun for a few hours, but it got stale fairly fast. Outside of creature cards, it seems like there were very few spell/action cards worth using.

Some updates on my opinion:

Now that I've seen some legendaries, rarity matters more than I realized at first. I now have five of them, four of which are in my deck:

Echowisp: level 1 gives a bonus copy, level 2 gives a bonus copy, level 3 fills your board. The lower rarity copy creatures only make one copy, or even flip a coin for one copy, and aren't significantly better bodies

Lyria, Muse of Varna: Passable level 1, 7/7 with a free creature at level 2, fills your board at level 3

Chrogias: Level 3 40/40 lol

Soul Drinker: The worst of the lot if only because of 1 health, but because his trigger steals the opposing creature's attack he effectively ruins their best creature almost unconditionally

In retrospect I don't know why I'm at all surprised that the legendaries are this powerful and rare; probably because I didn't realize at first that there were five rarities.

Re: Discarding, this may be a bug but I couldn't get it to work. That post did lead me to realize that you can play creatures in an occupied lane, making those useless creatures far less troublesome.

Re: spells being useless, that isn't my experience at all so far. There's the Surges, there's Ferocious Roar, there's various other pump/kill spells. The Alloyin tricks look lame to me but I haven't tried them.

I'm starting to have fun with my deck. OP legendaries aside, it's a big pile of value creatures that try to just take over the board entirely. It's a big pile of managing triggers vs. levelups vs. different triggers and I actually just lost a game to timeout. I can see myself getting tired of it but I think it has a couple weekends left in it at least.

I discovered Solforge last week and was immediately hooked. In my opinion the rewards are quite generous and I got competitive decks within days.

Yeah, I'm a big fan. Got my first 3-0 in draft a few days ago, which was exciting