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Ninety-Three

Hex: Shards of Fate: a lot like Magic: The Gathering

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Hex is a digital trading card game that's a lot like Magic: The Gathering. For comparison, if Hearthstone is 70% Magic DNA, Hex is 90%. I get the feeling that the developers started with the Magic rules and made a few changes, rather than building their own thing from scratch. That's absolutely not a bad thing, I love Magic, so I love a thing that's 90% like Magic.

 

If you've played Magic, imagine that Hex is Magic, but with some card designs that can only work in a digital envrionment: "Return target creature to its owner's hand, that creature's cost increases by 1" or "At the beginning of every turn, create an Ancestral Spirit card and shuffle it into your deck".

 

If you've never played Magic, what sets Hex apart from many other TCGs is the coloured resource system: About 40% of your deck will be coloured resources, and you can put one resource into play each turn. A card could cost 5 mana and have a threshold of two red, which means you can only cast it if you've played five resources, and at least two of them are red.

 

Oh man. The game feels really good. The cards do interesting, complex things and you have lots of opportunities to make interesting gameplay choices and build strongly synergistic decks. The problem I have with a lot of card games is that they feel kind of brainless: decks are just piles of good cards rather than cards that have been assembled to work well together, and gameplay consists mostly of casting your cards when you're able to and hoping the opponent doesn't cast better cards, rather than trying to win with decision-making. Hex doesn't feel like that at all, it's super great you guys! I don't know what any of the other starter decks play like, but the Dwarf deck is a super-fun robot-themed deck and I recommend it. Here's the card that convinced me Hex was a cool game:


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There are a few gameplay modes. You can challenge random humans in just for fun games, or you can enter tournaments which have entry fees and prizes. I haven't done that yet, so I can't say what it's like. You can also play against AI-controlled bots in Frost Ring Arena to earn gold. You have three lives to beat four increasingly difficult tiers of the arena, with each tier containing four basic bots, and then a super-powerful boss bot. If all you have is a starter deck, you won't get very far, and won't earn much gold, but I've been kicking ass and taking names after buying less than $10 worth of cards at the auction house. 

 

The bots are a recently-released beta feature, so they have pretty bad AI, which is compensated for by giving them some powerful, bot-only cards. The dumb AI doesn't hurt it that badly, but the compensation mechanism occasionally leads to games where the bot will do a bunch of super unfair overpowered nonsense that no human deck in the world could beat. It's rare enough that I still have plenty of fun playing bots.

 

Let's talk about the game's economy. You can grind for currency against bots, you can net a profit if you perform well in tournaments, or you can put down some real money and buy in. Grinding bots yields gold, while real money buys platinum, but the key feature is the auction house. As a trading card game, players can sell cards to each other for either gold or platinum. Since the economy has sinks for both of those resources, they become functionally interchangeable, and while you can't literally exchange gold for platinum, there's a semi-consistent exchange rate in the form of the auction house offering any given card for X platinum or [exchange rate]*X gold.

 

Because there's an auction house, it's way more money-efficient to buy cards individually, rather than buy packs and open the packs for random cards (though if you do want the excitement of pack-opening, buy your packs on the auction house, they're way cheaper than packs bought through the in-game store).

 

I'm sure you're bracing for the bad news about how expensive everything is, but I've found that cards are startlingly cheap. I put down $10, spent it at the auction house buying cards, mixed them in with my starter deck, and now I feel like I have a real, competitive deck. I didn't feel constrained by cost at all, I opened up the master list of cards (which has all kinds of useful filters and searching tools, available here), picked every one that I wanted for my deck, and never ran into the feeling of "I want to play this card, but it's a $20 rare". It doesn't feel like Hex is a game where you have to spend a few hundred dollars to be truly competitive, and it doesn't feel like a game where rare cards get printed 50% more powerful than everything else.

 

In conclusion, Hex is the second coming of Trading Card Game Jesus, and you should all go try it, it's free! 

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For the record, Hex is still super awesome and better than when this was posted because the first part of the PvE campaign mode came out, they've added PvP card set 4 (heck, I think even set 3 is new since this post) and a new tournament mode, improved the AI, added plenty of new shinies, etc. Oh, and it's on Steam now.

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I kickstarted this and bounced off the beta so hard I never came back. Maybe I should revisit when (if) I have some time.

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What I played of this was pretty good but honestly without an android port I don't think I'm going to put much time in just now. And I think I might prefer Duelyst's more tactical gameplay. I'm also not hugh on the sheer amount of cultural appropriation on display with the coyotle. It's in really poor taste to be honest.

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For me it's all about the singleplayer, which is head and shoulders above, say, the rather lackluster Adventures in Hearthstone, and free to boot. I do draft regularly, but that's because I also Kickstarted it, at a level where I get a free draft each week. So it's a free stream of cards. I almost never actually win the matches. The thing is, they do all kinds of stuff with singleplayer cards that would be unbalanced in PvP, and even for the PvP cards, they're interacting with equipment (which alters their card text and values) in unique and potent ways...of course, your character only has six slots for equipment, and they're specific (gloves, boots, etc). So you're balancing slots, building your character and deck in equal measure, etc. It's really neat stuff. 

 

There's going to be a lot more to it as they add Adventure Zones 2 and 3, more levelling tiers, more classes, mercenaries, strongholds, guilds, raids and so on, but even in its current form it's a whole lot of fun.

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It may well be the best pure card game out at the moment. Granted I rather dislike Blizzard's house style so I never got that far into Hearthstone.

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I Kickstarted this and also bounced off the beta because I had too many other games to play. I have a Guild Master's Kickstarter account, so if there's a Thumbs guild that's going to form I think I may provide some bonuses to it. Let me know if there's interest.

 

(By this I mean, if you make me the figurehead Guild Master, you get extra free cards on a regular basis, I think)

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I Kickstarted this and also bounced off the beta because I had too many other games to play. I have a Guild Master's Kickstarter account, so if there's a Thumbs guild that's going to form I think I may provide some bonuses to it. Let me know if there's interest.

 

(By this I mean, if you make me the figurehead Guild Master, you get extra free cards on a regular basis, I think)

 

That would be rad, but no, the Guild Master bonuses were 1) 10% extra exp for anyone in a guild with a Guild Master (don't have to be in charge I don't think), and 2) 3 codes for 30 set 1 packs each, as I recall. The latter were of course theoretically to hand out to your guildies to give them a leg up getting going but I confess I ended up grabbing the packs myself, and I bet most people with that tier's rewards did likewise.

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If it's just 10% more xp for anyone in guild with a guildmaster, tell me if you want me in the guild as the "Lucky Charm XP booster" and I'll gladly join.

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