Official site: https://www.krosmaga.com/en
A video that explains the basics well enough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JW-NvMfh610

Has anyone here ever played this? At its core it's a lane-based card game, like "Plants vs Zombies - Heroes", but it has different original elements to it.

First of all, the art: if you already know Ankama for Wakfu or Dofus you know what I'm talking about, and I like it a lot, but that's subjective of course.

The objective of the game is to break 2 eggs on the opponent's side of the board, mostly by attacking them with your minions (yes they call them minions just like in HS). The eggs have 5 HP each and there are 5 of them, but 2 of the 5 are "fake": they don't count as the ones you need to break in order to win, but if you break one, you are allowed to make your minions start 1 row further down the lanes.

On the 1st row on both sides of the lanes there are objects called "prisms" that are gathered by the player who first gets one of their minions on them. They can give you an additional mana (they are called action points here but I'll call them mana anyway), give you a card that deals 1 damage to an egg for 3 mana, or make you draw a card. They respawn at the start of the next turn after all of them have been collected.

The mana goes up each turn just like HS, but there's a "reserve" which functions as a special card outside of the game that you can play whenever it has 1 or more mana on it (you can't get only a part of the mana on it: if you play the reserve you get it all). You can put mana into the reserve through one kind of prism, through specific cards, or whenever you leave some unused mana at the end of turn.

There are 9 classes but they should reach 12 someday: I'm not into the Wakfu/Dofus lore enough to know it myself but I read there are 12 gods, and there are 3 empty spaces in the class selection at the moment. Each class has its own specific cards and mechanics, just like in HS. You start with Iop whose starter deck seems like an "all-rounder", then unlock the other ones by winning against the AI in Training mode; note that, unlike HS, you actually play with the class you're going to unlock, rather than against. The only class that I had trouble unlocking (losing twice, while I never lost unlocking the others) is Sacrire, a sort of enrage class whose starter deck often made me end up with a bunch of Bloodlust-like spells in hand and not enough minions to capitalize on them.

There's ranked and unranked mode; there's single-player mode and draft mode, but they are unlocked only when you reach rank 6 in ranked mode (they go upwards, from 1 to 30 which is the maximum). It appears that single-player mode unlocks exclusive cards, but each attempt at it costs in-game currency, which is the reason why I probably won't keep playing. And it's a pity because it's fun.

In case someone wants to try this game, the first step is to create an account, and here's an important note about it: you'll select an account name and a password, then you'll select your username (which is the one everybody will see) when your account is already created, and it needs to be different from the account name. It's a nice security measure, but they should make the users aware of it in advance, so that they don't "burn" their favorite nickname on the account name.