I'm sorry Mown but I have the following problems with Eternal:

- Rarity = Power
- Can run 4 of each legendary
- Packs only give 1 blue or (more rare) orange period
- Lands
- Deck Size
- Warcry
- Sandstorm Titan

It's been fun, but 43 hours in I'm starting to prefer HS a bit and since i don't even play that anymore right now that's a really bad sign.

That's not at all true though. I'll just pull all the 1st place tournament finishes I can find:
3L http://www.eternaldecks.cards/deck/5SXt ... EaoGEImcki
3L http://www.eternaldecks.cards/deck/4JIJ ... wOAkiiuqMw
7L http://www.eternaldecks.cards/deck/5FEM ... mmqOYea44u
3L http://www.eternaldecks.cards/deck/1hRc ... A2eQ82IaEy
4L http://www.eternaldecks.cards/deck/6QrN ... q0guWYSsKO
4L http://www.eternaldecks.cards/deck/7iPs ... 04SKcmaMiq
So out of 6 winning decks, there are 24 Legends used in total. I'm not going to run through distributions of commons either, but let me just list Torch, Oni Ronin, the favors, Dark Return and Wisdom of the Elders as random example. Most decks have a mix of all, which seems perfectly healthy, possibly even ideal. The only archetype that rams oppressively many legendaries is midrange Combrei variants.

That is the opposite of a problem. Restricting the number of legendaries you can run just makes several of them non-viable for archetypes, like Crown of Possibility or Feln Cauldron, because you'll basically never draw them. Besides, if Legendaries were overpowered, as the above sentiment would imply, then limiting them would only increase the variance of games and make them more random.

That isn't really a reason, unless you really like to hover over cards and see colors, I guess. You could argue that the economy is poor, but I find is substantially more generous than Heartstone's.

Fair enough, although I don't see how you can both complain about large deck sizes and un-restricted Legends.

uh, alright.

Darude's pretty good, but I don't see him that much these days. There's a few other cards I find significantly more oppressive, mainly Valkyrie Enforcer and Steward of the Past, which are anti-fun and really difficult to counter-play. Darude just dies to things a lot of the time.

To each their own. Eternal actively makes me dislike HS more, although it's in large parts because of the client itself.

I think legendaries is one of the few things Hearthstone does right. In a game where it's really expensive to get the most expensive tier of card, limiting them to one copy per puts a soft limit on how expensive decks can get. The feln cauldron argument is a straw-man, because all cards like that could just be rares and it wouldn't hurt much from a deck-building standpoint. Having those build around cards be legendary just makes those decks be a lot artificially harder to obtain and play, for very little good reason from a gameplay benefit perspective. From a money making perspective it makes it harder for people to obtain things they want without spending money so I guess that is good?

But at the end of the day the fact that you need to spend 12800 for a playset of something to play certain decks just makes those decks prohibitively expensive to play or even try out a budget version of. I really don't like it when games do this, and I don't think Eternal's in-game economy is generous enough to offset this.

Speaking of, being better than Hearthstone is not something to be proud of. I got to play 2 Drafts last week and got like 30 new cards off of it, only one of those being orange and about half of those being green. Most of the cards I got are things I don't want, and I got so little dust from that entire experience that it's going to take a while to assemble decks I do want to play without putting money into the game or starting to seriously grind it.
This game has so much more stuff to get than Hearthstone did that the amount of extra stuff it gives you really doesn't compensate at all.

Furthermore, you are limited to exactly 1 rare/mythic per pack, and you cannot EVER get a better pack than that. That is ridiculously bad compared to a very large number of ccg/tcg games I've been playing, where the average pack is a little bit better and there is a chance for nut packs, which really just make your day when you get them.

And because commons and uncommons are almost worthless, like severely bad to the point where Hearthstone would be ashamed trying to get away with this, 15 cards per pack because of this setup is very very little. Compared to other ccg games it feels like only getting 3 cards per pack, and it downright feels worse than most of the other things I've played and stuck with for long periods of time, and it is outright capped at a point where I just don't buy packs EVER. And drafts are kind of.... it's at the point where the amount of new content per time spent is very low and because I can't afford to make anything top tier ranked is just a chore to play.

Capping Legendaries doesn't automatically make it cheaper as a result, it comes entirely down to how you design them. Renolock runs 9 Legendaries, more than any of the above listed decks, with a smaller deck size (albeit some of them are from adventures, for better or worse.) That's almost 25%.
It's not a straw-man, I'm not misrepresenting anything, it's the reality of things. Even if you did change the rarity, putting all the weird build-around cards down a rarity impacts drafting a fair deal, although I would personally like to see them be at an in-between rarity because getting playsets of legendaries to make gimmicky decks really is too expensive. Furthermore, you remove the ability to actually make Legendaries with significant deck-building sway. Shimmerpack? Nope. Queen? Leave. Marshal, Eilyn, LtF or Call? Gone. They only become meaningful if there's enough support elsewhere to where it's just a 'nice addition', and I think that removes a lot of agency when it comes to designing legendaries, something that should be there.
Finally, Legendaries are conductive to a better play experience, even if they may seem like nothing but a barrier to entry. They add excitement to pack opening, and they give players goals to work towards. They also let designers make exciting and splashy cards and make their appearance rate according in limited environments.


Some decks are expensive, it's the reality of things. Sometimes, you'll have to work for what you want. There's still a lot of budget options for whatever you want. Aggro is easy to run budget. Someone hit master's yesterday with a Legendary-less control deck. The gimmicky mechanics of the game let you make combo-decks like Static Shock as well.

I don't want to just say 'git gud', but I'm pretty sure the answer is to get good at drafting. If you get even a single platinum chest, either naturally or randomly, the payout is pretty massive, since they cover 40% of the cost by themselves.

You can get animated legendaries, but sure, you can't get the absolutely insane packs you're most likely not going to get anyway.

>Hearthstone commons
>Not terrible
Sure, enjoy your 7 overcosted windfury minions.
Eternal's commons aren't the cream of the crop or anything, but they're perfectly respectable.

Mown you've completely missed the point on that one.

"And because commons and uncommons are almost worthless, like severely bad to the point where Hearthstone would be ashamed trying to get away with this, 15 cards per pack because of this setup is very very little. Compared to other ccg games it feels like only getting 3 cards per pack"

Commons are 1 dust and uncommons are 10 dust. The better cards cost 800 and 3200 dust. <- What Jack was referring to entirely.

A bronze chest is 1 dust + 1/100th of an arena run. A Silver chest is 10 dust + 1/40th of an arena run. This is what you are grinding on ladder all day. Then you pay for a pack and get maybe 1/8th of a legendary. You do this for a month or two, get one or two decks you may or may not enjoy playing (at which point if you don't enjoy it well then you are **** and might as well quit), and then that's just what you do for your daily grind.

That sounds like as much as the way I just described it.

-----------

You cannot, under any circumstances, say that the game gives good rewards so long as you just "git gud" at the arena format. You can't reasonably expect everyone to do that, and the reality is that I'm probably not going to any time soon, despite having been trying to do so. It is a competitive game right now and I am naturally bad at draft formats. Thus for me the reward pace is barely a trickle and it's just stuck there. If you can do better than bulay for you.

Speaking of I am once again going to mention that I get really pissed when I lose an arena game to mana screw .

Anybody excited for Omens of the Past?

Not currently.

I just wish it was here already. I have 12 packs of Omens that I'd like to open already. I hate having unopened packs in my HUD. XP

Alright, I'm excited about OotP now that I've seen some spoilers that have tickled my fancy. Reanimator looks like it's going to be a ride.

Omens of the Past is releasing with the patch today. Currently in downtime, should end in about two hours.

Edit: Five days later, I already have at least one of every Common from Omens of the Past. Still have seven Uncommons I haven't acquired yet, didn't bother counting the rares or legendaries.

What does it say about me that I had more trouble with the Bronze puzzles than I did with the Diamond and Master puzzles?

So a few months ago I decided to take a plunge, because Eternal looked balanced and the best way to play Magic-like games in the situation I'm in (aka busy as hell). So I bought the biggest gem pack, burned it on packs and built Budget Feln:

4x Wisdom of the Elders
4x Lightning Storm
3x Lightning Strike
4x Annihilate
4x Deathstrike
2x Feeding Time
4x Second Sight
3x Trailblaze
4x Vara's Favor

2x Staff of Stories
1x Azindel's Gift

3x Withering Witch
4x Thunderstrike Dragon
3x Champion of Cunning

25x power

Not a great deck by any means (never left low silver with it), but it was fun to play and gave me enough gold so I could begin drafting. Did decent enough in drafts to keep drafting on and on and some two months later I had plenty of actually good decks (full Feln Control, full Argenport Midrange, full Praxis Midrange) without spending additional money, save for Horus Traver. This game is very generous once you actually get some wins going, and I don't even play that much so it was not even a grind. The pack for the first win of the day helped wonders, that is all I can say, and I wish more games did this.

People on the Steam forums are freaking out over a change to the Gauntlet payouts.

Previous system:

1 win: nothing
2 wins: 1 copper chest
3 wins: 2 copper chests
4 wins: 3 copper chests
5 wins: 2 copper chests, 1 silver chest
6 wins: 1 copper chest, 2 silver chests
7 wins: 3 silver chests

New system:

1 win: nothing
2 wins: 1 wooden chest
3 wins: 1 copper chest
4 wins: 2 copper chests
5 wins: 3 copper chests
6 wins: 2 copper chests, 1 silver chest
7 wins: 3 silver chests

Wooden chests give 20-30 gold, copper chests give 40-60 gold and a random common card, silver chests give 200-300 gold and a random uncommon card, gold chests give 500-600 gold and a pack, diamond chests give ~2000 gold, a pack, and a random foil card (can be any rarity, but has higher chance of being common or uncommon). With exception to wooden chests, each chest has a chance to upgrade by one tier.

Also, holy crap I've been playing this game for almost a year now.

oh my they do that just after I praise how easy it was to build a collection, did I jinx anything.

I never really did much Gauntlet grinding anyway, most of my gold was from ranked and I used Gauntlet mostly as a low-pressure way to test decks/play when I was waiting something. I wonder the reasoning behind that -- too generous? Taking people away from ladder? It is definitely one of those feel bad changes.

Prior to the nerf, Gauntlet was the best way to grind gold by far; easily beating out PvP.

I guess the nerf was made to have more players in PvP. IMO, it's a step in the right direction, but it's definitel a feelbad choice and I would love to see another slight buff to Ranked rewards.

Mjack is silly, this is the most generous game. Ive been playing for like what, a month? Only put in $50 and can already afford a tier 1 ranked deck. Still have almost all my gems.

I'm very careful with superlatives, but it's definitely up there with Gwent in terms of being generous. In both games you can go F2P to have top-tier decks very soon.

Bart now costs 4 and its ultimate costs 7.

Purify costs 2 and is no longer fast.

Vara's Choice costs 2 now.

The lifeforce card drawer is now a 5/3 for 4 (instead of a 6/4 for 5).

I'd say Bart is basically gone from Argenport now, going Bart into Falchion/Bloodletter was a massive swing that is impossible to do on curve right now. Argenport is still a thing due to how insane Tavrod is, but the 3-drop spot is going to be very interesting.

Played this for a little bit. Did some of the puzzles. Played some vs AI draft and some multiplayer. This game helped me to get more of an idea of the difference between the Magic-like and Hearthstone-like games. In the Magics, creatures don't have to die unless they are killed by removal spells, so the board is more 'permanent' and building up synergy is more important compared to the Hearthstones where the board constantly grows and decays. One upshot of this is that having the right cards is even more important in Magics, so F2P players are going to struggle more.

Tavrod is disgusting.

So I crafted Tavrod Armory. Master rank here i come.