Which is plenty bad in itself. Painful confession time: I went out of control with playing draft in MTGO, and I ended up spending, no joke, $900 on the game. You know those stories about “whales” pulled in by the predatory Free To Play games? That was me for Magic. And it’s hardly uncommon, I suspect the median is well over $200. You don’t buy a couple of starter decks and stop.
The basic gameplay in that video is straight Magic with only a few name changes. It’s such a direct copy that I wouldn’t be surprised if WotC tried to sue them. Magic has its warts for me, mainly centered around the nature of the meta-game, and how to be competitive, you really had to have 4 copies of certain rares, depending on the current generation of cards. That, and it seemed like you had a very few top-notch players creating killer deck concepts, and everyone else copying those few decks because their own deck ideas would lose to someone who copied a top-notch deck, provided they paid for the required cards.
That’s why I liked drafting so much better than the other formats. You couldn’t copy someone else’s deck concept, you had to work with the cards available, and my own brainstorms might actually work in that limited arena. Draft was better than other sealed deck formats, because you all drew from a single, large pool of cards. Everyone had more or less the same chance at the cards, instead of it being a crapshoot where you hoped the rares / uncommons in your booster packs were the good ones, and that you’d find cards that would work together. Building theme / combination decks was much more workable in draft because you could pick and choose from a much, much larger pool, provided you didn’t overlap too much with the desires of other players. Of course, the downside to Draft was you were opening a new set of boosters every friggin’ game, which got expensive fast.
What might make Hex work for me is that you’re competing against autonomous AI decks, not other players. You don’t have to copy the top-tier decks to do that, you just have to make a deck that works. Which reminds me of the old Microprose version of Magic, which was about wandering around in a strategic layer, fighting opponents that had specific decks.
The stuff with permanently boosting your cards with equipment and gems would be awful if I were focused on playing other humans, since it takes a common complaint about Magic, rares are usually flat-out better cards than commons, and squares it. Your copy of card X is stronger than my copy because you pumped it up. That mechanic works if I’m competing against the AI, though, since “fairness” doesn’t enter into it.
