1841

It’s been a benefit to me researching the answers, because I learned things while looking. I don’t think the “pro tier” is a must for the long term, since it’s only about playing Draft. While I’m a big fan of Draft personally, I think it’s clear there’s plenty to do in Hex without playing Draft. There is of course a side benefit to the free Draft tournaments, since you’re getting 150 booster packs a year from them, win or lose, provided you play every week.

1842

Thanks for clarifying that. This is sounding better and better.

Glad to help! I don’t know if I’d call Pro a must, since I’m sure things will be tuned so players who join after the Kickstarter can enjoy it. But it is one hell of an offer, and there’s no way I’m going to pass it up. If you’re already going for King, then you can look at the upgrade as $130 up front for $300 worth of boosters every year in perpetuity for as long as you play the game and remember to log in every week to use it, plus whatever enjoyment you or your son get out of actually playing the drafts.

Yeah, each tier is definitely tuned to offer a better deal than the one below it, and there’s nothing wrong with the $35 one. But the stretch goals revealed so far are definitely tilting the balance even more toward the upper tiers, with most of the better benefits starting at $50 or $65.

1843

I’m finally off the fence. I went in for $250 and the Pro tier, because damnit, Draft is my favorite format. It’s still a crazy amount to spend on one game.

1844

I wonder if the rewards package is really worth an extra 130 dollars? Do you get extra cards?

3 boosters per week pays back the extra $130 in less than a year if one is serious.

It really stinks because not sure without trying the game but if you end up liking it than will be mad that didn’t get the better package.

1845

They’re now talking about a subscription model where you can get a booster a week for $4 / month, which is a tad less than $1 / booster. So maybe $150 in boosters is a fairer valuation. It’s still a lot like the lifetime subscription model that some MMO’s have offered, spending $250 up front to get what should be enough new cards every week to keep the game going for you.

1846

How would the draft work? I travel a lot and could not have a client on my laptop to play if the draft games only run on certain days etc.

Though when it comes out on iOS that would no longer be a problem.

1847

Well yeah, it has to be a much better deal than what they’ll offer after launch, because they’re enticing people into taking a leap of faith on a product that might conceivably flop. We’re clearly taking a bigger risk than someone who joins in only after it’s proven and established.

Yeah, I feel the same way, but it’s all relative. It’s a crazy amount to spend on a single computer game, but it’s a pretty typical amount to get into a new TCG (~3 boxes) or a new MMO (box + 1 year subscription). This isn’t the sort of game that you “finish,” so I am pretty confident that the long-term value proposition makes sense.

Drafts are available 24/7. There are three queues depending on how serious you are and what prize split you want, and whenever a queue has eight players ready to draft, it starts.

True, but the soft-sub is a pretty limited trickle of supply at that discounted rate. It only gets you ~16-17 packs of each new set, which isn’t going to go too far. I expect the majority of packs will still be purchased at $2, especially since the demand for each set will have a big spike right at release, so even people who register multiple accounts with subscriptions won’t have a chance to build up many of them.

1848

You get a free Draft play every week, which would normally be an entry fee and 3 booster packs. You get to keep any cards you drafted, plus any packs you win as prizes. The entry fee is unknown at this time - MTGO charges $2. Malkav11 said it’s $1, but I couldn’t find a source for that.

In MTGO, the prize pool for Draft is 11 to 12 packs, depending on format. What they’ve mentioned on the web page seems patterned after MTGO drafts. Magic has 3 draft formats: Swiss, 4-3-2-2, and 8-4. Swiss has no elimination, you play 3 games, and win 1 pack per win. The other two formats are single-elimination, and the numbers refer to prize distribution. I.e. 4-3-2-2 means 1st gets four, 2nd gets 3, and 3rd-4th get two. The corresponding Hex formats are Swiss, Casual, and Competitive. Swiss is the most forgiving, and Competitive the least, but Competitive offers a really big reward for 1st - it’s popular because everyone thinks they are going to win.

In MTGO, they’re charging the 8 players $16 to play, and providing 12 packs as prizes, for $1.33 each, which is much cheaper than the list $4 / pack. It’s a huge win form WotC, though, since they’re destroying 24 packs (which have to come from somewhere) and giving out 12, so someone somewhere is buying 12 packs of Boosters for every Draft tournament they start. It creates a big demand for unopened booster packs, as opposed to the market for the cards themselves.

I double-checked the FAQ thread to be sure that you didn’t have to provide boosters for the free Draft. You don’t get packs unless you play, they aren’t adding packs to your account, they’re just providing the packs and entry fee for 1 Draft tournament a week.

1849

I think TCGs in general are overpriced. I used the MMO argument to rationalize it to myself, since box + 1 year is about $230, and if a MMO really grabs me, there’s no question that I’m getting enough game for my $15 / month. The issue is that you only have to pay the box price if it turns out not to be good. The people who sprung for lifetime subscriptions to the Star Trek MMO mostly got burned, though some may have gotten over a year’s enjoyment out of it. I am in effect doing the same thing here, gambling that this will be good enough to spend $250 on a plan that’s somewhat like those lifetime deals.

1850

I’ve never played a collectible card game in my life before. What’s this “draft” thing you’re talking about? Is it like the NFL draft? Or when I play madden and do a fantasy draft for all the teams?

1851

Let me double check - so the pro gives you one free draft per week. This includes the draft fee plus the cost of three booster packs to play and you get to keep the cards from the draft game afterwards?

If I am correct than I will go Pro. If I cannot keep the cards I will probably go King.

1852

Actually thinking about buying in on hex now.

I used to be a big fan of Magic back in the day, i just got in to playing the magic 2013 game.

One of my major problems with basically every digital CCG is the price of the cards. Most of them seem to have the insane belief that the player should expect to play the same price for a digital card that they would for a physical card. This ends up costing players INSANE amounts of money. This is why i like he Magic games and even the tower defense CCG prime world: defenders so much. You don’t have to keep paying real world prices for a CCG to play the game, it is just a game with all the benefits and none of the negatives.

Hex looks interesting enough that i think i will give it a chance. The addition of a customizable player with talents and equipment to affect your cards is interesting and gives it some uniqueness beyond just being a straight copy of Magic. Not that there is really anything wrong with copying magic since it is a very nice system for the most part.

Still i worry about the required upkeep. I realize perhaps more than most that developers for a freemium game still like to eat food at least once a day, but i worry about how evil freemium CCG can be to the players.

1853

Per the FAQ thread:
Q: Do you have a tentative release date for the beta? And how will the pricing and reward structure for draft tournaments work? (Specifically, will we be able to enter drafts with the boosters we get from backing, and will we be able to keep the cards we choose after the tournament?)
A: We’re looking at a September release for the beta.
Pricing for draft is 3 packs + $1. It doesn’t matter where the packs come from. They can be KS rewards, you can buy them in the store, or you can use packs from previous tournament winnings.

1854

Woo-hoo! A chance to go into lecture mode!

Draft is an 8-person tournament. Each of you starts with 3 booster packs in front of you. You open one, look over the 15 cards, and pick one. You then pass the remaining 14 cards to your left, and the person on your left passes you 14 cards. You pick one, and then pass the remaining 13 cards. By the time you’re done, you’ve picked 15 cards. Now you open a second booster pack and do it again, only you’re passing to the right. And then again with the last pack.

When you’re done, you have 45 cards. These 45 cards are yours to keep, win or lose. You’d get 45 cards if you just opened the 3 booster packs, but you got to choose your 45 cards out of a pool of 360, so there’s a pretty good chance they’ll work together well if you’ve selected wisely.

These 45 cards do not include resource cards, called “land” in Magic. You can add an unlimited number of those, of any color. According to Cryptozoic, you’ll also have an unlimited number of gems, if you happen to have cards with gem sockets. You’re building a deck of 40 cards or more. Since you’ll be adding 17-18 resource cards you’ll only use 22-23 of the cards you drafted. The smaller the deck, the better it usually plays, so you usually want to shoot for exactly 40 cards total.

Now you take your 40 card deck and play against other players, with their new 40 card decks.

Yes, and yes. One draft tournament is free, they pay for your entry fee and 3 booster packs. Like any Draft game, you keep the cards you drafted at minimum, plus any prize packs.

One common issue is that since you keep your drafted cards, it’s not unusual for people to take the Rare out of a pack even if it doesn’t fit their deck, just to have the single Rare you get in each booster, since they get to keep it. It depends on how tempting the rare is, and if one of the cards they’re passing up for the Rare is particularly good for their deck.

1855

Thanks, I remember reading that now. Makes sense, I guess - the packs are half the price of MTGO’s packs, so the entry fee being half is consistent.

1856

Agreed on both points. I’m not really interested in getting into another paper TCG at this point, largely due to the cost. But going digital cuts out the cost of printing, shipping, and retailers, and makes it much more appealing. That investment that would buy 3 boxes of a physical game work out to more like 10 over the course of the first year here, and the ratio just keeps getting better the longer you play.

There’s an article explaining it here: http://hextcg.com/drafting-in-hex/.

It’s roughly similar to a sports draft, but instead of having the rotisserie style of one huge pool of choices that everyone takes turns picking out of, there are eight small pools (booster packs). Everyone picks simultaneously from the pack in front of them, and then passes whatever they don’t take to the next person, and that goes on until all the cards have been taken, and then repeats with pack #2 and #3. When it’s done, you build the best deck you can out of the cards you drafted, and play each other. It’s by far my favorite format to play, because it requires a lot of interesting decision-making and trying to read what’s going on at the rest of the table.

Yes, that’s correct. You keep all 45 cards you draft, and also have a chance of winning additional boosters as prizes.

1857

I am thinking that I may actually be able to win at draft versus having to design my own deck in regular competition.

I never tried draft because having four kids could never afford to even think about it. The Kickstarter gives me an opportunity to try it out at a lower overall cost. I used to play Chronx a bit if anyone remembers that game.

1858

I’m really feeling like the $250 tiers are meant to appeal to five different types of player with five different primary interests, but the relative value of the bonuses vary way too much. I mean, personally…I’m most interested in the PvE with maybe some light casual PvP with friends. But since PvP cards can be used in PvE (not vice versa), I do want to be getting those and I don’t so much want to be buying loads of boosters all the time. So even though in theory the Dungeon Crawler tier (or possibly the Raid Leader) would be most up my alley, all it’s really rewarding is spending less time playing the game to get PvE content. It’ll never get me anything I would otherwise have to pay for. The Raid Leader offers a moderate advantage in a particular type of PvE encounter. Cool? Yes, but not particularly competitive with the Dungeon Crawler, really. The Collector tier? Well, you get an extra copy of a bunch of stuff you’d get cheaper by combining two King tiers (requires multiple Kickstarter accounts but Cryptozoic has said they’ll support this sort of thing by merging the rewards onto a single Hex account), plus some alternate artwork cards. The alternate art will be exclusive, if that’s meaningful to you (it isn’t to me, but that’s fine). Going multi-King would also reward far more boosters. And then there’s the Guild Leader: 10% guildwide experience boost (nice, hard to say if it’ll be that meaningful or not, ultimately just a timesaver), and some boosters that your friends could get cheaper with better rewards by just also backing the Kickstarter. Or you could back multiple times and trade them the results.

By contrast, the Pro Player tier is presumably aimed at people who are big into the competitive scene and particularly draft tournaments. But it’s by far the most popular tier for the very simple reason that it represents three free boosters every week for the life of the game. A useful bonus for anyone, not just tournament players, and pays for itself pretty quickly, too. I’d honestly rather back a different $250 tier (not that I should be backing that high at all, but I am so psyched for this game), but it simply isn’t a reasonable proposition to do so. (On the plus side, at least it’ll get me to try draft. Maybe I’ll like it.)

1859

It’s my favorite format as well.

  • You’re working from the same card pool, so everyone has almost the same chances at good cards. Being a money bags with a big collection doesn’t help you.
  • You can’t copy a killer deck formula from the Internet. You won’t have the cards for it. You have to make your own decisions.
  • It’s better than other sealed-deck formats because you have 360 cards to choose from initially, not just 45-60. Combo decks are workable.
  • You get to see most of the cards at some point, so you have an idea what threats are out there. You can plan around that. In other formats, the guy you’re playing could have anything in his deck, depending on his luck.

The big drawback is the one WotC loves: you’re opening 24 new packs. It’s $16 per person to play one game, which is a lot even if you end up playing for 3 hours. Winning will offset some of that, but unless you’re coming in 1st-2nd all the time, it’s going to cost you a lot of money. I tried to get some friends on MTGO to do an informal draft where we all kicked cards we owned into a common pool, and draft from that. We’d get a Draft game going without that murderous expense. It never happened, though.

The price for Hex is lower (3x Booster + $1 = $7 / game), but that can add up fast too, particularly if you play elimination games and lose early.

1860

Same here. When I talk about my experience with Magic, it’s PvP, but that’s all that’s available in Magic. The only PvE version I’ve seen was the Microprose game, which I thought was great. I’d have continued with the Microprose PvE if they’d updated it with expansions regularly, but they didn’t. The game was over once I could beat the boss monsters.

I completely agree with your analysis of the other four $250 tiers. I’m not paying for bonuses which just make the game go faster. I don’t care about alternate artwork. The Guild Leader offers some strong bonuses, some of which aren’t spelled out on the Kickstarter page, just elsewhere. But I’m not paying $130 for that, either.

The Pro tier stands out because it’s a regular influx of booster packs, and in my experience you need that with TCG’s.

The nasty thing about “maybe I’ll try draft” is that it might get you like it got me. Draft is addictive. Particularly if your only other choices are unrestricted constructed decks, or sealed deck tournaments with a much smaller pool of cards. PvE is the boon here, since it’s something worthwhile to do with your cards that isn’t the brutal world of constructed play.

I’m hoping there will be a way to trade booster packs or cards for entry fees. In MTGO, entry fees are “tickets,” which have a nominal value of $1. You could easily trade unopened booster packs and rare cards for tickets from other players, though usually at a discount. Alternately, you could sell off cards or card sets for money on eBay, and use the cash for entry fees.

Why do I hope this? Because I’m starting with 150 booster packs. I’d like to Draft with those packs, but I don’t want to pay any more cash to do so. I figure drafting gets me the cards for PvE just like opening them does, plus a chance at prize packs.