comparing games chat (card game debate like pokemon)

[azrid]

Heartstone is totally playable if you like playing arena. You will eventually get good enough at it that you make a decent amount of gold for any constructed deck you want.
There is also whizbang for those who want to try a lot of different decks for cheap.

I am still a new magic player but to my surprise its pretty easy to get into when you play the online version.

[VDZ]

at least with magic once youve got a card, youve got it for good and its part of your expanding collection (i assume, never really got into it)

hearthstone does a thing where every couple of expansions, it wipes the slate clean, except for a selection of "basic" cards, everything else becomes non-standard and you typically then turn it into dust which can be spent on creating new cards at 1/4th loss in value every time (or become a faggy "wild" mode player)

It's sort of similar in Magic. There are various 'formats' which dictate which cards can be played. The major competitive formats are:
* Standard is by far the most popular format, but only cards from roughly the past two years can be played. Every now and then (I think once a year nowadays?) the oldest sets in Standard 'rotate out' and are no longer allowed to be played in the format.
* Modern allows all cards printed since summer 2003 except for cards printed in specific supplemental non-standard sets. Cards never rotate out. More popular than Legacy and Vintage, but less popular than Standard.
* Legacy and Vintage both allow all legal cards ever printed, but Legacy has a somewhat sane banlist while Vintage is Magic at its most broken.
In all cases, certain specific cards are banned, and if a card is reprinted, you're allowed to use the older version of the card in formats where the reprint is legal (e.g. Standard currently contains some cards first printed in 2003's Scourge set, so you can use the Scourge versions of those cards in Standard as well).
There's also various forms of casual play, many of which allow you to use all cards (often with a banlist for the most broken ones).

Magic is a TCG and so you can trade away or sell the cards if you can no longer play them in Standard, but you still lose value if you're a Standard player.

However, this is a necessary evil for two reasons. The first is pretty self-evident if you compare the prices for competitive decks in Standard, Modern and Legacy. A competitive Standard deck costs $200-$400 when buying the cards from professional resellers. Competitive Modern costs $600-$1500 depending on the deck, and competitive Legacy is somewhere between $1200 and $6600. As the card pool grows, more powerful combinations of cards become possible and demand for older obscure cards with very specific effects grows; in addition, if design mistakes from the past do not rotate out and are also not blatant enough to be banned, prices of those cards also rise like mad. (It shouldn't need to be said that a cheap Standard deck wouldn't stand a chance in a format with so many powerful combinations and cards.) The longer a non-rotating format exists, the more expensive it will become. Attempts to contain this, such as by reprinting cards that never should have been made in regular sets, would harm the game balance and with that the health of the game. The very fact that your cards become unplayable over time in Standard is the reason Standard is playable in the first place.

The other reason is commercial incentive. Creation of a TCG/CCG is a business and to make a profit, players need to keep buying new cards. If there are many old cards you can use and newly printed cards aren't really any more useful than the older cards, players don't have much of a reason to buy the new cards. Natural corporate processes then lead to a situation where the developer starts making cards more and more powerful to incentivize players to buy them (as in that case they have a benefit over the older cards). Other TCGs have fallen into this trap before, and history shows it's extremely harmful to the health of the game. Rotation provides an alternative to this: If older cards keep rotating out, new cards become exciting again if they do something the current card pool cannot, even if older cards - that have already rotated out - were able to do the same thing or were perhaps even better than the new cards. This reduces the need for power creep, protecting the balance of the game.

[AntiBlitz]

how is Gwent? anyone try it, i saw the new Thronebreaker game come out, and it uses Gwent as its base for the game. i wanted to give the game a try, cuz it looks up my alley.

[shubla]

how is Gwent? anyone try it, i saw the new Thronebreaker game come out, and it uses Gwent as its base for the game. i wanted to give the game a try, cuz it looks up my alley.

I assume that the gwent standalone game is completely different from the gwent in witcher 3. Good cards would give way too much advantage.

[MightySheep]

Heartstone is totally playable if you like playing arena. You will eventually get good enough at it that you make a decent amount of gold for any constructed deck you want.
There is also whizbang for those who want to try a lot of different decks for cheap.

I am still a new magic player but to my surprise its pretty easy to get into when you play the online version.

Thats a myth I had thousands of arena wins and high win average per arena, I could easily cycle arena to keep earning packs but its a drop in the bucket if you want full meta decks

The whole system basically just rigged to suck your wallet dry

[shubla]

Heartstone is totally playable if you like playing arena. You will eventually get good enough at it that you make a decent amount of gold for any constructed deck you want.
There is also whizbang for those who want to try a lot of different decks for cheap.

I am still a new magic player but to my surprise its pretty easy to get into when you play the online version.

Thats a myth I had thousands of arena wins and high win average per arena, I could easily cycle arena to keep earning packs but its a drop in the bucket if you want full meta decks

The whole system basically just rigged to suck your wallet dry

I played hearthstone for year or two and never paid anything. Didnt have much complaints. Of course sometimes you might get opponents that clearly have used a LOT of money in the game (having all of the latest fancy decks and cards), but that did not happen too often, you can easily win enough of matches to have fun without buying any cardpacks.

[azrid]

its a drop in the bucket if you want full meta decks

Well if you want ALL the meta decks I'm sure in any other card game it wouldn't be cheap either.
My point was you can easily get a few powerful decks from doing arena. You just have to select which ones you like.

And if you take heartstone as a purely arena game it will have no cost for you and you wont be able to have the excuse of someone having an advantage because of money.
Unless you suck of course.

[Lyrroth]

MtG: only real version. much funnier IMHO.

Pokemon Online: beside the Ex, Fuck-ex, ex-attacks, competetive players often using discard decks that are OP imho, its fun. Once a time I go back to play it.

Hearthstone: Was fun for me, when I was playing it somewhere Naxrammas or whatever you spell that, after this i had a long break and now i cannot find myself again in that, somehow

Gwent, i didnt like it much when i played beta but maybe if i would give it another try it would be fun dunno

Wonder how artifact will work out

[MagicManICT]

MtG Vintage: be prepared to sit down across from the guy with a $30k value deck. (Ok, I don't know. I haven't looked at the ban list for this in several years, but the power beta and Arabian Nights cards were never completely banned at that time, just restricted to one per deck.)

If you like CCG type games, check out Hex--very much a cross between MtG and Hearthstone, but has it's own unique things; pretty solid solo campaign; can be played for completely free, but much like Hearthstone, don't expect to be competitive without a lot of grind.
Faeria--CCG but played on a tabletop board like a turn-based strategy; fun game for an alternative to the "cards only" CCG

I played hearthstone for year or two and never paid anything. Didnt have much complaints. Of course sometimes you might get opponents that clearly have used a LOT of money in the game (having all of the latest fancy decks and cards), but that did not happen too often, you can easily win enough of matches to have fun without buying any cardpacks.

Even the casual matches are based on a hidden MMR, so if you're not a strong player or don't have strong decks overall, you're not going to get completely smashed by someone that is significantly higher rank than you. Some decks just smash through others easily, yet have their own glaring weaknesses.

[VDZ]

MtG Vintage: be prepared to sit down across from the guy with a $30k value deck. (Ok, I don't know. I haven't looked at the ban list for this in several years, but the power beta and Arabian Nights cards were never completely banned at that time, just restricted to one per deck.)

$30k is about right for Vintage, yes. Vintage is still restricted-to-one only, with the sole exception (beyond ante cards which have been banned since the start) being Shahrazad (the one that makes you play a sub-game of MTG) which was eventually banned because its usage was too obnoxious and too much against the spirit of the game. (Rounds in tournaments have time limits. What some players did was win the first best-of-3 match (or best-of-whatever), sideboard in a lot of cards to transform their deck into a Shahrazad deck, then use game 2 to stall infinitely using Shahrazad to make the time run out, giving them a 1-0 victory.)

Faeria--CCG but played on a tabletop board like a turn-based strategy; fun game for an alternative to the "cards only" CCG

I've also played a bit of Faeria and would recommend it as well.