While I’m still invested into Hearthstone, I don’t play it very much. I can chalk that up to a couple of reasons:

  1. The polish/animations make the UI too slow
  2. Playing online against real people is too slow
  3. The limit of 9 decks prevent me from having fun building decks (need to keep working decks around)
  4. The reward system is too slow

The last point is kind of interesting. There are daily quests (up to 3) which give you in-game currency, and this is supposed to keep you playing. If you complete all of them, you’ll probably have enough gold to get a new pack of cards. However it’s a lot of work to finish the quests (you have to play 5-10 games, possibly with characters you don’t really enjoy) so realistically I take a couple of days to finish them if I play actively. So I don’t get a lot of new packs (and when I do, I mostly get duplicates now). Because there is infrequent reward, I don’t feel like playing very much.

But I like the idea of card games, so I tried a new one called Solforge which is by the makers of Ascension. I sometimes enjoy playing Ascension so gave this one a try as it is available for Android and desktop. The reward system is better. You get a reward for logging in each day, your first win each day (irrespective of offline or online), and your third win. So you’re guaranteed some tangible reward (i.e., new cards) every day. As a beginner, that’s really great.

The game itself is OK – I’m still learning the intricacies and can’t beat the hard computer regularly (it also matters what cards you own). The UI sucks, and there’s a lot of reading involved (to learn the cards). I suppose that will get better over time (but the impact of the rewards will also decline as my collection gets larger). I initially tried it on Android, but the UI is even worse than it is on desktop! It’s in beta, so hopefully it will get better (Ascension’s UI is not that bad)