Duelyst - A potential competitor to Hearthstone?

I like many others am not that satisfied with Hearthstone these days. TGT was underwhelming and Blizzard is showing an unwillingness to balance quickly or properly, which is turning people off from the game. This has escalated to the point where the subreddit is almost entirely complaining about the game, with a front page post straight up asking for alternatives. That is how I found Duelyst.

Apparently this game was a Kickstarted product that just went into open beta fairly recently. The general idea is you collect "cards" that you use to make squads, you get one additional mana a turn to play out units and spells, etc. The real differentiation though is the board. This is not just a lineup of cards where positioning doesn't really matter - this is a grid based tactics game. Think FFT or something along those lines, but where you only start with a general at the start and then play out your squad over the course of turns as you move around your units and fight. For this reason, the game is much more tactical, with more ability to adapt to draws on the fly and hopefully make the game less rng dependent.

It seems interesting so far and I'll keep playing for a while. It has the standard dailies for gold and such, opening packs for more units and spells. Also supposedly rare cards are much more common than in Hearthstone so hopefully it won't become as spendy.

It is well known one of the reasons Hearthstone is so successful is because it has so little competition. There are tons of physical card games that are well established but very few good digital ones. There is that Elder Scrolls card game coming later this year (?) which may be interesting, but this is the first digital CCG(ish) game that has really caught my eye other than Hearthstone.

You can play through the browser at http://beta.duelyst.com/ or download the beta client at https://duelyst.com/

PS. If you do start you can use the referral code "redditpals" to get an extra 100 gold at the beginning. That code and many new player guides from the subreddit.

Sounds neat but I don't know if I'd say it competes. 90% of people who play Hearthstone will probably never go on the subreddit for the game. It has a kind of mass appeal that a kickstarter tactics game will probably never reach. It's unfortunate if Blizzard really isn't taking care of the game but it's a lot bigger than most free-to-play games will ever be in terms of audience.

It may be an interesting game but it isn't really going to compete with Hearthstone. People in to hearthstone are either playing it whilst in queue for other games like league of legends or Dota or are playing hearthstone because of how simple it is to just pick up and play even on your phone. Candy Crush and match 3 games are huge currently but games like puzzle quest that add interesting depth and refines it all are still a niche, the majority of people who make up hearthstone's vast playerbase upon reading "The real differentiation though is the board. This is not just a lineup of cards where positioning doesn't really matter - this is a grid based tactics game. Think FFT or something along those lines, but where you only start with a general at the start and then play out your squad over the course of turns as you move around your units and fight. For this reason, the game is much more tactical, with more ability to adapt to draws on the fly and hopefully make the game less rng dependent." will just think that doesn't sound interesting or appealing to why they play hearthstone and will elect to pass on it and stick to what they know.

Still though you've turned me on to it and I'll certainly check it out.

It's probably going to be about as much competition for Hearthstone as WildStar was for World of Warcraft.

I've been playing this game a decent amount, and I'm still not sure how to feel about it. Some common strategies are just plain unfun to fight against (mechaz0r, Songhai spell nukes, Lyonar healing spam), and the game balance, at least among the starter decks, seems to need some real work. I do like how easy it is to expand your decks, but some of the starter decks are just terribly lacking compared to other factions. High cost minions without a good opening gambit (an effect that occurs immediately when they are played) are next to useless given how easy it is to negate single targets.

It's weird because when you get a good match, this game is great. The tactics and deck building parts work wonderfully together, and every turn you have to make tough decisions. But when you get a bad match, the entire game falls apart entirely. I'm not sure if it's because of matchmaking or plain old luck of the (card) draw, but this game has the most drastic swings between being fun and being unfun that I've seen in a long time. I suppose that's true for a lot of games, but it's been especially evident here for whatever reason. I guess what I'm saying, is that it certainly doesn't solve the usual RNG influence from most deck building games.

On a technical front, the fact that sometimes you have to wait for animations to finish, and that too many animations playing at once really impacts the performance, means that trying to cram in moves before a turn timer ends is just plain frustrating. I've quit playing Abyssian entirely because the amount of animations you have to get through on your turn is just tedious.

In other words, I think this game has a ways to go, but when it works, it's really fun.

I did not mean to imply this was going to be some Hearthstone killer game - I'm fully aware this will only gain a fraction of a percent of Hearthstone's playerbase. Still though it has caught the eye of myself and many of my friends, at least for the moment, so I thought it'd be worth passing it on.

Perhaps a better title would have been "Duelyst - A CCGish game that scratches a similar itch to Hearthstone if you're bored of that at the moment" because people seem to be focusing on my use of "competitor."

You don't have to be a sizable threat to be a competitor. I just meant competitor in that it might appeal to similar people.

@mike: Damn man, that's a zinger! You aren't wrong though.

Lol no

Just to add about Duelyst, the lead designer is Eric Lang who has been putting out a bunch of hit board games. Recently he created Marvel Dice Masters which has had a large CCG-like following and more recently Blood Rage which has been getting a lot of rave reviews. He also got his start in Board game design doing a lot of CCGs decks like Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones etc under Fantasy Flight Games. So the game does have pedigree behind it. Not sure if that will lead to it competing with Hearthstone in this digital CCG genre.

Now all it needs is to be published by Blizzard.

It is neat, but no chance it is competition to heartstone.
Matches might take too long and it is even more swingy in the beginning when you don't have a deck. Which is heartstone you can get something decent going with what you have as a basis.

And the big thing. It doesn't say published by Blizzard. That still stands for something for some reason or another. Blizzard properties will alwasy get disproportionate amount of attention.

I really like it.