I've played Magic on and off my whole life and spent at least 1000 hours playing Hearthstone. I had MTGO since the very beginning, and Hearthstone since open beta. Eternal is the best online card game I've ever played. It combines the best aspects of Magic's strategic depth and Hearthstone's fast-paced accessibility while avoiding their flaws. PS:Though the mulligan will always drive you crazy,but I love this game indeed. F2P Magic will always be expensive because it's a tradable CCG with a reserve list of cards that can't be reprinted and expensive booster packs. Most cards lose tons of value when they rotate out of standard. MTGO is less expensive and more liquid than physical cards, but still expensive. Recently, Wizards have added features similar to other digital CCGs like treasure chests. Hearthstone is "F2P" in name only. New players need to spend lots of money or time to earn a viable deck. Otherwise, enjoy scraping out wins with a crappy pile at rank 17. Rewards for winning games are meager. You can get big payoffs in Arena (where you don't get to keep the cards you draft)...if you're already an experienced player and/or lucky. Arena costs 1.5 packs to play with cards you don't own and win at least 1 pack of value. You don't keep the cards. New Arena players get trashed. Eternal is truly F2P. The spoils of victory are frequent and generous. Each win either gives a treasure chest with gold and a card, or more gold and a better card, or even more gold holy shit and a booster pack. Each treasure chest has a chance of becoming a better treasure chest full of even better rewards. Single-player Gauntlet mode lets you face the AI for free to win big rewards. Forge and Draft are more expensive than HS Arena (2.5 and 5x pack price vs. 1.5x pack price), but you get to keep all the cards you draft in Forge and Draft modes while still winning big payoffs for playing well. Magic is pay to play, try to recoup your losses later. Hearthstone is an evil slot machine that reluctantly hands out the goods. Eternal is a slot machine that always gives you something, but sometimes gives you something better, and occasionally gives you an all-expenses-paid trip to Hawaii. Winner: Eternal Gameplay and RNG Magic is the deepest, most complicated, most strategically interesting CCG ever. Almost every type of card, zone and resource can be interacted with, during both players' turns. The mana system rewards intelligent deck building and decision making skills. However, the mana system has also been a constant thorn in its side. Mana screw and flood as well as color screw are a necessary evil of the game's design, and consistently ruin the experience and decide high-level matches. The mulligan system punishes you further for the crime of being unlucky. Magic Online makes no use of any digital-only design space (except Momir Basic) and the relief from shuffling physical cards. The metagame gets patched several times a year whenever the physical Banned and Restricted list is updated. Hearthstone sidesteps resource problems with its mana system, but has different issues instead. It's a simplistic "My turn, your turn" game with a hard limit to how interesting and interactive it can be. The mana system means that instead of getting mana-screwed, you get tempo-screwed if you don't draw a 2 on turn 2, a 3 on turn 3, and so on. It's called Curvestone for a reason. Being able to attack anything directly means that losing the board first usually means losing the game. The mulligan system is good. Hearthstone explores digital design space, but leans overwhelmingly on random effects. The RNG is so hilariously pervasive that even top-level players meme about it on a constant basis. Omnipresent powerful random effects make situations that are impossible to play around. It's one thing to get outplayed, but it feels awful to get outlucked. HS is the game of getting outlucked. Also, the meta is prone to getting extremely stale as Team 5 moves very slowly to nerf problem cards and very rarely buffs weaker ones. Eternal simplifies the essence of Magic's strategic, interactive gameplay. You can still interact on your opponents' turns and there's plenty of powerful spot and mass removal (at common and uncommon, even!) to deal with tall and wide boards. The mana and combat systems are similar to Magic's. Eternal mitigates bad opening hands by allowing you to redraw a 7 card hand with between 2-5 mana cards, guaranteed. Flood and screw are still possible, but not nearly as frequently as in Magic. The combat system is much more interesting less blatantly aggressive than Hearthstone's, with different advantages given for attackers and defenders. Eternal makes excellent use of digital design space. You can affect cards in any zone, some cards make copies of themselves when drawn, and card attributes will persist across different zones, resulting in creative combos. As far as the metagame, in the last few months Dire Wolf Digital has shown a willingness to alter cards and tune up the meta in a timely manner when certain strategies are revealed to be too oppressive or lacking in counterplay. Winner: Magic for overall depth, Eternal for elegance and creativity with digital space. Polish and Features Magic Online is the laughingstock of the digital games world. However, it has many more features than HS, with a huge variety of formats available, a full-featured collection and deck manager, and the ability to trade tickets cards with bots other players. Hearthstone is a beautiful experience with compelling graphics, music, animations and voice acting. However, it possesses a few game modes (casual, ranked, arena, tavern brawl) with only two formats for now (wild and tavern brawl). It possesses extremely few features despite its obscene profitability and years post-release. There is no tournament mode and the deck and collection managers are very weak. Eternal's art direction, sound design and graphical effects are better than Magic Online (like every other game) and worse than Hearthstone's (like every other game), but far closer to Hearthstone than to Magic Online. It only has two single player and two multiplayer modes. It has an intuitive, full-featured collection manager and deckbuilder with analytic tools to help guide deckbuilding. Winner: Hearthstone for polish, Eternal for features. Verdict On the whole, Eternal refines and simplifies Magic's gameplay and creatively explores new design space while avoiding the egregious errors of Hearthstone. The gameplay finely balances a majority focus on skill with a pinch of luck. There is a wealth of interactions and strategies to explore. The online experience is elegant, enjoyable and full-featured. The game is generous with its rewards. You should stop reading this and install it right now. Why are you still reading this? Go away. Go play Eternal.
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