More SolForge

In the past week I've started playing SolForge again. It was just sitting there in my Steam game list, right under Path of Exile. Play me, Nick! You know you want to! I'm a card game with interesting drafts! The games are fast enough that you don't really care if you lose! All those things that drove you away before are fixed, honest...

So I went back in. I didn't have enough tickets to draft (I feel like I would have kept playing if that was true) but I figured I could do the dailies for a bit and then draft. They had changed it at some point so your first online win of the day was guaranteed to be a ticket so you get to draft once a week for 'free' assuming you're willing to play every day and can actually win games against people. I can win games, but not very consistently because it still matches by hidden rating and I took so much time off that my deck is mediocre compared to the people I get matched against. I still have 2 Zimus and I sometimes draw well and beat people, but I have to try a couple times and it isn't a ton of fun...

It's even less fun because of the feature implemented to let people play multiple games at once. Because I'm just trying to win one game and because I don't know what the cards do I'm much better off playing one game at a time. I need to read my opponent's cards and I like to understand the game state even if the game is simple enough that I don't really need to do it. But the people who play a lot and have good decks don't need to spend that time, so they play many games at once. They're just goldfishing their awesome decks... So not only do I frequently get crushed, I have to wait a minute between turns to get crushed. It sucks.

I build up enough to draft, and then I ran it. But because the only real way to get tickets is to win an online game once each day I feel obligated to stop playing my draft games after I win one. I'm more likely to be able to draft again if I spread my 2 or 3 wins out over 2 or 3 days instead of all at once. And once again they actually released a new set in the middle of my draft. So I once again got to lose a bunch of games to cards I couldn't have drafted! (In this case they added new cards that work better when they're underleveled. This is awesome in draft since it gives you good card advantage plays with your 'useless' level 1 cards in age 2. But since I didn't have any and my opponents did it was bad for me.

I was about ready to quit again when I looked in my inventory and saw they'd given everyone a coupon for a free draft. Ok, fine. I'll do your free draft. Now I get some of the good new cards! (Hurray power creep...) But I still feel like I need to spread my plays out, and I still don't like doing that. I play games a lot when I play games at all.

SolForge frustrates me. I think I should probably remove it from my list of Steam games so I stop trying to play it.