The Internship Experience

-Corey Burkhart

Hey HEX TCGers! My name is Corey Burkhart, and I’m one of the volunteers who has been working on developing the HEX TCG over the past months. When I was asked to come work on the new secret project over at Cryptozoic Entertainment I was pretty stoked. I’m a semi-professional World of Warcraft TCG player, and I’ve been playing card games for more than half of my 21 years.

The team was looking for a set of external eyes to take a look at their game. Being a gamer, I couldn’t resist jumping at the opportunity to play a new game well before it was ready to come out.

Having to sign an NDA was pretty intimidating for me, because I’m a very talkative guy. I generally have an opinion on something no matter what it is, and I’m more than willing to share it. Thankfully, I had two good friends of mine also being asked to test out HEX, Kyle McGinty and Nathaniel Yamaguchi, so I’d still be able to bounce all my wacky ideas about decks and cards off of someone.

Kyle is a former World of Warcraft TCG writer and a very solid local player. He and I have been working together on card tournaments for nearly five years, and we’ve loved every minute of it. He’s usually the one finding all the potential of underplayed cards and is awesome to work with on HEX because he’ll always be building decks with crazy cards.

Nathaniel is a long time gamer and now well-respected judge in the community. His knowledge of the rules allows us to save a ton of time running back and forth between the rest of the HEX team because he understands the game at a very deep level already, giving him the potential to see the power of so many cards.

The three of us were initially brought in one Thursday night for a draft, and to say it was amazing would be an understatement. None of us had seen all the cards before we started drafting and playing the games, but as Kyle said, “It was like being a kid in Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory.” From bunnies, to orcs, dwarves, humans, and everything in between, the game was awesome. We were pretty ecstatic about being brought in to check out the game, and were offered to help them play test!

Play testing the game was not too much different than what we already do when preparing for big tournaments with our friends. We would all gather up at someone’s house, get some food and drinks, build a bunch of decks, and try to find what was the best deck for an upcoming tournament. In this case, we weren’t just looking for the best decks, but we wanted to make sure that if there were a set of “best decks,” that they weren’t too powerful, but also fun to play with and against!

At first we kept it simple, playing with some of the decks you guys and gals have already seen on the Twitch.tv stream, like the shin’hare deck or the Ruby aggro deck. But being experienced card players, after we gained a little bit of knowledge about all of the cards in the first set we were ready to break free of the training wheels and take a look at some of the more hidden strategies of the HEX TCG. We must have built 100 or more decks, such as decks that attack your opponent’s deck, to escalation decks, decks with all troops, and some decks with no troops!

The best part was that finding hidden gems wasn’t like finding a needle in a hay stack. Many of the cards had a place in some sort of deck in Constructed. If you wanted to do something crazy, exciting, and off the wall, you not only could, but were encouraged to do so. I’m a competitive guy, but having that ability to take any wonky idea and construct it into an actual piece of work was awesome.

Once we had built our deck we would run it through what we called the gauntlet, which was an assembly of all the best performing decks. Kyle and I alone must have played at least a thousand games with each other over the past few months, and that’s not to mention all the games we got to play with the rest of the team. Everyone was working on their sweet brew of the day or week, and once they had it built, was ready to play some games to see how their cards would work.

Having that small community of friends playing games was just like being on a team that, instead of looking to take down tournaments, provide the best gaming experience for a digital trading card game to you at home. Not only did I come to love each and everyone in the office, I was becoming emotionally attached to the game.

I wanted to see the work I had done giving feedback on the power level of cards, how the play patterns developed, and the overall fun factor the cards had. When I heard HEX was going to be put up on Kickstarter, I knew people would love the idea of the game, but I never knew it would grow to this.

Thus, I want to thank you all, and welcome you into our community, our team. It wouldn’t be the same without each and every one of you. You’ve helped create a game that started out as just something we played to help out, to something we have really grown fond of and put a ton of energy towards. Like a child growing up, I’ve seen the first set go through so many experiences and changes, and I can’t wait for it to be at the click of the mouse for the rest of you. You’ve earned it! As long as the team here will tolerate me, I’ll be here working on future sets that I hope you will all love them as much as I do.

In testing, we had tons of decks, but none stood out for me like some of the combo decks. There were loads of combo decks that we tested. I loved the silly things they could do, and how you would be on the brink of dying all game, just waiting to draw the piece that would finish your opponents off. My favorite of these was by far the Eye of Creation decks:

Eye of Creation is a one card combo all on its own. Pair it with a ton of sources, and you’ve got yourself a deck full of awesome cards ready to fight at a moment’s notice! There are tons of ways to make this card awesome, like Escalation cards, cards that manipulate the order of your deck, and cards that create copies that you want to put into play. Needless to say, when one these was played and you put a ton of resources into play and played all the actions, troops, and constants off of it, it spelled horrible times for your opponent, until they realized the real creation is what came off the second copy!

If you have any questions for me, or any of the other volunteers that worked on HEX, feel free to post in the forums. I’d love to hear your thoughts on Eye of Creation, as it’s one of my favorite cards, but I’d also just love to talk more about the game! I know you all are as eager as I was to actually get to play the game, and until then I’d love to help folks out with some questions they have!

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Card Previews

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While Archmage Wrenlocke won’t make your actions free, he does give you the power to draw lots of cards if you have cheap actions. Combine Wrenlocke with Dream Dance for some real fun!