My thoughts on Saga

My friend Wilmheath posted on the Saga forums welcoming people to give initial impressions on saga. https://www.playsaga.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6517

I say "friend" because I have spend money at his MTGO and Saga sites http://www.sagatraders.com/ buying no less then 2 full units of treants and other assorted excitingly units :) As much as I like opening boosters, I would have to honestly say that the cards I got out of about 20 booster packs I bought were basically worthless, and I found them impossible to trade for ANYTHING I was interested in fielding. (I don't want to leave out http://www.sagaunits.com/ because when Wilmheath didn't have stock, I got excellent service from them as well. As to other card vendors, I have had no luck in finding what I needed, but the team saga guy seems very nice.)

I guess that's my first gripe from initial impressions. Honestly the booster dynamic is kinda ridiculos. For example let me bring you a comparasion of several of the CCG's I play and how a real collector buys cards:
- When playing Magic and a new set comes out, we tend to get most of our real cards buy buying cases of boosters from volume retailers at a discount.
- For MTGO, we drafted cards in tourneyments. (Basically the tourneyment you can pick either the best card for your tourneyment or draft cards that you want for your deck, but my suck in a tourneyment.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_the_gathering_online#Tournament_effects_on_the_market
- Without drafting or buying volume, Saga really fails in making the unit creation easy. I've done COOP missions with several level 20s, whereas my partner fielded all common troops. I understand that cheap is important for some younger players, but I don't mind buying cards, I just don't find buying boosters is the best way to get what I need. (No matter how many times the loading screen tells me that if I want to help the game to buy a booster :)
- The other thing I found kinda silly is that I can't mail cards from my Light army to my War army. That really sucks, as I have to find another way to get them to try out the troops. I ended up selling alot of my War and Magic cards to the vendor after getting NO bids on the Auction for them. Selling Rares to the vendor seems kinda silly, but gold was more useful then inventory.

- This leads me to my next grip. The Auction seems like no one uses it really?? I know that's due to the lack of players that have the time to use it, but everytime I go looking for units, I see alot of commons, but no uncommons and rares. Except for people looking to trade materials for treants or other rare cards. It seems honestly like the best way to trade cards is to broadcast in channels, or find someone who like you and get something going. I saw this one guy that was looking for iron tanks, and I had a couple that I just gave him for nothing, as when I tryed to auction them for 12k gold on the AH, (like someone told me they were worth), I couldn't move them.

Changing topics I'll talk about the leveling curve.

I do like the way the quests are setup. The bronze/silver/gold is very fun, and rewarding.

However as the end game seems like the most fun, PvP is very well designed, I feel like the leveling to do endgame PvP is slower then a causal player would enjoy. My friend who is playing this game with me, seems to find it overly grindy for a causal player PvP game. It's causal for PvE, but not for PvP really.

Another thing that I observed is that the guild system seems like it's just a resource farming chain. You want people in your guild that give at least as much resources as you contribute. Although really you get less the a couple lumber mill runs per day from the guild contributions.

I only see one person on a day from the guild I'm in, so maybe I just need to hook up with more active players.

I do read alot of the developer post, and am VERY excited about what they post. It seems like if everything is out, this is a great game. Definitely worth waiting around for. Look at MTGO 3.0, they sucked for years, and we still played games.