Haha, I just came to post that I really don't like the drafting challenge. I was excited for it because I really like drafting in other games, it was my favorite way to play Magic and Hearthstone. It gets you to use cards you wouldn't normally, and can lead to some interesting situations where a card that is usually considered shit may be awesome if it counters something your opponent is trying to do. The meta goes out the window.
But in Magic and Hearthstone you use enough cards that you can make educated guesses about decisions. If you take a great card early on that costs a lot you can make sure to fill out your deck with a good cost curve. You can be reasonably assured you'll get a decent mix of archetypes, like a direct damage spell, a tank, etc.
But when you're only choosing four cards that's not always the case. It's way to easy to get burnt by an early decision, for example you get a choice between Musketeer and some other card and choose the other, than end up with no anti-air unit. In hindsight it was sort of "fair" since you were offered the Musketeer, but you have no way of knowing whether this is your one and only shot of countering a dragon or minion horde or whatever.
It is still fun to mess around with, playing friendly matches with my clan I've gotten to mess around with a lot of legendaries that I don't own which was cool, and seeing a crazy deck that no one would ever put together under normal circumstances is fun. But a majority of the time it feels like victory is based on who lucks out with their card choice, not skill. Losing is frustrating and winning isn't satisfying.
This game isn't really very fun. So many of my losses are simply because an opponent's cards outlevel mine and the stamina trade is negative as a result, or they're using cards that I can't even access yet. And running into people who are several levels higher than me, presumably on their way back up the ladder after a clan chest, is never fun because their buildings are impossible to kill and they just spam emotes as they crush their way through the match. Meanwhile I have to endure several minutes of it while I try to get another chest that I wait hours to open.
I've been trying to donate to the clan and contribute what I can to clan chest crowns but the actual game is more obnoxious than actually "fun". Slick UI, though.
I'm still having fun but I've hit a wall around 2400 crowns. My highest is a bit above that, and I was right around there for about a week. I started experimenting and took a nose dive down back down to Arena 6, but now I have a deck I like a lot more and I'm almost back up there, around 2300 currently.
But yeah, it is frustrating when half my matches are against people a level or two above me, and if their cards are higher level it's frustrating wondering to what extent they won because they're deck was better and they played better, and how much it came down to their cards just being stronger.
Games like this are really frustrating to think what could have been if they'd been created a decade ago. Imagine if Clash was a DS game more like Advanced Wars, you create a deck from a balanced roster of troops and don't worry about levels or having to collect cards.
It's frustrating as well knowing that there is no incentive for anyone to do that today. Even if someone made a paid game like what I've described and charged $5 or $10 or whatever for it, even if it took off and was wildly popular (which it probably wouldn't) there's just no chance in hell it could remotely approach Clash's profitability.
