I was for years a huge WOWTCG player, and though I am not currently attending DMFs or on a team, I still follow what Cryptozoic is doing with the game and they have continued to shine in providing a game with low barrier to entry and provide a framework for gaming communities to develop even while competing with the market behemoths.
For a two decades plus TCG veteran, Hex is full of exciting things. The ability to have have card rules and mechanics that aren't possible in a cardboard version of the game is super powerful. You can have things that change cards in your deck, or create one-off exception rules for specific cards, etc, all the things that would be tournament hell for judges in real life. I mean, you can create tokens that are actually cards that go to the graveyard, or dynamically create cards on the fly, the freedom you have with a real digital ruleset not beholden to cardboard is boundless. There's even a marketplace for exchanging and trading everything, so no binders full of women, err, angels to pile through to get to that juicy chase rare.
As mentioned in the video, both TCG communities and MMO guild community share a lot in common and the social constructs should mesh extremely well together. Cryptozoic has a very good understanding of how they can implement PvE and even multiplayer raids in a TCG environment and I expect that the content will be regularly updated with new challenges even between expansions.
Hearthstone is coming but the games are dramatically different in nature despite looking similar. This is really an MMO first with a TCG engine as its gameplay, whereas Hearthstone is really just a streamlined WOWTCG, which while awesome isn't anywhere close to the scope of Hex.
I'm very excited about the game and already got in for the early bird king tier, and will likely upgrade to a higher tier later if they need the late boost. But they really shouldn't as no company is really doing anything like what Cryptozoic is trying to pull of with Hex.
