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Hello fren,

First of all, thank you so much for your lengthy comment and playthrough video. It's really appreciated.

I'll address some of your comments below.

-I don't quite understand what you mean with Mana symbols looking different on the game table. Maybe you mean that the mana on the UI is a circle/ball and like a hexagon on the card. In this case, yeah this is an issue that I tried but wasn't able to address myself, so I'll need to get the help of an artist to improve it.

-You are correct, it is the card rarity and it has no relevance to the gameplay basically at all other than giving the player an idea of how strong a card is. The only reason it is the way it is is because I wanted to make the card symmetrical and couldn't come up with a better design.

- The map "going up" is a fair criticism, but I've tried making it go down instead and made for a bad UX at least with the assets and design I have going on, so I keep it going "up". While I get it is a bit silly think of the map being like in front of you instead of a top down view and that way maybe it makes a little more sense? 

-The shop says "Owned: 2" because you have two copies of a card, so when you buy that card you know you'll get the showcased variant, and a third copy of that art. It is this way because you might want the card for the variant you are purchasing, or you might want it for an additional copy of a card you already own.

-Variants don't share anything except card art and color, this is correct. While this might seem a bit silly, please keep in mind that every card in the game other than the starting decks is randomly generated every time you play.  Regarding card generation and colors, each color has a subset of effects it has an affinity with. For example "Sharshooter" cards among other effects, are more likely to generate "Deal x damage to any target" kind of effects. The effects have an 85~% influence, but the other 15% of the time you might get any other color's effect.

-Whenever you click a targetable target, a big purple effect with sparks and whatnot spawns on top of the thing you clicked, but I will try to make it clearer by maybe making the text for the part of the effect you are currently targeting for, a different color while you target or something to that effect. 

-The UI is a bit slop because I used asset store assets for most of it and did what I could with it. Having an artist work on them proper would be really nice but is a bit out of my budget at the moment. That said, screens like the Meta progress upgrade screen are particularly sloppy. Thank you for your comment on the tutorials, I tried my best! Also thanks for pointing out the spelling error in your vod.

-Regarding crafting, from what I saw on your vod, it looked like you never spent any gems on your cards, so the casting cost remained super high. The times you tried using gems the cost didn't go down because the effect and timing you wanted were quite strong, so getting them cheaper required a hefty amount of crystals. However, for balance reasons, the "max" casting cost is capped and balanced around your current difficulty level. This is a flaw that I realize now I have to address since a new player would feel the gems are doing nothing, but in fact, you just needed more gems, or going for a different timing.

The amount of available crafting options is based on your INT stat, I believe you had around 8 effects to choose from when first crafting, and while it is a fair amount, that's a random pile you get out of 60+ possible effects, so it is still working with restriction.

Funny that you mention "Crystals" for effects because that's what they originally were, and in fact, in the back end, the effects and timings you get as options for crafting still behave like crystals on an invisible inventory. I moved into the current system because having to drop the effects was tedious and also getting an effect you didn't want at all would mean you were stuck with it through the whole run instead of getting a new set of effects on each forge.  However, there are probably ways of making it work and I might try new approaches for this mechanic in the future.

Regarding encounters, the way that, for example, StS approaches it is "Don't build this kind of deck without any way to deal with its counters because the final boss might be a counter to your deck and you won't be able to win" Here the solution is somewhat similar. You can either go "All-in" with a specific strategy and pray you don't encounter your counter, or make sure you include some safety options in your deck. You can probably beat most runs on lower difficulty levels without much of a worry about deckbuilding against counters, but for higher DL's, there are some tools that you really wanna have in your deck, like at least one card that shuffles your graveyard into your deck and so on.

Regarding player interaction, I think you make a very fair point. I made this game mostly based on what I like and what kind of game/gameplay I wanted to make, which might be to the detriment of the final product's marketability and widespread appeal. I don't think I would be changing that aspect of the game this late in development since I want to complete this project and put it out there, but again, you make a very good argument and going that way would probably be more attractive for more people.

Again, thanks for your feedback! Have a good one!