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If you really want to try this game, I won't stop you, but as a veteran free player I feel like you deserve this warning: The developers make very poor design decisions with each update that make this game increasingly slow and grinding for free players, and increasingly expensive to make the same progress for pay players.

To me, the main fun of a game like this is figuring out strategies and then putting in the time to accomplish--as a free player--what paying players can do by throwing cash at the developers. In this game, that means having a powerful deck, clearing the main story stages, and maybe winning the top prizes in the occasion event. This involves a lot of grinding and saving. The fatal flaw of Smutstone is that it undermines that game dynamic by continually introducing changes that devalue all of that planning, preparation and saving.

At this point I assume you've at least skimmed this excellent guide, so you know about the importance of tournaments. You also understand that the main grind/loop of the game is converting energy into gold, which you then spend on upgrading cards and winning tournaments to get better cards. Gems are the premium currency that you can buy or accumulate slowly by playing the game for free.

Like the guide says, tournaments are how you progress to your first strong deck. They're also increasingly hard to win. This is often inevitable when you have a strong base of veterans who still enter. With my deck, I can farm about 20k gold for about 20 energy. This is a huge advantage over newbies who can only get a few thousand gold for 15 energy or so. Since tournaments are competitive multiplayer, more vets playing mean it takes more resources to take a prize position.

But it gets worse. Newbs can get a lot of mojo from leveling/seducing cards, but eventually you rely on opening silver boxes as the main way to win. But remember how you get raid tickets and energy back from those boxes? That's nice for you... but it's amazing for the vets competing against you. If open a box and get 20 energy back, your box is effectively discounted by the amount of gold you can farm with 20 energy. For you, that means the box is effectively a few thousand gold cheaper. But I can farm 20k with that energy... for me, the box is essentially free.

You don't always get energy back, but the probabilities are constant, and other players crunch the data and estimate how much gold, raid tickets, and energy you get back per silver box. You average this out, then look at how much gold you can get for energy. This will tell you how much the gold you effective spend per box. For new players, this is close to the full 20k, since your energy is worth less gold. For players like me, each silver box is only a few thousand gold, because on average I get nearly 20k back.

So tournaments are harder for you. Using daily free energy, I can save up gold much faster than you, and in the tournament, it costs me far less gold to get mojo and win.

But here's where things get worse: Every time a new map is released, the gold-to-energy ratio for the top players gets increased. Make it too high, and the top players get more gold, on average, than they spend on silver chests. This breaks the main limit on the game, and after exploiting this for a few days, the developers "fix" the problem by adjusting silver chests so you get less energy and raid tickets on average. For the top players who can farm the new content, this means going back to paying a few thousand gold per silver chest. But for everyone else, the main grind-loop of this game just got substantially longer.

This is the most egregious example, happening at least three times before, but it's not the only one.

Consider events: The best way to win thirty day events was to have a strong base deck and many saved gems, clear as much of the map and quests as possible, win daily event tournaments, and at the very end, spend as many saved gems as you must buying points to win the marathon. For free players, events were all about preparation: You don't waste resources trying to win every event, but instead save gems, save gold and leveling items, and build up your main deck, and then after a few months of preparation, you're hopefully to finish an event on top.

The devs broke this loop with a two big changes. They started selling points for cash only, making all those saved gems worthless. Then they also drastically reduced the number of prize positions, making it far harder for players who aren't spending cash to win a top prize.

I could go on, but this is already too long. Browse this wiki for entries like Wheel of Fortune, and you'll see more examples where the devs signal to players that grinding something or saving something is the way to progress in the game, but then make a sudden, unexpected changes that render all that work far less valuable.