SolForge - 15/20 hours

Well, I'm in no danger of falling under the delusion that I'm good at this game, that's for sure. There was a point, after I beat the last two campaign missions, where I entertained the idea that I might be getting better, considering I beat both of them on my first try. However, I then lost an easy difficulty match against the PC and have since come to realize my 0-11 multiplayer record is no fluke.

Although, if I'm trying to salvage at least some of my pride, I could fall back on the excuse that I didn't make my own deck for the easy-mode loss. See, one of the things that bugs me about SolForge as a video game is that when you play single player, you can only play against your own constructed decks. Which is a real pain, because one of the things I like about playing a video-game version of a collectible card game is seeing different preconstructs, especially theme decks that use an implausibly large number of rare cards. It was my favorite thing about Magic 2014, for instance.

And I did play a few matches against my own decks for the sake of killing time, but it got kind of boring, because I knew what was coming. So what I did was have the computer auto-complete four decks, one of each faction. My plan was to play each of the sixteen possible matchups and get a feel for how the factions played against each other.

The first match went as I expected. I played the computer's Tempys deck and handily beat its Nekrium deck. Then I moved onto to Tempys vs Alloyin and got my ass handed to me, twice. I don't know if I just had bad luck with my draws, whether the rng just happened to spit out an especially good Alloyin deck, whether the factions are not balanced against each other, or whether the fault was entirely with me as a player. All I do know is that it is demoralizing as hell to lose to an easy-mode AI.

I will probably try the ill-fated matchup a couple more times, just to see if it's a consistent loss for me, and then move on to the rest of the combinations. My hope is that the either the Alloyin deck will prove to be unnaturally strong (I did draft that faction most often of the four) or that the Tempys deck will be noticeably weaker than the others. It would dismay me greatly to learn that I was still so bad at the game after so long (then again, I never did get good at chess, despite playing it off-and-on for years).