I received a lot of feedback from the people I handed out Card Hunter beta keys to. Generally the feedback was quite positive, most people love the game. But there were several people who found Card Hunter rather difficult, a comment which usually came with some reference to the luck involved in drawing cards. So I would like to make one rather bold statement on Card Hunter strategy, and a discussion of luck. The principal thing to know about Card Hunter strategy is this:

Play with the cards you drew, not with the cards you wished you had drawn!

The funny thing about this statement is that how much you agree with it very much depends on your history as a gamer. Players of games like World of Warcraft are very much used to applying exactly the same tactics to every single mob fight, because the optimum sequence of button presses is always the same. But I played Magic the Gathering for a decade, and for people with a gaming history like mine the above statement is bloody obvious. One could say that card-based games have a strategy part, which is in the deck building, and a tactics part which is in playing the cards that you drew. Getting the strategy part right is very important, e.g. if your deck is full of piercing weapons you'll have problems with those skeletons in Card Hunter. But generally you only draw 2 cards out of your 36-card deck every round, so having the right strategy of deck building isn't sufficient; you need to learn to adjust your tactics every round to the cards you actually drew.

The specific rules of Card Hunter card drawing are important to keep in mind here: Every one of your characters draws 2 random cards from his deck every round, plus receives his 1 racial movement card. This is why your dwarf warrior is so slow, he only gets a walk card automatically every round, while humans get run, and elves dash. You can also keep up to 2 cards from the previous turn in your hand. So imagine you trade blows with stationary enemies for a few rounds: You draw a movement card every round, but don't use it, and if you don't discard your movement card at the end of the turn, those movement cards accumulate. So you stare at your hand full of 3 movement cards and curse your bad luck of not having enough attack cards, when in fact none of that cards was a random draw. Of course there are also movement cards from random draws, but you can reduce the occurrence of those by choosing boots with armor or attack cards in them. Unless you *want* more movement for your particular strategy.

Staying stationary for some time is very often the wrong tactical decision. Especially if through the effects described above you have several movement cards, there is usually an advantage to be had if you use them. Don't be afraid to spend a round just running away from the enemy: You'll use your movement cards up, keep your attacks (and armor) for the next round, and if played well you'll make the enemy discard his attack cards because he couldn't use them that turn. Movement is also extremely important to position yourself in relation to the enemy: Block cards don't work if you attack the enemy from behind, even some armor cards are vulnerable from the back (the Trog's crude armor for example). Some big mobs have "clumsy" trait cards in their deck, which make them unable to attack you if you are behind them. In short: If your strategy depends only on running up to the enemy and hoping to draw enough attack cards to bash his head in before he gets you, your problem isn't luck, but the lack of refinement of your tactics.

Now let's talk about a different kind of luck: Finding the right loot. If you play Card Hunter long enough, you'll pretty much have every card in your collection you need to build the right deck for the adventure you are facing. But at the very start of the game this is more of a problem. It isn't much use knowing that you can overcome these heavily armored monsters with piercing weapons and spells if you simply don't have enough of those items with piercing cards in it. This is where Card Hunter's Free2Play model is somewhat weird: It isn't Pay2Win in the long run, but you get a huge boost to your options if you spend money early in the game. If you are short on cards, getting that extra club reward item from each battle is huge, and buying a few chests is also having a lot more effect early on than later in the game.

But that doesn't mean you can't play Card Hunter for free, you only need to adjust the way you play it. If you play adventures of your level, you will gain 10 xp per adventure, out of 20 you need to gain a level. So you will get up in levels quickly. An adventure 1 level below you only gives 4 xp, and 2 levels below you only 2 xp, making you level up much more slowly. And you can use that to your advantage, because the loot you get from slightly lower adventures isn't much worse. So if you consistently play the adventures 2 and 1 level below you first, you'll get comparatively more loot per level. You'll level up slower, but end up with a much better collection of cards.

Overall "luck" is something very localized and momentary. If you play a game long enough, statistics tells you that luck always evens out. If your only problem was bad luck, you simply can do that battle you lost again, and you'll do better eventually. If you lose consistently, luck isn't the problem, strategy and tactics are.