Welcome to a round up of the week! We have a the name of our latest set, cool new lore, and more!
We are pleased to introduce Frostheart, our latest PvP HEX set! You can read all about it in our official announcement. But just what *is* Frostheart? What is Hogarth doing there? How do the lore articles from the past month feed into the story from this latest chapter? Check out our latest lore installment for some answers and hints at what's yet to come.
Ladder Season 5 Sleeve Poll
It's that time again! We are asking you, the community, to choose the next animated sleeve you can earn by reaching Cosmic on the HEX ladder. Here are two gorgeous alternate arts to choose from:
To vote, go to this thread on the official forums. You only have a week to make your favorite known, so don't delay! Vote today.
Interview with Fred
Fred is the mind behind the awesome community tool, hexpvptools.net. You may have seen them in game or in the forums, laying down hot knowledge about the current HEX meta. Today we are going to take a moment and learn about the man behind the machine:
Tell us a bit about yourself! How did you get involved in HEX?
I started playing TCGs casually a little over 20 years ago when I was a teenager with loads of free time. While I never played at a competitive level, or even considered myself a skilled player, I've always enjoyed TCGs for the strategic and puzzle aspects of the game. As I grew older, time was less available and I couldn't hang out in card shops anymore, so I stopped playing for several years. Fast-forward to 2013, I read a Penny Arcade comic strip about a certain Cory Jones being literally the devil. That led me to take a look at Cory’s Kickstarter campaign, and I was instantly sold on his dream of making the ultimate digital TCG. Being able to play a deeply strategic TCG from the comfort of my own home was something I didn’t know I wanted until then. I never looked back, and I've been a non competitive and not very skilled player since.
What is https://hexpvptools.net/? What made you first decide to start making a community tool?
The story of Hex PvP Tools started at the launch of Herofall, when Chris Woods announced the release of the Hex server API. With his announcement, Chris jokingly said that this API could help him get better at drafting. I thought about all the data that the API could provide and realized that it could actually help me get better at drafting as well.
Being a software engineer with a knack for numbers, I was certain that there could be ways to aggregate the data and dig through the numbers to figure out how the players who were actually good at drafting made their picks. The first iteration of the site running on my desktop was for my own private use, and it was only aggregating draft data. I managed to build a table listing the performance of each card in draft, which I would quickly browse through when drafting to see which card was usually picked first in a given pack. That’s when I realized that there was no reason to keep that data to myself and decided to get a cheap web host and share the tool with the community. Thus, Hex PvP Tools was born with a single page (that page is now known as the card performance tool).
I started receiving feedback from other players who also found the data useful, so I looked at what other information I could get from the draft data and began extracting the performance of champions and shard pairings in draft (which highlighted just how dominant Diamond-Ruby was at the time). Later, I built the draft replay feature. Now, not only could I see how each card performed in a void, I could follow a full draft, pick by pick, and look at each of the 8 players’ choices around the table.
Feedback from the community kept coming, and I was having fun working with the data. At first, I was collecting all the data that Chris sent my way, but I was only using the things that were relevant to draft because that’s mostly what I play. Every now and then, in various forum threads, people would comment on different topics and say “it would be cool if we had that kind of data,” or “we’re only speculating because we don’t have the data.” Reading those threads, I kept thinking “Wait a minute! We do have that data!” So, I started expanding my site with more and more ways to display the data that was available and that the community wanted to see. I expanded the card performance statistics to sealed and evo-sealed gauntlets, and I added a chart to show the level of activity in the game over a period of time. I also upgraded my web hosting package to something a little more hefty to handle the growing database.
In October, the second ladder season was coming to an end, and I wanted to grind the constructed latter a bit to get the AA cards offered as progression prizes. Not being a constructed player myself, I wanted to find out which deck performed well at the time, but I found that this information was hard to get and quickly outdated. I looked again at the pile of data that I was receiving and that I wasn’t using yet and figured that I could extract the ladder meta for any given period in near real-time... and so I built the perfect net-decking tool.
Following the release of the ladder meta analyzer tool, I noticed some discussions in the forums revolving around people complaining about the meta being stale and the format being solved, while other people argued that it was not the case because the meta in tournaments were likely different than on the ladder but that such data was not easily available. Knowing full well by then that the data was completely available but simply not being displayed in a digestible way, I started listing the final standings of every scheduled tournament in order for the community to have access to the data it needed to keep arguing.
And that’s where we are now. By first trying to gather data to help me draft better and then trying to understand the constructed meta, I ended up building Hex PvP Tools with the objective of making all the data provided by the Hex server API as transparent and accessible as possible. The progression from a single page hosted on my desktop to having to deploy a cluster of servers to crunch all the numbers and support the newer features has been impressive.
What feature are you proudest of on your site?
Looking at how it turned out and from a technical standpoint, the feature I love the most (and one I ended up not using even a fraction of what I thought I would) is the draft replay feature. Displaying the packs and the picks of all 8 players around a table, one pick at a time, was something that I loved building, and I am proud of the end result. Porting that tool to the draft gauntlets (meaning having to look at all the draft runs and find out which once came from the same pod) was also quite a feat. Unfortunately, the information provided by that tool ended up not being as useful to help me draft better as the card performance aggregation, the draft assistant, or even simply watching streamers play.
Do you have any cool war stories? Was there a feature that caused problems or was more difficult to set up than you anticipated?
By November, the Herofall draft meta had been pretty much solved, and it was obvious by looking at the raw numbers that, in any given pack, the Diamond and Ruby cards would always end up being the ones with the highest win rate. My card performance tool was no longer providing valuable knowledge while I was drafting, so I tried to push the analysis a bit further by building a tool that hooked into both the client and the server API to show me in real time the data that was relevant to the cards I had in front of me. I wanted to use the data from the cards I passed and the cards that had been passed to me to get the tool to show what signals I had been sending and receiving. The analysis of those signals turned out to be a lot more complex than anticipated, so I put that project on the back burner and opted to have the tool record all the cards that I had seen in the draft so that, when I was in a match, I could know which bombs I had passed in whatever shards my opponent was playing and prepare myself accordingly. Developing and testing this new tool took quite some time because the only way to see it in action was to jump into a draft. After a couple of weeks, I was satisfied with the result and deployed the draft assistant to the site on December 1st. As I was composing a message in the forums to announce this new feature, HEX announced that it was turning competitive drafts into gauntlets, instantly making a big part of the draft assistant obsolete since the cards that had been passed to the other players were no longer relevant.
5 days later, when draft gauntlets were actually implemented, about half of my site broke because all the tools that extracted draft data were expecting pod drafts and draft gauntlets were completely different messages. I hesitated for a while on whether I should just drop the whole thing or massively refactor my tools to deal with the new format, and I thankfully ended up deciding on the latter. Those couple of weeks were pretty hectic trying to fix everything while making sure not to lose any data in the process. I’m glad that’s behind me now.
What feature do you think has been the most popular in the community? Why?
On a normal day, the ladder meta analyzer is definitely the most popular tool, simply because there are several people who want to grind the constructed ladder but don’t necessarily have the skill to build a tier 1 deck on their own. You can also see new forums threads appear based on data from that list with people commenting on the ladder meta.
However, on the couple of days after a big tournament such as the Cosmic Crown Showdown, I see a big surge in traffic on that specific tournament’s result page as people want to see the rankings as well as the decklists of the players who performed well.
Do you have any new features planned for https://hexpvptools.net/?
Oh boy, do I? However, before I talk about any of them…
CAVEAT: Anything I mention here is exploratory. There is no guarantee as to when any of it will get released, or if it ever will.
Okay, we can proceed.
For the past couple of months, I have been pondering on the possibility of training an AI with the draft data, but I never really got around to it (that kind of stuff is like… really hard). Last week, burgleburgle, a mathematician and research scientist from the community, reached out to me telling me of his wish to train a drafting AI of his own and that he would like to use my data for that purpose. I jumped on the opportunity to delegate the hard part to someone who probably knows better than I do, and we’ve been collaborating on that project. Who knows what will come out of it?
I would also like to build a Sealed Assistant like I did for the Draft Assistant, which would be a tool that analyzes your sealed or evo-sealed pool and then highlights the viable decks that could be built with them.
I recently released a feature where a player could keep a record of all of his limited gauntlet history and records. I would like to do something similar for the constructed ladder too, but getting to the data required to do so is a lot trickier.
And then there are several minor things that aren’t necessarily worth mentioning. Of course, I’m always open to suggestions, and if I see a need in the community that can be resolved with the data I have, I would happily develop a tool for that.
Any last words?
I can’t say how happy I am that HEX shares all this data with the community, and I’m really glad people find the tools that I build useful. I am sure there is still a lot of untapped potential in the data coming from the API, and I would encourage anyone who’s a tinkerer to dream up new ways to use the data and build awesome community tools of their own.
Also, whenever people are posting in the forums and feel that having data would benefit the discussion, feel free to tag me in those threads. I will do my best to provide the data you are looking for. Some people have been doing that already, and I’ve enjoyed digging through the database to get the numbers they wanted. I just post the results as objectively as possible and try to not take sides. Feel free to contact me if you have questions about the tools, the data, if you think of a tool I could add to the site, or with any other kind of feedback. My contact info is on the front page of Hex PvP Tools.
Finally, I'm good with numbers, but I'm bad at design. People have noticed that the visual signature of the site is very basic. If anybody with web design skills is reading this and would like to help make the site prettier, I would definitely welcome the help.
Do you have an awesome story of your own you wish to share? Reach out to [email protected] with your details and we might just showcase you in a future update!
Tick-Tock Tickets
The second HexPrimal Immortal Championship tournament is coming up June 17th! If you plan to join us, you only have a few more weeks to get your 20 qualifying tickets from the HEX Primal Immortal queue.
Remember, this tournament has some pretty great prizes, including:
- 1st) $500 HexPrimal.com Store Credit; Complete Set Pack*; 20 Shards of Fate Packs & 20 Shattered Destiny Packs
- 2nd) $200 HexPrimal.com Store Credit; 20 Shards of Fate Packs & 20 Shattered Destiny Packs
- 3rd & 4th) $100 HexPrimal.com Store Credit; 20 Shards of Fate Packs & 20 Shattered Destiny Packs
- 5th-8th) $50 HexPrimal.com Store Credit; 20 Shards of Fate Packs & 20 Shattered Destiny Packs
- 9th-16th) 20 Shards of Fate Packs & 20 Shattered Destiny Packs
- 17th-32nd) 10 Shards of Fate Packs & 10 Shattered Destiny Packs
*Contains 1 copy of all cards of a set chosen by HexPrimal.com
Come for the prizes, stay for some of the craziest card combos HEX has to offer!
The HEX Clash is back once more! Sunday, starting at 8am PT (Worldclock), you have another chance to prove your mettle and walk away with cash and exclusive prizes! Will you end up a proud owner of these fine cosmetics like last week's winners?
Join us this Sunday and find out!
For full details on prizing, please check out our tournament page here.
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