Hex draws inspiration from three particular games: Magic: the Gathering, Hearthstone, and... World of Warcraft... well, the last one seems out of place but a digital cardgame inspired by the two best TCGs of all time... and also crossed with the digital-equivilant of a substance thousands of times more addictive than crack... Hex really is every bit as good as you hope it is.

Since so many people, especially among nerds prone to cardgames, have played any or all of the three big listed earlier, you're probably already proficient with most/all of these ideas, so to 90% of new players looking for advice on getting into Hex, the task is really just learning the jargon for this particular game, but as I stated earlier, the fundamental section is meant to be the foundation for the limited-theory I'll present later, but if you wanna skip past the kid-stuff, maybe come back and give it a look when it comes time to brush-up, eh? Athletes preach "practice the fundamentals" for a reason. Some of them also do performance-enhancing chemicals. I'm not even sure where that was going so on to part one.

< Quick aside: you'll notice I use terminology from both Magic: the Gathering and Hex interchangeably and with reckless abandon. If you're comfortable with English, you'll have no problem, if you're not an English speaker, my writing style will seem confusing and off-putting. Enjoy. >

Everything costs something. I'm not speaking about power-levels yet, I just want you to consider that putting a dude on the battlefield, shooting a lightning bolt at something, or brandishing a relic all require you to pay for it in mana. In both Magic and Hearthstone, each share the fact that your effective power level, how much mana/resource you have to spend per turn, builds across each turn you spend playing the game, the difference being Hearthstone eschews resource manipulation through "land" cards, always adding one to the max resources you can spend per turn until you hit the max. Magic, on the other hand, forced you to figure out how many cards to add to a deck to get a steady supply of mana into play, and yes, making flood and screw things people moan about often, but also opening up multi-color or utility-land options to deck-builders.

Hex somehow combined both these schools, each "land" you play per turn increases the number of units of mana available, and the frequency of colors among resources, whether you have one diamond, or two, or three, determines which spells you can cast. Its actually quite elegant, though quite a pain to discover for yourself if you decided against an FAQ and jumped into the deep-end on your first Hex outing.

In constructed, you'll be playing 60-card decks and a good rule is, for a deck that runs an equal number of small and medium creatures, and has fewer-than-average big ones, 24 land is where you want to be. If most your spells are 1 or 2 mana, your resource count should be between 20-24, if you're a control deck who wants to draw a land every turn, 24-27. An exception to this is if your deck has a card-drawing or card-filtering engine (an "engine" is two or more cards or effects that do something you want), in a case like this, you can run fewer lands than you would normally, and it stands to mention that as with any good rule, there will be times in which it is correct to break them, so keep that in the back of your mind (I mean as in life but also Magic).


Each troop is an investment in controlling the field. The person holding the bigger stick is usually the one who decides how the conversation goes. Of course, for some strategies, the bigger stick is a board wipe or a combo, but most of the time, its in having stronger, tougher, more evasive, or more useful creatures, both in individual quality and in sheer quantity. To differentiate between bigger troops and more troops as two different strategies, competitive players typically refer to having a few huge things as "going tall" and using a bunch of little weenies, like say to swarm past a single big-dude, as "going wide".

Judging your troops by just their power and toughness, your creature is efficient if its attack and defense are equal to the units of mana you paid for it. A 3/3 that you paid 3 for, a 4/4 for 4, etc. Note that this breaks down at the 1 resource cost because a vanilla 1/1 for 1 is a waste of your card. If it does something else or maybe is a certain type you have bonuses for, then you can make an argument, but 1 attack and 1 defense just do not shift dominance of the board in any direction, meaningfully.

Aside from special abilities, which are very obvious, you can also value a troop by its evasion, a term that, depending on who you ask, means either its hard or impossible to block, like flying or unblockable, that it means the troop is hard to get rid of with removal, such as spellshield, or as some truly enlightened individuals would tell you, both of them at the same time and neither.


Ideally just removal. One of the many things that makes Hex interesting is the fact that cards under an effect from another card retain said effect even if they shift through zones. Couple that with the fact that, similarly as with Hearthstone, there are many things in this game that grant permanent effects, as well as things that effect cards in hidden zones (doing something you can't do, like making the next card in the library have +2/+2, for instance).

Still, even in Hex, you want removal. There are as many flavors as there are colors but all are divided by a few criteria: hard and soft removal, conditional and non-conditional removal. The difference between hard and soft is, hard kills or removes from the game whatever you were aiming at, soft merely bounces, or taps. Conditional and non-conditional is even more straight-forward: is there a condition that applies to using it, such as "can only target attacking creature" or "can only play if you control an elf".

Being able to use these spells at instant speed, which means anytime either player's turn when you would have priority, is a huge, huge thing. Any card game, when diluted to its most distilled form, is a game about value and efficiency. Think of it as being intrinsic when you rub enough numbers together, a logic starts to form and out of disorder, you get order. Instants will quite often set you up for thwarting two of your opponent's cards with only one of your own. For instance, you attack me with a 2/2 and before damage try to give it +3/+3 but in response, I shoot a fireball at it and kill it. You lose both the effect of your pump spell and your 2/2. Not only is that card advantage, but all the time and mana you spent to make them is lost.


Saved the most important for last To be fair, there are schools of thought, especially within the Magic limited community, that argues for consistency over chasing the powerful Uncommons, Rares, Legendaries, and, Primal, which I hope is a thing I never have to worry about in draft and sealed. I think this argument depends on the card pool, and maybe I mean synergy when I say consistency, but either way, bombs turn the tide of battle, bombs turn a loss into a win, bombs get the romantic interest and the convertible. So what the hell are bombs, anyway?

Aside from setting off literally dozens of intelligence agencies by saying the word "bomb" many times, bombs warp the game in a very unfair direction. If your opponent sighs, you did it right. In non-troop form, these are things that kill all creatures, lowers your opponent's life while raising your own, returns something from the crypt, or draws lots of cards. Its generally harder for a troop to be truly bomb-level, it certainly needs the evasion aspect - the being hard-to-kill one, and also a commanding attack and defense or at the very least some broken ability.

For people who play only constructed, the fundamentals are still very important, but depending on how many different archetypes are in a given metagame, the variables and interactions involved in any given constructed tournament are much more controlled (vintage and legacy formats notwithstanding). Depending on the size of the set(s) you're using in your sealed deck or draft, there's a lot more variance within an event and I don't mean the kind where the guy next to you opened the bestest rare ever while you got useless land, I mean there are more viable strategies to play against and use (though sealed deck less so than draft).

To excel in a limited format, the most important skill you can have is a fundamental understanding of the cards, mechanically, and also the ability to correctly value them against each other. A constructed player understands a card in a certain deck because of its place in that deck or because the likelihood an opponent will play a card its strong against. A skilled limited player can compete in an event sight-unseen, and though card knowledge is super, super important (and daunting for this game), their knowledge of the basics will most likely yield a deck in the upper end of the power-spectrum - and yes, in spite of bad pools and bad beats - there are many people who consistently day two big limited events and you will too so long as you remember "the worse the cards get, the better you play".


Limited decks are usually smaller. Forty is most common, I believe Yu-Gi-Oh does 20 or some nonsense, but the purpose here is to show you both a technique and the theory behind how many lands your deck should have. Using my examples in the very first section of the fundamentals, lets find out how many lands a 40-card deck should have if its curve is similar to one in which we'd run 24 lands in were it full-size.

First, set up the 60-card deck as a ratio of lands to total. 24:60 Now setup another ratio, we know we want 40 cards and we're looking for the number of lands, so we can use the variable X and make X:40. Using mathematical logic, we can solve (24/60)=(X/40) and get X=16. Most limited decks will not have that 1-2-3-4 curve that 24 resources likes, but the fewer cards in the deck, the more dramatic each individual resource has over the frequency, not only of drawing a resource but of drawing the correct color.


The risk of your greed is equal to the amount of times you're to be tested Speaking as someone who was madly in love with a mechanical engineer for 8 years, the more moving parts you put in the thing, the more likely it is to explode. Most limited decks run two colors as a compromise between having a dependable manabase and having access to powerful spells. Adding more colors to your manabase gives you access to tools you'd otherwise pass but also introduces the opportunity to color-screw, third favorite gripe after screw and flood of the person who just lost, and while this is definitely a bigger liability the more rounds you play, it also requires a much greater mental investment as keeping that many balls in the air gets real taxing, real quickly.

In sets that focus on 3-color combinations, you'll find yourself stretching for 4-colors the same way a 2-color set strains for its third. This type of strategy/predicament is heavily dependent on the amount of mana-fixing found in the set versus the perceived strength of being three or more colors. Mana-fixing is an umbrella term that in most games refers to dual-lands that can produce 2 or more different colors of mana, spells or abilities that search for certain kinds of lands, or artifacts and creatures that add or filter colored mana. In Hex, this will almost certainly be a consideration in the future if its not already, but for the time being, the game's method of counting a resource's color makes it a bit more friendly than normal. For example, if you play 4 rubies and 1 diamond, you have 5 mana and in Hex could cast 5 one-diamond-mana spells despite the fact that you played 4 rubies. This is of course balanced by troops and spells having "thresholds" that require a saturation of 1 or more of your mana to that color, all of which resides within the color-identity of your commander... or um, captain... champion, there we go, champion.

Fluff-aside, understanding resources, charges, and thresholds will be integral to deckbuilding in a limited environment and we as a community will no doubt continue working towards that end. My advice for the current, unless you've mastered the set you're playing, stick with one to two colors. I can't grasp how splashing would work in Hex so don't be afraid to pass by a bomb out of your color for removal or a good troop in the color(s) you're already picking.


Having too few critters is much worse than having little or no removal People who are much better at this than I would argue that to the death - professional Magic god and limited guru Luis Scott-Vargas commented once that he'd run all removal if he could, and if you're following the bombs-removal-potatoes formula, you'll be picking them after your bombs, anyway (I'm using the word potatoes here to reference the dudes who might never get the romantic interest or convertible, but 51% of the time are the ones carrying you on their backs to victory).

Still, your troops are your physical manifestation of girth in this game and the idea is to throw it around. Games start out with both players on equal footing but before too long, its one person trying to stop another from winning. As I said before, control does undermine this idea by replacing boots on the ground with disruption and card advantage, but its weakness is having less to depend on for sealing the deal whereas a balanced deck with good board presence is greater than the sum of its parts, especially in a set that rewards you for this with synergy.

For a 40-card deck with 17 lands, I like 15-17 troops, and the rest being bombs and removal (in a perfect world, combat tricks in a pinch). You'll notice that balances the flow of resource and troop, the remainder filling up nicely with whatever accouterments your playstyle requires.


More accurately, how not to not bluff Most of what you need to know can be found in the gamestate. In a way, its a kind of divination, you're using the illusion of choice to observe the outcome. Bluffing is thematically a part of card games but only the kind you buy from Steve Jackson Games (the Illuminati Card Game has rules for cheating), in Magic, Hearthstone, and even poker, the psychology of your opponent plays a much more subtle role. Its irrelevant what you feel in respect to your opponent's motives, instead plan around the certainties: if your opponent has the resources open to counter your killing blow, regroup and find a safer route of attack.

The threat of a bluff in this situation occurs from both the fact that your opponent has unknown cards (in their hand), the resources to play a thing, and cause to want to do it in the first place. If you take any part of that away: no open resources, no cards in hand, or just wouldn't benefit from doing it anyway, your opponent is both capable and brave enough to do whatever they want, unmolested.

You will once again have to have encyclopedic knowledge of at the very least the set your playing and while I may have opened this guide with the idea that good fundamentals were more important than specific card knowledge, not knowing ever last card in the set you're drafting or playing sealed in is equal to showing up to a gun fight with a knife because you're really good at stabbing people.

I'll end this draft of my first guide before my analogies get anymore dark - I'm clearly tired and in need of some Hex before sleep. I plan on proofing and adding to this a bit later, so definitely not final version If there's anything you think should be added or that is wrong: go write your own. Seriously, I'd (probably) like to read a thing you wrote, even if it were about Hex.

I hope both the noob and the pro get some benefit from this and remember to spread the knowledge around at your LGS, university, office, or forward operating base.

You can find me in-game under "Livermush" and sometimes at Magic-League or Cockatrice depending on my fondness of MtG at the moment. Peace, love, donuts, and happy 420, guise!