I previously mentioned in the post First Public Playtest that there is some difficulty in teaching the game to new players who are generally unfamiliar with competitive card games. There are quite a few nuances in these games that someone who has a history of playing competitive card games, even at a casual level, will be able to understand and take for granted a time when they didn't understand some basic concepts.
I tried what I mentioned in the post in creating a quick 3-5 minute play through of the mechanics of the game before teaching people the draft portion and playing the "real" game. I tried it with a few new players, and where it did succeed in it's goal, the general feedback was that it made the game feel simple and shallow due to how short it was. I'm not sure if there is a psychological aspect to learning the "game within the game" in 5 minutes that causes this, but it's obviously taking away the richness in decisions that the game has to offer.
Through some good feedback that I got after posting the call for playtesters, I've decided to try packaging the game with a "Basic" and "Advanced" mode. What this essentially entails is that the "Basic" game will be taught and played with balanced pre-constructed decks that are made up of a majority of the cards currently in the game. I've removed one of the elements from the mix (Shadow, since it has cards that specifically need the Aether Stream and Nether Pile to function correctly) and created 4 pre-constructed decks where 2/3 of the deck is made of one Element and the remaining 1/3 of the deck is a complimenting Element. I also picked out two Awakened to be used for each deck, and added their items to the decks. This brings the decks to 20 cards each, one of four different factions, and the ability to learn the mechanics of the game and explore the interactions of the different elements without needing to make those decisions in a draft format.
After playing the pre-constructed decks a few times, players should be able to move onto the Advanced Format, bringing in the drafting mechanics, a completely new element, 1 new Awakened for each element, and be able to have the cards interact in ways they previously have never seen.
Initial testing of these pre-constructed decks has gone pretty well, and forced me to re-analyze and tweak some cards to have even better interactions with certain Elements that I had yet to do.
In addition to this change, there was also commentary on the importance of multi-player. It should be no secret that I've designed, tested and balanced this game primarily for a 2 player game. Competitive card games of this nature just work best in the 2 player format. The game can easily be played as multi-player, but you have the problem of player elimination in a game like this. If 3 people really want to take out the 4th player, there's generally not much you're able to do in a 3 on 1 pileup. Table politics become a very important factor in situations like this, almost more so than the cards that are in your deck.
Now there are some formats that were suggested and that have been used to try and "fix" this multi-player problem in games with player elimination. Predator/Prey is one of those, where you can only attack the person to your right or left, but I've never been a huge fan of that format because you're not able to have a significant impact on the person who is trying to eliminate you from the game, and if the person who is supposed to be attacking them is failing at their goal, that makes your goal even harder.
Another suggestion that was brought up was a format where you only need to eliminate the person to your right/left to win the game, but you can attack or assist any of the players in the game. This is interesting from the concept of having a different goal than each other player, but also giving you the ability to prevent someone else from winning the game by knocking out a completely unrelated player if you're willing to spend the resources to do so.
The format that I am most interested in trying to balance would be a 2v2 Team mode, which is what I tried out last night. I haven't got all of the specific details worked out as far as the number of Awakened that should be played per player (1 or 2) or if you should be able to eliminate one player from the team, or if you need to knock down both players to zero essence in play to defeat them both at the same time, but it was very straightforward for people to know who their allies and who their enemies are, and know what areas you could sacrifice when you think/know that your partner is going to be able to back you up. No real backstabbing to take place in this format, but I'm not the biggest fan of that political nonsense in games anyway.
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