People who claim the game has P2W mechanics or that they were cheated into paying for it because it has F2P mechanics and currency are either lying or being disingenuous with their hyperbole. Or just flat out ignorant and wrong.

The system the game has is similar to anyone who has actually played an old style physical card game like Magic the Gathering, but without gambling or booster pack style RNG.

For what you pay, they give you one starting Hero that comes with their faction deck. Faction decks are fixed, so you don't need to buy boosters or anything like that. Each faction then has multiple Heroes that interact differently with their faction deck with different abilities. So that's one thing you have to buy: Heroes.

The second thing you have to buy are Professions. There are 5 of these. You get one for free when you start the game. These are basically a second set of cards you can choose from to customise the way your deck plays.

Included with your base purchase are enough free credits that they throw at you to buy up to 3 more Heroes/Professions. Not only that, there is a practice mode where you can try ALL the heroes for free so you get a feel of them before you make any decision. You can also view ALL the Professions and faction decks fully before committing to any purchase in the deck viewer.

You earn credits by playing non-♥♥♥ games, or solving puzzle tutorials/going on daily quests. If you play regularly, I assume you can manage 3 - 4 real games an hour, earning about 200 - 600 credits. It costs 3600 credits to buy a Hero/3000 for a Profession.

If you went and did the puzzles, which are basically free money and their solutions have already been provided online by others, you'd have enough to buy a few other Heroes/Professions easily. And to top it off they have an experience track that gives you more free Heroes/Professions and more currency as you play.

And if you want you can pay money to buy their paid currency, which you can spend additionally on cosmetics, or convert to buy Heroes/Professions with. It's pretty cheap. To be precise, if you buy their cheapest/least discounted Paid Currency pack, each Hero/Profession would cost USD6.

That's it. Anyone who calls this game predatory or overtly monetised must have just woken from a coma and missed the past decade plus in gaming. Not to mention there aren't any gambling mechanics like randomised booster packs or lootboxes. I hope that helps anyone who wanted more info on how purchases work in the game.

Update for 2025, to address a few common misunderstandings new players who leave negative reviews have:

First the game is now F2P, so you don't pay like my original review talks about, but if you do pay the same amount you get a solid amount of credits to start you on your way. It doesn't limit your decks, only your hero. And heroes can all be tested for free before you get them, there's no paywall on new heroes, they're available for free currency when they launch. So really, there's not much to complain about from this side if you're a normal person who's played a F2P game before.

Second of people are put off by the randomness. Yes, unfortunately the game doesn't explain some systems of how the chances of cards you need are calculated. You have to learn this by yourself, there's a guide in the Steam guides section that will tell you. Once you understand how the card draw works, you'll realise there's less randomness that it appears.

Thirdly, as of now, most events have a free and paid track. All rewards so far have been cosmetics. There's nothing to P2W for.

Hope that helps people looking for an updated state of the game review.

find a lot of the reviews here quite misleading.
yes there micro-transactions. but I wouldn't consider it pay to win.
everything is unlockable if you just play the game a bit.
It's like buying champions in league of legend. the option is there, but nobody is their right mind would just straight up buy every champion using cash
this game start the player off at lowest rank with limited character selection to the simplest faction and sub class so it doesn't overwhelms the new players with all the factions and builds.
this is textbook difficulty progression.

Brilliant deckbuilding roguelike that manages to bring big changes to the genre and offer satisfying PvP and PvE modes.

Instead of building a large deck, you just set a sequence of 1-8 cards that play in loop. Your character & the enemy each play their sequence automatically until someone dies.

Then you can proceed to the next challenge, adding new cards, upgrading the ones you have or absorbing them to increase your stats.

PvE sets you on a series of extremely challenging random battles with some events in the middle.
PvP is basically a "battle royale", with you + 7 other players fighting each other repeatedly, upgrading the deck after each round. Each defeat decreases your cultivation points, lose all and you're eliminated.

The only real downside is that additional characters and sub-classes are locked behind a lot of grinding - or paying for microtransactions. However, that's just for PvP, you can try all of them in PvE.

Overall, a must-play for deckbuilding roguelike fans, would put it next to Slay the Spire, Dream Quest and Errannorth as the very best of the genre

As of the timing of this review, all characters are accessible by in-game currency, a few are available through the exp system, and fully completing solo mode with at least one character gives you full character access. So the only microtransactions in sight are for the (currently nonexistent) character skins.

Gameplay-wise, it's autochess deckbuilding using a 3-faction system, with each faction able to support 3-4 'endgame' playstyles. The characters have slight advantages in each of these playstyles, but you will be heavily reliant on RNG to get there.

All in all, worth the price. Decent BGM, charming graphics, and enough build diversity to keep you busy for a while.

Pre-rant about the negative reviews:
No but seriously, you can safely ignore any reviews talking about P2W microtransactions; you can buy cosmetics for premium currency, but unlockables are bought using the in-game, grindable currency.

Yes, you could buy all unlockables for real money, but it's not like that will gain you any advantage. In fact, good ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ luck trying to navigate through all the characters you bought as a new player.

• Autobattler X Card-game - although not quite a deck-builder in the traditional sense as the game favors adaptability, i.e. your build will rarely become strong enough to deal with everything. Sometimes a single card or card position will make the difference between you winning or losing.
  
• Singleplayer roguelike
  
• Multiplayer PvP (8 players, a la Teamfight Tactics)

• Deep mechanics with lots of different styles of builds that, at the time of writing (14 hours played) mostly all seem viable one way or another.
  
• Very clean and aesthetically pleasing art style.
  
• Everything is unlockable by playing - You get a free character immediately, and enough currency to buy another character or a side job (extra pool of cards added to your deck). I recommend buying whoever you like the most for free, and saving your currency until you've played a few rounds.
  
• I think the fact that you are constantly modifying your build is a strength of the game, so that you don't just lean back and watch the game unfold. Instead, you get bouts of strength where you feel strong, until that one opponent comes along who has an answer to your build, in which case - you must adapt.

• Game will sometimes disconnect randomly, although 9/10 times it's a brief interruption and you won't lose any progress. I've only had it completely disconnect once in 14 hours, and that was at 4AM.
  
• The amount of information in the beginning is staggering and may discourage new players. The tutorial does an... okay job at teaching you the basics, but this is one of those games you have to play for a bit before it clicks, in my opinion.
  
• The UI is decent, but is sometimes lacking. I'd love to be able to see my total Qi and Qi requirement while modifying my deck, for example. Right now, it only lets you know if a card cannot be played due to a lack of Qi.

All in all, I think it's baffling that the game is free. If it wasn't, I'd say it's about ~10€ or 10 dollary-doos. If you like card-games or autobattlers, there's absolutely no harm in trying it out.

I have currently played for about 6.2 hours now. The game is pretty fun and very interesting. The transactions people were talking about were from DAY 1 release. The DAY 1 NEEDED paid currency to play other characters. On DAY 2 they changed it to ingame currency. I believe it is 3000 or 3600 stones about 30~50 win games to unlock a new character. You can also get ingame currency and new characters through challenges, but they are insanely hard. Those challenges are under explore and one of the free ways to test the different play styles of the sects and puzzles to overcome.

Over all I am happy with the game, but very wary they go for a money grab and make everything real cash to advance or get anything. Will update when this develops more

Loved it during the beta, very excited to finally be able to play again! Easily the most fun I've had with an autobattler - I don't normally care for the genre.

The English translation is pretty rough in places but usually not enough to cause actual problems with understanding mechanics.

EDIT:

I want to address that most of the negative reviews are complaints about pay-to-win. Everything that affects gameplay can be unlocked through gameplay, and not in an especially grindy way. There are no "cracked ruby" vs. "perfect ruby" systems here, you either own a character or you do not and own a job or you do not. You do have to get a character to level 5 before you have the full array of choices with them during a game, but this takes only a handful of games. They actually made it much faster to get a character "fully unlocked" than it was during the beta.

When the game launched it was possible to unlock characters/jobs with either in-game points or premium currency, but after the intense backlash they quick-patched out the premium currency purchases. You cannot unlock anything that affects gameplay with money now, and haven't been able to since like... 8 hours after the game launched. The in-game prices have remained the same, which should be sufficient indication that they weren't deliberately high to encourage cash purchases.

So this game has hit the sweet spot of everything I'm interested. The autochess nature of something like Hearthstone Battlegrounds, yet with a deck crafting more akin to Slay the Spire, and unlike something like Super Auto Pets, I can play in a lobby with friends with Yi Xian. The negative reviews around microtransactions are unwarranted. Once purchased, you can enjoy the full game with an even playing field.

The one criticism I do have is the English translation is a little rough, but they do a good enough job with card text effects to let you know when skills will proc.

Important tips for the new:

The user agreement only applies to people in China. It doesn't appear at all unless you started the game in Chinese.

There's a way to insert cards, which is explained in a loading screen tip, but I'll repeat it here. To insert a card, hover it over the slot you want it in, and wait for the other cards to shake, then drag it slightly left or right to indicate which way to push the other cards, before releasing.

There's a lot of guides you can read, and many of them are on Steam. In the Yi Xian discord, there's a pinned link to an organized list.

The pros:
The game is great. Animations are charming, and there is a lot of depth to the game. Every strategy is viable and every character is able to go unique builds that you can further diversify by picking out of 7 "side-jobs"(basically subclasses).

The learning curve is a bit odd, which might throw people off; at first there is a LOT to learn, until you reach a point where you understand your character where you might think "well this game is easy I can just force this build every game and win", but soon you will realise there is a lot more strategy involved when people start building to counter you.

The ingame tutorial is great. and their way of explaining mechanics is quite smart in my opinion. They have a bunch of puzzles for you to solve, but there is always a mechanics guide first and there are tips if needed. The roguelite is also surprisingly deep for a game that is mostly meant to be PvP. There is one thing That I think needs to be explained somewhere that isn't: when you "exchange" a card for a new card, exchange is a very misleading word. What you do instead is discard the card, as well as another copy of that card in you drawpile, to draw a different card. Knowing this obviously makes you play differently around your exchanges so this not being explained anywhere is a bit odd, but not knowing it isn't exactly game losing either.

the negative reviews:

I see 2 common complaints that people have. One is server stability, and while it is true that there is no Europe server I do not share the experience others have stated. I have not been disconnected from an online match once, and the 110+ ping doesnt really matter because it is a turn based card game where the interaction with your opponents is automated(you build your deck before the fight similar to TFT, and during that process I never experience any lag)

Then the translations. They are indeed.. Not great. It is the one complaint I agree they could do better on, as it is pretty evident that the translations are very literal translations of the Chinese words which leads to some funny sentences. Because of this there are certain cards that do something slightly different than you might expect reading the card for the first time, but you learn those pretty quickly and this is something that even happens in card games with perfect English so it's not really a big deal.

There are also some reviews who complain about p2w elements. On day 1 it was indeed true that you had to buy characters with real money to unlock them, which is why I held off from playing the game on launch. This has however been changed and you can very easily obtain every character and class for free. The only paid elememts now are cosmetics like backgrounds, skins for characters, and effects for the cards itself(holo effects, and fore some card different art styles).

Overall I think the game is amazing, but I do admit there is a small hurdle when learning the game. Once you're past that the game becomes super fun to play and I would recommend the game to anyone(also its literally free and super small why wouldn't you).

And to the devs: please release the mobile app in English!!