Resource management
One significant and relatively rare in genre feature of Way to Crown is an approach to card costs resources.
Instead of usual ‘3 energy per turn’, Way to Crown uses four different resources: HP, MP, Stamina and Willpower. Card cost may contain any combination of resources, very similar to Magic the Gathering. As a result, instead of usual grouping of cards per hero, they are grouped by ‘color’ of resource used, with four ‘basic’ heroes (Warrior, Mage, Rogue and Priest) representing simple ‘mono-colored’ decks, while other heroes use various combinations of colors/resources.
Note that Way to Crown does not place any restrictions whatsoever on hero/card combinations, but heroes have built-in perks and starting decks which make their ‘preferred’ resources easier to obtain and more efficient to spend. It is a common strategy to ‘splash’ (borrowing Magic the Gathering term) a card or two from non-primary resource in the deck to achieve some specific narrow effect (such as healing or protection from poison), or to complete a strong combo.
Another fundamental difference of Way to Crown resource management is that all resources are persistent, and do not change between turns and even between battles. For example, Mage starts with 15 MP, and it is player’s responsibility to find ways to replenish that pool. Game has many cards and items with ‘add resource’ effects, but most of them have some additional twist or requirement, forcing player to balance between sometimes contradictory goals of killing enemies and restocking.
Aforementioned Mage hero has “Gather Magic” card (and yes, the name is intended as a weak reference to Magic the Gathering):
Since Gather Magic restores 1MP per card played (this turn), it is best played as late during the turn as possible, but even then it is not net-positive unless you play 2 or more on the same turn. So player immediately is faced with several interesting choices: kill last enemy or delay for a turn to restore MP? Play cheap but situationally useless cards just to increase card counter? Dilute deck with weak zero-cost cards, making draws less consistent for the purpose of getting free counter increases?
Persistence of resources between battles (called ‘stages’) makes resource management even more crucial, since frequently used strategy of “spend everything just to barely get over the threshold of winning encounter” almost never works. On the other hand, much higher resource caps mean that, given sufficient justification, player can spend, for example, 15 MP in a single turn, so the overall variance of possible outcomes is increased both in positive and negative direction.
These are some of design decisions which in my view justify ‘hardcore’ epithet I used in game description.