Sheesh, so here I am going through the 5 star games on this website. By and large, they're terrible, and so I go digging and find that nobody has said anything good about Card Hunter?
Right, so the game is at a standstill right now. Development has ceased, they're sick of the game's piddly profit margin, and they made the backend so slipshod that it literally requires a patch to turn on and off the anniversary event and holiday stores, and an employee needs to queue up the limited-time leagues every couple of weeks because nobody thought of automating that stuff.
This said, despite the weakness in the backend, the actual game is fantastic, there's no nonsensical timegating, and you will be thinking and collecting in equal measure pushing through the content. There are roughly 40 free levels in the game, with three to five maps per level, and you are given enough free premium currency to purchase one of the three smaller expansions for free. $30 should get you everything.
Back when Card Hunter launched on Steam, they made good money for, say, three months. In those three months, they made a free roguelike mode. Play it. It's fun.
One of the top competitive players from way back when was hired on as game staff. He rebalanced the game in a way that was neither fun nor actually balanced for most players, but now that development has ceased, he can no longer mess the game up, so that's a good thing.
There are also twenty-some sets of free player-made levels, 3 maps each, that you can play through in reverse order: newest first. Play those.
Multiplayer is excessively "stay to win". Let me explain. Card Hunter loot is a set of cards built into an item. If you want a copy of "Volcano", you may very well have to put up with two crap cards stuck in your deck because they are on the same item that Volcano is. Rarity of items is based on the rarity of cards, and also consistency. If you want a 6-card weapon with three copies of the same card, that weapon's rarity bumps up and is harder to find. This means that players who have been around for years have an immense advantage over you becusr they have a large collection of items that are inherently more consistent than yours. Avoid the constructed PvP, though the limited and prebuilt leagues that fire every five or six hours are worth your time. Draft mode is the best thing in Card Hunter.
All in all, Card Hunter is an excellent co-op game. Bring a friend and play through the campaign with two players. It's some of the best card-based fun you can have, period. It reeks of Richard Garfield's influence, and the same sort of pointless RNG-heavy, high-variance bullcrap that took Artifact out back and killed tried to kill Card Hunter as a result. (Let's face it. He's just not all that great at game design no matter what his career says.) Unlike Artifact, Card Hunter actually manages to work, at least in a PvE environment, or with the small, seven-card decks of draft mode.
Waving Garfield's name around like a magic talisman to make a lot of money? No, that didn't work, but how long has it been since that DID work?
No news is available.