Recent reviews by Yakub's Top Guy

At first I was enjoying this game a lot, but after playing it for a while some problems became apparent. I will be comparing it to HS battlegrounds because it's the only other autobattler that I've played.

1) Hard counters. In theory the player who managed to make a better board should win, in practice there are many builds that counter each other and a board even twice worse that yours can beat you if it's your counter. This is made worse by the fact that you have no way of knowing what your opponent is playing. Let's say you are playing a dooley build that destroys enemy's small items, you queue into someone who plays zero small items. You lose. That's it. There's no point in preparing for that opponent because you will never face them again. You have no way to assess your build's general effectiveness after that loss, just improve it and hope that the next enemy is a better matchup. This results in frustrating runs if you face 2 or even more opponents that beat you just because they play a build that counters yours and you can't do anything about that.
Compare it to HS battlegrounds where you know what strategy your opponent is playing from the last time you faced each other this game and can prepare for that accordingly. Sure their board likely changed during the turn but you both have general idea what each of you plays. They have big guys? Search for poisonous minions. They have tokens? Search for multi attack minions etc. Minions attack from left to right so you can change their positioning to increase your chances against specific strategies.

2)Gameplay variety. At first It seemed like you can make new builds each run and still be effective with them. It turned out that it's only really possible with weak opponents in free play. Meta exists for a reason and meta builds are surprisingly easy to force. A lot of the opponents I've faced in ranked ran meta builds with only slight variations. Ability to get items from other characters and enchanting are made to diversify you runs but I don't think they manage to do that well. Occasionally you get a great run where you find an item from other hero that is OP in your build (or you can see how it can become OP if you get some other items) and experimentation pays off but other times the items you get are completely useless for your character. Enchantments are another mechanic that exists to make runs more diverse. I think there were only a couple of times when an enchantment resulted in interesting synergy that changed how I make a build. Enchantments in general either make your board strictly better than it was or don't do much, you can choose only from 2 enchantments so it also feels very random and doesn't involve a lot of decisionmaking.
In HS Battlegrounds you see from the start what minion types are absent this game so you can't force the same strategy every run and the game directly tells you which ones you can't build this game. Even if you play the same strategy you need to care about resource management on basically every build and your optimal board composition and how you get to it depends on the turn you found necessary pieces, how big are your previous minions, how much resouces do you need etc. In bazaar the only character with similar importance of resource management is pyg.

Obviously HS battlegrounds has its own problems and frustrating things but in general I found that there I can make more meaningful decisions that affect the outcome of the game.

Some things I like about the bazaar are Card art, character identity and flavor, perks, the fact that PVP is asynchronous and you can pause any time you want. When I don't face hard counters several times in a row and the game gives me options to experiment it is a good experience. A lot of reviews say that the paid characters are OP and default ones don't stand a chance. That is not the case. There are metas where the paid character is top 1 but the free ones remain competitive and if the new character comes out overtuned they are nerfed pretty quickly. I have 2 paid characters yet my highest winrate is on a default character - dooley.

I don't consider the bazaar a bad game at all. It has potential and I know there are other modes in development but I don't think it's "The best autobattler on the market" and if you take into account that it's paid while there are worthy competitors that are free to play like HS battlegrounds that you haven't tried yet I don't see a point in buying it.