Smash Up : Mess up

I was the wizards and Gnomes....they don't mix well..

Finally played my first game of Smash Up. I had started one some time ago but did not continue so I was eager to see what all the hype is about. I won't go into details of the rules because you can see a lot of them from BGG. I randomly chose the wizards + magical creatures decks. My opponents had zombie+ghost, martian + robots and ninja + plants. In the end, the player with the ninja + plants won. The game is pretty straight forward to play and understand. There is a fair bit of reading because of the text on the cards and the bases but its nothing too difficult. There are quite a few bits of combos that you have to understand and being first time players that can be hard to grasp especially since you probably won't know what your decks entail. We also played with 4 which I don't think is the optimal number of players for the game as it may cause the game to drag on quite a bit. This game requires quite a fair bit of guarding otherwise potentially there could be a runaway leader concept.
To me, the base scoring mechanism most reminds me of Blood Bowl team manager but I prefer blood bowl because even with 4 it doesn't feel that draggy. We could possibly play with less points to win though. All in all, it was an average game for me but I won't mind playing it again with less players. I heard its really good with 2 so lets see. Try before you buy.