f13.net

Don't ask what happened to the other thread.

Anyway, I got a key. It's not the worst thing ever. I'm on the fence about it because the ENTIRE game is combat math. However, it's a nice diversion that may have more depth in the longterm than I suspected.

I'm also trying to get some keys to giveaway.

ANYWAY: I guess I'm schild#1679

I watched quite a bit of this on twitch and it does look fun.  My only concern is that if I keep watching streams and public access is months away I'll be bored of it before I even get to play  :awesome_for_real:  I guess I could quit watching, it but man stream are addicting!

Also I think the arena format makes it more interesting than just constructed decks, so hopefully that will be playable without too much investment.

I wouldn't mind giving it a shot, really.

The only big problem I have is that the UI seems... a bit much.

Were I not in two other betas, I'd be very interested in this.  I hope that we can get some updates in this thread.

I would love a key.  Income ha been way too risky lately for any substantial games so a fun beta is what I need.

I will probably stream this later this week.

The worst part about Hearthstone is that they made lifegain a little relevant.

I'm sorry but winning competitive games is about killing the opponent, not delaying death. It teaches players bad habits for other games.

Would love a key if it ever happened.

These two sentences are related, aren't they.

I signed up for the beta on battle.net months ago, like an obedient little zug-zug, and nothing. edit: keep your keys.

edit: grammars

I said don't ask, chuckles. THINK ABOUT WHAT THAT MIGHT DO TO ANY KEY CHANCE YOU MIGHT GET, OBEDIENT LITTLE ZUG-ZUG.

I almost did this morning  :awesome_for_real:

(http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m8cuifQ9Bq1r04hw7o1_500.gif)


But they need to recreate the authentic solo-Priest PvP experience from WoW, which mainly involved running around healing yourself like mad praying for something else to come along and kill your opponent.

Anyhow, grats on the key, I look forward to hearing your take on it!

Frostwolf Warlord shows a flaw in their static management of power/toughness. it says "Gets +1/+1 for each other friendly minion on the battlefield. Killed the other minions, it didn't lose any power or toughness. Meh.

Can you put the Warcraft thing back in the title, because I got confused and excited at first and thought you got into some kind of beta for Stonehearth.

Done-ish.

Let me know when you do.  I've been watching streams in the background a bit while working and it seems entertaining enough.

European closed beta apparently started today, btw.

I'm jealous, signed up for beta weeks ago.  Interested in your analysis.

Interested in a key.  Need a fix until Hex comes along. 

No one actually needs to say the want  a key. Like, if I get some ill post. If I dont, I wont.

I've played a good deal of this.

The best description I can come up with is it's like, an 8 year olds interpretation of Magic with cards still designed by professionals.

There's a good deal of balance in the set, but the arena is basically drafting for morons. Also, you're paying $2.00 and don't get to keep the cards you pick, so that blows.

There's 5 cards in a pack, so it's basically worse than YuGiOh in that regard. Also, there's no secondary market.

Finally, the whole thing is a little goofy in that while Blizzard will make money, they're leaving a shitload of money on the table. I can't bring myself to think this was probably intended to be INSIDE of World of Warcraft and then they decided to spin it outside of that as the popularity of WoW was beginning to wane. Also, due to the assbackwards logic of MBAs in gaming, I assume the Diablo 3 RMAH scared them away from doing that again, which would be a super unfortunate mistake.

It's basically half a game. It would be a full game if the concept of CCGs didn't exist the way it does.

Is there currently any sort of trading system at least?

No point in it if you don't keep the cards you're drafting.

Unless I misunderstood what Schild was saying there.  So can you purchase get packs separately from Drafts for like one on one play?

I don't know much about Hearthstone's stuff, but I assumed that there would be both Draft and Constructed formats.

The only constructed format right now is ranked play. It's... pretty anemic because the game is pretty anemic. I mean, it's like "fun" but not the same sort of brain-curdling adhesive fun that Magic is - but they can fix that maybe, over time, through depth of the card pool.

No, you don't get to keep the cards from the arena. You have to buy packs or craft cards to get cards. Or win packs.

There's no trading system nor does it look like there will be one. IN FACT, there's no in-game chat.

In the Arena mode you play until you've either lost three times, or won nine (might be nine games total, I'm not in beta so I can't say for sure). At the end you get five prizes that scale with the number of wins you achieved. The prizes are a mix of card packs, dust (used for creating cards), and gold. The cost to play arena is $2 or 150 gold, and I think the break-even point (given that a card pack costs 100gold I think), is only three wins, but I haven't seen enough Arena VODs that go to completion to be sure.

I guess they use this format because it allows them to keep the price of entry to arena low, which is more appealing. Since you need 12 packs to play, the fact that you're only paying ~1 packs cost as an entry fee means that it's less of a commitment to play I'm guessing. I'm not a TCG person, but I would consider playing arena for $2 for more appealing than $24, even if the overall gains per run were smaller.

You can also disenchant surplus cards and use the resultant dust to create other cards. I think you generally get 1/8th the dust value back by disenchanting; with costs of 40, 100, 400, and 1000 for crafting cards (I think?) depending on rarity.

My hunch is that they're aiming to make this more casual. Arena isn't supposed to be the same as what I understand draft to be. It's not supposed to be something where you commit and evening and a wedge of cash to play x players in a tournament, I think it's supposed to be much more drop-in drop-out.

I can't say how well it will continue with more cards, and I'll readily defer to schild's experience with card games here, but I suspect that despite the lack of trading, the crafting system is designed to make it possible for everyone to get every card, or at least every card they want. Certain evidence to the contrary, when it comes to multiplayer and e-sports Blizz has shown a tendency to favour some playfield levelling. Consider Starcraft where everyone has access to all the same units, or those WoW arena servers where you had access to every item in the game off the bat. These may be anecdotal, but I suspect the inherent lack of balance is one reason Blizzard has been a bit down on Diablo 3 PvP (complete guesswork and speculation all).

Crafting is actually 1/4.

At least at the top end. 400 for crafting a rare. 100 for disenchanting one. I think the 4:1 ratio goes through all rarities.

The crafting system (and the rate at which you gain gold) is abhorrently slow for a game with no actual economy. Like, Farmville slow.

I am positive I saw in-game chat in someone else's stream.

Okay, so at least we have constructed and packs, but not having a trading system is weird. Even if it's a simple "send this card to someone". Hurrrm.

Some stuff can be fixed, like adding a more expensive draft mode in addition to arena but I'm with Schild in that my main concerns are card trading and the fact that you may as well be playing against a computer for the amount of actual human interaction.

Seriously, what's up with blizzard and wanting online games to have as little interaction with other people as possible?

You can chat with friends, you can not seem to chat with the opponent.

Also, for those of you that are magic players. I basically built UR Counterburn and I'm something like 15-3. But have no counters. But it's not just burn.

Ok, it's just Delver.

Make that 16-4. Turns out there are Overrun effects style effects. Did not know that.

WHICH BRINGS US TO ANOTHER PROBLEM. There's 9 different champions. Each with their own subset of cards. Like, unique to that champion. So, 1, you have way more information in this game than you would in Magic before the game even starts. And 2, it weakens the entire card pool by imposing obnoxious unnecessary limitations. Certainly made balance easier though, since they could literally match hero up against each hero instead of accounting for any sort of deck possible across a completely open card pool of 350.

How do you feel about the smaller deck sizes and 2card limits?

30 cards decks + 30ish life is kind of stupid. Armor is a mechanic I do not like. The 2 card limits were also likely a development choice as it weakens decks.

Just nuked like 80% of my cards to craft Archmage Leonidas, who is just plain bonkers. I gave Blizzard $50 of my American dollars (so full disclosure there). Anyway, uh

I didn't get it.

Not the best of situations in a beta where they take money.

So, there's no uncommons in this game.

I just realized it. Packs have 1 Rare, which is actually uncommon. Epics are Rare. Legendaries are mythic, except their distribution is 1 in 100 instead of 1 in 8.

Without an internal economy, it's just going to be crap deck on top of crap deck.

Every complaint you've got so far, I see a "$" attached to. That's not good.

It is very much more $ based than even Magic due to no trading.

I paid $10 and lucked out and got the archmage. :grin:

The amount of money they're leaving on the table is absurd. I would rather have paid $50, gotten like 50,000 bullshitfarmvilledust and built my own deck.

God Schild, it's a BETA, you can't judge the product on what's in the BETA.

 :oh_i_see:

But seriously, I completely get what you're saying here and would also much rather drop $30 and build my own than $2 fifteen times for a chance at something good.

Quick question: don't you just disenchant the stuff you don't like and then build what you want?

Yes, but it takes 4 legendaries deconstructed to make 1 legendary. It takes 8 commons to make a common. The exchange rate is absurd. I thought it was static, it's not. It's shit.

Do we know what the scaling rewards list is for arena play yet?

I know what it is for 4 wins. Glitterdustx3, 5-15 gold, and a pack. /shrug

Yeah, if you could get some keys to give out, that'd be great.

/Lumbergh

Why the hell would you drop a $50 on this? Why?

Well it was from selling some Magic cards, which I consider play money. Also, the only game related purchases I've made this year were like $20 in stuff on Steam and Hex. So, kind of whatever. Oh, and I didn't buy so much as a single pack or card from M14 (because LOLLLLL why would I)

There are a million reasons the Arena mode in Hearthstone basically blows. There's one reason it's good "deckbuilding is fun." Unfortunately, it doesn't even scratch the same itch as 7 Kingdoms (the board game).

I am so torn on this game. It feels like they want to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Just like, too many bad gamers making it or something, I don't know.

Really sounds more like they are trying to be super careful.  I don't doubt they could give it a lot more depth but to me it seems like they realllllly want to make sure it's casual friendly, to a fault.

Alas, CCGs are, by nature, "not casual."

So were MMOs until WoW.

Sorry, but you think WoW somehow changed that? As far as I can tell, even the casual players became too hardcore to be called casual.

WoW's change was accessibility.

I thought casual and accessibility went hand in hand.

haha wut

No.

Blizzard is in the business of making gateway drug games

I'm curious to hear those reasons. From where I sit it's pretty amazing, at least in terms of some things that are important to me. I'm thoroughly unimpressed with the actual card game itself, but Arena format seems great.

- It's cheap: Rather than three packs + a sub-pack fee (draft) or whatever they do for sealed these days, it's one pack + a sub-pack fee. For that price, you get 3-11 games, plus at least a pack and junk as a reward. That seems pretty comparable to drafting, except the buy-in is lower. I'll grant that the packs are a third of the size, so in terms of card gain I suppose it's just as expensive, but I feel that's more a problem with the size of packs.

- It's an interesting pseudo-draft deck-building process: I don't think this is a particularly compelling point, but I like that it's not just sealed, and I also like that I'm not actually drafting against anyone, so I can take as much time as I want and focus on making a good deck, and can ignore signalling, hate drafting and the other intricacies of real drafts in a shared card pool against your future opponents. For some people those features of drafting are actually very fun, so I can imagine this sealed variant isn't what they're looking for, but I like it.

- You don't keep the cards: Sorta dovetails from the prior point, but since you don't keep the cards (you see 18 packs worth of cards, and use 6 packs worth for the deck, no way they could let you keep them and keep it cheap), you don't need to think about rare drafting. The only decision to make is "what is best for my deck".

- The time commitment is minimal: This is the clincher. Single-game matches, played whenever you feel like it. For me this is so, so many orders of magnitude better than blocking out 3+ hours of my life for a draft or sealed tournament. At no point do I need to worry about investing more than 15 minutes. And if something does come up such that I absolutely have to quit immediately, it's a single loss, not dropping out of the draft/tournament entirely.

So: cheap, interesting, focused on deck building, and on my own schedule.

Now, I'm 110% gung-ho for Hex, so when I heard Blizzard was making a F2P online CCG, my first thought was "Shiiiiiit". Then I played constructed against AI and players, and I was no longer concerned. Then I played Arena, and I was back to "Shiiiiit". I really hope a format like this (low price per game, laser focus on limited deck building, and low time commitment) will exist in Hex, but I'm not aware of them planning one.

What about it do you dislike so much?

Got into this, and the game is relatively interesting mechanically compared to the other CCGs available online pre-Hex, Magic Online notwithstanding. Card aqcuisition is obnoxious, though, the lack of trading is a huge black mark against this game. There are evident balance problems with the game as well, but that's to be expected from a first stab at a CCG. I think in particular going second is a little too good right now.

The stuff you get for going second is because people going first were winning too much.

They don't know how to make a CCG :( or balance one :(

The first tweak that comes to mind is that The Coin should not count as playing a card, so you can't trigger combo off of it on turn 1. That right there might be enough to tone it down. I kind of feel like mulligans should be all or nothing too, or at least be done before the extra card.

Yup and yup.

They must be making progress; they're going to be performing a full account wipe "soon" to coincide with a new patch.

Well shit...as I'm sitting here waiting for my Hex invite, I just got a Hearthstone invite.

Bliz trying to make a push or something?

It's funny because I just got another key in the mail (for Hearthstone).

Well if you're not using it, hook me up? Need smoething to do tonight instead of F5ing my inbox.

I'd welcome a Hearthstone key if anyone has a spare one too that they don't want.

NO, YOU CAN ALL WAIT (because I only have 1 key and frankly that's not enough to go around)

I wish I had a key, but it's going to take ages until this thing reaches Europe. Also the game seems simplistic enough that it'll probably be old and tired by the time it goes public. Which seems a likely consequence for many of these early beta shenanigans devs like to do.

This has been my initial impression.  There's strategy here, sure, but it's about as deep as a kiddie pool.  Would have much preferred a straight copy/paste of the actual WoW TCG.

Blizzard taking something for hardcore nerds, streamlining it, making it more accessible and polishing it to a mirror finish?
But that never works!

That's not actually what has happened here. Luckton is overstating the lack of depth though - it's much better in that department than SolForge, for example. There's way too much failure in the quality of life stuff - chat, collection management, etc., - to call this polished to a mirror sheen.

There's no mirror finish here. They shouldn't be dicking around with the window dressing so much.

Lol just got an invite while watching Hex download.

Edit: followed by battlenet crashing.

Edit: Battlenet up this morning, authenticator keyfob out of sync with Bliz. This must be a sign from God not to play this.

My keyfob was out of sync too. I did a quick CS chat online and got that sorted.

I ended up removing it via the webform and uploading my drivers license, then adding it again.

Are they paying mtgo players to shill for SolForge or something lately? I keep seeing people who are smarter about ccg's than me saying SolForge is a real game.

I have no idea. It's terrible, but it seems to fool some people into seeing depth that isn't there. The arguments in its favor are all about 'it's so great that you can't get mana screwed' and such, it gives me a headache talking to those people.

Solforge could be automated. Easily. It's shit.

 Sorry but that's crap.

Solforge is a good game, it has plenty of depth - it's just not in the normal place you expect to find it. There's a large amount of thinking and choices around what to level up and when.  There's a reason a lot of decent players are pushing it (and were involved in designing it).

Ok, I'll bite, in what abnormal place is that depth found?

The customer's wallet?






 :why_so_serious:

Yeah i just got in this friday, so spent some time in it while waiting for later hexing.  Seems ok as a game; my kids really seem to like it, but thus far, not much depth im seeing.
Now granted, WoW players have show much willingness to spend money on sparkle ponies and such, so while i am sure there will plenty of folks spending money on this I am not seeing any reason why I ever would.

I'm another one who got into this last weekend and just got around to trying it out this evening.  It's slick and fast paced, but ultimately pretty boring from what I can tell.  I'm not sure if I'll play it anymore after the hour or so I spent so far.  I can see it being popular as a card game for people that don't play card games, essentially.  But I can't see them breaking into the TCG crowd much.

I got a beta key. I don't think I'll take it up though, so if anyone wants it let me know.

lamaros a friend of mine is bugging me all the time for a key, if you're willing to PM me the key, I can spare you some steam coupons in exchange.

If anyone has a spare key I'd be grateful.

Got my EU (italian) beta key yesterday around 10pm CET . Time to put  my total incompetence at card games into practice  :grin:

Does everyone start off as a Mage, or is your initial/tutorial deck selected randomly?

Anyway, I started off as a Mage. In the small sample size of games that I played, I observed that I did pretty well against other casters, and got stomped by any hunter or warrior that stepped to the plate. This was both in practice and play modes.

I tried a couple of different approaches to deck-building, but wasn't having as much success as I'd like. Granted that my Mage is only leveled to 11 or so, I accept that I haven't put a lot of effort (or money?) into discovering a winning strategy.

When I finally did unlock Hunter, I switched. My hunter is now level 8, I've leveled him up almost exclusively in Play mode, and I've lost maybe one or two games so far. My strategy is simple. Stack the deck with minions, especially beasts. Combo them whenever possible with cards that buff them, which is one of the strengths of the Hunter deck. Have minion-clearing cards like Multi-shot, Arcane Shot, and Explosive shot handy. Plink away at the opponent with steady shot (the Hero power) whenever I have 2 mana laying around.

So, at a low level, and anecdotally, the Hunter seems to be easier to win with than the Mage.

I've spent zero dollars on the game. I've bought three of the 100-gold packs so far; that's how much gold I've earned from the in-game questing system.

I haven't tried the Arena yet; if I'm reading things right, this is Hearthstone's version of drafting.

Yes

The game definitely has a bit of Rock, Paper, Scissors feel with champions. Warriors wreck my Mage too.

Pro-Tip: You stop getting new cards at level 10. After that it's just gold (read: foil) versions of the ones you already have.

Yeah, I won a LOT when I started playing. People are bad at cardgames. However card quality (read:cash) trumps skill majorly in this game. So expect to start getting trounced by ridiculous cards shortly.

Yup, sorta. You pay 150g, then build a deck by picking between 3 random cards, 30 times. It's kinda shit, especially given that the number of rare cards you get is random. Then you play until you lose three times or win nine times and get some prizes (a booster + 40-160ish gold depending on wins, plus potentially other cards/crafting dust).

As a starting Mage, lost countless matches in a row against AI hunter and warrior, and finally managed to win my first match against the (AI) shaman on my second try. I'm so GOOD  :drill: :ye_gods:  . Currently at lv 7

I'll just post something i wrote about HS elsewhere.
Having played the beta for a few days, i can generally agree with others comments. Fun, fast paced, but missing much of the depth and complexity of Magic.
In greater detail, 30 card decks with any single card limited to 2 copies. You CAN run out of cards in a drawn out game, or if both players use a lot of draw spells, at which point you take 1 damage your first turn having no cards in library; 2 damage the next turn, 3 the following etc etc. In other words an empty library is not an auto win, but an escalating damage time bomb.
This means each deck more or less has to play an aggro role. No alternate win conditions, no mill, no graveyard manipulation, etc. You basically have aggro and mid-range aggro.

There are no actions you can take during your opponents turn - no instants. It's all summon creature, cast sorceries, summon equipment or use character ability. The only exception to this are Trap cards, which you play on your turn and if their conditions are met, they trigger when your opponent does something. Example, a trap that when your character is damaged, it does 2 damage to the whole opponents team. Or a trap that triggers when your opponent summons a creature, you get a copy of that creature. Lack of reactivity means less complexity. In magic terms, this means no counterspells, no mid combat tricks, no activated/triggered abilities on your opponents turn other than the few trap cards etc.

The other big issue is not unique to Hearthstone, but more pronounced due to no trade ability - the high rarity cards are way more powerful than common cards. To get them, you either need to grind a ton of matches to earn gold to buy packs of 5 cards that might have a rare or higher (i.e. win 3 matches to earn 10 gold - packs cost 100 gold), or you need to buy packs with real money.  Serious magic players don't buy packs to get the cards they want, they buy singles, or buy in bulk and trade. With HS, even though the game is technically free to play, it seems much more pay to win then even magic, and for less reason. With the small deck sizes, having 1-3 really powerful cards becomes much more noticeable and some of the folks i've played had much more than that.

The limited area is like a draft knock off where you don't keep the cards, and your winnings are pretty low. The crafting tool to turn extra copies of cards into crafting resources is very expensive, and only works on rare and above cards. There's a large character level grind related to the MMORPG which seems totally unneccesary here. etc.

TL;DR version - decent fun but very shallow and potentially dangerous to your wallet. Shore is Purty though...

Got into the beta. Fun, but not exactly the deepest game out there. Probably would be pretty fun for a fuck-around game on a tablet.

Serious Internet Critics, circa nine years ago, about another Blizzard product.  :grin:

Question was asked at Blizzcon about trading.  The answer was "Never."

Basically he said, "It makes new players not know the value of a card, so we aren't going to do it.  That's why we have the crafting system."  (And this is in 'no way' linked to being able to sell more cards than if trading were there!   :awesome_for_real:)

You stay classy Blizzard!

Coming to Android and IOS next year. Cool cool.

Man, the 1/3 priest minion that lets you draw a card whenever a minion is healed is kinda fucking awesome if anyone is stupid enough to not immediately blow any burn/removal they have on it.

Also I guess there's no max hand size.

I am interested in a beta key as well. Just in case another one pops up.  :awesome_for_real:

Open beta is"soon" so more keys might not be distributed.

From watching some of the vs. matches on blizzcon, I'm not a fan of the game board or card design.  Mechanics seem interesting but I'd agree it's lacking the. Depth of magic because there doesn't seem to be a winning strategy beyond aggro & push.  Paladin decks were rocking shit.

There is a max hand size; when you draw too many cards you automatically discard the new ones instead of getting to choose.  This game is definitely not as deep as magic, but I do think that most of the things it streamlines away are the least fun part of magic (not getting to play your spells, turn 1 combos, having your stuff destroyed before you get to use it, etc.)  A big part of what makes Hearthstone fun to play it that the UI is very fast and responsive; on your turn you can execute your strategy with tons of fast clicks and it feels great.  I guess this is what people call Blizzard polish, but I bet achieving that feeling is a big part of why the game doesn't have instants, so it's a game-design decision too.  Compared to magic, the card set feels pretty small, and they'll have to keep adding content to keep me interested.

If you play casually, the free to play model lets you earn 50 gold a day pretty quickly, enough to buy a pack every two days or play arena every three days.  If you do well in arena, you can go infinite and earn lots of gold, but you have to get lucky in deck construction to have a shot.

There are no draw-go style control decks, but there's a hunter deck that relies on early removal and combos you out, a priest deck that uses cheap removal and card draw to get to late game, and so on.  The variety of possible strategies is not as extreme as in magic, but it's there.

I've been playing around with this, and I am a bit confused. Back in the days I played a lot of the original WoW TCG, and knowint Cryptozoic left to make its own game (Hex) I was expecting to find a very different card game here. Instead, this definitely feels like a Blizzarded version of the original Cryptozoic's WoW TCG, which is a good thing to me. Granted, there are differences, but there is double the amount in similarities.

I can see why it isn't as deep as the other big ones out there, especially with just one set of cards, but I have to say I am positively impressed especially cause it fels like I found a long lost friend.

No comment on the monetization system or lack of trading, as I haven't really touched those aspects yet.

I dunno if this will hold my interest long enough for me to do much playing it on PC since I have better games to play, but man it kinda makes me wish I had gotten an LTE enabled version of my new Nexus. I'd play the shit out of this on a tablet if I was on a plane or vacation when I had to kill time.

Got the beta and liking it so far. How does buying packs work now? Will I get an equal amount of packs or whatever when the game comes out?

As far as I know, yes. It is good because if you got shitty cards you will get a new chance at rares and stuff. It is bad because if you got awesome cards there's a chance you will get shitty ones instead with the wipe. But yes, I think all you have spent on packs will be refunded to you in the shapes of new packs. No idea about the money you spent on arena though...

They already did the wipe they planned on doing.  As of right now, barring some huge upset, whatever you have now will be carried over to Live, which already has half of the internet trolls trolling on other MMO betas about why they can't keep their beta characters "because Hearthstone is letting you keep your cards."  :uhrr:

I'm pretty much the target audience and I love the game. It's accessible, not so much in being remedial, but that it doesn't feel like you're doomed to get beat down for six months while you're learning.

I'm not sure where it goes in six months though. Maybe the gold slows down, but it seems like if you catass for a while, you're going to have a ludicrous deck in very short order.

I gave this another look this evening and lost a few hours to it (played Mage to lv 11 against AI, unlocked all classes, played a few random matches and an arena match (1 win / 3 losses).

While it is definitely less rich than magic it's still pretty fun and it plays quickly, which is nice.

Things that took me a bit to wrap my head around (compared to magic or other CCGs I've played):
- creature health does not regenerate at the beginning of your turn
- there is only one resource type, you gain one resource per turn until you have 10 total
- there's no blocking, just creatures with taunt which prevent creatures from attacking your character while they are on the board
- characters can wield weapons allowing them to directly attack creatures or other characters

The Arena mode (their equivalent to draft) seems like fun -- choose one of three randomly presented characters, then 30x choose one of three randomly presented cards, then you play as many games as you like against random opponents until you lose three (total) games or decide to retire.  Prizes are related to how many games you win (not sure if you get some consolation prize for 0 wins or if you just get NOTHING).  Entry is free for your first ever Arena match, otherwise $1.99 or 150 gold.

My complaint with Arena mode is that you can't pick your own hero.

Streaming arena now here:  twitch.tv/trias_e

Been playing way too much of this the past week or two.  Legit fun, but it's been a struggle to suck less. 

I think this is where I sit -  I finally got some time with this on the weekend after being in Beta for awhile and I quite enjoyed it, but I am still terrible.

I enjoyed watcing Trias_e this morning. Which made me realize something: this game, being simpler, lends itself pretty decently to live broadcasting and the likes. Not sure how exciting can be in an eSport format, but the lack of interrupts, complicated card texts and long matches make it easy for people to follow and participate.

Well, 100,000 people watched their makeshift Hearthstone tournament at Blizzcon, which seems to be about 10x the number of people who watch your average Grand Prix event.

You can probably find the tournament on a site for viewing, the HOTS stream was linked on Escapist so you can probably find the Hearthstone one there as well.   I watched it last weekend since the wife bought a ticket and the game was very quick-paced. 

It took a little for me to understand the rules, but the mana being pushed out each turn and units not regenerating or being able to block made for very quick games.  The only reason to hit the other guys cards was to feed your units abilities or wipe out the problem ones on his side.  Every other strike was against the Champion.

Watching Trias_e draft makes me realize even more that I have no clue wtf I am doing.

Well, it's not drafting. It's making a sealed deck from a pool of 120 cards or something and you only get to pick 1 out of 3 at a time.

It's wonk as shit.

Yup - how the Arena determines the cards you get to choose from is puzzling.  Some pulls you will get 3-5 epics and 1-2 legendary choices, and other times just 1-2 epics.  I would hope there is some backend "overall deck power" calculation going on that ensures everyone gets a relatively even platform, but you sure as shit wouldn't know it when picking Arena decks.

As far as I know, the only given is you will get 4 rare cards.  That's it, everything else is pure chance.  The amount of epics and legendaries you draft is totally random.  I've gone up against a guy with 3 legendaries in arena.  Ridiculous.  I think the chance of getting just 1 legendary in a 'draft' is 15% or so.

The fun thing about arena is that, since there are no card restrictions, you can have some pretty ridiculous decks yourself.  It is enjoyable to draft 4 swipes as a druid.  Well, not for the other player.

I don't mind the randomness, and good players have over 75% win rate, so it's not as if the randomness cannot be overcome to some extent by intelligent picks and play.

I think the real problem with the game right now is there just aren't enough cards (as in, we need more variety).  There's pretty much consensus in arena as to what cards are worth drafting and what aren't, although you also need to take into account your class, mana curve, and the rest of your deck when picking.  Some of the never-used cards could use a buff, more cards need to be introduced.  But they will be, and I think the game will continue to be enjoyable.  We'll see.

Sounds cool and approachable. I like that.

The problem is that the mechanics of the game have pretty severely limited their design space for cards.  I mean, yes, they can do more with what they have.  But it's pretty much going to be variations on direct damage spells and creatures. 

Would you really be surprised if at some point down the road they introduced some kind of interrupt, or more interaction between players during each other turns, maybe starting with just a few cards before going full scale with a new card set?

Yes, actually, considering that they had the opportunity to copy/paste the WoW TCG as it was and instead decided to water it down to some kind of Parker Bros. version of the former. 

For sure, but in their minds that could be their own Blizzard way to introduce a few million people into something that would be otherwise too complicated, blasting it from huge to planetary. It's like: "OK, we need to take it down a notch to get everyone and their family hooked. Then, in two years, we'll give them interrupts."

I personally don't care. I just can see why they wanted to dumb down TCGs, and why they will have to complicate-it-up over time.

Hey, in a couple years, Hex might be playable too!   :why_so_serious:

It's drafting. You don't get access to the same cards every time. You're missing the most important thing about it too: you can play (and pay) arena even if you don't have time to play through a draft at that moment. Hex should very seriously consider copying it. Not to replace, but to add to the options. Or possibly as a replacement for phantom drafting.

It's not drafting because it isn't a shared pool of cards is it? 

I disagree that they have severely limited their design space.  There are plenty of things they can easily add.  Graveyard, multi-turn effects (like Overload), Regen mechanics, hand size stuff, mill stuff, and tons of creature mechanics.  The only things that are going to be lacking are lands and interrupts.  Also, since it is a computer only CCG, they can add many things that would be annoying as hell to keep track of in magic.

Really the only big thing they won't be adding is interrupts.  The main reason they won't add them is because they slows the game down immensely, since after each decision you have to sit and wait for your opponent to confirm whether or not they want to interrupt, which is terrible game design if you want a fast paced casual friendly game.

Secrets are auto-firing interrupts.

They're also stupid.

Put me down for "it's not drafting" too. Without having to worry about what I pass on to another player the experience is fundamentally different.

Got to 8 wins in the arena on my....7th arena go? You get a lot of gold in this game.

One of the "development of Hearthstone" videos from Blizzcon had a section where they listed ideas that had been cut. Interrupts were one for them - both for the reason you said (slowing the game down), but also because in the developers' eyes they're simply not fun.

The level of play at primetime is significantly worse than any other time of day/night.

My priest deck needs lots of work.  The matchmaker gave me the same opponent twice in a row.  We split the series.  I've only spent $10 but I did get Doomhammer, just trying to create a good shaman deck to use it in.  This is a good game, but two copies of the same card in a 30 card deck seems awfully restrictive.  Like others said, it's fun but shallow. 

Yeah this isnt drafting at all.  Draft has a shared card pool from a known booster distribution, and fixed opponent set (the 7 other people you draft with) which play a huge part in the strategy and deck building part of draft.  Knowing when to hate draft a card that would be problematic for your deck, or just knowing what good cards you have passed informs the whole process.  Arena has none of this.  You can't even rely that you will get some fundamental cards for your character class.  Example, last arena i chose priest, and got 0 mind controls.  In playing my random opponents, i played 4 other priests ALL of whom had at least 1.  And of course my rares sucked that card set too.  It's fine for Hearthstone but its also a deliberate low complexity version of limited play - it IS a sealed hybrid.  I'd put it closest to the old MTGO league play with just a 1 session limiit.

Mea Culpa. I hadn't thought about the strategy of the draft itself and understand what you all mean. On the other hand, it's definitely not constructed. It's random.

Either way, it's new and it works very well.

I find this all a bit amusing as I was someone who vastly prefers the forced grouping and difficulty of earlier MMOs and I've never warmed to WoW. I'm now on the opposite side because I find HS vastly more fun than Hex or MTG mainly because of accessibility issues.

If Magic drafts cost $2, I sure as hell wouldn't play much Hearthstone.

I just found an old beta invite from October.   :oh_i_see:
#installing

After a marathon day of playing I've gotten all my heroes up to at least level 10.  Spent $10 more and got a couple of purpz.  Every hero does have a unique flavor but I find I keep using the same neutral cards.  The Warlock has a lot of fun cards, but he's pretty fiddly.  My Druid deck is pitiful. 

I took the survey they emailed me about the game, and it seems clear from the amount of questions on the survey they are really positioning HS for the tablet/mobile market.  That and social media tie ins.  Take that for what it's worth.

Also, the one question on the survey that asked about what other features would you like to see added to HS, none of the choices were gameplay altering at all.  The closest one was "i wish i could reorder the cards in my hand".

The tech. men of industry with all the money have it in their heads that "mobile is everything."  I say this literally.  So...  get used to it.  Because we're at the point where if you've got a startup and need capital, you better have mobile capability.

When this game comes out for iPhone and Android, it will destroy all of its competition.  It's light-years better than any of the other F2P card games in that space and it has a much more player-friendly business model, too.  Maybe if it does well it will show Wizards how much money they're leaving on the table by not allowing real, affordable drafting in Duels of the Planeswalkers.

All signs point to yes. I can't believe they haven't announced a launch date for tablets yet. They are basically bleeding millions a day while they futz around. OHNOWAIT, Blizzard...

:rofl: Nope.

This.

Also, really, TCGs are, to me, the best option for getting a "real" game on a tablet. I don't think you lose anything in the translation, which you can't really say for many games.

Another patch today - frozen mage nerfed by increasing mana cost of most of their freeze spells. Oh, and the arena bug is supposed to be fixed.

This game vexes me.  I'm not aggressive enough by half at least. I try to do more than just throw shit out there for damage and it just doesn't work.  Charge and high damage creatures are the best route.  At least for those of us who haven't ground out a full set of cards.

Is there an NDA ? My key came in an email that was 100% Korean.

No NDA.

Also, based on the lack of chatter.. no fun!  :awesome_for_real:

To be fair, this is pretty much the only community I've seen that isn't head over heels in love with Hearthstone.

Didn't you get the memo? You're not supposed to admit to liking Blizzard games on this forum.  :grin:

I'm practically a resident blizzard fanboy and I think hearthstone is boring.

I "hate" Blizzard but I am really liking Hearthstone a lot. Granted, the lack of depth is blatant at the moment, and I really miss choices that go beyond deckbuilding to beat absolutely random decks, but it's perfect for very quick (5 to 10 minutes) card game fixes without feeling too inept for losing. Basically, I am liking this for all the reasons I usually dislike Blizzard games. But I feel it is a format that works for card games. Especially considering that if what you want is depth you are probably sticking to Magic anyway.

Small derail: has anyone tried Shadow Era? Opinions? Seems cool at a first glance.

I played Shadow Era for a bit on the iPad. All of these games tend to do the same obnoxious thing though, which is change the combat style of Magic from defensive strategies to offense. It's another game where you can attack anything on the board instead of making the player on defense decide who to throw under the (attacking) bus. That said, Between Hearthstone and Shadow Era, I'd pick neither. While the mana accumulation method is different, the parts beyond that are nearly identical.

Yes, it's the Titanic of online card games.

My problem with it really is that there's only one playstyle.  Throw out monsters, aggro as hard and fast as you can and PRAY that you pull the right card out of your deck when you need it or your opponent doesn't.  2 max of each makes that tricky.

I've lost games to my son randomly throwing shit out because I didn't pull anything other than low-value cards after the first few turns, and my deck was balanced.  I beat another player with a total shit deck because he didn't get lucky enough to pull his azzrape monster until I'd had a removal for it.

I was SUPER into this game for about a week but while it's very pretty and fun to play it lacks depth and I burned through it quickly.

It gets mixed feelings on /vg/, while the Hex community predictably hates it.

Hex has basically ruined rational discussion on several forums about the game.

Maybe.  But if I wasn't part of the "Hex community" I'd be bored with the game as a member of the "Magic community." Goodness knows even with the money spent on Hex it pales in comparison to 20 years of on and off Magic. 

Hearthstone is just what you get when you remove most of the interesting interaction between players.  Hearthstone might as well be played against AI for all the difference playing against an actual person makes.  That's boring.

What is there to discuss?

As someone who's not really interested in Hex, Hearthstone seems kind of boring, too.  I dunno, maybe I'm just cooled on card games in general, but there's this real sense of disconnect here that I don't get in a lot of other games.  I haven't played much of it, and only against the AI, so maybe this becomes clearer with time or something, but I'm never really sure what I should be doing or why or what kind of strategy there is in this game or if I just made a mistake or what's going on.  When I win, I don't know why, and when I lose, I'm not sure what I did wrong.

Which was kind of surprising for me, given that Blizzard has built it's business on being the company that takes inscrutable niche games and makes them immediately understandable to the retarded masses such as myself, but maybe I'm asking for too much, here.

It's not just you. That's the feeling I've gotten, too, except my reasons for losing are clear.  I didn't get the right cards pulled. That's it.

The guaranteed ramp-up of mana means decking multiple 1 & 2 cost creatures is nearly useless.  Deck 3 & ups, 1 & 2 are for character abilities or weapons & buffs.  If you've got a class AOE deck it to clear the board.  Creatures without a battlecry are near useless.  Taunt only delays the inevitable go for creatures that deal damage instead.

After that it's pray you draw the right cards and be playing the right class.  There's a reason the 'champ' at Blizzcon played a Paladin deck, then a priest.  Shits overpowered.

It's a fun game.  But I feel so constricted with 2 copies per card of a 30 card deck.  Hard to build really cool synergies.  It's simple, casual, colorful and fun.  But it just doesn't have the stickiness for me.  I played it tonight for the first time in 2-3 weeks.  It will settle into a game I love playing once a month.

The no-trade irks me still.  Makes it pay 2 win.

Does anyone actually doubt they won't fine-tune it to make it a roaring success for the guy who doesn't want to deal with the MtG or HEX rules?

No, but again, it's because of the fine-tuning (read: simplification of grander mechanics) that will keep me and others away.  If they copy/pasted the WoW TCG as it was from paper to digital I'd have some serious second-thoughts regarding my investment into HEX.  Since they didn't, who cares? 

Even the most casual of fans do want "some" depth in their games, simply because constantly repeating the same formula will get tiresome.  MMO's do this by changing the scenery, the npc's and the(lol) storylines but a card game can never change that much so the gameplay needs to have a bit of diversity. 

Right now in hearthstone ten different matches are hard to tell apart regardless of which classes are being played.

I totally disagree with you on that premise.

How much true depth is there in a game like Candy Crush? Or Angry Birds? These are casual gamers, and they eat this shit up over and over again with very little true change to the overall formula.

My basic point is that if you invested in HEX, contemplated HEX, played MtG semi-seriously, or MTGO, you are not going to understand this market.

A lot, actually, you should play them sometimes.  The rules are simple, yes, but it's what you can do with them that make them so addictive.  Hearthstone lacks the ability to do that because of the restrictions put on it.

Interrupts slow down gameplay, but you can limit them to quick actions at the start of your part of the phase and limit the "stack order" nonsense of MTG to only one interrupt and still have more depth and ability framework than Hearthstone has.   

All you can do to win in HS is throw out big creatures.  Guy with the biggest creature(s) out the most turns wins.  The end.  No milling your enemy or outlasting his deck or turning his assets (which are only creatures) against him.   

Unless they alter that rule set, that's all it's going to be and they have said they don't intend to do so.

On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being "A monkey could code/enjoy this" and 10 being "superior master race shit", Candy Crush/Angry Birds hovers around 1-2, Hearthstone's around 5-6, and HEX/MtG would be up there at 9-10.

I understand the market quite well.  I just don't see the appeal of Hearthstone when compared to HEX when I want my TCG itch scratched.

As far as Candy Crush/Angry Birds go, like most casual games of that caliber, they see a grand success for a while, and if they tend the fire well with more content, bug fixes, etc, they carry on for a while.  But I agree with Lakov; even the most stalwart fans of these games get bored and move on until they add something new mechanic-wise.  Every mass-success casual game has evolved over time as it's popularity soared.  Maybe someday Hearthstone will evolve and add back in the stuff they stripped out from the original WoW TCG.  Until then, pass.

I guess it doesn't shock me that the doom-casting/criticism and HEX/MtG player lines are going to cross.

We shit on a lot of things here because it's what we do. To me, simplifying the game seems to be the way to go, even if it does remove what purists think of as big strategic gameplay. I also think it will have massive appeal that HEX can't possibly match.

I'm sure MtG pines for the popularity that Yu-Gi-Oh and Pokemon have.  Doesn't mean that they're all not successful, it means the market's big and diversified enough for all of them to co-exist.  HEX and Hearth will probably follow the same suit.

Oh I agree they can absolutely co-exist, and that there is a market for both. I just roll my eyes a little when I see HEX/Mtg players try to tell me why Hearthstone isn't good.

I think  Hearthstone clearly shows that streamlining the gameplay helps -- things move faster, there's less waiting, and that's fun.

My complaint is the same as many others: this really limits the gameplay, which at the end of the day makes it less interesting for me.

It'll be interesting to see if Blizzard figures out how to allow for more diverse tactics while still staying super streamlined or if Cryptozoic will bend (further) toward streamlineing their client.  I think there's got to be some middle ground between the extremes of choice and quick play... it's a question of who figures it out first.

I think Hex will have incredible appeal for casuals once they get PvE implemented per their vision.  Hearthstone is just simple combat 1v1.  HEX is bringing dungeons, raids, characters w/talents and gear, and more.

I think the interface and pacing makes that tough, tbh. I watched an early video of HEX, and if they changed all the incessant turn button mashing it would certainly help.

It is something they are working on trying to solve actually.  I think the best system is to allow people to auto pass certain cards on the table (right click card, pass priority when this triggers) and allow people to set their pass priority preferences in the options (which you can already do some).  Perhaps they should have LESS of it by default and have a tutorial for turning them on if people want the "full experience" as it were.

PvE will be a big draw in my opinion as well.  I think the idea of dungeons + collecting cards + gear/character progression seems like it might tap into that progress thing people seem to love.

(on Hex: Magic Online lets you decide where the priority stops happen.

Hex would do wise to implement the exact same thing. Shame they put the steps in the middle of the goddamn playmat.)

(On Hearthstone: Game still sucks. Boy is it shiny right when you start playing.)

There's plenty of depth in Hearthstone.  It's easy to think that the game comes down to what you draw since there aren't many mechanics, but how you construct your deck and how you play your turns is by no means easy in HS.   I've played ~1000 games of Arena, and I don't feel like I'm very good yet.  Unless if you have an 75-80% winrate like top end players, the reason you are losing is not because you didn't draw the right cards, it's because you are drafting and playing poorly.  Even the top end players are still making plenty of mistakes as well.   From a long-time (but off-and-on, and not ever serious) player of MTG:  Hearthstone has been a great revelation to me.  It's taken out all of the shit you don't really need to have an interesting and difficult competitive card game.  HS still remains a great, interesting, and difficult game despite its streamlined nature.  Is it AS deep as MTG?  No.  Is it still plenty deep for 99% of the CCG playing population?  Yep.  It should only get better as well, assuming they don't fuck it up with future expansions.

I think most of the comments in this thread are pretty laughable.  Sorry I'm going to pick on one person here.


Nope.  It's usually because you played badly or constructed a poor deck.  Sometimes you can lose due to pure cards.  The two cases where this is often true are against super-agro decks where you don't draw AoE, and mage decks where they draw the perfect combo of iceblock/fireball/pyroblast fucking bullshit.  But usually, there are tons of reasons you could have lost:  Didn't correctly anticipate common class removal/AoE clear/commonly played cards with big impact on the game.  Didn't trade efficiently with your cards.  Didn't play aggressively enough when you were actually the 'beat-down' deck.  Didn't play defensively when you were the 'not-bead-down' deck.  Poorly constructed deck (either in constructed or arena).  Played your own removal/AoE cards at the wrong time.  There are many more things you could be doing wrong.  Remember, top end players have 75-80% winrate.  If you don't have that, most of the games you lose are due to your own poor play/deck construction.


The best Warlock and Rogue decks right now use a ton of 1 and 2 cost creatures.  There's also top end paladin and mage rush decks as well.  AoE is really important, yeah.  There are plenty of very useful creatures without battlecry, although many of the best neutrals are the battlecry buff minions (they nerfed SSC, but they need to nerf defender and dark iron as well IMO).  Taunt does kind of suck but can be good in some decks in the 4-6 mana spots.


Priest is currently considered one of the worst classes in the game, and Paladin is generally considered right now around 4th best behind mage, warlock, and rogue.  Mage being the most overpowered is pretty much accepted as fact currently.  Pyroblast and Fireball are stupid fucking cards.

I couldn't get past your first paragraph. The entire premise of the arena is flawed. First of all, you aren't drafting. It's ALL hidden information. You're choosing the best of three cards for your deck, which doesn't remotely help with drafting because other players aren't choosing the other two. Add to that the card pool is entirely too random and other players are not playing decks balanced against yours by nature of how packs are opened in a traditional draft, all you're doing is participating in a game that's poorly designed from start to finish.

The top players in the arena have more luck than skill.

Edit: OK, a little more.


Wrong to the n^th level. This game has less depth than pokemon and what that depth does (or should do) is separate the casuals from the competitive. This game is entirely for the former and not the latter. If you like it, that's fine, but that plants you firmly in the former group than the latter (which isn't a crime).

It sounds easy enough to change the draft method if they wanted to go that way.

It's not. They would have to rebalance the entire set, which is an unbalanced mess right now.

http://www.twitch.tv/ek0p/b/485865623

80% winrate after around 4000 arena games played.  It is close to impossible that that winrate is due to luck.  (although don't watch the stream, it's terrible.)

http://www.local.se/trumpstats_oldpatch.pl

Trump's stats pre-patch. 2100 games, 76% winrate (a winrate he has been very consistent at post-patch as well).  Also a stream worth watching, as Trump isn't obnoxious.


Perhaps it's because I was a poker player, but I really enjoy games where you have to do your best given randomness that may or may not be on your side (but WILL even out in the long run).  Second, arena is not all hidden information.  Players have a very small chance to have the option to draft legendaries or epics.  Players are highly likely to draft good class cards and neutrals that aren't legendaries and epics.  You can easily play around things in arena and guess the plays of your opponent (I'm a bad player and I do this all of the time).  Yeah, you'll lose to some random legendary bullshit now and then, and if that sort of thing pisses you off too much then arena is not for you.  However, considering how often the good streamers go 9+ wins (almost every run), these games decided by luck are fairly rare if you are a strong player.


I suppose it depends on your definition of depth.  Mechanics and card interactions are very simple, and given the small card pool, I've memorized every card in the game and its rarity.  In that sense, yeah, little depth.  But you can have a deep and interesting game from very few mechanics (chess).  Obviously, hearthstone aint chess, but still, it's hard to play well.   I'm constantly learning about how to actually play the game successfully.  Again, if you're not winning most of your games, you are playing or constructing your deck poorly (probably both).  To be honest, this is something I wouldn't have probably believed if I didn't watch the top streamers constantly get to 9 wins.  I think it's hard to realize this because Hearthstone is a game of inches in a way that MTG just isn't.

Is Hearthstone more casual friendly than MTG?  Of course.  Is there a lower skill cap?  Probably.  Is there still plenty there to sink your teeth into for serious players?  Yes.

So why isn't everyone at Legend rank if player skill doesn't matter?

Skill and knowledge matter. But the skill ceiling is very low when compared to something like Magic.  If you enjoy the game I don't care, but let's be realistic, there is just WAY LESS going on, way fewer decisions to make (in terms of deck building and actual gameplay) and less ways to interact with your opponent.   

But regardless, it's just boring to me because of such limited interactivity. 

Legend Rank does not account for losses. I hit Legend in my first sitdown with the game.

It's the equivalent of Planeswalker points. Which, if they couldn't qualify you for a Pro Tour, would be completely ignored in Magic. It's a metric of precisely nothing other than "how much you play."


Are you actually saying the margin for error in Hearthstone is lower than Magic? You clearly seem to like Hearthstone a good deal, which is bully for you. But it's still not a very good game in the pantheon of card games. No matter how much you write or how often some people get lucky, nothing is really going to change that. Worse yet, it doesn't actually equip the player with the skills needed to succeed in other card games because the actual set and gameplay itself is absurdly shallow. Combat math, along with the class system, makes for a very small decision tree compared to Magic. Or any other card game for that matter.

I will concede that there's "skill" involved in winning Hearthstone with regularity, but that level of skill is hilariously low. As a poker player, you should really see that immediately.

Apart from the bit where you need to be Rank 1 to start getting Legend ranks, you mean?

That's sort of the point. I see the skill level involved in HEX or MtG as a hilarious waste of time for a ton of the market. I think the more the competitive players rail against this sort of thing as a bad game or poorly designed, the more I'm likely to put money back in ATVI and ride the stock again.

What you're missing is that depth contributes to the long-term stickiness of the game.  MtG has depth at all levels, and so you can play the game differently or get better at different facets as long as you play, even if you never go out of the kitchen table/occasional store event level of play.  Stream-lined games are great for a huge batch of new players but large portions of the player base will eventually get bored with it.  Then, the devs have to try to bolt on other systems/more complexity to keep the player base engaged to a game that was fundamentally designed to be stream-lined and simple, which will largely end with the game sliding downhill or becoming an unweildy mess.

That is the development path of literally every other CCG ever, besides MtG.  Generally what then happens is a huge wave of new customers familiar with CCG mechanics but looking for something more interesting transition into MtG. 

It is perfectly possible to play MtG at a "lower" complexity level for extended periods of time.  One of the core demographics that Wizards caters to is "Timmys", or players that like to play big creatures and/or spells with big effects.  A large portion of the MtG buying public are so-called kitchen table players, who will regularly buy a few boosters or a fat pack just for a couple of cards to plug into the deck they play with buddies on the weekend.

I don't think this needs to be long term. It needs to rack up huge numbers early, operate for 3-5 years with diminishing results, and then replaced with something else or overhauled completely. If they do that right, it will still make more than enough to be worth doing.

Tldr: this game is fine but its not what a lot of people want in a game. Also schild hates it so much he misuses the word luck a lot.

As I said in the older thread it's a Magic-style game filtered through Facebook. It's a good execution of that, but I don't think that's a good concept. As with most "streamlined" games the streamlining takes away more than it adds.

If it weren't a Blizzard games I suspect it would be like Card Hunter - somewhat popular for a week then never heard from again.

I have no problem with the game. What I have a problem with is that people are for some reason thinking there's far more there than there is.

Are we really still doing this in this day and age?

 :why_so_serious:

You'd be surprised how many people are playing JUST because its a Blizzard game.

There seems to be a certain aesthetic to Blizzard games that I and many others find appealing.  But WoW had 60 levels and two continents of content where HS has a small amount of cards.  So the Blizzard shiny only lasts so long. 

HS is quite fun to me but it's missing something.  It doesn't have that secret sauce that keeps you coming back.

I don't think you can underestimate how valuable the fact that a lot of streamers play this, and a big part of that is that it is a Blizzard game.  High profile people got beta keys very early and (in a case that proves no NDA is good if your game is actually decent) streamed it right away.  It generates lots of buzz and lots of exposure.   Lots of LoL pros even started streaming it while waiting for their queue to pop.

I don't know how many people are playing this just because it's Blizzard or just because it is Warcraft, but the fact that Blizzard was able to essentially use popular Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo streamers for what amounts to free advertising has, I suspect, made a pretty big difference in how the game has caught on.

I don't think there are as many Blizzard devotees as we did say, 5-10 years ago.  So in the sense that people aren't just freaking out over this because it is a Blizzard title then I agree that it probably isn't being played "because it is a Blizzard game."  But because of Blizzard's position in the industry I think the game has taken off a lot quicker than it would have if almost anyone else had released the same thing.

Sort of.  Hearthstone forces you to make correct tactical decisions every single turn, where MTG simply does not.   You lose games in Hearthstone because of a seemingly toss-up of what minion to play on turn 3, or because you traded in such a way to allow your board to get consecrated a little bit better on turn 4 (out of a game of 10+ turns).  Of course, what you remember is the topdeck failing after you've lost control of the game, but what went wrong happened earlier when you barely lost control of the board because of a small misplay or two.  Hearthstone is a tug-of-war in a way that MTG isn't. 

As far as training you for CCGs...the game is a genius distillation of CCG basics:  Everything comes down to getting value of your cards and keeping control of the board (except for mages which are fucking stupid).  Since mana is equalized and you can trade minions at will, the game is entirely about the fundamentals.  There are no sneaky interrupts, less cheesy combos (almost all combos are newbie traps in this game) and everything is equal every game from a mana perspective.  You simply must get more value out of your cards than your opponent on a turn-by-turn basis, especially in Arena.  You can't skip turns or not trade/deal with the possibility of trading (since your opponent can attack your minions).  Every single turn is a forced action on you.  It's not a strategically deep game, but tactically, it's difficult and consistently challenging.  It's a great training ground for other CCGs, not the opposite.  You get 2 for 1'd without taking significant board control or bringing your opponent to the brink of death?  You lose.  Value your cards next time.

If you're new, you literally stand no chance in arena.  There is no amount of luck in the universe that could come together to make you win 12 games.  If you're interested in playing Arena and not going 2-3 every time, but you've played enough to know the cards and the basics, this is a pretty decent guide:  http://ihearthu.com/vivafringes-guide-to-arena/

So when you say "Seemingly a toss up" do you mean "actually a toss up."  Because if you really lose games all the time because you played the wrong minion on turn 3 and you really have no information to make the right decision, that is pretty much exactly the kind of luck-based thing people are talking about.


Again, I don't see how this contradicts the criticism that the game is mostly about just drawing and playing your best cards.  It seems like that is pretty much exactly what you said.

Given that you admit the game has little strategic depth I don't really see any thing you've said other than "I agree, but I like it anyway."  Which is fine, but don't pretend the game is something it isn't.

Bearing in mind that I got bored quickly and haven't played the game in a couple months I should point out that I did in fact drop $50 on it so....good or bad they are going to make a lot of money initially.

Last thing:

Those 'top players' all have full sets to pull from.  I do not.  I've lost to many cards I just don't have access to because my character is level 4 or 5 with 14/20 class cards and my neutral deck is maybe 25% complete, at best. It's like trying to play Magic using only a starter deck.  You're going to lose more than you win, it's set against you.


Yeah, same.  I figured, "Meh, it's pocket money."  But I've got a shitload of grinding to do for gold or a lot of money to spend for cards to be more competitive.  No thanks!

I also think people vastly underestimate the power a game has just by virtue of being popular. I've never cared for WoW, but I've played an awful lot of it, up to and including raiding because friends played it, because it was ubiquitous, and because it has such a great third party support network to figure out WTF you're doing.

One of the best parts about HS to me is there's enough people playing that there are people worse than I am.

I have no idea how anyone could claim this. In Magic you basically make all the same tactical decisions you do in Hearthstone, plus plenty more that Hearthstone lacks.

His definition of "tactics" appears to be centered around only the 'combat' phase attack mechanics.  If you use that metric then he's right.  You have to attack on every turn in HS where you do not in Magic.  There's no blocking, so not attacking means you just passed up the only opportunity to deal damage your turn and nothing more.

I'm pretty sure the first time I talked about Hearthstone I said that it was basically just the combat math part of Magic, but even then they simplified it by letting you choose which creature you wanted to clock in the teeth and there were no instants to change the math during combat.

Trap cards, lol. Moar liek Crap cards. Yuk yuk yuk. Really, they're stupid.

Choosing whether or not to attack in Magic is itself a tactic, and then there is blocking, instants, etc. I don't see how Hearthstone combat could possibly be more tactical, given that it's basically a strict subset.

The problem, as I can see here, bar a few cards is that Hearthstone has rules, and the cards "follow" those rules. Whereas Magic cards exist to break the rules of Magic. This is how Hearthstone was designed, so this is what we're stuck with. Sorceries, stupid traps, and shitty combat.

One big issue is the class constraints in hearthstone.  The only cards all classes get are monster cards so you simply cannot make say a "trap" warlock deck because you just don't get traps. 

This ranks as one of the dumbest ideas they had. I understand "why" they did it. They only had to make one very small set of cards and balance all of the other decks against that one. So, outside of minor variations, each class is basically the same and the actual cardcount of "playables" is shit tiny.

Basically, the mechanics have been streamlined down so much there are a few "strictly better" cards rather than a large swathe of cards that could be "situationally better".  The cards don't have that wide a variance in power, but the limited mechanics mean that if there is any difference one card will be strictly better than the other cards of that mana cost so should never be considered in deck design.

The lack of sideboards and one game matches also feed into this.  It gives generalist cards a big boost over situational cards, as a situational card is just less good in the majority of situations.  In MtG, there is a subset cards that will never be playable main deck in healthy formats (ie not dominated by one deck or archetype) but make great sideboard cards for situational use...  for instance recursive life gain in an aggro environment, or graveyard hate against decks that recur cards from the graveyard.

This is why MtG formats have a feeling of a whole life-cycle:  One deck begins to dominate the meta (aggro with burn as an example), so other decks begin to sideboard hate (recursive life gain), so the aggro deck either adapts with sideboard counter-picks or fades from the meta.

I mean, I know that. But people praising Hearthstone don't seem to.

What you are describing is the aggro archetype in MtG.  MtG has three major (and a few minor) archetypes: Aggro, Control, and Combo.  Aggro plays out it's hand, tries to get damage to the head of the opponent and maintain board position, and finally gets the opponent within range of it's "reach" which is stuff like direct damage to the face or hasty (charge) high power attackers.

Basically Hearthstone mostly plays with one of the archetypes of MtG, aggro, with some aggro-control or mid-range beats type strategies.  It sacrifices long-term board/hand development on the altar of tempo.

You also should specify between Arena and constructed (what do they call it? Using the MtG term here) play.  Limited in MtG (comparable to Arena, you draft a deck from a limited card pool) plays out pretty similarly in emphasizing tempo, board control, having creatures on the field, and card advantage through combat trades.


Also, this play state is pretty much based around the fact that taunt sucks and minions don't heal, rather than the inherent design of the game.  If taunt mechanics get a reasonable boost, you are going to see stalled mid-game states and more emphasis on long-term board/hand development.

Yah, I know you know.  Just expanding out your statement with wall of text CCG mechanics explanation.   :oh_i_see:

They honestly don't care. They are just playing it. Those players will never be the type who read into mechanics, builds, etc.

I remember when I could just play a game.  Those were the days.

It won't be around as long as Magic has been if thats the case.  I highly doubt 5, 10, 15 years from now people will still be playing HS.  Not that it matters much.  As I mentioned earlier, Blizzard is still going to make a fuck tonne of money no matter what.

Under no circumstances do I believe Blizzards goal is for this to be around as long as magic, compete for magic players, or even worry that magic exists.

Malakili, I used the word 'seemingly' for a reason.

Johnny Gee, I know CCG archetypes, and you're wrong about the dominant arena deck style in HS.

Just because you are playing every turn doesn't mean HS is an agro-game, and especially in arena, it's not.  Most arena decks in Hearthstone will be control, not aggro.  In constructed you will see a good mix of control, aggro, combo, and tempo (which is kind of control but in a lame way) decks.  

Some of the best cards in arena are frostbolt, fiery war axe, and wrath, and they aren't good because they hit the person in the face.  Both players have to spend their mana every turn in an effective way to effect the board, or rush the person, or gain tempo, whether in constructed or arena  (which is not to say that actually playing the board takes no skill:  It takes plenty, and is probably the #1 reason I'm still a 57% winrate player and not a 70%+ winrate player).  However, in arena, it's unlikely to get the cards you need to make a good rush or tempo deck, so you almost always have to pick for value and control.  Mages are disliked because they break the rules of HS control which is what makes the game interesting and fun to play.  Mages sit around, freeze all your shit and ice block to get a few turns, and then nuke your guy directly.  They don't play by the same rules as everyone else, and the game mages play is pretty lame (if HS was all mages I'd agree that it's a terrible and stupid game).  They are a badly designed class because that shit takes no skill.  I'm also not a fan of warlock agro, but at least you really only see that in constructed.  Control is beautiful in HS, and luckily, control is most of the game.

I would sort of agree that most cards in arena can be ranked as generally better than one another, but when actually drafting you will pick cards that are 'worse' fairly often, due to curve, class, or (admittedly rarely)synergy.


I mean, you can sit in your high tower and say whatever you want.  It's frustrating to read that, as it's entirely wrong, but believe whatever you want.  

Honestly, I'm the biggest dork for mechanics and builds that exists.  Shit, I theorycraft builds for games I don't even play all of the time.  Yet I love HS, and I read and watch more HS than I play, and have done so for 3 months pretty obsessively now.  I'm not saying this shit because I'm a casual donk who loves silly games.  It just turns out you don't need 10 years of wonky mechanics to make a good game!

Trias, I can tell you where Johnny is gonna stop reading.


Right there. You can't go from telling him you understand CCG archetypes and then assume he thinks all burn goes straight to the face.

We're all very shocked that removal is relevant in a game where the primary wincon is beating with dudes. Shocked.

I really want to be nice about it, but we're going around in circles.

I'll break it alllllllll the way down for funsies:

If you're good at Magic, Hearthstone won't do it for you. It's ONE part of Magic (and they really couldn't even get that right) and the tournament structure isn't even remotely good and there's no secondary market.

If you're bad at Magic AND arbitrage, Hearthstone may be the game for you. The class system makes building ideal decks ridiculously easy if you're willing to toss money into a fire, and the average player is going to be terrible at card games (and, likely, combat math).

I enjoyed Hearthstone (full set of cards plus quite a few golds) but it got old very quickly. The limited card base was painful and the meta is quite limited. Combat needs work as the "fly past non-blockers" makes it a cheese speed race and to be honest, it gets old quick. I haven't touched it in over a week which is telling but then again, the Magic Planeswalkers (I have all of them) series doesn't do it for me after playing Hearthstone - Wizards could learn a lot from Blizzard about making a virtual card game look good.

Loved the deck construction but the fact that my most successful deck is/was murloc based is telling. Strangely, the deck was Druid/Murloc which I'd written off.

Then again, I like control decks in MTG and loved being ittitating with Millstone/Jesters caps or Humility/Prayer/Outpost/Cap decks (which pretty much sums up when I gave up on the physical MTG game).

I have a weird, hypotetical, tricky question.What would the game be like if Blizzard pushed out tomorrow an expansion, a completely new set of 200 cards?

200 cards of what?  The same minions/class-locked spells and abilities without any new mechanics or changes to game operation?  It'd be the same game as it is now, except people would have a larger card pool to choose from.  Being limited to 2 copies of a card and a 30 card max deck would bring more emphasis to choosing wisely, but I imagine that in a pool of 200 cards being dropped in, there a pretty good chance there's gonna be a duplicate or two.  Maybe it'll be a murloc instead of a raptor, but the tangible stats would remain.

I don't get what all the hate is about. For those of you who are fans of the more complex CGs this is going to draw a lot of people to them. Anecdotally, two of my friends picked this up, played it til they got bored of it (cuz like you guys said, it's mighty simple), and are now looking towards other, deeper games. I directed them towards (what I knew of) Hex.

You're confusing criticism of limitations and scope with hate.  I think the only thing people have hated on is the class system, which is legit.  There's no good reason for it and it only confuses the balancing more.

That's the thing. Considering where the game is now, and, regardless of "success", the criticism about its lack of depth and lack of strategy, if they announced an expansion tomorrow where would you think they'd be going with it? Just more of the same? Or where to?

If they announced an expansion tomorrow, I'd expect them to add the 200 cards by early 2015.

An expansion would just fuck up the game.

I don't say that blindly. Right now, the game is clearly a card game for total casual card gamers. As I said, people who aren't good at Magic. People like that tend to get overwhelmed by choice. The number of bad players would increase and the number of good players would decrease as a result of choice paralysis. Right now, the only strategy in the game is to pick the actual best cards out of your limited pool. Decks are small enough and the number of good cards is small enough that right now there's a bit of wiggle room on the best deck. Combine that with the fact matches are one game without sideboards, it limits the scope of what they can print even more.

End of the day, it's too easily solvable a game and more cards would just make it even easier to solve if actual "good" card gamers are making picks on what should go in the tier 1 decks.

Top to bottom, the design blows.

The presentation is 100% of what is carrying the game. Good on Blizzard for being Blizzard in that regard.

1. It's Johny Cee.  With a C.
2. What is it with people trying to make a point based on things I never actually said?  I gave an example of aggro decks using a traditional staple (sligh or red deck wins) with spells being used for reach.  There are dozens of other traditional aggro decks.
3. I have not played the game, but have watched a fair amount of arena drafts (mostly Trump or Total Biscuit, so one good and one not very good player) and I'm interpreting that through the lens of having a shitload of MtG games played in most formats....  literally around 1,500 Limited events and thousands of constructed matches in various formats.

What you are describing as control or combo would be called aggro or aggro-control in MtG, or a "mid-range beats" style deck which is a slightly beefier aggro deck.  You are playing efficient creatures and putting damage on the opponent while controling his board with removal/favorable trades.  Even mage decks usually play an aggro-control game. 

Aggro doesn't just mean rush down or classic burn.  It means a concentration on the board state with the aim of constantly working towards a finish.  Traditional control and combo decks focus on advancing your card selection, your resources, denying your opponent resources, or your hand until you either take full control of the game or you combo out.  Are there still some combo and control strategies in HS?  Sure!  The druid has spells to increase his resources, there are damage combos, etc.  These strategies aren't powerful enough on their own to carry a deck, which means you still have to graft them on the aggro framework rather than make them the focus of your play.

HS has a streamlined and simple set of mechanics.  This makes it easy to understand and for new players to pick up.  The problem is those choices severely limit your design space for going in new directions or introducing novel strategies unless you throw out what your originally designed your card game for.

Creatures are limited to come into play effects (battlecry), leave play effects (deathrattle), and some triggered abilities (imp master, questing adventurer).  Activated abilities on creatures (tap this creature, do X like draw a card or create a minion) aren't in the game at all.  With the present mechanics, we have no idea how the game would actually handle that.  Creatures don't tap, so limit to one a turn?  How does summoning sickness work in? Etc.

It creates another layer of complexity and card choice (is this 3/5 with ability better than this 5/4 at the same resource cost?).  That's good for making a deeper game.  It's bad because HS is completely designed around intuitive and simple game play that people can quickly pick up.  Would it increase retention, or would it drive off casual players who find the basic mechanics changing?


Just adding a couple hundred cards in the existing set of mechanics wouldn't particularly do too much, as they have pretty well explored that design space.  This is the area where most other CCGs have fallen down as it just generally leads to card inflation as new sets are introduced into the limited mechanic pool.  MtG gets around this by constantly switching up mechanics with new sets and rotating older cards out. 

And making a point specifically about rotation, the fact that they've tied the cards to evergreen class abilities from the MMO means you're never going to see much in the way of a change in how the classes play. They can't get away with rotating a lot of the stuff in the game because they're married to the setting and the other game.

Apologies for getting your name wrong, Johnny Cee.  The main point of confusion/contention in the agro/control distinction is the 'putting damage on the opponent' bit, which is usually irrelevant in HS unless if you are actually playing an agro deck.  Agro usually means trying to damage at the expense of control of the board/resources/good trades.  By that metric, HS is definitely far more control than agro oriented in arena.  In HS you obviously must play more proactively every turn than in magic.  But your goal in doing so isn't to do damage to your opponent.  You play proactively, not because you need to damage to your opponent, but because you must make sure that you retain card and board advantage, (mainly due to the fact that mana is equal and minions are attackable).  That's the very definition of control, regardless of whether you are using minions or spells to do so.  HS isn't MTG. Playing a minion almost every turn has nothing to do with what agro means in HS.  Playing a minion every turn, the right minion, and playing them well over multiple turns is most often how you suffocate your opponent through card disadvantage and then defeat them through attrition.

From my point of view outside of the bubble I have to agree with Malakili; Blizzard's biggest coup here is getting coverage of a game that to the best of my knowledge they view as an experimental side-project, not a major franchise. Pretty much every single SC2, DOTA, or LoL caster I follow on Youtube has put out one or more hearthstone videos; some are putting out a LOT of hearthstone content. You can't do anything but discover this game. In contrast trying to find Hex gameplay requires you to know about the game beforehand, it doesn't just fall into your lap.

That said, I think this is a bit of an apples to oranges comparison. The games are pitched at completely different markets. What I see Hearthstone doing best is opening up CCGs to people who are looking for something to play for 5-10 minutes at a time, on their mobile device, or while they cook supper, or while they wait for their DotA/LoL/SC2 queue to pop up. It's going to do really well there. Hex is going to cater well to people who want a game like Hex, but I don't see it opening up massive new playerbases in the way that Hearthstone will. But perhaps that's half the point.

This - totally apples to oranges here.  Of course Magic and Hearthstone are different; that's the point.  Just as some people would rather play Civ than some meticulous, statistical strategy game, there is a market for a more casual CCG.  I am in that market - I played the hell out of Magic for a few years when it first came out in 1994-96, but I don't have the time to invest in figuring out the quite likely thousands of cards now, nor is the game particularly fast to play.  With Hearthstone, K9 hit it on the head - I can crank out a game while making dinner (or commuting home once it hits tablets).  It scratches the itch without so much investment and overhead.  By definition it has to be a simpler game; that isn't a bad thing nor does it make a game just for people who suck at other CCGs.  Just different games for different people.

The problem isn't just that it is simpler than Magic: The Gathering or, you know, the WoW TCG (which had the same classes but was awesome). The problem, at least for me, is that it is too random. The skill ceiling seems too low given the current card set, and I am under the impression that the higher win% rates are more related to being up to date with the -limited- meta than any particular skill.

The same argument could be had about HOTS vs. Dota/LOL.

Sure, but in this case I'm willing to give HotS an honest effort after taking so much burn from LoL.

Lower skill ceiling, sure. But it's the random element that bothers me about Hearthstone. And that's not gonna be that obvious in HotS since fingers tend to mix things up a little bit more than turn-based.

The lack of trading also makes (constructed) HS much more pay to win than M:tG/Hex, which is a huge turn off for me.

I wonder whether Clash of Clans or Sim City made more money in 2013?

The problem is that Hearthstone isn't for you; whether that requires a whole thread shitting on it (not pointing at you here btw) is debatable  :why_so_serious:

So there's some clownshoes eSport show going on in Berlin that managed to hire both the Champion and vice-Champion from the BlizzCon tournament, Artosis and Kripparrian (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KviNnwH0EE4). Supposedly, they are two of the best Heartstone players "in the world" at the moment. What I like the most is that even though Kripp loves the game, he never misses a chance to say that luck plays a very big role in Heartstone. Not that anyone doubted that, but it's kind of relevant when one of the best players stresses it -and keeps repeating how casual of a game it is- every time he gets a chance, whether he just won or lost a big match.

Anyway, if you are into eSports, and Hearthstone, this video might interest you.

"Best" at Hearthstone is like being a bully on the short bus for a blind school.

Artosis spent 10 years playing Brood War.  I always got the impression his decision to "train" for Blizzcon and Hearthstone was basically just him realizing that he could figure the game out with a small amount of effort and then just beat everyone.

But since it actually seems to be attracting attention as an "eSport" I can't help but think he decided "screw it, I'm going to run with this."

Backroom deal by Blizzard to manufacture some eSports cred?

 keep circlejerking wihile other people make shitons of money.

There's no backroom deal.  There's just a good game.  Blizzard happened to get one right.

I understand you are invested in this not being the case.  Sorry, it's the case.

Reminds me of brad mquaid laughing at WoW.  You're totally delusional. 

The skill ceiling for Hearthstone is clearly lower than MTG, but it's high enough that nobody at f13 is ever going to reach it.  That makes it a non-issue as far as I'm concerned.

I understand Kripp is not the word of god, but are you deliberately choosing to ignore the part where one of the highest ranked players says RNG is a huge factor (not the only one of course) in this game? He even goes as far as saying that when certain classes face each other is basically a coin flip... how 'deep' is that exactly?

God knows RNG never has anything to do with card games.  Ever.

Most (all) of the decks you see in these decks are not viable at a this point. While I won't say it's *deep* because of this, I will say theres definitely changing metagame

It's about as meta as Yugioh, and even that game is more engaging and strategic. 

When this guy (http://licentium.net/wiki/images/b/b9/Trap.jpg) shows up at the Hearthstone Grand Tournament, maybe they'll have something?

I know this is going to cause rage but it's a genuine question I have.

How is RNG *not* a big factor in MTG?  I mean, I admit my only experience with it is playing Magic 2014 with its premade decks, but while I can definitely point to times when I won or lost due to the strategy I employed  I can also point to a bunch of times I had terrible draws which caused me to lose, or perfectly time draws that allowed me to push through to a win.  

Is it just because MTG has more meta opportunities for deck building?

It's a factor but it isn't the primary factor. It's important for games like that to HAVE random elements, because otherwise you get chess where the better player wins 99% of the time and people will just quit. The issue with Hearthstone is not that it has randomness, it's that the randomness is a bigger chunk of the outcome than it probably should be. There are a lot fewer places in Hearthstone for skill to make a difference in the outcome than in Magic.

EDIT: Randomness in Magic is more akin to randomness in poker. In Hearthstone it feels closer to Blood Bowl, and as much as I enjoy league play in BB it isn't really in the zone for a game that should be played competitively at an eSport level.

The game can have a lot of variance for top players  even though there is also a lot of skill involved.  At professional magic tournaments where every player is very good the best decks and players win about 60% of the time; a well-set up deck will still lose to manascrew or bad draws a substantial percentage of the time.  Maybe there's a little more variance in Hearthstone, but I'm not convinced of that, and even if it's true there's plenty of room for there to be a skill ceiling the vast majority of players won't reach.

 :popcorn:

Yeah I'm not convinced on the magic claims either.

Of course any game with random elements gets pushed towards them when skill is balanced, but I'm not convinced that magic has as many points for skill differentiation to make randomness not a significant factor across a few skill bands. (Based mostly off consistency in results for top players.)

Every single place that Magic has player interaction is a place it distances itself from Hearthstone, IMO. And that's a lot of places.

Just a  couple of comments.  Mtg and hearthstone share the structure in that to win you really need 3 things: a good deck, playskill, and luck.  Being a card game, of course luck plays a large role, but there is also no question that the best players leverage their deck choice/construction skills and playskill to try and minimize the impact luck has on their results.

While HS does eliminate one whole section of luck with their mana mechanic, it added a giant luck factor in the lack of a true best of 3 matches.  Yes, in HS or Magic almost anyone can win 1 game if their opponent has bad luck (mana flood/screw or just not drawing well), but it's much reduced when you have to repeat 2 more games vs the same player and deck.  The odds of having such bad luck 2-3 games in a row is much less and allows the deck construction and play skills to come to the fore.  Even in drafts/sealed, MtG has matches as opposed to single games (and of course sideboarding plays a big role as well).  So for that reason, i think the setup of MtG is actually less luck based than HS, but at the end of the day they arent trying to do the same thing from a game complexity standpoint.  Tomato tomatoe.

 

That actually makes a lot of sense thanks.

For those that still haven't played and were too busy/lazy to sign up via Battle.net for inclusion into the closed beta that everyone eventually got into, the Open Beta just launched.  Enjoy?

I am so godawful at this I get curbstomped by the brain-dead AI.

But it's shockingly amusing.

Handy tip I think I mentioned earlier in the thread: Once you're out of the tutorial, you can swap to a custom (i.e. not completely terrible) mage deck to unlock the rest of the classes.

How does one get an invitation to this?

http://us.battle.net/hearthstone/en/

I've got all the classes unlocked and Mage and Rogue up to 12-ish. I mostly just don't know how to build a proper custom deck with the cards I have available to me, and either I'm absolutely atrocious at this game, or Blizzard's card suggestions in the deck builder are shit.

Ohh, derp.  Not sure how I missed the big "PLAY NOW" on the page.  Last page I looked at 2 days ago made it seem like this was invite only, closed beta still.  Heh.

edit: Double derp.  I guess it just went open beta.  :awesome_for_real:

It's fun. I managed to not fuck up the tutorials or my play matches so far.

I managed to get my mage deck to be decent. I was winning more than 50% of my matches, but after reading it seems like mages may be OP at this point. Now I don't feel so good about myself.

I find myself liking the game a lot more than anticipated. The speed and simplicity of it will do well.

I know one person out of 20-30 who still felt like that past a week or three of playing. Game gets really boring really fast. It will do well but it will be interesting to see how well with all the good will Blizz has lost over Diablo3 and WoW getting old.

Motherfucking North American Fucking Bullshit.

It would have taken you until next Satuday to patch anyway.

I would have installed this, but battle.net is so secure I can't even log into my own account, authenticator and all...  :oh_i_see:

I don't represent anybody but myself, but I would agree. Big crush for 10 days, haven't touched it in 3 weeks.

What's supposed to keep casual players engaged after the initial crush wanes is the lust for random interesting cards obtained via Daily Quests; a new pack of five cards every two days from a few wins a day.
For those who lose interest... it is what it is.

The daily quests just feel way to grindy to me.  I really dislike the pressure "log in and do something every day" to get the resources you need to play or whatnot.  And yeah, count me as another who found it pretty shiny and polished but not deep enough to keep me engaged past a week.

I appreciate the polish and the quick play, but having played some MTGO over the past week (and it certainly has a whole mess of problems), stuff like being able to cast Act of Treason on the other guy's Serra Angel, attack him with it, and then use the Blood Bairn that he made can't-attack/can't-block with Pacifism sacrifice it while it was in my control is just massively more interesting.  I find I have more fun *losing* MTGO games than winning Hearthstone games.

That's the annoying thing ;  I got BT Infinity installed this week.  This game took 5 minutes to install and Rift another 10.

And one I couldn't play and the other was pants.

 :why_so_serious:

You can let them stack up and often you'll be able to knock out 2-3 quests at once. You can also complete quests while playing arena, which is the only mode in the game with lasting appeal IMO. I like that they've taken a big part of what makes drafting fun (improvising a deck) and condensed it into a much shorter time span.

http://www.hearthpwn.com/blue-tracker/topic/4705-hearthstone-open-beta-is-here

YAY.

Thanks man.  The wife gave me shit for getting her hopes up.

I opened all the classes last night. Now to get the basic cards.

I don't really know how to build a deck so i'm not bothering with it yet.

I downloaded this a couple days ago and the first night "one more matched" my way into a fight with my wife.  But it didn't stick, by the second day I played about 8 matches and this morning I realized that  I was never going to buy anything and that grinding out quests so I could play more arena wasn't something I was going to do so I uninstalled.  The game was ok but it felt like I was playing some kind of Magic Tutorial that hadn't quite got to teaching you about instants and timing.

Once you get all the basic cards you can google "Trumps basic rogue deck" (or whatever class) and he has some really solid decks you can use to get started.  You can win quite a few games with them until you have enough cards to start making real decks.  They don't hold up forever but they are miles ahead of the decks you start with.

There is a "suggest a card" button for the deck creation page. YMMV. Since you don't need to worry about mana, decks are only 30 cards, and the mechanics are way less complex than Magic, it's pretty simple to throw together something that doesn't completely suck.

A simple way to start would be to make sure your deck has a good mana/cost-curve (not all 7-energy cards, in other words), make sure you have at least a couple control cards (hex, polymorph, etc.), and then just pick cards that aren't awful. You can make something more specific down the road once you're comfortable and have more unlocked.

It's so awesome when you decide to play arena and they give you absolutely no control cards at all.   I feel like I'm getting RNG'd in the rear.

This is an interesting diversion.  I don't think I'll ever get to the point where I want to be spend money, because a) it's really, really grindy and b) I'm pretty awful at card games (having never really played any).

I fucking hate arena so much.  Oh, give my mage maybe one blue teir card, give my opposing mage two pyroblasts?  Brilliant!

IT'S A SKILL GAME, LAKOV, GAWD.

You can't help yourself, can you?  :awesome_for_real:

Nope.

Haven't played in a few days, but I built a decent starter Rogue deck and did my first actual Play game against another human. I get a Shaman.

Things go well, I try to keep pressure on him as best I can, but I keep drawing my high-mana cards early on, which allows him to get and keep a healing totem out, but I manage to mostly clear his board. At about turn ten or so, I'm at 25 life and he's about the same. I have a couple minions out, and he's just got the healing totem and four cards in his hand.

He calls a totem, gets the +2 attack to adjacent minions one.

Then he pulls out fucking Ysera and plops her down next to the totem to bring her to 8/12. I could throw my board at her and not kill her, so I go for his face and hope to get something to kill Ysera next turn.

His next turn, he pulls out a card that buffs Ysera by +5/+5, then drops a Windfury buff on her, and takes me from 25 to dead in a single move.

Welp!

Welp indeed!

I played my Mage against a Priest deck last night.  The Priest deck was full of Mind Control and other judo cards like that where he copied my cards, etc.  It was a gimmick deck though, and I slowly choked him out with my superior board control.

Haven't tried Arena; I like knowing what cards are in my deck and their purpose.

This sounds like every description of every Magic encounter ever, except that the descriptions are shorter because the game is less complex :-)

Yeah, it's basically Magic for Children.

Elena loves it.

Handy arena card ranking spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0AifXEOqTcGcLdFVvWk1GRjVJTHJUaTVLcGViR1RRTFE&gid=7

It's Magic with 25% of the complexity but 90% of the fun.  Oh, and there's no $500 barrier to entry.

This thing is going to make them hundreds of millions. I have no doubt now that I've seen it in action.

90% of the fun lol ok

Edit: I should elaborate. 10% of the fun I'd agree with. But the "fun" of deckbuilding isn't there because the card pool isn't even a little deep. The "fun" of competition isn't really there because you play a single game, no sideboard, no match. The "fun" of the economy and collecting aspect is completely lost on this game. The "fun" of doing things besides turning dudes sideways isn't there. The "fun" of tournaments isn't there because you can't fucking communicate with people. Good news for Blizzard though, 10% the fun of Magic is more than most companies ever achieve.

You're not wrong about your assessment of the game. It just doesn't matter.

The market is there for this kind of simplified version.

Yah, it'll kill. It already has pretty impressive streaming numbers. I just wonder if it lacks stickiness in its current form.

Not being able to communicate is a plus, IMO. I'd rather not be berated by some barely litterate teen.

I never ever claimed it wasn't.

That's fine, since we all agree it's going to be a smashing success, I don't think assessing the actual gameplay has much value other than questioning stickiness as Rasix pointed out.

How does this make any sense at all?  We can't say "McDonald's sells shitty food" because it's popular?  There's a market for it doesn't have anything to do with its quality.  At least most of the people who eat McDonald's know it's shitty and do not argue that it's an exceptional restaurant.  A few people were making that argument about Hearthstone.

I prefer calling The Titanic out in situations like this because it is a piece of shit movie from top to bottom, but ya know, McDonald's works too. Maybe even better since at least their french fries are delicious. But a man cannot live on french fries or mediocre combat phases alone.

In either case it's usually laden with jealousy that what's "good" to some isn't popular. When it comes to food and entertainment, these arguments are subjective since not everyone wants complexity of flavor or entertainment. It happens often on this site.

At some point, and I've been guilty of this as well, you've made your point. We get it. It makes you look petty if you continue to rehash the same thing over and over in a game that we can agree will financially blow other games you like out of the water.

Tried this, had a bit of fun. The grind seems ridiculous, how do you try out different decks without the cards?

You don't. You spend money or grind.

I agree with the first part, though I don't think people here are critiquing HS because they're butthurt a CCG wasn't for them. Instead I only see a lot of good analysis of the fundamentals of the game itself.

Whether HS is "good" or not is completely market dependent. We know that. But there's some universal elements of the game system that are weak or missing which will impact its success even in that market. I haven't play it to anywhere near the length of time of many of you, but the stickiness problem is easily noticable right away.

It's not enough to attract a lot of people. It already has. But you're only going to monetize a subset of them, and without some of the systems that have been proven to keep people interested (like those schild described a few posts back), you're going to lose the sheep that subset needs to have the feeling of their own relative value, and from which comes the kind of competitors that the subset continually buys deeper into a system to keep up with.

Granted, I don't think their operating costs are going to be very high for this game, especially compared to their other titles. And maybe this is the junior version of something players graduate to rather than being the thing they hope to be the success itself.

I still think you guys are massively underrating the depth of decision-making in this game.  The times when there's a clear right choice are very few, and intuitions about what your opponent might have or might do are very relevant to your decisions about what to play when and how to attack.  This is just not a shitty game -- it's a game that takes the most interesting and fun part of MTG and gives you tons of it for free.  I'm not arguing that it's perfect or to everyone's taste, but I do think it's genuinely a very good game and that simplicity has enormous benefits even to experienced players and surprisingly low costs to the overall experience.  Schild reminds me of all the haters whining about how Magic has become focused on creature combat at the expense of Counterspell at two mana.

By the way, as people said above, the real game is arena, and you're only supposed to play constructed to finish quests or earn gold for arena (which also gets you constructed cards.)  If you do well enough in arena you can go infinite and never have to play constructed when you don't want to.  If you think playing Arena is grinding, then this game is not for you.

This is the fundamental difference of opinion.

I'd say the most accessible part, which is where you get the money and get them hooked.

See all that shite Schild talks about ?  Most people don't give a fuck about that.

Alternate, less useless, suggestion: Play arena. As long as you get to 3-4 wins per run, it works out the same as just buying packs and the better you do the more you get.
And, you know, at least you're playing the game that way.

Woo.

Just went 9-3 as a Paladin in Arena.  Had a bunch of small dudes combined with blessings.  If they leave 1-2 guys on the board, the paladin can just buff them up way way too high.

Exactly.

Holy shit.  Some legendary cards are beyond bullshit.

Step 1:get ragnaros
step 2:win

Oooo - Link me that one ?

 :grin:

http://hydra-media.cursecdn.com/hearthstone.gamepedia.com/8/82/Ragnaros_the_Firelord%28503%29_Gold.png (http://hydra-media.cursecdn.com/hearthstone.gamepedia.com/8/82/Ragnaros_the_Firelord%28503%29_Gold.png)

Yeah you can tell by turn 3 when you are facing a paying player. And you can get ready to bend over.

Thanks for this.  Having a better run with some of those suggestions.  Still managed not to draw a single Consecrate for my Paladin run, which is problematic.

Same, I've been consistently going 4-7 wins.

Except when, like you said, you get zero board clear spells as Paladin or Mage.

Yep, that list is very helpful. I crafted a mage deck that isn't ass now.

Having been playing a metric fuckton of arena lately I think one of the major problems is that since certain cards are weighted more heavily to appear you will always have some classes being better at deckbuilding.  The problem being you don't get to pick you class either so if you roll three bad classes as your choices well, tough titties.

I don't think there are any classes which are legitimately bad in arena.

I do feel like Priest and Warlock benefit a TON from premade and the opposite of that is the arena.

Rogue was the class that I felt suffered the most in arena, as it can be hard to pull off the good rogue combo cards without A) drafting the actual combo cards and B) low-cost cards to combo off of that don't suck. That said, they're ranked as one of the "best" arena classes so who knows. I got destroyed by a rogue arena deck recently that started with Defias Ringleader using The Coin, netting them a 2/2 and a 2/1 on the first turn. Their momentum only picked up from there but it seemed like a really lucky deck to have built & hand to have started with.

Warlocks work well in arena imo: most of their class cards are removal or decent creature cards. Priests definitely work better in a constructed setting since it can be hard to stay alive long enough to really abuse your class power, or draft the creatures that will benefit from it, but they have lots of excellent/simple removal spells that make them a good fit for arena too.

There aren't any classes that I'm given in arena and instantly think to myself "well shit, guess this is going to be a bad run".

Its stupid that the Coin counts as a spell/played card, for that very reason.

Also boosts a couple dudes that get bonuses from cards played.

Coin/Ringleader actually used to be worse, if you can believe it.

They really shouldn't count the coin as a spell, though.

Or maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaybe they should've designed a game where going 2nd didn't absolutely suck giant dick through a straw.

What's the remedy though? Is it because of the way they have the mana working? I honestly have no prior experience to these types of card games.

There really isn't a great remedy. The giant elephant in the room is that the game doesn't have instants. Or phases really. Not to mention it doesn't even have matches. Oh, and decks don't need land and the mana curve is perfect, always, and forever. So if you go second, well, enjoy it not mattering if you lose since you're not playing a best two of three where you'll go first the next game.

I feel a little bad for shitting on this game so often, but it's kinda a "sorry not sorry" situation. If I design a card game, it's certainly not going to be the shell of a single phase.

The winrate difference between going first and second is 2%, so their system isn't that unbalanced.  The coin works as is quite well.  It definitely used to bother me that some decks/classes benefit from the coin much more, but I don't really mind it now.  It does add flavor to the game to have decks that want to go first, and decks that want to go second.

That's not flavor when you can't choose to go first or second its picked for you by a coin flip RNG. I have no idea why the winner can't pick for themselves beyond that seems to be the design goal of Hearthstone. Almost no options.

Playing some more it seems that Arena should determine your 90 choices first. Then present them in nine rounds of 10 by curve or whatever arithmetic they use to determine rarity/mana cost of choices.  Let you choose 3 at a time.

Or all 90 at once and have a restriction based on rarity or some shit.

My last three goes have had no board clears and no legendaries.  I'm getting smashed here.

I just drew Ysera in arena.  :awesome_for_real: :awesome_for_real: :awesome_for_real: :awesome_for_real: :why_so_serious:  I didn't even think you could get Legendary cards in arena.  That seems like a mistake.

You can get multiples.  Its nuts when it happens.

Yeah, just lost to Pagel (of course drawing cards every turn until I finally got it...) and Ysera.

One of the nice things about Arena is that you're much more likely to get to play with Legendaries there than in constructed.  I'd say you get one every four or five drafts.

It's been 10 days. I'm still enjoying this and playing it every day. The dailies make it fun to try different classes.

I got through closed beta and then got bored. I'm not sure why as I loved the paper MTG and liked/hated Magic Online. I got a full set of cards together and about half the gold legendaries so maybe I OD'd on it but it just doesn't have depth and the fact that some classes can't remove a 1 or 2 drop that has additional skills until later in the game is painful. I rate it as the person that used to ritual out hypnotic spectre and hymn to tourach turn 1, strip your control card out of your hand and then drop necropotence 2 turns later. It's just not fun when you are on the receiving end.

Hunter in Arena sucked because the good stuff was beast related and half the time I wouldn't draft beast cards because generics would pop up. I hope they fixed that.

I will say I like the Arena mode best. I suck at building decks and even when I learn a system, I suck at losing gracefully. Theorycrafting and emotional investment kinda go hand in hand with me :-) With Arena decks, I don't have a connection with some hours or days of decision making. Nice and casual.

Of course, that was before it asked me to pay money. That I don't see myself doing. Because that paths leads to theorycrafting, which leads to anger, which leades to hate...

Some people are apparently just really bloody good at forging decks with random cards.

The bastards.

You know, on reflection i think that one reason this game didn't stick for me was the complete absence of any social aspects.  The games are generally so short and not being able to communicate with your opponent really makes it almost feel like you are constantly playing an AI.  It got the point where when i lost a match i wasn't disappointed that i lost, i was disappointed that i had wasted my time (all 5-10 minutes of it).  And then i realized, playing it really feels like solo grinding mobs in an MMO.  "3 more wins to earn 50 gold" or "kill 10 rats" just feel the same if the moment to moment gameplay isnt that compelling.

By contrast, yesterday i took my son to the latest MtG paper pre-release and had a blast for 6 hours.  The games themselves were fun, but all the social stuff happening outside of the games was just as fun.

Pretty much this.  With no chat lobbies or anything it's just a very empty game.

I think no chat lobbies is the strongest aspect of the game. There's nothing they could bring that would add to my enjoyment of the game, and 10x the things that would lessen it.

Kinda on the fence on this one.  On the one hand, more interaction with decent players would be good.

On the other, I just finished a game with the Right Honourable 'OwnzUrAss' who made it clear, every time I made a mistake and he emoted 'Well Played', that I would have had a hard time with a chat client being on.

So, you know.  Fence sitting.

No chat option sucks; for those of you who don't like dealing with internet assholes you could just turn it off and things would be functionally the same.

Maybe add more chat bubbles but not voice.  I have no desire to hear from 'Beegpeenis'.

Honestly what joy to you get from chatting with randoms? It's like talking in PUGs in WoW. I could do without it.

Sometimes I wonder if the people that want chat just want to critique somebody else or rub in their wins.

I think with card games in particular a certain audience has the local game store experience very integrated into their love of the games, or even just the sitting around the kitchen table with your friend experience.  That's a big part of the appeal to table top games, and when they are ported over to a digital format it is really noticeable when that aspect is missing.

Yeah I get sitting around with friends.

These aren't friends. This is the same pool of PUG assholes we've bitched about non-stop in the WoW forums. This is unwashed humanity with absolutely no barrier to entry.

Oh yea I meant text only.

Lately I've been squelching everyone as soon as I get into games.  The chat is much more likely to make me feel bad than good.  You can friend people after playing them if you really have something you want to say.  Once I had a really close game against a Mage and I had to tell him that he should have shot his own Leper Gnome to get in for the last two damage on the turn before I won.

I suspect it would cause more headaches than it would solve.  It would be like cross-faction chat in WoW, or "all" chat in LoL: 75% of the time it would be unused and pointless, 20% of the time you'd just be chatting with normal people, and 5% of the time it would be total assholes who generate CS calls and drive away customers.  That's not a feature that adds value.  Games like LoL and Dota have a reason to have chat, for their own team at least, but I don't see what it adds to Hearthstone.

I'm not disagreeing with that, I'm just saying that for some of us that social experience is very connected to our experience of card games, so it is noticeable when you're just sitting there by yourself.

I might as well be playing against a pc, that's not exactly fun for me the same way playing virtual chess against the computer is not fun. 

Just downloaded this and unlocked all the classes. Mage is kinda fun. I got some packs and opened them.

I haven't tried versus real people yet -- I take it arena is more random class/deck, whereas the standard 'play' is your custom built decks or a stock deck?

Wife got Legendary Hogger in pretty much her second free pack.  And then proceeded to bend me over the card table and make me squeal.

He doesn't look that powerful on paper, but combined with the Priest healing, I found him to be a real fucking irritant.

http://hearthstone.wikia.com/wiki/Hogger (http://hearthstone.wikia.com/wiki/Hogger)

That guy there?  Yea anything that makes free mobs is a top priority.

Arena is draft (or "draft"), you choose from one of three random preselected classes, then one of three cards in a series of selection rounds to fill your deck. You play other players (matched to your performance level, each round) with that deck until you lose a total of three matches, ending your run. You always get a deck reward, plus progressively better additional rewards like gold based on number of wins. That usually works out better than buying decks for 100 gold, if you can muster up at least 2-3 wins. Especially if the matches are simultaneously counting towards your daily quest(s).

Play is your constructed deck against a random opponent, matched against you by rank.

If anyone is struggling with deck construction early on, and don't have many cards beyond the basic ones, I would recommend googling "Trump's Basic classname Deck" for a solid build to start with.

So, yeah this game is pretty fun/addictive. Slayerik #1699 if anyone wants to roll sometime.

Finished my first arena. Won 5 times and got 100 gold plus a pack, so not too shabby.

I can see the allure of arena for sure. It's more fun that just buying a pack outright and the downside is minimal.

Hogger is a decent card
Hogger is decent, but in many games he is just an overpriced silver hand knight.  If you can keep him alive for multiple turns, you were likely winning anyways, so it's kind of a 'win more' card.  And 4 health as a 6 drop is usually pretty easy to deal with, even without board presence.  I will say that Hogger is a very nice top-deck late game though, and if you happen to have a taunt you can play it behind...look out.

The more OP legendaries that make free mobs also both happen to be 6 mana:  Cairne (Double Yeti for 6 mana, WTF), and Sylvanus (5/5 + random mind control on death). 

Hogger's a good card, too bad I don't have him.  I run Imp Master http://hearthstone.wikia.com/wiki/Imp_Master (http://hearthstone.wikia.com/wiki/Imp_Master) on a couple of my decks.  Just make sure there's a Taunt mob out first.  She's good for the Priest deck because he can keep healing her and she can keep cranking out imps.  But Hogger is clearly better imo.  For six mana you get a 4/4 Hogger and a 2/2 Taunter in one turn.

The trouble here is that you never really get to the overwhelming stage.  The limit on creatures on the board is a pain in the arse.  Brought out the Frostwolf chap and he's pretty much limited to being a 10/10, but having two of them before she cleared the board was funny.

Power overwhelming: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WN0cfdT5_3E

What is that? Turn 16?

(http://i.imgur.com/LTwgSSX.jpg)

FYI, I think I'm Morat20 on Hearthstone. I think.

I can't seem to break the 4 win plateau in arena.  I get that far and just shit the bed.  All of my losses in my last run had severe misplays.  I was just playing too fast and made some dumb moves.  Used my swipes way too early, but my deck lacked any really good spells otherwise.  One loss I didn't clear a 4 damage minion and instead put out Onyxia because I was close to a win if I did that.  Then they fireballed me twice in a row and I hit zero with the minion attack.  :awesome_for_real:  It was a good deck too.  I had a knife juggler and a bunch of abilities that summoned minions.  Pity, I think I could have pulled 8 wins out of that one if I didn't fuck up so often or had a bit more low cost cards.

My win percentage for normal games seems to be hovering 70%+.  Some truly horrendous play.  I had one game where the other person was either high or letting their 6 year old play.  They did nothing but attack me directly and made no effort to clear the board.  It was really weird.

Like most games these days, it really lacks for a replay option.

I'd kill to see some of the games you chaps are playing and I think I would provide great hilarity to see mine.  Also, it'd be good to replay the games you've just done because, frankly, you don't believe the BULLSHIT you've just seen.

You'd think it wouldn't be that hard to implement.  It's cards and they've done this sort of thing with a more complex dataset.  Hell, just a text log of a game would be immensely helpful.

If anything, this sort of experience shows that it's not ALL just getting rng-fucked, and I have a lot of room for improvement. Which makes sense, considering I've never really played a card game like this against people.   I think I probably caused this one Paladin to burst into laughter after my real epic misplay.  Game went down the tubes fast after that one.

My first arena experience without knowing WTF i was doing, I won 5 games.

I have no idea what my win rate is, but it's higher on certain classes I like (Mage, Warrior, Priest)

EDIT: My last game was very interesting, me as Shaman against a lock with a good deck. I basically turtled him by playing mostly totems and taunts while he got frustrated and used his ability to pull cards. Finally he ran out of cards and I had cleared his board for the win.

I keep drawing Schild in Arena.

i don't get it

I feel like ranked play should always be best of 3 matches.  If you want a quick game casual is great for that.

Correct, mostly.

Thus far when I've played Arena, I've been beaten by high pro maniacs with high value nutjob cards.

It was kinda backhanded compliment.

Good news, you're only losing to due RNG.

That IS good news !!

Oh wait.

I've been playing quite a bit.  I've spent maybe 13 bucks of real money on this, much to my shame.  Like 7 bucks on a pack of cards and the rest on arena games, because I really want to play arena but grinding the gold in regular play is painful and slow.  Also, I suck. 

I've been doing a lot of reading on Trumps site and various forums, looking at the tier ranking sheets that have been posted, trying to improve my play.  It must not be sinking in because 3 wins is all I can muster.  In regular play it seems everyone I face has spent some cash because I'm getting Nat Pagle on round 2, multiple instances of Ragnaros and the ever popular Unleash the Hounds spam.  I see an awful lot of Legendary cards out there.  In arena play I think it's just bad playing on my part.  I've got a fairly good handle on card value and closed deck building (uhhh I like to think) but I can't string together the 7-8 wins you need to "go infinite".  I can't seem to close out games.  Alot of times I'll have someone on the ropes then late in the game they card combo something together and ass me out.

If by "regular play" you mean unranked "Casual", then you're going to run into Legendary'd-out decks all the time, since ranks recently got reset and folks with expensive decks will putz around in Casual for dailies and to test out decks, and you'll often be matched up against them.

If you don't care about your rank that much, just go into ranked play and you'll actually get matched up against people with your level of card availability.

I'm shit with some classes (Hunter, for some reason) -- mostly because I started with Mage and I don't think I'm adjusting my playstyle. I do stupid shit with some classes.

And of course in Arena it's never a class I've tried playing much, so trying to sort out a deck and strategies is just a crap shoot.

Yes Casual.  Good to know, I'll try some ranked games.  Thanks!

Fortunately, it's not that bad yet on the EU.  Casual is still casual.

I suspect that will change.

Gave this another go because "skill game." First arena run was RNG addled but still won 3 games. 2 Rares, lol. Second arena run, 4 epics, 2 rares? Why do people genuinely like this again?

Because people who suck at card games can still win if they pull OP cards?

I think mostly because it's quite accesible and 'fun'.  Also, because it's not hugely complicated thus easy to pick up.

bazinga.

How is this different from drafting in Magic, really? The pack you open could have a trash rare while everyone around you could open a bomb rare. The other players at your table could over-commit to red/black/green/blue and the third pack at the table could have a ton of awesome white cards for you alone. The format is naturally unfair in any TCG. Magic might be slightly more fair because you can influence the picks of the other people at your table, but your card pool is still extremely luck-based in Magic drafting or Hearthstone arena. It doesn't stop either format from being fun.

The second part of your post throws the first part of your post out the window. In Magic, you're on basically even terrain. This system doesn't even make sense. There aren't pods. There isn't a "known" card pool. There isn't any influence. There isn't even a proper tier list of players because it's absurdly random.

This is the Zynga version of CCGs. Cardville.

Right on both counts. I like cards but I don't have the time or inclinations to learn the nuances of Magic. This provides a nice distraction even if it is a coinflip most of the time.

HS is way beyond Magic's level of randomness. Every player sees the same number of cards at the same rarities in limited play in most CCGs, including Magic (with the minor exception of occasional mythic rares in the rare slot). Hearthstone doesn't seed rarities in Arena which is baffling. In addition Magic sets are now very carefully designed for Limited play and it's actually quite rare that I've seen a pool that just flat out sucks in recent years. That is far from where Hearthstone is right now.

On a side note: Magic draft pools haven't been luck-based since roughly Time Spiral.

And, of course, Magic Draft/Sealed gives you some headroom above the 40 cards that are going into your deck to work with, gives you the ability to adjust for the 2nd or 3rd game in a match, and so on.  Yeah there are random factors but you are given a lot more in the way of tools to compensate for them.

You can influence the table in a Magic draft, but your card pool is still largely determined by luck. You may open shittier packs, and be passed cards in a shittier order than the rest of the table. You can overcome bad luck in what your potential card pool ends up being vs your opponents by building a better-balanced deck, having a better mana curve/land ratio, and by playing better. Same is true for Hearthstone Arena (well, minus land ratio). If the luck/RNG of Arena bugs you I don't understand why luck/RNG that is inherent to drafting in Magic doesn't also.

My biggest problem with Hearthstone is that the legendaries/rares seem completely out of balance with the rest of the cards in the game. It's not that other players I'm matched again might have more legendaries/rares than me, it's that those cards are disproportionately powerful compared to everything else. Magic does a better job of making cards with equal costs/purposes, but different rarities, have strengths and weaknesses so that there were plenty of situations where the common was the better card.

I mean I'm still shocked people are comparing the two. They aren't the same at all and that's a good thing.

I get that people will try to pretend that HS is high level, and I'm sure you can shave the random factor out a bit similar to high level poker players, but at the end of the day you're subject to the draw.

It's already been explained a few times in various ways here...

In Magic drafting skill matters much more than luck, in Hearthstone arena luck matters more than skill once you aren't playing against terrible people anymore.

Bobby Kotick: "Hearthstone has potential to become Blizzard's fourth "mega" franchise, following World of WarCraft, StarCraft, and Diablo"

I agree with His Satanic Majesty, this will be a huge success.


P.S. Hearthstone is not Magic. It is known.

Same reason people like Dice in their boardgames.

Buttheads like dice.

All the cool kids quit playing MtG after Ice Age.

It kills you that this is going to be successful, doesn't it.  :why_so_serious:

Not at all. Farmville was successful, why wouldn't a shiny, watered-down hilariously unbalanced card game be successful? Remember, I live in a world where juggalos and yugioh players are real things. And the latter is a very profitable card game.



Wrong, they quit after Fallen Empires, came back for Ice Age / Necropotence and quit because of Chronicles a month later.

Except some have already decided not to put any more money in that shitdicks pocket.

But I think this will be rather large nonetheless.  I'm not going to generalise from my own thoughts to the rest of the world like some.   :why_so_serious:

ATVI stock jumped a ton this week, FYI. The company posted net revenues over $2.2 Billion in just the fourth quarter.

Soooooo, Kotick's not going anywhere. And as much as people may hate the guy, I'm impressed by the fact he's running one of the few actual businesses in the gaming industry, unlike the rest of these unwashed fuckups.

What's that got to do with anything ?

You referenced Kotick, and I'm pointing out that people that say they aren't putting money in that shitdicks pocket are either lying or aren't making a dent.

I'd like to reiterate -- I suck at this game. Massively. Not sure why. My drafts on Arena never seem to work out (0-3 my last try), the decks I make end up sucking, so obviously I'm doing something wrong.

I cleared out the practice normal and expert, that wasn't too bad (well, Priest v Priest on expert sucked so much I switched to Hunter to kill the Priest), but against people?

I learned a few neat tricks (like silencing your own minions to get rid of negative traits, that sort of thing) but by and large I just get crushed in Arena and my win/loss in casual and ranked isn't worth writing home about.

Did you try using that tier list?

Arena is about not drafting bad card and trap cards.

Trap cards?

Eh, mostly it's half MtG reflexes when building decks (my brain still insists you can't attack and defend in the same turn, that you can pump health past thirty, etc) and drafting for the arena and part just not having a consistent feel for the classes I'm being offered.

Mage I understand. Priest I'm coming to understand. Hunter I'm still a bit iffy on how to focus it. So I keep getting like, none of those classes on Arena. And getting slammed on casual by people whose EVERY FREAKING MINION HAS TAUNT and I've got nothing for direct damage.

It's like you didn't read the next line.  Premature Ejaculation there.

I meant cards that require some sort of synergy to really work well.  Just no way to plan for it.  You just have to pick the best card out of 3 for 15 goes, then fill out whats left in your curve.

Ah, gotcha. I sorta crushed a guy today in casual as a druid with a similar thing. All my cards came up perfect.

Also got some sort of Legendary out of a pack. Something something Dragon that something something Dream.

Ysera? She's green.

Ysera is some serious bullshit.  Enjoy.

Every time I've managed to play it, I've had it one-shotted it. It's pretty sad. :)

Stupid Power Word: Death and other insta-gib cards.

The playerbase is pretty damn weak after open beta started.  Even bad drafts should go at least 3 wins generally speaking.  If you're constantly getting less than 3 wins, I highly, highly recommend watching Kripp or Trump stream some arena.  Trump has full runs nicely archived on his youtube channel.  Here's one with a bit more explanation than usual:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaz4pQkFpmg

Ysera is very good because, even if it gets 'insta-gibbed', you still get at least one card out of it.  Almost all of the good legendaries all give some effect the turn they are played (or when they die), because removal is quite likely.

Yup.  I thought dream cards were just a fancy way of saying 'more cards' until I looked them up.  It's a massive bullshit fest. 

There's an 11-1 trump arena run with a Deathwing where he uses it twice tho - for the skilled players, it would seem legendary bullshit is mostly redundant.

Alarm-o-botting Ysera out was hilarious. Just for the record. :)

Right now I'm basically filling up the basic decks. Don't like Warlock that much. Hunter's kind of fun, especially with a beast-heavy deck.

The only thing better than alarm-o-botting ysera is alarm-o-botting deathwing (note alarm-o-bot does not trigger battlecry)

That is a useful arena video. I can see at least some of the errors I'm making with card choices and deck design. The flow of the game is a bit different than I was building for.

Well, with Ysera against folks with Hex, Poly or other removal, you have to try and bait it out earlier.  A turn six boulderfist ogre or even a turn 3/4 yeti might get one of them out of the way.  When I had my arena deck with Onyxia, she was taken care of in a turn most of the time.  :awesome_for_real:

Hunter might be a bit hard in arena if you go for a beast deck.  Your ability to do that is somewhat hampered by RNG.  However, hunters have some great value cards if you're able to pull them.

I've had various amounts of luck with just about every class in arena, save priest or warlock who I haven't played yet in that format.

I find the trouble with Beast decks is removal.  Many, many, many of the beasts are just shittily fragile.  I've had a whole wall of beasts just consecrated or flamestruck out of existence.

I tried Priest in Arena and died horribly. I got 1 win, but on the whole I don't think the deck holds up well.

For those of you thinking of trying the 'priest can now damage instead of heal' don't bother.

It really doesn't work with the rest of his cards.

The first game I played that card I used the ability incorrectly, killed two of my minions and healed my opponents. And then I didn't know how to concede.

The second game I facerolled with it and velen :grin:

Yeah, it pays to double check. Yesterday I played some minion with a healing battlecry who got charge by another minion on the field (or the other way around, not quite sure). Anyway, I targeted the enemy hero and healed him instead of attacking. :uhrr:

Shadowform is tough to fit into decks, although when you get it going it's the best hero power in the game, but Auchenai Soul Priest is an amazing card that can really turn a game around.  The Soul Priest -> circle of healing combo is a 2 card 4 mana flamestrike.  Definitely a non-bo with Holy Nova, though.

In arena for me it's still Mage and Pally > everybody else.

Yeah Mage and Pally are definitely the best arena classes.  Or at least the easiest to do well with.  I'd also recommend not playing priest or warlock in arena, unless if you're a very good player.  You can see the general ranking here (although these stats have selection bias for better than average players):  http://www.arenamastery.com/sitewide.php (http://www.arenamastery.com/sitewide.php)

I do have to wonder how much of this is just that the 'worse' classes are easier to misplay.  For instance, taking a look at Trump's stats, his three best classes in the current patch are druid, priest, and warlock.  He still loses to mage and paladin the most, and crushes priest and warlock when he plays them.  It implies that other people are doing something wrong with those classes, and Trump is doing something right.  However, sample size is of course an issue. (only about 1k games played on the current patch)

http://local.se/trumpstats.pl

Admittedly this was before they did the big rebalance which included making MC cost 10 instead of 8 but Priest was easily top tier arena. The priest ability is the best ability for the type of games almost every arena game is.

Basically you fuck up all combat math and force less than ideal trades thanks to your ability and you win everything that isn't a steamroll or the rare arena combo you out doing 15+ damage in a turn game.

Its hard for me to imagine they have changed enough cards that Priest ability plus the best creatures isn't still top tier.

Priest ability is generally considered fairly bad or at least mediocre.  It is good if you are ahead on the board, but if you are behind, it's useless.  On the other hand, top tier abilities are Mage, Rogue, Druid:  They are always useful and can affect your opponents board directly.  There is so much removal in HS that an ability that is purely defensive just isn't useful often enough.

The stats don't lie:  Priest has the worst winrate in arena.  Although it is partially due to being more difficult to draft for and class cards, I don't think the hero ability is helping the matter much.

So far 4-0 with a Mage in the arena. Fun is playing that legendary that puts a fireball in your hand and then zapping the only minion with a chance in hell of killing it with a 0 cost ice lance (because I've got one little minion that is -1 to spell cost).

Next turn? Enemy has 15 mana, I have fireball in my hand (3 mana to cast at the moment) and...9 mana. :)

Edited to add:

6-1 when I finally quit for the night. Stupid priest on the last one Mind Contolled two giant minions (one the "cast a spell, get a fireball one") in a row. On the bright side, he had 13 health and I had two fireballs in hand and 10 mana. Gotta suck to just mind control a 6/7 and a 5/7 legendary and then die anyways before you get to use either of them. (I frost bolted the first one. Pity freezing doesn't kill taunt).

Best run I've had is a 7 win druid run. No legendaries or epics, not even a swipe. 4-5 wins are about my norm, I'm not sure if that's good or not. Hunter can be a lot of fun if you build it right.  It's all about Unleash the hounds in combo with the card draw/and or the +1 attack beast for one, even scavenging hyena works well with it. Doesn't cost all that much to play them all in one turn and really change the board. Also, you can play fast cards and help control the board with explosive trap, snipe, freezing trap.

It helped that the game I played the absolute worst on, my opponent was just as bad. (My loss was to a rogue -- I simply kept drawing crap and they did not.)

I watched him do things like feed a 5/6 creature into my vaporize secret without using the 1/1 he had first, clear the board on mutual kills when he could have killed all of mine and still had a guy standing, etc.

Sometimes things just go bad.

(http://s3.amazonaws.com/quotefully_production/photos/character/e1cc61f798dd11e0909212313b10052d_small)

5 wins is what you can expect from an average deck (because you're playing against some decks that are worse than yours.)  If you're getting five wins you're guaranteed enough gold to make arena just as efficient as buying packs.  If you hit 7 wins, you're guaranteed enough gold to go infinite and immediately buy another arena entry.  After a bunch of washouts I just went 12-1 twice in a row, first with paladin, then with shaman.  No legendaries or good epics, just lots of good rares and commons and the luck to not be forced to pick any bad cards.  For Paladin I really like argent protector and will pick him over almost anything except efficient removal.

You guys are making me feel bad about how awful I am at this.

You're not the only one who sucks. I've done arena three times, netting 1 win, 5 wins, and 0 wins.

I did better before I saw those tier lists.  Won five games on my first outing, haven't broken three since.

I swear everyone just picks all the Taunt enemies.  It's pretty annoying.

Is Post Beta planning to reset this ?

I can tell if a deck in arena is going to suck by about the 20th card. I hate it when that happens. But all I have to get is 2-3 wins to make back the value. At worst I've lost 15g I think overall value.

Even if you 0-3, you still get a pack.  Just means you wasted 50 gold in the process.

My last run should have gone farther, but I had 2 matches where I was just not drawing anything and couldn't pull a fireball/flamestrike/poly all game despite having multiple of each.  Sometimes they RNG really reams you despite having a decent deck.

Sorrrrt of. You can't resell any of those cards so to me the break-even point is a lot closer to 'I got enough gold to flat out pay for the next Arena run'.

Since the value of a pack is 100 gold, I look at break even of those plus 50. Granted it's not the same as break even gold, but to do that you have to be winning 6 games each time.

I think my first Arena outing was 2 wins, my second was 1 win, and my third was none. :)

Welcome to team Peaked Early.

Even if you go 0-3 you get some dust for crafting so it's not straight-up loss of 50g.

Giving this another shot in Arena using the spreadsheet, and doing much better. Although I got 0 cards above rare.  :oh_i_see:

It doesn't matter as much if you get a good class you like. I've lost more on classes I don't like with more rares and above, and won more on classes I like with less.

I was doing alright, went 3-2 as a mage (which I'm most familiar when) and then the game crashed on me like 4 times. I gave up and went back to Hex.

Weird.  I've never had the game crash.

I'm about to go 0-3 with a Druid deck that has Ysera and Cairn :(

I got some kind of connection error at the finding opponent screen, then it crashed to desktop. Repeatedly.

That's odd.  I've only ever seen small graphical glitches, like floating cards and minions.  It's been quite a stable beta for us.

Arena, hunter with the worst freaking draw ever. It's 2-0 and I expect 3-0. I just got fistfulls of nothing. Every decent creature was 4+ mana, I had crap from 0-3 in terms of decent minions. Virtually no beasts at all.

Ugh.

Floating card is the most annoying I've encountered. It happens a ton. It's very silly watching that thing float there over somebody's card so I can't tell what to attack.  :oh_i_see:

So I had a wee level 4 lock and I thought, fuck it, I'm gonna make a wee deck.

He's now level 12 with 3 levels of Rating and this wee deck hasn't been beaten.  I have to stress that the lock was only 4 and had hardly any 'lock cards, but I threw it together with some of the other nicer cards I'd won with other classes.

I don't get it.  I don't consider myself a stupid bloke, but when I craft gratuitously, my decks suck and this thing I put in 'for funsies' is fucking rocking epic folk.

Odd game.

Still fun.

On my lock deck, I don't actually use a lot of the lock cards from leveling up.  It does pretty well.

My hunter deck is doing pretty well at low-level ranked.  It's probably something like 8-2.  Luckily unleash the hounds, savannah highmane, and other hunter cards are really cheap to craft.  Works great with the vulture, knife juggler and bonus-on-death cards.

My last arena run, however, had no cards over 6 mana, and I didn't draw a single consecrate or any of the high value power cards (yeti, shield master, harvest golem, etc).  It did.. poorly. Sword of the divine and 2 BoK's at least made it interesting.

Two arenas -- 1 win apiece. Not a good run. With one I just had shit cards, the other was just me sucking -- although I could have drafted better, because at the end I knew I had a serious minion and mana cost imbalance and I still didn't draft to fix it.

I started leveling Shaman (I figured it might help if I had some experience with all the classes) and I can't for the life of me work out the Shaman playstyle. Totems just clutter up your minion space, and some of them are nice but others aren't so great. I don't see how they really fit in.

I mean I get how you can have a field of shit 0-2s and then Bloodlust them or something and do serious damage, but it felt like a weenie deck where half your cards couldn't do anything but soak damage 90% of the time. I don't even know what sort of minions to fill the deck with -- taunts? High damage?

And then there's the spells and overload....I get the mechanics, but Shaman just plays...weird. I'm missing something.

Shaman isn't too different from other classes.  One thing about Shaman is that most of their combo cards require you to have board control, so its imperative that you maintain board control at all costs.  They are kind of the opposite of mage, where you can let the opponent develop their board because you have such strong tools to deal with it.  Luckily, Shaman has some great tools to accomplish their goals.  Fire Elemental might be the best card in the game:  Take it over anything else.  Stormforged Axe, Rockbiter Weapon, Hex, Lightning Bolt, and Lightning Storm (if you're lucky enough to draft it) are all absolutely great cards as well.  I would recommend only drafting one bloodlust, and probably only one flametongue totem (debatable).  The minion that gives windfury is pretty good, but the actual windfury card generally isn't worth a spot in your deck.  Generally speaking with Shaman your goal should be to remove everything from their board every turn no matter what, hopefully slowly building up board presence in the process.  Then end games either via suffocation or via combo.  

For some general drafting ideas (mana curve, what type of cards are good), here's a 12 win priest deck:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/585853/Hearthstone_Screenshot_2.14.2014.23.27.35.png
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/585853/Hearthstone_Screenshot_2.14.2014.23.27.37.png

For the record:

Fuck Murloc decks. Fuck murloc decks packed full of goddamn legendaries.  Especially at rank "I suck" on ranked list. How on earth is a guy with a themed freaking deck and legendaries ranked that low?  EVERY card he played was a murloc or a legendary. I spent my entire time squashing his multiple buffing murlocs.

I guess he just bought his way there. Too much for my "crappy Shaman who still doesn't have half his stupid Shaman cards".

Shaman doesn't seem to have a lot in terms of "clearing the field" either.

I'm playing ranked because casual still seems full of mis-labeled players.

Dude.  This is a game where you can pay for cards.

Of course you're gonna find this.  Retard probably dropped a wallet-full to get there.  Bloody stupid it is too.

You can pick up some good shaman removal via crafting for a reasonable amount of dust. Lightning Storm and Forked Lightning in particular can be really helpful.

Murloc decks are cheesy, but if you focus on keeping board control early they'll play out their hand and lose. They only really succeed when they manage they keep board control from the very beginning.

If you lose to one you can always console yourself by remembering that they probably spent $100+ to build their cheesy one-trick-pony deck.

I discovered by accident that you get the legendary Murloc for free if you acquire all the other murlocs.  Haven't gotten around to building a murloc deck yet.

You should all read the achievements.  There's a lot of gold to be had for pretty much doing fuck all.  And gold is Arena, is decks, is fun.

Strangely, you can't see what achievements you  have yet --- although i did get 100 gold yesterday for finally unlocking all the basic cards.

Yeah, you get a shitload for beating all the computer AI's (but who does that, right ?)

Trouble is, because it's all hidden, you have fuck all idea which one's you've done and which you haven't, so you have to plough through it all again.

God, rank 20 game and some asshole has pretty much all gold cards and pulls out a Ragnaros on turn 8.   :oh_i_see:

I just went 3-2 in the Arena, but had the absolute fun of Mind Control teching two legendaries in both games I won.

Of the three games I lost, one was a total blowout against a Shaman. He had board control from the beginning and nothing I could do could stop him. The other two loses were fairly close, so not so horrible a shut-out. Never had board control for more than a turn in the last one, so it was still a pretty good beat-down.

Didn't have enough 2 point 2/3s or 3/2s to really hit the early game. And no flamestrikes, only one fireball, and I don't think I ever drew my legendary any of the five games. Wait, once -- as the initial draft so I tossed it. 7 points in hand is pointless at the beginning.

The random nature of this game is very strange at times.

Utterly shit deck, flew through 4-0.

Then the wife decides to sit and cheer me on and I get humped 4-3.

Got some nice stuff, but I lost to shit I shouldn't and won when I shouldn't too.

Crazy.

I'm really fucking pissy with that damn priest inner fire bullshit.

Two games in a row against a priest and I see that stupid 1/3 cleric (you know, heal a minion, draw a card) manage to survive a round, then get the "double health" and then "make health equal to attack" card played on it.

It's turn four and I've got a 6/6 minion sitting there that I can't kill, and he happily uses it to pick off minions than heals. I'm playing a paladin. What have I got to do 6 damage? Nada. At least a mage could fireball it.

I hit my first game-breaking bug. I drew flamestrike and it got "stuck" onto the next card drawn. ALWAYS the next card drawn. I couldn't cast it. I rather needed to -- in fact, quite sure I could have easily won the game, but I couldn't.

Even when I had it showing "flamestrike" I'd go to cast it and it'd be the other card in my hand.

Really sucked.

That's one of the reasons I want a replay system - I've had matches where I've lost where I could have won and seeing if it was just RNG messing with me or if I screwed up earlier in the game would be useful.

I think there's something to the theory that a lot of the bad luck is multiple small, avoidable mistakes that add up over a game. From mistakes drafting to mistakes playing.

At turn four Blessing of Might, Blessing of Kings are options. Or Equality. Or Humility to buy yourself some time. Sure, you might not have any of those on hand, but with that many options you can't say that Paladins are terribly suited for this kind of situation in general.

Oh, I had options. Just, you know, not in my hand. :)  Or in some cases in my deck.

I'm beginning to see the real benefit of the 'draw a card' minions. Cult Master, when you get him rolling, is insane. So is whatever that 'take damage' guy is.

Also, knife juggler can be hilarious. :)

I lost an arena game because on our second set of turns I pulled a mad bomber that tossed all 3 barrels at me. Then my opponents pulled out a mad bomber that sent all 3 barrels at me. He also had a unit sitting there as well, and my mad bomber.

I'm not sure what the odds of that are, but it just laughed as I knew I was totally fucked.

The magic players here have been yelling about the randomness of this thing for 10 fucking pages.

What do you expect?

It's not a skillgame.

We tuned you out nine pages ago.  :why_so_serious:

Tuning me out doesn't magically change the design or implementation of said design. Though, that'd be neat if it did.

I dunno, there's some skill there. I've been beating people because they make errors. The rankings have more people making dumb (ie, errors I can spot) ones, but even in Arena I've seen guys do things like trade badly (letting me go 2-1 instead of an even trade) or play cards in a bad order, that sort of thing.

I have come to love Priest, though. :) There's something hilarious about having 10 cards, all the time, and just instantly nullifying anything your opponent does. :)

I think I've finally stumbled upon the problem. Since I've been playing card games at a competitive level since I before I knew what a vagina was, I consider "not making stupid mistakes" part of playing a game competitively. I don't consider "being skilled" to mean "can play correctly without fucking up." I consider being skilled to be able to see the things a a low-level competitor can not see. To make the better decision, not just the right or minimally correct decision.

Hearthstone, due to how unbelievably simplified it is (which will let it make a shitload of money in the short term and get a fuckload of players), doesn't have "better" decisions as far as I can tell. It just has right and wrong decisions based on what's on the board. As for what the opponent could play, who the fuck knows. You're not drafting against them in the arena. It's a fucking crapshoot. Maybe they got epics, maybe they didn't. You don't know. No one knows. It's an incredibly poor competitive environment. Unless it's supposed to be a slot machine. In which case, yea, I stand behind it being the Farmville of CCGs.

You know, considering their "finding you an opponent" animation in Arena...

I don't see why hearthstone can't add complexity over time through expansions. It's not unheard of for card games to get more advanced with time.

Obviously if it's not as convoluted as a MtG which, I might add, they still can't get working online right -- it's just a dice roll. :)

I admit, I miss having to choose between defense and offense (it was a bit of a struggle to remember that there was no downside to attacking. At all), but it's got a decent foundation. Deck building is important as hell, for one, as is efficient and correct play.

It's not MtG and it's obviously not a three or four year old game with multiple expansions, but the sneering of "it's luck" reminds me a little bit of the sneering at WoW's "cartoon graphics".

MtG is pretty intimidating to a lot of people. Lord knows, I wouldn't really want to try picking it up again after 10 years away from it (other than occasionally screwing with the online thingy).

What's it missing that other card games have? The offense/defense choice (they've just got taunt as a forced defense), card interactions are a bit more limited but not entirely absent (deathrattle/battlecry is pretty easy to understand, although it's really obvious when someone knows what they're doing and when they don't). So what's missing? Depth of cards? Is it the smaller decks and faster games?

The number one thing it's missing as far as I am concerned is instant speed spells/abilities and a "stack" of some kind.

This is exacerbated by the lack of blocking. In my mind the sort of most basic possible Magic interaction - I attack, you block, but aha! I have a "Giant Growth" and my creature is not more powerful - demonstrates the essence of the whole game. Even the most basic aggro decks tend to play some of these sorts of "combat tricks." It only gets more complicated and interesting from there.  The fact that Hearthstone lacks these two things is a total dealbreaker.

I'm not sure what they could add later that would increase the depth significantly but not break the super-streamlined gameplay.  The downside (beyond complexity) to MTG style "you can interrupt/respond to the other player's actions" is that you need to given the other player a chance to do this, which means either they have to hit a key or click a button to say "nope, not doing anything" (like MTG with stops enabled) or have a little timer countdown 5-10s every time they might want to jump in (like in DOTP).  Either way will obviously slow the game down a bunch.

For all the additional waiting, the much less polished state of the client, the rather daunting learning curve, etc, I've found MTGO to be far more interesting than Hearthstone because of the richer gameplay and more complex interactions.

Even sealed and draft feel more interesting in MTG -- instead of 30 "pick 1 of 3" choices you end up with 90 random cards in sealed or 45 drafted cards and from this you assemble a 40 card deck (which will probably have 16-18 lands), so once again the random element is tempered by choices you make building your deck from your limited pool.

The entire basis of the game in combat. That the combat nearly universally favors the attacker, since blockers aren't chosen by their controller, represents a complete lack of understanding on the designers parts for how to make a fun AND complex, but still easy to understand, game.

For my part, I understand what you're saying (I play Magic myself, or used to).  I'm merely reiterating what's been said for 10 pages now that I'm actually seeing it in action.

That said, there's currently NO Hex information on these boards that I can see and I've started watching the Hex videos that have been on lately and, holy fuck will that shutdown the casual player.

Any chance you can do us a state of the game Schild, or is there some super-seekrit embargo ?

Heh, no, we moved all the Hex bullshit to a private forum. The state of the game is "it's still an Alpha." It's getting there.

I'd say its well on its way to being about a million times better than Magic Online, but we both know that's probably the lowest bar in online gaming to surpass. Given that Magic is the most popular game in the world and it's growing bonkers fast, I don't really see how Hex will shut down a casual player. Wizards and gaming stores have always said their Magic bread and butter is, in fact, casuals.

Well, I think the fact that it's actually a MMO/Single player will help, but what I really meant by the casual crowd are those not to interested in complexity in the ruleset.  The video I watched took about ten minutes for the chap to play his cards and attack and it really, really, really seemed to have a lot of steps and clicks to go through.

Magic is great for that, as everyone says here, but presenting it in a computer fashion tends to be offputting.

I may look at the slowpoke backers stuff.  May.

The key to Hex will be in getting the single player right. In the single player environment, you can control the more complex elements of play, like priority, because you can read the player's hand and customise waits accordingly without being worried that the AI will guess what's in the player's hand.

You get single player done correctly, and it will gate the multiplayer experience.

I would tend to agree.

In the case of Hearthstone, I'm not sure that they'll be able to merge the more complicated game that people want.  I suspect the easiest thing to do would be to have a Hearthstone:Advanced wherein the rules and cards become more complex.  As people are suggesting, I can't really see them building something more complex on this foundation of quicksand.

That's definitely part of it.  The other appeal of Hex from a "casual" player standpoint is the cost.  They are many people who like the complexity of Magic but only play casually because they dont like how much they would have to pay to acquire the cards they need to play against serious players.  Even drafting can seem steep if you have to pay $15 a draft (MODO pricing).  The free to play nature of both HS and Hex will be a huge draw for people who feel priced out.

Yes.  I was taken a little aback when I was reading about Hex last night (first time I'd looked in a while) and they were stating it was going to be completely free to play with in game currency you could get for cards.

That pretty much changed it for me as a 'I might do this game' to 'I'm going to do this game.'

Hearthstone is kinda the same, but it would be worse if it had a cost attached to it because it's so .... ephemeral.

MTGO's pricing is pretty offputting, even if you forgive them their clunky client.  Parity with the cardboard game means pretty steep pricing compared to all-digital and f2p+inapp type products.  Also, they still lack something as simple as an auction house, instead depending on their super clunky person-to-person trading and bots, leading to buying/selling cards being a huge pain in the ass -- you have to find a bot or person with the cards you want, trade for them, the only "currency" is event tickets which sell for $1, and the game itself cannot track partial tickets so you have to trust the bot or other player to remember that it owes you change / you have a credit.  Since running bots is nontrivial and requires leaving a computer on, it's not something players do casually which means there's no convenient way to list things for sale.  The resulting economy is a mess and strongly favors the bot traders over the average players and I suspect seriously artificially inflates prices of cards.

HEX is making good progress but is still quite alpha (has stability issues, does not have the entire first set implemented, etc).  It's what got me playing MTGO -- poking at the alpha made me want to play a magic-like ccg, but client incompleteness/instability got in the way of finishing games and hearthstone was a massive disappointment.  I suspect by the time HEX hits beta and reasonable stability I'll be playing it instead of MTGO.

For all the Magic bashing, the MTGO beta client is significantly more stable than HEX, their deckbuilder is massively more responsive, I have not yet had a game or tournament fail to complete, etc, etc.  On the other hand, given the rate HEX is improving and how many things are still broken about MTGO, I fully expect it to surpass MTGO in basic playability before long.  I do wish they'd fix basic things like "support resolutions > 1920x1080", "make list scrolling responsive", and "use fonts that are readable" sooner rather than later.

I do think Magic has somewhat better card name / art / flavor than HEX at the moment, but WotC has been doing that for 20 years and they have it down to a science.

Cryptozoic has been doing card art/flavor/names for like 7 or 8 years, but Hex is more in the vein of WoW TCG in that department, so I can forgive some of their complex and/or stupid names because I know where they got that bad habit. Especially since all I see is a rules box and casting cost when I'm really playing.

Ya, given how much money Wizards is leaving on the table, there is room for someone to swoop in and clean house. The game itself pretty damn good, but the platform is shit. I feels like its taking forever with their 2-steps back, 3 steps forward development process. I use to be confident that Hex could swoop in an eat MTGO lunch, but with Hex moving so slow and Hearthstone eating the casual market, its not so clear.

Sig worthy.

I don't know why you have said that now in the private forum and the public forum. What part of this Hex development cycle strikes you as slow?

Given that MTGO was originally released in 2002, comparing where they've gotten to with where HEX is in alpha does not make me think HEX development is terribly slow by comparison.  I think it'd be a mistake for CZO to chase the casual CCG market -- a place where a bunch of smaller shops are trying to compete with Blizzard -- instead of focusing on the more serious TCG market where MTGO is the only game in town and, to date, has improved at what could be called a glacial pace at best.  I'm not convinced that casual CCGs are going to be bigger (monetarily) than the more hardcore ones, but even if they are, it seems like there's plenty of money to be had in the more serious business TCG market.

Magic is bigger than every other card game put together, multiple times over. The casual gaming market doesn't really exist comparatively. Hearthstone is going to carve out a niche, but being popular has never automatically meant something is good.

It took 4 months to make games stable by adding card dancing. Sealed has been out 25 days with barely any discernible progress. The gem interface is still broken after 4 months in?  Not that stuff is insurmountable but Hex looks at least 2 years away from where Hearthstone is today and be serious player in the TCG.  That's lead time for competitors and lots of streams highlighting your unstable platform.

Hex's client is shit compared to Hearthstone's in the polish and stability categories, there's not much question.  Hex doesn't have as much room on the screen for useless bells and whistles, since it needs the room for actual cards instead of the stripped-down monster icons that Hearthstone can get away with, but even as a minimalist interface Hex's client is not great.

I don't really think it's fair to compare the two in, well, any category.

FYI the slacker backer stuff closes on April 1st.

I don't know how big the HEX team is, but given that their design is 99% cribbed from an existing game, progress seems pretty slow to me. I work in enterprise software, not video games, but pure software development isn't hard. Particularly if all the major content is pretty much finalised.

Hearthstone tip: Those "draw a card" abilities are rather important. I can't help but notice the guys out of cards lose to the guys with cards, pretty regularly.

It's why I like constructed warlock decks, much more oppurtunity to fill your deck with cards that combo off eachother than the random "draw a cards" but warlock arena is all kinds of terribad.

The only functional part I can see is individual games with decks made from all available cards. The builder is in a remedial state. Tournaments still don't work past the first round. There's no auction house, no guilds, no system for purchasing decks, no PVE, not all the cards are in, the client doesn't support the card backs and mats promised to pledges. This is nine months after the kickstarter and four months after the alpha.

All this for a game that implied it was close to a full featured beta originally listed as starting last September. That included Cory assuring people that when they said that the game wouldn't be complete at launch, they didn't mean the features mentioned in the kickstarter, but new features they were planning down the road and a few of the stretch goals.

The other thing I can't get past is this is not an MMO or full immersive RPG or shooter. It's cards on a screen.

And if it takes months of alpha testing to get cards working right, how exactly are they going to add new decks?

As to Hearthstone's complexity, they can add and change that. Get ten million people playing and then when they want more complexity add it once they're addicted.

My last pass through the arena every crushing victory I had corresponded to having "lots of cards in my hand" whereas my crushing defeats all boiled down to "That guy had like 8 cards and his hand and I had none which made me screwed despite having 28 health to his 7".

The trouble with Warlock decks like that is if the other guy can just hold you back juuuuust enough, you end up killing yourself.

I have a really good Lock deck that burns through cards and this has happened to me a couple of times.  Never really that funny, alas.

Agreed, card draw is huge. Gameplay is all about getting better trades, control, synergies, etc at any given time than your opponent, and having more options always puts you in a better position to execute. Hero powers that might allow you to defer using a card, even if the power is inferior to another possible play, can be almost as good as a draw. As is a willingness to ride out some damage or loss of control to preserve your cards for when they'll be more effective/decisive. My best Arena run came with a Shaman deck which taught me a little of that.

That approach is causing me to take a lot of time on my turns weighing options, and I'm finding Arena pretty tense :/

I still chuckle when I fireball one of my enraging cards just to piss them off and up their attack. Synergy cloud dovetail!

Before I go getting into this, am I able to play directly against friends?  I want to set up a deck for me and my kid to play against each other when we want.

So, finally rockin out Arena pretty well. Had my best (9 wins) with a rogue, basically loaded up eviserates, Defias, SI agents, backstabs, +2 attack dwarfs (and the 1 cost guy) and some cheap stuff to help combo. Cold blood can work well too. Very fast and fun deck. The next one I made was the opposite, 8 win druid slow deck that just hammered things if you let it get the mana. I have a 5 win Shaman run going now, but I'm sure I'll fail before the 7 win, 150+ gold payout.

Made a horrible rush priest arena deck. Managed 4 wins, but not recommended!

Yes.

Oh man, congrats.

My last two runs were a 1-3 Paladin and a 2-3 Rogue deck.

That was after a 10-3 Shaman run.

Card draw is nice, but if you find yourself down 5 cards (and he didn't get some crazy draw with cult master or starving buzzard or something), you're probably not getting enough out of your cards.  You don't really need any card draw if your deck has strong cards which are likely to 2 for 1 your opponent.  You really only need card draw if you have a very low curve or a weak deck that is going to get behind on cards.  On the note of card draw, cult master, azure drake, and loot hoarder are really good cards.  

Rogue is absolutely devastating when you get 2+ backstabs and 2+ eviscerates.  It also really sucks when you get no backstabs but a bunch of combo cards :(.   Rush, priest, and arena are not words I have ever heard put together, so 4 wins is probably pretty good for it.

This is the most aggressive deck I've made in arena in a while:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/585853/Hearthstone_Screenshot_2.21.2014.07.33.33.png  
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/585853/Hearthstone_Screenshot_2.21.2014.07.33.35.png  

It's super fun and can really put out some surprising burst damage.  I love Warrior in arena, one of my best classes and also in my opinion one of the most fun to play.  Some picks I made late were coldlight oracle, battle rage, and warsong commander.  Not great cards in general, but given how low curve my deck was, they made perfect sense, and they've definitely helped me take games.

(http://i.imgur.com/natfh0J.png)

I didn't get enough card draw, but wasn't really given any options.

Currently a very slow 1-0 (played a paladin that went to maybe round 18 or so).

Figured you can't have too many fireballs, and never got a flamestrike option or even +magic options so I was left with Blizzard for clear/control.

Edit: 4-3 was final. I could've done with a few more minions.

My last mage run went 3-2.

I think I'm loading up on too many spells. Of the three losses, two were because I just didn't have the minions. The two wins, I drew a good ration of spells to minions.

And yes, zapping your own minions for the enrage or to force a card draw are hilarious.

Whatever that stealthed 0/1 "give a random minion +1 health card is, that's a bitch and a half. I've had more than one game where two of those have been dumped out and just stayed stealthed and serious fucked me.

Blood imp.  Really sucks when you have no method to clear it. 

Heh, on my current arena warrior deck, I think I'd only be able to clear it with cleave.  I didn't bother picking up a whirlwilnd. This deck is weird.  I has nearly zero taunt, tons of charge and just gets them to lethal really fast.  It's working well.  Now that I've said that, I'll drop the next 3.  Probably to druids.

My kid and I only started playing yesterday.  It works for us.  She's 3 of 5 and I'm 3 of 3 in Play.  We're noobs, but it's fun.  I know it's not as deep as most other TCGs.  However, it might be a good stepping stone for us to jump into Magic in the next year or two.

I figured out what I was doing wrong with my mage play.

I wasn't taking full advantage of freeze, basically killing units that are frozen the same round I froze them rather than spreading the damage around a bit and using AOE after to kill everything.

Edit: Had an amazing draw in the arena today, just a near perfect set of Mage cards, pairs of all the useful spells (frostbolt, fireball, flamestrike, pyroblast and plenty of good 1 and 4 draws. Ended up with my first 12 win run.

2 Pyroblasts.  EEEP.  Had a good run with a pyroblast/Rag deck.  Rag is such bullshit, but it always seems when I play him that someone has a cloning or mind control ability. 

I'm getting better results.  Usually go 5-6 wins now.  Except for my shaman draw, where I did an 0-3 and was glad when it was over.  My shaman draws are total shit, and I can't seem to figure out how to play them in arena.  Warrior/mage/druid are all solid. Paladin/hunter are OK.  Rogue/priest/shaman are pretty much my personal shit tier. 

My shaman is just total shit everywhere, but somehow they seem to curbstomp me with ridiculous ease. It's BAD when you keep praying for firestorm or whatever that "nuke the enemy world for 4 points" card because you can't get a goddamn break. I'm trading 2-1 and still can't keep minions on the field.

I did Mage in area again -- another 3-2. I'm beginning to wonder if I'm making my mana curve too steep in the middle. I thought I had plenty of 2 and 3 point minions, but every game I lost had me draw (and discard, and then draw AGAIN) a handful of 4+ cards and the two games I won had me start with two or so 2 or 3 mana cost ones.

I mean, the games I won were absolute runaways, and two of the games I lost were close (and one was a shaman curbstomping me, but I keep thinking if I'm THAT screwed by an opening draw three times, then I'm drafting wrong.

It's especially annoying because my ranked mage is doing well, despite basically being "Basic mage plus handful of expert cards I happen to have" -- I seem to have a solid win/loss record. (Then again, does Arena match you against random people or people who suck as much as you do?)

I have a strong impression that it reconsiders the matchmaking each round, based on your current record.

Correct. It's the smart way to run things; it makes 0-3 stompings much less likely to happen (unless you have a really bad deck), which in turn encourages you that "Hey, even that awful deck went 2-3/3-3/etc. - if I try again, maybe I'll get a better draught!"

I went 4-2 with a Warlock today. I barely beat a Shaman who had somehow managed to make a murloc deck. I'm not kidding, I hadn't drawn Hellfire I'd have been slaughtered by a field full of Murlocs with at least three buffs on them.

I gotta remember that Hellfire ISN'T Flamestrike -- twice today I've dropped a minion then hellfired, because I'm used to mages. And, you know, lost the minion. :)

(http://i288.photobucket.com/albums/ll177/edog420420/Hearthstone_Screenshot_2232014213702_zps59167f46.png) (http://s288.photobucket.com/user/edog420420/media/Hearthstone_Screenshot_2232014213702_zps59167f46.png.html)

(http://i288.photobucket.com/albums/ll177/edog420420/Hearthstone_Screenshot_2232014214450_zpsb73b9509.png) (http://s288.photobucket.com/user/edog420420/media/Hearthstone_Screenshot_2232014214450_zpsb73b9509.png.html)

Went 12-1 . Paid about 500 gold. Nothing amazing, just a solid ass deck with answers. I really like having a couple +spell damage guys for the lightnings. Rockbiter is amazing, and you cant see it but I had 2 azure drakes, a silver hand knight, a sunwalker, and 2 fire elementals. Seemed like having good 3 drops was key to the success. Anyway, pretty pumped :)

Well done Slayer!  Did you use a spreadsheet for your draft? 

Nope, but I used Antigravity's tier list for a while until I felt I knew what cards were best for the classes.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0AifXEOqTcGcLdFVvWk1GRjVJTHJUaTVLcGViR1RRTFE&gid=20

I know they say paladin is top tier but my highest runs are always shaman decks.  6-8 wins usually if I get decent draws.

Are there plans to be able to gift packs?  I know they squashed trading.  However, it's a big pita to put a payment method on my kid's account, buy her some cards, then remove the payment. 

She actually handed me my ass twice last night.  I stopped going easy on her and then she started dropping the hammer.

How old is your kiddo?

Almost 9.  She's pretty bright, though. 

It's not a complicated game.  With the right cards, Elena will MURDER you.

For the record, the Rogue card "Headcrack" is a bullshit card.

That is all.

And then I went 0-3 in Arena with a paladin. Jesus what an awful game. Well over half my cards were under 4 mana (heck, 40% were three or less) and the first two games? Drew NOTHING under 4. Initial or replacement.

I had nothing to pick off minions except other minions, nothing to draw cards, only had one taunt at all even offered to me. No heals, no conscreation... The second I lost board control I was screwed because minions was basically ALL I had.

You might've been playing against children. I've heard they're brutal in Hearthstone.

lol

Given how thoroughly my son trashes me in some games, it would not surprise me at all. :)

And I'm thinking I'm calling it "done" in Arena.

I obviously just suck too much for words. 0-3, 1-3, 0-3....I can't seem to win a game anymore. I seem to do worse when I'm actually consulting card rankings than if I just pick randomly.

Good mana curve, bad mana curve, it doesn't matter. It all ends with me getting stomped into the ground. I'm guessing the common denominator here is "me".

Typically I'd be all for calling someone out in this sort of situation like that, but in this case I'm just going to go with "No, it's not you, it's Hearthstone."

Maybe. I'm sort of on the fence about that, because I really think "it's just bad luck"  is sorta a biased explanation.

I do a lot better with decks I construct myself, but I was (before the latest ranking wipe) just hovering around 17 or 18, so I wasn't exactly good (although some of that was I'd flip between classes, rather than sticking with my 'best' class because casual play is so freaking hit or miss that I'd rather just lose rank than have casual match me up with a guy with a ridiculous legendary murloc deck).

*shrug*. Mostly I win if I get momentum going in Arena, but the random deck draws mean I rarely have ANY "fuck the board" cards. A custom deck I can at least make sure I have a lot of "fuck you" cards (flamestrikes, hexes, whatever) to make them waste cards and give me some breathing space, but Arena? I dunno, it just doesn't seem to work out. I get offered lots of shit cards, or cards great in conjunction with another card, but that doesn't do a hole lot of good.

I think Arena might be better if they just gave you 90 cards and let you pick 30 from that, rather than 3 at a time for 30 tries.

Morat, it is bad luck.

It's more luck-based than skill-based. Had you had a run of wins it would not necessarily be because you were better than all of your opponents.

Morat, try watching some of the decent arena streamers for tips and analyse their plays as you go. A good way to do that is pausing at the start of a turn, decide what you'd play in that turn, see what they actually do, and then work out why they were different.

Trump's pretty good for that as he tends to explain/think out load as he goes.

Schild's wrong, by the way. If the game boiled down to just RNG then even the top players would trend to 50% win-rates over time instead of the 70-80% they have. Just throwing hands up in the air and going "it's all luck!" doesn't really help anyone; of course chance is a part of it, but it's not the only part.

It's more important to not take bad cards in arena than to get really good ones.  You'll do better with a team of solid value guys than you will with a deck of leper gnomes and flamestrikes.  Of course, the decks that are lucky enough to have both are the best.  It's harder to come back from a bad position in general in Hearthstone than in other similar games, so winning the early game and controlling the board are really important.

It's just not true that there are not difficult decisions in Hearthstone.  If you don't think they're there, it's because you're not good enough to see them, not because the game's luck-based.

I see this like poker. It has a lot of luck involved, but the better players can minimize that luck through their strategy and risk management.

I'd like to reiterate that headcrack is a total bullshit card. Three points of damage, three mana, returns to hand as long as it's a combo. OVER AND OVER and there's no way to stop it. Except run the rogue out of cards.

No, I'm not wrong. I said a few pages back that you need to not make egregious play errors. But even then, you can still get trounced in this game. The top players having a 70-80% win rate says more about the intelligence of the player base than it does the top players as this is far more luck-based than well, Magic.

I'm sorry if saying the game is way more luck-based than it should be offends people that like it, except that I'm not sorry and it is.

Edit: Basically this, and I feel dirty for using a meme to make a point.

(http://i.imgur.com/MBpUt4d.jpg)

I'm not saying that luck doesn't play a part but you can't really just handwave off "help me play better" with "It'd all just RNG. Deal with it" when you yourself admit that skill (or "the intelligence of the player base", if you prefer) is a factor. Yes, there will ultimately be a skill level which boils down to "whoever drew the best cards wins" (or "who got lucky on the random effect cards" or whatever) but that's not exactly exclusive to Hearthstone - and if Morat (sorry, Morat but you're a good example) is struggling to reach break-even point in the arena then there's probably more factors in play than just bad luck.

It might be bad card selection, or sub-optimal plays, or what have you but consistently missing the 50% win rate level over multiple arena runs cannot just be the RNG screwing him again and again.

I agree. Of course, they just reset the rankings again so who knows it that effects Arena. I just know I've gone from from generally doing 2-3 at worst (and generally 4-3 or 5-3) on average to 1-3s and 0-3s and I know my skill didn't collapse, and if anything I'm choosing better cards since I've, you know, started putting in the effort and using spreadsheets and the like.

I still think I'd prefer to choose 30 cards from 90 rather than 1 from 3 30 times in a row.

I'm with you.  I was consistently running 5-8 wins.  Now I've had a bunch of 0-3 2-3 runs.

Just got my second shaman arena deck in a row with 0 board clears.

I was loving the randomness of the Arena, to the tune of a cup of coffee a day ($2/per).  But with my recent spat of 'bad luck', I'm back to every few days knocking some quests/ranked and hopefully getting gold.

The difference you guys are arguing in 2 simple lines:

Hearthstone: Card access > luck > matchup > skill
Magic: Card access > skill = matchup > luck

All the things are a factor in both games, but Hearthstone is just not complicated enough for skill to be a big enough factor to outweigh luck. So yes, better players will win more often than bad ones, because it's still a minor factor, but all those other things tend to have more impact on any given game.

I don't think hearthstone would be hard to fix however.  Arena building needs work but simply adding more cards with maybe an extra rule or two would go a long way to adding more skill to decks.

Blockers.

I think sometimes people get too heavy on spreadsheets and stuff when drafting. What I have been doing is trying to take my first good rare/epic/legendary and building a deck around it. If you just take a bunch of good cards, many times your deck will be lacking in speed, card draw, removal, whatever. Have a concept for your deck....speed, Mid-game, or late game control. Build around the concept when you can.

I think the main thing to look at in cards is' can I kill 2 cards for one', or summon something that requires 2 cards to get rid of. Chillwind Yeti is a great card, usually causing a 2 for 1 trade. But you also need to look at your deck and see if you have 14 other 4 cost dudes. My general rule is:

Board clear > direct removal > card advantage > ass kickers > card draw > tricks > Taunters >

I was in a position where I could take Bloodsail raiders (comes into play +attack = your weapon attack) and the dread corsairs early, but I hadnt drawn any weapons up to that point. I took a risk that paid off, as two truesilvers and a lights justice came, and won we a couple matches....had they not, I woulda been pretty screwed. Risk/reward stuff

Maybe your mulliganing is bad... The only time I keep anything over 4 is if it is truly a game changer. Other than that you want 1-3 drops so you can maintain control early, most the time.

Combat would have to fundamentally change.

One change they could make tomorrow that would have a large positive impact is everyone seeing the same assortment of rarities in every Arena draft.

Another easy one would be, draft 40 cards, build with 30.

I'd love to see both of those ideas implemented.

That would hamper a child's ability to win. Adding more decisions to the tree adds more complexity than you think.

What they could do is nothing. Stick with what they have. Make a shitload of money in the short term, having made a better gateway drug to Magic than Yugioh or Pokemon. Because let's be honest, the bar was pretty fucking low on the entry level for CCGs.

High enough that some have never bothered until now.   :|  I still don't think I'll ever try Magic unless my son gets into it.  Hex is a possibility if it's ever close to what they promised.

I could continue to play this casually (without spending money) for some time. I haven't much lately due to some bad arena runs and Diablo 3 being interesting again.   

The best thing about Yugioh is getting to say AND YOU'VE FALLEN FOR MY TRAP CARD BWHAHAHAHAHA.

People say that in every game.

Source: I've said it and have never actually played YuGiOh despite knowing how. My old eyes can't read the text on cards.

You need a 8 year old nephew then! Then you'll get to play all the Yugioh you could ever want.

I'm a terrible uncle, when my nephews wanted to play stuff like that I said "Call me when you learn how to play magic."

I'm just waiting for Hearthstone to reveal they are going to do cooperative arena raids against bosses.

SHUT YOUR WHORE MOUTH!   :ye_gods:

Yugioh was pretty fun back in the day and by fun I mean constructing trap decks solely to piss off opponents and occasionally winning.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvX1QeySUJ0

If they do, they would only be copying a planned feature of Hex  :awesome_for_real:
(the entire pve side of Hex is designed to appeal to the WoW players of the world, complete with dungeons, raids, rare equipment, character leveling, etc)
(Course, they could not do the pve side of their game at all and it wouldn't matter to me)

If they do, they would only be copying a feature from their own WoW card game. Which, incidentally, happened to be developed from Cryptozoic too  :awesome_for_real:

If anything, Blizzard and Cryptozoic share the paternity of that.

That was my point. The pvp is fine of this game, but the killer application would be to tie it back to WoW with cards that unlocked vanity items in your account, and have those come off raid bosses. Arena draft the cards, and get to boss hunting with your Hearthstone LFR.

More hardcore would be Hearthstone cards coming from WoW Raiding!  :-P

Wow raiding stopped being hardcore a while ago, now it's just a chore.

 I just played a mage deck where they played 4 blizzards.  Who knows how many they actually had.  WTF.

edit: actually might have been 5.  I fucking lost count.

Is it a bug or a cheat? You can only have 3 of a card, max unless they changed that.

It's actually 2 max in any constructed deck (1 for legendaries). In arena, you can bypass that limitation if the RNG gods smile upon you.  It can make for some total bullshit.  Still, I could have won that, but when I put out a Senjin Shieldmasta to buy me another round, he pulled out a Black Knight.  I wish there was an emote for "your deck is bullshit" or "ohh, the humanity".

"Skill Game"

 :uhrr:

It's the same in Magic. But in Magic it's fine. Here it's absurd.

I'll ad that to the "Things I did not know about Magic and was artificially hamstringing myself with" pile.  Fuck.

Wait, I thought in sealed deck/drafting, you were still limited to 4 of any one card in magic?

Nope. As many as you can get. When I won a Rise of the Eldrazi grand prix trial, I had 5 staggershocks and Olivia Voldaren. (lol)

The deck construction rules are different in limited vs constructed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic:_The_Gathering_formats#Sanctioned_Limited

Huh, wow.  I mean, I don't think I ever pulled 5 or more of one card that I'd actually want 5 or more of in my deck during a sealed tournament.  But I always built my decks under the assumption normal rules applied.

(http://076dd0a50e0c1255009e-bd4b8aabaca29897bc751dfaf75b290c.r40.cf1.rackcdn.com/images/files/000/006/085/original/original.0)

Another big change is you can really go nuts with side boarding in limited.  You could play a completely different deck with more cards in it every round if you could change it quick enough.

Well yeah if you get to play with an Innistrad card that might be an advantage.  :why_so_serious:

(I assume you mean Drana)

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA OH MY BRAIN

I meant Brimstone Volley and it was an Innistrad GPT. Jesus christ, I feel like I had a stroke.

There really need to be a "hurry the fuck up and play your cards" emote.   :oh_i_see:

Game is officially live.  Whatever that means now.

It means the legendary nerfs begin.

 :grin:

I don't know.  Part of me wants a hurry up emote.  Part of me giggles when they start trying to move during the dynamite timer and clearly fuck it up.

My first legendary was nozdormu.....FML

I want the timer to be faster. There is no reason a turn in this game should take more than 20s.

Agreed.  They need to hurry this shit up.  If you let the dynamite timer run out 3 times in one game it should be an auto loss.  Also an insta-ban for your account.  Fuuuuuuuuu

I guarantee that's a strategy for some people to bore you into quitting. Which is honestly griefing and Blizzard needs to put a stop to it.

You have to think of the late game when big plays are being calculated.  I generally play extremely quickly, but I still have run down the clock on the swing turn when you are figuring out what your best plays are against a full board/can I kill him this turn?/can I survive this?/what are my most advantageous trades.

I've never run into too many people that just delay in the hopes of a forfeit.


Then again, barely played the last couple weeks.  Burned out very, very fast on this and have no desire to grind up the gold for another arena run.

Yeah, I'll burn the wick once a game roughly.  The timer for one turn isn't bad, but there needs to be a rolling counter so it can't happen on multiple turns.

I don't mind the timer being longer on later turns. There's no reason it should be longer than 15s on turn 1 or 2.

I thought the game already had something to counter this in the form of the next turn you take being shorter if you ran the timer out during your previous turn?

Only if it completely runs out without you doing anything.  If you made a last second timer move that went through, you get a brand new timer.  Some paladin today afk'd for the rest of the game at around turn 3 or 4. I couldn't draw a high damage minion to save my life.  It took around 5 turns to finish him off, each having to wait for the fuse to burn.  After 2 non-plays it should just end the game.

I had a warlock demonfire his Knife Juggler in an arena game today.  Poor fella rage quit 3 turns later.

Knife Juggler being "good" is a great example of why Heartstone is a mess.

/bandwagon trias_e on

I like this game.  Ranked 16th today, I have been pushing through with Reynad's constructed decks.

As predicted by other minds here, I loved this for about a month, got bored, and have not logged in for over two now. Unless casuals stick around longer (typically, not their defining trait) they are going to need to liven this up with some new cards asap, because things got stale quick running 3/2's into each other all day.

Introducing new cards would be hard as what cards can do is pretty limited compared to Magic. As it is even Magic has a lot of reprints, functional reprints, cards that are basically the same, etc.

Couldn't they introduce new mechanics as a block of cards?

Funny because I tried once again and got my ass kicked with two of his decks.  That's the joy of random draws. 5 games 2 wins, all losses were by turn 4 and I had no chance.

Ed: Fuck that guy's hunter deck w/ all the taunts. Destroys his warrior deck which was the only one I could build. I played 4 more games before I got the last of my 3 wins because every. single. deck (no joke) was the same fucking hunter deck.  Thanks match finder.

See what Schild and I were saying earlier.  They have limited design space to keep it easy and streamlined, unless they want to completely change how the game is played.  They could add graveyard mechanics or activated abilities for creatures (tap to do X) or whatever, but that isn't in the game now, isn't supported in the interface, and who knows how difficult it is to code into the system they have now.

The main obvious route for expansion they have is adding the WoW classes that aren't in there - Death Knight, Monk. Other than that between the narrow mechanical space and the fact that they've at least for now shackled themselves to WoW flavor-wise they're working with a very limited set of options. Certainly they can add more weapons, neutral monsters, and the like, they've got plenty of those left. New mechanics are a bigger problem, and even with spells they don't have a ton left that they didn't already make into cards.

The game already has too many classes. Classes were a fucking dreadful design mistake. Especially if their goal was "KISS," which it was. It both decreased possible depth in design and decreased the overall card pool an insane amount.

The problem is that they could add the bolded, and it wouldn't matter because they would be on the same power curve and do the same thing as what is in the client now.  There isn't a way to print something new without it being functionally the same or play functionally the same as what is currently in game, unless they do one of two things:

1.  Bleed mechanics between classes.  Give priests weapons, for instance.  This would be bad because it homogenizes the game.
2.  Ramp up the power/cost on new minions/spells.  This is what has happened to most CCGs not named MtG over the years, as they give in to power inflation to sell new cards and piss off many of their current users.


Just about the only broad design space I can think of that Blizzard can explore is tribal (see Murloc design and abilities), and I guess they could make secrets not worthless (but they are reactive so they are starting at a heavy disadvantage) and taunt not be a bad mechanic.

Even Magic has a lot of reprints, functional reprints, "fixed" versions of existing cards, color-shifted cards and cards that fill basically the same role as existing cards.

You can play with numbers and abilities to make new cards, but making them feel new and distinct is a different matter, especially if you aren't rotating out old cards. In magic you can create a 2/2 for 2 guy with a minor special ability and in the next set have a different 2/2 for 2 guy with a different minor special ability and it can feel distinct because the old card is gone, but if both were to overlap at the same time they would probably feel indistinct and crappy.

I don't know how the Hearthstone player base would react to cards rotating out. I suspect not well.

The things with cards rotating out is that there should at least still be some format where the cards are playable.  If a bunch of cards simply become obsolete because they are literally unplayable, I think people will be rightly upset.  Magic players would be upset too.  The real question is, then, how would Hearthstone players like having multiple formats to play and keep track of.  I don't know the answer to that.

Well I found out that you can get a mount in Warcraft, just for winning 3 games in Play mode in Hearthstone!
So I let the client update. Since I haven't played since Oct/Nov, I looked over my level 8 Hunter deck to make sure I was still happy with it, then dialed up a game.

I just overran this poor Warlock that I got matched up with. He conceded at 24-1. It was beautiful. I love it when the deck works exactly the way it was designed to work. Lots of minions, buffing each other, with the occasional Shot card to clear the other guy's minions.

We'll see if the next two wins come this easy. Probably not. But I couldn't resist a little gloating  :why_so_serious:

I got the mount. I guess if they ever fix this xpac price to normal levels I might see it one day in WoW.

Good thing it's a ground mount, amirite.

 :why_so_serious:

http://economics.about.com/od/helpforeconomicsstudents/f/inflation.htm

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=troll

EDIT: Wrong thread

(http://i.imgur.com/STd0xiA.png)

That's gotten me to Rank 10 pretty easily. 

I lose though if it goes to 9-10 mana and they start getting fat taunters out, but usually the game is over before then.  Just too many combo abuses.

I've been playing for about a month now, and the RNG is not my friend. Every time I think "Oh hey, 150 gold... I'll try the arena." it's functionally a matter of me throwing my money away.

I've done it six times (seven, counting the free one at the beginning). I have won a total of ONE game. I've read up on which cards to pick, which classes to choose, what to do... no good. Doing fine with constructed decks, arena is a way that I can pay 150 to get a deck that would have cost me 100 and 25 gold.

Great.

I went like 7-2 today and then 0-3. 7-2 with a Rogue, a class I rarely play -- and then 0-3 with the Warlock, a class I play often (and win often with).

Then to get the taste of RNG out of my mouth, I went and watched a video of a guy learning why having two Alarm-o-Bots in his hand is a recipe for sadness, as they kept summoning each other instead of the single other minion in his hand -- Ysera.  (I think he might have drawn the second Alarm-o-bot right before the one in play triggered).

Rank 18   :|

/*mumble* sour grapes

*mumble*/

Aussie release of this on  the iPad yesterday. Well worth the download as your cards and decks are account bound so you just pick up from where you last played on the PC. The only thing I don't like is the drag to attack/cast a spell on a target. Other than that, it's great.

Canadian iTunes has it as well.

What's the install size on your ipad?

480 meg file size on the iPad

If anyone wants the ipad version, it's as easy as changing your itunes address to a Canadian one, installing, then changing it back.

They're going to be doing single player PVE (http://us.battle.net/hearthstone/en/blog/13665269) and expanding the deck with reward cards. It'll require gold to "buy" the various modules.

Getting closer. With PvE it's just a matter of time, now.

The time is now.  PvE is coming in the form of Naxxramus, with 30 new cards to boot.

Looks cool tho.

http://us.battle.net/hearthstone/en/blog/13665269/beware-the-curse-of-naxxramas-4-11-2014 (http://us.battle.net/hearthstone/en/blog/13665269/beware-the-curse-of-naxxramas-4-11-2014)

Goddamnit, that looks cool.

Should I be ashamed for losing some practice matches as I climb through the tutorial I.e. trying to unlock all the classes?  I can't tell if it's me or the vanilla starter decks and Blizzq wants me to buy stuff to drill through the intro.

No, not really.  They decks they give you are shit, and Hearthstone still has a strong RNG aspect to it. You'll lose to even the shittiest AI if you get cold decked.

Grabbed this for the iPad. This was pretty clearly their intention from the beginning. Doesn't excuse the randomness of the game, but it's really quite gorgeous and tailored specifically for that experience. Even explains the lack of chat.

Is it coming to Android at any point?

Summer

Finally my purchase of a Kindle Fire HDX looks like a shrewd move!

Cool, thanks. Although if it doesn't come out before Hex's Android version it's a moot point.

I'm sure it will.

That's a new one. I got put in a queue today. Did the ipad roll to the US?

Doesn't the Amazon App store get stuff months behind Google's?   :awesome_for_real:

If at all. Amazon's app store is about 1/5 the size of Google Play.

Played this for about two days now. Basic, bland mechanics, too much randomness, not even remotely balanced, has a pretty bad playtime vs. gold curve even for a FtP game and you only encounter 'cookie-cutter' brain afk builds. Also no sealed-deck modes.

It's as if Blizzard looked at all of the tactical and collectible/trading card games that have come out over the last 20 years and ignored all of them.

I can't imagine playing this for any length of time.

I tried this myself. It does seem very shallow. And the overabundance of voiced actions that I have to wait on is really irritating.

forgot to add something: the matchmaking in this game is just hilariously broken. I'd  have expected a bit betters from a AAA game dev than just matching players that are close in rank. The matchmaking doesn't take deck strength into account at all for example. As a newbie you'll get your ass handed to you countless times because the matchmaking algorithm is pairing you up with players who have vastly better decks than you.

If you have experience with deck building games it won't matter as much because there seem to be a lot of HS players with lots of disposable income but no skill (if you are competent you will reach rank 15 easily even against players with lots of epic and even legendary cards) but players new to the genre will get face stomped and probably not have a great time.

IMHO it's pretty much a disappointment as a game and as a cash-sink. As a deck building game it lacks so many things that are staples to the genre. It seemingly ignored most of the developments and evolution in that particular genre and feels half-baked at best. It has huge balancing issues, it features a shitload of cards but has nearly no variety. Rushing seems to be the best strategy to win always.

It even fails as a pay to win game. It lacks the addictive quality, it doesn't draw you in in the same way other games do. It takes to long to deliver the initial successes and gives you to little free gold to spend on card packs. If you excessively play you'll' earn 400 gold over two or three days, which are worth 4 card packs or two trips to the arena. By that time most casual players will already have lost interest. Most pay to win games give you more and easier successes at first and make you hit the wall later.

You can feel that Blizzard has no clue how the deck building genre works and how the pay to win genre works and that they didn't have the intention to make a real pay to win game anyway. This game is just a half baked mess of mediocre ideas. Fails as a cash grab and as a real game.

Theme decks are way the fuck too pricey. They're fun, if annoying to face (goddamn Murloc decks) -- but nobody without serious OCD playstyle or a ton of cash is going to have one.

I can't seem to get a good balance going on cards -- half my draws are just shit, always. Even with vetted decks other people have designed, it seems like the game boils down to "Is my draw a handful of shit" followed by "and did I get more shit when I discarded".

I love starting games having seen all of my 5+ mana cards on my draw and re-draw.

Yeah you can have essentially an unwinnable game if you're picked first and pull nothing but 4+ cards. That is if your opponent doesn't have the same thing and/or is a functional player. I don't even worry about those anymore. If it hasn't turned by turn 2, I just concede and start over. There's no reason I can see to play out those matches and waste your time.

The ipad release has flooded the arena with noobs.  I'm winning 7-8 games with bad decks (I have an 8 win warlock deck right now that has 3 total spells and no card over 6 mana) and 3-5 with decks that have no business winning one.  Casual and ranked are still flooded with pay-to-win.  

I played some guy today that was taking so long between turns that I finished a set of D3 bounties during the game.  Game ended up going to the point where I pulled the very last card of the deck (a dread infernal) with 6 HP left and he couldn't clear it.  Felt good as the guy was lucking out hard, pulling out flamestrikes as his only card when I had tons of minions on the board.

Arena is a crapshoot anyway. Waste 150 Gold on the prospect of your RNG being better than those of your opponents at drawing random cards.  I've recently had to do arena with a Mage setup that didn't give me any of the decent class cards. No fireball, no frost bolt, no arcane intellect, no arcane missiles etc.

On the other hand the 2x per deck limit doesn't seem to be in effect either so I lost one game due to a 20/20 enemy minion being boosted by lots of 0  - 3 mana buff cards.

I either lose 0/3 or have insane winning streaks because I face stomp anyone due to an insanely broken deck that wouldn't be possible in constructed mode.

I'd rather spend that money on card packs to be honest.

How do you grind cards without spending monies?  Also, is the only way to get crazy cards (i.e. Knife Juggler) by boosters etc?  Pretty uneven experience so far.  Surprised, since Blizz usually seemed so polished.

Quests.  You get gold and either play arena (costs 150), which is a guaranteed pack + scaling bonus based on how well you've done.  Or you pay 100 gold for individual boosters if you don't like arena.  You can also craft cards after disenchanting extra cards or cards you don't like (this isn't very efficient).

I have a fair numbers good cards without ever paying money to Blizzard. But, I mostly play sporadically.  I let my quests build up and then finish them.  Won gold is used to play arena.  I'll play ranked or casual to complete quests, although you can complete them in your arena matches as well.  

Of course, I do only have 1 legendary, but a fair number of epics/rares (including Knife Juggler, Pyroclasm, Gorehowl, etc).  The card grind is a bit brutal if you don't want to pay any money.  That's primarily why I don't play much ranked. My decks are outclassed in a majority of my losses.

Trump (https://www.youtube.com/user/TrumpSC) on Youtube has been doing a series of decks using brand new accounts on a different server and taking them as high as he can get them completely F2P. He's taken a free Mage to Legendary, and he's been posting his Shaman run lately too. It's a good lesson on effective play in ranked, and gives an idea of how it's possible to progress as a total F2Per.

That said, it's a bit harder to emulate his success on your own, as he's one of the top five or ten players in the world, so what takes him about 70-80 games would probably take most people hundreds more.

I've played his Mage deck for the last two days. I've also watched a few of his streams.

I get why he chose Mage. Firstly it seems to be his favorite class and secondly Mage is now underrepresented in ranked at 6 and above.

It's workable but pretty tedious. If you have a good draw you can win against pretty much anything. I've won against a hunter with two hounds combos, granted he wasn't playing perfectly but nonetheless. If you have a bad start or bad draws though you'll pretty much lose against everybody and you'll lose badly against hunters and locks.

You can even see it in his own YouTube videos, he has really bad losing streaks where he loses six or more games in a row just by bad draws. I'm far from a good player so it hits me harder and sooner. It took me 40 games to get from 16 to 13 because you'll lose often if you can't execute the deck perfectly. The deck will leave you starved for cards, so if you lose control of the board early most classes outdraw you and kill you by turn six or seven.

Compare it to for example the 'starving buzzard,' 'unleash the hounds' and 'timber wolf' combo of the hunter that gives you 5 minions on the board attack and four cards drawn on average for five mana with just class cards and you realize just how tedious it is by comparison.

So yes you can FtP it to legendary if you are one of the best players in the world and/or are willing to invest weeks into playing the hundreds of matches and if you enjoy often losing against mediocre players that invested more money into their decks than you. (most legendaries are just ridiculously overpowered)

Also due to the fact that balancing is just broken at the moment you'll pretty much encounter Warlocks and Hunters two out of three times in ranked play pretty much all of them playing varieties of the same deck.

I'm gobsmacked the game has balance issues.

I find this game...frustrating as fuck, actually. I mean, there's fun there -- but I literally get pissed off at my draw, or my opponents, or the bullshit combos.

Not because I'm losing but because I feel starved of options. A bad draw fucks you from the get go. A random card can save your ass or kill it.

In M:TG, I had games with bad draws or lucky combos or "hey, I have the sole card that fucks your six card strategy in my hand, bitch" moments -- but never so fucking often. I play with verified decks, admittedly I'm still mostly on 'free' decks with the occasional expert or rare thrown in, but it's not like I've got a totally pointless deck.

It just...frustrates me to keep drawing shit. Over and over. Too few cards on the draw, too few cards in the deck is what it is. If they jumped to a 40 size deck and added another card or two to the draw, that might actually help. It's just too easy to draw four completely ass useless cards unless your deck's an early rush deck. And even then, you can get create starved with all your "fuck you" spell combos in your hand and only like one creature to execute it one.

You need more cards in your hand at the start. Which means you need more cards in the deck. Which really means you need to buff the two card limit too.

Edited to add: I find myself literally hating arena. I haven't done better than 2-3 in weeks. I can't seem to get anything going, and it's not like I have particularly shitty decks.

Frustrating is exactly the right word for it.

I've played over a hundred games right now and this game makes me angry as fuck. If you had a bad draw or once the opponent is ahead in cards there's no way out of losing except by an extremely lucky draw or if your deck massively outclasses your opponent's.

I've lost games by turn 4 where I was only able to play two cards against my opponent's seven there are truly ridiculous combos that leave you with no recourse except losing. It's in fact nothing like other card games.

It's almost like people are figuring out on their own the stuff Schild and I were talking about 12 pages ago!


Again, great streamlining of mechanics to make it easy to jump in and have fun....  but then you start figuring out the way the streamlining is fucking you over.  There is a world of difference between best of 3, where you get a chance to adjust your play/mulliganing strategy and pull cards from your sideboard, and a single game match where oftentimes you either don't know what the opponent is playing or you have to make an educated guess based on the meta when deciding what to toss/keep.

In MtG, it's not uncommon to get stomped game one and you just play a delaying game to see what your opponent's deck is running to make better choices for the next games in what you need in your starting hand and what you need to bring in from your sideboard, and how to adjust your playstyle to your opponent's deck. 

This game is awful.  I have maybe 10 hrs in it.  No more. 

I actually think that they need to rethink the game. It's horribly unbalanced and treating it like a competitive PvP game is a mistake for the reasons listed. It's too RNG, the constant mana generation removes gameplay strategy, and the drafts aren't really drafts in arena.

However, if they rethought it as a PvE cooperative game? Sort of like they are doing with the Naxx thing as a starting point? I think it's much better.

I'm up to rank 9 now, I decided to make a murloc hunter deck with no unleash the hounds/starving buzzard. It seems just the threat of those cards will sometimes slow down your opponent from filling the board up. Which is good for me, cause I'm throwing everything I got at em. I understand the complaints about the game, and I'm pretty tired of facing warlocks and hunters. So I adjusted my deck some for the meta and it's working out pretty well. Proper mulligans are probably the number one place to improve. Know the decks you will be facing, keep a game changer card even if it may be a little pricey.

Anyway, still having fun. I've probably dropped about 50 bucks in 3-4 months, and don't feel bad about it at all.

MY WORK WILL NOT BE DONE UNTIL EVERYONE AGREES WITH MY COMPLETELY ACCURATE ASSESSMENT AFTER 5 MINUTES OF PLAYING THE GAME

By the way Trump has noted his stats (https://sites.google.com/site/trumpdecks/freetoplay#freemage) for reaching legendary rank with the free to play mage deck. They are quite interesting. Quote: "Trump made it to Legendary after 7 days, 197 wins, and about 55 hours of game time.".

His shaman deck took him 183 wins to reach the same rank btw.

You need 95 stars to get to legendary from rank 25. You gain two stars if you are on a 'winning streak' until rank 5 (each consecutive win after the second won game) and you'll only ever lose one star but only below rank 20. So the minimum amount of games you need to win to reach legendary is 59. The minimum amount of games you need to play to reach legendary without streaking about 120. (lose one game for every two you win until you hit rank 5) or an 80% win percentage.

This would put him at about a 60% win percentage which is rather close to the 'spread' for one of the top ten hearthstone players even if he purposefully gimped his own deck to prove a point. Even worse on average he takes only six or seven minutes to play a game start to finish (I casually checked a few of his youtube videos for the ranks 10 to 1 so take it with a grain of salt). So the 55 hours total would amount to roughly 450 played games. Which would put his win ratio at 45% to 50% and implies a significant variance that put him into winning and losing streaks because the only way he would be able to reach legendary with that ratio is by having huge swings between winning streaks and losing streaks. (If you win and lose 3 consecutive games you average 1 star, if you win and lose 5 consecutive games you average 3 stars).

This shows that he is a skilled player because he managed to barely beat the spread with a 'basic' deck but it also shows just how stacked the game is in favor of players with expensive decks and just how much luck factors into it. He basically only barely managed to outperform a 'coin toss'.

After catching up on the thread I tend to agree with Schild (typing that feels dirty ;) ), Johnny Cee and others.

It will make Blizzard millions for sure and it is quite addicting for a few days and I won't feel angry if people like the game but mechanically speaking it is too limited. Unfortunately I can't think of any remedy that wouldn't make the game more complex or that wouldn't require introducing new mechanics and reworking the current system.

My biggest issue with the game is that the basic mechanics and game design choices make 'rushing' the only viable option. Yes people on HS message boards might group decks into aggro, control and other categories but they are essentially pretty much all rushing decks with various amounts of 'control' spells mixed in. Even a 'mid game' or 'control' deck focuses on the first five or six turns of the game. By the time you reach turn 10 or after one of you will be pretty much dead man walking. This might be a 'long' game for HS but as far as I'm concerned it's pretty much a rushing game if the game is decided after at most ten or eleven turns were made. This is because if every game only lasts ten moves you'll never be able to beat a bad draw or a bad beat before everything is over. You can't make up the starting advantage in such a short time. Especially because you can't act in any form on your opponent's turn except for a few 'secrets'.

Limiting cards to only 2 per deck and the deck to be only 30 cards compounds to that. If you can't make a move in the first two or three rounds you'll always play catch up to the other player unless your deck pretty much outclasses your opponent's or he is an idiot.

Focusing the game on the first ten to twelve turns means that you are slave to the RNG. A standard 'control' deck has a 'gaussian' distribution with the most cards at 4 mana. This means that you'll have to reach turn 6 or 7 to have a decent hand and a decent set of options. By that time you'll be hopelessly behind since there's no way to stop a 'rushing' deck than to make it 0 -3 heavy and stack removal for the early game. This also means that if you draw high cards on the initial draw and on the mulligan you'll be at a huge disadvantage against 'rushers'.

Basically if the opponent has the board and/or card advantage at turn 4 you'll very likely lose because while you play catch up he'll be able to combo you to death. This puts decks like hunter or lock to a natural advantage.

To change the game, true 'control' decks or other strategies need to be more viable which pretty much means that you'll have to either make initial games last longer on average than ten turns or to at least make it 'best of three' to average out the RNG influence more.

You'd basically have to make the game a little 'slower' by changing a few class cards. You'd also have to introduce new mechanics. Right now if you are at an disadvantage and you can't 'outdraw' your opponent you'll be at a disadvantage until you lose the game because you spend your turn catching up and he'll spend his turn giving you a new problem to deal with.

As a mage the only way I can beat a Zoo-Lock or a hunter is to hope that I either never lose control of the board or that I'll draw flamestrike which means that I'll have to draw the card and to survive until turn 7. Because I'll not be able to prevent either class to build up a huge minion advantage in the early game.

Hunters are complete bullshit right now.

Yes they are.

I've been having good success against them with Mage.

Turn 7 flamestrike. WEEEEEEE.   :awesome_for_real:

Nice, just when you think there's nothing that can enrage you, you are proven wrong.

- cards with the caption 'do x when a minion does y' can be cast on your opponent's minions. I found this out the hard way when a paladin cast two blessings of wisdom (draw a card when this minion attacks) on my minions while I controlled the board basically making me draw cards for him. This shouldn't be possible.

- dispel and silence remove enrage, taunt and most battle cry effects making taunt even more of a useless mechanic as it already is

- freezing and other incapacitating effects as a mechanic are useless because they don't prevent your opponent from using hero powers or most minions from using their powers. They only prevent from attacking. So there's basically nothing you can do to prevent a hunter from using his 'deal two damage to an enemy hero' power.

I don't know if it would be possible to write a post that was more wrong than that one Jeff Kelly.

Oh and hunters are completely broken.

- change a minion's health to 1: 0 mana
- when your hero gets attacked deal 2 damage to all enemy units: 2 mana
- deal 3 damage, when a beast is out deal 5 damage: 3 mana
- remove all enemy stealth effects and all enemy secrets: 1 mana
- destroy an enemy minion: 3 mana
- for each enemy minion summon 1 1/1 hound with charge: 2 mana
- deal two damage: 1 mana
- deal 5 damage to one enemy and 2 to adjacent: 5 mana
- look at the top three cards of your deck select one, discard others: 1 mana
- all other beasts have +1 attack: 1 mana

Etc.

Plus hero power: deal two damage to enemy hero: 2 mana. Can't be blocked by anything

I'm wrong all the time, you'll have to narrow it down for me.

The thing about it that struck me is that removing interactions like the Blessing of Wisdom thing you describe, and stuff like silence, will make the game even less interactive and interesting than it already is. The game doesn't need *more* streamlining.

that doesn't make it less broken.

I don't think either of those interactions/effects are broken - frustrating to deal with, maybe, but not broken. BoW being able to be used as *very* soft removal, that's not a particularly big deal I don't think.

As for silence, it's a mechanic that rides herd on other things to stop them from becoming broken themselves, there's nothing broken about the mechanic inherently. It's sort of the opposite of broken.

take blessing of wisdom for example: it's a 1 mana card which already is great value since you get at least one card out of it. playing it on an enemy minion will give you one card plus it will pretty much mean that your opponent has to kill or sacrifice that minion to not give you even more equity.

It's bad enough when such an effect is on a minion your opponent played because you'll have to remove it from play but when he can play it on your cards it's even worse because you'll now have to counter your own minion.

You could always silence it.  :awesome_for_real:

Well I disagree, but not on a 'this single card/mechanic is broken' level so not sure how to express what bugs me.

I had a hunter think he had me over a barrell on my mage with about 5 health left. He had 3 things on the board, but I had one beserker, and a flamestrike.

He kept "well played" spamming me over and over thinking he had it in the bag, even though he had like 11 health. I turned it on him at the last turn by pulling a healing card on one of my draw a card draws, healing, shooting my zerker with a fireball, and beating him.

That felt good. I hate well played spammers, but I leave it on for those moments.

Er - how is the paladin forcing you to attack with the minion and thus give you cards? I'm not saying it isn't a strong play, but you're describing it like you're obligated to attack with this creature, where you aren't, in most circumstances. You can make it be a simple 1 for 1, granted a pretty efficient one.

Don't you play Poker? How the fuck are you enjoying Hearthstone? Or are you just playing it for the nut draw and hoping for that every game?

not being able to attack is a pretty great debuff.

If I use the minion normally my opponent gets a card each time I attack. If I debuff the blessing away I just wasted a debuff on a 1 mana card. If I sacrifice my minion he traded one of my minions and got a card out of it for 1 mana. If I don't use the minion he just disabled one of my minions.

Basically it makes me contribute to the enemy's card advantage or spend my own mana to prevent it potentially wasting a minion on a less effective play.  played this way makes the card to strong for the cost.

I do play poker. I don't really treat this game like that at all. It's more just a 30m session while I'm watching baseball. I play ranked, but I don't take this seriously.

I'm mostly just playing it because I like collecting the different cards in packs.

Not being able to attack makes it essentially a 1 for 1. 1 for 1 trades are like the backbone of every card game ever. Yes, it's a tempo advantage because he probably paid less for his BoW than you did for your creature, but again, that's not unusual in a removal spell. Plus you still have the capability to throw it at him or a minion if you're desperate or the card draw can't help him much. It's hardly broken. If BoW is broken, how much more broken is a card that just kills the minion without giving you an option for how to deal with it?

so broken

2/10 'dies to doom blade'

How is it a one on one trade? One card for one card? If the value of the cards in question isn't equal it can't be one to one.

And yes a 'kill a minion' class card that not even everyone potentially has access to and only costs 3 mana is even more broken. It all ties back into the discussion started by Schild and J Cee that's why I really don't want to argue about individual cards. They simply amplify what's wrong with the fundamentals of the game.

Yes, that's what a 1 for 1 trade means.

Some concepts I suggest you review, they will make you a better player of any game like this, even Hearthstone:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_advantage
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempo_(Magic:_The_Gathering)

Trading 1 card for 1 card is almost never broken. There's really no 'but the cards aren't equal in value!' A card is a card, and if you have bad cards in your deck you should get rid of them. You'll get a lot farther treating a card as a card rather than thinking 'ugh he used his crappy blessing to negate my awesome giant creature!'

I will say that apparently what might be broken about BoW is the fact that it leaves the creature sitting around on the board afterwards means that it lets the defending player hurt themselves by making bad decisions about how to deal with it.

So now we're essentially at the 'you're a noob so don't qq' stage of the argument? Nice.

Sometimes - not nearly as often as its invoked but sometimes - that's a valid argument.

This mechanic has been in every card game of this sort, ever.  Your complaint boils down to; "It's not fair that the other player can put cards that grants advantage to him on my cards."  M:TG has this, Jihad had it, Star Wars CCG had it.  

In this specific instance it's a clever use of a mechanic others might never have thought of.  It certainly threw you off game enough to stick this much of a hair up your ass about it.

No? I was not being sarcastic, those concepts will be an enormous help to you as a player. The way you're thinking about card 'value' is something that is going to hold you back.

But anyway, think through the situations that you get with BoW:

I put it on your creature, you never attack with it. Assuming the creature has no other effects, we've traded a card for a card. I get a minor advantage in mana spent depending on how expensive your creature was.

I put it on your creature, you attack me and I draw a card. You just gave me a 2 for 1 at the cost of a little damage to me.

I put it on your creature, you attack and trade with one of my creatures, I draw a card. We're even on that exchange; you lose 1 card, I lose 2 cards and draw another one. 2 for 2.

I put it on your creature, you use a card to kill the effect and get to go back to using your creature. 1 for 1, your silence-type card for my BoW.

I put it on your creature, you for some reason use a card to kill your own creature. 2 for 1, don't do that.

Most of these are 1 for 1 trades, a card for a card or two cards for two cards. They're not hurting you nearly as badly as you think, unless you make one of the choices that gives your opponent a 2 for 1 or better trade.

EDIT: We're also setting aside that it's only of value for me to put it on your creature if it is one you'd want to attack with anyway. I can't use it to stop a taunter, I can't use it to stop guys who buff other creatures or your spell power, etc., etc. It's a pretty narrow bit of 'removal' to use it that way.