Magic: The Combattening - Hearthstone

[schild]

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.

[Rendakor]

Is it coming to Android at any point?

[luckton]

Is it coming to Android at any point?

Summer

[Tannhauser]

Finally my purchase of a Kindle Fire HDX looks like a shrewd move!

[Rendakor]

Is it coming to Android at any point?

Summer

Cool, thanks. Although if it doesn't come out before Hex's Android version it's a moot point.

[schild]

I'm sure it will.

[Numtini]

That's a new one. I got put in a queue today. Did the ipad roll to the US?

[luckton]

Finally my purchase of a Kindle Fire HDX looks like a shrewd move!

Doesn't the Amazon App store get stuff months behind Google's?   

[Trippy]

If at all. Amazon's app store is about 1/5 the size of Google Play.

[Jeff Kelly]

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.

[HaemishM]

I tried this myself. It does seem very shallow. And the overabundance of voiced actions that I have to wait on is really irritating.

[Jeff Kelly]

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.

[Jeff Kelly]

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.

[Morat20]

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.

[Paelos]

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.

[Rasix]

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.

[Jeff Kelly]

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.

[Soln]

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.

[Rasix]

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.

[koro]

Trump 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.

[Jeff Kelly]

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)

[Jeff Kelly]

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.

[schild]

I'm gobsmacked the game has balance issues.

[Morat20]

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.

[Jeff Kelly]

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.

[Johny Cee]

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. 

[Soln]

This game is awful.  I have maybe 10 hrs in it.  No more. 

[Paelos]

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.

[Slayerik]

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.

[schild]

MY WORK WILL NOT BE DONE UNTIL EVERYONE AGREES WITH MY COMPLETELY ACCURATE ASSESSMENT AFTER 5 MINUTES OF PLAYING THE GAME

[Jeff Kelly]

By the way Trump has noted his stats 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'.

[Jeff Kelly]

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'.

[Jeff Kelly]

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.

[Paelos]

Hunters are complete bullshit right now.

[Jeff Kelly]

Yes they are.