Hearthstone!

I'm getting sucked into another blizzard game, arghghghhhhh, that's my stifled cry of agony as the blizzard vortex swallows me up.

I'm pretty new to it, only rank 24 and won maybe 10 games total. I haven't done my proper research. I started as a mage but all the paladins were wiping the floor with me (which actually I read mage counters paladin, go figure) so I switched to druid cus they're supposed to be mega op. At least a while ago, dunno now if they patched anything recently.

Paladin seems pretty good too, just the standard deck can be immensely strong.

What classes do you enjoy?

I struggle at building my deck, I think I do not use enough 2 and 3 mana minions. I only have like one 1 mana, a 2 and maybe 2 3s. I'm perhaps too reliant on major end game minions and buffs/spells. I fought a priest who had two shadow word death cards and pain cards and it was bad, every time I put out a huge minion he killed them in one yet. Or sometimes they get out a ton of early minions and beat me that way.

I also feel while there is some skill involved there is a ton of luck, like way more luck than skill. Like maybe a 75/25% ratio of luck to skill. Maybe I'm way off here. But if you get all the perfect cards to counter what the other guy has you will win period. I guess the skill part is making sure they're in your deck. But you don't know his deck ahead of time either. Matchups such a huge part.

Matchups have long been a huge part of any card game, that's just the nature of the beast. I played Hearthstone for a few weeks not too long after it came out but I gave up on it. As someone who played Magic the Gathering for years when I was younger Hearthstone was just too simplistic to grab my attention. Some of the interactions were interesting but overall there just wasn't enough complexity to keep me from being bored by it.

Also, and HOPEFULLY this has been nerfed by now, but back then the game too often came down to coin flips. I remember watching videos on Youtube of the highest level Hearthstone players facing off against each other, and an unacceptably high number of those games were determined based on who got luckiest with Nat Pagle draws or Ragnaros hits. I remember one game where the winner ended up drawing like 5 cards in a row off of Nat Pagle and that kind of raw card advantage allowed him to just steamroll the game, it was stupid. Random coin flips in a card game can be fun in casual play but they should never be strong enough to be metagame defining, that's just bad game design.

I played Hearthstone a bit right after launch, then stopped for a while due to the apparent high-luck factor. However, I am playing again and enjoying it, at least in small doses. Luck *is* a factor in this genre, but there can be good strategy in deck building which will help mitigate the luck factor in the long run. For one game, certainly, anything can happen depending on the match up of the cards.

I suggest playing every class to level 10, and then focus on the types you enjoy most.

Have FUN!

Wolfbeckett said:

Matchups have long been a huge part of any card game, that's just the nature of the beast. I played Hearthstone for a few weeks not too long after it came out but I gave up on it. As someone who played Magic the Gathering for years when I was younger Hearthstone was just too simplistic to grab my attention. Some of the interactions were interesting but overall there just wasn't enough complexity to keep me from being bored by it.

Also, and HOPEFULLY this has been nerfed by now, but back then the game too often came down to coin flips. I remember watching videos on Youtube of the highest level Hearthstone players facing off against each other, and an unacceptably high number of those games were determined based on who got luckiest with Nat Pagle draws or Ragnaros hits. I remember one game where the winner ended up drawing like 5 cards in a row off of Nat Pagle and that kind of raw card advantage allowed him to just steamroll the game, it was stupid. Random coin flips in a card game can be fun in casual play but they should never be strong enough to be metagame defining, that's just bad game design.

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I totally agree, it's like when I was playing a mage, popping two arcance intellects right away was huge. Or playing a druid and getting two wild growths at the third turn plus a bunch of 6+ mana minions you can use the mana on. It's a little too streaky.

I played quite a bit after launch. It's a quality game, and fits well into the Blizzard theme of polish + "easy to learn, difficult to master."

After a few months, though, I realized I was really waiting for it to be more fun than frustration. One day I realized it just wasn't happening so I stopped. My biggest gripe is the pacing - waiting for other people to finish their turn, especially in the early game, is just mind-numbing.

Yeah I do not understand what kind of people are playing this, little kids? 60 year old grandmas who can barely click? Literal invalids with one arm? The amount of time some people take is mind blowing. I blow through my first 3-4 turns in 20 seconds. I never spend more than 10 debating which cards to keep at the start.

Luck is a factor, but skill is still a lot more important. There's a reason people like Kolento can get to legend incredibly quickly with an extremely high win-rate. Don't take this the wrong way, but if you're rank 24 and have only played ten games then you're likely pretty terrible and have a bad deck. That said, sometimes the draw can screw you over, but that's just a part of card games.

I've gotten bored of constructed after playing thousands of games. Once you get to the higher ranks, you play against the same few decks over and over again, to the point where within the first couple turns (often the very first turn, and sometimes just by looking at the hero they're using) I basically know what cards/playstyle my opponent is utilizing. Arena is a lot more enjoyable because it's a lot less predictable, but even that gets stale after awhile - you'll still see a lot of the same cards because they're superior cards.

Basically, there simply aren't enough cards in the game.

My roommate got me into this game. I played until I had all my characters up to level 10, so that I could create custom decks for them.

But then I stopped playing because players better than me were just.. that much better than me. I'm a casual gamer, so further playing doesn't really appeal to me too much. People were beating me because they had better cards than me, for the most part. There's some luck of course and strategy - but strategy isn't a big enough aspect of this game for me. The cards you have in your decks have far too much of an influence for my tastes - I don't have time to try to get all the powerful cards everybody else has. I just want to play against people on some sort of a level playing field. Maybe that's why card games never appealed to me before? What you have in your deck is just too important.

What I love about the game is ARENA. It's random and thus awesome. The problems that you need 150 coins to play, and in order to get coins you need to play elsewhere.. so.. that's why I haven't really been playing lately - I can't get into Arena easily. If it was more open, I would probably play a couple times a week.

Yeah I did really enjoy Arena when I played. In fact, most of the reason I stopped playing was because I had a string of bad Arena runs that drained my coins to zero, and I didn't want to play constructed long enough to get myself back into the Arena game. Also I had a personal prejudice against Arena because Warlock was a pretty bad Arena class back then (might be different now, I don't know). Back when I played WoW I played warlock as my main for years, to see my class be so ineffective in the game mode that I enjoyed made me cry on the inside.

Easiest way to make gold is to play the game every 3 days and finish the quests in ranked mode (you can also log in daily to replace a quest if you don't like it, but that's optional). You will run into the occassional rank 20 farmers that try to overwhelm new players with their full equipped decks, but overall you will stand much better chances than in regular constructed play.

And, yes, Hearthstone is a simple game but requires quite a bit of skill and good judgement. One thing I can recommend is watching a few Hearthstone videos on YouTube. Personally I like Trump - he has a calm personality and his play is very "value" focused. Go watch his "F2P Mage to Legend" series. It is a bit outdated at this poin - lots of things (most of all the meta) has changed, but you will learn lots about the basics nontheless (e.g. Chillwind Yeti is a superb card).

If you want to do some sparring send me a PM via the forums and I'll add you to the friend list (I play on EU).

If all you're after is the Arena, it's a bit easier to win games in unranked mode, or whatever it's called. The wins count towards your quests, so you'll get to your arena matches quicker.. at least from my experience.

I just wish they would give you 1 arena fight a day or something instead of making you go through all that to be able to play it.

I was under the impression that only Ranked Games and Arena Games counted toward the daily quests.

Wizard-Bob said:

I was under the impression that only Ranked Games and Arena Games counted toward the daily quests.

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Nope, any pvp should count for the quests. It's basically their bribe to get people to populate the pvp pools.

I've actually had more luck in ranked than unranked. The ranked players seem to be brand new, have very little outside of default cards. That's cus we're like rank 25, 24, all pretty new and bad. The unranked players seem to be not very good but have way better cards so I often lose anyway. Seems like a lot of them go to unranked to try and skill up before attempting ranked.

On EU ranked is far easier than normal play, at least below rank 15 (or maybe even 10). You might run into a difficulty spike around rank 20 (because that's the lowest the farmers can get with their decks to bash new players).

I've started playing this week. The match making seems a bit odd, if I pick the one character that I've levelled up and have a reasonable selection of cards (mage) then it works fine with slightly more wins than losses. If I pick another character that I haven't levelled up yet then the matching doesn't seem to adjust so my record with other characters is W1 L7. The biggest issue in those games was that I have a lack of expensive cards for late game so I run out of cards.

That's one aspect of the game I don't like, that some players have amazing decks, while your deck might suck. I realize that the object is to continue collecting cards and such, but I prefer games where multiplayer matchups are well balanced. .. I'd prefer to play against people who have the same access to the same cards as me - it's more fun that way, because nobody's going to bust out a super card that you've never seen before or some such thing.

That's why I like arena, it's random. And yeah, I get that this is what such card games are supposed to be about - the collection of cards. But that's the part of it I like least.

Hunter has had periods of absolute dominance using a deck that was pretty cheap. Zoo (also cheap) has been a very strong deck for a long time. Shaman midrange decks generally aren't too expensive. Skill is a lot more important than having legendaries. "I lost because the other person has better cards" is more of an excuse than anything. Trump and others have hit legend with several classes using free-to-play decks.

It can definitely be a factor, but it's not as important as skill. Blaming losses on lack of rares/epics/legendaries hinders you from realizing mistakes and misplays you made due to lack of skill. It takes time to get good at the game.

On the flip side, having good cards doesn't mean you'll automatically start having success. You can play a fully fleshed-out control warrior deck and still be terrible.

Zack said:

Hunter has had periods of absolute dominance using a deck that was pretty cheap. Zoo (also cheap) has been a very strong deck for a long time. Shaman midrange decks generally aren't too expensive. Skill is a lot more important than having legendaries. "I lost because the other person has better cards" is more of an excuse than anything. Trump and others have hit legend with several classes using free-to-play decks.

It can definitely be a factor, but it's not as important as skill. Blaming losses on lack of rares/epics/legendaries hinders you from realizing mistakes and misplays you made due to lack of skill. It takes time to get good at the game.

On the flip side, having good cards doesn't mean you'll automatically start having success. You can play a fully fleshed-out control warrior deck and still be terrible.

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This is all true. The perception of newer players is that they lost because of some epic and legendary cards that came into play, but really they just lost to a superior deck (and likely a more experienced player).

What newer players should be doing (sadly) to compete is netdecking. Go to the hearthstone fansites that have constructed decks and find the cheap ones that you can form or nearly form. Hearthpwn is a great site for this - they even explain how to play the deck.

Ultimately, new players to hearthstone have to understand that pvp in the game is the deep end - you've been thrown in, and you will repeatedly drown for a while until you start learning to swim.

Zack said:

Skill is a lot more important than having legendaries. "I lost because the other person has better cards" is more of an excuse than anything

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It's more like

"The guy I was playing against has a whole bunch of cards some of which I've never seen before that work incredibly well together and lead to my demise even before I realized what was happening."

Skill is important, but it seems that certain card combos are just too powerful.. and a lot of those cards need to be bought or crafted or whatever.

I've been playing though.. believe it or not Built a pretty solid warrior deck that usually leads to many victories. I've also beaten the 3 bosses in the.. solo adventures thing. Now I guess I'm trying to accumulate 750 gold so that I can unlock the next tier, but that might very well take months.