Hearthstone

Peter LaCara

Peter LaCara

Soooo, I don't know if I'm slow or what. But I just had a realization today.

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Jason Waddell

Jason Waddell

Administrator
Staff member
I installed this game and played it for the first time today. Tried the different classes and immediately liked Warlock, which feels like kind of a Grixis-y class.

The gameplay is pretty fun, and I like the way it encourages clever sequencing to make resource trades and grind out an advantage. No clue what the constructed play is like, but I found the 'starter' decks to be fairly enjoyable.

Ran some friendly games via the 'play' option and went 7 - 1, losing only to some dude with a deck wayyy better than mine, given away by the fact that he had some custom card sleeve back. I do find it weird that it's mostly your opponent who sees your card backs here.

How experienced do I need to be to enjoy playing Arena?
 
Chris Taylor

Chris Taylor

Contributor
Jason Waddell said:
I installed this game and played it for the first time today. Tried the different classes and immediately liked Warlock, which feels like kind of a Grixis-y class.

The gameplay is pretty fun, and I like the way it encourages clever sequencing to make resource trades and grind out an advantage. No clue what the constructed play is like, but I found the 'starter' decks to be fairly enjoyable.

Ran some friendly games via the 'play' option and went 7 - 1, losing only to some dude with a deck wayyy better than mine, given away by the fact that he had some custom card sleeve back. I do find it weird that it's mostly your opponent who sees your card backs here.

How experienced do I need to be to enjoy playing Arena?
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Your magic instincts will carry you pretty far in the games, but I'd look up some basic pick order stuff before you wing a draft. Curve is, as always, very important
 
safra

safra

I like using an overlay program. The HearthArena app is quite good for HS novices, and I use Hearthstone Deck Tracker for Constructed.
 
Jason Waddell

Jason Waddell

Administrator
Staff member
I did my first run through the arena and went 6 - 3 as a Druid. Seems reasonable. I got some stardust or something that I'm not entirely sure what to do with.
 
Modin

Modin

You can forge cards with it. For now I'd just let it be, it's more of a concern if you want to build specific constructed decks. Arena is a pretty nice way to get some cards, I use Hearthstone Deck Tracker to keep track(!) of the cards drawn and played etc. it gives you a pretty great overlay(almost feels like cheating tbh)
 
Peter LaCara

Peter LaCara

Jason Waddell said:
I did my first run through the arena and went 6 - 3 as a Druid. Seems reasonable. I got some stardust or something that I'm not entirely sure what to do with.
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6 wins on your first arena run is really fucking good. It took me a ton of practice and experience before I could crack 5. Dust is what you use to obtain specific cards, since you can't trade with other players. You can 'disenchant' cards for dust. 'Golden' cards are basically foils, and are worth a lot more dust than a normal card.

Card backs aren't anything special. All you have to do is hit rank 20 by the end of a month to earn one, and that's just a matter of playing for a while, since before you hit rank 20 you can't lose stars by losing. It is absolutely worth hitting at least rank 20 every month, even if you have a garbage collection, since you're eligible for an end of season chest, which includes some dust and a few golden cards (worth a lot more dust, as mentioned before). It's a key way of building your collection without spending money.

And I would recommend spending at least a little money on the game if you end up liking it and are at all serious about it. I treat it sort of like any other video game: spend $60 to play it and then treat the expansions like DLC. Grinding out gold to improve your collection is a lot less painful once you have a few basics. The $5 Welcome package that gives you 10 packs and a guaranteed class legendary is an insanely good deal and should be enough to get you a good way to a constructed worthy deck.
 
Jason Waddell

Jason Waddell

Administrator
Staff member
I watched some streams to get an idea about how constructed works in the game, and was kind of pleasantly surprised. In Magic constructed sometimes feels like it has nothing in common with limited, but there they were still playing Hearthstone as I "know" it. Decks even used some cards I already have, which was a nice touch point.

One interesting design note: since there are no sideboards, the designers are forced to make cards that can interact with each other. Since creatures double as removal in this game, I think that happens fairly naturally, but I didn't see anything that looked like the "two combo decks goldfishing against each other" that you see particularly in Modern.

I really liked the Renolock deck I saw. How much cash would someone have to shell out to get enough dust to forge that deck? If I were spending dust, are there any cards from that deck that would be good to purchase first because of their general usefulness?
 
Onderzeeboot

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
What's the oldest campaign atm? Keep in mind that they cycle through those. I think League of Adventurers (or whatever it's called) is one of the older ones, so Reno might be leaving standard soon? Anyway, I used to play a Renolock deck when I still played, and it is super funny, so there's that :)
 
Peter LaCara

Peter LaCara

Hearthstone rotates an entire year at a time. So when the first expansion hits next year, Blackrock Mountain, League of Explorers, and the Grand Tournament all leave standard. So Reno's only got a couple months left. However, considering all the Kabal cards from Mean Streets of Gadgetzan use the same mechanic, Reno-style decks are likely to persist even after rotation.

Unfortunately, since Reno decks are singleton, they tend to rely more heavily on legendary minions than other decks, so they're some of the more expensive. Hearthstone is similar to Magic in that aggro decks tend to be cheap (I bet you could put together a halfway decent Zoo deck with the cards you have now), while control is expensive (a while back, the best control deck used to be called 'wallet warrior' if that tells you anything).
 
Peter LaCara

Peter LaCara

Jason Waddell said:
I watched some streams to get an idea about how constructed works in the game, and was kind of pleasantly surprised. In Magic constructed sometimes feels like it has nothing in common with limited, but there they were still playing Hearthstone as I "know" it. Decks even used some cards I already have, which was a nice touch point.
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There's a lot of fairly powerful commons in Hearthstone, and some of the most powerful cards in the game are actually basic cards unlocked for free (Fiery War Axe, I'm looking at you). So odds are that you do have at least 60% of a constructed deck already.

One interesting design note: since there are no sideboards, the designers are forced to make cards that can interact with each other. Since creatures double as removal in this game, I think that happens fairly naturally, but I didn't see anything that looked like the "two combo decks goldfishing against each other" that you see particularly in Modern.
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There's a little bit of that if you get into a Freeze Mage or Miracle Rogue mirror, but for the most part yeah, games of Hearthstone are going to be more interactive and focused on the board than any game of Magic in an eternal format.
 
Diakonov

Diakonov

Being able to interact with everything is nice in some ways, but that's also the part that I miss about Magic when I'm playing Hearthstone. It's more difficult to build an incremental strategy when your permanents never stick. To utilize synergies, you're completely reliant upon drawing certain combinations of cards in the right order, and then having the mana to play most of them during the same turn. It's harder to proactively plan ahead in Hearthstone, which makes the game a lot more tactical in nature.

They use small creatures with Stealth to mimic noncreature permanents, but really it's a design space that should be explored much further.

Also, the random-card-generation mechanic is pretty lame IMO. It's fine for something like Animal Companion where you can at least assess the probability of what could happen, but the variance of the portals and Malchezaar is sort of annoying.

Complaints aside, Hearthstone really is fantastic. It's quick and packed with lots of interesting decisions.
 
Chris Taylor

Chris Taylor

Contributor
Yeah hearthstone has had a longstanding love-hate relationship with variance. Like remember the OG portal?

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Doesn't take a genius to see that this card has an insane high end and a shite low end
 
Jason Waddell

Jason Waddell

Administrator
Staff member
Thanks. I don't really know what to expect at this point. My play was pretty much tight level 1 play. I have no idea what to play around, and particularly when an opponent plays a secret, I really have no clue how I should react.

It helped that I got my favorite class (Warlock), and some good finishers (Sea Giant), as well as load of interaction. It turns out Blastcrystal Potion is just the nuts for getting through a top-decked Bog Creeper.

Also, Mortal Coil has to just be my favorite card to play with. So much value!
 
Onderzeeboot

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
Jason Waddell said:
Thanks. I don't really know what to expect at this point. My play was pretty much tight level 1 play. I have no idea what to play around, and particularly when an opponent plays a secret, I really have no clue how I should react.
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There's a series of articles on icy-veins that offers a pretty good guide how to play around secrets.

http://www.icy-veins.com/hearthstone/mage-secrets
http://www.icy-veins.com/hearthstone/hunter-secrets
http://www.icy-veins.com/hearthstone/paladin-secrets
 
Onderzeeboot

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
Also, I just learned your arena games are about to get harder :)

For players on their first few Arena runs, matchmaking is intentionally altered to provide an easier transition into the game mode. For matchmaking purposes, the player's win/loss ratio is considered to have one more loss than it actually does, thus matching them against what should on average be easier opponents. The system will also prefer to match such players against each other.

The exact number of games required to be eligible for this adjustment is something that the developers are "still tweaking a little", but as of April 2016 is "in the realm of 2 or 3 runs." Once the player has exceeded this number of runs, they are matched purely on their win/loss ratio, with their number of previous runs no longer affecting their matchmaking.
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