From zero to tavern hero: A story of kindling the competitive fire



Mike Uh (far right) with the Americas Hearthstone elite



Introduction



Well met! My name is Mike, and in Hearthstone, I go by the battletag ‘lucky’. In the real world, I am a 37-year-old clinical psychologist who works with active duty military service members suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and other psychological conditions. I live in the suburbs of Montgomery County, Maryland with my wife of nine years and our two dogs.

I have been a gamer for most of my life, but when Hearthstone came on to the scene, it caught my attention because I had come to terms with the fact that my age had caught up to me in terms of being able play games competitively. It was nice that Hearthstone didn’t require me to commit long stretches of my time to play, so I could easily stop and attend to family/work matters if they came up. I also wanted to get into card games because I had friends who used to play Magic the Gathering during my youth, but I never got into it then. So I downloaded the game on day one of release.

"I struggled mentally for weeks to decide whether it was even worth my time to try out this Tavern Hero qualifier thing."



Like most people, I started by playing arena mode exclusively in the first month to learn about the game and familiarize myself with all the cards, and researched all the popular decks to get an idea of what deck I wanted to build with my dust. Additionally, I taught my wife how to play the game because unlike the other games I played, Hearthstone was available on the iPad, and the game actually looked decently fun to her whenever I put on Reynad’s stream on my TV, whom she thought looked cute because he looked like Edward Cullen. Season 3 came around, and my goal was to hit legend, and amazingly enough, I managed to achieve this goal with Handlock and it was quite the exhilarating experience. I wouldn’t hit legend again until November, 2015 and I haven’t gotten legend rank again. My typical ladder finishes have been between ranks 5-2.



My entry into the Tavern Hero qualifier tournament



Having played Hearthstone for nearly two and a half years now, I’ve always been interested in the competitive scene and followed most tournaments up to this point. What is surprising to me is that for a major metropolitan area, the Washington DC area is sorely lacking in fireside gatherings. However, I discovered that one venue in Fairfax, Virginia (called The Cave Gaming Center) regularly hosts events, and started to host Tavern Hero qualifiers on a regular basis this year.

The problem was that it was still somewhat far away from where I live, and my work schedule made it difficult to attend. At the same time, the thought of entering into a Tavern Hero qualifier just didn’t feel right for a number of reasons. For starters, when I researched this venue and checked out streams of previous tournaments, the competition was no joke. This wasn’t your social, fun gathering with 50+ participants and drinks to go around when you weren’t playing games. These gatherings were stacked with a small group of pros, semi-pros, top-100 legend caliber players and streamers, who were all fierce competitors.

Not only would I be out of place and out of my element due to my age, but even as a ‘mere’ two-time legend player, it wasn’t unreasonable for me to believe that I’d go out there and get stomped from game one. Furthermore, the possibility that this would all be broadcast on their twitch channel? Yikes. And even if I somehow won, that would just mean I would get thrown into a pool of even better players and pros who play Hearthstone for a living, and what chance would I have to progress in that field?

I struggled mentally for weeks to decide whether it was even worth my time to try out this Tavern Hero qualifier thing. What’s really interesting and funny about this whole experience is that while I was deliberating and making this a complicated process, to my wife, this was a no-brainer that I should go. Who cares what happens? There’s no reason you wouldn’t be able to compete with the players in the tournament – is what she would say. Also, I don’t think I look that old just yet, and I could probably pass for someone in their mid-20’s?

"My basic spreadsheet suddenly turned into a sophisticated win rate analysis database, and I started to feel empowered to compete because I saw a means to put myself in a good position."



Ultimately, our conversations led to the conclusion that this shouldn’t be an emotionally-driven decision, and I would be better off tapping into my academic roots and make a data-driven decision. So I slapped together a basic spreadsheet of decks that I feel comfortable taking into my potential lineup, and organized them by win rates against decks that I anticipated would be prevalent in the tournament field. I took the spreadsheet to my wife, who works for one of the premier consulting corporations in the country, and is second to none in her ability to analyze data to make the most optimal decisions based on the data. My basic spreadsheet suddenly turned into a sophisticated win rate analysis database, and I started to feel empowered to compete because I saw a means to put myself in a good position to win Hearthstone matches.

After we finished organizing the data, we concluded that Patron Warrior, Aggro Shaman, and Zoo were the optimal decks to take, factoring in my comfort level playing these decks, and the anticipation that the field would consist mostly of aggressive decks. As for the fourth deck, I wanted to include a relatively new deck on the scene called “Yogg Token Druid,” which the jury was still out on at this time, and which has yet to become a tournament and ladder staple (C’Thun Druid was the more popular Druid). When I saw this deck, particularly the version that Senfglas built, I knew I wanted to play it and take it to the Qualifier because it looked incredibly fun, and despite the lack of data on win rates, there was only a handful of people who really saw the broken potential of Yogg-Saron in this deck. It looked so strong to me, I felt it had the potential to carry me through the tournament. So in the two weeks leading up to the Qualifier tournament, all I did was play Yogg Token Druid and it was a blast on the ladder.

So the day of the tournament came, and the tournament itself was pretty much everything I expected it to be. The competition was high level, most people brought similar aggressive lineups, my lineup and strategy worked out for the most part, and Yogg Druid turned out to be my strongest deck, to the point that my finals opponent banned it. Amazingly enough, I was able to squeeze out a 3-2 win in the finals and secure a spot in the Tavern Hero tournament leading up to the Summer Championship preliminaries. Who knew? Some random middle aged guy goes into a competitive Hearthstone tournament and wins the whole thing? I certainly didn’t expect it. But man, was it exciting to compete like this again since my high school days of playing tennis, which was over 20 years ago!



Preparation for preliminaries



Okay, so I won a Tavern Hero Qualifier, and now I was faced with the task of trying to come up with a winning strategy against the best of the best Hearthstone players in America. Taking my experiences from the qualifier and a hard look at the caliber of players I would be facing, I felt that I would have to take a slightly different approach to my lineup and ban strategy. Again, drawing from some of my professional knowledge and experiences, this time around my approach would have to revolve around the principle of recognizing my limitations, and adapting. When looking at my situation, my major limitations were as follows: 1) The lack of experience/time compared to the field even if I were to give myself extra time to play, and 2) The lack of a team and practice partners to help with preparation (except my wife, whose best ladder result was rank 2 with Midrange Hunter).

"Some random middle aged guy goes into a competitive Hearthstone tournament and wins the whole thing? I certainly didn’t expect it."



Given these limitations, the following assumptions had to be made: 1) I am going to fall behind in most games against the field, and 2) My primary source of practice is the ladder. To better explain assumption #1, my belief was that if I were to take the typical lineup of Warrior/Druid/Zoo/Shaman, players who are much more experienced than I am at piloting these top tier decks would have a significant edge over me in the mirror matches and tempo/early board oriented matchups due to their ability to know the absolute optimal mulligans and plays at every turn, board state, cards in their hand, and cards in my hand. So it was clear to me that taking the same top tier decks as the majority of the field would just result in me getting out-punched because they would know exactly how to get ahead, stay ahead, and close out the game.

Based on these assumptions, my deck choices would have to fit these criteria; 1) Allow me to come back or win from an unfavorable board state, 2) if possible, have decent winrates against the top tier decks, and, 3) be decks that I enjoy playing, as I was committed to two or three hours of Hearthstone ladder every day and wanted to enjoy the experience. So after running the numbers with my wife with these criteria in mind, this was the lineup I came up with:

Given that there was no such lineup that could beat all four top tier decks, we decided that this lineup makes the most sense with a Shaman ban in mind. I also believed that the Malygos package in my Druid deck would help support my assumptions of playing/winning from unfavorable positions. Most of the matchups came out to be even, and at worst, slightly unfavored, so it was up to me to practice and nail down the matchups against Dragon Warrior, Yogg Druid, and Zoo. Fortunately, the ladder was quite saturated with these decks, and every time I lost to Shaman with my decks, I could just say “that didn’t count,” which made for a much healthier ladder experience.

So the big day finally came, and here I was, competing for a chance to play at Blizzcon. It was kind of hilarious to think about it because everything kind of happened out of nowhere. Suddenly I’m in the venue with all these top pros that I saw regularly on stream, and even though I didn’t directly interact with them, they all turned out to be friendly and courteous young men.

"So the big day finally came, and here I was, competing for a chance to play at Blizzcon."



In the Tavern Hero tournament, I managed to win enough games to advance to the main Preliminaries – I earned my first win by beating my opponent’s Dragon Warrior three times in a row, and in the second win, I beat my opponent’s Zoo three times in a row. The plan worked! All the “practice” in the ladder payed off! Again, who knew? And the fact that my wife and I pooled together our professional expertise to try to win a children’s card game? We definitely didn’t see that coming, but it was fun, and I guess that’s what mattered most.

I would return to the venue again to compete in the Summer Championship Preliminaries, but unfortunately, my first match was against Vanqswisher, where I was obliterated 3-1 by his mostly aggressive lineup, and my first match in the loser’s bracket was against Dog, who did not bring the typical lineup and I was thoroughly outclassed and out played in every way and lost 3-1, despite having favorable matchups on paper. And just like that, my tournament run was over, and I saw my name crossed out in the list of Tavern Heroes on stream.



Takeaways and thoughts about the Hearthstone competitive experience



Even though my Summer HCT run was quite short and unnoticed in the public eye, I believe I was able to gain some insight into the competitive Hearthstone scene, as well as gain a perspective of the game that I haven’t seen before. First, I noticed that participating in a Hearthstone tournament opened up a completely new facet of the game that contains a significant amount of strategic thinking and analysis, particularly in formulating lineups and anticipating the tournament meta. This is something one cannot do on the ladder.

"Playing the game with a much larger purpose in mind made for a much more enjoyable playing experience."



Secondly, playing the game with a much larger purpose in mind (such as preparing for a tournament) made for a much more enjoyable playing experience because it forced me to stretch my cognitive abilities in my deckbuilding and observation of the meta, instead of just playing to gain arbitrary ranks with the best decks. This principle could also be applied to playing the game with the purpose of learning/mastering a deck. And really, anything that takes the game beyond playing a tier 1 deck to grind out ladder ranks will be a plus, as the act of winning as a standalone result will eventually feel hollow.

Lastly, I believe that the majority of the Hearthstone player base will enjoy the game more by going out to events like Fireside Gatherings, if not just for the social experience and meeting others who share a similar enthusiasm for the game. At my work, whenever I notice a staff member play arena on his/her phone during a break from an annual training seminar, or catch a patient at my clinic trying to squeeze in a ladder game on his tablet before group therapy starts, I can’t help but wonder just how many people at my hospital play Hearthstone, and how cool it would be to get together with these people outside of work to play some games, or even have a friendly staff tournament. It’s definitely encouraging to see that Blizzard is ramping up their efforts to create these events each year. To conclude my story, it took a little bit of convincing, but I’m really grateful that I was provided an outlet to live out a childhood dream of competing in a gaming tournament, and gain a chance to compete for a world championship. The journey was definitely worth it and absolutely enjoyable, and despite the results, I had tons of fun and I hope more people could experience Hearthstone in this way.