It’s all I’ve been playing. I got a new job the same day I got access so that was a very exciting day! I’ve been streaming me playing and listening to tunes but nobody to come and talk with. Le sigh. However I feel like this is a good chance to give Hearthstone a review.

Hearthstone is a Blizzard’s take on the CCG genre that has been recently blowing up given Magic: The Gathering’s success with the digital version of their game. (In case you didn’t already know, Blizzard had a Warcraft TCG for awhile but ever since the development of Hearthstone they have abandoned support for the physical card game all together.)

When you first launchh the game you start with one of the basic decks (The Mage i believe? I’m not sure) and you must defeat the bots of a specific deck to earn access into their decks. You can get the deck you want, then just start playing in unranked or ranked right off the bat, but I wouldn’t advise that because you’re not going to have a good time. Usually you can just unlock all of them and be on your way within an hour. Once you unlock all 9 decks you gain access to the infamous Arena.

There are 3 ways to play Hearthstone, and this is what makes it so interesting.

1. Unranked, you use a custom deck and duel a random player of your skill or a friend.

2. Ranked, duel with random people of your ranking on the ladder with a custom built deck.

and finally, the most exciting and terrifying one

3. The Arena.

The Arena costs an entry fee of 150 in game gold (which is earned by completing daily quests, achievements and winning normal games), or paying $1.99 real life money. The difference between arena is you draft your deck through a process that looks a lot like slots. You chose 1 of 3 randomly selected decks, then start to choose one of 3 randomly selected cards until you chose 30 cards. You only play against people in arena who are also using an arena drafted deck and they find people of your experience level. How it stands, you get 3 losses and can win up to 9 times. With every win, you get a better key which will open a box with appropriate prizes for the progression you have made. Personally I’ve not gotten further than going 2/3 though I did get 100 gold back and some nice cards in the pack, but you are guaranteed at least a pack of cards, which costs 100 gold or $2.99 for 2 packs. So even if you completely blow out and go 0/3 you’ll get a little gold and a pack so it’s not that bad for how much fun it really is. Kind of gambling esque but much more fun. We all know how much blizzard loves money so they had to jump into the free to play/micro transaction system somehow and I know this is the best way to go about it. They did a good job at making it NOT pay to win so much that makes it unfair. I mean I’ve heard people buying 40 packs for $50 and only getting one legendary.

There is also a crafting system in place in the game as well. When you earn/buy cards and packs you can disenchant a lot of those cards for dust, which allows you to craft any of the cards, though of course a card like Deathwing costs a lot of dust. I personally find it balanced out well.

Hearthstone, in its few short months of beta is an amazing game. I have little background in card games. I played Magic when i was in elementary school but I preferred Pokemon, then comes Yugio and i got into that for a little bit though I never played competitively. This background knowledge only helped me so much and I have to say I was able to pick up on how to play pretty early on. It’s a very casual and fun experience.

I have only had a few days with this game but I’m loving everything about it, The balance of the game is pretty good and I’ve only experienced a few bugs with cards floating awkwardly and in random places and random disconnects. I still am not really that good and have a lot of learning to do but I’m extremely excited to see where Blizzard takes this

Just to finish this off, here’s a couple videos of mine. 🙂 Like and sub to me on youtube if you guys want, no pressure though.