Of all the strategic debates constantly swirling around Blizzard's Hearthstone, there's one question that seems simple on the surface but generates a surprising amount of debate among players. That question: is it better to go first or go second in a match?

The fact that there's such a debate shows just how effective Blizzard's in-game solution for inter-turn balance has been. The player that goes first has an important tempo advantage in Hearthstone, getting access to mana crystals before the opponent has a chance to respond with the same resources (i.e. the first player gets to use three mana crystals on Turn 3 before the opponent has the same chance). To make up for that difference, the designers at Blizzard give the second player a free extra card draw at the start of the game, as well as "The Coin," a card that gives a free one-time-use mana crystal.

There are enough pros and cons to each turn order position that even serious players can't seem to agree on which side has an advantage. There is an answer to this question, though, and Blizzard has addressed it a few times in the Hearthstone's short history. Last September, early in the game's closed beta, Hearthstone Lead Designer Ben Brode shared statistics showing a slight advantage for the first player, which becomes even more negligible when you reach expert-level play:

Across all leagues – 4.4 percent better to go first, on average

(i.e. 52.2 percent of the time, Player 1 wins)

Master League Only – 0.7 percent better to go first, on average

(i.e. 50.4 percent of the time, Player 1 wins)

These statistics weren't consistent across Hearthstone's various classes, though. As Brode explained, "Some classes are actually slightly better going second, in Master League only (Priest and Rogue win 51.5 percent of the time when going second in this league)..." Blizzard's stats also show expert-level players seeing less disadvantage to going second. Perhaps more experienced players simply know how to make better use of the crucial advantages of The Coin and extra drawn card when going second.

A couple months later, at Blizzcon, Brode and Lead Designer Eric Dodds shared updated statistics showing a six percent advantage for first-turn players among lower-ranked "copper and silver" matches and a 2.6 percent advantage for the first player in Master-level matches. Brode and Dodds confirmed that the advantage was still there in a February interview with Hearthpwn, saying it's "about three percent better to go first over second" and that the advantage persists across classes, save for some specific decks built around going second.

Ars’ analysis shows near-perfect balance

Not content to take Blizzard's slightly outdated word for it, we decided to conduct our own analysis of the first-turn advantage in top-level play. For our mini-study, we examined online recordings for matches from three top-level Hearthstone tournaments: the Hearthstone Invitational at last year's Blizzcon, the Hearthstone tournament at this year's Dreamhack Bucharest, and six seasons' worth of matches broadcast as part of ESGN's Fight Night Hearthstone. In each case, these were some of the best Hearthstone players in the world playing matches with real money and prestige on the line, which should eliminate a lack of skill or deck quality as a confounding factor. Besides, since Hearthstone assigns which player goes first randomly, any inherent differences in skill between individual players/decks should balance out in the long run anyway.

In the end, our analysis of these 219 pro-level Hearthstone matches found a razor-thin, almost nonexistent advantage for the player going first, who won 110 times (50.23 percent) versus 109 times (49.77 percent) for the second player. That's an extremely statistically insignificant edge, even though there is a significant margin of error (+/- 6.6 percent at a 95 percent confidence level) that means the actual results might be a little less balanced.

Despite the overall statistical dead heat between the first and second players, there was a lot of variance in the relative turn-order performance of the various classes in our sample. While these sub-sample averages have even worse margins of error than the full sample and should be taken with an extra grain of salt, the results seem to show that some classes definitely play better on one side or the other of the opening coin flip, at least at the expert level.

Rogues in our sample, for instance, won only 40 percent of the time when going first but 62.5 percent of the time when going second, which makes some sense when you consider how important The Coin is to activating some early-turn "combo" abilities in the popular Miracle Rogue decks. On the other side, Hunters played at an even 50/50 when going second, but they won 61.54 percent of the time when going first, showing the importance of that tempo advantage when rushing the opponent with an array of beasts.

Balancing turn-based games is tough

Achieving Hearthstone's level of statistical parity between first- and second-player win rates is not an easy feat in designing turn-based games. In a game like League of Legends, simply going first during the all-important Champion drafting phase gives the blue team a 30 percent advantage over the red team, according to an analysis by the Daily Dot. In a game like Hero Academy, going first seems to be worth a handful of rating points in league-level play.

The imbalances apply to more ancient games, too. Tournament analysis shows that the White player, going first, wins anywhere from 52 to 55 percent of the time in Chess (accounting for draws). In Go, the first player is generally accepted to have an advantage worth anywhere from five to seven points, though the rules didn't explicitly account for this tilt until the 1930s.

In other games, turn order can be enough to completely determine the outcome of a perfectly played match. Computer analysis has proven that the first player can always win Connect Four if he or she plays completely correctly, yet a similar analysis shows that the second player can force a win in some versions of Othello/Reversi. The word game Ghost is also almost always winnable by the second player, depending on which dictionary you use.

The balancing of fellow collectible card game Magic: The Gathering is perhaps the most instructive example for Hearthstone, though. When the game was first introduced in the '90s, the player going first won about 60 percent of the time, according to a Wizards of the Coast (WotC) R&D study. That number mirrors the 20 percent first-turn advantage Brode says the Hearthstone team observed during alpha testing of its game.

In response to this finding, WotC changed Magic: The Gathering's rules so that the first player doesn't get to draw a card on his or her first turn (note the similarities to Hearthstone's extra card for the second player). After that rule change, WotC did another study where it looked at the effect of winning the opening die roll on a couple of high-level tournaments in 2003 (the winner of the die roll gets to choose whether to go first or draw an extra card by going second). The results, as Director of Magic R&D Randy Buehler put it, "were fascinating":

In New Orleans, 47 percent of players who won the die roll went on to win the match—47 percent! That means winning the die roll was a bad thing. The only explanation that makes any sense is that going second was actually correct some of the time, but no one knew when to choose 'draw.' In [the Hiroshima tournament], the results were a little less crazy: 53 percent of players who won the die roll went on to win the match.

Magic's balancing efforts are especially interesting in comparison to Hearthstone, which doesn't give either player a choice about whether to go first or second; the game simply assigns both roles randomly. If the game were changed so that one lucky player got to choose the play order each game, perhaps we'd see more strategizing over which role suited specific decks.

So back to our original question: is it better to go first or go second in a given Hearthstone match? The answer seems to tilt ever-so-slightly toward going first, but Blizzard should be commended for creating a turn-based game that's about as balanced as it can be between the two sides.