Hearthstone experience & Gwent experience

25k games of Hearthstone later. ~30 tournaments in (maybe some statistician somewhere knows)

400 games of Gwent later. 0 tournaments in.



My Hearthstone experience:



I'm going to start off by saying Hearthstone completely changed the card game world by showing how successful & fun an online interactive card game can be. The latest nerfs, expansion, standard have all been big and great changes from my perspective. If they keep changing Hearthstone in such a positive fashion it's going to be an absolute beast of a game. I played un'goro non-stop in april & completely loved it. The game is an amazing game to play while streaming and i plan on doing more of that in the future & will continue to participate in more tournaments from time to time.



However as a competitive player...

For the longest time it didn't feel like Hearthstone had its veteran or competitive players in mind between dr booms, shredders, portals. Taking 6 months to nerf undertakers, years to not nerf dr booms, capping prize pools whilst doing nothing outside of the world championship for us http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/legal/community-competition-license.html (which also happens to fuck you if you want a decent sponsor yet arn't a popular streamer), making conquest the go-to format, not adding tournament features in-game, not adding replay systems. But with the changes over the last year there seems to be more hope for competitive players. I also know personally, I could have been a much more positive influence on the competitive scene but failed in that regard. Reynad & Amaz were probably the two most influential players in that regard. Firebat & th3rat were other players that put effort into the scene as well.



I played Hearthstone more than it was meant to be played which helped lead to this.



Hearthstone alone stopped being REALLY fun for me about 2 months in (aside from the first week of expansions) I do realize i grind through new game content faster than most. Tournaments were still fun for a long time & streaming it was fun for a while. Conquest kind of killed the fun of tournaments for me as some of you might know by now 8). Also the prelim ESL admin ruling costing me and other players games, and continuing to do so in prelims after that was not fun.



Gwent

I never planned on playing gwent since it didn't look fun to me. One drunk streaming night later i played it and quickly found i was both having a blast and being challenged. The game requires you to think ahead from turn 1 or you will probably lose from a missplay vs other good players. Similar to my favorite matchups in Hearthstone where both players play almost all or all of their cards. It's very easy to make atleast one missplay at any point in those games that end up costing you the game.



I have to give absolute props, i've never played or seen a card game like it before in terms of the way it plays out, on top of that it's pretty damn polished.



The devs seem like they care about game balance, they are already making alot of small nerfs/buffs similar to what icefrog would do (a game balancer i'm very familiar with, after playing dota ~10 years).



So yeah with all that in mind Gwent is right up my alley, i'm going to be playing it for the foreseeable future. I also happen to fucking love The Witcher world even though i never played it (I don't really play single player games). But my single player counterpart, my brother, was quite obsessed with it when it came out so i've seen/heard of quite a few snipits of it from here and there. I also now have an excuse to play it now that i stream & play Gwent.

Reply · Report Post