A lot of people have complained about Hearthstone recently.

Some have said that the meta has been stale. Others have said that recent policies have shifted the game toward pay-to-win. Still others have said that recent expansions have added nothing new to the game. However, I think that all of these complaints are just symptoms of a bigger problem. Hearthstone’s classes have an identity crisis, and until that crisis is solved, we are going to continue to see these problems over and over again.

The Magic of Competition

Before I dive into this problem, let’s talk about another collectible trading card game: Magic: The Gathering. Magic’s lead designer, Mark Rosewater, came up with something called the color wheel. It was a set of rules that defined what each of Magic’s colors did. Each color had a main theme, and also leached some side themes from its neighbors. Red, for example, is the color of direct damage. However, it is neighbors with green and black, and thus inherited some of black’s weenies and sacrifice mechanics, and green’s big dumpy creatures.

Meanwhile, black is color of sacrifice and trickery playing with resources of life and the graveyard, but also inherited card draw from its neighbor blue and direct damage and removal from its neighbor red. This is a vast oversimplification of the color wheel theory, but it’s enough to understand what has kept MTG design on point until now.



This color pie created an identity for each of the game’s core colors. No matter what set was being made, the rules of this color pie were followed. For example, in Planar Chaos, Wrath of God, a white card that killed all creatures, was reprinted as Damnation in black. Wrath of God fit white’s “equality” theme while Damnation fit black’s “destroy creatures” them even though they are opposites on the color wheel. The card had useful synergies in both colors.

So why am I talking about Magic in a Hearthstone article? Because, Hearthstone lacks a color wheel, and the balance it helps to provide. It hasn’t established what its classes do and THIS is the center of its identity crisis.

Class it up

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We know a little bit about Hearthstone’s classes on the surface. Mage deals direct damage, Warlock sacrifices its resources, Paladin swarms the board with minions, Priest heals, so on so forth. The issue is that Hearthstone’s “color wheel” has been broken into shards.

Let’s look at Priest for a minute. Priest’s major theme is healing. It’s supposed to be the best healer in the game. It even has a healing focused hero power. So it should be hard for other classes to heal right?

Well, no. Every other class in the game ALSO has healing. Paladin just has healing focused cards as does Druid. Warrior can generate armor which is like healing, and Mage can both create armor through secrets and make use of lifestealing elementals. Hunter even has healing through the use of lifesteal beasts. Heck, Warlock, which is supposedly themed around sacrificing your own life, now has some of the most powerful healing in the game, and uses it frequently in Zoo and Control decks. Perhaps the ONLY class that can’t heal easily is Rogue, and even then they have a hero card that generates armor, and they can make use of several neutral cards with healing effects.



Yes, a little bit of screwing with class identity is fine, but Hearthstone does this all the time to the extent that class identity means very little anymore. For example, Paladin is supposed to be the class that buffs things so it was given the “hand-buff” mechanic in Mean Streets of Gadgetzan. Fast forward a few years and now Warlock has the “hand-buff” mechanic… for no good reason! Yes, they are making better use out of it than Paladin ever did. But it doesn’t fit their themeing at all. They don’t have to sacrifice anything for this buff. They just do it.

And this would be fine, if Hearthstone continued to explore the hand-buff mechanic in Paladin, but it simply didn’t. It wasn’t particularly powerful in Mean Streets so the devs just abandoned it until recently.

Meta

This is actually why the Hearthstone meta stays so stale all the time. The devs are constantly coming up with new mechanics that break class identity, and then abandoning them just as quickly. Without building up these mechanics and supporting a class’s identity, the meta won’t ever evolve beyond tiny snapshots.



What do I mean by that? Well let’s take a look at Mage right now. Mage is getting a whole bunch of new cards that interact with its hero power. That’s a really neat idea, and it even fits the Mage theme, to an extent, since the Mage hero power does direct damage. Mage can become known for being a “hero power” focused class.

The problem, is that Mage won’t get any hero power focused cards beyond Rastakhan's Rumble. So the deck either does well with just the cards from this expansion, or it flops and we end up never using these cards at all. If the devs, say, started “printing” more hero power focused cards in the next expansion, then we might see hero power focused Mage decks rise and sink in viability over the year. This would be a great time to try, considering Paladin is currently one of the most powerful classes in the meta and is a hero power focused class.

So why does this identity crisis spawn all these other problems we talked about? Well, if Hearthstone devs keep swapping out what mechanics define their classes, the meta is always going to be defined by whatever class in the recent expansion has the most powerful cards. This is what makes the game more pay-to-win. If they keep swapping out mechanics then we will never see less powerful mechanics get a buff to become meta relevant. This is what makes the meta stale. This is also what increases the chance of new expansions being useless, since they don’t naturally synergize with other expansions.

Once they establish a class identity, then they need to work on expansion identities, which is a second and equally important problem. Let’s look at Rastakhan's Rumble. Warrior is getting a lot of synergy with dragons, something they have had in the past. Druid is getting some beast synergy too. So is this a “tags matter” set? Will we see other classes getting similar mechanics? No. Mage hasn’t gotten any elementals and Warlock hasn’t gotten any demons yet. While this can change, the legendaries in the set clearly don’t care about tags, so that’s not the central theme of the set.

Thematic Issues

So what is the central theme? On the surface it’s this whole arena business, a sort of pseudo “Legends of the Hidden Temple” theme. That’s great for flavor, but what about mechanics? That’s the issue, there is no central mechanical theme.

This is another thing that Magic has over Hearthstone. Magic’s blocks all explore a theme. There are sets that explore color interactions, sets that explore tags, sets that explore artifacts, and more.

Hearthstone rarely has a mechanical theme for its sets. Early on it did. Naxxramus was all about Deathrattles and graveyard recursion. Blackrock Mountain was about dragons. Even TGT largely interacted with hero powers.

But what was the theme of The Boomsday Project? Mechs right? But only a few classes got mech synnergy. In fact, there were so few mechs that were worth playing in The Boomsday Project, that they were largely ignored.



Hearthstone devs could have approached this one of two ways. They could have printed more mechs in more classes, thus increasing the chance of mech synergy being important. Or, they could have printed more mechs in other expansions. It appears as if they are doing neither.

It’s not entirely clear why Blizzard has shifted away from sets with more consistent theming and more pronounced class identities. While, yes, this does make each new expansion very shiny and exciting, it does little to help the longevity of the game. If Blizzard is going to want Hearthstone to survive in this new world of competitive digital CCGs, then they are going to have to make some serious mechanical decisions in the future.

Otherwise, the game will remain stale, and stale games don’t survive long.