Why I am Retiring from Hearthstone for The Elder Scrolls Legends

Hello,

If you are reading this you are a sexy beast. I don’t care what your mother says.

About Me:

I am a 30 year old male gamer that up until July 3rd focused his time on trying to break into the competitive hearthstone scene. I started playing hearthstone around the time the game was released. I wasn’t very good though. I would usually putter around rank 14. This was around the time Trump and Eloise were huge factors in the scene. More about Trump later. While playing hearthstone I quit after deciding League of Legends was more my game. For you see I lived in NYC for almost a decade and when I decided to move back home I lived with my brother, his wife and my niece. My brother was very into League and we were both into games. My brother is the reason I now can’t turn my computer on without turning on a twitch stream. He is also the reason I got into competitive gaming. For you see we have an age difference of 5 years and I wanted to find a common ground for us to enjoy together. Luck have it i’m now more obsessed with this world than he is.

What’s hilarious to me is that as a 3rd grader who grew up bottom middle class my first two games were Warcraft and Daggerfall. Which you know were developed by Blizzard and Bethesda. Shortly after my parents found out you could literally make your character naked in Daggerfall we were grounded from that game. So it seems destined that 22 years later I would somehow end up spending my time as an adult man playing one of their titles. I was also really into Magic the Gathering at this age. I still remember mustering the 50 dollars together through chores to split my first box of Magic cards with my friend Lance. I still remember the smell of those packs.

I played WOW after high school and into college to the point where if I didn’t quit playing i wasn’t graduating. Long story short i left WOW 4 times. Logged YEARS of playing time. Defeated raid bosses as server firsts etc etc.

My short lived Hearthstone Career:

I came back to Hearthstone late last summer as I heard of a new expansion. I quickly figured out the meta and peaked at rank 3. Firebat(who was world champion in 2015) and I became friends on twitter and this made me more eager than ever to become one of the greats. After a few months I finally hit legend in January of 2017! It was amazing. It felt incredible. That month I peaked at number 49 in North America. Not bad for a first time legend player.

I told myself that if I ever hit legend I would start to stream. As i love to talk. I love to play games. I love to spend my time with quality people while playing games instead of alone in my room.

So me and my kid brother set out to set me up for steaming. I bought the best MIC(at the time) and webcam. I streamed everyday for a few weeks. And i was growing rapidly. I really cater to the people that want to better themselves. A lot of my regulars still say I had one of the best streams and I was their favorite streamer.

But after awhile I was realizing just how competitive it was to break into the Hearthstone scene. I started to lose momentum, i started to tilt a lot on stream and react in a not so professional way.

So i quit streaming. Kept playing hearthstone. Hitting legend every month but realizing it wasn’t doing anything but occupying my time. I was not having fun while grinding ladder on hearthstone. It felt stale. It felt too random. I would constantly climb to rank 2 by the 4th of the month and sometimes not hit legend until the 28th of the month. Imagine falling that far, that many times and still persisting. It’s not easy.

Why I am quitting Hearthstone for ESL

So on July 3rd I saw Trump tweet out that he was playing ESL and he really liked this new expansion. I was tired of shoving pirate warrior in hearthstone so I tuned in. I immediately fell in love. With the game, not Trump. And if you don’t know Trump one of the things I will say about him is he is a very good teacher. I decided to say hell with it why not play both games? So as i was installing the Bethesda launcher i was still slamming pirate warrior on ladder but salivating at the chance to finally play a new game! A fresh take.

The game was finally ready to play so i started it up with anticipation! While still shoving pirate warrior on ladder. Though my attention to hearthstone was waning. I realized it’s very hard to play both games at the same time so I shut hearthstone down and focused on ESL.

Generally when I am passionate about something I do everything I can to maximize that passion. I want to figure out the meta, i want to figure out the community and I want to make sure i’m making the right plays.

After finishing the solo campaign in a few hours i looked at my cards and started making what I thought was going to be the best deck of all time.

Drain and Pilfer

I was wrong. But the deck seemed so strong! Until i brought it to rank 12 ladder. Where i shit you not I lost 8 games in a row. I was heartbroken. But I realized i just didn’t have the cards to be competitive. So I posted this in the ESL subreddit.

Text of Reddit Post for the Lazy:

“Hey guys,

I was planning on saving my gold up to buy a pre made deck. I’m not yet going to buy dark brother hood as i want to make sure i like the game before spending real monkaS money.

Are the premade decks worth it? I made a pil and drain deck and am rank 10 atm.

Any advice for a new player would be great

I know about the one site with deck lists but i can’t make any decks yet.”

I was greeted by warmth(for the most part). I was desperately trying to get enough gold to make a premade deck. But as gold is a valued resource I did not want to use it unwisely. My reddit post was simple. I’m new here what pre made deck should I buy to climb ladder seriously with.

It was JakalDX that told me about this post that makes the Alduin deck competitive with a few small tweaks. So i set out to first play this deck to get a better understanding of it and to tweak it so i could better face my opponents. I had never had such large win streaks in any game. I was getting really fired up.

Whiteman007 another reddit user clued me into a tournament going on that very night on Schwiddys channel. Where I got my first twitch drop of 1500 dust. This would now allow me to make my Alduin deck almost perfect. Because up to this point I had not spent a single dollar on this game.

My Alduin deck would only allow me to go so far though. I was stuck around rank 4 and couldn’t quite make it to 3. So i decided to spend my first hard earned dollars on the Dark Brotherhood expansion.

I did this because at the time I thought it was the latest expansion. I was wrong but after 5–6 hours(it’s not easy) i finished it. And i went off to make a new deck that i saw on https://www.legends-decks.com/. I didn’t have enough cards to make anything. Even after finishing TDB.

I was sad but i realized my core % was very very low. So wanting to truly test my skills I spent 20 on packs for core, 20 on packs for heroes, and the welcome bundle.

Now I was ready. So i tuned into to see who was streaming at that very moment. A guy named Bradford Lee was playing what looked like my type of deck. It was a battlemage that used charge to conquer its opponents quickly. Before Brad jumped over to do an arena he showed his stats with this deck on rank 3 ladder ( I was also rank 3 at this time) and they were 13–1. I now knew the deck I wanted to play!

Shout out to the initial creator of this deck Charm3r

But I was missing a few cards so I decided to throw in some things and take some things out. One example, personally I don’t like Dark Rebirth and realized it sat in my hand more often than ever being played. But to each their own.

On July 6th I hit legend. I couldn’t believe I was able to hit legend in a game in literally 60 hours from the time I installed it.

And that is why I am retiring from competitive hearthstone and focusing on ESL. Well that and I personally believe that the community is better than any other in any game I've ever played. I can confidently say that even though I've only been a member for 3 days.

I am now going to focus on becoming one of the best names in this game. As well as streaming weekdays and weekends. I hope that you will join me in my conquest of Legend 1. I am currently top 100. But I really want to hit Top 10.

I want to thank some specific people now:

NoxiousScythe

Charm3r

BradfordLee

YumYum36

BurntheSky

Schwiddy

JakalDX

Zubul

Contact Info:

https://www.twitch.tv/flextsl