Well this is mostly a top end ranked thing, which you definitely don't have to participate in, if you just play casual then you can experiment with any number of decks. Also it's never a guarantee that the StrifeCro deck is invincible. But yes if you play the exact same deck everyone else plays then obviously it's probably going to be at least 50% luck. The old ranking system didn't have this issue since it didn't take 125 games over 500 or whatever to get to legend/3 star masters (for like a week or two and then it resets so it's even more pointless) so people would mess around with different decks and different classes.

@bisonhero: With Beta invites it was like a doubling, tripling or quadrupling of the playerbase more or less; you started out with like 10,000 people or so having beta invites, then it went up to 25,000, then 50,000, then 200,000 and so on; it's probably up to like 3-4 million invites out by now so making it open beta is just going to draw in a couple hundred thousand players or so and there's only going to be 10-20% more players; hence as we go along until they add new cards every part of the game other than friendly or experimental constructed play will get more and more repetitive.

@fredchuckdave: I still can't believe how fucking well I did with that Arena Shaman deck where I literally had never seen 80% of the cards I was picking, and only had a very basic sense of what Shaman mechanics even were (since no Overload cards are in the starter pool). My opponents were like wall-to-wall noob city, because that deck should've been like 1 win at best.

Now everybody in Arena is a tryhard, and if you get a so-so pool of cards there is just no way to get more than 3 or 4 wins because most Arena players know what they're doing.

@bisonhero: They did buff the 1-4 win gold rates so you're basically just buying a pack and doing the arena on the side; but eventually arena becomes annoying enough that I just resort to buying packs (I still have like a 65-70% win rate since it became stale, but it just doesn't feel rewarding after a point). Even 9 wins isn't particularly satisfying anymore because the rewards are so shitty, and a 12 win run could take 3 hours. It's still fun to simulate drafting via hearthhead or what have you, it's just not any fun to play the deck.

I started playing last night, and I've won every match except one, which was my first time trying Arena mode. 4-5 wins in casual, 5 wins in ranked, now rank 22. I'm playing a Priest deck and I dunno if I'm good at these kinds of games, if my experience of playing Magic: The Gathering is translating really well (understanding things like card advantage, mana curve, and removal), or if Europe is just not that competitive. 90% of my games played involved me going down to between 10 and 20 life in the early rounds, then building an insurmountable force of minions in the late game. This is exactly how I play Magic - control, not aggro. People I've played tend to prefer attacking the hero when they could attack my minions. Anyway, as someone who's usually pretty rubbish at multiplayer games, for me to have had such a successful start is...let's say, alarming.

I came into Hearthstone from the perspective of playing MTG, and I have to say that I very much appreciate the ways in which Hearthstone is similar to Magic and the ways in which it is different. The notion of not actually having to play land cards, instead just earning one mana every turn, takes a lot of the frustration out of Magic - no having to mulligan after getting a hand that has no land or no creatures - but it also takes out some of the depth and strategy. I think in a lot of ways that that is basically the design principle driving Hearthstone - elegance and tight design instead of depth and flexibility. I love Magic an awful lot, but it is janky as fuck. Maybe my favourite mechanic in Hearthstone that differs from Magic is that the question of damage dealing is done by the attacker, not by the defender. Magic, by design, is a very reactive game, especially blue spells, and Hearthstone is the opposite - I haven't seen any cards that can be played during other people's turns, there seems to be no equivalent of "flash" or "instants". Again, this is a case where Hearthstone chose to give the player a more assertive role and streamlined mechanics instead of allowing for extra layers of strategy, and I greatly respect that design decision.

@atlas: In casual people are mostly trying out different builds or jsut newbies getting their feet wet. Ranked is also pretty much just a stomp in early ranks as it's mostly people playing with prebuild non custom decks, or just unoptimized decks in general. If you want to get a feel for the competition straight away, play the Arena mode.

There are some cards that activate during the enemy's turn, those are secrets, they are class specific and not all of the classes have them (Priest doesn't for example). There are also cards with immediate damage effects, buffs and other doodads that are a must for arena play as they allow you to react straight away the same turn, in a fashion.

(PS: getting all the classes to 10 will give you some feel for them, as well as provide a good starting amount of coins to play arena mode for free)

@tennmuerti: I hope that playing constructed continues to be fun and gets challenging without going overboard. I don't really like draft as a format in Magic or any CCG, but I'm sure that higher level ranked play is people who've worked out the most optimised OP decks full of cards that Blizzard is as we speak working out how to nerf (at least they can do it immediately, unlike MTG which has to wait two years for cards to go out of play), so that's not much fun either. Maybe I'll dabble in arena, get far enough in ranked, and then decide that the best way to play the game is with friends (of whom I have like two at the moment).

I've seen the "secret" mechanic - I test built a paladin deck that had secrets (bad deck, got crushed by Mage AI). I get that there are reactive elements to Hearthstone, but it's nowhere near the level of MTG. They're much more like trap cards in Yu-Gi-Oh!, which I never really liked. I played a secret card which resurrected a creature when it was killed, and brought it back with one health. But this triggered on the first creature that died, whereas I'd actually want to choose which creature this applied to, like in Magic where my best creature is about to go down and I play a card like Brave the Elements to neutralise the damage, or Doom Blade to remove the threat to the card before it attacks, or a blue counter spell like Cancel etc. Almost everything that I can do to counteract opposing threat - such as my favourite Priest removal cards, Shadow Word: Pain and Shadow Word: Death - has to happen on my turn, by playing minions with abilities or by playing spells. There is a level of control and flexibility in reactive Magic play that Hearthstone, with its core design, will never be able to match. And that's fine, because they're designing a different game.

And yeah, there are cards that do different things (I love seeing card that actually have text with explains what "lifelink", "deathtouch", and "double strike" means - although Hearthstone does have key word "battle cry" whereas Magic cards have to write "when X enters the battlefield...), and I look forward to trying out new deck types.

This game is fantastic, i have a Windows 8 laptop/tablet and the game plays really well on a touchscreen.

Definitely prefer using touch controls over the mouse.

This is basically how I feel.

Also, I have literally never felt like an Arena loss was my fault. It's always something like "Oh, cool, that guy pulled 3 flamestrikes and a legendary and I have 0 UTHs and 2 mostly useless class rares, and then he topdecked a charge the turn before I had lethal. Neat shit game." I like drafting more than standard in most card games, but Arena in Hearthstone manages to feel completely unfair.

Did you know that Arena matchmaking is based on number of wins? So for instance, if you have an 11 win run and you're gunning for 12, you will most likely face someone who has around 11 wins. The higher you climb in arena, the more often you'll see crazy decks like that.

Mages in particular have been complained about a lot by the community. Some of their neutral cards are just too powerful. Polymorph, Fireball, Flamestrike, Water Elemental.

@colorbrandon: Polymorph is fine more or less, Water Elemental is quite good but I think it would be fine as a rare. Fireball is the best card in the game in any mode, Flamestrike is the 2nd best card in arena. Frostbolt is pretty absurd too.

Mortal Strike, a rare card for a warrior, is a very good card in arena; and it is a straight downgrade from Fireball.

@colorbrandon said:

Oh, so that's how it's set up? What a terrible way to do it.

Like ajamafalous, I've drafted in other games, and I much prefer just doing a round robin of sorts with other people. Happen to get a good deck? Then go 4-0, you earned it! Instead, you are progressively more likely to be matched with some asshole who isn't even very good, but he got so many good Legendaries and Epics that his Mage deck just autowins unless you get exactly the right removal draws.

So yeah, neat shit game.

@bisonhero: Well it's the same as it has always been with MMR, while on paper a functional system it never actually winds up being interesting or entertaining at all and "skill" becomes this arbitrary amount of time spent researching and copying other people rather than actually trying to innovate for yourself. The "noobs" in arena are extremely rare though so it really is just becoming a diceroll every time out beyond the first few games; streamers have a bit more luck because morons queue against them intentionally; but even in those cases they don't maintain particularly high win rates.

@fredchuckdave: MMR in online multiplayer is basically the worst thing to ever happen to multiplayer gaming. I just want to be the king of my sad little kingdom, whether it be a local arcade or CCG shop, or a friend group that includes 6-12 people.

What I don't want is to constantly have a 50% win ratio because the game is continually handing me more and more savage assholes, because then it feels like I'm stuck in a nightmarish Red Queen's Race where I'm trying my ass off and it doesn't feel like I'm doing any better at all because I'm still losing as much as I win.

Maybe this is because I didn't commit to a sport as a child, so I have no particular interest in being put in higher and higher leagues where the competition is tougher and tougher. I'm not out there trying to be the fucking Wayne Gretzky of Hearthstone. If I get a particularly good Arena deck, randomly matchmake me some games, and let me thrash 7-12 people.

@bisonhero: Well there's nothing wrong with having a skill driven system, it just needs to be completely hidden from the players (the old system in Hearthstone had many more decks being played in interesting fashions, now it is literally 2 or 3 decks all the way to legend); like random MMR that you have no idea if it exists or not is usually fine and level-based matchmaking isn't necessarily terrible. I used to play Brood War with some of the best players in the world, and we knew that we were the best players because of how well we played not because we had a gold star next to our names. Those same players are just unbelievably better than say your well above-average MMO player. Sure we played the game for 10 years, but there was this sort of exalted feeling that I've never gotten outside of Warhammer basically, but being the best player in Warhammer (which didn't have MMR) is nothing compared to being a top 5 player in an exclusive group in old Brood War.

Personally I was never an elitist but I was amongst those that actually "deserved" being elitist. Now there's elitism because "get legend scrub" or "get gladiator scrub" or "get masters scrub," it's just so fucking stupid. I mean we could take a random sampling of the very best players from any of these systems and put them into that old Brood War situation and they'd be maybe passably mediocre at best. Yes we knew how to best exploit the system and it was a ridiculously steep hill to climb but there were people willing to help back then in a brutal climate, now it's as simple as go read a FAQ or a guide or some shit and copy copy copy. I can't tell you how many people in Warhammer would be like "Oh I was a Gladiator in WoW," then they'd turn out to be shit at a game with actually adaptive free-form PvP.

@fredchuckdave: Yeah, no, I'm not interested in a skill-driven system at all. So everything you said does not resonate with me in any particular way. I play multiplayer games pretty casually, and I don't give enough of a shit to research and practice any one game very much. So I'm increasingly pushing most multiplayer games out of my life. Fuck 'em, I guess.

@bisonhero: Dark Souls 2 baby! (note: also has a generic as hell playerbase)

As a MTG player I've tried Hearthstone, but I found it to be a little too close to MTG to get away with being so simplistic. With the caveat I have only played Arena, I found that there didn't seem to be that wide a range of synergies and strategies available. I think the removal of blocking and the direct attacks to creatures is one of the main problems, as it gets hard to build up creatures, and there are no enchantments or artifacts, so its hard to develop a battle plan other than smash the other guys face. It just feels like a simple version of MTG, so it gets hard to justify playing it; I think Solforge does a better job competing as it has enough different to be interesting to me. Perhaps there is more to be found in constructed, but I have neither the time, money or patience to stumble around opening packs until I get a deck worth playing, and I didn't see any way to buy single cards directly.

Yes, I did know that. It doesn't change the fact that across the 10-15 drafts I've done I've literally only pulled 2 epics and 0 legendaries. Skill can only take you so far with a shit deck.

I've only played a few matches so far and it's been alright but I'm not really that impressed. It feels a bit too much like they just took Magic: The Gathering and removed a bunch of mechanics. This would have been a great opportunity to implement some cool stuff you couldn't do in MTG because of the serious nature of MTG or because of physical limitations when dealing with real cards but I haven't really found anything like that so far.

Also, I think it kinda sucks that the viable strategies to victory are all based on playing lots of creatures and hitting your opponent with them. There is very little room for control decks, token decks or burn decks.

A bit disappointed so far, but maybe it will be get better.

I'd say 90% of the time the game is great, the other 10% extremely frustrating. And I REALLY wish they'd separate matchmaking between players that have bought cards with real money and those that haven't, at least in ranked play. Yeah yeah I know it's free-to-play and that's just the nature of the game but it's so fucking irritating when you get wiped out by someone who's clearly dumped a shed load of money into the game and got a bunch of stupidly overpowered cards while you're trying to grind it out the hard way.

@bakoomerang: There's a fair number of decks that don't require many rares/epics/etc. the Hunter Aggro deck doesn't at present for example (Leeroy is good but something like an Arcane Golem can take his place) and the warlock aggro deck doesn't either, though that got nerfed a little. The top Paladin and Druid decks do require a fair amount of "expensive" stuff but it's still not that bad.

There's a player named Reynad who climbed to Legendary, pretty much the top of the ladder in 5 days without spending a penny.

http://www.reddit.com/r/HearthDecklists/comments/1wdjzz/reynad_hit_legendary_in_5_days_with_his_budget/

It's true that you can get better cards by just paying money, but look at magic or yugioh, where good decks cost 300 dollars each. At least you can play this game for free. Getting cards is an incentive, not a hurdle.

I have never played a card game before, so maybe that's why, but I find this game really difficult and kind of unfair? I constantly get stomped by both computers and real players. All of my wins and loses always seem to be absolute stomps that are projected early on. I rarely play a game where it seems close, or that there is any chance of me or the other guy coming back.

@ssully: I'm also relatively new to playing competitive card games and thinking critically about them but I've had a lot of really close games. A good chunk of the games I play in seem to come down to the very last turn in which had I not killed him then he would've killed me the next turn. Really satisfying really. So no, it isn't always a total stomp. It can be that way though if one player takes and maintains board control and just keeps pounding on the other player while also keeping them from getting out anything they can use for sure. Trick is to try to not let that happen.

@ssully: Sounds like you're still learning how to play at this point. The game doesn't have a particularly high skill ceiling (though there's some very interesting decks out there from time to time and still room for improvement), but it's a decent amount of fun and outside of Arena it should feel relatively fair, not having certain cards aside.

It's hard to say what Hearthstone needs, but it does need something. Right now when I'm out of gold (which is most of the time) I end up in constructed and usually my opponents wipe the floor with me. It's not uncommon to see tons of rares, epics, and legendaries being tossed out left and right, and while I can compete with those kind of monster decks with a lucky draw, most of the time it just isn't even close. When I have the gold I prefer Arena, but I usually end up averaging about one run every other day due to having to grind out gold for the entrance fee.

It's a devious F2P system that doesn't seem that bad at first, but if you get into the game (but aren't great at it) then it seems like a constructed mode grindfest as you complete quests for gold.

I think I found some bugs

@ilikepopcans: OH GOD YOUR COMPUTER IS DYING

@ilikepopcans said:

I think I found some bugs

Yeah, seems like "Screenshot saved to desktop" is always on your screen.

I solved this problem by getting bored easily of the game, so I end up going at least 2-4 days without playing it, but I remember to login to activate the daily quest each day. So when I finally get a hankering to play it after a while, I suddenly have all these quests to do, and when I finish them I'm up like 100-150 gold.

But yeah, the rate at which you get gold from constructed mode is basically useless. Also, yeah, I'm surprised how many people of my ladder rank have decks that are surprisingly full of Epics and Legendaries (my decks do not). I wonder if their decks have terrible mana curves or something, because clearly their card pool is better than mine, but I still manage to beat them on occasion.

@bisonhero: Maybe it's the matchmaking that needs help the most? My almost all basic Priest deck just faced a Warlock in Casual with Cairn, Ysera, Ragnaros, 2x flame imps, and a Faceless Manipulator. I don't want to say I had no chance of winning, but come on.

@mb: Again say there's a million people playing well maybe 750,000 of them are going to have better decks than those just starting out. I think this is just an intentional way to force people to buy cards; whereas if you got into the beta a while ago then you wouldn't have any particular reason.

@ilikepopcans: That just happens randomly when you alt tab whilst matchmaking; pretty amusing but sometimes difficult to play with.

@fredchuckdave: Are they wiping everything once the game gets out of beta? I swear I read that somewhere (which is why it's extra stupid to buy more than like 1 pack with real money right now), but man, I still think people are going to be SO mad when that happens, after grinding out all of that gold for months and months.

@bisonhero: Supposedly there will be no more wipes; would be smart to wipe it from a business perspective though. That old "you won't have to buy the expansion to play with the new multiplayer units" lie with SC2 comes to mind.

@fredchuckdave: Yeah, I really expected they would wipe for the business reasons, and claim "Well, we didn't want closed beta participants to have an unfair head start on everybody else". Then again, how many other F2P games have sold stuff for real money but then wiped everything after all those cash transactions?

Still, isn't there still some big warning when you go to spend gold on packs or in the Arena? I can't check right now.

@bisonhero: They would refund the cash transactions with gold I imagine, you'd just be boned from an "earned" gold perspective. A smart yet customer-friendly thing to do would be to release the new cards alongside the main release and bump the price on the new stuff to 200 gold/250 gold arena runs while keeping the real money price around the same.

@fredchuckdave: That's the thing, while I wouldn't consider myself great at Hearthstone I'm certainly not just starting out. I've even gotten a couple of Legendary cards from packs I won in Arena but they're nothing I can really use.

I just need to face that I'll probably never have the right cards to be able to participate in Ranked mode and just play Arena, when I have the gold.

@mb: Have you tried casual? I have good enough decks to get to legendary I just don't want to grind for 300 games only to have it reset 1-2 weeks later, but I play a fairly wide range of people in casual mode. Also what legendaries do you have? Most of them can be pretty useful alongside basic cards; you don't have to have Ragnaros to have a halfway decent deck.

just started playing, probably done about 25ish matches in total and I'm having a lot of fun. although i think I've only lost one match so far so maybe i'll hit a losing streak and throw a total hissy fit. Nonetheless I love the presentation, its all really slick in that trademark blizzard way.

@mb: The only Legendary I've opened was Harrison Jones, who I think is basically unplayable since this game doesn't allow you to substitute cards in to specifically counterpick the class of your oppponent's deck. He's just a terrible card unless you're against one of the classes that uses weapons.

I disenchanted him immediately and got a few hundred dust. I recommend the experience.

@fredchuckdave: casual seems about the same or worse than ranked. In my experience I have a higher chance of running into people who are stupidly good at the game and have ridiculous decks in Casual than I do in Ranked.

@mb: Yeah that's sort of what I'm worried about for the game's future. I have a buddy that just picked up the game and I'm curious what his experience will be with nothing but basic cards. I have another buddy who's played a fair amount but just has essentially no chance against any of my decks except the random ones; and he has a good handle on how to play/good neutral rare cards; it's not some huge skill difference here just access to good cards more or less. I don't look at deckbuilding guides or anything so my decks aren't carbon copies of some other dude's stuff but just through knowing which cards are good and which ones aren't they're at least somewhat similar.

Man it's a real shame but I think I'm done with it. Those first couple of months were great but over the past few weeks it's gone from being something I looked forward to playing every day to being a crappy experience more than half the time. I know I shouldn't let myself get frustrated but if I'm not having fun any more then I might as well walk away. Maybe the free-to-play thing just finally caught up with me. I never paid for any packs but I did put down $10 a while back for the sole purpose of making a few runs at the arena, but in hindsight I wish I hadn't because even that has turned out to be mostly a bust. I've still got two bucks left on my account so I guess I'll make one more arena run and then that will be it for me.

What do you guys think of the Mage deck I just drafted? I had a couple of all-bad draft rounds but I think it turned out alright. I'll play it a little later. 4 Flamestrikes...haha. The last time I had 4 Flamestrikes I also had Ysera and ended up going 10-3, the best I've ever done. I'm typically a 5-6 win Arena player though, I'm not that great at the game.

Gallery

I just started playing this past weekend. While I think it's a really fun game and I'm willing to accept the free-to-playness and CCG of it all, it still does hurt when someone drops one great rare/epic card after the other and demolishes you.

Gotta say as someone who likes the game but doesn't want to pay to win (especially since I have no idea how much money it would/could take), this game has more or less lost me.

Earlier on I could win at a reasonable for someone who hasn't put any real money in, but now it feels virtually hopeless.

@slag said:

The thing is, since you can't buy individual cards, you can't even really pay to win. At a certain point you're just buying packs full of Commons and Rares you already have, and turning them into dust. Even dumping money into buying packs, it's still complete luck whether you get the good Epics and Legendaries. I don't know how long you've been playing, but even having a mostly full set of Commons and Rares goes a long way to making better decks, since many of the starter cards are unplayable garbage.

So to be more accurate, you're losing to a bunch of tryhards that have probably played this game for a few hundred hours over the past couple months, and just grinded out a ton of gold.

been playing a couple months, it was a lot easier sledding back then.

That's a fair point, I keep seeing some rare cards and just figured people were just loading up on packs. I do have a few moderately complete sets of commons and such, but I haven't come close to putting hundred of hours into the game. I know I'm not a great player, but I don't think I'm absolute trash like my record suggests of late either. What you suggest also would explain what I'm encountering.

Since most of the gold quests I get are related to wins , I'm not sure I want to put that time in either.

I just won my 12th Arena game as a mage with Arcane Missiles. Two minions on the board, opponent has 3 health, I have one health left and need all three of my missiles to hit the hero for the win or I die next turn for sure. All three hit...I think it worked out to about a 4% chance of that happening. Hearthstone.

So after spending late last week on a Titanfall Beta run, I decided to cleanse my palate and try me some Hearthstone. After about 20 hours of play in about 5 days, I can't stop either playing or thinking about playing this game. Am I a bad person for enjoying this game much more than Titanfall (or almost any game I have played the last 6 months)?