So, I'm very casually playing Hearthstone and enjoying it a lot whenever I do. Mostly it's once or twice per month, but then several days in a row until my interest in it fades again and I get back to playing other games from my massive backlog. I didn't buy any of the previous expansions and I never bought even a single card pack. But Journey to Un'Goro looks really neat and the new cards seem like they could be rather fun. So here's my question: Could it be worth it to invest in the pre-order pack for Un'Goro (the one where you get 50 card packs and some other extras if I'm not mistaken) or is that kind of investment just silly for someone playing it as casually as me, especially when taking into account that I don't have any of the previous expansions and am therefore also lacking quite many cards from those, obviously?

I think I might know the answer already (it's no, right? it's just no!), but it can't hurt to ask. So thanks in advance for all your answers. :)

I've played fairly casually since Naxramas. The first expansion I preordered was The Grand Tournament and I did the same for every one since. (Not buying Ungoro to save money, but I have enough gold saved to get just about as many packs.) Opening 50 packs at once is pretty fun, and it's nice to have a bunch of new cards to play with right off the bat. HOWEVER. While you do get quite a few new cards it won't really come close to completing the set. This is going to be especially true for this expansion I think since there are more legendary cards than usual. Specific epic cards are also pretty tough to pull, since they are pretty rare and there are a lot of them.

If you haven't bought any of the adventures, I would recommend those. The cards they had were often quite useful, and the single player challenges are also pretty great. League of Explorers is rotating to wild, but it had such great cards that it might still be worth getting just to have them for wild or Tavern Brawls.

I don't regret preordering in the past but know that if you do you're just getting a solid place to start in the new expansion, and will still have a ways to go to get all the cards you might want. If you have 50 bucks you don't mind spending and know what you're in for, then go for it! Otherwise, you might just want to grind it out. There are also daily rewards that give packs for logging in up to release, so if you just log in from today onward you can get a couple packs for free.

You can check out this website that simulates opening packs. Pretty nice for getting a sense of what you'll get.

https://speedodevo.github.io/packr/

Sorry for the jumbled response!

$1USD per pack is the best rate you can get. I don't spend money on the game except for the $50 preorder, since it's the best deal. I wouldn't recommend buying packs at any other time.

I'll say that it's a lot of fun to open up a bunch of packs right when a set is released, and try out a bunch of cards in new decks, even if most of them turn out to be dumb ideas.

The alternative is opening far fewer packs at launch. Sometimes that's fine (most of The Grand Tournament cards turned out to be underwhelming and there were really only a few cards you genuinely needed from that set, and you could just craft them with dust), but usually the new sets have a bunch of neat cards.

Overall though, it's up to you how much that $50 means. I've done the last few Hearthstone preorders, but also I've really scaled back how much money I spend on games in other areas, while Hearthstone I still play pretty regularly so I can justify the cost to myself. I will say that the $50 preorder is enough packs (assuming you also save up a little bit of gold to buy packs with as well) to almost guaranteed get all of the commons and rares in the new set. Which is nice for deckbuilding options, though you will still need to spend some dust to craft the epics and legendaries you want to use.

If you're only playing once or twice a month it's kind of hard for me to recommend you spend $50 on Hearthstone. And this is coming from someone who will probably be opening like 175 packs of Un'Goro later this week.

Thanks for your replies. I think I might just go for it this time, although I'm not a 100% sure yet.

One more question though: When I go to the store, it says that Blackrock Mountain and League of Explorers are going to leave the shop soon. When is "soon"? When "Journey to Un'Goro" launches? And what if I buy the first wing of each of those expansions with the gold I have earned? Will the rest still not be purchasable afterwards anymore or have I then bought myself the chance to still buy the rest at a later point in time?

BRM and LoE will no longer be purchasable when the rotation happens, which is whenever Un'Goro comes out (sometime on the 6th). If you have one (or more) wings of those adventures though, then you can still buy the rest at a later date.

With gold only, once a set rotates you can't buy the rest of it with real money even if you already own the first wing.

@knurrunkulus: And remember that the adventures are a pretty sizeable gold investment overall for cards you can't use in Standard as of a few days from now.

If you're really concerned that you don't want to miss out on that PvE content I guess they're worth getting. In that department, I think League of Explorers is probably the best adventure in all of Hearthstone; it's a fun premise, is a reasonable challenge, and has some fun gimmicks. Blackrock Mountain lies somewhere in between LoE and Naxxramas, in that its premise is moderately clever and has moderately interesting gimmicks/mechanics. If you missed Naxxramas, don't worry, it's the dullest PvE and was ridiculously difficult at the time, though some of the cards were absurdly powerful/efficient for their mana cost.

Also the cards can still be useful if you play in the Wild format, and those cards are often allowed in Tavern Brawls (most Brawls are Wild, though rarely they can be Standard instead). But keep in mind you could also just use dust to craft individual cards you want from old adventures.

Whenever they launch a new set they hand out packs like candy. You should be able to pick up about 10 free packs just from completing easy quests in the launch week.

I'd say that this release is more important than the previous ones however, simply because there are quite a lot of current cards being rotated out of standard play and into wild, so your existing decks may suddenly have some holes in them. I'm playing a fair amount of ladder each month so I'm probably not in the "casual" bracket, but I've paid for the pre-order and I'm probably going to buy at least another 20-30 packs with gold I've been saving from quests. If you're committed to the quests you can make enough to buy 2 or 3 packs a week.