I've recently watched Amaz' Super Jeoparino, which is basically a Trivia show about Hearthstone hosted by Amaz, a very famous Hearthstone streamer. I recommend you watch its entirety, but long story short - at the end there is a challenge for the participants. The rules are as follows:

4 Cards maximum damage challenge

1.Your opponent has 30 health, 970 armor and no cards in their hand

2.The board and both decks are empty with no fatigue cards drawn yet (meaning drawing a card would make a player take 1 damage)

3.You have 4 collectible cards from any class or combination of classes, and any hero power; you can have any number of copies of a card (max 4)

4.You have 10 mana this turn

5.All RNG effects (bombs, missiles, etc) are controlled by you and will always yield the desired result

The task: Name the 4 cards that will result in your opponent taking the most damage this turn

The cards that result in the most damage are

for a total of

damage.

Pretty cool. My own combination was like 30 damage. But, I would like to see what you bombers come up with!

However... the challenge wasn't really enough, so I came up with my own. Similar to Amaz'... but with a lot more 'oomph'.

Here it goes:

10 Cards maximum damage challenge

1.Your opponent has 30 health, 970 armor and no cards in their hand

2.The board and both decks are empty with no fatigue cards drawn yet (meaning drawing a card would make a player take 1 damage)

3.You have 10 collectible cards from any class or combination of classes, and any hero power; however, you can only have a maximum of 2 of the same card

4.You have 10 mana this turn

5.All RNG effects (bombs, missiles, etc) are controlled by you and will always yield the desired result

6.You can make up your own match history, meaning that you can decide what cards the players played in earlier turns (however, only damage done this turn counts)

The task: Name the 10 cards that will result in your opponent taking the most damage this turn

I'll post my solution in a spoiler block shortly

EDIT: For those interested, here's my solution:

For a total of

damage.

Do YOU have what it takes to solve both of these puzzles?

1. sorcerer's apprentice, unstable portal, receive and play second sorcerer's apprentice. 3 mana, 2 cards.

2. resurrect for gahz, resurrect a second time for rhino of charging. 3 mana, 4 cards.

3. dark whispers. 7 mana, 5 cards. gahz is 11/14

4. 2x divine blessing. 11/56, 7 mana, 7 cards.

5. bouncing blade. damages gahz 55 times, then kills an apprentice. 8 mana, 8 cards, gahz is (11*(2^55)/1.

6. ancestral healing on gahz. 8 mana, 9 cards, (11^59)/56.

7. bouncing blade again, costing 2 mana, so 10 mana, 10 cards. 59 damage to gahz, then 2 to the first apprentice. gahz is (11*(2^112))/1. Swing.

Your solution had gahz with a power of about 1.5x10^26. My gahz has a power of 9.1x10^35. I suspect this is still not optimal.

Edit: If anyone wants to take this beautifully silly exercise further, I suspect you may be able to use Power Overwhelming in stead of dark whispers to save mana. You actually run into the issue of not enough minions to kill with bouncing blade, though, if you try to take advantage by cutting an apprentice. Don't bother with faceless manipulator solutions, they don't help.

Further edit: I tried to do math at 6am and hecked it up. My score is reduced from 10^122 to 10^35.

@mongoose1021: That's pretty sick. Yeah it actually makes sense to heal Gahz for the second Blades to proc. Resurrect into Rhino is pretty awesome as well, didn't think of that.

I'm sorta surprised there are no infinite damage loops in Hearthstone yet. I feel like MtG has had multiple different ones for ages, though obviously they require so many different cards all working at once that they're easy to disrupt. I wonder if Blizzard is just actively avoiding that, because in something like MtG you can usually declare a certain number of times that you do it that is sufficient to win the game, but since most things are automated in Hearthstone, maybe the loop would literally be infinite until you crashed the game with a memory overflow.

I'd probably go with Lorewalker Cho, Unstable Portal, Mind Vision and Charge.

1. Play Lorewalker Cho (2 Mana)

2. Play Unstable Portal (2 Mana) To get Sorcerer's Apprentice

3. Play Sorcerer's Apprentice (0 Mana)

4. Cast Mind Vision (0 Mana) taking Mind Vision from the enemies hand (thanks to Cho)

Repeat infinitely

5. Mind Vision (0 Mana) Unstable Portal back

6. cast Unstable Portal (1 Mana) to get Edwin Van Cleef

7. Play Edwin Van Cleef (0 Mana)

8. Cast Charge on Edwin Van Cleef (0 Mana) Which should get you infinite damage. Likely to be one short of the damage cap of 2,147,483,647 as that is the highest damage value possible in hearthstone because of the whole 32-bit integer thing. Exceeding it would drop the damage back to 0 I believe.

So 4 cards, 5 mana and technically infinite damage. The Same could also be done with Mana Addict albeit with 5 cards and 5 mana as it needs to be on the board during the infinite mind vision casts. It would likely actually be better for reaching the damage cap in hearthstone given that it's damage would be an odd number while Edwin is even.

There is one infinite automated damage loop, actually. It involves attacking with Mistress of Pain while having Auchenai Priestess on the board.

It seems like HS simply has failsafes for having too many individual commands. However, the longest recorded Hearthstone turn clocked in at 45 hours. This wasn't a case of infinite command loops, just a few commands that were incredibly long.