Hearthstone
By Relkin 19 Comments
I think I should preface this by saying that I have very little experience with CCG's, so my grievances may be entirely from a lack of appreciation or understanding of the genre as a whole.
I've been playing since 3 months prior to launch, and I've formed an opinion about the game: Hearthstone is fun slash bullshit.
Hearthstone is one of the best card games I've ever played while simultaneously being the most frustrating. It isn't that the game is hard; in fact, Hearthstone is pretty simplistic. The best possible play is almost immediately apparent every single turn. It isn't that the game is unbalanced(although I'm sure some might disagree with that). To the layman (me) each class appears pretty balanced. They all have a few class-specific cards that get on my nerves, but none rise above the rest. My issue with the game lies with certain types of decks, and the random nature in which cards are drawn.
Getting an opening hand that is entirely unusable for the first four turns of the game is disheartening to say the least. When your routine card draw each turn also provides you with nothing to play, you can usually assume that the game is lost. Perhaps you'll luck out and your opponent will be in a similar situation, but its unlikely. This leads to a completely one sided game, and I've found that regardless of what side of that fight you're on, its not enjoyable. Losing horribly and winning by a mile are equally boring. This leads me to my deck issue.
Different types of "gimmick" decks are quite annoying. I'll focus on "Rush" decks for the sake of brevity(which I probably won't achieve). A rush deck is a deck that is devoted to doing as much damage to the enemy hero as quickly as possible. In an ideal situation for the rusher, their opponent is incapable of turning the fight around even for a single turn. Here's my issue: if things aren't ideal(or close to it), I've found that these decks are easily countered. In my experience, if I have even a mediocre opening hand, or are capable of taking control of the fight for even a single turn, the fight is won handily. This means that running into one of these decks is almost always a one-sided battle, and they're commonly used. There are also cards/plays that I refer to as "Hail Mary's" that can be exasperating. A couple of legendaries like Ragnaros or Ysera are just disastrous if you aren't capable of dealing with them immediately; and even then sometimes the only way you can remove them in an expedient fashion results in terrible trades(using multiple creatures or spells to kill off/neuter a single card). If I don't have a Polymorph/Hex/etc in hand, in most situations the match is lost; if not the following turn, then after a slow, lingering loss taking the next five minutes. At least some of these Hail Mary's(like a Priest using Divine Spirit and Inner Fire, or the card Edwin Van Cleef) require multiple cards to pull off. If you're capable of removing them, then at least your opponent has sunk a bunch of cards, giving you the preferable trade.
I don't want to sound completely negative about the game; Hearthstone is a lot of fun in at least in half of my matches, win or lose. The free-to-play model is quite friendly to those that don't want to spend much money(if any at all). The portraits and animations are attractive, and the decision to speak with your opponent through emotes was an expert sidestep of the vile obscenities that some like to excrete when under the protective cloak of online anonymity.
I know that the more reliable decks are ultimately far more effective than the gimmick decks, but it's quite frustrating having to deal with them at all. Obviously there is no way to avoid them in matchmaking, but my complaint remains.
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