Hearthstone: Not a Review

[Joose]

Before anyone panics, I have checked the FAQ and there is no NDA, so we can talk about it all we like.

I've played the everloving fuck out of this game now, and here are my thoughts on it. Its not a review, its just thoughts, like an RPS Wot I Think.

The golden standard of trading card games is almost inarguably Magic the Gathering. Other trading card games exist, but certainly none are as successful. Although there are I'm sure plenty of people who would disagree with me, I think MtG has only 3 major flaws:

1) It is modelled to gouge you of all the monies, all the time and forever. This is less of an issue if you are only playing in a small group of like minded friends, but if you are in a tournament setting or playing in the wilds of Magic Online you can easily find yourself in a card based arms race, where people who only spend a little money are blown out of the water by people of equal skill but deeper pockets. Its a fixable problem, but its a problem that is spewing wealth into Wizards of the Coasts accounts, so I don't see it being fixed any time soon.
2) Screw. If you play any amount of MtG you will eventually either experience this yourself or hear people bitching about it. It comes in various forms, but the most common is Mana Screw or Land Screw. In simple terms, everything in MtG is paid for with Mana, and Mana is created using lands. In most cases, you "tap" a land (turn it sideways) to get one Mana. Because Land comes on cards, and because cards are distributed randomly through your deck, even the best player can be completely fucked by random luck if he spends half the game either drawing no Land cards, drawing only Land cards, or drawing the wrong Land cards. 90% of the people who shout and scream about getting screwed are just bad at deck building, but if you are one of those 10% it is one of the most annoying things in all gaming. It would be like playing a multiplayer FPS where you are getting all the shotgun ammo in the world but keep getting killed because you only have an assault rifle.
3) Its too damn complicated. There are 12752 different cards in MtG, and they are as diverse as basic lands (tap to get one mana) to standard creatures (he is a dood, he can attack and defend) to the crazy insane complicated bastards like Warp World (Each player shuffles all permanents he or she owns into his or her library, then reveals that many cards from the top of his or her library. Each player puts all artifact, creature, and land cards revealed this way onto the battlefield, then does the same for enchantment cards, then puts all cards revealed this way that weren't put onto the battlefield on the bottom of his or her library.) You really dont need to even know of the existence of every card to be competitive at the game, let alone memorizing all of them, but its still damn intimidating to new players. Having all these complicated as hell interconnected systems to worry about is bad enough, but then a new player is suddenly faced with Knowledge Pool and their brains start dribbling out.

All of these problems are easily fixable if you are playing with mates.

1) agree on a maximum spend you will all stick to, or limit yourself to a certain number of rare cards per deck or something. Don't play with randoms unless you are happy with getting occasionally bummed by an army of cards with little golden logos.
2) Learn to make better decks, or use a house rule that separates land from non-land so you can choose what to draw from each turn. The first option is the better option, but its also pretty hard.
3) Pick one set to play with at first, and only play against decks also from that set. That means you only need to get to grips with a much smaller selection of cards, and can scale up gradually as you get more competent or fancy more of a challenge: start with single set, then go to standard format (latest three sets) then go up to extended (a bunch more sets), then classic (all the sets). Beware, Classic is balls out mental. I have lost games in classic before I had played my first turn.

You are probably wondering what all this has to do with Hearthstone. I think Hearthstone is an attempt to make a game as compelling as MtG whilst avoiding the above issues. In some areas it succeeds, but only in small, limited ways. They have gotten carried away.

Lets take the three big problems of MtG and see how Hearthstone tries to solve them.

1) Its free to play, you get a bunch for free and you can earn money to buy new things simply by playing the game. People who want to dump all their pennies in can, but the only advantage they get is a savings in time. This is actually one of the ways Hearthstone is an improvement, but it hasn't solved the issue, its just lessened it a bit. You could spend a bunch of real money on getting in game money and use that in a roundabout way to get yourself a copy of Deathwing, right the hell now. If you want to get Deathwing without spending real money, expect to spend a lot of time grinding away at games without him whilst you save up. In the meantime, everyone who has spent money will be kicking your ass just the same as they would be in MtG.
2) There is no screw in Hearthstone, because there is no land. You just get given mana to spend, and every turn you get one more to spend than the turn before it. Its exactly like MtG would be if you were reliably putting a land in play every turn. This is great in that it is less frustrating, but it removes a significant chunk of the game without putting anything in its place. Simpler means its less frustrating, but it also gives you less options.
3) Like I just said, its a lot simpler, both in number of cards available and the complexity of the cards themselves. Most of the cards are creatures or spells, and most of the creatures are only different from each other in minor ways, and most spells either boil down to "do X damage" or "draw some cards" or both.

All this boils down to a game that's a lot simpler for a new player to get into (I honestly don't think its possible for most people to get into MtG without someone with a bit of experience holding their hand) but is paddling pool shallow. MtG's complexity is a problem for new players, sure, but it is also its greatest strength because it leaves you with near infinite options. There are thousands of different ways to make competitive decks, there are thousands of interesting combinations of cards that make wacky things happen. There are options for Spike, Timmy and Johnny. Which you probably know nothing about, so I will explain.

Spike, Timmy and Johnny are the names MtG developers gave to three archetypical players of Magic. I don't know if they came up with the design technique, but they did come up with these names and its a system that is now used in all sorts of games design. It basically goes like this: "Johnny" is a player who likes to be creative. He wants to win using something he has come up with himself, and is generally happy losing 4 out of 5 games as long as that fifth game is the one where the bonkers game breaking combo he thought up finally pays off. Johnny probably enjoys building desk as much as or even more than playing games with them. "Timmy" is a player who enjoys playing the game itself. He will come up with his own decks, but only as a means to an end and is just as happy playing with deck lists he found on the internet. He particularly likes that moment when you play one big, awesome card that makes everyone stop and go "whoa". "Spike" is the competitive player. For him it is all about the winning. He doesn't care if he got the deck list off the internet or made it himself as long as it performs well, and how the game plays is irrelevant as long as he wins. In reality, most players are a mix of all three of these archetypes, but by keeping them in mind the MtG developers can create card sets that appeal to the maximum number of people. They include *this* card because massively powerful but simple cards will please the Timmys, they include *this* card that at first glance appears useless because Johnny will get a kick out of trying to win a game using it, and they make sure the whole thing is as balanced and fair as possible to keep the Spikes happy.

Hearthstone has Timmy appeal in spades. There's a bunch of cards in there that give players the "oh shit son!" feeling by themselves, and that feeling is expertly elevated using special graphics and sound affects. Put a particularly large creature down and it gets an impact crater. Do a large amount of damage in one go and the virtual crowd go "OOOOHHHH!!" So Timmy is happy.

Spike is probably reasonably happy too. There is a decent amount of tactical thinking required, and although there is a luck element the skilled player will average out much better than the less skilled. The classes still need a bit of balancing, as some (like the Mage) are currently just objectively better than others, but Blizzards years of developing the PvP aspects of WoW and fine tuning Starcraft for the competitive scene gives me confidence that they can fix that side of things. I still suspect that anybody at the extreme end of the Spike spectrum will probably already be heavily invested in the competitive MtG scene and will need one hell of an incentive to leave. That incentive just doesnt exist at the moment, but that might be fixable.

Johnny is, at the moment, shit out of luck. Which is where my problem is. I am predominantly a Johnny type player. I like putting interesting combinations of cards together and surprising people when I finally work out a way to make One With Nothing not suicidal. To illustrate that point, have some of my favourite moments in my Magic the Gathering career:

1) There is a card that lets you play land from the graveyard (the discard pile). There is also a card that lets you play as many lands as you like in one turn (you can normally only play 1). There is a creature that lets you play a spell from your graveyard whenever you play it, and an artefact card that lets you return creatures to your hand by tapping it. Watching the person I was playing against face as they got increasingly confused by what I was up to was only beaten by their utter horror when I played the card that said "destroy a land. Your opponent skips their next go". If you understand, you are probably also a Johnny. For those that don't get it: I played the final card, making my opponent miss their next go. At the start of my next go I put the destroyed land back in play, bounce the creature back to my hand using the artefact and then play it again to get the final card back. I then play it, making my opponent again skip their next go. No more goes for you!

2) I cant remember the specifics of this one, but there are some cards that summon what are called token creatures. These are small creatures that don't have cards, and when playing in a physical game they are usually represented by pennies, or beads or similar. I discovered a way of making token creatures that each had the property "at the start of your go, create 2 token creatures". The created creatures would also have this property. I played it in an online game and by 5-6 turns in I discovered that MtG Online has a hard limit on how many creatures you can summon. Particularly gratifying was the fact my opponent was laughing and cheering me on, only conceding when the game client was showing signs it was about to crash.

3) this is actually a story of my own failure that I mentioned earlier, but it appealed to my Johnny side: an opponent in a classic game (basically anything goes) won the toss and played first. He proceeded to spam out card after card that all combo'd off each other and culminated in a "do X damage" card where X was essentially as big as he wanted it to be. This was all done on his first turn. I could do nothing but sit back and marvel in his decks horrible glory.

You will never get any stories out of Hearthstone that are anything like that, because the cards available just don't give you the options to do anything interesting. There are no cards that seem pointless at first glance but later give you a "HOLY SHIT, THAT WILL WORK AMAZINGLY WITH THAT OTHER USELESS CARD TO PRODUCE AN UNSTOPPABLE COMBO OF AWESOME!". Everything is immediately and transparently obvious. It might be easier for the new players, but it means I can't put anything of my own personality into deck building. Many cards are just strictly better than other cards, and most cards hardly interact with each other at all. You cant make interesting combos. Hell, you can barely make decks outside the predefined limit imposed by the class system. Nearly all of my deck building experience with this game has boiled down to adding all the class specific cards, taking out a couple of obviously shite ones and filling the spaces with rather dull cross-class cards. Nearly every Mage deck I play against is basically the same, nearly every Paladin deck is basically the same, and so on and so on. Sitting down to a game of Magic there is always a chance that you will see a deck concept you have never even heard of before, let alone played against. I feel like I have had all the experiences available to me in Hearthstone now, and all I have to look forward to is more of pretty much entirely the same.

Blizzard need to add a lot more cards and make them a lot more flexible, or Hearthstone is going to be a flash in the pan for a third of their potential audience.

Yes, I do realise I spent more of my Hearthstone not-a-review talking about MtG than I did talking about Hearthstone.

[Dog Pants]

That's a huge amount of text, but it pretty much matches up with my far more limited experience. Maybe it's that I forced myself to stick with Shaman even though it felt like I had a pretty bum deal, but I never really felt much in the way of tactical variation either. I tried a deck which spams crappy minions, mixed with buffs which cause more minions to spam. I hit the minion limit pretty quickly. I tried a mix of shield minions and buffs to build up to one super-minion, which was Timmy satisfying but I really struggled to get a balance of buffs and shields. Maybe that's me, but I was frequently down to only a couple of cards and that doesn't leave you with a lot of option. I'd put myself between Johnny and Timmy, but I wasn't really feeling the satisfaction from it. It's not a bad game, just not very deep.

[Anery]

I was receptive to card collecting games, I had no major beef with them - it was just turn based strategy whilst trying to keep your units secret.
But then WoW Cataclysm came along that changed. Being somewhat of a fanboi and a pretty hardcore raider at the time it was released I bought the special edition which happened to include a 'starter deck' for WoW TCG.
I was looking forward to having a game with missus, so we sat down with this inch and a bit thick deck of cards and tried to play. Apparently an inch and a bit of cards is only enough for one person, not two - I've had no time for them since. Is this likely to change my opinion?

[Grimmie]

I don't have anything constructive to add, but that was a good read :D Thanks Joose!

[Dog Pants]

Is this likely to change my opinion?

Maybe. It's better than playing on your own, and it's free (although getting into the alpha is difficult) so there's nothing lost trying. It might prove to be a good entry point.

[Joose]

Apparently Hearthstone is going to receive a bunch of new content soon. It includes a single player campaign mode type thing and some updates to ranked play. In other words, none of the things I actually see as a problem are being looked at in any way. Ho hum.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

Apparently this is now an open beta, just so you know.

[Thompy]

So thought I'd post here first before making a new thread in case it's a non-starter - is there any interest in organised Hearthstone play? I'm hesitant to say "competitive" as it really won't be, this is 5punk after all. Two options spring to mind.

1 - A simple ladder. Completely open, just add your name to the bottom of the list and challenge people up to two places above you (maybe one place if numbers are low) and switch places if you win. No restrictions here, any character, best deck you can make.

2 - A (slightly) more complicated league/tournament. Maybe round robin then knockout or just knockout or a play everyone twice league or all of the above. Needs more thought if it's a goer.

Probably start with the ladder as it's no commitment and doesn't need participants organising. Also, I'd say a "win" should be best of three, considering the luck factor involved.

Thoughts?

[Dog Pants]

I'll give it a shot.

[Joose]

league/tournament.

Yeah, I would be up for a ladder thing though.

[Thompy]

You mock! But if enough people get into I shall make it so. Interest so far though is... muted

[Joose]

Its more that tournaments around here have something of a history. Of massive failure.

[Thompy]

Oh, I knew that's what you meant, but still

[Dr. kitteny berk]

ooh, I'm in.

[shot2bits]

So is anyone playing this still? i forgot about it for ages but picked it up again in the week and have been enjoying playing it a bit here and there again. Would be nice to have some games against 5punkers if anyone's interested?

[Dog Pants]

I occasionally pick it up. I'll give you a game (if you can play arranged games) at some point.

[Anery]

Goblins vs Gnomes is out next week and Blizzard have given everybody 1 free arena pass (150 gold otherwise) and they've also made the GvG cards available to arena players. Which is very nice.
I built a shamen deck and faced off against another shamen - didn't think anything of it, then noticed he had the legendary card back, then noticed it was fucking Kolento. In case you didn't know, Kolento is a pro HS player for Cloud9 gaming who is currently ranked #1 in the EU after winning Dream Hack Winter.
They need a face palm emote in this game.
Turn 7 I caved as he just owned the board.
Bad start, bad run in toto. 1 for 3 at the end.

GvG cards are fun and unpredictable but don't head off into the arena right now - or do, but only play one game, save the session until everything has calmed down.

[Dog Pants]

If you're gonna lose, lose against a pro.