Thoughts on the Hearthstone open beta

A while back I wrote a review of Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft while it was still in closed beta. At the time I thought it was a good game and worthy of praise. Since then, there have been a few changes to the way the game works in terms of card mechanics, rankings, and the arena system. So while it’s still essentially the same game at its core (i.e. an electronic CCG), I thought it would be worth revisiting and talking about the current state of the game. With the recent transition to open beta, there have been an influx of new players and a lot of interest about the game in general. So pull up a chair by the hearth and let’s talk about virtual cards.

By now you’re probably aware that Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft (we’ll just stick to Hearthstone for short because H:HoW looks stupid) is a free to play virtual CCG based on characters from Blizzard’s various Warcraft properties. It is not, however, like the Warcraft TCG that showed up many years ago. Those are completely different products. I’m going to presume you’re familiar with the basics of Hearthstone and just move on.

Here’s the thing about writing an article for something like Hearthstone: the game is constantly changing. The best I can do is provide a snapshot of what I see right now. Saying that Blizzard likes to nerf and change things from time to time is like saying that there might be a few people saying incredibly stupid things on Reddit. They are constantly tweaking cards in small or large ways, especially if those cards are heavily used by players. Personally, I don’t mind it that much. If everyone puts Novice Engineer and Defender of Argus in their custom decks and their arena drafts, it probably means that they feel like they need to. Of course, a number of people still seem to feel that they need to play a priest in the rankings if they plan to get anywhere, so maybe the class itself warrants a little investigation.

So how do I feel about the game? I’m extremely happy with it now. The new ranking system allows you to climb from the lowest rank (25) to the highest by winning a series of matches and earning stars along the way. You don’t lose stars from losing matches until you hit rank 20. That’s when it gets competitive. That’s also when I’ve taken to swearing at my opponents. Don’t believe me? Tune in to my Twitch stream while I’m playing and you might hear some colorful language. Yes, it’s still early enough in the life cycle of the game that people who have cash to burn are going to have an advantage in the cards they can choose to put in their decks. Not that it makes them any better at actually building a deck. If you’re broke and have an eye for deck building, you’ll still get there eventually.

Still think it’s pay to win? Do some quests, get some gold, and just go play the arena mode. Nobody gets an advantage in there by having money. It’s all about how well you can draft a deck on the fly from randomized card options. Sometimes they’re awesome and you get a legendary or two. Sometimes the choices you get suck beyond belief and you can’t form a working deck any better than congress can form a working budget. Which means that you might end up spending three matches yelling at the worthless inflatable fuck-hole that you’re playing against for getting a better deck than you. It happens because random is random.

I don’t like that they reduced the number of rewards you get in arena based on the number of wins you get. However, I’ve noticed a lot more gold as rewards when I hit 3 to 4 wins before being eliminated. I’ve gotten more than 70 gold several times. Do the math – if you pay in 150 gold, but get 70 out then it only cost you 80 to play. One of your rewards is guaranteed to be a pack of cards. So you essentially get a pack of cards for 80 gold instead of 100. It doesn’t always work in your favor, but I really enjoy the draft system and getting to play with a variety of cards so I don’t care if I don’t win as much.

What I’m saying here is that Hearthstone seems to be headed in a very good direction. I wouldn’t even mind if expansion sets for it were cash only. If I’m still interested and playing by then, they deserve some money from me. Blizzard is keeping on top of balance issues that they didn’t foresee being issues and nerfing down over-powered cards like Blood Imp on a fairly regular basis. And when they do, they let you disenchant them for the cost of crafting them so that you don’t really lose anything if you don’t like the change. I encourage anyone that enjoys a good CCG to give Hearthstone a chance. It’s now open to anyone that wants it and it’s entirely free to download and play for as long as you want.