The Hearthstone Thread

The Game Room
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There are way more than those three. They were just the ones that came immediately to mind. I’m sure that there are plenty I haven’t even seen yet, but there’s a whole class of cards that has this problem.

Every card that creates a minion other than itself (like, puts a token into play) fails tp specify the cost or the type of those minions. There are quite a lot of those.

There ought to be a way to figure these things out in-game. If I hover over “Taunt”, it tells me what Taunt does. How come I can’t hover over “Banana”, or “Spectral Spider” and have it show me what those cards are?

They clearly made this decision on purpose because they thought it added to the fun. It’s not like they couldn’t have put “(1-cost spells that give +1/+1)” after “Bananas”, and I’m sure someone suggested it. I’m just think it’s a dumb choice in a game otherwise filled with all sorts of really well-made choices.

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Information overload, though. I mean, is it really worth saying (1-cost spells that give +1/+1) on the card, when every time you play afterwards, you’ll know what a Banana is?

It’s like saying in Magic, when tapped put a Mountain into play. What’s a Mountain and what does it do? Of course, you know what a Mountain is. Same with the cards in HS - after the first time, it’s clear enough what the cards do.

I kinda dislike Ysera’s dream cards as well, but there’s just no elegant way around it - you can’t very well have Ysera’s text box be 4 paragraphs. Elite Tauren Chieftain is even worse, since it’s so much rarer - I wouldn’t be able to tell you what the Power Chord cards are.

Is it worse than not knowing that Mage has a card called Flamestrike that will deal 4 to all your units, though? I mean, you have to go online to look that up too, and the first time you get hit with Flamestrike, you’ll curse to the high heavens. Would it be worse if your opponent played a card beforehand saying “place a Flamestrike in your hand”?

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Some info for those who like to play Hunter:

This deck, #3 EU Legendary Hunter Naiman is the best I have seen. I found it the day the season was about to reset and I went from Rank 6*** to Rank 1*** in the final five hours of the season – just ran out of time.

The guy is streaming right now (12:40 PM Friday) – he is up to Rank 3. It is his first time streaming so there is some flakiness and dropouts, the cards are in Russian, and the graphic quality is not very high. The deck requires two Snake Traps and a Sea Giant. If that stuff doesn’t put you off and you want to climb the ladder fast, have a look

twitch.tv/Naiman_hs

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Again, I’m not saying that it should spell it out immediately. But the keyword abilities are a perfect example. If you hover over a card with Taunt, it shows you what that ability does. No need to always put that on the card, you just have it pop up in hovertext when necessary.

I think it is worse. It’s not strategically worse, in the sense that it’s more likely to make you lose games. But it’s way more frustrating.

My expectation when playing a game is that I will run into cards I haven’t seen before. I think that’s part of the fun of discovery in a CCG, and I like learning from my mistakes and realizing that when someone was playing in a way I didn’t understand, it was actually because they had a card I didn’t know about. But when I have the opportunity to play a card, I want to be able to play it to the best of my ability. Which requires actually knowing what the hell it does. “Bananas” with no reminder text is being cute at the expense of playability. But, obviously someone at Blizzard disagrees, since they clearly made a conscious choice to do it that way.

A thousand times yes! That’s just being annoying. It’s giving you information, and it could give you actually relevant information, but it won’t. Also, it doesn’t scale particularly well. It works great when Hearthstone has a few hundred cards. Magic has 10,000+ cards. Remembering what they all do by name will become harder and harder.

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Started playing a couple of weeks ago. Amazed at how bad I am - I probably went something like 20-60 over my first 80 games. Of course I was working with almost entirely basic decks, and that does put a damper on things. More recently I’m probably winning at about a 40-45% win rate, which is a significant improvement. Haven’t gotten past rank 15 or 16 though.

I generally average about 2.5 wins per arena run and I think my max was 5.

I haven’t put any effort into reading about the metagame or anything - just trying to learn by playing - so I guess that slowed my developmental curve.

Could someone run down the basics for me on what different types of decks do? What’s a zoo deck vs a control deck vs a miracle deck, etc? Or point me to a resource that covers that.

Which types of decks match up better with what classes?

I’d like to learn about the game in concept rather than just copy someone else’s deck - where should I go? Should I just start watching Trump videos from the start, or is there a better way to go about it?

Is Naxxramas worth it? it seems like it’d really build up your deck with a lot of useful stuff. I probably won’t ever spend more than that initial $25 on the game, but I’d consider it. Otherwise I’d do daily quests for arena runs, since I find the arena fun. But it seems like Naxx could give a big boost early on.

My favorite deck to play has been a priest deck based around inner fire/divine spirit/power word shield/lightspawn. I won a game recently by having an oasis snapjaw on the board, applying power word shield for 9hp, divine spirit for 18, another divine spirit for 36, inner fire to make it 36/36, and then instantly killed the enemy at like 26 health, all in one turn. Very silly.

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A zoo deck floods the board with low-cost minions. A control deck is meant to essentially maintain pace until late game when you quickly gain tempo and stomp the opponent with late-game cards or combos. I’m not entirely clear what a “miracle” deck is in general, but searching around it seems to stem from MTG and refers to essentially stacking spell combos and buffs to make superpowerful minions (apparently it comes form “Miracle-Gro” despite the fact that there’s a MTG card called “miracle”).

Generally decks fall into 3 categories: aggro, midrange, and control. The vast, vast majority fall into midrange. A midrange deck is meant to be control or aggro depending on the situation. A rule of thumb for the game is that each game has an aggro player and a control player depending on the decks and the situation, and your key to winning is figuring out which one you are. Of course, even the most hardy-hardcore aggro deck can be control in the right circumstances, and the most late game deck can be aggro if you’re playing an even slower deck (or an opponent with really crappy draws).

Generally, the Hearthstone meta isn’t something to worry about at low levels. At higher levels the meta is kind of a cycle – certain decks gain popularity, and are soft-countered by other decks. A meta strategy is sort of to figure out where the meta currently is and pick the appropriate soft counter, and then switch to that deck’s soft counter before it becomes the new FOTM. And, obviously, new cards, nerfs, and buffs can change what the meta cycle looks like too.

Generally with deck building, there isn’t much variation even at high levels. You’ll still see zoolocks and miracle rogues that are basically the same ones you find on the internet. They may have a few curveballs here and there, but Hearthstone, IMO, only really rewards creativity in constructed at a “this is fun” level rather than a way to actually build viable decks. This is why when it comes down to it, Hearthstone is generally skill based. The pool of common decks and counters is pretty small, so it ends up being a game of who has the best execution of the maybe 10 or so canonical deck templates.

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Buying Naxx is definitely the most efficient use of real money in the game. If you want to give something back to Blizzard for the game, that’s a great way to do it. If I had a fresh account, I wouldn’t save up in-game gold for Naxx immediately. I’d craft the rares for a class or two first and some of the better neutral rares. Probably for Shaman since that’s a nice well-rounded class.

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ya with the pricing, paying for Naxx with $$ is a good option. gold saved could then be used for Arena in next month’s expansion instead, assuming the new cards would be better than the old ones…

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I found this guide to be useful.

http://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/comments/2lh4vp/the_complete_guide_for_hearthstone_player_free/

This thread might be helpful in running down the different deck types and what they do.

http://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/comments/2asee4/types_of_decks/

If you’ve never played a CCG before, deck types will generally be classified as aggro (goes to the face, tries to burn an opponent down as fast as possible), control (prevents or otherwise deals with opponent’s damage options until win condition can be performed), combo (uses a combination of cards as a big win condition), and midrange (middle of the road, gets maximum value for each card).

Miracle Rogue for example I would classify as a combo/control deck. Basically, Rogue has a lot of cheap removal spells and weapons, so you remove your opponent’s minions before they can do too much damage to you. Combined with Gagetzan Auctioneer, your spells cycle your deck, so you can build your finishing combo. That combo used to be Leeroy + Shadowsteps + cold blood for a 26 damage burst, but after the nerfs people are starting to branch out, mainly between Malygos (for a spellpower win) or Violet Teacher (for a more minion based board control).

Knowing a deck is control helps you understand the deck’s motivation, but not how it’s played and its matchups, though. Warrior control, Paladin control and Priest control work very differently, although they focus on damage mitigation and big end game finishers. Well maybe not Paladin, that guy’s finisher is “not dying before the other guy”.

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I had a guy today summon Kel’Thuzad, use two ancestral recall to clone him (or whatever the shaman kill and then re-summon card is) twice to give himself 3 kel’thuzads. Then he used some other “resummon when this minion dies” ability, then deliberately got one killed, which spawned two more - one from the effect, and another from the kel’thuzad resummon. 5 Kel’Thuzads in 2 turns.

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That’s definitely a fringe case of “combo” :wink:

People have experimented with KT/Reincarnate combos, but generally they’ve been more for fun than a game winning combo. The main problem is that KT has to stay on the board for more than a turn, and against most decks this is a tough thing to do. If you did have a KT stay on the board for more than a turn, most likely you were winning anyway. And to even get a chance to do all that, you need to stay alive until turn 8+, and actually play reincarnate.

Still, once in a while, it’s nice to pull off the major wombo combo. However, lack of consistency means that you probably won’t get far up the ladder this way. Have you tried the priest Inner Fire/Divine Spirit combo yet? Most new players tend to start from there, and I have to say, while it feels amazing to hit face with a 54/54 Lightspawn or Lightwell or whatever, it’s very, very rare that everything falls into place and you manage to pull it off.

252

So here’s a video with some stuff happening that I don’t understand: Hearthstone Blackhole｜爐石黑洞 - YouTube

I think I have most of the oddities figured out, but the one thing I don’t understand is why seven copies of the destroyed minions spawned on both sides of the board. Any ideas?

What I figure about the rest of the weird stuff is:

Jaxraxxas: Apparently that player was a Shaman, I read from a comment, though I’m not sure how this is known. (Maybe that card on his board, which I don’t recognize, is a Shaman class card?) If this is so, then how Jaxraxxas ended up there would be: he was summoned directly onto the board with a card that places a random minion from the deck straight onto the board, which card I don’t know. Then was returned to Shaman’s hand with a card that returns minions to the hand. Then Shaman played it.

Zero-cost Twisting Nether: Seems to be landing in the player’s hand as the video begins, but on the left side of the hand rather than right. I think there must have been a Lorewalker Cho on the board just before the video began. That, and a Millhouse Manastorm, were killed by a Twisting Nether cast by the opponent, and the Twisting Nether was (by Cho’s power) copied into opponent’s hand, with zero cost per Millhouse Manastorm)

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Rank 15 puts you in the top 25% of Hearthstone players. You’re Better Than You Think!

The pdf Tabby Cat linked to is pretty good. Much like in poker, most players never actually get beyond Level 1 thinking – I have this so I do this. Going to Level 2 and thinking about what your opponent has is problematical in Hearthstone because there are so many cards (and soon to be a whole lot more). It takes a lot of study/time/experience but it isn’t actually all that difficult, just time consuming. That’s a good reason to study the popular decks; be familiar with what is most likely to happen rather than spending a lot of time thinking about things that are very unlikely.

I don’t play much anymore – usually just do the daily, maybe play an hour or two once in a while – and end the seasons at Rank 5 or better … just haven’t put in the grind time to hit Legend.

There are always a bunch of people streaming Hearthstone on twitch.tv; filter out the cursing, drunken young males with loud rap beats drowning out their chat and most of the tittering young females. It’s a very slow process learning by watching but I did find it helpful in the beginning to watch people like Trump, Kolento, and Reynad (when he’s sober) and listen to their thinking.

I’d say that studying and playing the decks of other people is a fine way to learn how to build your own. You didn’t do it alone in poker, you read the books, right? Keep in mind that those top level deck builders have been playing the game for over a year – use their experience.

The deck listings on Hearthpwn are a good starting place. You can filter out the cards you don’t have to find decks you can make. A lot of the deck listings have good discussion on why certain cards are included or excluded, and on what cards may be acceptable substitutes for ones you don’t have.

For climbing the ladder, aggro Hunter is the fastest and easiest to play. General Hint: concentrate on clearing his board in the early game, then hammer his face once you get him down to 15 health.

Warlock Zoo is a bit more difficult to play but is probably the most common deck for ladder climbing. It’s not really aggro, it’s more about making favorable trades than about bashing his face. Zoo decks can be very cheap to make, consisting mainly of basic cards.

Hunter and Zoo decks can climb to Legend. You don’t need a big collection of Legendary cards.

To reach top levels will take a LOT of experience mainly because there are so many different cards to consider. It will be very time consuming. And they keep changing the rules.

Two very important things to think about while you play: If you are going to do something that draws a card, draw first (if you can). Always count to see if you have Lethal.

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You know it’s a Shaman because you can see the Shaman card Lava Burst in the history panel. They setup the board with Nozdormu and an Abomination and then used Lorewalker Cho to pass Ancestral Spirit back and forth. Each instance of Ancestral Spirit causes the minion to respawn, so multiple buffs triggers multiple spawns. They also used Milhouse Manastorm to make the Twisting Nethers free. My guess is that the two Lava Bursts cleared Lorewalker Cho and Millhouse, which is why you can’t see them. This also explains why the Shaman used 8 mana on his turn (3, 3, 2.)

255

A bit more for SenorBeef.

As you’ve already seen, your poker experience is going to be very helpful. The game turns out to have a pretty low skill-cap. The real difficulty is the large number of cards and the amount of time it takes to become familiar with them. The new cards coming out soon appear to add an even greater amount of luck/randomness.

Zoo generally refers to a deck which uses only a small number of Class-specific cards and many low cost Neutral cards. It usually refers to a Warlock. They spam the board with lots of low value minions, making advantageous minion trades and pecking at the face until they have Lethal.

Handlock is also a Warlock but rather than lots of small minions, they start off very slowly, tap on their early turns (perhaps playing an early Ancient Watcher which will later be Silenced and given Taunt), building up a hand of many cards while taking face damage, then play Giants and other big minions with Taunt in the late game. When they get down to 12 Health, they play Molten Giants for zero mana, so you have to be watchful about doing damage to their face once they get near that point. You need to either do a burst of damage to take them from 15 to dead (14 doesn’t work because they can Tap and take themselves to 12 for the free Giants), or be able to Reach through their taunts to kill them once the Giants are on the board (and do it fast because you only have one more turn when you’re looking at a board full of Giants).

Miracle usually refers to Rogue. The miracle is when they play a very large number of cards and do a lot of damage on one turn. When you see a Rogue play an Azure Drake on turn 5, you must kill it. His turn 6 is going to be the Auctioneer and you will sit there for a couple of minutes watching him draw card after card after card before he kills you. There are some other decks with similar play, known as OTK (One Turn Kill), but it is mostly Rogue because they have the class cards to ensure they will draw the needed components for their combos.

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The game needs to move to a timebank system for turn time. I’m willing to accept that occasionally, people might have tricky decisions or a lot of cards to play and might need that long for one turn, though that’s stretching it. But they certainly don’t need that amount of time every turn. And a lot of people do it just to be dicks - either to punish you for winning or to try to get you to quit, they’ll take the maximum amount of time every turn. Which means you can end up sitting there for 20 minutes to finish the stupid game.

The game should have a ~2 minute usable time bank per game and maybe allow turns to last 30-40 seconds otherwise. If you need extra time for a couple of big turns, you can dip into your time bank.

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Sounds like byo-yomi, whih ice used in Go. Excellent, but not exactly newbie friendly. Heck, even a chess clock would be nice, and this is comin from someone who likes to play miracle and priest.

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Just run Nozdormu in every deck.

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I hope that’s not a serious suggestion.

When the Gnomes and Goblins expansion comes out, you’ll no longer be able to get regular card packs (the original expert set) from arena wins. You’ll only get expansion cards. So if you like arena, and you want some of the original expert cards, you’re fucked.

This is the same reason they won’t let you have more than 9 decks - they assume their player base are the dumbest people on the planet and that if you give them anything but the most dumbed down “streamlined” experience, they’ll be utterly baffled.

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I can understand why they did it, though. The collection book is intimidating enough as it is.