descender wrote on Jul 22, 2014, 19:25:
Anything is better than spending real money on MTG. Fuck that noise!

Agreed. Getting started with even a single competitive deck in MTG is prohibitively expensive. That's just one deck let alone others. I'll admit the number of decks you can create in MTG are more varied given the years of headstart they have. MTGO is even worse without bulk discounts.

I'm enjoying Hearthstone now and it's refreshing to be able to try out new decks and progress without the need to fork over your wallet and then some.

Yeah, definitely if you're patient then you can play Hearthstone entirely free - even Naxxramas. I've been just playing every 3 days getting my dailies done and I've managed to accumulate well over 5k gold. Now and then I'll spend some to buy packs to build new decks. I'm more than willing to wait and play. If I feel like supporting the game directly, I'll go ahead and spend real money on packs despite my hoard of gold. That choice is what makes it my goto card game.

I play ranked and arena. Ranked I don't play very seriously, but with a simple Warrior rush deck I can make it down to around rank 12 without any real difficulty. But I don't play often enough to really break past that. Usually the end of the month/season hits by then. Maybe sometime I'll spend more time on ranked.

Arena's a lot more luck based, but gives a more varied play without having to own all the cards. It's basically drafting and competing with others. It's good fun too.

I'm not sure how much longevity the game will have without the introduction of more game modes (Naxx is a good start), but it's definitely won me over with its business model. I probably would have been just as happy to pay for the game too given the number of hours I've gotten out of it.

There's no reason to spend real money on the game, other than impatience. I agree that each individual game is a little "luck of the draw" but... what card game isn't? That can't be a real complaint when "card draw" is basically always the most powerful ability in CCG. You can't judge the depth of this game by the ability to win any single match-up IMO.

I don't agree that there is "limited deck design". Maybe if you are only interested in copying the most powerful decks from the internet that are currently "breaking" the metagame and not coming up with your own decks? I only wish they would allow MORE slots to create MORE custom decks at once, limiting it to 9 basically means you can only have 1 saved deck per class.

Getting into single digit ranks has proved quite difficult (for me at least, without using popular internet decks like the zoo/frostmage/miracle rogue). Constructed (ranked) play is hard and can certainly get frustrating when you start to run into lots of legendaries. That's why I tend to spend most of my time in the Arena.

I've quite enjoyed my time with Hearthstone so far, and obviously still have more to learn. Like SimplyMonk said... grind, grind, grind for more free cards.

Anything is better than spending real money on MTG. Fuck that noise!

That's exactly the kind of review I'm looking for thanks!

Flatline wrote on Jul 22, 2014, 18:31:
Is anyone playing Hearthstone? Is it any good?

I've enjoyed the time I spent on it. Roughly maybe 20-30 hours or so since Beta. I haven't invested any money in it though due to the game play itself being too much luck of the draw, no player trading, limited deck design and boosters being a little to costly in my opinion. The metagame sounds a little boring at the high end to me as well. I've never ranked more than 20, but I have two friends in the 5ish range where they say it is more luck in match-up and draw than skill. Grind, grind, grind.

Production value is fantastic though and I'll definitely be trying out Naxx. Just have better places to put my disposable income.

Is anyone playing Hearthstone? Is it any good?