Hearthstone

I made a major mistake this week.  I installed Hearthstone to see what the fuss is all about.

And it is really, really good.

I have played Magic in the past and, despite liking the game at first, I very quickly grew to dislike the game intensely primarily for two reasons.  And Hearthstone manages to fix both of them!  Is it any surprise that I'm currently a little hooked?

Land as mana
In Magic, land cards form part of your deck and actually represents the mana resources you use to play cards.  The problem with this is that your ability to actually play is wholly dependent on your ability to draw land cards.

I have literally lost count of the number of games where I never drew any additional land and played most of the game with just the 2 or 3 land that I had in my starting hand.  Similarly, I have too many memories of games where I drew nothing but land and ended up with 10 land out on the playing field by turn 10.  Both of those situations are pretty much insta-lose which is extremely frustrating when you lose simply due to bad luck.

Hearthstone manages to fix this issue by removing land from the equation.  Instead, you start with 0 mana and gain 1 mana per round (up to a max of 10 mana).  This not only removes the random element of luck from mana, but also lets you plan ahead for what you can do in a round or two.  Naturally, you are still subject to the vagaries of luck with regard to card draw but this simple change removes a massive element of frustration from the game.

CCG business model
The other element of Magic which annoyed me was the simple fact that it was a CCG.  As a CCG, the cards you have available with which to build your deck are wholly dependent on how much money you spend on the game.

This leads to a major problem at the budget end of the game (which was how I was playing it).

The nature of a deck construction game like Magic is that there are many different ways to build your deck.  For example, you could build a Green deck focused on massive monsters which might take a beating in the early game but, once you got your land out, you can put those monsters into play and then steamroll over your opponent.  Alternatively, you could build a Black deck focused on insta-death cards where you don't have to worry about large monsters as you can just instantly blast and kill them.

Which is where you start to see the problem - the metagame.  If you built the above green deck and go up against the above Black deck, you are going to lose 8+ games out of 10 (the remaining one or two wins due to bad draw from your oppoent).  You lost the metagame as your deck is never going to be competitive against that Black deck which counters your strengths perfectly.

In Magic, your options are pretty limited.  You can either find a different opponent and hope that opponent doesn't have a similar deck (not really an option if you are playing with friends).  You could hope that your opponent spends money to build a different deck.  Alternatively, you could spend money to build a different deck.  None of those options are appealing.

Hearthstone, although it is also a CCG, manages to solve this problem simply by virtue of its being an online free to play CCG.

If you come up against a player who perfectly neutralizes your decks strength, its not an issue.  As the game is played online, your next match will be against someone new.  Even if you were only playing against the same friend again and again, you can easily change your deck by just building a new deck from the available free cards.  Sure, you can more easily build competitive decks by spending money but so far, in my week of play, I haven't spent any money and have been able to slowly build my card pool just from normal play.



Long story short, Hearthstone has managed to reignite my passion for deck construction games.  If you have never played a CCG before, or left Magic for similar reasons to those I posted above, go check it out!