Hearthstone Players!

jeb wrote: If you want to go face, I would get at least one bow.

Definitely. The Bow is one of the better weapons in the game. The traps just make it amazing.

jeb wrote: @Jackwraith: I have all these awesome fun cards, but I never get to play them... you do, you filthy Priest.

Yessir. That's why the name of my Priest deck is "Sweet. Thanks." (incidentally, that's also the mandatory phrase for the Dracula player in Fury of Dracula whenever anyone draws from the Event deck and has to give the card to Dracula: "Sweet. Thanks.")

I hope that Mages and Druids are removed from the game in a future update.

Check your email and Trashmail, Barnes!!!

Mages are fine. It's the Goddamned priests I can't stand. Which priest build, you ask? ALL OF THEM.

That and tank hunter. Yuck.

SuperflyTNT wrote: Check your email and Trashmail, Barnes!!!

Play Hearthstone!

Druid sucks because most of the time those decks effectively have like 50 health. Mage sucks because of their ridiculous damage output to cost ratio.

I hate everyone and everything.

Priests are like playing Hearthstone with Cosmic Encounter mixed in. "WTF just happened here? Where did that come from?" It's a lot more fun to be on the giving end than the receiving end. But Priest-Priest battles are awesome to watch.

I haven't built a Priest deck in a long time. I don't have most of the really good cards for it, so mine are always sort of half-assed.

Re: FaceHunter above, the only reason I was pondering it was as a cheap way to be more flexible about quests. Right now the only decks I really have in fighting shape are my suicide Warlock and my hard-mode Oil Rogue. I need to rebuild my Shaman, because I have nearly all the big cards for that class.

The only decks I actively dislike playing against are FaceHunter and Control Priest. Everything else is fine. I don't like playing against FaceHunter because it fundamentally alters the game. They don't trade minions, they don't interact with the board, it's just a ridiculous race. They pray for 4/2 Huffers and lucky juggles, I pray for my cheap shitty cards that are in the deck because I have to pay against FaceHunter. Who's enjoying this? The whole game is degraded by this archetype.

Control Priest, by contrast, is obnoxious in the other direction. They don't do anything. They just sit around and wait for me to do something so they can steal it or fuck it up somehow. It's so obnoxious. I have played my Shaman deck against them and just count on decking to win. My little healing totems can make them FLY through their deck if they get Northshire Clerics out. Again, where is the fun? Hoping they don't Thoughtsteal my Fire Elementals? Whee? I get that it's a part of the game, but it's sad that we don't actually get to play the game when they are the opponent.

Grim Patron Warrior is annoying, as is Fatigue Mage, but I feel like I have a chance. There's some gamesmanship there trying to set things up and disrupt. Everything else is Hearthstone fun times.

So, a little bit on this:

Like most card games and especially Magic, Hearthstone tends to follow the aggro/control/combo troika, with "midrange" worked in there somewhere. Over the course of the beta, that troika swung from one side to the other in emphasis and viability but most of the problem decks were aggro for the simple fact that Hearthstone is a MUCH faster game than Magic is, even though players have 50% more life. In Magic, any creature can block. In HS, only Taunters can do so. That means games are going to proceed much more quickly and, thus, aggro has an advantage that control often can't match.

During the beta, there were a lot of changes to try to address this. Unleash the Hounds used to be a 2-mana spell that gave all of your Beasts Charge and +1 Attack. Hunter players would sit back, completely ignoring what you did except to remove taunts, until they could drop a Buzzard, cycle through playing Beasts and drawing, cast Hounds, and kill you. Unleash went through 3 changes trying to address this problem and Buzzard was nerfed to the point of unplayability. Likewise in Warrior, Warsong Commander used to give all your other minions Charge. In the same fashion, Warriors would sit back, ignore the board except for protecting themselves from anything really dire and removing taunts, then drop 2 free Molten Giants and a Mountain Giant and hit you for 24 or more and kill you. Warsong got nerfed to its current form (as did the card Charge, since it used to cost 0 and affect all minions and was also part of that deck) and here we are.

The problem, again, is that in a game this fast, aggro is almost always going to have the edge. The flip side to that problem is that if they lean too heavily toward control, aggro disappears and every game becomes a 30-minute waiting game between whoever can play the biggest card last. So it's a very fine line to walk, especially for a game as new as HS with a card pool that is still really small in comparison to many other CCGs on the market.

Don't get me wrong: I vastly favor control. I find the game to be far more interesting playing control decks and in very few cases have I bothered to play an aggro archetype (I'm doing it right now (Zoo) because I'm kinda frustrated with the current meta.) That's not to say that aggro can't be fun and it's also not to say that aggro always has to be the mindless, straightforward approach of Face Hunter (Fuck. Those. Guys.) Zoo, at the very least, requires some thought and there's really nothing so viscerally entertaining as watching a Hunter run out of gas, down to 2 cards, when I've just wiped the board and am still on 15-20 life with a full hand. Most of them just quit right there and good riddance to them. OTOH, I've been on the other side when Zoo is running along a perfect curve or when I finished top 8 in two successive PTQs running SuiBlack:

Me: "Swamp, Dark Ritual, Priest of Gix, Priest of Gix, Black Knight, Sarcomancy, go."
Opponent: [blink] .... [blink] ... "Um... forest."
Me: Swamp, Bad Moon. Comin' over for 12. Wanna play again?"

The one real downside to the current environment is that there are some cool cards that simply can't be played because they're just too slow. OTOH, your description of Control Priest isn't entirely accurate, since most of them are doing something in the early turns: trying to stay alive. That's why most Priests run Deathlord these days by default. If I have Deathlord down on turn 3, I'm almost certainly hitting it with Velen's on turn 4, which means I'm going to start cleaning up the board with my 4/12, not waiting for you to do something. That said, it, Control Warrior, and Freeze Mage are probably the closest to the classic Draw-Go mono-blue decks of 90s Magic fame ("Draw. Island. Go.") that were mostly reactive and about locking down your opponent. I loved Stasis... Of course, I loved Necropotence, too, so I guess I can still see things from both sides.

So I was playing through the arena last night. My first foray since my initial free trial of it. You get to see way more cards and experience some cool stuff. I'd like to create a short list of "cards that make you say "fuck".

Grim Patron Warrior - When this guy hits the board...if you aren't prepared to wipe him out...all you can say is "fuck".

Knife Juggler - Harmless on his own. Then someone throws down a Grim Patron Warrior and then plays some card that damages all minions for 1. This happened to me on a turn where they played two Knife jugglers. By the end of it...there were like 4 Grim Patrons, lots of knifes thrown and me basically saying, "fuck me".

Force Tank MAX - Never seen this card before. If you've made it to late game and this sumbitch comes out..."fuck".

Obviously there are ways to deal with these cards...but man they make me PANIC when I see them.

Last night I got trounced in a way that I actually respected, as opposed to my usual "fuck me" rage. Sorry that I don't know the card names. It was a Rogue with one card that caused both players to draw two cards, and another card that put three copies of a card back into his deck. He basically just played those two cards over and over. Obviously, pretty quickly my hand was full, so I was losing cards. I was playing a Druid deck that has a lot of high cost cards (I call it "Big Guys." It's slow, but I have fun playing it.) That meant I could rarely get more than one or two cards out of my hand on a turn. Then, it wasn't long before my deck was exhausted. I knew that I lost health when I couldn't draw a card; I didn't realize I lost more points each time it happened (1, 2, 3, 4, etc.). It was brutal. I thought I actually put up a pretty good fight, but I was probably dead before the match even started.

I keep forgetting to post my ID. I'm Gregarius1371 (at least, I *think* that's the number. I'll have to check again when I get home).

@Egg Heh. Both Juggler and Patron are cards that have Super-Taunt. In other words, they don't have taunt, but people act like they do because they kill them (if they can) ASAP for exactly the reasons you mention. Force Tank is a little easier to deal with if you also happen to have a big guy on the board and, hopefully, a small guy or Hero Power to pop the bubble. I did that last night playing an Arena Druid deck. I took 7 (well, 6) to the face when someone Facelessed my Force Tank and then used my still-bubbled Tank to kill his. Still, that play with the Juggler, Patron, Whirlwind is a pretty nice setup for Arena. You'll occasionally find stuff like that that makes you feel like you're playing a constructed deck. Grim Patron Warrior does the same stuff, albeit minus the Jugglers.

@Gregarius That's a Rogue mill deck, the objective of which is to do exactly what he did: mill your deck away (after the famous Millstone of M:TG fame) and then kill you with fatigue while he survives because Gang Up puts three copies of any minion he targets into his deck, giving him effectively 6 more cards than you have and, thus, more able to survive the fatigue. The Murloc he was playing is called Coldlight Oracle and it's a draw mechanism that all mill decks use (Rogue and Druid have been the most notable versions) but it's occasionally used by control decks who are banking on the idea that the cards they're drawing into hand are going to be better than yours. The Rogue version is better than the Druid version ever was because of Gang Up and because Rogue has more direct damage than Druid, which means that fatigue becomes an issue earlier (i.e. you can die within the first couple turns, rather than having to go several turns deep; the Druids used to survive because of their armor and healing options.) While I appreciate the idea of wining via another method than just beatdown, I find mill decks pretty annoying to play against. Thankfully, every time I've played one, they've been unfortunate in that the forced draws have left me with a lot of key cards, so the cards that go burned weren't as important to me eventually beating them down.

Yeah, I'm about done with this. I can't win more than 3 games in Arena no matter what I do and I get pasted by people in the ranking. So yeah, I'm done.

Barnes, I don't know what you find to be so special about this. This is a hollow comparison to Magic. It's frankly no better than any other bullshit free app I can install on my phone. Fuck this game.

Greetings,
Just started with Hearthstone (my youngest son played a bit last year). I am enjoying it and I
thank you all for the insight and advice.
I have been reading/lurking for a while.

Todd
Mantidman#1912

Just some general advice for Stormy, if you're willing to go back to it after you come off tilt, but also for anyone just getting into it:

(As an aside: I've been there. There are days when nothing seems to work. My only suggestion at that point is to step away from the game for a couple hours, if not days, and then come back to it. If you're really eager to play, run some games against the Innkeeper. It's still using cards from the base set so you should be able to walk all over it and get a better feel for how your deck is functioning, how it draws, how you react to certain creatures/scenarios, etc.)

I'm talking mostly about Arena here, because that's still the best path to both learn the game and accumulate gold and dust to get cards. Most of what I'm saying also applies to constructed, however.

Gameplay:
Board control is paramount right now in Hearthstone. What you want to do, especially in Arena, is keep using your creatures to take out your opponent's and then hit them with whatever is left over. Don't just go to the face because if he takes your board out next turn and still has stuff left over, he's turned the advantage to himself. There are times, even when it looks like you have a clear advantage, that it's still better to keep control of the board. Barnes was playing last night against a Priest he'd gotten to 5, but couldn't close the deal and his opponent built his own board, reduced Barnes', and took him from 30 to 0. That's an extreme case, but it's illustrative of how quickly the game can turn. If MB had crunched the numbers and realized he didn't have the kill shot, he should have spent some time getting rid of the Priest's minions (ESPECIALLY Northshire Clerics (Super-Taunt (i.e. do not let them live.)) and setting himself up to be able to recover better when a Holy Nova came through and cleared his board. There ARE moments when your opponent has minions in play that it's a better idea to just hit face and keep the pressure on. But 90% of the time, it's better to clear and control. If you find yourself with 3 big minions that the opponent can't easily remove with what's on the board then, yeah, go for it. But that will be a rare circumstance in Arena.

That last note is one that comes with experience. You'll learn to feel out when those good face-smashing moments are. The other thing that comes with experience is anticipating what your opponent could do. If you're on turn 6 against a Mage and you have 3 creatures on the board with 4 or less toughness and you have nothing else to do but play more creatures with 4 or less toughness, DON'T. You already have board control (presumably), have 3 minions on the board doing good damage, and next turn is turn 7, which almost always brings Flamestrike. Do your damage, watch him spend his whole turn clearing your board, and THEN drop 2 more guys on the board and keep going. In this respect, card advantage is almost as important as board advantage. If you blow your wad and have no cards left in hand, your opponent knows your whole game. He knows what you can and cannot do because you have no responses. Even if you're not at turn 6 against that Mage, if you already have 3 minions out and you don't have a good way to spend your 6 mana (by only being able to play another 3/2, for example), don't. Keep your cards, activate your hero power, and move on. You're banking resources against his comeback.

Also, the game, like most, is about numbers. Do the math. Take a minute to tally up how you're going to attack that is going to work most efficiently, clearing his board (if you can), and leaving you with as many minions as you can retain to attack again next turn. You want to extract everything of value that you can from minions that you've spent mana and card advantage and opportunity cost to play. Crunch your numbers and then attack. Also, always make sure to tally up what's on the board in the mid- and late-game. People miss lethal all the time because they don't stop to add up everything that's on the board and in their hand (like Abusive Sargeants and Hellfires and whatever.) Every turn that you give your opponent is a turn for him to make a comeback. Stay aware of whether you can close it out this turn instead of giving him that chance.

Deck construction:
Good decks are built on a curve. You don't want too many small minions in the late game or too many big ones in the early game. The former are often useless, the latter are unplayable until you get the mana. When you're drafting an Arena deck, you look for two things: value and how it fits in your curve. If you already have two Knife Jugglers and some other 2s and a third pops up, take a look at your list. Do you have enough late game? Is there a card being offered that's less good than the Juggler (like a Tallstrider) but which won't be killed so easily on turn 9? Think about how your deck is going to curve out and what you can expect to see in your hands when you start. Arena is often about fast/good starts that the other guy just can't keep up with. You have a 30-card deck. You want maybe 10-12 early game cards (1-3), 10-15 midgame cards (4-6), and about a half dozen big things (7-10+). That covers minions. Spells are different and take longer to become familiar with. Just like in Magic, removal is key. However, you don't want to take so much removal that you're sitting there with a hand full of blasters and nothing to clear a path for. In most cases, what you'd like are creatures that bring value so that you can use them to clear a path in addition to whatever removal you've picked up.

The question of value is tricky and, again, mostly learned through experience. One overriding factor in most cases is toughness. You want creatures with high toughness because they're durable and can often gain you card advantage by taking out two of your opponent's minions for the one of yours. They're also more difficult to remove than other minions, which means you can still 2-for-1 your opponent if they have to spend a creature and a removal spell to get rid of your guy. It's for this reason that cards like Chillwind Yeti are highly valued in Arena (and constructed.) Yeti is a 4/5 for 4. That means he can kill another 4/4 (like Ogre Mage) and still survive. If your opponent doesn't have a Hero Power capable of pinging that last 1 health (Mage, Rogue, Druid), then they're going to have to spend another card (they've already lost the Ogre Mage) to get rid of it. That's advantage to you. If they can't get rid of it, then you can keep doing 4 to their face for the rest of the game, unless there's something else they've just wasted their turn putting down that you're going to remove with your 4/1. That's value. The Yeti brings more to the board than his cost generally implies. It's for that reason that you don't want to draft cards like Magma Rager, a 5/1 for 3. Yes, in the ideal scenario, you'll play your Rager on turn 3 and then, next turn, you'll hit them for 5(!) But the ideal scenario never happens because you're playing against a Paladin who spent turn 2 summoning a Dude (1/1) who can kill your Magma Rager, thus allowing his 2-drop to kill your 3-drop. That's value for him, as you're behind now.

Don't think of the ideal scenario. Don't draft cards that "will be super awesome if I have THIS card in hand!" because you will rarely have that card in hand. Draft cards that are good on their own, not dependent on others. Leave that stuff for the constructed decks. That said, if you've drafted 3 or 4 dragons and are offered a Corruptor, take it. Remember: draft to your list in addition to assessing for value. The other often overriding factor is draw. Creatures that let you draw (Gnomish Inventor, Acolyte of Pain, Loot Hoarder) are good because they replace themselves. The Inventor is even better because he's a 2/4 (fat butt, 2 for 1) and the god of draw creatures, Azure Drake, also brings +1 spell damage to the party. That said, again, draft to your list. If you already have a ton of 2s, Loot Hoarder may be suboptimal and will ALWAYS be suboptimal in the face of, say, a Sunwalker (4/5 for 6 with Taunt and Divine Shield) because it's often likely the latter will 3-for-1 your opponent. And, of course, the toughness and draw aspects aren't hard and fast rules, either. They're guidelines. 2/3s aren't better than 3/2s just because they're fatter. They generally have reasons for being valued over others, but that will become obvious largely through experience.

It takes time to get good at this game, just like with any other. It's NOT Magic. If you make that comparison, you'll just get frustrated (even more than you are.) It's a different game; a faster game; a swingier game. But it's still a great game and it's a lot of fun if you stick with it. Even then, sometimes you just get beat by a bad draw on your part or a good draw on your opponent's part. Or they're just better. It happens. Good luck.

Jackwraith wrote: While I appreciate the idea of wining via another method than just beatdown, I find mill decks pretty annoying to play against.

I have no doubt that I'll come to despise mill decks, too, but this was the first one I'd come across. It had a savage beauty to it once it really revved up.