THIS IS NOT AN ANIME POST

So I have been developing an unhealthy obsession over the past two weeks and, like any responsible blogger, I thus must bring it to all of you other anime nerds, so you can share in my social withdrawal. This obsession is a game called Hearthstone. For those of you who do not know, Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft is a CCG which uses mythos and characters from the World of Warcraft universe as cards in a turn based, life elimination based game reminiscent of Magic the Gathering or Yugioh. I will deal with major differences in a moment, but first, the nature of the beast.

Hearthstone is a turn based card game with scaling increased mana used to play cards from your hand, each with it's own mana cost. creatures can attack one another or the players' life total (starting at 30) with the objective being to reduce the other players life total to 0. One card is drawn at the beginning of each turn, and spells played each turn are only limited by mana. This seems like a lot of information for a few sentences, but the nature of games like Hearthstone is that explanation always over-represents the level of complication. The game is highly intuitive and has a comparatively small number of mechanics compared to magic or yugioh, all of which are straight forward. The reason the explanations seem complex is simply that it takes

a fair number of words to explain things your brain can process automatically with relative ease.

To your right, there is a minion card (minions are the equivalent of monsters, creatures, etc). The mana cost is in the top left, it takes two mana to cost this minion. Each player begins the game at one mana and gains one each turn, capping at ten. The three with a sword through it is the attack power, and the two in a tear drop is the minions health (damage permanently removes health, unlike magic).  In the box below the cards name, there is ability text. Almost all abilities in Hearthstone are triggered abilities, meaning they activate when a particular even occurs. In this case, casting a spell (a non minion, non equipment card) triggers the ability to deal one damage to all minions, yours and your opponents. Spell cards are similar in layout to this one, but have only a mana cost, other values are not present, and an ability. Equipment are the final subset of cards. They are a weapon that can be give directly to your hero and used to attack (thus they have an attack power) but have a liminted nuber of uses, called durability). Now to heroes!

This is a hero, in this case the priest class. Each hero has a subset of cards that can be used in deckbuilding or drafterd in arena mode that are unique to that hero. There is also, of course, a general pool of cards that all heroes can use, but a large portion of the strategy side of Hearthstone is selecting a hero who has the cards and power to make a particular deck type. Hero powers (look below the priest) all cost two mana to use and have different effects on either minions, you, or the enemy hero. In this case, the priest's hero power, lesser heal, heals two points to any minion or player. It is important to note, however, that no minion or player can go above its designated life points without the designation being changed by some other effect, so healing yourself while at thirty life would do nothing.

Deck building. I am not going to go into the strategies of deck building in hearthstone, as this does not need to be a 20 page blog post. Basically, from your pool of hero specific and generic cards, you build a thirty card deck containing no more than two copies of each card, or one if the card is a legend (basically, rare cards you can only have one of in your deck). In arena mode, you build a thirty card deck by drafting one card out of a set of three, thirty times.


Ranked play. it exists. it is fun if you take the game seriously, not at all necessary if you just want to play for fun. This is my ultimate conclusion about Hearthstone; it is a fairly simple game that allows you to take it as seriously as you want to without creating too much of a gap between paying and non paying characters and scales well to your competitive level when matchmaking. As of now, the game is in Beta but I look forward to seeing it develop. Finally, for the record I have yet to spend any money on this game and instead play totally free no money style, but am able to hold my own and have been ranking up over the past two weeks against players who have spent money, so do not feel that you have to spend money to have a good time. As a bonus, I am including my budget and non budget priest deck lists below, enjoy.