Topic: Hearthstone: Blizzards digital TCG

[idolminds]

Official site

Digital trading card game! You can opt-in to the beta in your Battle.net account. I'm kind of excited to try this one.

[Cools!]

Still waiting for Blizzard All-stars.

[Quemaqua]

I could actually be interested maybe, kinda.

[W7RE]

I was expecting Blizzard All Stars and this sort of pleasantly surprised me. I'm not into moba games at all, but this could be fun.

[idolminds]

[iPPi]

I'm interested... I liked WoW's TCG, even though I played it for a very short period of time.

[Quemaqua]

Man. That looks really sexy.

[iPPi]

The game actually looks a fair bit simpler.  It doesn't appear to have interrupts or 'instant' abilities (that could be played if it was not your turn assuming you saved the mana).  Still, I can't wait.

[Quemaqua]

I opted in. Here's hoping.

[gpw11]

Well, I for one was hoping for something new and awesome.  Like starcraft ghost

[W7RE]

Man I was so excited about Starcraft: Ghost. The Starcraft universe looks so great, but since I'm not really into RTS I've never been able to enjoy it. SC:G would have done for that universe what WoW did for me with the Warcraft universe.

[idolminds]

I just got in the beta. I shall report my findings once its downloaded.

[Cools!]

Nice!

[K-man]

Which means we should hear something around 2015

[idolminds]

No impressions of the game yet, but I will tell you the tale of my current attempts to download and install the game!

There were/are several things conspiring against me getting this going. The main thing of course is my general lack of high speed internet. So my usual course of action is to take my netbook to the book store and leech some wifi to grab the big files, then just transfer them back to my main PC to use. For the majority of things this works fine. As you might have guessed, Hearthstone has been different.

Blizzard is releasing a new Battle.net desktop program, which is now in open beta. This program will replaces the separate launchers/updaters for WoW, Diablo 3, and Starcraft 2 and just have this one program handle all the games. Smart move on their part. I also hear it will allow you to see friends online and chat with them but that part isn't in the beta it seems.

First order of business was getting that installed. At home this was...slow. The installer was 5MB but of course had to download more. What was strange was the installer jumped to 64% almost instantly and then had the slow crawl to the finish. The problem was it was maxing out one of my CPU cores the whole time. No idea why. But the fans kicked on and I just waited it out. I was worried about it working at all on my netbook but with the high speed connection at the book store it installed pretty quick.

I figured now I was home free but this is where things got tricky. See, my netbook is kinda shitty. It has a 4GB internal SSD thats slow, and a little less than 3GB of that is taken up by the OS. Only things I have installed are Firefox, uTorrent, Keepass, and a download manager (for those times when I lose connection). But that didn't matter before since I could plug in a USB thumbdrive and have whatever space I needed for files. I bought a 32GB SD card for the SD slot on the thing, which is mostly empty so far. I have plenty of space! I thought.

Here is the wrinkle: the Battle.net program would not let me install Hearthstone to the SD card. I assume it doesn't want you to install to removable drives but...this was a problem. So I went through the poor little SSD and cleared as much space as possible to try install to the C: drive. I got shy of 1.5GB and Hearthstone was only asking for 1.17GB. It would be a tight fit but it could work. Battle.net kept telling me there wasn't enough space. So I was scouring google looking for any answer to what I can do. I looked into seeing if I can trick XP into thinking the SD was non-removable but every site with instructions directed me to a forum that apparently doesn't exist anymore. Super frustrating. I then hit on one post on the Blizzard forums that ended up being really useful. Being a SSD you want to avoid writing to it all the time and wearing it out, especially these old SSDs. So on this netbook I setup a ramdisk to hold the temp folders for Windows. Battle.net wanted to download the installer files to temp but there wasn't enough room!

I switched the temp directories in Windows to my SD card and what do you know, it starts downloading Hearthstone! Hooray! I cracked the code and I'll be playing Hearthstone tonight! 500MB and its flying by (thank you, Barnes & Noble). Everything is going to be ok. Except, you know, not.

I'm watching the temp directory as the file is coming in. It's done, and then the program must check it or something since it duplicates the file with a different extension. Then the directory is deleted along with the files. Must be installed! Oh wait...no. Battle.net says that this PC doesn't have enough RAM and so the program might run poorly. Ok whatever, I'm not actually going to play it on this PC so thats fine as long as I can copy the files that....uh...that you didn't even install and instead outright deleted. Great.

So I had to redownload it a second time and while it was doing the "conversion" thing I made sure to copy the downloaded file to another directory before it could be deleted again. Hooray...I think. But that's all I could do and by this time the book store was closing so I had to pack up and go home anyway.

Back at home I was happy to see the Battle.net program was finally installed so I could attempt to do...I dunno, something with this Hearthstone file. The Battle.net program itself was acting stupid, using a bunch of bandwidth for seemingly nothing...plus a notice that Blizzard was going to be performing maintenance soon. Great. I decided to leave it sit overnight to download whatever it was trying to download and I would deal with it this morning.

That brings us to this morning. Maintenance still going on so I had to wait for that to finish. Got into Battle.net ok and then went to install Hearthstone. After dealing with all this last night I at least sort of knew what the program was going to do and how I had to get in the middle. It first had to download the .torrent file first, and with my slow connection this took more than the blink of an eye. This gave me the opportunity to copy the file I downloaded last night in the directory. That way when the torrent started it would see the file already there and done. Success! The installer skipped downloading and went right to that weird conversion step. I checked and yup, it was installed! Hooray!

And then Battle.net wanted to download another 500MB. I knew it was too good to be true. Now luckily this can be paused and shit so it'll take a few days but I should be able to handle it. Alternatively, I can copy the now installed files to the SD card, go back to the book store and point the Battle.net program at that directory and in theory it should update it and not bitch about where it's installed.

So thats where I am now. Game is only half-installed, but I should be able complete it.

[idolminds]

So you can ignore that last post, which I'm sure most of you did. I went back to the book store with sme magic and got that shit downloaded, and I was playing it! Just now! IT WAS AWESOME!

Ok, maybe not full caps awesome but it was really good. Blizzard level polish on top of a card game is really nice. A lot of digital card games tend to feel kind of...sterile? Yes it's a card game so you're going to be pushing cards around, but Blizzard has just made it looks and sound really nice. Little effects all over the place. It's nice. Did I mention it's nice? Because it is.

So if you haven't looked at how it's played, it's really simple. There are no "lands" or other resource gathering. Start of the game you have 1 mana. Next turn you will have 2. Turn after that you will have 3. I think it maxes out at 10? I don't know exactly.

You have a hero, which is your typical WoW classes. Started with a mage. Heroes can have their own abilities to attack with, so like I had a basic fireball for 2 mana that caused 1 damage. Useful for killing off weak enemy creatures without taking return damage.

Attacking and defending is a little different from Magic. You can target the enemy hero directly, bypassing his creatures. The downside of course is it leaves the enemy creatures to attack you next turn. But if the enemy only has 3 health left you can kill him and end the game instead of slogging through all his creatures first. Now some creatures have a Taunt ability, which means you have to kill them first before attacking anything else. There are also abilities that can make heroes untargetable, like one of the tutorials you play the hero became untargetable until you killed all his creatures.

But yeah it's pretty awesome. You get thrown into it right away and the tutorial is pretty nice. I just finished with that and now I can go into Practice mode and unlock new heroes, or I can play online. Buying packs in the store looks like 100gold for a pack. That can be earned in game but I dont know how much time investment 100g is yet. You can also buy packs with real money, looks like $1 a pack.

[idolminds]

So, some stuff. Yes, max mana is 10. There are a couple cards I have that give you bonus mana for just the current turn, but I was not at max mana when I used them so I don't know if they allow you to go over that.

Unlocked the druid and the rogue by playing practice mode. Basically you select one of your unlocked heroes then you can challenge any other hero. Win and they are unlocked for you to play. Snazzy. I also fought the hunter but he kicked my ass pretty hard. Need to really get in there and handle all the creatures he will throw out. Which is a lot. I'll have to work out a good strategy to take him on, maybe fight him with a different hero.

I also unlocked a quest! Quests are a quick way to earn gold. Or...quicker way. Seems you earn 5 gold for 5 wins in random matchmaking...so saving 100g to get a pack will take a while. But the quests can earn you 40g or something and I guess there are daily quests so thats not so bad. The one I unlocked is to beat someone in an online match. I'm still a n00b so I don't know how that will go. It seems like there is no in-game chat, to keep people from trash talking and such. I believe you can chat with people on your friends list, though. Of course I'm the only one I know with the game so far so I can't really test it.

If you can get a key, play. It's great. And I'll play a round and quit, then 5 minutes later want to jump in and play again.

EDIT:

Had to play some more. I unlocked the Shaman and Priest. Shamans ability is cool. 2 mana and you will get a random totem. I saw a totem that gave a bonus to spell power, but most of them seem to be like "walls", no attack but some HP. Also Taunt so you have to target them.

The priest matchup was pretty tense. I decided to try make a custom deck for my mage and then I took it up against the priest. Things were pretty even for a while, then he got some good turns in and was wrecking me. Lots of taunts, healing almost every turn, and a bunch of creatures. At one point I was down to 8hp vs his 26hp. I barely scratched him and I was near dead! Figured it was a loss. But some lucky breaks and my heavy hitters and taunts started coming out and I pulled it off...won with 8HP. He wasn't able to hit me again.

I'm trying to unlock all that heroes since I think you get a booster pack to open once you do. That and it's good practice. You also level up your heroes as you play, unlocking new cards for them. So it's probably a good idea for me to do some of that before going online against people that probably have all those cards unlocked.

EDIT 2:

Well what the hell, I tried an online game. I was sorta worried because I picked my mage and went up against a hunter. Luckily I didn't let him build up any creatures, and I had enough taunts out that he didn't have his choice of my creatures to attack. I also had cards that would spawn extra creatures. Weak, sure. But they add up. Then I brought out my big bruiser, who gets +1/+1 for every creature I had in play. So I drop that sucker and hes 10/10. My opponent has no creatures in play. Next round he plays one but...no charge, no taunt. I can just ignore it and melt his face. Next card I pull is a 5/something with Charge. I had too many creatures in play, so I used my weak 1 damage fireball to kill one of my own weak creatures (who had a spell on her so she was 0/1 anyway and useless). Boom. Drop the 5 with charge. With all my creatures I took the dude down from 26HP to 0 in one turn.

Completed the quest! Got a pack to open and I think some gold? I didnt check the gold. Pack had some ok cards, nothing that stood out as amazing. But man, that was a really cool finish.

Oh, there are emotes to communicate with. Right clicking on your hero portrait and you options like Greeting, Oops, Well Played, Thanks, Taunt, etc. So no griefing but you can communicate a little about the game at hand.

Now that I think about it, replays would be a cool feature. With open hands, so you can see what your opponent had to work with while you battled.

[Quemaqua]

I wanted to try it but I don't think they ever sent me anything.

[idolminds]

I got some more information after reading and playing some more.

The Arena is an interesting beast. It has a fee to enter, either 150g that you earn in-game or $2 real money. This is more than just buying a pack of 5 cards (which is 100g, or about $1.50 a pack), but it can be worth playing. You are guaranteed to get a pack of cards out of it, so you're essentially only paying 50g to enter the Arena.

When you enter the Arena (first time you play they let you go through it for free), you pick a hero out of 3 random ones presented to you. You will then be presented with 3 cards at a time and you select one for your deck. You will do this 30 times to build your 30 card deck. Now whats interesting about this is ANY card can show up, including ones you do not possess yourself. Also normal deck building rules do not apply. Normally you can only have a max of 2 of any card in your deck, but if through the process of choosing cards you see 5 of a particular card then you can pick them and have 5 of that card in your deck.

Once you have made your deck you are matched up against random other players. You can play with that deck until you have 9 wins or 3 losses, whichever happens first. These do not have to be in a row or in one sitting, you can quit out and come back whenever. The more wins you have by the end of your run the better your final prize will be. You get your pack of cards even if you go 0-3, but for example if you make it to 7 wins you will get 150 gold...enough to enter the arena again. Plus you will get Arcane Dusts for crafting cards, more depending on you you do.

So you get a fun deck building thing, plays some matches, get some stuff for just a little more than the regular cost of a pack of cards. Not bad. This will probably be the money maker for Blizzard.

---

The game plays really fast, with many people building decks and combos to end the game by turn 4 or 5. So who goes first in a match can be a big deciding factor. Blizzard has been trying to balance this out, and the current method is the second player gets an extra card, as well as The Coin. The Coin just materializes in your hand as a 0 cost card that will give you a +1 mana. This would let you play a 2 mana cost creature or spell on your first turn. But being a card in your hand, you can hold onto it and maybe play a 5 mana creature on turn 4...which can be pretty devastating. It also counts as a spell when played and there are creatures that will get buffed for every card or spell you play. The balance is still being worked out. Apparently in earlier betas the second player got a +5 health buff, which ended up being too unbalanced. It'll be fun to see how this aspect evolves.

[idolminds]

There is a fine art to building decks. You need quite a few low mana cost creatures and such so you don't run into a situation where you're drawing cards you can't cast yet. Nothing worse than going a few turns with nothing to really play other than your hero ability. But you also need to have some decent high mana cards or you'll never build up the force to crack the opponent. I think is better to slant a little more on the lower mana cards than the high ones so you can at least keep the pressure up.

I unlocked all the heroes, so thats nice. I'm going to try pick which ones I want to level for now, since if they wipe progress at the end of beta its not worth trying to level them all for the basic cards.

I went to complete a quest of playing 3 matches online. Easy enough, didn't even matter if you won or lost. I won 2 and lost 1. First one was nice and close, both of us whittling away at each others health. I was down to 6 or something, and he had 10HP. He had 2 minions on the board with enough power to kill me (plus whatever he might have had in his hand to play). I also had 2 minions on the board but with a combined total of 4 attack I couldn't make the kill. I had two sheep in my hand so worst case scenario is I sheep his minions to reduce their damage and take them out, but that would just stall the game. The random number gods smiled on me in that moment because I pulled up a Fireball on my turn. 6 damage, plus my minions and I took him out.

Second game I lost to a warlock. I was getting bad draws and that dude knew some shit about playing warlocks. I put up a decent fight but he just had board control and I couldn't keep up. Well played, except you didn't have to taunt me. I know I was losing.

Third match was fun because it was mage vs mage. I took an early lead in damage but soon started running out of cards, and then she started dropping her heavy hitters. Anything I put out was killed the next turn, and she started playing +Spell Power cards and doing more damage. She even played a Secret card, which seems to be like YuGiOh trap cards where if conditions are met it will then take effect but your enemy doesn't know what it is. I'm guessing it was something about a minion attacking her, but lucky for me...again...I got a fireball and was able to kill her. I was lucky to have my HP fairly high for the last few turns so I could soak that damage.

Completed my quest, got 100g and a new quest. I'm probably just going to buy a set of cards. I don't think Im ready for arena. Next quest is deal 100 player damage in online or arena play. So...that will take a couple games.


EDIT

One thing I've thought about is the current lack of interaction with other players. This will probably change when I get some friends playing and we can chat. But right now it feels like an offline singleplayer game. There isn't any indication of how many people are actually playing and no chat rooms. I know why they are doing it, multiplayer communities seem to have grown very toxic since the days of Quake so by keeping chat out you don't scare off the more casual players. The downside of course is for an online game it feels lonely. The only difference between playing the AI and playing online are sometimes real players will play emotes at you or respond to yours. And they might have a really cool deck.

I don't know what a solution might be that also keeps the griefers at bay. Maybe something like the ability to spectate matches? Choose from a big long list of currently running games. Then you can get a sense of other people playing the game too. I dunno, but having some indications that the game is really active would be nice.

[Cools!]

I'm sure they'll be adding chat later, though I kind of like the idea of only being able to send emoticons. Like you said, things can get toxic.

[idolminds]

Yeah I like the emotes. It would be nice if there were a few more, and especially lacking is a "Good Game" emote. At best you can do a "Well Played" but it doesn't have the same meaning. Also once the final blow hits, thats it. It shows you gaining XP and whatever but there is no chance to thank your opponent for the game. It would be nice if they added that.

I started picking up on the metagame by reading the forums. For example, priests can be badass if you underestimate them. So here is the current priest tactic: Start slow, maybe throw a few taunting minions out for protection, and you have the healing ability to keep them and you alive. When you get to 4 or 5 mana then you can put your plan into action. Have taunts up and then drop a creature with high HP. You need it to survive to the next turn. Then there are some special cards you hope to have. One card will double the HP of a selected creature for 2 mana. If you have both of these, pump up that creature. A cheap casting creature with high HP is this turtle with 2 attack and 7 HP. So two casts on it will pump its HP to 28. Then you use the other card, which will set a minions attack to its health. So in one turn you can have a 28/28 creature out on the field ready to attack. Considering players have a max health of 30...its pretty much game over if you don't have any taunts of your own and some way to get rid of that thing (sheep, silence, execute, etc).

This was good information because my last game paired me against a priest. I was seeing the signs showing up, taunts being thrown out and then a creature with decent HP...which he started to buff. Luckily I had in my hand (rogue) some cards to get rid of them, by either outright destroying or simply returning it to the players hand. The emotes are nice because it was obvious to him I saw his plan and ruined it, so he gave me a "Well Played". After that I had a bunch of minions in play and it was too much for him to make a comeback, though he did deal some decent damage to me in the mean time.

---

So the daily quests are interesting. I currently have two of them, one for yesterday and one for today. You have three slots to hold daily quests so you don't have to finish them in one day. My current quests are to deal 100 damage to enemy heroes, and to kill 40 enemy minions. After my battle with the priest I am 38/100 for the first (priest healed himself a few times) and only 4/40 for the other.

So currently you get a new daily quest the first time you log in each day, which resets at 2am or something (midnight Blizzard time?). The rub is you max out at three so you will want to clear them if you can to leave room to get more. But you might end up with a daily like "Get 2 wins as a Warror". Maybe you don't like how Warrior decks play, maybe you keep getting matched with people that kick Warriors ass., maybe you don't even have that many Warrior cards. I get what they are doing, having the dailies to push people into trying out other classes, but it would be nice if you could abandon a quest to free up the slot if you're having trouble completing them. Also those kinds of quest should perhaps earn more gold for completion. Dealing 100 damage or killing 40 minions will happen simply by playing. You WILL eventually complete them even if you lose every game. Requiring wins and wins with specific heroes the player may not be good at should maybe be worth a little more.

[idolminds]

Playing with the stock decks for each hero...not really advised. Went online to do the 100 damage quest so I played a few games. Won one, lost two. The two ended up being against priests...the same priest, in fact. I got matched with the same dude twice in a row, and both times he pulled off the strategy I explained in the last post. I just didn't have my removals on hand when he started setting up. And he built his deck around that thing, so he had Taunters all ready to go to help him keep the big guy alive for one turn. Then he just pumps it up and destroys me. Oh well, quest complete and got some gold. Also have a decent chunk of the kill 40 minions one done.

[idolminds]

Ok, I'm taking the arena for a spin. I was given the choice of paladin, warrior, or warlock for heroes. I chose paladin, whose special ability is 2mana to cast a 1/1 minion. Which is sorta shit but I was hoping for cards where a lot of minions would be useful.

Honestly, I have no idea what I was doing. Cards come up...are they good or not? I dunno...I guess? I just kept picking ones that seemed good and didn't give me a really wonky mana curve (if you make a deck with nothing but 4+ mana cost cards you're in for a world of hurt). So I'm going to give this thing a whirl. I don't expect to do terribly well but no matter how I do I'll get a free pack out of it, and it'll work on my daily quests. I will report back how it goes.

EDIT: Won my first arena match! Wee! The deck I build seems to lean more towards cheap minions so I had quite a few out.


EDIT2: Won my second match! That one was rather fun since we both had Secret cards in play. When certain conditions are met they will trigger. I had one up first which would take any damage directed at my hero and also cause it to the enemy hero. This worked out well when he dropped a 4/4 boar with Charge and smacked me, so we both took the hit.

A few rounds later he put up a Secret and so did I. Then the funny happened. I direct damaged his hero, spring the Secret which caused 2 damage to all my minions and my hero. The damage to my hero sprung MY secret which caused him to take damage like I did....which seems to have sprung his trap a second time. I guess luckily/unluckily that was as far as it went otherwise we just discovered an endless loop of death, but I wish it had just ended on my hit because I didn't want all my shit totally eliminated. Ok, looks like it was just a visual bug now that I think on it. I still had one minion left alive that would have been killed if that trap actually sprung twice. I reported it. Yay, beta testing!



EDIT3: Currently 3 wins and 1 loss in the arena. Finished off both the daily quests I had so I have 125g right now. Enough to buy a pack or depending on how this arena goes, maybe enough to re-enter the arena. I think though that I will wait to continue in the arena tomorrow, so I will have my new daily and my matches will count towards completing it.

So one thing to pay attention to in Hearthstone is the order in which you do things. Unlike Magic where you have a draw phase, a play phase, an attack phase, etc, HS just draws you a card and from then on you do what you want in whatever order you want. So on one turn my opponent had some nasty thing out that causing all minions to cost an extra mana to cast. So on my turn the first thing I did was use my current minions to kill it and then I could cast my cards for their regular cost.

[idolminds]

Heh, the metagame worked out in my favor just now in a different way. I got a daily quest of win 2 matches as priest. I'm sorta worried about this since I havent played as priest at all. Eh, whatever...basic deck and go!

Matched with a hunter and we're having a good time, and I gain a little bit of an upper hand in minions. One of which is the Chillwind Yeti. This obviously worries the hunter, because he spends a card to lower its health to 1, and then another card to cause it 2 damage. I think there was a bug so the damage didnt happen. It was also kind of a bad move since his minion out was a snake that will kill any other minion that attacks it. Could have done a 1:1 trade and kept those 2 cards for a different move. Oh well.

Anyway, after his attempt failed...he conceded the match. I was confused at first but then I realized he must have thought I was going to pull off the priest move I described a few posts up. The yeti is one of the popular cards for that, plus I had dropped 2 other minions to give the yet +1/+1 twice. It looked like I was beefing it up for the big kill but in reality the basic deck I don't think even has the cards for it! So I faked him out and won a game. Hopefully the second one goes as well.

UPDATE: I lost my second battle as priest, but it was a close one for most of it. But we both ended up late game with no cards and he had a better set of minions on the field. We'd play what we pulled because thats about all we could do, and the lucky bastard kept getting the "Return target minion to players hand"...so I'd toss out a nice 4/5 taunt to take some heat off my hero and he would bounce it right back to my hand and I just got smacked around. Good match, though.

Won my third battle, so daily quest complete and 40g! Nice matchup with a shaman. My last match I realized the faults in the basic deck. There weren't many cards to pull more cards, and some of the cooler priest spells I was unlocking weren't in there. So I went and built a priest deck myself to include that stuff and I did a lot better. Plus, MORE TAUNTS. Priests and taunts are great because it forces your opponent to target them, which leaves you free to heal or buff your other minions (or yourself). That and some of those "draw a card" cards and I had a nice hand the whole time.

Silence is a neat ability because it removes any ability or buff placed on a card. For example the shaman cast a totem and got on that would buff his other units. BAD! I silenced it and buff went away, plus it left a 0/3 minion on his side taking up a space. He later buffed it so it could attack but by then it was too late and I won next turn anyway.

[idolminds]

Heh, had some fun with a little priest deck I built and threw in some fun cards. The special gold card you get when you buy from the shop is a 6/6 minion that will spawn a "random AWESOME invention" when played. The one I got would randomly heal +3 to each side. So the downside is it I ended up healing my enemy some. But with my other cards...man. One would draw a card any time a minion was healed. And another would draw a card any time I cast a spell. So I would cast heal on something and get cards, then the invention would kick on a heal and Id get another card. Like every round I was pulling 3 cards, it was crazy.

[K-man]

FYI I hate you and this thread until Blizzard gets back to me on why they haven't sent me a beta invite.

[idolminds]

So I don't know if todays wave of keys is out yet, but there is some extended maintenance going on.

But a heads up, if you use gmail and have those tabs go check your Promotions tab. Apparently the email can end up in there. One guy on reddit actually had his key sitting in there for almost 2 weeks and didn't know it.

[Quemaqua]

Those can be turned off too. I got rid of the fucking things the day they added them.

[idolminds]

Well, my arena run ended 3-3 when I lost 2 in a row. I was really close in the first game, had him down to 2HP and he made some great plays and wiped me out. All I needed was one turn where I could attack and it would have been mine!

So my arena key was level 3, opened the chest and I got a pack of cards (as always), 20g, and 20 dust.

Shitty part is I am maxed out on daily quests so I need to win 2 as pally, 2 as druid, and 2 as...some third class Im forgetting. Rogue? Maybe. I was hoping to win something in arena since I was a pally and it would have counted but noooooo, match me with better players why dont you?

You can see them use the arena key in this video. Note: Dont do it with one win!

EDIT: Looks like a bunch more keys went out today. Check those emails! I want people to play with!


EDIT2: Man, I dont like my quests. 2 wins each as druid, paladin, and hunter. So now I'm sorta grinding the AI to unlock their basic cards. I could just jump online and try my luck with the base deck but that can go bad. I dunno, maybe I'll try it and how I get paired with another noob.

[idolminds]

You know all those games I won? Yeah well I guess they are now matching me with better people because I haven't won a single game for two days. My last match I had this made down to 2HP and she made a comeback like crazy. Ugh, I needed just one freaking spell card! I know there was a 3 damage spell in the last of my deck, which was down to like 6 cards. But she got board control and I couldn't keep any minions on the table. I was reduced to spawning my 1/1 but her fireball easily killed it and then her minions just kicked my teeth in.

It's kind of killing my buzz with the game. Can't complete the quests so I'm not earning gold. Can't win matches so I'm not even earning the pittance of gold everyone bitches about. I don't have any friends in the beta so I have to just face randoms. It's like I can't make any progress at all, other than the XP I'm earning for my losses. Whoopie. Feels like I'm throwing myself against a wall. I'm guessing this will be less of a problem when the game goes live and more people are playing it, especially people that are worse than me. Current beta testers are sorta hardcore about it.

Also since its beta and all my progress will be wiped anyway kind of kills the reason to get past it. Great, I'll open some packs that will be taken away from me in a few weeks/months. I think at this point I'd rather just play some friends games.

[Cools!]

Stop hating yourself. Go play something else.

[idolminds]

Blizzard Game designer talks about The Coin.

I mentioned it before but I'll explain it here again. At the start of the game there is a coin flip to determine who goes first. The player that goes 2nd gets some bonuses: an extra card and The Coin. The Coin is a 0 cost spell that gives you +1 mana for the current turn.

Anyway, read the designers post where he talks about first turn advantage and them trying to balance it out. It's pretty interesting.

[idolminds]

Account wipe coming.

Beta must be moving along. With the big update they have planned (maybe this tuesday?) they will be wiping everyones accounts. They don't think they will need to to another one before release so any progress made will be kept! Hooray! They also plan some more big waves of invites and I can't imagine open beta being too far away.

But man, some people are soooo pissed that there won't be another wipe between this one and release. Lots of complaining about "unfair advantage". I don't see it. Ok, I'll have unlocked some cards and earned some free packs from doing dailies. But after about a month of play everyone will be fairly even. And some guy day one could just buy 40 packs of cards and have more cards than me. Whatever, its a non-issue.

EDIT: something that occurred to me. Having a wipe as you open the game to the public in this case would be pretty detrimental because your matchmaking system will be treating beta players with lots of experience the same as new people just coming in. Probably a good thing to not have their ranks wiped. Any "advantage" they might have is moot if you won't me matched with them until you're considered equals.

[idolminds]

Haven't played too much recently. Once the wipe was announced I sorta stopped playing since everything was going away anyway. Now that we're post-wipe I'm sluggish since I have to unlock everything all over again. I know, boohoo, you're in the beta. I'm slowly unlocking the classes again and going to work on leveling them up. The nice part is now XP can be gained in practice mode as well as playing with friends up past level 10. So you don't have to always join random games to level up and get the golden cards.

They have been doing near daily invite waves since the wipe, so keep checking your email. They moved the game onto what should be its final servers so they are ramping up the player count to test it. There has been some errors pop up and today there won't be a wave because of it, but it's coming along.

[idolminds]

Just had a really intense match against the expert level AI. I was playing druid with a custom deck with a lot of cards that also spawn extra minions, vs the mage expert AI deck.

Start was sorta rough since my first turn I didn't have any low mana cards to play so right away I'm on the defensive and just trying to keep her in check. The hard part with mages is they are really good at clearing minions so my bonus minions were dropping before they could do me any good. About mid game it was looking really bad for me. The AI pulled out a couple secret cards that granted her +8 armor both times, and I had yet to hit her once. She essentially had 46 life and had been beating on me so I was all the way down to 9HP. She counter-spelled my healing cards so I didn't even get the bonus from them. I almost forfeit.

But I decided to stick it out thinking the game was over in 2 turns anyway. Well things started turning around as I finally had enough mana to drop my big hitters and comboing them with my druid buff cards, giving them +2/+2 and Taunt and things like that. It wasn't much but I was able to clear her minions and start dealing damage of my own. At this point both our hands were pretty empty and just top decking it every turn. She had a LOT of Secrets in that deck but I managed to hold out. As a bonus by keeping her minions in check and since I could only cast a single card a turn anyway I was able to use the druid special ability turn after turn and built up a respectable 14 armor for myself. A couple cards that allowed me to draw extra cards put me at a card advantage.

It came down to the wire, though. Pulling the extra cards was great but it also meant my deck was going to be empty first and start taking Fatigue damage. I lucked out and managed to land a killing blow on the turn I drew my last card. It was quite a rush.

[Quemaqua]

Sounds really fun! I never did get an invite to the beta, but my love of card games kinda makes me wish I had. Though at this point I know I'd give it too much time anyway and I really shouldn't.

[idolminds]

They are doing invite waves on nearly a daily basis. So either you'll get a key soon or they will be doing open beta soon. I think they are pretty much just ramping up the player count so the hardware doesn't die on a single release day rush.

[Cools!]

I want an invite to Heroes of STORM!

[idolminds]

If you signed up for beta, check your emails!

We have some other news to share too. As of today, we have sent beta invites to everyone who opted in to the Hearthstone closed beta test prior to Monday, December 16. If you opted in before that date and have not yet received an invite email, check your spam folders or different email tabs to see if you invite may have ended up in an unexpected location. If you still can’t find your Hearthstone beta invite, don’t worry! We’re putting together a list of all Battle.net accounts that opted in to the Hearthstone beta test and did not claim their beta key. These accounts will be flagged for beta access within the first few weeks of January.

Opt-ins for the closed beta test will end on January 7; we plan to invite everyone who opts in by that date to the closed beta test at some point before the open beta begins. So keep playing, testing, and amassing your Hearthstone collection, as we do not plan on performing another card data wipe.