I’m kind of disillusioned by Hearthstone because while I enjoy collecting and making fun decks; high level (ranked) play ends up being the same decks over and over again. Even if you don’t get to higher ranks (which I am surely not), a lot of people look for deck lists on the internet and just copy those “optimized” versions. That takes a lot of fun out of the game because the duel is so structured.

I’ve thought how championship play must be kind of straightforward because everyone knows what decks everyone is bringing; and what’s in the deck. But I guess the difference between professional and amateur is that the professionals are able to play out the entire game in their head before they actually run the play (kind of what you would do in chess). It just feels constrained when there is no randomness or surprise within a deck, but again it’s not like a chessboard has secret pieces that your opponent doesn’t know about.

In any case, I just play for fun and having every opponent use some sort of optimized hero archetype is frustrating. That’s why I’m happy to see the Hearthstone formats change. There was a ton of knee-jerk complaining about the change, but I think it makes the game much more healthier. If you play Standard, you’ll have to rethink all the archetypes and build new decks and card synergies to make up for retired cards. No doubt, the meta will devolve back into netdecks, but at least there’s going to be a period where people are just trying stuff out.

Wild will also be … Wild! I’m a collector so I’m spending all my F2P gold on GvG packs now before they go “out-of-print”. I’m a bit bummed that I won’t be able to get cards to complete my collection without crafting them (which given my Epic and Legendary pull rate, might not be that much harder to do) but I’m excited about how crazy that format will be in a couple of years. It’ll be like Tavern Brawl every day.

Also, if it’s not obvious, I’m a Johnny player type, although I need to win in order to fuel my collecting (so Spike by necessity).

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: games, hearthstone