Hearthstone Revisited

There's always time for Hearthstone.

No screenshots this time.  Mostly because you've already seen 90% of the game from the few I uploaded before.  It's a TCG, what can I say.

I've been playing Hearthstone and MGR almost exclusively this past week.  Spoiler alert: they're both great.  MGR has quickly earned itself a very high spot in my all time favorites.  As for Hearthstone, well, it's easily the best card game I've played.  It is now in open beta, which these days means it's more or less released.  Go ahead and play it.  They're still working on it, apparently, but in the past week it's only had one very minor patch.  I assume they're saving the 1.0 patch for "launch", which is still TBA.  It already feels like a finished game, with crazy amounts of polish, but the content is a bit lacking and the balance is a little off.  So basically, it's as finished as 90% of online games.

One of the things I mentioned, erroneously, in my review was the quest system.  At the moment you'll get plenty of quests to start, but once you're done with all the buildup you get one quest per day.  I understand why they wouldn't want you to get tons of quests; the more gold they give you the less reason you have to spend money on a pack.  Still, one per day isn't great, especially because almost every quest boils down to "play the game as you normally would, only you get some gold for it".  There are also a large number of "secret quests" which you can do at any time and generally are more difficult with greater rewards.  Unlocking every hero, for example, will net you 100 gold.  Disenchanting a card will give you 95 bonus dust.  It's worth doing these as soon as you can.  I really don't know why they're hidden.  One hidden quest gives you 100 gold for defeating every expert-level AI opponent, which is something most people would probably never do otherwise.

You can hold up to three quests at a time, so unless you play at least every few days you're going to be missing out on some gold.  A standard quest give 40 gold and a pack costs 100, so the quests are actually an extremely important source of income no matter how rich with precious cards you are.  To put it into perspective, a bundle of seven packs costs ten dollars, giving us a value of 70 cents per pack.  This means each quest is about the equivalent of about 32 cents.  It doesn't sound like a lot, but if you do a quest every day for a month you just got almost ten bucks worth of cards just for playing the game.  Add in the hidden quests and the fact that you get ten gold for every three wins and the game is actually quite generous with packs.  It's a nice gesture.  Games like League of Legends (which I like, by the way, so calm down) give you in-game currency for playing but not nearly at the same rate.  Hopefully more companies will follow Blizzard's lead and make playing microtransaction-based games more rewarding.

But there is one rather enormous problem that I, as a newbie, could not have foreseen.  You see, Hearthstone has what are called "legendary" cards.  These cards are both exceedingly rare and extremely powerful.  You can probably see where this is going.  All other things being equal, a deck with a legendary will just about always beat a deck without.  I'm not kidding either.  Depending on your class there are ways around it, such as playing Assassinate or Hex to neutralize the legendary, but even then you're still liable to be at a considerable disadvantage.  Take, for example, Archmage Antonidas.  He costs 7 mana and has 5 attack and 7 health, so he's a little below average in terms of strength.  But, you see, he also has an ability that gives you a Fireball card each time you cast a spell.  This means that, even if you immediately neutralize him on your turn, a Mage who plays her cards right (ahyulk) can easily get two or more Fireballs without you being able to do anything.  Fireball is a 4 mana spell that does 6 damage.  You may recall that your hero has a maximum of 30 health.  It's a problem.  And if you don't have the means to destroy Antonidas on your next turn, your game is basically over.  Unlimited Fireballs which you can do nothing about are a bit of a quandary.

Now, I get it.  TCGs need rare, powerful cards.  Otherwise, why buy packs?  And how do you improve your deck?  The problem is there's no controlling for them.  I'm only rank 19.  You start at 25.  I recently played someone who dropped four legendaries in a row.  This is extremely inconducive to enjoyment and learning.  By the time you reach a higher (or lower, depending on how you look at it) you should really have a legendary or two in order to compete.  But the fact that people can play these against total newbies is a problem - a big problem.  I'm sure Blizzard will do something about it once the game is out of beta.  It makes no sense from a design perspective to pit people with endgame cards against those starting out.  Blizzard isn't exactly a paragon of balance, but you can't say they've ever done something like that before.

Ignoring the legendary cards, Hearthstone's balance is, for the most part, fine.  There's a definite tier system going on, but it's fairly close.  It's more World of Warcraft than Street Fighter.  This is largely due to the fact that most cards in a deck are inevitably going to be neutral cards which any class can use.  The class-specific cards are influential enough that you play these neutral cards in different way for each class, but a Kobold's a Kobold no matter what spells you have.

Even though the bulk of this review is about how every so often you'll get a match that was a divinely-conspired loss, I do like the game.  I just worry that, although it's in beta, the worst of it will remain unchanged once the game goes live.  I've noticed a trend in the past four or five years wherein "beta" just means "game we didn't bother playtesting but we'll totally get around to it later I promise".  I can't say I'm entirely pleased, but I trust an enormous company like Blizzard to put the ETA back in beta.  Or...something.