Hearthstone Open Beta

Pull Up A Chair By the Hearth

One night back in 1994, on the eve of my birthday, my best friend gave me a deck of Magic: The Gathering cards as a present. While I was a firm believer in the maxim "Save Gaming, Kill a Magic Player" thought process at the time, it was my best friend, and he wanted to play the game with me.  So I was willing to give it a try.  Unfortunately, I have a mind like a sieve, and left the bag of goodies at the rec center where my birthday party was being held.  And some schmuck got a nice deck for free to either use or sell.  And of course, given my dislike for the game prior to that I had the dickens of the time convincing my friend whose feelings were justifiably hurt that I had not done it on purpose.  These are the ways youthful angst gets us and often leads to midlife guilt.  So with that in mind, this article is dedicated to my favorite Tasmanian Devil.

Blizzard Entertainment has created a game called Hearthstone, which is a CCG that is played online. It is currently in open beta.  If you have a battle.net id, you can talk to any of your other blizzard games friends through the battle tag system.  It is a free to play model, with the ability to buy more cards through their store. Both in game currency and real currency can be used to buy a pack of random cards, or to access the Arena.  Each pack includes at least one "rare" card or better, and extra cards that you don't need can be disenchanted into a crafting material that can be used to make cards you want but don't have.  Thus, if you are on a budget, you can play completely for free if you don't mind grinding away to earn the currency.

Game play is pretty straight forward.  Each of the classes in World of Warcraft is represented by a "Hero" of Warcraft.  Each class has a specific deck of cards available to them, 20 basic cards that are earned by leveling the character through both practice and real matches.  Matches against other players are more productive as they grant more experience points to allow you to level up faster.  Each hero other than Mage needs to be unlocked by defeating them in practice games.  And each deck has their unique play style, that grants a pretty good feel for the class it is representing. Thus, you might find yourself playing the class of your main pretty well, unless of course, you don't have the cards to make that deck work.

The Choose Your Hero Screen shows you each deck you have open.

 

Once you choose your hero, you are off to play.  There are three play modes available: Practice, Play, and Arena.  Practice is versus the AI and is a good way to learn your deck. It's useful to level starter decks up and find out which decks are interesting to you.  Once you get enough basic cards to make a custom deck you like, you can start to play against other players in Play Mode.  Arena Mode is a special mode where you make a deck from random cards and play against other players for enhanced rewards. I won't go into that much at the moment, since I have only played one game of arena since that costs money/coins which I am currently hoarding to craft cards.

Once your opponent is selected by the computer, you get a load screen where you get to choose either three or four cards for your initial deck.  If you go first, you get four, if you go second you get three and a card called  "The Coin" which allows you an extra mana crystal at any time you play the card.

Mana crystals are used to pace what you can use when, with each card having a mana cost.

Choose Your Starters

In the image above, the top number is your card's cost in mana crystals. The lower left is the minions attack value, the right hand number is it's health. From these four, you can choose to replace one card with another random card.  Once both players select their starter hands, the game begins.   Mana crystals start at one, and add an additional one each turn up until a maximum of ten.  From there, the strategy begins.  Each Hero has a Hero Power, a special two point ability that they get to use if they choose so long as they have the mana.  In keeping with tradition, the Warlock doesn't use mana to use their Hero Power, they Life Tap and take two damage instead.  For the Paladin in my example, he gets to summon a one health/one attack minion for two points.  My opponent, the mage, gets to do a one point fireblast for two points.  Once the game starts, the cards are played in turn, and each is graphically represented on the table.

Not a Gnome!

This screen shows a number of game features. First off, the bear on my side of the screen is a taunt unit, which forces minions and hero abilities to attack them first.  Not all abilities are linked to this, as there are spells which can be used to target minions other than the tank.  But most abilities do require you to attack the one with Taunt, and thus they are a good way to control the battlefield.

The card being played, the Novice Engineer, has a "battle cry" which is, it does something special when played. In this case, it allows its player to gain an additional card.  These cards are particularly useful if you have a lot of low cost cards in your deck and as a result have a few cards in your hand later in the game. 

The purple "?" at the top of the mage's portait indicates that they control a secret.  A secret is an ability that is played that only becomes visible when the action that triggers them occurs.  In most cases these are either upon a summoning of a minion or upon an attack.  In this particular case, it was when I played a minion a copy was summoned for my foe.  Secrets can be very nasty, and have to be earned through decks in most cases.

Each Hero starts with 30 health and the first to reach 0 loses.  At that point, the game is over and the victor is declared.  You get a nice splash screen, win or lose, though the win one is cooler naturally.

All Hail The Triumphant Hero

At the bottom of the screen, you will note the three crowns followed by the bag of gold.  This is a quest completion. It grants you 10 gold for winning three games in play mode.   This quest is completable once per class.  Daily quests are granted each day and give more gold for completion. They are either the "win x games with hero x" or the "complete this objective x times" sort.  My current one was to win two games with either a paladin of a warrior deck.  Others have been to destroy forty minions in combat, or to cast forty spells, etc.

The game is fun, fast, and of course, addictive.  This game will be coming to tablet soonish, and eventually smart phone.  Next time, card creation.