Hearthstone

Dandai_sl said:

They're both played with cards?

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Hearthstone is to MTG as Go Fish is to Poker?

Citz_sl said:

I'm a bit of a CCG noob so I'm wondering what does MTG offer that Hearthstone doesn't have?

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First off, what MTG doesn't offer, but Hearthstone does:
- Grinding games as an avenue to building your collection. Pay cash or go home.
- Game speed. MTG is slower paced, since every action allows for a reaction.
- A 2013-quality UI and animations.

What MTG offers that Hearthstone doesn't:
- Massive card pool. I quickly counted 63 expansions on the Wiki page, each of which is at least as large as the Hearthstone pool. Note that most tournaments use only the 3-7 most recent card sets, but that's still a far larger number of possible permutations compared to HS.
- Non-creature permanents. Think if Hearthstone totems weren't creatures, but another type of card which could only be removed by certain spells/abilities.
- Instant spells and abilities. These can be played during your opponent's turn and/or in response to his spells. Kind of like secrets, except you don't have to play them on the board first, and they activate when you want, rather than on a particular trigger. This means you can never be sure your opponent doesn't have an answer to whatever it is you are planning during your turn, which adds a whole new level of decision making.
- Active creature abilities. Instead of automatically triggering at certain times (end of your turn, etc) and always being random, creatures can have any ability a spell can have and be activated on demand.
- Different combat mechanic. Attacker always attacks hero, defender can choose to block with his creatures. This makes removing creatures with annoying abilities much harder, and along with the point above, allows for significantly more interesting creature design.
- Instead of 1 mana crystal automatically per turn, you can play 1 "land" per turn which creates mana. You also have 5 different "colors" of mana. This has massive impact. You can get unlucky and draw too few or too many lands, or the wrong colors of land (if you have multiple in your deck). You can tailor your deck around having few lands or many lands depending on your mana curve. You can have a deck built around destroying your opponent's mana supply. You can use cards from multiple colors (classes, in HS terms), accessing powerful cards from all those colors, but this increases the risk that you will not get the mana you need.
- Destroyed cards go to a graveyard pile, instead of just disappearing. The cards here can be manipulated or utilized in a number of ways, including be brought back into play, be used to buff up creatures in play, etc.
- Automated tournaments at all hours of the day.
- Sideboards. After the first game in a 3-5 game series, you can exchange cards in your deck with cards from your 15-card sideboard. Sometimes this is used to bring in specific cards to counter your opponent, e.g. board sweepers vs. aggro decks. Sometimes it can even be used to completely change your deck, to outsmart your opponent. You can be a pure spell based combo deck in game 1, and as your opponent sideboards out all his creature removal, you can sideboard in lots of creatures and smash his face in. In general this means fewer matchups are as lopsided as they can be in Hearthstone. You may have a poor matchup against a certain deck in game 1, but by dedicating much of your sideboard to defeating that deck, you can turn the odds around for game 2 and 3.
- Trading.
- Lots of stuff I didn't mention.

Like Ronne said, there are a ton of differences, even if the basic structure is similar. Blizzard should be commended for creating an accessible, fast playing CCG in Hearthstone. As far as strategic and tactical depth goes, MTG is just miles and miles ahead of it. If WOTC would take their heads out of their asses and create an appealing online offering for people who aren't already heavily invested in MTG, they would see a massive boost in popularity and profits.

MTG online is intentionally shitty so as not to jeopardize cardboard profits. If/when cardboard sales start to wane is the only time we'll ever see a more "slick" online MTG, or another game like the old Shandalar (ie, a game with a full card pool and actual deck construction).

No, I think Ronne has the right of it here. WotC absolutelywill notdo anything that cannibalizes their physical card domination.

You aren't wrong of course, part of it is incompetence or lack of motivation but I do think they might be missing out on a goldmine here. Yes indeed a FTP or micro-trans fueled MTGO with Blizzard production values and a non-rapey cost structure would probably make a shitload of money but the problem is, it would collapse their card/tourney/B&M empire quickly too. They aren't taking the risk.

As someone who casually played MtG a number of years ago, I'm liking Hearthstone. Mind you, my MtG experience was limited to games with friends or maybe a card store tournament or two. Nothing at all serious.

It's great that if you have a spare half hour, you can play 2-3 games and enjoy yourself. No idea if this has staying power, but it was easy to get in to the game mechanics and is fun so far. I got my key Friday evening and started play on Saturday morning. The weekend was pretty busy, so my play was fairly limited.

To get started, I played a few hours of AI practice matches to learn the game, then I've played ~10 unranked matches. I'm around 50%, but I have a lot to learn before I'm actually effective.

I'm constantly stunned at the money that players of MtG are willing to shell out and the values of cards that they are willing to accept. If I had a player base like Hasbro does I probably wouldn't rock the boat either.

But that does create opportunities. I don't like Hearthstone at this exact moment but there's something there. It just needs some time to develop and for the card pool to grow. Blizzard has a big audience and at some time down the road it could be a real challenger to MtG. It could also go nowhere. Right now I spend maybe an average of five dollars per month on MtG and I get play all the games I want to play and do all the experimenting that I want to do. I'll never, ever get involved in physical cards again outside of maybe a draft here or there because the costs are absurd. Hearthstone is just about perfect in concept for someone like me.

just had someone in a game that was able to stall the game forever without triggering the time limit warning for taking too long on his turn by hovering his card over his side of the playfield, just great

Teron D'Amun_sl said:

just had someone in a game that was able to stall the game forever without triggering the time limit warning for taking too long on his turn by hovering his card over his side of the playfield, just great

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Do you play on EU? Because the servers went down. It stalls the game and it looks like the other guy went afk forever.

Thats just a bug. That means you DCed and he is still playing against you. Of course you are no longer there to make any moves.

Happens when you play some cards, as well as other things trigger it.

So I've never touched MtG before and this post should probably go into the MtG thread, but I'm making it here since Hearthstone is my first step into the card game genre.

Geek and Sundry runs this series where Day9 plays MtG with other people. They explain the game fairly well and it's pretty amusing to watch. The third video with Jesse Cox is the funniest.

It definitely gives me an appreciation for how Blizzard has simplified the game. MtG looks like a fun game, but I'm sticking with HS, mostly due to the logistics/time commitment with a physical game.

Column_sl said:

Happens when you play some cards, as well as other things trigger it.

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Thanks, that's helpful.

Millhouse manastorm ftw.

Mist_sl said:

Hasbro doesn't make any money off the secondary market. In fact, the opposite. They print products like From the Vault, then sell them to stores for 30 dollars, let the stores mark them up to 150 dollars, just so the brick and mortar stores can raise their margins.

Hasbro could easily sell these special releases and stuff like Modern Masters through Walmart and Target for those prices and keep all the money for themselves. They do a lot to make sure that your local gaming store gets a big chunk of the profits, more than enough to keep the doors open at least.

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I didn't say they made money off the secondary market. I said if I had a consumer base willing to spend the kind of ridiculous money that MtG players were willing to spend I'd not be willing to rock the boat with online action either.

When I win or buy a pack of cards, how exactly does it work. If I already for example have 2 lightwells in my library, what happens if the pack has another one? Is it wasted, or is it automatically disenchanted for me? Or can you only get cards from packs that you don't yet have two of, meaning in theory with enough packs you will have a guaranteed full collection?

You can get duplicates beyond two. There is an option to disenchant all the extra cards you have with one click.