Hearthstone

Why would they remove one of the few things to work for in the game (500 wins). They need all the incentive for people to log in that they can get IMO.

The Ancient_sl said:

I'd be more worried about humility or aldor peacekeeper. That's an entire deck ready to be milled.

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Yeah, that's happened but normally milling out the deck isn't a concern. It's hyper agro so if we're at turn 6-7 and not near fatal there is a very good chance we're not winning the game. I think I still have a little too much of the MTG mindset of agro where aside from clears you don't really concern yourself with what the opponent is doing. That could be a good reason I got to rank 13 and slid all the way back to 18, but minor details I say!

ugh so now fatigue mage is a thing.

so I'm rank 5 on the 12th I guess I should go for it huh. Apparently I need to play even more games than I have so far this month at the same win rate to make it there.. what a grind.

Just faced this at 3-2 in arena...
Mage with turn 1 mana worm zombie chow, 3 fireballs, flamestrike, loatheb, and dr. boom. How someone manages to go 3-2 with that is beyond me.
Generally I find that you get matched up against opponents with similar card strength until you get into the 7-9 win range but my deck was below average this time. Once again I find racial slurs coming out of my mouth, thanks Blizzard.

So I had completely forgotten you could play this game for free because everytime I see a stream or read about it, money is involved somewhere. Anyway, I'm just wondering how far can I realistically play this until/if I get to a point where I'm seriously underfucked for not spending money?

Cool, thanks. Not nearly as bad as I was expecting.

eXarc the Internet Panther_sl said:

So I had completely forgotten you could play this game for free because everytime I see a stream or read about it, money is involved somewhere. Anyway, I'm just wondering how far can I realistically play this until/if I get to a point where I'm seriously underfucked for not spending money?

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Depends if you're talking arena or constructed. Arena you can technically play forever for free, although it's generally unlikely that a new player has the skill and experience to do 'infinite arena,' i.e. win enough games in each arena run to make back the money it costs to enter. You need to average seven wins per run. Until you can do that, expect maybe one arena run per day and sometimes days where you simply can't play arena because there's essentially no way to earn gold besides your daily quest and then arena itself. This is why telling new players to 'just play arena' is really pointless; new players can't actually access arena regularly, there's simply a limit to how often they're allowed in due to the 150 gold cost and the fact that you typically get 40-60g per day from the quest (and often have to spend an hour or two in casual mode just completing that with a shitty basic constructed deck).

In constructed, unless you're content playing just the one cheapest deck from the dozen or so top tier decks, the game is not free to play. Youcanmake face hunter with very little dust, but it's the absolute noskill bottom-feeder deck and you'll be regarded as the most spineless scrub in the world if all you play is face hunter. It's the easymode newbie deck of Hearthstone and also incredibly irritating to play against, as well as really boring to play as there's virtually no strategy or decisionmaking involved. But it's a good enough deck to take you to the top, so that's essentially the option for F2P players. If you want to play real decks, you simply have to invest money or play arena for a few months first.

I'd say the minimum amount of money to get a few proper decks (without first playing arena for a few months) is a hundred bucks. Any less and you'd have to be lucky to open some necessary legendaries from packs. You need to invest $50 just for the two adventures as those cards can't be obtained any other way (you could probably get away with just the first wing of BRM as few decks use the cards from the other four wings, but I'd recommend getting the whole thing anyway).

To actually get, say, five or six of the best decks around, you're looking at something closer to $200, with all of it spent on packs and disenchanting every card that isn't used in one of the top tier decks. And you'll still have only maybe half of the decks dominating the meta, if even that, which means many of the decks will be difficult to play against as you've never tried them yourself. The difference between knowing a deck from playing against it and being familiar with it from owning and playing it is huge, and you're probably never seriously on equal footing with the top players until you have all cards yourself, which takes either hundreds of dollars or many months of regular play.

Hearthstone is only F2P in the technical sense of not requiring you to buy it or pay a subscription fee. It's pay-to-compete, and the barrier of entry is such that getting anywhere without spending money is almost completely unrealistic. At this point in time, with two adventures each costing 3500 gold to unlock, doing this with gold earned from playing the game is basically not possible. You could potentially get all the important classic and GvG cards playing arena very heavily for maybe two months and spending all excess gold on classic packs, but earning 7000g through play is something that would take even highly skilled veteran players something like four months to do. I have never heard of a new player obtaining all cards by playing the game, not counting people who started back when there was just the classic cardpool.

The only problem I have with the facehunter for beginners is that it doesn't teach you much about trading and value. You can learn that very well with arena though, just don't get stuck in a facehunter mindset if that's what you play in constructed.

I personally never looked at the game as "FTP" anyway. I consider a 40 pack to be like the box cost, then another for expansion box cost, and of course the $25 for adventures is like a half expansion or DLC cost. That's like $200 over a couple years. Of course I've been playing since beta so its easy for me to say. I also bought more cards when they did that big amazon coin deal.

Deathwing_sl said:

I would strongly recommend playing arena on all three realms(Americas, Asia, Europe) and picking classes that correspond with dailies and aren't the worst currently(hunter, warrior, priest). Only play if you have a daily that your arena run can complete, otherwise move to another realm. It's rare, but there will be times where you'll want to play more but you're out of dailies or none of line up with your arena run. I have a kid, so your free time might not be the same as mine.

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I've done that too, then saved my leftover arenas to match up with future dailies and/or the generic dailies. If it didn't match up then I'd just do the daily in constructed. It can be frustrating but really you can get bad arena drafts as a mage or pally too, I find it more fun to actually experiment with various classes in arena and get a feel for what you can do in that format with their choices.

Warrior feels worst to me, no weapons = GG. Even with weapons if your opponent's class/deck is built for fast damage then your weapon removal gets to be a liability to your health. Rogue is sorta the same way but they tend to draft some more efficient removals and aggressive bursty shit more consistently in my experience.

Zoo is still a cheap deck to put together, and it the most beginner friendly imo.

Even tho the deck pretty much plays itself, it teaches them the patterns of every deck they run into, and how to play control.

When you get better you can play more advanced decks. I even think face hunter is to rough for a beginner because new players tend to panic too much.

zzeris_sl said:

Very little in life is free. You can do very well for as little as $50 though.

Axeman hates hunter obviously and is full of shit on the costs of the game. He is correct about arena and needing the adventures for a few necessary cards going forward. I spent about $50...the whole time I've played. Do you need to have the top cards immediately? No, and that is the real cost. Wanting something without any patience.

Sure, facehunter is hated but it is a very solid deck for beginners and what is your main goal? To win while learning the game. That deck does that very well. Who needs every deck dominating the meta? No one. Patron warrior is also very affordable. So is mech mage, zoo, and mech shammy. These are competitive decks that can be created without a lot of dust or money. You can spend some time a a little bit of money to get you started with decent decks. It's up to you on how quickly you feel the need to have the expensive cards.

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You either didn't read my post or failed to comprehend plain English. You're basically saying I'm full of shit and then in the next breath agreeing with what I wrote.

That 3rd game for Dog and Nelrea with Lorewalker Cho coming out of the Shredder between Patron Warrior and Oil Rogue was fun to watch

I've played since beta and have put exactly 1 dollar into the game to get the limited edition golden. Basically I do what Deathwing said(albeit on one realm) and by the time expansions roll around I have enough gold to buy them. If for some reason I run out of gold, I just farm quests. I can build all but the most expensive brand new decks. For a new player, I'd recommend dumping in the money for the expacs and then just doing what Deathwing said to get arena practice. You aren't going to get to Legend tomorrow, but you'll be able to ladder soon enough. They NEED to give new players a way to arena for classic packs though. It's the only reason why what I just said isn't quite true. Why this is still a problem is beyond me.

In other news, do you guys think Coheed and Cambria will write a song about me?

I bought a 40-pack of Classic, and the two expansions. That's the only money I've spent. But I'm getting to the point of being impatient about getting some of the GvG legendaries. I have only the worst ones. I'm still missing quite a few "necessary" Classic legendaries, but I have enough to create decent decks. Probably not legendary level but I wouldn't invest that much time into this game anyway.