Ganite wrote:

Well if you play it it will probably make your son stop playing. Well atleast that's what happens in the shows/movies.

Nah, we play a few games together. I sort of trained him to like some of the older games, so we play AoEII, Diablo, Dungeon Keeper, etc.

Dakumonki wrote:

spent over a thousand on that damn game

Definitely won't be doing that... I'm looking to spend about $0.

it's a little pay to win because you get to avoid the grind.

Well, for card games, I look at 'the grind' more as 'play-testing and finessing my deck', so I don't know if that bothers me a ton.

It's the best game for smart phones that's for sure something not boring to-do while AFK

I don't have a phone...

It's really difficult and time consuming for new players to properly get into the game. The current meta (popular strategies and decks) involves the use of a lot of cards that you can only get from the solo adventures and packs.

Flick wrote:

four laptops

My phone flips. Essentially, it's an item to suck money and electrical charge with the occasional received miscall to the recycled number.

Hardcore till I dieeeee

Yut Put wrote:

There's this indie card game called Epic coming out that had a successful kickstarter and its cards are essentially the opposite of what Hearthstone's cards are. Every single card can do a variety of things. Even the simple, no-cost cards have multiple abilities they can cast. By giving the low-end cards tons of value, the game becomes so much deeper and therefore more interesting/diverse to play.

That does look pretty sweet. I might have to order a set.

UUmmm magic the gathering has always been pay to win... it's a tcg where you buy shite for rare cards...

Yut Put wrote:

hearthstone is also flawed at some pretty fundamental levels. You'll have one card that costs 5 mana and has 5 attack and 5 toughness, and then another card with 5 mana 6 attack and 5 toughness. Due to the fact that one card is objectively better than another in the most simple way, there is no reason to ever use the former card in your deck if you have the latter. In a perfect world, all cards in a TCG are balanced in value. MTG strives to do this, and it allows for great diversity and fun with deckbuilding. Hearthstone fails to do it in the most basic ways.

The only reason I'm going to bother to correct you is because I know you're passionate about game design.

You don't have a deep enough understanding of how cards go in and out of the meta. It's not as simple as "oh, this card has more health and damage, and costs less than that other card, therefore X card is better than Y".

I haven't played HS in a while so I can't think of cards that have these stats off the top of my head, but let's just say for a moment you have two cards with these stats:

5 Health, 7 Attack, 5 Mana
5 Health, 6 Attack, 5 Mana

You're looking at these two cards asking yourself "why on Earth would I ever pay 5 mana for the card with 6 attack in this situation when I can obviously get more bang for my buck by going with the 7 attack card?"

The answer is



When you're playing in a meta where there are tons of people playing a specific class or card, there come times where it makes a lot more sense to play a seemingly lesser value card just so you can play around popular card X. To give another example, back when the game was still new, Priests were running rampant for two reasons: Shadow Words, and Mind Control ( which was much stronger at that time ). As you probably already know, cards with 4 attack aren't affected by Shadow Words. Because of the sheer prevalence of asshats running those ridiculously OP control Priest decks, it was almost always a good idea to run several 4 attack minions regardless if their stats were inferior to other cards with the same mana cost because:

- It couldn't be shadow worded
- 4 attack minions aren't game changing enough to make Mind Control a threat

Hearthstone has balance issues, but just not in the way you were describing. If you wanted to use an example of poor balance in Hearthstone, all you had to do was mention this piece of shit:



Bear in mind, another reason why stats, specifically attack, aren't really relevant when deciding value in cards is because the most you ever really need is 4 attack. You should subscribe to Kripparian for more insight on this, but generally, if you have 4 attack, you can kill most things in the game either with the 4 attack, or the 4 attack + 1 other minion attacking. This is why it's not a big deal to focus on minions with higher attack because usually at that point it's just overkill at the cost of being a BGH target or easily removed by a spell ( most high attack minions have low health ).

Block or take the damage? Spend your mana now or later? Hold on to this instant? These are all questions you don't need to think about in hearthstone, dramatically decreasing the fun of the game.

Lol. It's very obvious you either didn't play enough Hearthstone or never bothered to attempt to play it at a competitive level. At least in Hearthstone I'm able to do something every turn. In MTG you can go 5 turns without being able to do jackshit just because your lands are sitting toward the bottom of the deck. Let's count how many players have won games of MTG not because they were the more skilled player, but because their opponent needed 1 or 2 more lands to win the game and never got them. Even the players at the top competitive level in MTG admit the game is heavily influenced by chance so I don't know why you're complaining about RNG in Hearthstone.