Reynad shares his thoughts about the popular card game from Blizzard

Apr 29, 2014 00:31 GMT  ·  By

Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft professional player Andrey "Reynad" Yanyuk believes that the free-to-play card game from Blizzard can become the next big eSport and that the title isn't pay-to-win, even though it allows players to buy card packs with real-world money.

Hearthstone was revealed to the world quite some time ago as a free-to-play online trading card game that allowed anyone to play and unlock cards but, if they wanted to get better and better cards and build more impressive decks, then players had the option of spending real-world cash on the virtual card packs.

As you can imagine, this led to debates about a dreaded pay-to-win situation, in which those with lots of money to spend could stomp those who didn't want to invest any actual cash in the free title.

According to professional player Andrey "Reynad" Yanyuk, who talked with Softpedia at Dreamhack Bucharest, the situation isn't actually so, as the game emphasizes skill and strategy more than just good cards.

"I think the pay-to-win scenario is non-existent. I was the first player in the world to get a Legendary on a completely free account. I did it in 5 days so it was pretty easy to do. You don't need to spend money to do well. If a bad player spends a lot of cash and buys every card in the game and builds what he wants, he's still going to lose to good player with cheap cards in an efficient deck," he said.

"I think skill has a lot more to do with it than what cards you have. It's nice to be able to get some reward for playing Arena and unlock cards as you go. I think it's in a good spot."

What's more, Reynad is quite confident that the game can become the next big eSport, even though it's quite different from current fan-favorites like Dota 2 or League of Legends, which rely on teams and not on individual players.

"The audience is there and the big companies want to get into it. It's a different experience, it's card oriented and not a team-based eSport, so you need a different structure than for Dota 2 or LoL. I think the audience is there, the interest is there for such events. If you compare Hearthstone, which is just a few weeks old, to Dota 2 or LoL in the early days, it's quite ahead of them," he added.

Hearthstone has just had one of its biggest tournaments ever at Dreamhack Bucharest and it was a success, so expect to see more of the game at more competitions.