14 DAY TRIAL // I’m not a good Hearthstone player, but I’m addicted to it. There are many players who are not good at a game, but keep playing it because they enjoy it. I’m not a bad player either, and when I have enough time, I can come up with interesting metagaming ideas when it comes to card games.
My first encounter with Blizzard’s Hearthstone game happened less than a year ago, and since then I’ve been occasionally playing it in my spare time. Hearthstone is a well-thought concept, as the game has been designed from the beginning to be played in “bursts.”
Whenever you have 15-20 minutes to pour into something that you know it’s going to relax you, you fire up Hearthstone and do your daily quests for the in-game gold that would allow you to improve your decks by purchasing boosters.
Hearthstone is a player-vs-player game, as in it requires two players to play against each other. However, Blizzard thought it would be fun to allow some players to play against the AI and win extra cards if they are victorious.
The result was the first expansion for Hearthstone called Curse of Naxxramas. The name comes from a very old World of Warcraft raid, in which I have personally spent way too many hours in the past.
Soon after all wings in the Curse of Naxxramas adventure unlocked, I had all the cards, so you could say that I didn’t take my time with the expansion. But that won’t be the case with the new Goblins vs Gnomes expansion, which brings so many cards onto the game.
Curse of Naxxramas brought in 30 cards and heavily influenced the metagame. Now imagine the changes after Goblins vs Gnomes, which adds no less than 120 cards to Hearthstone.
There are so many possibilities, so many combinations that we, Hearthstone players, will be swamped into metagaming for many months. Coming up with new, sometime weird ideas is what I like most about Hearthstone.
Since Blizzard announced last week that Goblins vs Gnomes would be launched on December 8 / 9 in North America and Europe, respectively, I tried to hoard as much gold as possible in order to purchase lots of boosters containing the new cards.
After a too long maintenance, I was finally able to log in to Hearthstone and open my 3 boosters given by Blizzard for free.
Arena is more fun and offers more rewards, Ranked is serious business
My next thought was to try out the Arena, so I can get to play with the new cards. Arena is pretty different than Ranked because you can’t bring your own deck, so it heavily depends on everyone’s skill to make a good deck.
RNG is involved as well because you are allowed to pick your cards from a set of three cards randomly chosen by the AI. This means that you won’t know what your options will be after you have chosen a card, so good combos are rarely seen in Arena games.
My favorite class is Warlock, but I had to choose between Mage, Druid and Hunter. I chose Mage because this class is recommended for beginners.
My deck, as you can see from the video below, doesn’t contain any amazing cards or combos. Every time I enter the Arena, I try to pick the cards that cost less mana because I like aggressive decks.
My next pick would be cards that I believe they offer great advantages for their mana cost, like Chillwind Yeti for example. But with the new cards from Goblins vs Gnomes I was a bit confused on what could work better in the Arena, so I have decided to apply the same principle.
Despite the fact that my deck is far from being good, I’ve managed to score a win in my first game. But most of all, I had my fair share of fun. I can’t wait to dig into more of this stuff over the weekend. Oh, and stay tuned, as we will have a Goblins vs Gnomes review up next week as well. Thank you, Activision, for making it possible!
