What is The Game Hearthstone?

“WELL MET!”

Of all card games in the world right now, Hearthstone is definitely one of the most popular ones out right now. It’s playfulness is enjoyable, and the digitization of the game lets them do so much more than the typical card game. The fact that you can play this on your phone is amazing, and is one reason why people love Hearthstone. Other card games, like Magic The Gathering, are competing with this by trying to digitize their card games. Magic Arena is an example of this. P.S. The beta for Magic Arena is live, and I recommend you go and see it.

But How do I actually feel about Hearthstone, and it’s present in the card game community? Well, first let’s explain what Hearthstone is.

Hearthstone is a multi-user digitized card game. It is a game of strategy and decisiveness. You have to make a deck out of the card selection that they have for you, and you have to choose a class. The classes include: Warrior, Shaman, Rogue, Paladin, Hunter, Druid, Warlock, Mage, and Priest. Each class has different unique qualities for it, and each class gets a hero. Every hero starts off at thirty health. If your hero goes below thirty health, you lose the game. In Hearthstone, you have cards that are just for your class, and then you have cards that are what we call neutral. Neutral cards are cards that every class can use, but Class Cards are cards that can only be used by the class you are playing. Classes don’t only effect your cards but they effect your heroes too. Every hero gets a Hero Power. A hero power is a unique ability that every hero has, and it always cost two mana(which we’ll talk about in a sec). For instance the Mage hero power says, “Deal one damage, but the Warlock hero power says, “Deal two damage to your hero and draw a card”. So choosing your class is very important. It effects what type of decks you make, and what your hero power is.

Now, the cards in Hearthstone are unique too. They have different level of cards in Hearthstone and different rarities. The rarities are Common, Rare, Epic, and Legendary. Each rarity has a color, that way you know what value the card is. Common is grey, rare is blue, epic is purple, and orange is legendary.

In each deck you make, you have a limit of thirty cards, and up to two of the same cards. The only exception to this is Legendary Cards. You can only have one copy of a legendary card in your deck. This is in the standard format of Hearthstone, the Tavern Brawl and Arena are completely different game modes for Hearthstone, but let’s focus on standard play.

Every card is different and unique. Different cards do different things, and there are different types of cards too.

For instance, the card to the left is called a minion. You play it on the field and it can attack. The top left number is how much mana it cost to play this card. You gain one mana every turn. The max amount of mana you can have is ten. This card cost zero mana, but let’s say you have five mana and you play a card that cost one mana, then you would have four mana crystals left. When you play this a minion it goes on the battlefield. Each player can have seven minions on their board at a time. The number on the bottom left is how much damage it does, and the number on the bottom right is how much health the minion has. A minion can attack for however much damage it has. This minion has one damage. That means it can attack for one damage. Minions can attack other minions and they can attack the enemy hero.

Now, the card this card is called a spell. Spells are a different type of card. Unlike minions, when you play a spell it doesn’t go on the battlefield, and notice it doesn’t have any attack or health like the minion does. Spells are one time action cards. If you cast a spell, it’s cast and then it leaves your hand. This spell here says, “Deal 6 damage.” For four mana, you can deal six damage to any character. This means you can attack a minion or the hero. Spells are crucial cards to your deck, and the interesting thing about spells is that there are no neutral spells.  That means every spell is for a specific class. Fireball, the card to the left, is only for mage. There are spells that can give you different class’s spells, but we won’t worry about that right now.

The final type of card I have to show you today, are called Weapons. Weapons are unique cards that aren’t minions or spells. When you play a weapon it equips itself to your hero and allows your hero to attack. This basically makes your hero a very large minion. Weapons can attach heroes and minions, but if you attack a minion, the amount of damage that it has will still hurt your hero. If you attacked a minion with three attack and your at twenty five health, then health your health is gonna drop to twenty two health. Get the picture?

See how it equips to the hero? This allows your hero to attack. The rogue hero power actually equips a weapon. It has one attack and two durability. durability means that you can attack that amount of times. If it has three durability you can attack three times. A hero can only attack one time per turn.

Now that you know what these cards are and the type of cards, how do you get them? It’s simple: you buy packs. You can buy packs in the Hearthstone store. What are packs? Well, one pack will give you five cards, and at least one of your cards will be a rare. You can spend money on packs or you can save gold. Gold is Hearthstone’s currency. You can get gold by completing a Quest. Quests are goals in Hearthstone that you achieve by completing them.

Once you complete the quest you get your gold. You can have up to three quests at a time, and when you get one quest a day. If you complete all your quest in one day, then come back the next day you will only have one new quest. Quest range from 40-60 gold, and it takes one hundred gold to get a pack.

As you can see here, this guy got a legendary, an epic, a rare, and two commons. This is an extremely good pack. Most common packs are four commons and a rare.

And now we talk about what keeps people into Hearthstone. Hearthstone Expansions. Blizzard Ent. releases a Hearthstone Expansion every 3-4 months. Goblins and Gnomes was the first expansion, and Boomsday Project is the latest one, but every expansion comes out with more cards, mechanics, and sometimes a new types of single player mode. Expansion change the meta, which change the game. You get new decks and types of game modes. It becomes really fun playing different decks.

So, this is Hearthstone. It’s not as complicated as it sounds and it’s a whole lot of fun. I’ll more information on the topic later and can’t wait to share it with y’all. If you want to learn about Mechanics in Hearthstone, click that link. Until then, I hope you play the game and enjoy it.