“Enjoy your win credit card baby. Enjoy flipping burgers just to buy your legendaries scrub.”

See, my first mistake was accepting the friend request of a total stranger.

Last weekend, after not touching Hearthstone for a good month and a half, I hopped into the client and jammed a few games. My deck: your run-of-the-mill midrange Druid deck, complete with a few legendary minions in Cenarius, Sylvanas Windrunner and Ragnaros. Since I haven’t played much since Goblins vs. Gnomes was released, I wasn’t playing the new fangled things all the young people were playing. All of these mechs and gnomes and goblins were disturbing my lawn so I felt like telling them off with a savage roar.

I’m terrible at puns (sorry).

I decided that before I jumped straight back into ranked competitive play, I was going to get some warm-up in casual matchmaking just to see how the new cards played. On my first ever match since December, I managed to beat a Mechwarper into Piloted Shredder into double Spider Tank opening from a Mage (with much difficulty) before putting the game away with a Cenarius pumping my whole team.

Almost immediately, I receive a friend request from my opponent. I remember thinking to myself: ‘Hey, it’s 2015. Surely people on the internet and especially in video games are calm, kind people, no?’

Wrong. And so we have the quote that I started with.

That got me thinking however: a common problem most gamers, especially the more competitive ones, have with collectible card games and other strategy games is the concept of “Pay 2 Win” — the idea that a person only wins as much as they do because of a combination of luck and a willingness to spend a metric ton of cash to buy the rarest, most powerful cards and effects.

To a certain extent, this is true: a simple reality of a collectible card game is that some cards are inherently better than others, especially in a Constructed environment (where you build your deck from your collection and battle players who do the same). Oftentimes, cards with higher rarities are more powerful and more expensive, making them difficult to acquire for someone who wants to compete but doesn’t want to shell out money for cardboard (or in Hearthstone’s case, virtual cardboard).

While Hearthstone (being a modern video game) is essentially free-to-play and allows any player to acquire any card in the game without paying real money, it does offer paying users the ability to buy card packs that greatly accelerate their ability to create more powerful decks using powerful legendary cards. Something a player who isn’t willing to pay up front for those powerful cards may find unfair.

This can become especially frustrating for new players entering the game. A friend who started playing Hearthstone around the time the Naxxramas expansion was released was mortified when his first match in ranked play was against a fully-decked out Handlock. When you’re just starting out and casting Shattered Sun Clerics, facing down turn 4 Twilight Drake as 4/7s and Mountain Giant into Sunfury Protector can leave you with a salty feeling. A level 25 Angry Chicken facing down a dragon and a goddamn mountain.

The simple explanation here is that some of the players queuing up to play games have been playing since the game’s release. While we will never know whether my friend’s opponent got all his cards for free or whether he bought endless amounts of packs to build his deck, new players are faced with the realization that in order to catch up with all of the players playing since the game’s release, they’ll have to spend real money in order to compete.

Winning for Free

With that said, is there no hope for the player who does not want to spend money on a free game? How about for the new people flocking into the game? Are their lives not safe despite being low-ranked from the sheer amount of players with deep pockets or early beta access?

An aside: Personally, I have no problems with paying for packs in Hearthstone. Coming from other strategy card games, it is something I completely understand as a necessity if you truly wish to compete and stay on the top of the game. This article and the following advice comes from a position of empathizing with players who may not share the same experience.

After my game, I decided to form a deck filled with just commons and class cards and decided to see how far along in ranked matchmaking I can get before picking up a loss. Here’s the deck I battled with:

Now, since crafting my Druid deck more than a month prior, I found that I had to craft some of the commons. In order to truly commit, I decided to dust my entire druid deck.

All of it. Might have been overkill.

I tried to simulate a deck that a new player can have reasonable access to; the total dust cost of my deck equals just 520 in commons and the rest are class cards. Given the amount of starting gold a new player can get just doing quests, free arena runs and generally playing the game casually, the list is my best guestimate to the equivalent of 2 weeks of playing time for a casual or beginner player before they decide to head over to ranked play.

I managed to reach Rank 13 from 22. Along the way, I faced a ton of legendary cards, rare cards and epics. Eventually, I lost to a Leeroy Jenkins from a Hunter. Justice, I suppose. Fitting that I was put away by a legendary card after all that time.

Playing the deck is fairly straightforward. You really want to keep hands that have a strong Turn 1 through Turn 3 play in terms of minions. Generally, reserve your spells such as Rockbiter and Lightning Bolt for when you have more mana to work with. The idea is to create an early board presence. Use your spells on later turns (when mana is less of an issue) to remove the opponent’s threats.

It might be tempting to keep a few removal spells as your early turn plays, especially against Hunters. This is a trap that new players walk into. A removal spell can take out one minion, but a good minion played on curve can take out two or more.

A good advice that new players should take to heart is to use minions that either have high health or leave more minions when they die (such as Haunted Creepers and Shredders) to remove opposing threats. In this way, you create more chances for cards you’ve already invested mana on (you’ve already paid for them and put them down) to destroy more cards that the opponent still has to pay for, creating favorable trades.

Eventually, you should be able to bring them down low enough where your same removal spells can now double as game finishers by taking out the last points of life from your opponent.

Against more controlling match-ups such as Handlock and Control Warrior (two decks famous for their high legendary count), I advice a different approach: since their card quality is just so much better than ours, I found that the best way to beat them is to be more aggressive with our cards and attack their face directly instead of trying to keep up and control their board. Since these decks are built to have favorable trades to begin with and drag the game to where their expensive cards can take over, then trying to create favorable trades all the time is playing directly into their plan.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that you should throw your cards willy-nilly at their face and ignoring what’s happening on the board. What this means however is, given a choice between attacking their face or trying to kill one of their minions on the ground, it can be a correct choice to go for their face and allow them to deal with your ground assault even if it ends up in an unfavorable trade. The more damage you do to them, the less time they’ll have to play their cards.

Essentially, if they have late-game cards that we can’t afford, it would be better to try and kill them before they have the chance to play them.

It’s All About Learning, Really

I highly recommend this for people starting out and trying to learn the ropes. By doing this fairly spur-of-the-moment challenge to myself, I remembered some of the basics of Hearthstone that can serve as sound advice for newbies and casuals who want to get competitive without breaking the bank:

1. Yes, Legendary Cards increase your chances of winning a game of Hearthstone, but they do not automatically reflect skill. A player who owns all the legendary cards in the game still has to A.) draw the cards and B.) play them correctly in order to win. While it may be difficult to win against a tournament-proven deck list with a lot of powerful cards with only a few commons at your disposal, the beauty of Hearthstone and any other strategy card game is that a combination of skill and luck is worth more than shiny cards.
2. Learning the basics of deck building and tight, technical play can increase your win-rate which in turn will help you gather the necessary gold to buy packs and start building your own collections without breaking the bank.
3. Even with a budget deck, knowing how to create favorable trades and controlling the board will lead to more games won than simply having a shiny legendary. Conversely, knowing when to aggressively go for the face when faced with more controlling and often more expensive decks leads to more wins against otherwise bad match-ups simply because you are cutting down the time frame where they can play their expensive cards and pressuring them to draw their answers sooner.
4. The only real way to get better at anything is to keep playing 🙂

That’s all for now! Hope this guide helps because it’ll certainly make me feel better knowing that I was of some help. If for nothing else, it can take away the sting of dusting away all those mythics away.

In hindsight, I may have been a little too impulsive on that one.

Bonus List!

For people who may have not been able to get the Naxxramas expansion and are looking for a cheap Shaman list to play, here’s what I’d run:

I play a few Elven Archers as removal spells as the climb from Rank 15 below is littered with Hunters and aggressive Warlock decks. It is often not difficult to find good targets for Elven Archers to take out in the first few turns of the game. Annoy-o-Tron is also a welcome addition to the deck as it plays well with your cards that augment its attack power, allowing it to trade up and stay on defense thanks to its divine shield.

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