In case you've been under a rock, hiding from the gaming world the past few months, a game called Hearthstone has made a huge entrance. It's a big deal because it's a different type of game. There's no running around, adventure or story,. there's just cards. Card games are the oldest type of games in existence but digital card games have only become popular in the past few years. Popular is an overstatement as they're still considered very niche, games such as MTG have a small but dedicated player base.
Hearthstone came in as an online only card game. It's been attempted before many times by smaller companies but because this was spearheaded by Blizzard it became an instant hit. Even in the beta where access was very limited, it managed to completely take over twitch. The exclusivity of the beta and the amount of fun the streamers were having playing it made me want this game so badly.
I got the beta from a very nice guy who I met in Sweden, he follows me on twitter and gave me his spare key. This was towards the end of the beta but, better late than never I guess. I jumped right in and it was amazing. The game hadn't been figured out yet and because of the RNG aspect to it, it was hard to judge what really worked vs what didn't. The game has this brilliant artwork and incredible game modes such as arena and ranked.
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You then play vs opponents with the same wins and losses as yourself and see how many wins you can get in the arena before being knocked out. You get kicked out for losing 3 games in total. The whole point of arena is to try and get 12 wins. If you achieve this you get the best rewards, often multiple packs of cards to open and a lot of gold to re-enter the arena. If you achieve 7 wins or more then you will always receive at least 150 gold to re-enter the arena and a pack of cards as your reward.
Arena streamers are successful because they pick the most efficient cards in arena which aren't best suited for constructed. A good example of this is mind control tech and stampeding kodo. The most entertaining aspect of watching arena players is seeing them achieve high numbers of wins with what would be considered terrible decks. This is the same for a great deck which performs poorly, usually because of bad RNG.
Something that I found amazing with hearthstone is the competitiveness of the game. Its often mocked amongst other esports but it's actually attracting many viewers with some tournaments breaking 100k concurrent viewers. I often wondered what will happen in open qualifiers where there's a good chance a great player may lose simply because they were unlucky with their draws. Surprisingly, the same players seem to be winning these qualifiers or getting the top positions.
A huge element to the game is your deck list and champion select. Some champions naturally counter others so being able to win one of these games where the odds were again you can be huge in a best of 5.
When a player is playing ranked on their own and constantly losing not because they're making mistakes but simply because they're getting unlucky must be crushing. This also makes it entertaining to watch when a player considers themselves professional but still loses repeatedly to the same person who is just getting lucky.
I expect hearthstone to lose its popularity over the next few months. I found myself enjoying it much less as I started to understand why I lost. Coming from Starcraft, losing a game was crushing because it was only on you. You were the one who messed up so I struggle to change this way of thinking. Perhaps other people won't have the same problem but we will see.