You don't have to pay money to play Hearthstone

...but you should pay money to play Hearthstone.

Hearthstone is a deck building online multiplayer game staring the characters from World of Warcraft. Each deck contains a hero and 30 cards that you pick from an available pool. Each hero has a class warrior, rogue, preist etc. These classes all have their own cards that include spells and effects on your gameplay and some even have exclusive minions. This gives you a lot of variables to take into concern when building your deck as well as upping the learning curve.

If you read learning curve and just had that mini gamer panic attack we all do when we realize we're getting in pretty deep pretty fast don't worry there is a cornucopia of websites and forum posts dedicated to the minutia of deck building and which cards will help which hero the most. Of course I have looked at these sites exactly no times at all because who wants to do research to play a game. I'll just fail constantly for a while and have irreparable stats as my legacy. After playing for hours and hours it is pretty obvious what type of deck i will be building. My most succesful deck uses the age old strategy of online multiplayer gaming, the cheaper and more obnoxious you play the better you will do.

In fact I built a deck with the only motivation of causing whoever played to me to suffer an anger stroke at just how obnoxiously my cards played out. If your interested, this is my Paladin build. If you don't care or haven't played the game yet skip this part it will just annoy you (mission accomplished).

blessing of might x2 (paladin card)
hand of protection x2 (paladin card)
Humility (paladin card)
redemption (paladin card) (white gem)
shieldbearer (white gem)
holy light (paladin card)
ironfur grizzly x2
raid leader
silverback patriarch x2
truesilver champion (paladin card)
blessing of kings x2 (paladin card)
consecration (paladin card)
hammer of wrath (paladin card)
sen'jin shieldmasta x2
abomination (blue gem)
booty bay bodyguard
darkscale healer
frostwolf warlord
lord of the arena x2
reckless rocketeer
sunwalker (blue gem)
guardian of kings (paladin card)
stormwind champion

The stars indicate rarity of the cards. Don't fret I got these all pretty quickly in the game. there are 5 levels or rarity for cards: basic (no gem), common (white gem), rare (blue gem), Epic (purple gem), legendary (orange gem). It's pretty easy to build competent decks with all basic cards if you want to be a purist since they are all unlocked just by leveling the different heroes up to 10.

Whether they be physical or digital there are a veritable shit tonne of deck building games out there so why should you choose the newest version of Yugi-oh? Well because this is the only deck building game made by blizzard and even though i'm not a honk i do admit that when they finally make a game once every couple of years that game ends up being pretty sweet and literally an amazing amount of fun to play. Hearthstone isn't even done yet, It's still in beta! It's already well polished but it's a fair bet Blizzard is still working away on their genius machines in addiction headquarters making this game better and better every day. The game is free there is nothing to loose so you should play for realz bro.

Yes it is a free to play game. Yes there are in game purchases available and I have heard the lamentations of gamers out there. "I would try Hearthstone but I don't want to pay money to be able to match the other players." I don't want to sound like a Blizzard PR rep but these worries are wrong and you should give blizzard your money anyway. We've all played WOW and we've all payed money to play WOW and we all felt like we got adequate returns on our investment. Unless you didn't play WOW and somehow are reading a video game blog post about a game that is a spinoff of WOW in which case you should go play WOW. Just enough for it to ruin your life and keep you from judging the rest of us who have already been there.

Lets get back to the super interesting financial part. Hearthstone rewards you with packs of cards that you buy for in game gold. 100 gold gets you one pack. You get gold by completing quests or racking up wins streaks in multiplayer. Each pack of cards contains 5 individual cards with at least one being a rare or better. So you can get even the rarest cards in the game by chance and all you have to do is play enough to get a little bit of gold which really doesn't take that long.

Real life actual money comes into the equation because you can buy the packs of cards in various bundles at different prices. They start at $1.50 and the bigger the bundle the more you save. Basically like the vast majority of free to play games you pay money just to save time but since the time investment in hearthstone before you see rewards is minimal it's not really that important. You might get a slight edge by being able to get cards faster than using in game money but it is still up to chance and ironically enough I've gotten a fat goose egg by going this route. Yes that is right I paid $10 to get seven packs of cards and I got basically nothing. All my strongest cards came out of packs that I bought with gold. I'm not urging you to pay real life dollar bills on this method of getting cards instead I urge you to pay to play in the arena.

The arena costs $2 to enter or 150 gold and your deck is random. You start off by picking a random hero class and then the cards come up three at a time and you pick your favorite. The bad effect of the randomness is how hard it is to build a deck that synergizes very well within itself. On the other hand the best part of arena is all the cards are potentially available to your deck so you might get to have a taste of the most powerful cards in the game.

In the arena the more wins you rack up in your three lives the more glorious loot you get. Your drops are varying amounts of gold arcane dust and best of all just for entering you get a pack of cards.

What makes the arena the best play mode in the game is the old school arcade multiplayer feel to it. It's not unlike when you used to walk up to Street Fighter II cabinet in an arcade, drop in a quarter and start working over the computer as dhalsim because you feel quirky today and even though Ken is the best fighter in the game when you want to rack up some victories, you woke up with a case of the fuck arounds and dhalsim's arms stretch pretty effin long and the first time you went to yoga and your arms didn't stretch you got totally bummed out. That's why you should play arena mode on hearthstone because the people who designed the characters in Street Fighter II, although colorful and inventive as they might be, are fucking liars. Did you know that the three skulls around Dhalsim's neck are the remains of children from his village in inda that died during a plague. Now how the fuck do you step against a dude who has kid skulls around his neck?