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kiwifarms.net
In light of the newest expansion, Journey to Un’Goro, being released in the US in a scant few hours (stay free EU), I thought I’d make a retarded effortpost. There was like one HS thread before by a mod that I could see and it had zero replies so I figure I’m safe to make a new thread.
Disclaimer: I probably don’t need to say this but remember that this is Kiwi Farms so be sensible about sharing your Battle.net tags. If you want to share IDs for spectate quests or something go ahead, make a google doc and I’ll link it in the OP, but remember this post when you wake up in the middle of a home invasion with Donny Long’s aids gun halfway up your spaghetti factory.
This most recent expansion is themed around an expedition to Un’Goro Crater, a primordial jungle full of dinosaurs and other prehistoric wildlife. Here’s a list of the new cards
Un’Goro adds a new card type to the game: Quest cards
Quests are legendary class spell cards which are guaranteed to start in your opening hand if one is in your deck. Completing the task after playing the quest rewards you with a unique card. All of the reward cards are varying levels of insane, and it will be interesting to see which ones make it into competitive decks!
So what is Hearthstone?
It’s Magic the Gathering but on your very own handheld smart device and/or personal computer! That’s right, no more need to protect your $400 foil Tarmogoyf from sweaty nerd buttcrack fart miasma
Now you can play your digital cards in front of a homeless man’s buttcrack at the bus stop, in the vicinity of several men’s pooping buttcracks in public restrooms, or just keep your own sweaty buttcrack buried in your own office chair like you always do you fucking neet
There are three main play modes in the game: Constructed, Arena, and Tavern Brawl.
Constructed
Constructed is the “main” mode of play where you build decks from your collection and compete with other players online, either on the ranked ladder or in a casual unranked mode. In spring of 2016 what was formerly a single constructed ranked format was split into 2 play formats: Standard, and Wild. Each mode has its own separate ranked ladder, and your rank in one does not affect the other.
In Standard, you can only construct your deck from cards belonging to either the “classic” set the game launched with, or any expansion released within the last 2 years. This is the most popular mode of play in the game. The format rotates out old expansions every spring release, meaning expansions released in the spring are actually standard legal for longer than summer releases, and quite a bit longer than fall releases.
In Wild, you can make a deck using any card you own. It’s a fun mode that’s reasonably popular, but can be inaccessible to players that don’t have a big collection yet.
Arena
Arena is a very different beast from Constructed, and has its own circle of players and pros that play Arena exclusively. It requires an entry fee of 150 gold or $1.99 Ameribucks to play each time. When you buy in, you are entered into a tournament against other players using a deck of 30 cards you draft upfront. The game will present you with a series of choices of 3 random cards, and the ones you pick make up your deck. 12 wins are max, 3 losses and you’re out. It’s not a great value if you lose a lot, but if you’re good you can get some serious rewards.
Tavern Brawl
Tavern Brawls are a special format with a new set of rules every week, starting each Wednesday. There are constructed formats where all cards keep the same text but become a 1/1 for 1 mana, there are co-op brawls where you and another player work together to beat an AI boss, there are preconstructed brawls where both players get to be overpowered boss classes from the single player content. Sometimes old brawls get rehashed, but more often than not you’ll see something new each week. Your first win for each new brawl will give you a free pack, so they’re always worth a try.
Adventures
Adventure expansions were a form of single player content that gave you cards for completing missions. Blizzard announced that they are no longer releasing adventure expansions, however. There is currently no way to purchase or otherwise obtain the single player content from adventures that have already rotated out of the standard format. Hopefully this will be remedied in the future, since a lot of the content was interesting and enjoyable. Cards from these adventures are still craftable as any card for the purposes of Wild format play.
Here are some helpful links:
Icy Veins – They have some simple but functional decks that can be constructed from a class’ ‘basic’ card set. You may need to play the class a bit to level up and receive all the cards you need from their base set.
Tempo Storm – They have some gay articles and stuff I guess but nobody cares about any of that because you know your ass is just here for the world famous Hearthstone Meta Snapshot. CEO of Tempo Storm and legendary MTG cheater Reynad has assembled a crack team of experts to tell you what everyone is going to be playing for the next month.
Vicious Syndicate Data Reaper Report – They do a meta snapshot too, but instead of hiring a panel of expert players like Tempo Storm, Data Reaper aggregates … Both meta reports have their own strengths and weaknesses, because while TS’s experts judge subjectively and can get things wrong from time to time, DR’s statistics include dummies like you who don’t know what the fuck you’re doing.
Hearthstone Top Decks – A nice handy aggregator of decklists the pros play
r/CompetitiveHS – While the vanilla Hearthstone subreddit is aids, CompetitiveHS is generally full of useful and thoughtful posts.
Lightforge – Card tier rankings for arena.
HearthArena – Arena deck building tool. Enter your available card choices, and it will tell you what to pick and why. Can be helpful when you are still learning the ropes so you go 0-3 for your bad play instead of for your abominable deckbuilding skills.
And some tools:
Hearthstone Deck Tracker – In a kind of questionable move Blizzard decided that using deck tracking software is a-OK with them, as long as it’s not used in official tournaments. HDT will tell you what cards you have remaining in your deck and the % chance of drawing them, what cards your opponent has played this game, and on what turn each of the cards in his hand got there. Even if you think using it is kind of cheesey, your opponent doesn’t.
Track-O-Bot – Allows you to keep track of your ranked wins & losses and analyze your performance per-deck in different matchups. A good tool if you're really serious about analyzing your play.
Disclaimer: I probably don’t need to say this but remember that this is Kiwi Farms so be sensible about sharing your Battle.net tags. If you want to share IDs for spectate quests or something go ahead, make a google doc and I’ll link it in the OP, but remember this post when you wake up in the middle of a home invasion with Donny Long’s aids gun halfway up your spaghetti factory.
Journey to Un’Goro
This most recent expansion is themed around an expedition to Un’Goro Crater, a primordial jungle full of dinosaurs and other prehistoric wildlife. Here’s a list of the new cards
Un’Goro adds a new card type to the game: Quest cards
Quests are legendary class spell cards which are guaranteed to start in your opening hand if one is in your deck. Completing the task after playing the quest rewards you with a unique card. All of the reward cards are varying levels of insane, and it will be interesting to see which ones make it into competitive decks!
So what is Hearthstone?
It’s Magic the Gathering but on your very own handheld smart device and/or personal computer! That’s right, no more need to protect your $400 foil Tarmogoyf from sweaty nerd buttcrack fart miasma
Now you can play your digital cards in front of a homeless man’s buttcrack at the bus stop, in the vicinity of several men’s pooping buttcracks in public restrooms, or just keep your own sweaty buttcrack buried in your own office chair like you always do you fucking neet
There are three main play modes in the game: Constructed, Arena, and Tavern Brawl.
Constructed
Constructed is the “main” mode of play where you build decks from your collection and compete with other players online, either on the ranked ladder or in a casual unranked mode. In spring of 2016 what was formerly a single constructed ranked format was split into 2 play formats: Standard, and Wild. Each mode has its own separate ranked ladder, and your rank in one does not affect the other.
In Standard, you can only construct your deck from cards belonging to either the “classic” set the game launched with, or any expansion released within the last 2 years. This is the most popular mode of play in the game. The format rotates out old expansions every spring release, meaning expansions released in the spring are actually standard legal for longer than summer releases, and quite a bit longer than fall releases.
In Wild, you can make a deck using any card you own. It’s a fun mode that’s reasonably popular, but can be inaccessible to players that don’t have a big collection yet.
Arena
Arena is a very different beast from Constructed, and has its own circle of players and pros that play Arena exclusively. It requires an entry fee of 150 gold or $1.99 Ameribucks to play each time. When you buy in, you are entered into a tournament against other players using a deck of 30 cards you draft upfront. The game will present you with a series of choices of 3 random cards, and the ones you pick make up your deck. 12 wins are max, 3 losses and you’re out. It’s not a great value if you lose a lot, but if you’re good you can get some serious rewards.
Tavern Brawl
Tavern Brawls are a special format with a new set of rules every week, starting each Wednesday. There are constructed formats where all cards keep the same text but become a 1/1 for 1 mana, there are co-op brawls where you and another player work together to beat an AI boss, there are preconstructed brawls where both players get to be overpowered boss classes from the single player content. Sometimes old brawls get rehashed, but more often than not you’ll see something new each week. Your first win for each new brawl will give you a free pack, so they’re always worth a try.
Adventures
Adventure expansions were a form of single player content that gave you cards for completing missions. Blizzard announced that they are no longer releasing adventure expansions, however. There is currently no way to purchase or otherwise obtain the single player content from adventures that have already rotated out of the standard format. Hopefully this will be remedied in the future, since a lot of the content was interesting and enjoyable. Cards from these adventures are still craftable as any card for the purposes of Wild format play.
Oh boy, sign me up! How do I get started?
Here are some helpful links:
Icy Veins – They have some simple but functional decks that can be constructed from a class’ ‘basic’ card set. You may need to play the class a bit to level up and receive all the cards you need from their base set.
Tempo Storm – They have some gay articles and stuff I guess but nobody cares about any of that because you know your ass is just here for the world famous Hearthstone Meta Snapshot. CEO of Tempo Storm and legendary MTG cheater Reynad has assembled a crack team of experts to tell you what everyone is going to be playing for the next month.
Vicious Syndicate Data Reaper Report – They do a meta snapshot too, but instead of hiring a panel of expert players like Tempo Storm, Data Reaper aggregates … Both meta reports have their own strengths and weaknesses, because while TS’s experts judge subjectively and can get things wrong from time to time, DR’s statistics include dummies like you who don’t know what the fuck you’re doing.
Hearthstone Top Decks – A nice handy aggregator of decklists the pros play
r/CompetitiveHS – While the vanilla Hearthstone subreddit is aids, CompetitiveHS is generally full of useful and thoughtful posts.
Lightforge – Card tier rankings for arena.
HearthArena – Arena deck building tool. Enter your available card choices, and it will tell you what to pick and why. Can be helpful when you are still learning the ropes so you go 0-3 for your bad play instead of for your abominable deckbuilding skills.
And some tools:
Hearthstone Deck Tracker – In a kind of questionable move Blizzard decided that using deck tracking software is a-OK with them, as long as it’s not used in official tournaments. HDT will tell you what cards you have remaining in your deck and the % chance of drawing them, what cards your opponent has played this game, and on what turn each of the cards in his hand got there. Even if you think using it is kind of cheesey, your opponent doesn’t.
Track-O-Bot – Allows you to keep track of your ranked wins & losses and analyze your performance per-deck in different matchups. A good tool if you're really serious about analyzing your play.
Newbie tips: Building your collection
- Consider playing arena whenever you get the gold to build your collection early on unless you loathe the format. If you learn to get even moderately good it’s much better for earning gold and cards than Constructed, and because everyone’s on a level playing field it feels less pay to win when you’re new. In order to go “infinite” you need to average 7 wins, but with the help of quests you should be able to average just 4 or 5 and still do an arena or so every day.
- If you want to get good at the game fast, go to Tempo Storm, find the best and cheapest aggro deck, and build it asap. Everyone north of the absolute bottom ranks of the ladder is netdecking, and aggro decks in this game are often inexpensive and very good. Reddit thinks aggro decks are for no-skill players that want cheap wins, but r/hearthstone is full of the type of niggas who would complain that throwing in Street Fighter is cheap.
- Gold cards are shiny! The animations are so cool! I’m gonna keep them all and someday I’ll have a full gold collection, Jonny says, a small amount of spittle flying out of his open gullet. Well Johnny, do you have about 10,000 dollars? No? Welcome to the real world motherfucker! If you don't need it, and you're building your collection, dust your golds.
:powerlevel: I’ve been playing since beta and have only missed about 4 months of the 36 from the game’s release until now, have dumped a couple hundred dollars into the game over the years, and I still only have a mostly complete non-golden collection. And that’s with dusting every single gold card I got that I already had 2x of. (But not my golden Boogey Monster, and he will continue to flop around in every single Tavern Brawl deck I can put him in.) If you’re new and struggling to make a meta-viable deck, dust your non-essential gold cards.
- Only dust your extra cards when you have a card that you want to craft and use, and enough dust to craft it immediately. Cards occasionally get nerfed or changed, and when they do they’re disenchantable for their full dust value rather than their normal reduced disenchant value. Plus, the little animation is just so much more satisfying when you nuke a bunch at once!
- If you didn’t notice, there’s a little ‘X’ in the corner each of your quest boxes. You can re-roll a single quest and replace it with a new one each day, resetting at midnight wherever your server is. The average dust value of a quest is about 52.5 gold. That means you should be rerolling your lowest value quest as long as it’s less than the average value for maximum gold gain. If you want to be really autistic about it you can also try to intentionally avoid completing 50g and 40g quests unless your quest log is full of them to maximize your chances of being able to re-roll them into something good.
R - It's not worth your time.
