Create a second account. At the start of every expansion cycle rotate and switch to another account and test and play with each of the six loaner decks to see which playstyle appeal to you the most (one week trial period).
Pick the one you enjoy the most and play that for that expansion cycle.
Repeat above steps. Loaner decks used to be once per account but now that limit is removed. With this limit removal you can cycle indefinitely using only two accounts.
In this way you truly play whenever you want not tied to fomo mechanic like daily quests and stuff.
This ^ is something that I been exploring since last December while reviewing both the new player experience and the returning player experience.
Here are some of my observations.
1). The new player experience is much more engaging because of the way the Apprentice Track is designed and the amount of packs (especially the Catch Up packs), gold, and dust one gets, along with access to testing the free deck options before claiming one of them.
But I will point out that despite the abundance of all the resources that new players will get early access to, they will have a much harder time building a competitive deck and getting wins on the Ladder than it was to do 5 or more years ago, because of the amount of powercreep and broken cards that fill up most of the over-tuned archetype decks, which are played on the Ladder—even in the Bronze and Silver ranks.
They could quadruple the free resources and most new players would still struggle with getting wins. The same could be said for fairly new returning players. I do not foresee them cutting back on the freebies any time soon, since without the abundance of free stuff it would become nearly impossible for them to combat the shrinking player-base.
In the first few years of Hearthstone, I used to frequently look at the collections of new players and suggest budget decks and strategies that were based on what they had, which worked decently on the Ladder at low ranks. The days where cheap budget decks work on the Ladder are basically gone. Right now, new players do have the rare option of building a cheap Elemental Mage deck, but that deck will likely be nerfed next week.
2). With the new account that I made in December with a collection on all three servers, which I let go dormant for three months, twice, and came back each time after 90 days for more Catch Up packs and another two free decks still seems shy of enough resources that I fell like I want to let the account go dormant for another 90 days to come back and access if I can build a very competitive deck or not.
All of this takes a bit of planning and effort in order to play in constructed formats that continue to provide less and less “player agency,” despite the “lip service”from the devs that they plan on addressing this problem. If player agency becomes much less, then there is not much point in even playing such a CCG.
In April, I made another new account with a collection on all three servers. Over the last few days with each collection, I have been claiming my 2nd free DK deck (Playbringer and Headless Handbuff), but since Rainbow DK is not that great right now, I will likely let these collections go dormant for another 90 days.
Now, I chose to go with the free DK decks because each deck had a couple of good legendaries, and DK is a class that I have played only a little on the Ladder, but I am interested in playing DK once again when the class has a dominant deck in Standard.
New or returning players might want to claim
Divine Auras (Paladin) because it has a high dust value and it may the most competitive of the free decks. Dragon Time may be the 2nd best deck pick with a high dust value.
Assuming it’s not violating the TOS (it most probably does) I see that making sense only to an extremely niche set of players, those playing extremely rarely anyway. If you play regularly and you do the quests then I see that as more trouble and just worse than just playing and getting packs.
I can understand being F2P on the grounds of not having disposable income. I can also understand being F2P “on principle” and only playing up until the point where you hit the paywall in whatever game of choice you were playing. But this… this is something else.
At some point you’re going to learn Time itself is a currency, and one that cannot be banked up or bartered for. We don’t know how much we have left at any given point, and the really crazy thing is we don’t even control when it runs out - that is something that almost always gets forced upon us via external forces beyond our control.
Now much like fiscal currency, there are those who value Time more, or less, than others. And this perspective probably shifts as Time goes on and their circumstances change. If someone wants to spend that kind of Time - and Effort too, no less! - on the mental gymnastics of multiple accounts and swapping back and forth, more power to them I guess.
Me, I’m just going to borrow that black lady meme, “ain’t nobody got time for that!”
Greetings! I don’t think logging into a different account once every 4 months take much time and effort for it to be anywhere close to being mental gymnastics.
If anything it is like you said "ain’t nobody got time for that (grinding daily quest, weekly quests and so on).
However there are some people that log into all three regions on the same account and grind daily and weekly quests on all of them. In this case your remark does resonate to me.
Umm, I am sort one of those people. I currently have 6 HS accounts, which I use to play on all three servers, which means that I have 18 different collections to manage.
Now, that might sound daunting to many players, but it’s not like I try to log into all those accounts every day. I have one main collection that I have spent money on, which I try complete all my quests on every week, but occasionally that does not happen. I often can’t be bothered to do Travern Brawls that I dislike even on my main account, so I am not always getting the maximum amount of free resources on my main.
Why do I have so many collections? I easily get bored with Standard. Even in good metas, by the time I hit Diamond Rank 5, I am done with the Ladder for that month. The last few years, I rarely find gameplay on the Ladder satisfactory enough to even bother playing constructed.
So I tinker around on many different collections as I complete quests and spend time in whatever format is currently providing the most fun, whether that’s doing a good tavern brawl, doing some casual BGs, playing Arena, or occasionally testing out a Standard deck on an alternate collection before crafting cards for my main collection.
I have always been interested in the new player experience because I understand that if it’s not good, then the player-base will shrink and the game will die. Occasionally, fooling around with some new collections gives me a keen perspective about what HS currently has to offer new players.
On all of my alternate collections, it really does not matter if I log into them often or complete their weekly quests. It’s not like I am trying to constantly build and maintain competitive Standard decks for those alternate collections.
I tend to invest the most time into whatever format yields the most fun. Right now, that’s the dual-class Arena event, because it’s a lot less boring or frustrating than all the broken gameplay that goes on in Standard, and Arena feels a lot less repetitive.
I just crushed three barcoders in Arena with a Shaman-Mage draft, and it felt pretty good to do so. I hope those bot account buyers feel very salty about their losses.
Anyways, I do take some simple notes to help manage my collections and to decide which ones I want to log into on any given day:
It’s unclear to me why you do that when you play a lot anyway; I would understand it if you said 3 regions(not my taste to spend so much time on a game but I understand it at that 3-regions level); I assumed that since you play a lot anyway then you’d get an advantage from getting XP on the fewest accounts possible which means more packs (= more “collection”).
I assumed the OP plays very little which is the only way it makes sense (unless you ALSO play very little (even for 1 account I mean) (and the many accounts are most of the time completely dormant)).
What’s a “barcoder”(I can’t even find it on urban dictionary)?
I don’t enjoy the game as much nowadays therefore I don’t grind hard for the daily quests and stuff.
It feels like bondage / chore / obligation and enslaving with the fomo implementation.
Unpopular opinion: the most fun thing in hearthstone for me is the once in a blue moon “coop mode” in tavern brawl where two players beat a boss together.
Ya, I totally get where you are coming from, because:
1). Dous BGs does not interest me, because it’s too much bother to deal with on a mobile device, which already provides a mediocre to crappy play experience without being bogged down more by trying to coordinate with another player.
2). I feel like player agency is so low in constructed for most metas that I don’t see the point of playing much on the ladder these days, with the overturned algorithms trying to push players to a 50 percent win rate, and wins mostly be determined by what deck beats what or hoping that very unflavored matchups can still be won only if your opponents’ key cards are buried on the bottom of their deck.
I really hate loads of un-interactive gameplay in a CCG.
3). So I mostly play Arena and the better brawls. I like the cooperative brawls as well. I wrote tips for Mechazod brawl. I like the Christmas brawl a lot too, where you fight for the gift cards. I don’t care if the matches are long if they are fun to play. So I will get quests done while playing brawls, then switch to another collection and repeat. Then I will use all that accumulated gold on all those F2P collections to play Arena.
Genuine question, what do you actually mean by “interaction?” Because your statement here:
would suggest you define “interaction” as a measure of how much input you get on what happens. If this is the case, you should probably stick to MTG or something else that allows input even during your opponent’s turn.
Note that I’m not saying your concept of interaction / player agency is wrong, but I am making the observation that this game fundamentally does NOT allow the kind of input you find engaging.
But, then you have THIS statement which seems to directly contradict everything you just said, and how I interpreted it:
Arena is literally infested with barcodes and the drafting is incredibly restrictive compared to what you can accomplish in constructed OR brawls. It’s literally a worse version of ranked in all aspects that matter to a legitimate player.
So I’m left with a very confusing picture here on your rationale. I get that you hate ranked, but am confused as to why. Could you clarify what I might not be understanding here?
I find this rhetoric to be in repugnant taste. You sound like a talk show host trying to rally your base into buying your dietary supplements. “A slave to the incentive systems?” Unplug from your echo chamber, my friend.
I wish there were some way, some technology they could implement, so that we could have something called “Classic” mode, it could even have a Clippy type thing to help all the new players understand how Hearthstone used to be, except instead of Clippy it would be a floating laughing Ben Brode head
Terms like interactive play, counterplay, and player agency are related to one another. Counterplay is central to terms like interactive play and player agency, so let’s discuss defining counterplay:
In Chess, counterplay can be defined as “a threat or offensive position intended to counter an opponent’s advantage in another part of the board.”
In Hearthstone, counterplay usually involves trying to negate an opponent’s advantage on the board.
Think about how Warlock Zoo (in vanilla HS) fought for control of the board while pushing damage towards face any chance it got.
The ability to counteract what an opponent did on their turn gives a player a sense of control—this is what player agency is all about. If there is a lack of counterplay in a CCG, then the game has low player agency.
/yes
You are right, MtG has more player agency than does HS by design because one can interact with an opponent’s actions during their turn.
While HS has always had less counterplay and player agency than MtG, it once had enough that I found playing Ranked to be engaging. Now, not so much. During the evolution of Hearthstone’s design, counterplay and player agency have decreased significantly, which has reduced my interest playing in Ranked.
You’re right, Ranked is currently not engaging enough for me, which is one reason why I mostly play Arena and the better tavern brawls these days.
Despite the abundance of barcoders with god-drafts in Arena right now, I feel like Arena generally offers more counterplay and player agency than ranked. Certainly not in the form of deck building, but more in the sense of turn by turn interactions and counterplay. But I want point out that Arena is also greatly impacted by design problems which reduce counterplay and player agency too. So it’s not like the problem does not exist in Arena. This is a consequence of a game that contains so much powercreep, bad balance, badly designed cards, and broken cards. All of Hearthstone’s game modes suffer from these problems.
So why am I playing HS and not MtG these days?
The answer is mainly one of convenience. I can open the app and play nearly whenever I want. I can squeeze in matches in between other activities during my day. There is no time commitment of 4-6 hours for tournament play. No commuting to a place to play, while wondering if there will even be other players there to play against (for non-tournament play). Other factors include the expense of owning real cards or even digital cards for MtG.
I think my above responses should provide some insight as to why I currently dislike Ranked, and why Arena holds my interest more. Arena matches feel more dynamic than ranked. Arena decks are more diverse and play out less consistently than Ranked decks, which makes Arena less boring than Ranked.
There is much less mystery to what cards are in my opponent’s deck or hand in Ranked than there is in Arena.
I think Arena has a bit more counterplay and player agency that Ranked does.
I think the term most related to player agency is balance. I define balance as: the appearance (really, the illusion) that mutually exclusive player options could all be the optimal choice.
Balance is usually brought up in the context of metagame choices, e.g. which decks are strongest or which fighting game character is strongest. However, in the terms of player agency, we normally are referring to the “actual,” “piloting” game and not to the metagame. In the context of a fighting game, piloting balance would mean focusing on the “buttons” and special moves available to a single character, and seeing if that character has multiple viable options (for various situations) to vary play within that character, or if the character is “cheap,” a one trick pony that is predictable, always following the same basic flowchart. In Hearthstone, piloting balance is about one deck having mutually exclusive choices to make during each turn, that is, multiple plays to choose between.
My counter suggestion is https://lawofgamedesign.com/2014/01/31/theory-what-is-counterplay/
This doesn’t fit with your own definition of counterplay. A empty board is NOT “a threat or offensive position.” By your own definition, borrowed from chess, counterplay is when both players have threats on board, but for whatever reason these threats do not interact directly with each other and just go face, creating “race” situations.
The word you’re looking for is control. Control is using removal options to clear opposing threats, usually from the board (although it is possible to control hand or deck as well).
Control vs counterplay is an important piloting balance consideration. Excluding the Taunt mechanic, minions generally have the option to trade, transforming a threat into removal, or to go face, the counterplay option (when it is actually a choice, and not merely the consequence of an empty board on the opponent’s side). Player agency is better off the more often that this choice is interesting, and it is made interesting by balancing the two.
I do not know if MtG has more player agency or not, but I strongly disagree that it has more agency just because at allows instants during opponent turns. Player agency is NOT about giving players a higher raw quantity of choices, because quality is more important than quantity here. A lot of MtG “choices” during opponent turns are simply passing. What determines the quality of the choice is the balance between the available options.
Edit: Passing vs playing is generally better balanced in MtG than it is in Hearthstone. There is a dilemma between being too early and jumping the gun, or being too late and missing out, and this dilemma wouldn’t exist without multiple “mini-turns” per refresh of resources. So I think that’s a point for MtG. However, the concept of lands is, in my opinion, just bad game design, as it makes resources share a draw step with more active measures; in essence, MtG players draw 0.6 to 0.7 “real” cards per turn by default. That’s a point against.
As you might already be aware, I was previously a top 100 player in Arena. I have not played in a long time, because of the barcoder infestation. I have also this year climbed to top 100 Legend in Standard, I think one expansion ago.
I am inclined to agree with you regarding counterplay (understood to be inherently threat-based, aka “do I go face or trade?”) but disagree regarding piloting player agency overall. I think the majority of player agency in Arena is in deck building, although the advent of overlay tools like HearthArena have allowed many players to sacrifice that agency to emulate a skill level which is top 1000 but not top 100 (per the pre-barcode leaderboards).
The truth is that many Arena decks, three years ago if not right now, were essentially Curvestone in philosophy. Curvestone is the epitome of low agency piloting, at least in terms of which cards are played from hand. Curvestone can lead to some interesting face vs trade decisions, so I do give it high marks in that category. But playing multiple cards in a single turn is a rarity in Arena, especially in regards to the cards interacting with each other — in Arena the typical two card play is just two different piles of stats.
Regarding the belief that Arena has more agency than constructed, I believe what this says about you is that you value board-based agency, that “trade or face” question, extremely highly, and that you have a general disregard or underappreciation for hand-based agency. Typical Curvestone enjoyer.
Sure, a badly balanced game is not going promote good counterplay.
I am not advocating curvestone, but I do like matches where both players are fighting for control of the board.
My CCG deck playstyles tend to be diverse. I played all colors and combinations in MtG from white weenie to five color control decks.
Within a year of discovering MtG, I would walk into gaming stores armed with 12 to 20 different decks that were ready to play with no proxies in them, which meant owning a dozen or more copies of a card so that I didn’t have to swap cards out of one deck and into another, so that all my decks were ready to play.
I was a great player to bump into if a player wanted to quickly test their new deck against a diversity deck types.
I do not know where Magic is these days in terms of player agency, since I stopped playing Magic in 2013, but HS has a lot of problems these days and player comments like the following one are just going to get more and more common:
“I expect to be disappointed when I lose, not have my soul crushed. Facing three Aman’thuls in three turns isn’t fun. Facing six Zilliaxes is not fun. Getting a half a dozen zero-mana Seabreeze Chalices dropped on you isn’t fun. Getting OTK’ed by pirates with charge isn’t fun.”
One of my friends picked up one of the new set’s Commander precons, and there was a Skullclamp in there. I don’t know if that particular set is “tourney legal” but that ought to give you a rough idea.
Regarding that comment at the end, I don’t think the specifics really matter because there’s just too much stupid to really make any one thing extra important. When everything is bonkers, nothing is. You know what I mean? You’re just chasing infinite nails with your hammer if you go that route.
I rather think the more important question is, who out there ENJOYS the act of WINNING with these decks? I’m using the meta decks to climb ladder because it gets me rewards, snowballs into next season, and once I reach “Legend” I can start playing silly stuff again without fear of “Sisyphus effect” (falling down the ranking hill). But I don’t really LIKE using “okay, I’ve survived 11 turns, it’s time to dump 5595959783984723984732 damage from my hand via 3 cards”