This topic is intended to advise new players / veterans making new accounts how to best go about starting out. And so, please, if you have any advice in this regard, share that in the comments. Lastly, if you spot anything wrong that I list below, I’d highly appreciate the correction(s).
- Quests & Achievements. There are numerous quests and achievements that you can complete as a new player that reward gold, packs, or dust. These are as follows:
- “Level Up.” You will receive a card pack for raising a class to level 10.
- “First Blood.” For winning a game in play mode, you will receive a card pack.
- “The Duelist.” You will be rewarded 100 gold for defeating 3 human opponents.
- “Crushed Them All.” For defeating all AI heroes, you will be granted 100 gold.
- “Ready to Go!” This will reward you 100 gold for unlocking every class.
- “Crafting Time.” You receive an additional 95 dust for the first time you disenchant a card.
- Choosing a Main? Due to having very limited resources when beginning in Hearthstone, it’s common advice to invest in a single class at first, until you’re able to branch out into others. This might allow you to have a single strong deck for the highest level of competitiveness. However, on the other side of the coin is the thinking that one should build multiple decks from a few classes. Although these decks will not be as strong as if you were to maintain just one class, this does give you options. Additionally, it helps to learn how various classes are played firsthand. This is a personal decision to make and I’ll leave that up to you.
- Mulligan. You typically will want to keep lower-cost cards that you can play for immediate effect. However, it is not unusual for it to be beneficial to retain a high-cost card or two that you know will be significantly useful on later turns. Hearthstone being board-centric (usually), you will want to aim for minions of low-cost to best gain traction on board. What you want to keep in your mulligan oftentimes varies based upon the class you are facing, however. For instance, you may want to hold onto removal spells if you are up against a Face Hunter.
- Trading. You will be faced with the potential need to trade your minions for your opponent’s minions. This sounds simpler than it is. You will want to make these trades in the most efficient way possible. This means, when trading, you will want to do so in the way that the least amount of your minions die. Alternatively, sometimes there will be opportunities to trade, but opportunities you shouldn’t take. An example of this is if you have a taunt minion that can be traded one for one with an enemy minion. In these instances, it’s often better to, instead of trading, to go face (attacking the enemy hero directly) while allowing your opponent to instead make the trade on their turn. Whether it be via minion or spell, you will generally want to use as little resources as possible to remove enemy minions. For instance, if you can use one spell to remove a minion as opposed to two, you will of course want to go the way of using just that one spell.
- Positioning. At times this is irrelevant. But, for the most part, it is important to where you place your minions. You will want to avoid positioning minions in such a way that your opponent is capable of destroying your highest value minions. Spacing your powerful minions around smaller ones is probably your best bet. However, concerning auras (think Battlegrounds Battlemaster), you may instead want to position your strongest minions together, so you are able to place your Battlemaster between them to gain maximum potential.
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Spending Gold. It’s important to know that for each individual expansion, the first ten packs opened will guarantee at least one legendary card. You will want to purchase ten packs for each expansion in rotation, before investing more into any single expansion.
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Mass Disenchant. In your collection, you are able to disenchant all cards that you have more than one of. You will generally want to avoid doing this, and instead hold onto the cards you have. The reason for this being that cards are nerfed frequently, and so by disenchanting such cards individually, you will be able to disenchant said cards for their full dust value.
- Tilting. After a sequence of defeats, it’s too easy to get salty. This will often negatively affect your gameplay, even without realizing it. A good rule of thumb is to stop playing and taking a break after 3 to 5 consecutive losses to regain your senses.
- Where to Find Decks. There are a number of resources at which to find decks. I recommend the following: HSREPLAY, Vicious Syndicate, and Hearthstone Top Decks.
- Watching Your Replays. Paramount to improving your gameplay is watching your match replays. To do this, visit HSREPLAY and register an account. In settings, link your Blizzard account to HSREPLAY. When you have done this, you can hover over “My Data” and click on “My Replays.” Here you will be able to watch your past matches. You can see all cards both you and your opponent kept in mulligan and have drawn. Additionally, you can view your opponent’s deck list. You will be able to watch these replays at whatever speed you prefer.
Hope this helps someone!
