New player: Which format do you play, most favor, and why?

Community Discussion
1

New player here. I’m trying to understand what format is for me and still at odds on what to choose.
I read about Classic, Standard, and Wild formats. So far, I’ve gathered that;

  • Standard is most popular but cycles out cards, requiring more time spent collecting free pack(s), spending gold on packs, or spending money
  • Classic is limited to a static set of cards with less time being spent to acquire cards to compete
  • Wild has a growing power increase each time a new set is released (three times a year).

I could be missing some points here, or even wrong about some or all of them.

I am now left with the curiosity of; what format do you play, most favor, and why?

2

First off, don’t bother playing any of the formats if you don’t plan to be a whale. With gold, you will never get all the relevant legendarys before the next set is rolled out because every pack will simply dump duplicate commons & rares on you and the only way you will craft anything good is if your pity legendary happens to be one that is refundable by dust…
Battlegrounds took a big hit with Season 2 (aka Whale hunting - Thar she blows!) so the que times are around a minute and if you don’t squeeze out some blood your chance at a good hero is reduced 50%., but it is still enjoyable.

Since doing quests gets you nothing after the “reward” track is done, because gold has no real use beyond packs, which got the nerfbat, there is little reason to play formats unless you LIKE getting beat by the same 3-4 decks who did buy the ~6 required legendary and 8 or so epic cards.

3

Classic, as far as I understand, doesn’t get new cycles of cards, does it?

4

I have not played the Classic format, since it was re-introduced, because I imagine it being too “vanilla” and boring to me—having already played so much with Hearthstone’s oldest and largest card set.

No, Classic does get new cards, and I Imagine the same kind of decks that dominated in 2014, still perform best now: Combo Druid, Miracle Rogue, Zoolock, Handlock, Aggro Paladin, Face Hunter, Freeze Mage, and some midrange decks.

I would not recommend Classic for a new player, since it’s a large set (240 cards) to collect, and I would image the format gets boring pretty quickly without an influx of new cards to spice things up.

Standard is probably the most accessible constructed format (although a case could be made for Duels). New players, who do not want to spend much or no money at all, can work towards building the cheapest effective deck in the format, which is usually some kind of fast aggro deck—it’s currently Aggro Druid.

Wild is the Wild Wild West with the least balance and most broken shenanigans.

I personally do not spend much time playing constructed modes these days, since it contains so much:

I mostly play Arena (but the current Meta is not much fun), and a blend of Tavern Brawls (if its a fun one for the week) and casual Battlegrounds (with only two heroes to choose from).

5

Of the aforementioned, playing mostly Classic, having been in this game since open beta, having quit somewhere after Un’Goro’s launch, returned for Classic when I learned that it was a thing — partially due to nostalgia reasons and my belief that the game has mostly gone downhill, partially wishing to try the things I couldn’t back in the day — and subsequently stayed also for Mercenaries. No interest in Standard (let alone Wild) and yet another ‘My jaw that bite’ or whatever they come up with (is it Theotar nowadays? No matter), besides, the game has had a P2W reputation since some point, unlike what it used to be.

I wouldn’t say that were much the case for Classic. There are maybe a couple of legendaries plus a few niche ones that you really need (and no, that doesn’t even include Ragnaros; Leeroy and maybe Thalnos are more or less ‘must-have’, some situational ones like Mukla or Cenarius could be used, but are not even that necessary, and that’s about it), and there are cheap (i.e. without any legendary or even epic cards) decks out there you could play competitively. Some of the more expensive decks or cards are fun, but overrated.

That’s quite a poor and superficial analysis of the game mode. Besides, I’m playing more or less none of these stupid decks (well, still running just one combo in my ‘big taunt’ druid and laughing at those no-brain netdeckers; played a bit of freeze mage, but it’s actually quite bad and weak there, being more or less a counter to some obnoxious decks, but having a hopeless match-up against a number of others) and having great fun (well, and otherwise in terms of emotions, to be fair, but that’s another matter) and success.

To sum up, I would probably recommend only Classic, but mostly if you are nostalgic or something like that, although it’s still somewhat good.

6

mercenaries is what got me into the game. I played standard primarily to feed my mercenaries game but did also enjoy it at times. between the supposed rng, people who obviously pump lots of real money into it and use only netdecks, nerfs to cheaper working decks because whales can’t stand to lose to a non-whale and being f2p I’ve now given up. I put all of my resources into a couple of decks that have now seen multiple nerfs and they were only passably strong to begin with. eff it.

7

Yep, that’s what I would recommend nowadays, especially PvE.

How so? Opening a lot of packs, which is the only thing you can get with gold acquired elsewhere, in Mercenaries isn’t very efficient, with the returns diminishing drastically, what’s more, you could probably get all the packs you need by completing tasks — first the story, then those for individual mercenaries. In this regard, this game mode is more or less self-sufficient and dependent more on a bit of grinding within itself.

8

Standard, because it is the more balanced and cheap to play.

I invested a lot of dust in wild, which is imo the most entertaining mode between classic/standard/wild, but due to poor design choices it became too unbalanced against yhe type of deck I like to play.

I see no point in playing classic: the meta is doomed to never change, cards cost as much as standard/wild ones, but they get boring quickly.

Unlike standard there aren’t free classic cards for a new player.
In standard you have access to the free core set and also a deck of your choice once you are out of the beginner ranks.

There is also a 4th mode which is casual, which is where I play when I want to use a wild deck

9

Is it? I just looked up the best decks for Classic, and it did include all the decks that I mentioned among the list. I did forget about Control Warrior and Control Priest.

DLMdD seems to concur with my viewpoint.

I find this surprising, along with SparkyElf’s recommendation of Mercenaries as the mode to play, since I play-tested Mercenaries extensively, dropping about 10k gold on the mode during the first month of its release, and my review of it was very critical:

I see Mercenaries as a disaster, but hey, “different strokes for different folks.”

1 Like
10

Am I the only one here who thinks one should actually use one’s own brain instead of netdecking immediately? :grinning:

Oh, and why am I reaching relatively high ranks in the legend area regularly (although Classic is mostly for doing those pesky weekly quests for me nowadays plus some occasional games) without all that SMOrc stuff mentioned above (and no, I’m not gonna post my deck lists)? What’s more, when Classic was launched, people were still discovering archetypes such as face shaman that were largely unknown back in the day. I wouldn’t be surpsised if something else could be found… if more people actually used their brains at least a bit, which isn’t at all trendy nowadays.

But then again, without the nostalgia factor, as said above, I’m not sure whether I would definitely recommend even this mode of traditional Hearthstone.

Which are actually not that good at all — a whole level below best-performing decks, just like a few others mentioned above.

As said, gold or real money doesn’t help that much.

So? Is that the ultimate truth in the universe or what?

The mode is far from problem-free (although it has seen major improvements), but quite fun from a puzzle-solving perspective, now also free from luck-based outcomes in PvE since the player always wins speed ties (so the order is deterministic, apart from some special cases) and F2P-friendly — in fact, as I must have said somewhere else, it’s even more fun this way than ‘whaling’.

Re Standard and all that — one more interesting point: the era of Ben Brode, who was (in)famous for his maniacal bellowing laughter (‘Bwahaha!’) and design solutions consistent with this kind of behaviour, some questions having been raised about possible… sources of inspiration, is considered by some in the community to be the golden era of Hearthstone — and that should tell you something. Nowadays we’re regularly seing controversial design choices not even he would consider making. I haven’t got access to the numbers or data, but it might have actually been Battlegrounds that’s been the most popular mode for some time — which has been made P2W recently, btw.

1 Like
11

Thanks for the interesting input and discussion here in this post! I appreciate it. My mom Zelled me $100 so I bought standard packs and the tavern pass. I will try to stick to the Standard format until, and if, I feel otherwise compelled to stop (only time will tell).

However, I like a mix of the other modes too; I will mix in BGs, Mercs, occasional Tavern Brawls, and Solo Adventures to build my Wild collection (so that someday I might have enough variety to theory craft decks with the hopes of discovering something cool and powerful).

12

I hope you saved some resources to buy the mini-set on September 27th. :slight_smile:

13

Yeah definitely! I am getting pretty close to 2k Gold now. Not quite, but almost there.

2 Likes
14

Good deal. :slight_smile:

(Twenty characters)

15

I prefer Standard, which is easier to start being competitive on as a new player given that it is easier to get the needed cards for a competitive deck. Wild can be fun to do some crazy things but I would focus on standard first.