by JR Cook - 11 years ago     show comments

Chances are that if you are on this website, you have some form of passing knowledge about Hearthstone and similar card games. Maybe you played a short game against a friend who swore up and down that Magic: The Gathering was the most fun you could possibly have with cards and even let you use one of his or her pre-built decks along with the promise they would go easy on you, proceeding to crush you mercilessly. Or perhaps you’ve ordered a giant box of randomized World of Warcraft cards from EBay and spent an entire afternoon building new decks and testing them on your friends. Who knows, maybe you’ve even played in a Pokemon Trading Card Game tournament.

These articles are intended for those that might not fit into the above scenarios, those that have little-to-no knowledge about such card games. As a self-proclaimed Card Noob, I will be walking you through the basics of such games until you can easily beat me with that awesome deck you spent hours building. You won’t be an expert, but you’ll have the basic understanding needed to competently play and, most importantly, enjoy the game.

The first thing we need to do is address the fact that Hearthstone is not a traditional Trading Card Game like Magic: The Gathering or the WoW TCG as there is no actual method of trading cards. Instead fits better into the all-encompassing genre of Collectible Card Games, or CCGs. Despite this minor difference, the basic mechanics are still the same.  Such games are, like most card games, a mixture of luck and skill. However, where the classic 52-card deck of hearts, spades, kings, queens, etc is based more around luck, CCGs place strategy over chance. This is because the decks being used are built by the players themselves, allowing those with tactical minds to combine cards that complement one another. The usual trading aspect comes from the fact that there are literally hundreds if not thousands of different cards and the only way to get them is through randomized “booster packs”, purchasing them individually at often high prices for rarer cards, or trading. More often than not you’ll get cards that you have no interest in but may be a perfect fit in someone else’s deck, allowing you trade that card for one or several that you might. As stated in the introduction there is no trading in Hearthstone but there are still boosters that may supply you with unwanted cards. Fear not though, as you will have a use for all of those. More on that in a later post.

While all collectible card games are different, they all share one common objective: reduce the HP of the enemy leader to 0. The leader can be the player themselves as it is in Magic: The Gathering or a hero card as is used in the World of Warcraft TCG and soon Hearthstone. Attacks are done through the use of the cards in your deck: some are units with their own health pool that dish out punishment or can aid the player and other units on the field. Others are one-shot abilities that can do anything from destroying the enemy’s cards to preventing them from performing certain actions during their next turn. There are many other types of cards that can show up in a TCG that all do different things, but the goal is always the same: Kill the other guy before his cards kill you or your main card.

Next time I will discuss basic deck building rules that apply to nearly all Collectible Card Games, including Hearthstone.