by JR Cook - 10 years ago     show comments

You’ve played some Hearthstone. Maybe you downloaded the iPad app and poked around against the AI tutorial; maybe you’ve had the game since it entered beta and have thousands of games to your name. Either way, you’re here, and you’re in the predicament that all players eventually find themselves in – you have to choose to either take a decklist you found online and make it work (this is called ‘netdecking’), or you can try to fumble your way through and make your own.

If you’re anything like most people, you’ll swing back and forth between these two poles. One night, you just want to find a decklist that someone else has already put the wrench time into designing, load it up, and see whether or not it works. Sometimes you’ll get lucky, and be ahead of the meta curve ever-so-slightly – those are the nights you go on unprecedented win streaks, and think you’ve unlocked the secret to hitting Legend (maybe you have!). Other times, you’ll flounder around, moving up and down the same couple of ranks back and forth all night/week/month/FOREVER (at least, it feels that way). After that happens, plenty of players decide it’s time to draft their own decklist – whether for the enjoyment of going through it, or to try and get competitive on the ladder.

So, you want to design your own decklist now! Very cool. The hallmark of a great player, and what separates a pro from an expert, is understanding the game at a level that you can craft your own solutions. An expert can play the game well, given the tools – a pro will build their own tools. It’s one of those make an apple pie from scratch things. Invent the universe solution.

Still with me? Then let’s start Deck Design 101. If this class goes over well, you might get more!

Rookie Mistakes

The first – and arguably most important – lesson in deck building is What Not To Do™. Learning to construct decks correctly will take time and talent, but learning which traps and errors to avoid is a close second. We’ll break this section into two segments: General rules of thumb and specific examples of poor card inclusions or thematic decisions.

In broad strokes, there are three types of mistakes I would like to identify: Card valuation, BCSM, and the “three Cs” (curve, counters, and conditions).

Card Valuation

How valuable each individual card is can be a very good starting point for deck construction. There are a number of variables to take into consideration when factoring out how to design a deck, but a good baseline is simply knowing whether a given card is technically good or bad. It’s not totally accurate, but for sake of ease, I’ll refer to this article over at LiquidHearth. Despite being somewhat dated, it’s a good – if oversimplified – starting point for someone just learning how to determine card value.

So, what kind of errors do new or inexperienced players make? They will often pick cards that are under budget without realizing it, or cards that have properties they want (e.g. Taunt) but are inefficient and poorly costed. Examples of weak cards include:

• Goldshire Footman
• Raid Leader
• Silverback Patriarch
• Reckless Rocketeer

That is obviously not an exhaustive list, but it helps to provide some additional context. The goal is to get you thinking about how to evaluate individual cards, and whether or not you would run them – in particular, what cards you should avoid!

BCSM

Not to be confused with another acronym, BCSM stands for Best Case Scenario Mentality. This is a trap that even experienced players can fall into – the temptation to build towards a miraculous One Turn Kill or something YouTube-worthy is always there:

Yes, we all want to do this. No, it’s not an effective strategy.

BCSM is the opposite of how smart players approach their deck designs. The best decks are going to be ones where you can safely build towards your win condition, quickly or slowly, without being overrun or stuck with a hand full of cards you can’t play. (Spells that buff minions, like Mark of Nature or Blessing of Kings, although not inherently bad cards, are great examples of cards you can absolutely have too many of.)

When you design your deck, look at it and ask yourself questions that will help you avoid falling prey to BCSM, like:

• What is the worst starting hand I could get?
• What is the longest I could possibly go without having a playable card in hand? (This is a big part of what mana curve is about!)
• If my win condition card(s) is/are at the bottom of my deck, how will I play this decklist?

In fairness, plenty of decks circumvent bits and pieces of this logic. Zoo Warlock works because they can mitigate both of the first two questions with the Warlock hero power. However, to arrive at a working model for Zoo, serious thought was given to both card valuation (as above), as well as avoiding any kind of combination-dependent BCSM.

Editor’s note: BlizzPro does not endorse or encourage the use of the aforementioned Zoo Warlock.

The Three Cs

There are three c-words (polite ones!) that deckbuilding requires you to think about:

1. Curve
2. Counters
3. Conditions

Curve refers to how expensive each of the individual cards in your deck are, and what that looks like when mapped out. A well-constructed deck will (generally) have a few inexpensive cards for the early game, a variety of mid-game cards, and a handful of expensive, late-game cards. As with many of the pieces of advice in this article, there are certainly examples that bend the rules, but every single one of those decks was designed by someone who gave thought to the logic, and how/why they wanted to get around it. Ramp Druid is a great example of a decklist that trades card efficiency for tempo, allowing the player to run a higher mana curve than would otherwise be recommended.

Counters are the cards you will use to protect yourself. If you design a brilliant deck, only to hit the ladder and lose with it constantly, you likely haven’t taken your opponents into consideration. How are you going to remove their minions? How will you survive long enough if their deck is more aggressive than yours? Can you play from behind with your deck? In short, this is the Flamestrike category.

Conditions refers primarily to win conditions – the card combinations that you are building towards to finish your opponent off – but, in context of this article, it’s important for players to think about the conditions under which their deck will fail as well! If you’re using a deck that relies on overwhelming your opponent with minions, your ‘loss condition’ might be having your board wiped without sufficient follow-up to kill your opponent, or their getting up a wall of taunts you can’t clear with your whole board/hand. Knowing what can kill you and when you’ve lost is an important part of understanding your deck’s weaknesses, which will help you not only to figure out whether to run it, change it, or scrap it, but also what other decks you are weak to as you continue building your own!

Summary

Avoiding the errors that lead to weak deck design can help you move ahead in the game. Hopefully, some of the lessons in this article will help you make progress as you push for higher ranks!

Did you find the article helpful? If so, let us know in the comments! A second segment on deck design, as well as a couple of similar articles on actual gameplay advice, could round out a really fun series.