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Deck Design 102

by - 10 years ago

Welcome back, class. For those of you who are joining us for the first time, Deck Design 101 is a prerequisite, so please make sure you’ve completed your first assigned reading before continuing. 😉

In 101, we talked about typical deckbuilding errors and how to overcome them. Armed with that knowledge, the critical next step is to – while still avoiding those traps and pitfalls! – make good deck design decisions. Welcome to Deck Design 102: Choosing Correctly. Our focus in this segment is on choosing strong cards, deck theme, and building towards a playstyle and win condition.

 

Expert Selections

Hearthstone is a game that requires you to balance a significant number of resources simultaneously. It may not seem intuitive at first, but you actually have six resources you are managing constantly:

  1. Health. Your health represents how long you have to live, and can be traded – using weapons, hero powers, etc. – for card draw, removal, and more.
  2. Mana. How much mana you have to spend each turn underlies most every decision you make.
  3. Cards in hand. By extension, this also includes how much room you have to draw cards (up to the 10-card hand limit), as well as your ability to draw new cards.
  4. Cards in your deck. What you have left – damage to deal, healing to do, etc.
  5. Minions. This covers concepts like board advantage (having a stronger minion presence), as well as room to play further minions (up to the seven minion board limit). I would also include the concept of ‘tempo’ here.
  6. Clock. Clock refers to how many turns you have to live, based on a snapshot of the game state, and you manipulate this number with almost every card you play. The game’s default clock is 35 turns.

As insane as it might sound, you need to be thinking about all of these resources and how they will work in tandem when you build a deck. Here is an example:

Azure Drake is a card often touted for its tremendous value. The vanilla stats – eight points on five mana – are fairly weak, but as an overall play, it has a lot going for it. The card draw and spell damage are both inherently valuable, either at the point of the curve that the Drake can be played initially, or later in the game in tandem with other secondary cards. Outside of a very few specific edge case scenarios, like it being the absolute last card in your deck, this is almost always a viable, if not positive, overall play.

Deck Theme

One of the curious mistakes many newer players make is failing to identify the ‘type’ of deck they want to design. Picking strictly cards that are valuable is a great way to end up with a highly-probable-to-succeed Arena deck, but will often leave you devastated by a well-designed constructed deck with a plan.

The goal in planning a deck style or theme is not to simply pull a bunch of combination-friendly cards together – those decks are often worse than even decks that simply use independently good cards, because they rely on certain combinations. A winning deck has an overarching playstyle, but meets a set of important criteria that include:

 

  • Card draw. Fast decks will need less, slow decks will need more. Ensuring you have adequate ways to utilize your card resources (measured against your intended clock) is paramount. This is how decks like Miracle Rogue became hugely popular – good Rogues had a very high probability of being able to draw through their entire deck quickly, allowing them to build to a set win condition consistently.
  • Versatility. The most powerful decks are able to be played aggressively or defensively, allowing you to choose whether your response will be to maintain board control or build an aggressive board of your own. Removal and mechanical cards (taunts, silences, etc.) factor in here! Pay attention to what you see your opponents using, and what you’re losing to.
  • Complementary cards. The difference between a card that is complementary and a card that requires a combination is that you still see value from the former when the latter doesn’t pan out. A Druid can run both Force of Nature and Savage Roar and get value from them independently (more so the former than the latter), but they also serve as a great win condition when played together. Contrast that with a card like Savagery, which serves no purpose whatsoever unless played alongside another card (Savage Roar, Claw, or Bite).

Knowing how you are going to achieve the above effects in your deck, where appropriate, helps you understand how to choose the right overall set of cards. You cannot do all three of these things perfectly, and knowing which you are giving up – card draw in an Aggro Warrior deck, for example – lets you make a plan of attack for how to select cards and how to play the deck.

 

Hashtag Winning

Your last major deck design hurdle is a win condition. Broadly speaking, decks win games one of three ways:

  1. Aggressively. Your deck is designed to beat the opponent as quickly as possible, and relies on them not being able to stop the snowball effect of your early game advantage. These games are often over in four to six turns.
  2. By attrition. If you’ve played a Priest or a Paladin deck, you know what I mean. Your goal is simply to survive through everything your opponent is going to throw at you, until ultimately, you don’t so much win, as your opponent runs out of steam and loses. Note: This does not strictly mean winning by fatigue damage.
  3. Explicit combinations. From the Miracle Rogue to the Force of Nature/Savage Roar combo mentioned earlier and dozens of other ideas in between, these decks build to a specific method of closing out a victory. A brilliant example is the Frost Mage style popularized by RDU at Dreamhack – it ran cards that worked together in varying ways to defer damage, clear the opponent’s board, and ultimately build up to a one-two combination of Alexstrasza into lethal (unstoppable by minions!) spell damage.

Alexstrasza

When you’re building a deck, decide which of these three styles of win condition you see yourself using. Aggressive decks will require lower-cost cards that can efficiently deal damage and snowball (using complementary cards) quickly; attrition decks will need more card draw, healing, taunts, etc. In decks that aim to fall somewhere in the middle, identify your explicit combinations, and then figure out how you’re going to get to them! Miracle Rogues use draw to get there, while FoN/Roar Druids play more of an attrition-like style to hang in until they get the necessary cards to deal big damage in one swift motion.

 

Hopefully you found these general principles useful! You can see examples of all of these deckbuilding principles in various decklists on our site, and further guides like this on general playstyle are also forthcoming – stay tuned.


JR Cook

JR has been writing for fan sites since 2000 and has been involved with Blizzard Exclusive fansites since 2003. JR was also a co-host for 6 years on the Hearthstone podcast Well Met! He helped co-found BlizzPro in 2013.


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