Ragar tries his hand at Blizzard's new digital CCG

How Much Is This Going To Cost Me?

Now we're getting to the important part: just how much is this free-to-play game going to cost me to play? My thoughts: not that much to be honest. From everything I've seen, it's perfectly viable to get your card packs solely through questing or winning them in the Arena. Sure you have to put in a few games to complete the quest objectives, but you were going to do that anyway and since you can work on them in I ranked Play Mode matches, there's no risk involved in working on your quests.

The only real catch here is the choice you're forced to make between the Arena and card packs. Buying a pack of five cards will cost you 100 gold, the equivalent of 2-3 quests, whereas playing in the Arena will set you back 150 gold. Conversely, if you go the real world money route, you're looking at around $1.20-1.50 a pack (depending on how many you buy) for buying the packs themselves or $1.99 for an Arena pass. If you feel confident in your card options for the Suggest A Card builder in the Arena, there's greater potential in the Arena, but the human element always makes that a risk. Card packs are still a gamble, but they're a consistent gamble - you're always getting five Expert cards, at least one will be Rare or better, and you can always burn any triples (or doubles for Legendaries) for dust since there's no trading or other incentive to keep more cards than you can put into a single deck.

That brings us to crafting, the other way you can get cards without dropping cash on them. Any time you get cards you don't care to keep, or simply have more than you need, you can burn them for crafting dust. With that dust, any card in the entire set can be crafted for your own use. The rarer the card, the more dust it'll take to make. This means that even if the card pack you bought/won doesn't contain the card you needed for your killer deck, the dust you gain from burning the unwanted extras still puts you closer to your goal than before.

Conclusion

After all of that talk about the mechanics of Hearthstone and what it has to offer, what's my opinion of the game? I still need to put in more time with the decks other than Jaina, but so far it feels like Blizzard has made a very solid CCG. There's a good assortment of different cards and hero effects to ensure the decks feel unique. I'm personally a fan of the controlled mana flow they use here, though I would imagine some players may prefer the MtG or Shadow Era route where resource levels are a conscious player choice in both play and deck construction. To me it feel like it clears out a lot of the clutter for my deck as well as removing most of the reason I'd take a mulligan at the start (there's still starting with all expensive cards, but luckily they include a redraw option in Hearthstone as well).

I'll be curious to see just where Blizzard takes this game as beta continues and we move toward launch. Will they keep it contained to Warcraft or could we see Diablo or Starcraft themed heroes and sets? This is, after all, considered to be a game played by characters in the Warcraft universe - nothing says they couldn't have a Starcraft set in their fantasy game. There is one question above all of the others though, even beyond the monetization question I answered earlier. That question is: when's the iPad version coming out? I've got this blank spot between SolForge and Ascension on mine and this would fit nicely.

Michael "Ragar" Branham

For resources to help build your perfect deck, check out the HearthStone database at Wowhead.