Getting to Hearthstone Rank 1 in Your First 30 Days
Tips for beginners (Part 1)
I received my beta invite to Blizzard’s amazing new game Hearthstone on the 19th of December, and have been playing pretty steadily over the Christmas break and through to the new year. When Hearthstone’s Season One ladder officially closed on January 9th, I was sitting at Rank 1 on the regular ladder, just a few wins shy of Legendary status.
At that point I’d spent a grand total of $86 on the game, and had been playing it for all of 22 days. I’m obviously not the best player out there (hell, I barely made it to the top of the regular ladder before the season ended), but I do think that I was able to squeeze a lot of good experience out of my first 3 weeks playing the game. This series of articles puts together some thoughts on how to get far on the Hearthstone ladder as a newbie with a relatively small budget and a limited amount of playing time. Hopefully other new players will find it useful as a starting point for their first few weeks as well.
1. Getting Familiar
I played tournament-level Magic: The Gathering for about 7 years back when I was still in school, and Hearthstone by comparison is less demanding in terms of strategy and much, much smaller in terms of card pool size. So getting myself familiar with the game was relatively easy. Apart from spending a lot of time looking at decklists online and watching Twitch.tv streams, I subscribed to podcasts like Turn2, Angry Chicken, Hearthstone Pro, and Happy Hearthstone. (I also had to download a couple of unofficial Android apps to help me remember card names and abilities, as I was having trouble understanding over 90% of the discussion I was listening to.)
Between working on my web startup and drinking lots of beer, I have a very finite amount of time to play Hearthstone, so I made the decision early on that I wanted to go deep, not wide. In other words, I wasn’t going to try to collect every card and learn every class. I just didn’t have that kind of time.
Instead I was going to pick two (out of the available nine) hero classes and get as good as I possibly could with them. Those two classes turned out to be Warlock and Hunter, although these days I’ve stopped working on my Hunter deck and shifted to Mage instead.
I started making my first few tentative steps towards deck construction based on whatever basic cards I had. The game’s initial skill curve is tuned very finely towards first-timers, so racking up my first few wins via the Casual Play mode was relatively straightforward. My MtG experience helped a lot here, since fundamental concepts like mana curve and board control were already pretty familiar.
2. Constructing Your First Deck
The first thing I noticed about Hearthstone’s “asynchronous turn” mechanic was that it was very conducive to fancy, combo-based play. Your opponent essentially relinquishes control to you during your turn, so it’s very tempting to build decks that rely on multiple card combinations to deliver that oh-so-impressive One-Turn Kill. What you have to understand though is that although these combo decks are awe-inspiring when they work, they’re entirely dependent on the skill of the player wielding them. Which is not to say that YOU couldn’t pull it off, of course. It’s just that playing simple, aggressive decks tend to be better suited towards newer players.
Here’s the deck that I hit Rank 1 with — a really straightforward, bread-and-butter Warlock deck named for my favorite Lost character.
He ain’t pretty,
but he gets the job done.
Obviously, the deck didn’t start off this way. It was mostly a hodgepodge combination of basic cards and various Expert cards I had randomly picked up while spending my first few dollars on packs. I didn’t get my first Legend card (the Sylvanas, of course) until I had been playing for over a week, and I had to craft it too.
3. Crafting Your First Cards
Although the current Hearthstone card pool is relatively small, it’s still a bit of a feat to complete the collection without spending a whole boatload of money first. Your best bet is to disenchant as many of the cards you aren’t currently using in order to trade up to the cards that you need in the short-term. This strategy only works, however, if you are willing to commit to one or two classes early on, and just ignore all the other classes. Obviously, picking which class to go with has a very distinct effect on your success in the game.
As of this writing, the classes I would recommend for newbies are Mage, Warlock, and possibly Rogue. It’s no accident that these classes have the highest representation in both Ranked games and tournament games: they’re by far the most flexible and most straightforward to play. Warlock in particular is a very forgiving class when you don’t own lots of Rares, so it’s a good way to kick off your first few weeks. (The card advantage of its hero power will often win you games even if you’re drawing sub-optimal cards.)
Essentially, you need to be merciless with your disenchants. It takes a lot of dust to craft Legend cards (1600 a piece) and trust me when I say that you will perpetually find yourself just a few hundred dust way from getting that one Legend that will start winning you games. Some decks simply can’t be built without lots of Epic and Legend cards (Warrior and Druid decks are especially rare-heavy), but a fast minion deck like my JohnLock list above has a lot more leeway for cheap substitutes.
In order of priority, the Legend cards I would saving up dust for are:
Obviously, some Legends perform better in some decks than others, so your mileage will vary. (For example, Edwin VanCleef would be a fine addition to any Rogue deck, and practically all burn decks will run a Bloodmage Thalnos.)
Up next: Climbing the Ranks, Keeping Track, and more …
