One of the most persistently annoying mechanics in Hearthstone is Taunt. When a minion has Taunt, you have to attack it—you can’t attack other minions or the enemy Hero. Usually, Taunt minions are not that difficult to deal with, as they typically have weaker stats than their Taunt-less counterparts. Sometimes, though, Blizzard decides to create…
Hearthstone has shifted and bent its shape a handful of times over the years. When its first Naxxramas-themed “Adventure” expansion released in 2014, it took the shape of a single-player strategy game. Most recently, with Kobolds and Catacombs and The Witchwood, it took the form of a dungeon-crawling roguelike. And now, with the launch of…
Hearthstone’s science-themed expansion The Boomsday Project drops tomorrow, and players are out in numbers doing what they do best: speculating about which cards and classes are going to be overpowered once the expansion is live. A few common themes have already made themselves clear, namely: that Boomsday looks like one of the strongest sets released…
On December 22, 2017, when SpaceX launched its Falcon 9 test rocket and lit up the skies of Los Angeles with a glowing orb of smoke, a not-insignificant number of Southern Californians began to believe the aliens had finally come to murder us all. I was there for that, and I can say with confidence…
Hearthstone is a game about careful preparation, where you amass a grand collection of cards so that you can build powerful new decks. But yesterday, in the continuing rollout of its new science-themed expansion The Boomsday Project, Blizzard announced a card that ignores all that, allowing players to build a deck that includes this one…
No Hearthstone card is bad on its own. Sure, some underperform in certain decks, in certain metagames, in certain pools of available cards. But time has proven that sometimes, cards that we thought were bad are actually pretty good when things align the right way. Case in point: King Togwaggle, a Kobolds and Catacombs card…
Update, June 8, 12:20 PM ET: Since the publication of this story, Blizzard has addressed the backlash over patch 11.2 by reverting the changes to Tess Greymane and allowing Quest Druid players whose decks rely on the newly-weakened Jungle Giants card to switch out their decks in this weekend’s Hearthstone Championship Tour Seoul competition. Blizzard…
In Hearthstone, the art of deck building has always taken a relatively specific shape: You choose a win condition (e.g. kill your opponent with small minions as quickly as possible), then fill your deck with the most powerful card combos to help you accomplish that. In the past, some cards have attempted to switch up…
Since Blizzard’s Hearthstone launched in 2014, 1,594 cards have seen the light of day, some incredible, some terrible, and a majority just passing muster as “pretty good.” But which is best? This is the question that Blizzard senior game designer August Dean Ayala set out to answer with a recent series of polls on Twitter,…
There is no objective way to measure whether something in a game is fun or not. But in the context of competitive online gaming, where empowerment for one player sometimes translates into abject misery for another, it’s much more common to encounter a mechanic so demoralizing, so soul-crushingly boring, that you simply know in your…
When Hearthstone glitches out, you can see it. Cards fall into crevices of the board they should never go. Graphical effects linger perversely. Turn timers run on with no apparent end. Usually, to break Hearthstone this way, you need to pull off some strange once-in-a-blue-moon interaction with obscure cards and janky animation mechanics that are…
Now that all the cards from Hearthstone’s Witchwood expansion have been revealed, most streamers and analysts are doing their best to rate cards and theorycraft about the upcoming meta. Well, dear reader, we’ve been through this enough times to know that once the expansion drops tomorrow, everyone will prove to be slightly wrong in their…
The object of Hearthstone is to bring your opponent’s life points down to zero, so it stands to reason that Ice Block, a Mage-specific card that makes that literally impossible to do for a whole turn, is pretty strong. So strong, in fact, that starting with the next expansion, Blizzard is moving the card out…
Hearthstone is a game for haters. It’s expensive; its metagame stands still for months; no matter how well you play, you will drop games to bad players with good luck. Read the comments on pretty much any article about Blizzard Entertainment’s wildly successful collectible card game, and you’ll find a glut of testimonials from disgruntled…
After three long months with Hearthstone’s dungeon-crawling Kobolds and Catacombs set, Blizzard has just announced a new expansion. Dubbed The Witchwood, the upcoming release brings new card mechanics, a major shakeup to the competitive card pool, and a fresh single-player adventure mode–all set against a gothic horror backdrop. First and foremost, fans of Kobolds and…
Hearthstone is about to get a feature that fans have been begging for since its earliest days—a mode that lets you run your own organized tournaments from within the client. Every year, Hearthstone gets a “soft reset” of sorts: a new competitive season begins, and old cards rotate out of Standard play to make space…
There comes a time when every Hearthstone metagame grows stale and players get tired of seeing the same competitive decks over and over. We hit that point with the latest expansion Kobolds and Catacombs a while ago, but now, with the announcement of a new set of balance changes, we may be in for a…
Hearthstone’s biggest tournament of the year, the HCT World Championship, is officially underway in Amsterdam. To celebrate, Hearthstone is letting players pilot past championship decks in their pure, unnerfed forms. Dubbed “Hall of Champions,” the special game mode is a limited-time Tavern Brawl that gives players a random World Championship-winning deck to play against another…
Every once in a while, a formerly crappy Hearthstone card finds its place in a deck and works so well that it starts to look like it might actually be good. A while back, that card was a Hungry Crab. Today, it’s a fedora-wearing rodent called Weasel Tunneler. If there’s one thing you should know…
Now that Hearthstone’s latest expansion Kobolds and Catacombs has been out for a few weeks, we’re seeing the metagame start to calcify as people begin to realize which decks and cards reign supreme. In the process, many cards that went under the radar in the lead-up to Kobolds’ launch turned out to be a lot…
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