The Shrine

It seems like nobody who is important is ever going to review this game without saying the obvious, so I figure I should do it. This game is sucks compared to Magic The Gathering, and sure everyone will tell you it's not supposed to compete against MTG but I'm pretty sure Blizzard's goal when they enter the CCG market is to beat Yugioh. Actually, Yugioh is still a better game than Hearthstone, and that's including the fictional rules where you can't attack players if they have no creatures earlier in the manga.

The only thing good about this game is that it is really fast, but so is playing against the AI on Duel of the Planewalkers. I mean I get that MTG takes way too long to play, but turning it into a game like the original manga version of Yugioh where whoever has the most expensive cards always win is not the way to go. Since you don't have the concept of colored mana, there is pretty much always a strictly best X-drop card out there for all values of X, and obviously the very best cards would require you to spend more than enough money to do well in MTG online. I have no idea who thought it was a good idea to make creatures able to attack players directly at all times unless something has taunt. It's basically like playing MTG with every creature being unblockable, and it pretty much completely throws out any complexity you can have with creatures. Not to mention you can't actually cast spells on opponent's turn so you literally got nothing to do on your opponent's turn.

This game might be okay if it was actually free, but obviously it's not. I know people dropped tens if not hundreds on this game. You can get a better game by buying DotP if you're cheap, or just get the real thing for Magic the Gathering. Well, this game does have a very good matchmaking system, but again I don't think having a superior matchmaking on an inferior game is the way to go.

Blizzard is good at taking an established thing, and then delivering it to the mass market as a fun casual game. Hearthstone is no different.

Once they finally port it to mobile devices I think they'll hit the true sweet spot.

Man, i've been sucked back into MTG the last 6 months or so. I guess its the latest obsession that i tend to go through. It used to be SC2, Skyrim, Diablo 3, and now MTG and MTGO, its a vicious cycle.

I've heard not so good things about hearthstone, but thats from Magic nerds, so that is to be expected. I think Magic is a really well balanced game and lots of fun to collect. I disagree that it takes too long to play, because in the Modern format you can easily roll through a match in 20 minutes or less. Sometimes, the game will get long, but that just means you are probably in a really good match and its all the more fun.

Star City is a pretty big site to buy cards, read articles, and they also host tournaments. Last month I won an 80 man Qualifier in Standard to be able to go to their big Invititational tournament, so I was really happy about that. Magic is way better than it was in Highschool because now I can afford the good cards and decks.

A game of Hearthstone probably takes 5 minute to finish if I play both sides (lots of newbie players take a long time on their turn despite the fact that there's almost no complexity to the game).

For a point of reference you can finish a round of arena in about an hour usually (pending on matchmaking time + the speed of your opponent) and that's equivalent of a draft tournament. I believe a single ROUND in MTGO is 50 minutes. I have been in real MTG drafts and it took an hour to just finish drafting/building our deck that we got kicked out of the place we're using to do the tournament before we were done drafting.

But that speed comes at the cost of having no real complexity to speak of. There's no evasion. Everything can attack everything else (unless something has taunt). I just don't see how you could make a game where creatures cannot normally block for the player and still have any meaningful complexity.

MTG defnitely takes too long to play, but there's a reason why MTG takes a while to play, because it is necessary to need that much time to have a balanced game.