Hearthstone Player 1

ASMODEUS | THE COMPLETE GUIDE FOR HEARTHSTONE PLAYER 1

-by Asmodeus

This is unofficial guide in no way associated with or endorsed by Blizzard Entertainment®

Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft content and materials are trademarks and copyrights of Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. in the U.S. and/or other countries. All other trademarks are the property of the respective trademark owners.You may not post, modify, distribute, or reproduce in any way any copyrighted material, trademarks, or other proprietary information belonging to Asmodeus or others without obtaining the prior written consent of the owner of such rights. Thank you, to everyone who contributes to Hearthstone and the gaming community. Whether you're a big streamer and content creator or someone who just helps other players by answering few of their questions on forums. You are elevating gaming and e-sports to a higher level. And thank you reader for picking up this e-book in an attempt to become a better player. I wish you the best of luck.

- Asmodeus ASMODEUS | THE COMPLETE GUIDE FOR HEARTHSTONE PLAYER 4

Table of contents

Introduction ...... 6

Part I – Beginner ...... 7

1. Getting started ...... 8

2. Building your collection and earning gold ...... 10

3. Crafting ...... 13

4. Game fundamentals ...... 20

5. Hidden rules and exceptions ...... 22

6. Common mistakes and misconceptions ...... 25

7. Building your first deck – constructed play ...... 28

8. Basic arena strategy ...... 32

9. Naxxramas ...... 35

Part II – Intermediate ...... 51

10. Tempo and value ...... 52

11. Synergy ...... 55

12. The correct order of actions ...... 57

13. Foresight ...... 59

14. Finding the hidden play ...... 62

15. Tile and decision-making ...... 64

16. Focus and mindset ...... 66

17. How to improve ...... 68

18. Tracking your results ...... 71

Part III – Advanced ...... 74

19. The art of mulligan ...... 75

20. Reading and predicting the enemy ...... 77

21. Deeper understanding of a card game ...... 80

22. Similarity to poker – using poker resources ...... 82

23. Calculating probability ...... 84

24. Deckbuilding ...... 87

25. Adjusting decks ...... 89

26. Innovating ...... 91

Recommended resources ...... 93

Personal coaching ...... 94

Introduction

I view playing games at the highest level as a form of art. Players express themselves through their playstyles, and their gameplay paints a picture which is admired by their fans all over the world. When you reach a high level of proficiency at a game, you discover a completely new dimension. You can finally play around and still be successful. You can start meta-gaming and outsmarting your enemies. This is what I most enjoy about games and that's why I help other players to get better.

I'm giving this e-book away to everyone who wants to become a better Hearthstone player than they're currently, with the hope of adding just a little bit to the Hearthstone community, and elevating the average skill level of Hearthstone player-base just by a little bit.

This e-book is designed to to help players of all levels, become better at Hearthstone. If you're a beginner it will speed up the initial learning curve by a lot. You will learn how to avoid the most common mistakes and find some decks and advice that you can follow step by step, right away. If you're an intermediate player, you'll learn about the most important concepts of the game and what is the difference between you and the best players. More advanced players will find resources and methods of getting small advantages, and finding their strong points, to maximize their wins.

Remember that everyone in Hearthstone starts from the same place, so have fun playing and learning, and enjoy the rest of this e-book!

-Asmodeus

Part I

Beginner

Chapter 1.

Getting started

"First came the chicken."

When you log in to Hearthstone for the first time, you'll be guided by the innkeeper through the very basics, and after playing a few matches against AI you'll be left on your own to explore and discover what the game has to offer.

My first advice to you, is – read everything! It will save you a lot of time, confusion and effort if you just read everything you encounter. When you see a new card, take a while to read the text on it. Nobody wants to sit down and learn card descriptions one by one. This is playtime, not school, so spare yourself the effort and get to know every card as soon as possible, one at a time. Before you know it, you'll be familiar with most playable cards, and ready to take the next step.

Leveling and quests

In hearthstone there are 2 types of quests. Daily quests and unique quests which you can complete only one time. For now, we'll focus on the latter.

There are currently 9 playable classes in Hearthstone, each of them offers you a set of basic cards, which you can acquire simply by getting to level 10 with each class. This should be the first thing you do. Once you complete the tutorial and unlock every class, you'll be rewarded with 100 gold.

In chapter 7, you'll find decklists for decks that you can make with only basic cards, for each class.

Next, you can jump into practice mode and fight against the expert AI. Beating all of the expert AI opponents will grant you another 100 gold. Focus on playing 1 class at a time, and become familiar with their cards and hero power. Once you hit lvl 10 with your first class, you'll be rewarded with a pack of expert cards. Pick another class that you like, and one by one get them to lvl 10. Once you do that, you will unlock all basic cards, and get another 100 gold.

After you defeat every expert AI hero, go to the Play mode, to be matched against real players, of approximately your skill level. You will get more experience points by playing against other people than by playing against AI, and on top of that, for every 3 victories in play mode, you will receive 10 gold (maximum 100 per day). Your first game in this mode will also grant you 1 pack of expert cards, and first 3 games, regardless of the result will give you 100 gold.

This is all the "free" gold you're getting until you hit 100 and then 1000 wins in any game mode, which will both reward you with an additional 100 gold each. Don't spend it all on candy!

Read everything

Unlock all basic cards

Complete unique quests for gold

Chapter 2. Building your collection and earning gold

"One way or another I'm gonna get ya!"

Unless you're prepared to spend a fortune on card packs, building your collection will take some time, but many people have already proven that you can get access to every competitive deck, while going completely "free to play" on any account.

There are multiple ways of getting cards

• All basic cards are earned by leveling each class to lvl 10 • Expert packs - 100 gold each – reward you with 5 random expert cards • Arena rewards – you can get random expert cards and 1-2 expert packs after completing an arena run • Soulbound cards – they're awarded for completing quests and single player adventures such as Naxxramas

Everything mentioned above can be acquired with real money or the in game currency. The best use of your gold, in the beginning of your Hearthstone journey is by far the Arena entrance fee, but in order to get the required 150 gold first, you'll have to get the gold from play mode first.

How to get the most out of daily quests

Every day, you'll receive a daily quest, for completing which, you'll earn either 40, 60 or 100 gold. You can hold up to 3 quests at any given time. The basic strategy of doing daily quests involves the ability to re-roll one quest per day. By pressing the red "x" in the top right corner you'll be able to exchange that quest for a new, random one. Quests that give 60 and 100 gold are more rare and thus you should never try to exchange them. Always try to re-roll the 40 gold quests and if you get another 40 gold quest that involves a class which you can avoid playing save it for the next day, so that you can try to re-roll it again in case your next daily quest will be the one with 60 or 100 gold reward, leaving you with an option to save it and try to exchange the old one.

Earning gold from play mode

Play mode – often referred to as Constructed - is where you can test your skills with custom made decks in either casual or ranked matches. For every 3 victories in this mode you'll get 10 gold, and you can repeat that 10 times – giving you maximum of 100 each day. It doesn't matter how many losses you get, you don't have to streak the wins, so with time you can always get your gold this way if you want to.

Gold spending strategy

Spending your hard earned gold. This is where most people fall into the instant gratification trap. If you follow the advice in the next few paragraphs, you can save yourself a lot of time, that equate to a lot of money, simply by spending your gold correctly and being patient.

First of all – never buy expert card packs with gold. Especially in the beginning, if you buy a pack instead of an arena entrance fee, you deny yourself the opportunity to get lucky, but even more importantly, you deny yourself the opportunity to improve at arena. Why is it so important? Because arena is the fastest way of earning gold and cards in Hearthstone once you get good at it, and the best way to get good at it, is to play it.

This applies mostly to beginners, if you're already a veteran with a bank of 5k gold, you have my blessing to go on a pack shopping spree!

An average win rate of 50%, which equals to 3 wins in arena, rewards you with almost the same amount of potential cards as 1,5 expert card packs. Anything extra is simply a bonus. Arena is strictly more efficient way of spending your gold, because you're getting more value for your currency.

It may seem counter intuitive, but waiting for more gold, to enter the arena instead of buying packs is going to get you cards much faster in the long run. At first, your priority is just to become more proficient at it, but once you can average around 6 wins, with the help of daily quests you can keep playing arena indefinitely and build a gold bank together with your collection rapidly increasing in size.

As a beginner, you won't get enough wins to play only arena, but you can "cheat" it a little bit by using multiple accounts. By playing on more than 1 server/account, you'll get more than 1 daily quest per day, and alternating accounts will let you play more arena's. That way you can get better at it much faster and transition to playing only on your main account once you can keep playing arena there.

Spending money on Hearthstone

How much you want to support Blizzard is completely up to you, but here are my recommendations for you in regards to spending money on Hearthstone.

1. Naxxramas is currently the best use of your money. You know what you get, you pay for a single player challenge, which is a lot of fun to complete and the quality of rewards is very high. Definitely worth buying one way or the other.

2. Arena entrance – if you're planning to play this game for more than few weeks, investing in your ability to become self sustaining arena player is much more valuable than the short boost of cards, that's why I recommend buying arena over expert card packs.

3. Expert card packs – if you already average 6+ wins in arena or your collection is very rich but you're looking to get lucky or build golden decks, this is the main purpose of buying packs.

Try to get 60 and 100 gold quests by re-rolling the 40g ones

Save gold for arena

Get a second account or alternate servers to get faster gold for arenas

Get Naxxramas before buying card packs

Chapter 3. Crafting

"I solemnly swear to uphold the dust, and never disenchant a card without thinking" – The Argent Dust Oath

Crafting cards is one of the most rewarding features in Hearthstone. The more patient you will be, the bigger the rewards and satisfaction. You can craft most cards using arcane dust, which you will get either from arena rewards or disenchanting other cards. You can disenchant only the cards which you can also craft.

Cards that cannot be crafted include:

• Golden promotion cards (such as golden Gelbin Mekkatorque)

• Non-golden Naxxramas (and any future adventure) cards

• Cards from the basic set

• Soulbound quest rewards

Before you start crafting, it's important to understand as much as you can about the cards and the crafting process itself

He thought disenchanting Hogger was a good idea, until control warriors showed that Hogger really is super powerful!

The table below will show you the cost and reward for crafting and disenchanting a card of each rarity type:

Rarity Cost of Crafting Reward for Disenchanting Regular Golden Regular Golden Common 40 400 5 50 Rare 100 800 20 100 Epic 400 1600 100 400 Legendary 1600 3200 400 1600

An exception to these rules is applied whenever Blizzards decides to buff/nerf or alter how any particular card works in any way. After a patch with these changes goes live, you can disenchant affected cards for full value. That means if you happen to have some extra pyroblasts, and that card is affected by a patch, you will have about 2 weeks from the time the patch goes live, during which you can disenchant pyroblast and get 400 arcane dust back, because it's an epic card.

Which legendary to craft first?

This is one of the most commonly asked questions on forums. Earning 1600 dust takes some time, and it's an important decision because next chance to craft a legendary of your choice may not happen for some time. There are a couple of factors that go into crafting legendary cards.

Firstly – do you have a main class? If there is a specific class, which you enjoy playing the most, you may want to invest in the class specific legendary. Not all classes use their legendary card, so i divided them into 3 categories.

Class specific legendaries used commonly – the strongest ones:

• Tirion Fordring • Edwin VanCleef • Lord Jaraxxus • Grommash Hellscream

Class specific legendaries used sometimes – strong but optional:

• Archmage Antonidas • Cenarius • Al'Akir The Windlord

Class specific legendaries rarely played – limited use, not recommended:

• Prophet Velen • King Krush

Secondly, we have to consider legendary cards that fit in most decks, either because of their versatility or sheer power. I ordered the neutral legendary cards so that you can see which ones you should consider crafting first, and which ones are not even worth keeping.

Top tier neutral legendaries – played in many of the best decks:

• Sylvanas Windrunner • Cairne Bloodhoof • The Black Knight

Good legendary cards – definitely worth crafting:

• Bloodmage Thalanos • Ragnaros the Firelord • Alexstrasza • Ysera • Baron Geddon

Situational legendary cards – for specific decks – good in their niche:

• Malygos • King Mukla • Harrison Jones • Leeroy Jenkins

Optional legendary cards – there is use for them but they're never needed:

• Deathwing • Hogger • Onyxia • The Beast

400 dust, or sentimental value:

• Nozdormu • Gruul • Illidan Stormrage • Elite Tauren Chieftain • Captain Greenskin • Gelbin Mekkatorque • Tinkmaster Overspark • Nat Pagle • Millhouse Manastorm • Lorewalker Cho

How ironic that the most powerful of ogres – Gruul – sees much less playing time than a simple boulderfist ogre

Crafting epic cards

These cards are less valuable than legendaries, but you should still understand which ones are important, and which ones you can dust to craft your desired deck instead.

Just like with legendaries, we have to take a look at the class specific epics first. If there is a particular class, which you'd like to explore more, you can save all their epic cards, just in case – otherwise – you can follow this list. Number in the brackets, represents how many copies of that card, you'll need for all of the good and established decks which are played currently.

Druid:

• Ancient of Lore (2) • Ancient of War (2) • Force of Nature (2)

Hunter:

• Bestial Wrath (0) • Gladiator's Longbow (0) • Snake Trap (2)

Mage:

• Ice Block (2) • Pyroblast (1) • Spellbender (0)

Paladin:

• Avenging Wrath (1) • Lay on Hands (1) • Sword of Justice (1)

Priest:

• Cabal Shadow Priest (2) • Mindgames (0) • Shadow Form (0)

Rogue:

• Kidnapper (0) • Patient Assassin (0) • Preparation (2)

Shaman:

• Doomhammer (2) • Earth Elemental (0) • Far Sight (0)

Warlock:

• Bane of Doom (0) • Pit Lord (0) • Twisting Nether (0)

Warrior:

• Gorehowl (1) • Brawl (2) • Shield Slam (2)

And now for the neutral epic cards, which you can craft and disenchant. There are certain neutral epics, which are widely used in many decks and on the other hand there are those which you almost never see. Here they are, divided into 3 main categories:

Neutral epics which are useful for more than one deck:

• Big Game Hunter • Doomsayer • Faceless Manipulator • Molten Giant • Mountain Giant

Neutral epics which are situational and niche cards:

• Blood Knight • Murloc Warleader • Sea Giant

100 dust:

• Hungry Crab • Southsea Captain

Crafting decks

In the beginning, you'll play around with the basic decks, but they can only get you to a certain point. After that, if you want to progress in constructed ranks, you'll have to build a stronger deck, using the expert cards. Until you develop a strong sense of the game, card interactions and the metagame, it's best if you just copy a deck that's tested by experienced players. Popular streamers and top pro players often keep their decks available to the public and after every tournament, new decks are released for everyone to copy and take advantage of the deckbuilding talent and expertise of pro players. You can also find current, popular decklists on various websites. There is often an option to sort the decks by the crafting cost so that you can find something affordable for yourself.

At the start it's best to stick with cheap aggro decks, because you can craft them fairly quickly and earning gold in play mode with them is faster. Hunter and "zoo" warlock are currently the most popular of the cheap aggro decks that are capable of reaching legend rank in the hands of a skilled player.

Consult a list or an experienced player before you disenchant a card

Start crafting with the essential cards for your main deck

Craft cards starting from those which you're the least likely to get otherwise

Start by copying cheap aggro decks

Chapter 4. Game Fundamentals

"Mrrraggglhlhghghlgh"

Basic mechanics and win conditions

In Hearthstone, there are many ways to win the game, but the most basic of them is winning through board control. This means, prioritizing putting as much power in play as you safely can, and removing enemy minions from the board to limit his options. By trading efficiently with enemy minions and using appropriate spells to remove enemy threats you can create small advantages for yourself every turn, and when the enemy runs out of answers or simply gets overwhelmed, your minions will easily finish him off.

Playing for board control, means that you don't have to worry about your enemy HP until you can kill him within 1-2 turns. You should focus on removing enemy minions, even if that means dealing 6 damage to a 3 HP minion. Limiting the options of your enemy and preventing him from utilizing various buffs is the safest way to the victory.

When you kill an enemy minion with your own, without losing it, you can force the enemy to use another card in order to deal with your damaged creature. That way you gain card advantage, because he had to spend two cards in order to deal with your one.

The term “drop” relates to a creature that can be played on it's own for specific mana cost. For example River Crocolisk is a 2-drop, and Chillwind Yeti is a 4-drop.

Card advantage and drawing cards

Another way to win the game is - to gain a significant card advantage. In later turns of the game, when you have more mana available, you're able to play multiple cards each turn, and since you're naturally drawing only one card per turn, you run the risk of running out of cards.

Whenever a player is out of cards – it's called a topdecking mode. Topdecking refers to playing a card that you just got from the top of your deck.

Having some card draw mechanics in your deck is very important, but too much of it, can lead to clogging up your hand if you can't empty it out fast enough. Balancing the amount of card draw in a deck comes with experience. You can also gain card advantage by playing bigger minions, which are able to trade for two or more smaller minions played by the enemy, or you can play AOE (Area Of Effect) spells, that deal damage or kill multiple minions at once, such as Flamestrike.

Alternative ways of winning the game

More sophisticated ways of winning the game include winning by having much more tempo than your enemy. This simply means, that your deck can deal more damage, and put more power in play for the same amount of mana as your enemy has to pay for less damage or minion stats. Decks that rely on tempo require significantly more draw power to work properly.

The last method of winning a game which I will mention – is winning by fatigue. There are 2 ways to win by using the fatigue damage. On one hand, you can stall the game for so long, that both you and your enemy draw all 30 cards in your decks and through preventing damage and healing yourself you can outlast the enemy while you both take the fatigue damage.

On the other hand, you can force enemy to draw multiple cards with cards such as Coldlight Oracle or the spell Naturalize. Together with opponents draw cards, which he'll be forced to play, because you're filling his hand and he runs the risk of destroying cards once he has the maximum of 10 that each player can hold. Forcing enemy to overdraw and prematurely reach fatigue damage while discarding his cards is referred to as milling, and decks that do this are called mill decks.

The sheer panic of your enemy when you force him to draw 6 cards in a turn, while they all get destroyed makes for some very fun situations!

Control the board to build up advantage

Trade efficiently with enemy creatures to save yours and gain card advantage

Always be aware of your card advantage or disadvantage

Remove enemy minions to limit his options

Chapter 5. Hidden rules and exceptions

"HA HAAAAAA! ...wait, that's not what i had in mind."

In this chapter you will learn about some not-so-obvious rules in Hearthstone. Often times the in-game situation gets complicated with multiple trigger effects in play and sometimes you can get lost in it all. Hearthstone takes the card descriptions very literally (in most cases – molten giant is one of the exceptions).

Why reading is important

For example – let's take a look at the warrior epic card – Gorehowl the 7/1 weapon. Text on the card reads:

"Attacking a minion costs 1 Attack instead of 1 Durability." so you go ahead and smack a couple of enemy minions down in the next two turns, and on the third one, when his board is empty, you hit him in the face. Oh no! Gorehowl disappeared?! Many players are confused when they encounter this situation at first. Even though the card text doesn't say that "ONLY attacking a minion costs 1 Attack" that rule is still implied by the literal meaning of the card description. This is the case with almost every card and ability in Hearthstone, so by reading carefully you can avoid many, easily preventable mistakes.

Hidden rules

There are many rules in hearthstone, which are not obvious to the new player, and at first it may seem random, or that something didn't work as intended, but at this point, Hearthstone went through so much testing, that bug's are incredibly unlikely and there is probably some hidden rule you might not be aware of. Here are some of the most important ones:

1. Deathrattle triggers after the combat happens in the order in which the minions were played, one by one.

2. Playing a card, or a minion means playing it from your hand. Minions and effects summoned by other means, do not count as "Played".

3. Battlecries work only when the minion is played from your hand.

4. Destroying a minion – for example using Shadow Word: Pain on it, doesn't deal any damage to the minion, so it doesn't trigger any effects that happen when damage is dealt.

5. The maximum mana pool you can have is 10 – if you're at 10 and want to play a coin or innervate you have to spend some of your mana first.

6. You can have maximum of 7 minions on board at once, and when the board is full you cannot play any more.

7. Secrets such as mirror entity are triggered after battlecries occur.

8. Secrets trigger in the order they were played.

9. Destroying divine shield does not count as dealing damage.

10. Spell damage affects every card that is a spell and deals damage, and it affects only that.

Silence

Silence is one of the most confusing game mechanics for many players. The easiest way you can look at it, is to think of silence simply as an eraser or a rubber. When you hover over a minion you can see the description and various buffs or debuffs if they're present. Silence removes all of that. The only thing that stays is the minion statistics, such as mana cost, attack, health and the minion type (Beast, Dragon, etc.)

You can silence enemy buffs, taunts, divine shields, deathrattle and trigger effects, but you can also silence debuffs from your own guys. Silencing a minion that has been frozen, will remove the freeze effect and let you attack with it this turn, just make sure that the minion doesn't have other beneficial effects, because silence will remove all of them. You can even silence minions after equality to restore their hp or minions affected by Aldor Peacekeeper to bring back their attack power.

Polymorph and hex turn creatures into completely different minions, they're not counted as debuffs, and thus you can't silence them to get your original minions back.

Silencing Ragnaros the Firelord will let the owner attack with him like with a simple 8/8 giant, it can be sometimes used to finish the enemy off by avoiding the random effect

Card descriptions are simplified but almost always precise with their wording

Try to remember the order in which secrets are played

Remember the order in which minions with deathrattle were played

When silencing a creature, remember that all effects are silenced, not only the ones you want

Chapter 6. Common mistakes and misconceptions

"You can do everything with a shield... no, really."

Getting good at anything requires you to make a lot of mistake. That is to be expected and you should embrace it. The more mistakes you make, the more ways you find of how not to do things. Every mistake that you notice is a big step towards becoming a better player and reaching your goals. With the small mistakes you'll have to deal yourself or with personal coaching, but right now I'll help you avoid some of the big mistakes that could otherwise set you back if left unchecked.

Creating bad habits

Repeating the same thing, for a long time, will cause you to develop a habit of doing it. Your job is to make sure you evaluate the way you play to find any bad habits you might be creating. A good example of this would be drawing the cards first. When you're planning out your turn and you decide that it will include drawing a card, you should draw first in case the new card can help you make a better and more efficient play. The key is to always act as if that was important, even when it isn't. By drawing first, even if you hold the best possible answer in your hand, you're reinforcing a good habit and you eliminate the chance of misplaying when it actually matters.

Draw first, ask questions later!

Being VERY optimistic

This is a very common mistake, and a reason why many players struggle to improve while being stuck in a plateau. There is nothing wrong with being positive and optimistic, what I'm talking about is always expecting favourable outcome and not looking at the bigger picture. This happens during deck building, drafting arena decks and during the game itself. People get stuck at the first idea that pops into their head.

– Hey man if I pick this Alarm-o Bot I could get like a really big creature or even a legendary and get it on board for free, that would be crazy! Let's pick it.

That scenario is possible, but it's so unlikely that it's absolutely not worth picking a card like an Alarm-o Bot in arena. You have to look at all the possible options and try to guess, how likely it is that the one you're imagining is going to happen.

This is especially important for the new players, who are overestimating combo's and synergies. Before you gain a lot of experience with these cards and get a firm grasp on what usually happens, you should try to stay very realistic and go with the choices that seem the most solid and consistent.

Playing too fast

Even the best of the best are guilty of this sometimes. Rushing and making quick decisions can only lead to bad things. There is often a hidden and marginally better play to make and acting too fast may rob you of that opportunity.

The simplicity of Hearthstone is often misleading. It appears very easy and casual, and that's why the difference between the best and average players may sometimes be not obvious. It's all about increasing your chances. Taking your time each turn, ensures that.

Bonus tip: right click on the enemy portrait and squelch him at the start of each game, so that they don't bother you when you're thinking through your turn.

Not looking at the bigger picture and being impatient

This one is a dead giveaway to everyone, that they deal with a brand new player. I'm talking about wasting spells and attacks to hit the enemy face and caring too much about your own health. Using weapons and hero powers to attack minions is one of the best ways to gain card advantage and pull ahead in the game.

New players often care too much about their health and the enemy health. Once you learn the most common combinations of burst damage you'll be able to very precisely tell when you're safe and when you should protect your health pool. Especially in arena, you can easily go to 15 hp while your enemy sits at 30 and still be in a dominating lead because of your board presence and card advantage. Don't waste your resources to damage the enemy hero unless you'll be able to finish him in the next 1 or 2 turns with lethal damage. Using any spells to damage enemy hero without having lethal in this or the next turn is almost always a big mistake.

Think about the future turns and try to anticipate what can happen. It's better to use spells to protect your minions, because your minions can hit the enemy face multiple times, while spells are gone after you cast them.

Lethal – refers to having enough damage to kill the enemy hero right away

Trying to reinvent the wheel before learning the basics

This one, applies probably the most to constructed play. Creating new decks is fun. For me it is the most interesting aspect of the entire game, but before you can create a deck that is successful, and works against other players, you have to make sure you know the game itself and current metagame like the back of your hand. The best way to experience and learn the game is to experiment, and I encourage you to do so, however when you'd like to move up in the ladder and your goal is to win more, you should take advantage of all the great work that other Hearthstone players have done for you. You can netdeck something that fits your style, and learning to play good decks and getting to understand how they work is a very valuable experience, because you can see what works and what doesn't, very clearly.

Netdecking is simply copying decks from the internet. Some people look down upon it, but that's beacuse they've lost to netdecking players too many times!

Always try to make optimal choices to create good habits

Take your time each turn

Hero health is just a resource, don't be afraid to use it

Stick with tried and tested strategy until you fully understand how it works

Chapter 7. Building your first deck – constructed play

"I may be a novice, but I can still kick your butt!"

At the beginning, in order to earn your gold from daily quests and victories in the play mode, you will need some starting decks. On the next page you'll find a list of decks created entirely out of basic cards which are available to you once you hit lvl 10 with that class.

Play mode, just like the name suggests should be a playground, here you can try things out and get familiar with cards, game mechanics and the flow of the game. Get comfortable playing against all classes before you move to arena.

These basic decks, will help you learn the fundamentals and gain some experience. You will have an advantage over new players who are just starting, and trying to play with their own decks, but it can only take you so far. When you face decks with legendary and golden cards, don't get discouraged, everyone in Hearthstone was a beginner at first, and had to deal with strong competition. With time, you'll develop your skills and your card collection and you'll be able to take on the best decks in higher ranks.

Once you get more cards that you'd like to put in your original decks, you can consult the arena tier list, to see which cards are better than the ones you were using.

Become familiar with every class in play mode before you go into the Arena

Start with the basic decks from this chapter and upgrade them as you earn cards

Basic decks can take you only so far, but probably much further than you think,

Stay positive, everyone in Hearthstone started from the same place

Chapter 8. Arena draft strategy

“Some day I'll be just like that popular streamer!”

Arena is the true test for how strong your fundamentals are. Over time, everyone gets approximately the same luck during draft phase, and the average win rate across many games will reflect how well you can play the game. Before you jump into the arena, make sure you played the game long enough in constructed, to not be surprised by what other classes can do against you.

The Draft

Drafting is incredibly important in arena. There are many things to consider, but the first choice you'll be faced with is always picking one of three random classes. For advanced players, the strength of every class will be relatively close, and classes like Rogue or Hunter become much stronger at the top level. You can perform well with all of them. For beginners however I recommend that you go either with a class that you have the most experience with or use this simple tier list:

Tier 1:

• Mage • Paladin • Druid Tier 2:

• Rogue • Shaman Tier 3:

• Hunter • Priest • Warlock • Warrior

Drafting your arena deck

After choosing your class, you will be offered a choice between 3, semi random, cards until you create a full deck. When learning to play arena I recommend you consult an arena tier list until you develop a strong sense for each card so that you can make the best choice available to you. You will find links to arena tier lists at the end of this chapter.

The rules of drafting a good arena deck

Other than picking the best cards, you also have to consider your mana curve. There are different playstyles and many viable types of mana curve but here are some guidelines for you:

• You should have at least five or six 2-drops (you can count the 1 drops as well)

• Good 3-drops are hard to get, when you have a hard choice, lean towards them. You should have at least four 3-drops

• There are some great 4-drops, you can be more picky about them.

• Don't pick too many cards that cost 6+ mana, the peak of your mana curve should be around 4 mana.

• Be aware of how many picks you have left

Mana curve is the distribution of your cards mana cost across the deck. For example - a lot of cheap cards makes for a “low” mana curve.

Every few picks, you should take a look at how many cards you have left and how your deck looks so far. Try to identify strong and weak points in it so that you can proceed with the draft accordingly. It is important to have a plan and think about how you will try to win the game. If your deck consists of many small minions, you should get a little more draw power when given the chance and if your deck seems very top heavy, with multiple big creatures you should look to fill your early game holes.

Around pick 15 and even more after 20, you should prioritize a little weaker cards in order to balance your mana curve. Even legendary cards won't save you if you lose badly the fight over board control in the first 4 turns.

Removal spells, such as Fireball and Swipe are very versatile, pick a lot of them. On the other hand, situational removal, for example Shadow Word: Death, can sometimes be a dead card in your hand. It's very important to have one or two of them, but any more will hurt you more than help.

Just like with removal, you can consider every card in that sense. Minions and spells that are versatile and good in every situation, should take priority over niche and situational cards that require special conditions to work well.

Good way to balance your deck is to have just enough draw, just enough removal, just enough big threats and a lot of ways to win, or stay even in the early game (turns 1-4). The more experience you have playing arena, the easier it will be for you to identify these thresholds.

Synergy in arena

Synergy and combo's are very often overvalued by new players. Whenever you're trying to build a deck around certain synergies, like Houndmaster or Mad Scientist, you should look at what you already have in your deck, rather than trying to think about what you can get in future picks. You can't predict what the draft will give you, that's why you need to focus on the information that you already know. Look to the future, but rely on the deck that you already have. You can also expect specific mana cost minions more reliably than spells.

Try to remember, or better yet – screenshot your decklist before you jump to your first match in arena

Arena draft tier lists

Both of these players did a great job of putting these lists together, and it will help you greatly in learning the value of each card. Remember that it's only a guideline.

AntiGrav1ty's list JerkyGunner's list

Pick your best class

Focus on the highest value cards at the beginning of your draft

Around pick 15 start filling your mana curve

Constantly look at your deck and evaluate it

Chapter 9. Naxxramas

“Bring it on Kel'Thuzad!”

Curse of Naxxramas is the first adventure mode added to Hearthstone. It consists of five wings, containing 15 bosses to defeat. Beating each boss rewards you with 2 copies of a specific new card, obtainable only from Naxxramas. Additionally after completing each wing, you will get a specific Naxxramas legendary card. There are also class challenges with class specific cards as a reward.

You can buy each wing of the adventure for 700 gold or access them by spending real money. If you're considering paying for anything in Hearthstone, buying the entire Naxxramas adventure is definitely worth the money. You know beforehand which cards you're going to get (there are 30 collectible cards to get), and they're used in almost every competitive deck. It's a lot of fun to experiment and find creative ways of defeating the bosses, especially in the heroic mode where the challenge becomes significantly harder.

In order to get all the cards, you will have to complete the class challenges, which give you a predetermined deck to fight one of the bosses from regular Naxxramas wings, and you'll have to defeat the bosses themselves in normal mode.

Heroic mode is completely optional, and the reward for it, is a themed card back. To get the cards you'll have to beat each boss only in the normal mode. I've created a deck for each of them, to help you get started. I tested every single one of them in the Naxxramas adventure and beat each boss on the first try. The good news, is that you will need only basic cards to build these decks and with expert cards you can improve them significantly to beat the heroic mode.

Basic decks for each of the 15 Naxxramas bosses. The Arachnid Quarter

Anub'Rekhan

Beating this boss should not be a problem. The fight is very straightforward, just make sure you're controlling the board, which should be easy with the card choice of this deck. Play your minions, kill his minions and once you get enough of an advantage, squash that nasty bug.

Grand Widow Faerlina

This deck deals very well with the Grand Widow. We're playing warlock here, to avoid her hero power doing too much damage. You can empty your hand really fast, and as a warlock you will not run out of card due to the Life Tap hero ability. The minion choice emphasizes creatures with more health so that you're guaranteed to have a board after she launches her missiles. Simply spend your cards as fast as you can and you will win by overrunning her.

Maexxna

Fight against Maexxna is a very interesting one. There are many ways of beating her, but the easiest one is by using minions with battlecries, charge and small token minions that will play around her hero ability. On normal difficulty you can fairly easily overrun her with low cost minions and paladin hero power. Once she returns a minion with battlecry or charge to your hand, you'll be able to benefit from it again. Flooding the board with small guys is better than playing one large minion.

The Plague Quarter

Noth the Plaguebringer

This boss can be tricky if you're not careful. Your objective in this challange should be to keep your minions alive, that's why priest is the best choice here. You can heal your minions up and increase their health to avoid Noth's passive hero ability. Aoe damage from deathrattles and your holy nova will be enaugh to deal with his 1/1 skeletons that spawn eventually. Don't panic when he destroys all your minions, just make sure to draw cards from your cleric and you can catch up very easily.

Heigan the Unclean

To defeat Heigan you can use the exact same deck that you used for Noth the Plaguebringer. Positioning your minions correctly is very important in this fight. Make sure to put creature with the most health on the left side of your board. If you manage to buff it with Power Word:Shield or Divine Spirit you the game should be a piece of cake from that point. You can continue to heal the leftmost minion with your hero power when you can and win through board control.

Loatheb

Playing against Loatheb can be very fun. The finish is always very explosive due to the spores which buff your creatures. Try to flood the board as much as you can with small minions and your hero ability. When you manage to keep several minions on the board you can use one of them, or something like consecration to gain the attack buff and finish loatheb in 1 turn so don't worry about his health untill you fill your side of the board with minions.

The Military Quarter

Instructor Razuvious

This boss is all about preparation. If you know what's waiting and you come with correct deck, you can win without any problems, otherwise Instructor can destroy you in just a couple of hits. Make sure to get your water elementals and oozes early, they're the key to winning this battle. You don't need to activate the crystal until after you take 1 hit from his weapon, feel free to develop your board by playing the early minions. Once you can hit him with the water elemental and prevent his weapon from obliterating you, it's just a matter of playing minion after minion and killing him with them.

Gothik the Harvester

In order to defeat Gothik you'll need to utilize the token minions you get from killing off his creatures. Playing a warlock allows you to keep up with his hero power drawing cards. Make sure to save buffs like Shattered Sun Cleric for the Spectral minions and once you buff them, use them to trade with enemy minions to avoid taking too much damage (but don't worry about that damage too much, the fight will be over before it matters).

The Four Horsemen

The Four Horseman may seem scary but if you manage to draw Shadow Word: Pain and save the Acidic Swamp Ooze for later, you will defeat them decisively. Priest is the best class to tackle this boss while using only basic cards. You can draw a lot of cards and keep yourself alive untill you take out the 1/7 minions and finish the remaining Baron Rivendare. You can try to Mind Vision early to get his Shadow Word:Pain and make the fight even easier.

The Construct Quarter

Patchwerk

Patchwerk is a very unique boss. He doesn't have any cards except his giant hook. Just like in the Instructor Razuvious encounter, you will rely on mages ability to freeze, mirror images and Acidic Swamp Ooze. Pay attention to his mana costs and plan your turns accordingly. Flooding the board with small minions will play around his hero ability and with this deck you should have no problem beating him.

Grobbulus

This hideous fellow will try to AOE your creatures down, that's why priest is again the right choice. Your holy nova should deal with the slimes and echoing oozes, while your beefy minions endure his hero power miltiple times. Getting the Gurubashi Berserker in play is a very quick way to victory.

Gluth

Gluth is one of the harder opponents in Naxxramas. His weapon can become a problem over time, so try to clear the board when it's not equiped or when you can play the Ooze afterwards. Pay attention to the deathrattles and use them to your advantage. You can heal yourself by killing the zombie chow's and clear the board with unstable ghouls after he uses his hero power and you buff your minions with Stormwind Champion.

Thaddius

This encounter can be very fun and unpredictable. You can take advantage of the AOE buff auras from mnions like Raid Leader and Stormwind Champion, because your minions will gain stats permanently after Thaddius uses his hero ability. Remember when planning your next move that each turn the health and attack of all minions will change.

Frostwyrm Lair

Sapphiron

The encounter with Sapphiron can last a long time and even take you to fatigue, but it's only due to Sapphiron freezing your minions and the limitation of his hero power that will let only 2 of your minions to survive each turn. The fight is actually very easy, it just takes a while to finish the mighty frost-wyrm. Try to keep 2 biggest minions that are available to you on the board, one on each side of the Frozen Champion. Keep healing them and killing off Sapphiron's threats. Once he runs out of cards you can just keep healing and attack whenever your creatures are not frozen.

Kel'Thuzad

Definitely the most challanging boss in all of Naxxramas (he would like me saying that). The most important card against KT is Flamestrike. You can survive a lot of his Frost Blasts, just try to develop your board and kill his armor once you'll have at least 7 mana and a flamestrike or Frost Nova available. He will play a lot of minions at the same time and you'll have to catch up by using AOE. If you manage to successfuly cast at least one flamestrike the final boss should fall to the onslaught from your bigger minions.

Whether you use gold or real money, Naxxramas is worth purchasing

You can unlock all cards just by beating the normal mode

Class challenges have their own fixed decks

To beat the normal mode you'll need only basic cards

Part II

Intermediate

Total Dominance?! Quest accepted!

Tempo

The understanding of tempo is incredibly important in Hearthstone. In the most basic sense, it refers to how much you can do with the same amount of mana as your enemy. Playing faster, or having better tempo, means that you can put in play more meaningful stats (health and attack) by using efficient minions or deal more damage by using cheap spells.

Decks based on tempo rely on playing lots of cheap cards and dealing a lot of damage, very quickly (for example Miracle Rogue) or overrunning the enemy with a board full of minions which are able to trade efficiently (such as Zoo Warlock).

The trade-off for playing faster decks is the fact that you would be spending cards too fast to stay relevant for more than few turns. Because of that, decks that rely on tempo require much more draw power.

Miracle Rogue is able to recover its hand size by using the Gadgetzan Auctioneer, and Zoo Warlock supplements his natural draw with the hero ability – Life Tap.

Value

Value refers to how much a card can accomplish in terms of gaining card advantage and in relation to its mana cost. For a simple example, let's take a look a 2/4 Gnomish Inventor vs. 4/5 Chillwind Yeti. Both cards cost 4 mana, that's why it's easy to compare them. Gnomish Inventor is a good card, it allows you to put a minion in play and draw a card, however you would need three Gnomish Inventors to take out the Chillwind Yeti, and he would kill all three of them in the process. In a vacuum, this situation would give 1 card advantage to the player who chose the Yeti and we can say that the Yeti has significantly higher value than Gnomish Inventor.

You can also compare the combined value of all the cards in your deck with your enemies deck. If you're playing a ramp druid vs. an aggro deck consisting of small and cheap creatures, you will probably need only 15 or 20 of your cards to kill off the entire 30 card deck of your enemy (the difficult part is surviving long enough to draw and play them).

Hero power

Hero abilities are another way to gain value. By killing off a damaged creature with your hero ability you can eliminate enemy card from play without spending any cards of your own. Same with healing your injured minions. If you keep them healthy, they'll be able to trade for more than 1 enemy minion and put him at a disadvantage. Hero ability lets you gain value, for the cost of tempo.

Ramp Druid is a deck that uses mana gain mechanics in order to play many big minions, turn after turn until the enemy has no answers to them and gets out-valued.

Choosing between tempo and value

Knowing tempo and value is one thing, but applying it in practice will take some experience. In general, faster plays offer less value and gaining value, requires playing slower and spending more mana.

For example – if you're playing a priest and have 3 mana this turn, you can chose to heal your damaged 2/3 River Crocolisk, so that he survives attacking enemy 2/2 Kobold Geomancer, and that would be playing for value, but you can also suicide the damaged River Crocolisk and play Dark Cultist, leaving you with 3/4 on the board, instead of 2/1. That's playing for tempo. You sacrifice a card to put more stuff in play.

If you have a significant card advantage over your enemy, you can spend your cards less efficiently. You're unlikely to lose by having less cards than your enemy, so make sure you don't fall behind in tempo. Instead of saving your minions by using hero power you can play more minions, to advance your position on the board and sacrifice your weaker minions. Spending cards faster than your enemy will allow you to capitalize on your card advantage.

On the other hand, when you have stronger board than your enemy, and you're not in immediate danger of dying, but you're behind on cards, compared to your enemy, you should utilize the tempo advantage (you already have more minions or stats in play than your enemy – so he needs to catch up) and make the most efficient trades possible. Try to save your creatures, use your hero ability, but make sure to not overextend against possible AOE.

Always evaluating your position in game with regards to tempo and value/card advantage will let you pick the best play in any situation. With time and experience, you'll be able to see it more clearly and make finer distinctions that allow for even more optimal plays.

Always try to be aware if you're ahead or behind on cards and board position

Hero ability provides value at the cost of tempo

Faster decks require more draw power

Identify your opponents deck, so that you know if value or tempo is more important

“Any Blood Knights around?”

Many players, including me, are initially attracted to Hearthstone, because of all the cool combos and synergies. When the stars align, you can make some incredible plays. You can even kill your enemy with a single attack from an Angry Chicken. The drawback of any combo deck, is inconsistency. Currently the only combo deck that works very well is Miracle Rogue, and that's due to the incredibly powerful draw engine – Gadgetzan Auctioneer, which allows the player to draw so many cards that having the necessary combo pieces is almost guaranteed.

In the beginnig, try to rely on the expertise of seasoned players, when it comes to building decks based on synergy between specific cards or complicated combinations. New players often overestimate how good these decks are, because they don't have any kind of refference. They don't know how likely it is to draw specific two, three or even more cards. In order to know that, you need to play enaugh games for the luck factor to even out across them all, that way you'll know what to expect on average.

Multiple small synergies vs. One huge combo

Unless you're drawing your entire deck, relying on combinations of cards that require multiple pieces to work is not the best idea. You will be much better off including in your deck cards that synergize with more than one other element of your deck. For example – a deck such as token druid, uses multiple cards that allow you to fill your board with lots of weak minions, in order to capitalize on AOE buffs like Savage Roar or Power of the Wild, but each of those cards have multiple uses, so that when you cannot pull off your combo, you can use them on their own and get something out of them.

Token is usually a small minion summoned by other card

Many ways to synergize

There are many game mechanics that alow you to create powerful decks, which include strong synergy between the cards. A card like Undertaker, has very low value on its own, that's why it's not the best pick in arena, but once you add multiple minions with deathrattle to your deck, he suddenly becomes one of the best cards in the game. This kind of synergy is based around specific card mechanics. There are also minion type synergies – such as beasts, for hunters or demons for the warlock.

When adding a new card to your deck, take a look at the cards you alraedy have in it, and ask yourself, will the card that you want to add, make any of your other cards stronger or weaker? If it makes more than 3-4 cards stronger, it has have higher value and that's considered as having great synergy with the deck. On the other hand, some cards can make your deck weaker. If you add a Nerub'ar Weblord to your paladin deck filled with battlecries, it will prevent you from playing your minions at the correct times while it's alive. Try to avoid anti-synergies like that as much as you can.

Powerful, multiple card combos are unlikely to work, unless you can draw many cards consistently

Multiple small synergies are better than one big combo

Use versatile cards that can synergize with more than 1 piece of your deck

When adding cards to your deck, check for cards that benefit or become worse through adding that new card

“When it comes to loot – DKP before age and beauty.”

You already know from previous chapters, how important it is to cultivate good habits and avoid creating bad ones. Even if the situation doesn't call for it, you should exercise the correct way of playing, just to practice and make it automatic. That 5% of the time, when it actually matters, will make the difference in your win-rate.

Here is a list you can use to make sure you're doing everything right on your turn. You can develop your own mental checklist, but these are the general guidelines you should be using.

1. Make a mental list of all your options when your enemy takes his turn.

✔ How much mana will you have next turn?

✔ Which cards can you play?

✔ Can you use your hero power together with some of them?

✔ Are you likely to have lethal damage and finish the game?

✔ Are you ahead or behind in cards?

2. When it's your turn to act, sit back and don't touch the mouse. You have 90 seconds to make your move. In a game based around decision making, time is your friend.

✔ If you hover of the cards that you can play, your enemy can guess what's in your hand.

✔ Imagine the entire turn in your head before you start doing anything to make sure you have enough mana

3. In most situations this is the order in which you should act during your turn.

✔ Draw cards if you decided on doing it this turn – they may change what you ultimately do this turn

✔ Roll the dice – for example if you play shaman, getting a specific totem might affect what you can do this turn, or hitting certain targets with Mad Bomber could allow you to trade more efficiently.

✔ Play minions with triggered effects first – Questing Adventurer or Knife Juggler will benefit from playing them before other minions.

✔ Play the rest of your cards or use hero ability.

✔ Attack enemy minions or the hero.

4. End the turn after you make sure there is nothing else you can or want to do.

If there is no possible plays, you'll hear the “Job done.” sound bite and the End Turn button will turn green.

Practice always playing in the correct order

Use the time during your opponents turn to plan your next possible moves

Go through every card in your hand before you act

Don't hover over cards until you're ready to take the action, to conceal the information from your enemy

“Yarrrr! Blood and plunder! I hope you thought about good insurance!”

This ability alone is the difference between an average player and the top of the ladder. Without it, most games would be determined purely by luck of the draw and which deck counters which.

"- the ability to predict or the action of predicting what will happen or be needed in the future."

Predicting your enemy

There is a lot of factors that go into predicting future plays of your opponent. If you know the decklist of your enemy, you'll be able to count the cards and keep track of what he already used.

In situations such as playing against a new deck or in arena, you have to go with tendencies and card popularity. Playing around the cards that are almost never played can get you in more trouble than not playing around them, which is the exact opposite when it comes to cards that are popular and expected to rest in your opponents hand.

The top players are able to observe the position in hand from which enemy cards come into play, and based on that, very accurately guess which cards does the enemy hold.

Planning your future turns

This one is fairly easy in comparison, but equally important. Using coin to play your 2 drop might seem like a great idea at first, but if your hand has no other 2 or 3 drops you're going to be stuck doing nothing while the enemy pumps out minions every turn and catches up to you.

Planning your turns based on cards that you can see in your hand is one thing, but planning your turns based on the probability of drawing specific cards takes much more thought and experience. That's why, knowledge of your own deck is so important. It lets you calculate the odds of drawing an early drop when you need it, and with that information you can make much better plays in the long run.

Ending turn with the best board state

It feels nice to make easy trades and blow minions up with spells, but often if you consider the situation carefully, you'll find a much better play that will set you up for victory later on.

A hallmark of an excellent player is being able to stop yourself from making an obvious play in favour of doing something less obvious that will benefit you later on. Understanding tempo/value and card advantage lets you evaluate your position much better and you're able to make the correct play, because often it's worth to lose a card, just to be able to put more power in play.

Knowing your deck and your outs

I mentioned this already, but it is worth a separate point. If you know your deck to a card, you'll be much better equipped to make hard decisions. It is also important to keep track of how many cards you've already played.

Have you ever been in a situation where you wonder whether you should trade or try to draw removal but you're unsure about your chances to draw one, or whether you even have any left in your deck? How about going all in and wondering if you can draw additional damage?

This is the kind of knowledge that lets you make decisive plays, and marginally win games you would have lost otherwise.

Taking smart risks

All of the above points come together in this one. Many of you have seen the famous YOLO Tap by Reynad. The odds were in his favour, but the only way of knowing that, was keeping track of every card he used and knowing precisely what is left in his deck.

You need to know the chances of your enemy to win the game in the next turn and your chances to draw a card that secures the win precisely in order to make something like that work out for you most of the time.

Remember, that even if it has a chance to fail, you should take the favourable odds. If you play arcane missiles, against a 2/1 Worgen Infiltrator and it misses 3 times, it's still a good play. The result of 1 RNG roll is never an indicator of how correct the play was. Keep that in mind.

There is a great depth to predicting your enemy, the draws, outcome of RNG rolls and how it all interacts with the game that you're playing. It's one of the most important, yet under-appreciated aspects of the game, but it enables better players to win so consistently.

RNG – Random Number Generator – refers simply to a randomized outcome, which is outside of the players control.

To better predict the enemy, take note of the most popular cards in arena and learn the most popular ladder decklists

Always keep your next turns in mind when making a decision

Know the deck your playing, take a screenshot if you have to

Try to calculate or estimate the percentages of possible outcomes to predict what's most likely to happen

“Think first – but then. charge forward!”

Deceptive simplicity

On the basic level, Hearthstone is a very simple game, this creates an illusion that the game is simple in every aspect. This causes many players to never find out about the depth to which they can push their ability to make the best decisions.

Sometimes the mark of a superior player is playing the game slower instead of faster. There are many traps for players who are easily satisfied with the first convenient play they see. Gaining small, incremental advantages every few turns really makes the difference. There are many things to look out for, when you're searching for the most optimal play.

Buffs and auras

Check for all the ways you can buff or alter your minions to find more efficient trades, which will let you end the turn with a better board state. Think about enemy buffs and auras. Sometimes you can remove enemy minion which temporarily grants health or attack to other creatures – such as Stormwind Champion, which in turn can help you trade better and save some of your minions.

Dynamic mana cost

There are many minions and spells, that allow you to play cards for reduced mana cost or temporarily gain mana crystals (for example the Coin or Innervate). Plan out the best sequence of actions to get the most out of them. If you want to attack and trade with Sorcerer's Apprentice, make sure to cast any spells you need first.

Turn one Cairne Bloodhoof will seem like a great idea every time... until he gets sapped!

The routine trap

Sometimes it's easy to miss things that you're not used to. If you Thoughtsteal a weapon as a priest, you may forget that you have it equipped because this is not something you deal with on regular basis. You can miss a deathrattle that will spawn a minion and activate your Knife Juggler, or a way to enrage your minion with the Stormpike Commando battlecry.

With 500 playable cards, it is impossible to know beforehand every interaction between them. The more you play, the more you learn, but knowing the general principles of the game, and being thoughtful will give you a big edge over your enemies regardless of your experience.

Use every tool

Always look for alternative ways of dealing with your in-game situation. Impressive and effective plays are not obvious and that's why they're impressive. They're difficult to spot, so make sure you go over every card you have in your hand, even if it seems obvious what you'll do next.

Don't be satisfied when you find a good play, always try to look for something even better

Keep in mind all the changes that will happen when you take each action during your turn

Watch out of unusual mechanics you don't normally interact with

Pay special attention to dynamic effects such as buffs, debuffs and battlecries

“I've got the revenge in my sights!”

Decision making is everything in Hearthstone. If you can't think clearly, your opponent has a big advantage. Some players use this to their benefit by trying to make the enemy impatient or frustrated through abusing emotes. For that reason I recommend that you squelch the enemy player at the beginning of each match.

Greetings + Squelch is a very powerful and underrated combo in Hearthstone!

Tilt

Being on tilt means that you make poor plays, which you know are wrong, but the emotions interfere with your ability to stay focused and think clearly. Nobody is immune to tilt, even the best and the most calm of players will sometimes be affected by it.

The most common cause of tilt is having specific expectations. If you play a card with randomized effect, when you're 80% favourite and lose the roll few times in a row, you might get frustrated, because you expected the outcome to be different. That's why understanding probability and statistics helps a lot when it comes to expecting specific outcomes.

Losing streaks

Another way of becoming frustrated because of your expectations is simply losing many games in a row. If you're focused on winning each particular game, you may become angry when you don't reach that goal over and over again. The simplest way to deal with it, is focusing on how you play, instead of the end result.

You should be satisfied as long as you played to the best of your ability. Don't try to control things which are outside of your reach, instead, focus on things that you can influence directly. I'll explain more about that in the next chapter.

Simple remedy

Everyone will tell you this – when you're on tilt – take a break. People often ask – What should I do when I'm on a losing streak? First of all, stop the streak instead of extending it. Playing more and trying to chase the loses never works. If you can record your gameplay, it can be very helpful to watch the lest few games or better yet, let someone else watch it, so that they can look at it with a fresh eye.

Staying healthy through good nutrition and regular exercise WILL make you play better!

Try to notice the triggers for your frustration. Knowing yourself helps just as much as knowing the game.

Staying in good physical shape reduces your tendency to go on tilt

Record your games or let someone watch you play when you're not sure why you're losing

Taking a break always helps when you're on a losing streak

“I have the right mindset! And I have the left mindset!”

In order to succeed at anything you need two things. Clear and compelling vision or goal, and focus. You cannot hit a target that you can't see, that's why having a specific, measurable goals is incredibly important.

Why do you play the game?

Do you just want to have fun for a while? Maybe you like the competition? Or maybe you want to test your skills? Whatever it is, pick something to strive for.

In previous chapter about tilt, I've mentioned how focus can help you to not become frustrated. If your goal is to collect every Hearthstone card available, surely a couple losses won't stop you from doing that. If you picked something like – increasing your average arena win rate to 7 wins, then one or two bad runs will not make you frustrated if you can look at the bigger picture and realize that there will be plenty more of lucky and unlucky runs, and what matters is that you just play a little better each time.

Focus

In order to stay on top of your form with regards to decision making, you have to feel well.

• After each game, take a short break, you can reflect on the game or do something unrelated

• Stay hydrated and eat!

• You play better when you're well rested

• Daily exercise will help with bringing more oxygen to your brain – that's a good thing!

These are the obvious things you can do, but often overlooked when players wonder why they sometimes play better and sometimes worse.

Dividing your attention

Many people, including me, like to watch streams, read, browse internet etc. while playing the game. Not giving your full attention to the game, will harm your win-rates. It's fine if you do that while grinding 10 more gold from the play mode, or finishing some daily quests, but when it matters, when you try to squeeze that last few wins in arena to get the required number of wins you're better off muting or shutting them down and focusing on the game at hand.

With all that focusing don't forget to have fun!

Pick a specific, measurable goal for yourself in Hearthstone

Take care of your body and brain, and your body and brain will take care of your Hearthstone results

Focus single-mindedly on the game you're playing if you want to maximize your wins

Don't put too much pressure on yourself, you will improve faster if you're having fun

“Train to become a knight, not just a better squire.”

Nobody is cut form a different cloth

If you want to be successful at something, find out what the best people in that field do, copy it, and do what they did until you get the same results. Doesn't matter if you're a genius, or you graduated from the part of the class that made the top 80%... possible. Successful players simply do the right things in the right situations, based on specific rules, and the important part is that everyone can learn it.

Most pro players keep their decks public, and thanks to streaming you can see exactly how they're played. You can use this to your advantage, and instead of being lost, just walk the path that has already been proven to lead to success.

If someone else can do it – you can do it

Dealing with plateaus

Learning occurs in plateaus. You get a big boost when you learn something new, and then you plateau. And then you discover another big thing, and plateau again. But each plateau is higher then the previous one.

It's on the plateaus that people give up and stop trying to improve like they were before. What you need to understand is that plateau is a perfectly normal part of the learning process. During the plateau phase, you don't see any changes, so in order to improve, you have to have the confidence that you're still moving towards your goal. Focusing on the right things will get you through these periods.

Plateaus and setbacks are only temporary.

Learning from streams

Whenever you're watching a Hearthstone stream, there is a very simple way you can improve without much effort. If the streamer is a good player, you can try to make the decissions each turn, before he does it. That way you'll be able to compare your line of play with his. If what you would do, was different from what the streamer did, notice what was better about his play.

• Did he clear the board without losing as many minions as you did?

• Did he save an important spell?

• Did he play around a swing card, like consecration?

After some time, you'll find that you can often make the exact same decission as the player you're watching, this is a good sign that you're improving.

How to make your luck

Another thing that keeps people from improving is confusing luck and chance. People get discouraged when they get unlucky, and they think they have no control over anything that happens in the game. Whether you get a set of legendaries or 4 wisps and ancient watcher in a pack is out of your control, but:

• If you learn more about the popular decks and how they play out – your probabilities of winning are greater.

• If you keep learning about tiny advantages you can get with your deck – your probabilities of winning are greater.

It's not just luck anymore. If you trace it back, you'll find out that there are certain things, just the smallest changes that affected many of your wins or losses.

Ignore the luck and improve your chances!

Make everything fun

Each time you don't make fun of yourself, you leave the job to someone else. Even if you play the most boring deck in the world, you can make the game enjoyable. Imagine your opponents face when you're top deckin' and wreckin' him.

Try to come up with the craziest scenarios that could happen if either you or your enemy get insanely lucky, i'm sure you've seen plenty of those happening on various streams. Never make a big deal out of your losses, and it will be much easier to learn from them.

The more fun you have, the less affected you are when you lose, and that protects you from tilting and going on huge losing streaks. Learning and improving is necessary to win more, and there is no better way to learn than by playing and having fun.

Copy the things that great players do, and try to understand why they do them

Instead of giving up - be motivated by plateau's and challange yourself to raise above them

Try to make decisions and choices together with the player you're watching during the stream and compare them

Try to get as many small advantages as you can – they accumulate over time and help you win more

“This Alterac Valey battle is going on since yesterday, has either side made any progress?”

The tips and advice I'm going to give you in a moment, apply not only to hearthstone, but to virtually any activity that can be measured and tracked over time. Whether it's for other games, like League of legends, StarCraft 2, or real life activities such as working out.

Why you need to track your results

First, let me show you, why tracking your results with software or on paper is essential, and cannot be replaced by anything else.

As humans, we live in sort of a medium reality. Because of the way we evolved we can't remember very small details, or overlook large periods of time, those skills were not critically useful to our ancestors.

Just try to recall your last 5 games of hearthstone. Can you tell precisely which decks you've faced, how many times you started first and how many times you had the coin? How many of your last 50 games were against mages? 5, 7, or 15?

It's futile to try and remember all of that, and it can hurt us more than help us if we'll try to do it by feeling, because almost every time we'll get it wrong due to various biases and psychological tendencies that can't be circumvented.

So now that you know the "why", let's get to "what" and "how".

Tracking software

First step is to chose 1 method of tracking and stick with it. It's important to use 1 method of tracking consistently, because the more data you can gather, the more accurate it becomes. You can simply write everything down in a word file or on paper, but it would be a huge waste of time considering there is already plenty of tools you can use.

I personally use Hearthstonetracker which captures the results automatically and lets me overview them any way i want. Feel free to check out any number of those tools and pick one that suits you the best.

You'll find more links in recommended resources at the end of this e-book.

What to look for

Once you start tracking your games, you can notice all sorts of things. In the case of Hearthstonetracker, you'll want to use the tab "charts" the most. It lets you see your win rates by dates, class, decks and opponents.

One of the biggest benefits of tracking your win rates against specific opponents is ability to re-evaluate your decks. You can clearly see which classes are the most problematic for your main deck and what you need to adjust for. Maybe you suddenly find out that your win rate against rogues and mages is surprisingly low and it pulls your overall performance down? Time to add Loatheb to your deck!

You can see day by day how the metagame changes by checking out how popular other classes are and thanks to that you can pick the most optimal deck and win more games.

Sometimes the games can be so similar that it all becomes a blur and before you know, you've lost 10 games to a single deck that you keep meeting over and over again. If you have tracking software, now all it takes is one glance at your performance against different classes and you can right away identify the problem, and deal with it.

It's very important to find the biggest, nastiest hole in your play or decks and fix it first, before even looking at something else. This will help you improve much faster than if you were just grinding games without a clue about your biggest sticking points. Without a coach or a friend watching you play, it's almost impossible to find those holes in your play by yourself, but tracking software can assist you in that.

Remember, that it's not always the deck that needs changing. Sometimes your playstyle needs to be adjusted. Maybe you have some bad habits or tendencies that make you lose more against certain decks. Now you can see which decks are the hardest for you to beat and what you should focus on.

Another interesting tip – if you notice your win rate with and without The Coin you can see how well you're using it. The percentages should be around 50/50, so if you're losing significantly more games whene you go as the second player, you can look at improving your usage of coin and gain additional edge to win more games through that.

Unless you're not human, you can't track your results accurately in your head

Find the best tracking method for you and stick to it

Regularly check your win percentages against each class to find your biggest weakness that you can fix

Make sure to gather a lot of date, the more data you have the more accurate it becomes

Part III

Advanced

Chapter 19.

“Nobody wants to see me in their starting hand...”

Mulligan is one of the most overlooked parts of the game. You can win or lose matches right then and there if you mulligan incorrectly. Basic strategy is to throw away cards which can't be played in the early turns to ensure smooth mana curve and have something to play on each turn. Mulligan is more important than you might think.. even if you already know that.

Knowing your deck

Knowing your deck is crucial for the mulligan phase. In constructed you should always know which cards you keep and which cards you replace in certain matchups. It's so important, that many deck guides on the internet have a specific section explaining the exact way to mulligan in every popular matchup. The more you play one deck, the better you will become at choosing the right cards to keep or throw away.

Always try to remember what you have kept and what you replaced so that you can see how that worked out for you during the game. You will notice, often something that seems like a good idea on paper, doesn't work out at all because of the game flow, different tempo or something else entirely, that you didn't account for.

Knowing the matchups

Second thing you'll want to know, is the exact decklist for each popular deck. You have to know your enemy in order to keep the best cards in your hand. If you're playing against an aggressive and tempo based deck, you have to be very strict and keep only the low mana cost cards, throwing away anything that is too slow to keep up. If you face slower decks, like a priest or paladin, you can get much more greedy and save the high value cards, that are important in this specific matchup.

Arena mulligan

In arena, early game is incredibly important. The first 3-4 turns, will often dictate how the game goes, that's why you need to know precisely how many minions you have, that you can play on each turn. If your deck lacks in the early game, you should generally keep anything that costs 3 or less mana. If you have a lot of early game, and you're offered some of your best cards for the midgame – you can keep some of them.

Going first or second

There is a distinct difference between having or not having the coin. Having a coin and one more card to work with, makes the mulligan more flexible, but also more complicated. If you're going first, you usually don't want to keep double 2-drops or 3- drops, while with the coin you can play one of them a turn earlier and get the guaranteed early game play. Going first you also don't want to keep cards that cost 4 or more mana, unless they belong to the game-changing category described below. Always think about the first 4 turns and what possibly you can get from your deck if you chose to replace any of your cards.

Game changing cards

In certain matchups or in some arena decks, there are cards that can give you a big mid game advantage, and help you catch up to the faster decks. These include AOE spells, weapons, the handlock 4-drops etc. If you have very limited number of these cards, it's often good to keep them in your hand.

A good example would be an arena paladin deck. If you have only one consecration and average or below average early game, you should keep it, but if your deck has more AOE or an early game that's very robust, you can throw it away in order to get a very smooth opening.

Mulligan is incredibly important, make it your priority to improve at it

The better you know your opponents and your own decklists the easier it will be for you to mulligan correctly

Identify the crucial and game-changing cards that you should almost always keep in specific matchups

Try to plan your first 4 turns based on which cards you keep and which cards you can get from mulliganing

youtube.com/AsmodeusClips | asmodeusblog.tumblr.com | twitch.tv/asmodeusstream © 2014 Dariusz Młyńczak ASMODEUS | THE COMPLETE GUIDE FOR HEARTHSTONE PLAYER 78 Chapter 20. Reading and predicting the enemy

“Will he uproot or will he not?”

Experienced players are able to guess fairly accurately what cards the enemy is holding. Often when you play, you can name the card that the enemy is about to play before its revealed based on how fast he reached for it. If he did it fast – it's most likely the most obvious response to the current situation.

Know your enemy

You have to be able to put yourself in the shoes of your enemy. For example – if you played a couple of small minions with 2hp and the paladin on his turn 4 instantly tries to play a card, but then decides against it and instead uses his hero ability, you should be almost certain that he's holding a consecration and he's trying to make you commit to the board more.

During each game, keep track of the board position and ask yourself these questions:

• What would be the best card my enemy could have to respond here?

• Is this a good time for my enemy to AOE?

• If my enemy had removal, would he use it on one of my minions now?

Keep track of the possible scenarios during the game and when it's time to commit to the board either with a big threat or multiple minions, you'll know if your enemy is likely to have a response to it.

If you already played a big creature and he had to run his smaller minions into it, putting you in the lead, that means, he probably doesn't have the appropriate removal and you're safe to play the next big threat.

The player matters

Reading your enemy works best against players who know what they're doing, and there are two kinds of players that are very hard to read

1. Beginners who didn't learn how to play correctly yet,

2. The absolutely best players, but they won't bluff you unless they also know you're a good player capable of making strong reads.

In the case of beginners, you should just play safe and solid style and you'll make up for any surprises caused by their unusual play.

Don't try to bluff a fish!

Playing around swing cards

Swing cards, are the cards which allow for the player with disadvantage to punish the enemy for overextending on the board and take the lead. They usually involve AOE damage or some form of Mind Control.

Playing around swing cards is especially important in arena because in order to counter them you need to have an appropriate swing card of your own. In constructed, decks are much more resilient to them, because you can play minions with deathrattles to be less vulnerable against AOE damage and you know exactly how much damage you'll be able to output during the game, so that you can punish the enemy for using his entire turn on dealing with the board.

There are two major things you can do, to know when you should play around these cards. Firstly, like I mentioned before, keep track of the board situation and enemy mana, to see if there are good turns for him, to use the card you're trying to dodge. Secondly, keep track of the position of cards in his hand.

Card position in hand

When you look at your enemies hand, the cards are ordered just like a mirror image of your hand. New drawn cards are put on the far right side and the position of cards cannot be changed unless they're played and somehow returned to hand, but even then you'll know exactly which card in your enemies deck is the one returned.

With that in mind, if you see that your enemy is playing cards only from the right side of his deck, you can safely guess that on the left side of his hand are either situational cards, for which there was no good turn yet, or cards with larger mana cost than your enemy had available up to this point.

If you notice someone holding on to one card for the entire game, it's likely to be a late game finisher card – something like Pyroblast or Mind Control.

Keep track of the board situation for both sides to see if your enemy has opportunities to play important removal or AOE

Unless you're playing against someone you know is a top player, they will do the most obvious plays

Keep track of the positioning of enemy cards as much as you can

Pay attention to enemy hovering over his cards, they're usually an obvious reaction to what just happened in the game

youtube.com/AsmodeusClips | asmodeusblog.tumblr.com | twitch.tv/asmodeusstream © 2014 Dariusz Młyńczak ASMODEUS | THE COMPLETE GUIDE FOR HEARTHSTONE PLAYER 81 Chapter 21. Deeper understanding of a card game

“He used to fear the boats, but that ship has sailed.”

Take what you can get

Some of the advice in this book might seem unusual, or even unrelated. It's designed to help you figure out everything that's in your power to get better at the game and win more. Try to approach the game from many different angles, to find your strong points.

Everybody is different, you'll be able to take advantage of some things better and some things not so well. Take what you can get and play into your strengths. Always look for things that make you play better or worse, regardless of what they are.

Small advantages

I mentioned before, that Hearthstone is deceptively complicated, even though it seems very simple on the surface. Once you get to higher level of play, it stops being about finding a good play to make, and starts to be about avoiding mistakes and making marginally more optimal decisions.

When everyone is playing well, you have to gain small advantages and accumulate them to win the game. They won't win you every game, because of the significant factor of randomness, but over time, that one small thing that you learned to do, can give you 0.1% better win-rate. Find ten ways to get small advantages and that's 1% higher win-rate. Do that in each matchup and you'll get almost 10% more wins, just from doing these tiny adjustments that seem very minor and irrelevant.

Everything matters

From how well you eat and sleep to the specific ways you play the game, everything can give you an advantage. These are the things that you don't notice. These are the things that you'd like to know when you go on a losing streak and have no idea why it happened. It's very hard to look at yourself and what you do in a a very broad spectrum. If you can do something better, to increase your chances of winning the game, there is no reason not to do it.

Taking from the outside

Playing other games might give you a new perspective on Hearthstone, especially playing other card games and games where decision making is critical. Players coming from poker or other TCG's have an advantage over those with no prior experience, because many of the general rules are universal between those games. Once you understand the important ideas about optimizing your decision making, probability and statistics and psychology you need to work only on the specifics of the game.

TCG – Trading Card Game

Use everything you can to your advantage

Small, tiny and seemingly insignificant decisions accumulated together are the real difference between the average Joe and a Hearthstone pro

Playing other games and looking at the bigger picture of how they work can help you understanding Hearthstone better

Keep going back to basics and try to look at the basics in order to stay open-minded and find better ways to win the game

youtube.com/AsmodeusClips | asmodeusblog.tumblr.com | twitch.tv/asmodeusstream © 2014 Dariusz Młyńczak ASMODEUS | THE COMPLETE GUIDE FOR HEARTHSTONE PLAYER 83 Chapter 22. Similarity to poker – using poker resources

“Don't try to coin me, your dirty gambling money has no power over me.”

Hearthstone may be a very popular game, but it's not as popular as poker. Poker games have been around for much longer, they've been studied more extensively. With money on the line, people went to great lengths to find every possible way of getting an advantage, that's why learning from poker can help you immensely.

Similar but not the same

Keep in mind that despite all the similarities and common rules, these are different games. In hearthstone you'll want to play safer because every match ends with a winner and a loser, while poker can be treated as a never-ending game where your job is to maximize the value. In that sense, Hearthstone has more in common with Magic The Gathering.

Key concepts from poker that apply to other card games such as Hearthstone

1. Psychology

2. Optimizing the decision-making process

3. Tilt

4. Probability

5. Statistics

We already went over some of those aspects, and in the next chapters I'll talk about probability, but first...

Statistics

Statistics can get very complicated, but all you need to know are just the basics. You need to know that data, or outcomes will vary a lot in small numbers, and the more data you collect and the more outcomes you observe, the more accurate the distribution will be. Which means that when you're trying a new card, deck or a strategy you'll need to try it more than a couple of times to see whether or not it works.

Just because something you did – gave you a positive result – doesn't mean it's the right play. Think what would happen if you made the same play 10 000 times? Would you win most of them? It works both ways, so don't get discouraged when something doesn't work. With large amounts of randomness in Hearthstone, you have to be patient and see more than just few examples to learn what works best.

At the end of this book you'll find some recommended resources to learn more about that

Take some time to study the basics of poker if you haven't already

Many aspects from poker overlap with other games, especially games focused on decision making that involve random elements

Remember that not everything is the same in both games

Check out the recommended resources at the end of this e-book to learn more

“Is it hot in here or is it just me?”

Calculating probability for Hearthstone can be very simple or nearly impossible. It depends on what you're trying to calculate.

RNG based cards

Cards with random effects are the most frequent subject of complaints from players who happen to get unlucky, but paradoxically, out of all random things in Hearthstone, they're the easiest to predict and manipulate. RNG cards usually work by hitting a random target. Some cards, like mad bomber, can hit any character, while cards like Knife juggler can only hit enemy characters. To calculate the probability, first determine the number to targets that can be hit, and then count the number of favourable outcomes.

For example with a knife juggler, if there are 2 minions on board on the enemy side, that means there are 3 targets you can hit, which gives you ~33% chance to hit any of them. If you'd like to increase your chances to hit a particular minion, see if you can remove other creatures first and reduce the number of possible outcomes. If you reduce the number of outcomes, while having the same number of favourable scenarios, you will increase your chances of hitting what you want.

Try to remember the most common numbers so that you don't have to calculate them every time. For example, if you play the Mad Bomber against 1 minion on the board the chances of killing it are:

1 hp minion – 70%

2 hp minion – 26%

3 hp minion - 4%

Your chance to draw

A chance for you to draw a specific card is also a fairly simple thing to calculate When calculating your chance to draw a single specific card, all you have to do is take a look at the number of remaining cards in your deck and know how many of them are what you're looking for.

If you have 15 cards left in your deck, and you'd like to draw either a fireball or a polymorph, both of which you have 1 copy of, remaining in the deck, then your chances are 2 in 15. To translate a fraction like that simply divide first number by the second one and multiply the result by 100. In this case that's 13.3% to draw either the fireball or polymorph.

For more complicated situations, such as calculating your chance to get a 2 drop in your starting hand when you have 5 of them in your deck you can use this calculator made by xqwzets:

http://pusio.linuxpl.info/hearthstone.html

It's especially helpful in arena when you're playing a deck that you can't possibly be experienced with so mulligan and predicting your chances to draw overall are much harder because you don't have the reference experiences from playing that specific deck before.

Chance for your enemy to draw

Determining the chance for your enemy to have or draw a specific card is more complicated because you have to take into account the Monty Hall effect. It means that if you'd like to know whether or not your enemy has a specific card, it matters what your enemy is likely to do with that card.

Let's say we're trying to determine if out enemy has at least one of his two flamestrikes after drawing 15 cards from his deck. Normally you'd assume that it's the same as with your chance to draw, but you have to take into account that some cards can't be played before you get enaugh mana and other cards will be purposefully saved by your enemy, so that he's selecting other cards to play before it, and skewing the probability.

The best way to deal with this is to try and bait out the card from your enemy first. If you notice that there is a clear position where your enemy could play the card you're trying to guess and the card is not played, you can assume it's not in his hand and calculating the chances of him getting it from the top of your deck goes exactly the same as calculating your own chance to draw cards.

More about the Monty Hall poblem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem

RNG cards are not so random, you can often control your chances to get the desired effect

Use the calculator if you don't know the basic chances to draw cards yet

When taking a risk try to see if you can calculate the probability first

Cards kept by your enemy in his hand are over time more and more likely to be situational removal and end game finishers

“I am The Black Knight, sent by Lich King himself... putt me in your deck, pretty please?”

Copying successful decks is good

Successful decks are successful for a reason – they've been tested by a lot of people and they're proven to work against current metagame.

The important thing when copying a deck is paying attention to any advice, the author of the deck might provide. Sometimes the strength of a deck lies, not in the cards, but in how it is played. Always try to learn why and how the deck works.

Tournament decks are often not well suited for ladder, so make sure to copy decks which are made for the ladder

Synergy

Synergy between cards is often the premise behind the deck, but it's also often overvalued. If you want to build a deck around a certain combo, remember that the more cards required for the combo – the harder it is to pull off.

The best combo decks either have lots of synergies, so that you can use any of the many combinations that are within the deck, or they draw nearly the entire deck, to guarantee getting the essential combo pieces.

More cards that synergize with the core of the deck is usually better than super powerful combos that can be rarely pulled off.

Win condition

Every deck has to have a win condition. Sometimes it's not obvious, like for example in control paladin or priest. In their case, the win condition is having more value in their cards than the enemy, thus, if they survive to draw most of their deck, their cards will simply beat the entire deck of their enemy.

In aggro decks – like mage or hunter, the win is achieved by dealing enough damage to kill the enemy before they can take control of the board and finishing off with burst damage from burn spells like kill command and fireball and miracle rogue relies on Malygos or Cold Blood/conceal combos. Always make sure you understand the win condition of your deck, so that you know the correct playstyle in each matchup.

Tempo vs Draw power

Faster decks will require more draw power, while slower decks sacrifice it for more value cards. Your mana curve should be a good indicator of how much draw you need.

Decks like zoo can afford to have very low mana curve, because of warlock hero power, that compensates for spending cards very fast, on the other hand if your mana curve peaks later and shows many late game cards, you'll need less draw. This is a hard balance to find and that's where testing and adjusting comes in.

When copying a deck, make sure it's well suited for ladder

Make sure you understand the win condition of your deck

Include cards that synergize and support your win condition

Adjust the amount of draw to the mana curve of your deck

“Wanna practice with me?”

Testing and adjusting

Perhaps the most important part of deckbuilding. This is where you test the deck against the reality of the game. Every time you're playing a new deck, try to take a note of how you win and lose – especially how you lose the games.

• Did you run out of cards before you could take enemy hp low enough?

• Did the enemy overwhelm you with a bunch of small minions?

• Were you stuck with multiple copies of high cost cards at the start of the game

Whatever it is, try to find out which scenario happens the most and adjust for that first. Always try to keep in mind your win condition and make changes that support it.

Countering the meta

Very crucial point. Adding or taking out 1 card can make immense difference in your win rate if you understand the current metagame. You'll want to adjust your deck, but this time it's not about how your deck works, but how the decks that you face work. Cards like Harrison Jones, Big Game Hunter, Loatheb. They're all specific counters that can be used to give you additional edge over popular decks at the moment.

Sharing the deck so that other players can review it

There is a reason why Hearthstone pros practice and build decks in teams. It is always valuable to have your deck reviewed by other players. Maybe they'll notice something obvious that you missed by accident, or maybe they'll find a way to beat the deck that gave you the most trouble.

Share your deck and listen to the input from other players. They may be right or wrong, but its always worth listening, just to get second opinion.

Constantly improving and keeping an open mind.

The metagame is constantly shifting. If everyone starts running The Black Knight, people will use less taunts, and that will prompt everyone to stop using The Black Knight. It goes in circles and your job is to always be mindful of that decks you're facing and what are the popular cards.

Performing well with any deck, requires that you're not just passively grinding games. Be open minded and always look for ways to improve the deck and yourself as a player.

Always test the decks. A great idea in theory might not work so well in practice

Pay attention to the decks that beat yours, what do they have in common?

Track against which classes you're playing the most, and change your deck to boost your chances against them

Always keep evolving your deck and keep an eye for things to improve

“Why are you still reading?!”

Everyone is creative. Have you ever had this experience where you had a cool idea, and then weeks, months or years later you see someone who made that idea into a real thing? The great secret to being innovative is asking questions and not taking anything for granted. If you're able to take a step back and go to the basics of the game, you can find many unexplored paths to the victory.

During the time when I played StarCraft 2 I was able to stay ahead of everyone else in my league by innovating completely different style of playing, it was so much better than the standard way of playing that I could take on and beat Masters and Grand Masters players who had much better mechanics and more experience than me, and a couple months later I saw more people using these styles.

Hearthstone is still a young game and many classes are not yet fully explored in constructed play. With new cards on the horizon this is the best time to be creative.

Nobody gets it right the first time

To explore new ways of playing the game and make new decks you'll have to fail. Failing is simply finding what doesn't work and the more you do it, the more you learn. More feedback and experience will naturally steer your in the right direction so don't be afraid to experiment.

Look for ideas everywhere

Every card and hero can be an inspiration for the new deck. At the very beginning nobody knew what's best, so everyone experimented, asked questions, looked for synergy between cards and identified the crucial elements which every deck needs to have, after many bad decks someone stumbled upon something that worked very well, shared it with others, received good feedback and the deck became a popular and well established way to play the game.

It's fun

Innovating and trying to make things work can bring you a lot of joy, especially when you find something that works. That's why I always encourage people to experiment, because the more fun you're having, the faster you learn.

No matter who you are, you can be creative

The better you are at the game, the faster you can develop a new working strategy

Remember about the core elements of the game when trying to innovate

Keep experimenting and share your ideas

Recommended resources

Arena tier lists for drafting in arena:

AntiGrav1ty's list JerkyGunner's list

For learning arena I recommend you check out the Arena Coop series: youtube.com/adwcta

For poker related matters check out: forumserver.twoplustwo.com

The Monty Hall problem: wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem

For tracking your stats: hearthstonetracker.com hearthstats.net arenamastery.com

Simple hearthstone calculator for draw probability: http://pusio.linuxpl.info/hearthstone.html

Other related websites: http://www.hearthhead.com/ http://www.hearthpwn.com/ http://www.liquidhearth.com/ http://ihearthu.com/ http://tempostorm.com/ http://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone http://www.reddit.com/r/competitivehs

I hope you enjoyed this e-book and I wish you good luck on your way to reach any goals that you may have set up for yourself. If you'd like a little shortcut to get there however, I'm offering personal coaching for both - arena and constructed in Hearthstone.

I've coached enough Hearthstone (and not only Hearthstone) players already, to know beyond a shadow of a doubt how helpful it is to have someone take a fresh look at your gameplay from someone who understands the game.

The only thing required of you, when you book the coaching is that you want to get better at the game, and have Skype for the screen sharing.

First, I always find out what is it, that you want to accomplish in Hearthstone. When I've got that I'm able to fit the session plan to your needs and give you the most important information and techniques to target the sticking points and affect the most crucial areas needed for improvement.

It's also a great way to ask all the questions, that are very specific and relate to you, that you can't find answers to, on the internet. I like to stay in touch with everyone I coach by adding them on Battlenet, so that they can ask questions and I can see them climbing the ranks afterwards.

You can always find up to date information about my coaching rates and availability on coaching-with-asmodeus or simply contact me through [email protected]

Have a great day!

Asmodeus

This is unofficial guide in no way associated with or endorsed by Blizzard Entertainment®