I have 65 wins on a free-to-play account I created late last year to simply make it easier to do “Watch and Learn” quests on my main account. I’ve opened 3 Legendaries and a handful of Epics. I also have C’Thun as Legendary #4. If I really wanted to, I could dust the shit out of stuff in order to make more efficient net decks, but it’s not that big of a deal to me.
Rank 25-20 is fine, for card backs and rewards. Then I just flip to casual, and casual has its own hidden MMR (which ranked doesn’t use since it’s a ladder), so I’m typically pitted against proper opponents anyway.
I just unlocked the Brawl on the account last week (rather sprint than take one class to 20, I’ve been spreading the wealth and unlocking all the basics for each class instead. Now that Brawl is open, it’s going to be a damn gravy train of free cards and gold for that account. Brawl is phenomenal for new and f2p accounts half the time due to how Blizzard goes out of its way to level the playing field every other week.
Brawl has been, for me, the best way to get back in to the game. It makes it less P2W. That being said, the cards from the “adventures” are so damn powerful that you are at a disadvantage when you’re back in “Play Mode” if you don’t spend money on them. You can’t even create them with dust. If your opponent has a Reno and you don’t, that’s a huge difference in recovery potential that doesn’t have a replacement. Bran is similar for some decks. Naxx had the same impact on the core game, but it has at least fallen out of Standard.
Yes, you can spend gold to get the adventures. But they are 700 per wing. A new player is going to need to grind quests for a few weeks to get enough to buy 1 wing. Months to buy the full adventure.
I don’t begrudge Blizzard having incentive for players to spend money to be competitive. I just don’t agree that the game is anything less than frustrating if you don’t spend at least $20 - $50 on it relatively early on. It’s free to play, as long as you’re willing to be a punching bag for a while. After a few months of getting free packs from rank 20+, a pack from the weekly Brawl, some arenas if you don’t want to buy adventures, and the free C’thun packs, you can worm you way out of the basement. How many people are willing to do that though? I know there is anecdotal evidence of people in the Legendary class who haven’t spent a dime. Face it though, those are the special unicorns, not the typical player who is trying to get in to the game, or returning from a hiatus. Their early match-making gives you the illusion of competitiveness…until you start getting paired with people in the general pool instead of your fellow new players.
It also doesn’t appear that MMR ages off like I would expect it to. Back when I used to play regularly, I was consistently finishing at Rank 11 or better. I got out right before the first true expansion (not Naxx) landed. When I came back a couple of weeks ago, the people I was getting paired against…holy crap. I about uninstalled it right there and then. Luckily I hung around until C’Thun was released, spent $50 on the pre-order, and now I’m in the thick of things. Again, felt like that’s what I had to do in order to have a chance against people running every stellar card from the previous expansions that I missed out on and didn’t have a chance to farm out.
I’m playing like crazy. I enjoy the game. I enjoy it more since I spent money on it. To say it’s F2P is accurate but also misleading. This isn’t HoTS, where you are in the same boat as other players. This is a true case where you either need to spend money or an insane amount of time in order to come close to leveling the playing field.
A new player does not have to grind for a few weeks to buy a wing. They feed you tons of gold when you start and you’ll probably have the 700 gold for a wing in less than 5 hours of playing just single player tutorial type stuff. The first wing of LoE gets you Reno Jackson, the second gets you Brann Brozebeard. Pretty solid cards for not a huge time investment, plus you get a bunch of other good cards along with them.
And just because you don’t have Reno or Brann doesn’t mean you can’t beat people who do. Those are good cards that fit well in a particular style of deck, but they are far from core Hearthstone cards that are better than everything else, which everybody uses (like Dr. Boom used to be).
dr. boom is still a very nice card :D
I see the point in terms of getting in to it now. I’ve had the luxury of playing since release. I put in like $20 at the start, and although I don’t complete daily quest every day, I do play between 5-15 matches a week. And the gold I earn I will either put in to playing arena matches, or save up for a new solo adventure. It’s pretty easy to quickly gain enough money for a single pack. Sure some people will have absolutely crazy decks with tons of Legendary cards, and yea that pisses me off. I simply have to chalk it up to them getting a really good draw on a very strong deck.
That being said, in ladder mode between 21-24 (which is where I start out each month) I don’t see too many crazy decks like that.
It’s always in Casual mode where I see the crazy stacked decks.
Brawls, as someone else mentioned, is also a great place to gain more cards, gold, experience with cards. There often you get to play with game generated decks. you can make progress quest objectives in Brawls. Wins will count towards the 15 gold reward for winning 5 matches. And you get 1 standard pack with your first win each week.
I’m not saying you can’t beat people running those cards. A pikeman can destroy a battleship if the rolls go right. But the playing field isn’t level. Things have to go your way and against them. Some cards are so powerful that they are game changing. And those cards either take an extremely lucky pack-open, a lot of dust, or money to get.
Some decks can be successful with cheap cards. You can net-deck a cheap zoo deck pretty easily. You’re just going to be stuck in the high teens, at best, if you’re playing those kinds of decks. I’m not talking about winning, I’m talking about being competitive. I’m talking about not feeling like you hit a brick wall at rank 19 or 20.
I believe you can get to the the low teens at least with a cheap zoo deck. I’m curious enough about the F2P experience that I will probably give that a try over the next few weeks and report my results.
Yeah, cheap lock zoo / face hunter have always been the best way to actually win some games with a crappy collection. Lord help me I find those decks boring, though.
All things considered, I think it’s a damn good model. I can’t play Magic the Gathering for free. (Can I?)
I can play, have some fun, and earn additional cards. OR if I want an influx of new cards I can buy some.
Same with the single player content. Don’t want to grind gold to unlock the different wings of single player content? Then pay up front.
I don’t view this so much as pay to win, as there is a cap for each expansion. Yes, if you don’t want to put in real money, it will be that much harder initially; but it’s not like you’re playing Hearts. This game is building/evolving/expanding.
You can, actually. Duels of the Planeswalkers Online is F2P. And from what I hear, has a much more generous F2P model than Hearthstone. I don’t play it myself because I don’t much care for Magic anymore and the appeal of the Duels franchise was in fixed card sets and prebuilt decks, for me. But it’s around.
Are we still talking about Hearthstone? Zoolock has won tournaments. Facehunter and Aggro Shaman are high tier decks as well, and I’ve personally played them to rank 5, although I’m not particularly good. They actually climb faster than decks with higher winrates in certain segments of the ladder, because of the matchups you face there.
Yep, tried that back in the day, and similar to your experience - I disliked the specific card set/prebuilt decks. I would play one that is most like the style of deck I personally prefer - yet never can play the way I really wanted to. So passed on that.
This might not be exactly what you mean, but yes you can. Do give it a try - it is really quite good, enough so that I coded up a few (simple) cards myself to complete a few of the pre-built decks. It has an amazing amount of on-going support, and development updates come out frequently.
As for hearthstone f2p - if you’re casual enough, f2p is fine. I have no expansions, and can still win enough games to get rank 20 on the odd occasion I’m motivated enough to do so. I’ll drop $20 of Google Reward money on LoE this weekend (mostly cause it is starting to expire), but right now is one of the better times for a new player to hop in. A legendary for playing, 13(?) free packs of Old Gods plus however many free packs you can scrounge from the original newbie quests and the new recipe system and/or judicious use of Innkeeper+Hearthpwn to find cheap decks makes it tolerable. I fully understand the buying LoE with case kinda taints the ‘f2p’ moniker - I have 2700 gold I could use instead if I chose. That said, the game has been interesting enough that $20 (of free money anyway) isn’t that much of a burden.
Phew, my terrible luck for opening packs at least is getting turned around slightly. Somewhere around 60 Old Gods packs opened with 1 legendary popping out, but I got an 11 win arena run and got 280 gold, a Malkorok, and a pack. Admittedly I’m not sure I’m ever going to actually use Malkorok but I absolutely won’t sneeze at it.
Been doing fairly well with arena actually. Haven’t played but a handful (Probably less than 10) since the closed beta in 2013 but the 6 runs I’ve played since Old Gods hit I’ve averaged a 70% win rate. Only problem is it’s reminding me why I stopped playing arena in the first place, which is it’s a larger chunk of Hearthstone than I really like to play at a time. Really hate to split up an arena run in progress since I lose the feel of the deck, and that run was 2 hours which is more than I play in constructed at a go.
I created a F2P account last night and played for a while. The 20+ ranks weren’t too bad… in fact I went 9-2 with a patchwork C’thun Druid I cobbled together out of my free WOTOG packs. I can definitely see how it can get frustrating once you get into the mix with the people who have played for a long time. One of my losses was against an opponent who dropped down Ragnaros and Grom. There was nothing I could have done to win.
Some thoughts on the experience so far…
-They could do a better job of letting you swim in the new player pool for longer. Now that I’m rank 20, I am going to see many more refined neckdecks from players who have much deeper collections than I do. The Legendary cards are not my biggest concern. It’s mostly stuff like rares and commons that I don’t have yet and are much more impactful on the game.
-The starting collection could probably use some reworking. There are lots of cards in there that are just awful. If I didn’t get fed a bunch of cards from the latest expansion, it would have been very difficult to put together something decent. Some classes seem to have it a lot better than others. On the other hand, it’s fun to open new packs (which they feed you often as a new player) and have a good chance at significantly upgrading my collection every time.
-I can see the quests to win with a certain class as a problem for a new players. These are the quests that generally give you the most gold, but it’s more manageable for a new player to build out a collection for one or two classes when they are just starting. It’s hard to expect new players to have enough cards to be able to put together something playable with every class when the starting collection is so bad.
-The gold doesn’t come in quite as rapidly as I remembered. You can get a lot of gold early on to buy an adventure wing, but it is going to take some time to level up all your heroes to level 10.
I’m going to keep working at this account and see how it goes from here. Now that I’m past the newbie ranks, it’s going to get much harder.
Once you reach Rank 20 on ladder go play play casual for the rest of the month, it has a hidden MMR that ranked doesn’t have. You’ll get more matches vs basic decks that way. Neither mode will 100% protect you from net-decks choked with legendaries, but low-MMR casual is a different pool of people for newcomers.
There’s a new brawl due in an hour or two as well, but since last week was 100% random, this week could very well be a constructed variant. Not a huge deal, but some people seem to prefer one or the other.
So, I am just getting back into the game after playing casually about two years ago for a while. I was never great, but I felt like I was pretty good at playing a board control style with low cost decks.
I am trying to cobble together something cheap that will work, ideally board control-ish since that’s what I am most comfortable with, but I can learn other things. And so far I just run into a wall in 75% of my games where the other player’s early game low cost cards are better than my late game monster cards. I only have time to play a handful of games a day and I don’t mind losing, but it’s tough to get as many matches where it’s clear by turn 6 that I never had any chance.
There’s sooo many deck resources out there it’s hard to filter to a good basic deck to build, and I’m hesitant to just pick one and waste dust. Anyone have a suggestion on either a cheap Paladin deck or their go to resource? Is there a place I can put in my cards and it will help me pick? Most of the ‘basic’ decks I find have multiple legendary cards in them. All my best cards that I had crafted way back when to fill out decks are wild or no longer the kind of cards you build decks around.
I’d rather not play a C’thun deck because it doesn’t appeal to me long term and I’d have to craft a bunch of his minions to have a viable deck.
If it helps, I opened up Hearthstone and laboriously copied down all of my legendary cards:
C’Thun
Blingtron 3000
