Archive for the ‘Hearthstone’ Category

2nd Hearthstone Expansion

Saturday, December 13th, 2014

The new expansion of Hearthstone (Goblins vs. Gnomes) is now online. The first expansion contained fewer cards, which you would acquire by completing specific single player matches. This new expansion contains a lot of new cards. In fact there are so many that when you buy a new pack of cards now, you have to select if you want the original cards or the new ones. I wonder whether Goblins vs. Gnomes will be commercially as successful as Naxxramas. I personally have no incentive to by card packs with real money. I play in the lower reaches (typically rank 20-17) anyway. So there is no need to buy packs or arena passes with real money to get cards more quickly. I rather spend my in game gold on them. With Naxxramas it was different, the real money bought access to the game content which otherwise would not have been available to me for long time.

In any case the new cards are great fun. Buying packs with gold brings back the excitement, for you get only few new packs each week. Since now I have only few of the new cards, many packs contain five unknown cards, some of which are great. Wow! I also have the impression that there are some very powerful cards in the new set. This is obviously for the same reason as with Magic the Gathering. If the cards of a new expansion are just equal (or even worse) than the existing cards, no one will buy the new cards. Anyway, I played with a Hunter and noticed how the Webspinner is boosted.

 

Webspinner 

The card still works the same way as before. I was however lucky and got one of the new überbeasts:

 

Gahzrilla 

The next game went equally well and the Webspinner summoned the new legendary druid beast, a feat I didn’t even know was possible.

 

Malorne 

Hearthstone – Card Rarity

Saturday, August 2nd, 2014

Recently, in expectation of the Naxxramas Expansion, I played a bit of Hearthstone. What I usually do is play a few games on the weekend. So I look at my three quests and cancel the one which has no synergies with the rest. Ideally I hope to complete the quests by as few games at possible. The other strategy (which I don’t follow) would be to always cancel the 40 gold quests, hoping for 60 or even 100 gold quests.

Anyway, since I didn’t buy cards with real money so far (except for the one purchase during the Beta phase to get the promo card Gelbin Mekkatorque), I decided it makes economically more sense to buy access to the Naxxramas quarters with real money, instead of buying cards with it. The ratio of gold per Euro/Dollar is almost twice as good with the Naxxramas bundles.

A “legendary” card (rarer than “epic” or “rare”)

 

Having said all that, what I actually meant to say was just that I noticed something and I don’t know whether Blizzard already commented. In WoW white are the trash items, green are OK and starting from blue items become good. In typical collectible card games (CCG) there is usually are large chunk of uncommon cards between the common and the rare cards. In Hearthstone white is common and blue is rare.

I therefore suspect that with further game expansions the green category (uncommon) will be added to the game. Maybe next year…