A Brief Hearthstone Memoir

this is how I win

I’ve had a long on-and-off relationship with Hearthstone. This Friday, I had the urge to pick it up again, so I sold some cards from my old collection and built one of the current top meta decks. A few days of ranked play later, I have now summited at “Legend”, Hearthstone’s top rank. Hearthstone’s Legend rank isn’t quite the same as Challenger in League of Legends or Global Elite in CS:GO and other top ranked pro-levels of video games. Since Hearthstone is a card game closer to Magic, the meta shifts frequently, so the leaderboard resets every month. The monthly reset makes Legend more grinding than a display of true skill. I used to play Hearthstone a lot, and as I played it again to hit Legend again over the last few days I thought about how the role it had in my life, and wanted to write something.

I started playing Hearthstone in summer 2014. I was going into my senior year of high school with no job, in my final summer of true youth. Hearthstone, as a collectible card game, wants you to spend money buying the cards, but I was a child playing a game I downloaded for free on the internet, so I didn’t spend money on anything. I remember loving the streamer “Amaz”, or at least watching Youtube highlights of him, since he played the traditionally very bad Priest class at a high competitive level. I could not afford the kinds of control decks Amaz played, but I played Priest for a while, hanging around the low ranks using default free cards and learning the game. Hearthstone was my first card game period so I was learning a lot of fundamentals. 

As I got better over the next months, my deck of choice became Hearthstone’s cheapest competitive deck: Zoo Warlock. Zoo Warlock was named Zoo because it used an eclectic mix of cheap and efficient creatures. Zoo Warlock was all about dropping cheap creatures early, and then abusing the Warlock’s Hero Power, Life Tap (Pay 2 Life, Draw a Card) to find more creatures to buff and support your starting ones, and win before your opponent really got set up. Zoo didn’t do anything that crazy, especially compared to some of the decks now, and it required extremely intense mechanical care. You had to be sure to perfectly place your Dire Wolf Alpha so that as you would trade minions and they’d die, other minions would come next to him and get his buff. You’d have to think turns ahead in terms of where you put your Nerubian Egg, if you wanted to buff him with Defender of Argus, or if you wanted to eat him with a Void Terror without eating one of your other minions too. Other more expensive control decks focused more on hand management and threat sequencing and maintaining win conditions, larger and more abstract concepts, but Zoo was about squeezing every last drop out of these cheap minions by playing them mechanically perfectly. Coming back to Hearthstone, trading is always what I see in my head when I first play. I love planning how I can most efficiently play so I’ll come out of this sequence with a 3/1 minion instead of a 1/1, or whatever minor mechanical advantage can be found.

September of 2014 I hit Legend rank for the first time. I jailbroke my iPhone so that I could play a modded version of the iPad-only Hearthstone app while I was at school. While this was going on, Hearthstone had just released its first expansion “Curse of Naxxrammas”. The first wings of it were free, and I got the cards from them, but the later wings were not. It would have taken weeks of constant saving earnings for me to get the cards from later wings. As the meta around that expansion gradually became refined, I was left in the dust. I was unable to return to Legend and so I got less engaged in the game. My saving grace came in April 2015, when the real Hearthstone iPhone app came out. My extended family members would give me and my siblings Apple Giftcards as gifts for Christmas, and with the official version of the app I could now spend that money on Hearthstone. I flipped real money with my siblings for 50% discount Apple Giftcards since we had each acquired $100+ dollars worth. It still wasn’t enough to get to the most expensive control decks, but I had enough to start competing for real. I made Legend again in May 2015, and summer 2015 was my true Hearthstone summer. I graduated high school, still had no job, but I got paid to write a few Hearthstone listicles because of my credentials. I remember loving the deck Patron Warrior, and I also played a lot of Face Hunter.

Fall 2015 I went to college for Computer Science and Statistics because I liked card game probability. I played lots of different Hearthstone decks at this time, but I can’t remember the order: Dragon Priest, Mech Mage, Beast Druid, Secret Paladin, C’Thun Warrior. Still always had a Zoo Warlock in my mix. Tournaments, which I played more of in college, require you to bring a series of decks, unlike ranked ladder, where you can learn and master a single deck. I was constantly Legend rank just from practicing these decks though. I was active on Hearthstone Reddit, went to some local tournaments, and debated streaming.

I also went to some college game day tournaments and did really well, winning two of them consecutively. I was a freshman and this was more of a clique than a serious eSports team, but my results were hard to ignore, so I was drafted to my university’s eSports team for the Spring semester. In the Spring 2016 semester, in sanctioned college eSports play, I personally only lost one game and our team was one match away from going to the live in-person finals. I played Zoo Warlock in almost all these competitive games, because that was the deck I played best compared to the rest of the team. Fall 2016 the team split in two, for reasons I cannot remember. I was with people I was more friends with, but we regressed in play and didn’t even make the playoffs.

At the end of Fall 2016 semester I was put on academic probation because I stopped going to my Computer Science class and didn’t tell anyone. The teaching staff never even sent me an email to reach out and see if I was okay, just gave me an F in the class. I quit the Hearthstone team because I was embarrassed to tell them I wouldn’t be able to play for a semester because I was doing badly in school. It wasn’t that my grades were bad because I was focusing too much on Hearthstone; my grades and my Hearthstone play were regressing because I was doing bad at life. I couldn’t really give it up: I remember I got back on for a few weeks in Spring 2017 and made Legend with Jade Pirate Shaman using the OP card “Patches the Pirate”. But I stopped after that, and didn’t restart for a while. Shortly after my Jade Pirate Shaman Legend run was when my Coldhealing persona was born, which I think was a lot as a search for identity now that competitive Hearthstone couldn’t be me anymore. I really did get better, but I don’t know if it was because I didn’t play Hearthstone. I became an English major, I didn’t play video games at all for over a year from March 2018 to May 2019. I look back on that year with only fondness but I look back on the 2015-2016 Hearthstone era with fondness too. It’s all me.

But 2017 was mostly the end of my time with Hearthstone. I came back to Hearthstone in September 2019, a few months after graduating college when I was really bored, and I made it to Legend in a week with a Divine Spirit + Inner Fire Priest deck that was OP. And now I did it again here in April 2022 with Quest Pirate Warrior, which is also OP. The gap from April 2022 to September 2019 feels shorter in my mind than the game from September 2019 to March 2017, which is a bad sign. When I started playing Hearthstone, the game was very raw, and they were still learning how to make a healthy card game. It’s probably healthier now, it feels closer to Magic the Gathering the gold standard card game, but I think I learned more fundamentals from the early Hearthstone days when they were out of control. The result of their more controlled approach is it’s relatively easy for me to pick up a netdeck and dominate with it, trusting that’s it’s solid enough and doesn’t need any of my deckbuilding knowledge or knowledge of the full suite of cards. Both of these recent return runs felt like shows of force more than me getting seriously back into the game. I don’t pay much attention to my opponent’s decks or other cards, I just force my way to the top with raw card game mechanics. Basically, to show myself I can still do this if I want to, but I’m not sure if I do.

I’m probably better at Hearthstone than I was back in 2015 and 2016. I was just mentally unwell enough to play it lots back then. Being good at games, even games as random as Hearthstone, requires a lot of mental acuity. You have to have awareness of a lot of different subtle things. You have to adapt when things don’t go your way. You have to take responsibility for your mistakes, because the ranked ladder doesn’t lie, other people are climbing when you lose. I think I’m better at those things than I used to be.

The real question that I guess I hoped to answer here, one that I still don’t know: is it worth our/my time to game? I wrote a Medium piece on this trying to find the answer a few years ago, and I didn’t know then, and still don’t know now. Games have a lot of negatives. It’s not the most beautiful use of one’s time to sit at your computer looking at flashing lights meant to get you to spend money, or retain you as a user to sell to other people who will give them money. But I’ve always loved competitive gaming. I think there’s a lot of dignity in the act of pitting yourself against someone else with both of you using every tool at your disposal to try to be the victor. Competitive card games are maybe the peak point of that sort of human competition, although people smarter than me would say it’s chess. I’ve always been better at more wide but less impactful turn choices of card games, than the sharp choices of chess where one lapse costs you everything. I’ve also always been particularly bad at non-turn based competitive games, like League of Legends or CS:GO, that require quick reflexes and good judgment. And then I guess you could extend this to say that I’m also not competing in real sports, which is where a lot of other people exercise their competitive desire. Whenever I think about why I love card games, I come back to Adam Sandler’s scene in Uncut Gems where he explains to Kevin Garnett why he loves betting obscure NBA prop bets:

Doesn’t that make you wanna step on Elton Brand’s fuckin’ neck and laugh in Iguodala’s fucking face? Come on, KG. I’m no different from that. I’m not a fuckin’ athlete. This is my way. This is how I win. 

I really love that particular “This is how I win.” It’s not a villainous reveal of victory like how that sentence would normally be read, the stress in the sentence is on the I, which changes the meaning. This is the way in which I, as a unique individual with my own unique skills and desires, find fulfillment ie: win. Winning isn’t about victory in the specific, it’s about the act of being really good at something. For better or worse playing card games makes me feel this way.