I first started playing Hearthstone around the tail end of the Knights Of The Frozen Throne expansion about halfway through 2017, just before Kobolds and Catacombs was released. And man, let me tell ya - Kobolds and Catacombs, certainly balance-wise, was a mess! Warlock was broken as shit! I still have nightmares about Cubelock; Skull of the Man'ari, Bloodreaver Guldan, Voidlord etc. every few months. I picked Hearthstone up because while I'd never played World Of Warcraft (and didn't particularly care for what I'd seen) I liked card games and thought this one looked cool. It had a ton of charm and colour and personality, a sense of style and humour that WoW seemed to be lacking. To this day, this is still one of my favourite things about Hearthstone. It's not hugely self-serious like WoW, not constantly trying to force an unearned sense of grandeur or epicness. This game just has a ton of fun with itself. Recently they had a wild-western themed expansion where Paladin got a card called "Holy Cowboy" who discounts your holy spells. They referenced Leeroy Jenkins and gave him a card. He's one of the most broken cards in history! It's fun!

In 2017 I liked everything about Hearthstone except for playing Hearthstone. Decks stayed broken and oppressive to play against for a long time. Either the balance team were asleep at the wheel for years on end, or they didn't exist. Corridor Creeper, Shudderwock, Call To Arms, Ultimate Infestation, THE CAVERNS BELOW. I can list off so many notoriously diabolical Hearthstone cards that made the game unfun to play for months at a time off my head like that, it's so easy. Beyond this, the game's monetization model, whilst not the most evil thing I've ever seen, was still pretty manipulative, as all monetization models are. Hearthstone was very stingy with handing out rewards of any kind. Card packs were few and far between, and getting the arcane dust needed to make the cards and decks you want practically necessitated shelling out a bit of money for some packs and getting lucky, or waiting a week for your weekly quests. Y'know, all that mobile game shit.

But it's not 2017 anymore, it's 2024, and Hearthstone has just recently celebrated its 10-year anniversary, and man how things have changed. Maybe you could argue the improvements have come too late, that positive changes being enacted 10 games into a game's lifespan isn't particularly impressive, and I think that'd be fair! But the fact remains the same, Hearthstone has been improved massively, and after years of considering my relationship with this game "complicated", I've finally come to terms with the fact that I just like this game. A lot. In 2024, Hearthstone comes dangerously close to being what I'd call "generous" with its rewards. There's a rewards track that's honestly been a godsend for the game. You're meted out gold fairly frequently now for just playing with the game, you're given extra points towards levelling up on the reward track (which results in gold and free arena runs and other stuff) by completing achievements, which are usually fulfilling fun, silly stipulations based on certain card effects. I just got one for copying a certain amount of minions with Celestial Projectionist, for example. This gave me gold versions of the card for free, and allowed me to trade in my original, non-gold versions for other random rare cards! It's good stuff! It's honestly not that hard to make the decks or cards you want anymore, I haven't felt behoved to spend money on Hearthstone in ages and that's awesome.

Equally as importantly, the balance team are super on top of things nowadays. Things rarely stay broken or oppressive for long. Hotfixes and balance patches are far more regular, and they also buff cards now too instead of just nerfing stuff into the ground. Handbuff Paladin just recently was hideously broken. Now it's reasonable! Now Tempo Demon Hunter is totally ludicrous, the devs have already acknowledged it and hinted at a hotfix! The game is simply more fun to play when you can actually have faith that the balance will be ironed out within a reasonable time if/when ever it gets out of whack.

And with this in mind, I struggle to find much to dislike about Hearthstone nowadays. I think it doesn't get enough credit for its incredible art and theming. Hearthstone card art is so consistently incredible, so colourful and cartoony, yet so detailed and expressive, I could stare at it for days. Baku The Mooneater, Cat Trick, Kobold Librarian. Some of my favourite card art ever! And the soundtrack? Bro. I've probably used the Hearthstone soundtrack more in my videos than any other video game OST. Ballroom Slink from One Night In Karazhan is one of my favourite pieces of video game music ever - so silly and groovy and tonally perfect both for a zany card game, and - as it turns out, my YouTube videos! I love love love the very cosy, baroque feeling Hearthstone's music goes for, it really does capture the feeling of being in a tavern by the fireside, but also kinda...Immersing yourself in other settings, imagining being in the desert for Saviours Of Uldum, or atop a volcano in Blackrock Mountain. I don't think I've ever heard as many guitar slides in any game's music as much as I do in Hearthstone, the peeps on the woodwinds and acoustics in these songs are pros, bro. This is all without mentioning the incredible attention to detail. Every. Single Card. Gets a little bit of flavour text in the Collection Manager, generally, these are actually pretty funny and well-written jokes! And the fact that every playable minion, including ones that aren't cards themselves and are only tokens summoned or generated by them have voiced lines of dialogue for when they're summoned! That's super impressive! I don't think people talk about that enough! I don't think they give enough credit to how good this game feels to control! "How it feels to control? It's a card game lol" your hater-ass is thinking, throwing in a little passive-aggressive "lol" at the end just to piss me off. Fuck you. You can cue up actions in Hearthstone, there's like a buffer of actions that lets you perform about 30 different inputs without card animations or voice lines slowing you down. You can easily cancel a summon if you think twice about it by just pulling it back to your hand. It's super intuitive! It has great game feel!

I guess I still fundamentally disagree with the Hearthstone devs' philosophy on randomness. Hearthstone has been criticised for years for relying too much on randomness. On random card effects, random targets of damage, random cards that can be summoned or generated in any number of ways. Against classes who practically rely on generating random shit like Priest or Mage (both of whom I hardly ever play out of spite) this can just be really frustrating! It's basically impossible to keep track of what cards they have at any time! And you can end up losing to some random bullshit they have that you could never have possibly predicted! The devs maintain that the randomness spices up the game, it keeps it fun and fresh and stops people from falling into predictable play patterns. I get what they're saying, and I'd agree if this wasn't a game that leant so hard into competitive, if there was any more substantial single-player experience where this randomness could go, never to interfere in matches with actual stakes. Hearthstone has had great single-player experiences before like Dungeon Run, which I loved! And it also had Mercenaries, which is...Fine! But I don't think, and have never thought that Hearthstone's reliance on randomness is worth the supposed variety it brings. Okay, yeah it spices things up, but at what cost? Again, if the game didn't lean so heavily towards being for people wanting a high-level, competitive experience, I'd get it! But as it is, this weird championing of random generation and crazy shit just feels totally at odds with what the game is otherwise trying to be.

But y'know, if it weren't for that randomness, I think in 2024 I might consider giving this game 5 stars. It was maybe 3, 3 and a half back in 2017, but it really has come a long way. I was pretty surprised, and to be honest a bit saddened to see this game's average rating sat at 2.9/5 on here. Maybe these reviews were left back in the day? Maybe people were angry about the monetization, or the balance, maybe - like me, they felt kinda dirty about lavishing praise on any game associated with Activision Blizzard. But those first two things have been largely remedied, and closer inspection will show you that Hearthstone's dev team seem to be a diverse and inclusive group of people who were often appauled by the decisions of ActiBlizz. They've made a gorgeous, charming, artful card game that I've found myself going back to many times over the years, and it's a shame that their game is often caught in the crossfire of their overlords' controversies. If you played Hearthstone a long time ago and found yourself frustrated and disheartened by it, I implore you to go back and give it a second look. You might be surprised by what you find.

Been playing since Naxxramas, never really taking a break for more than a month. Kind of scared to know how many hours I've sunk into this, but also interested, alas. Used to play arena for years, then focused on low-rank ladder using only decks with 40 legendaries. Nowadays I play mostly Battlegrounds, with the occassional arena run, 35-legendary wild game, or Whizbang standard match. Since I never tried to compete heavily, I never felt any pressure to pay for anything, and hopefully never will.

So the bastards roped me back in with hundreds of free packs, an expansion featuring the return of some of my favourite characters and I managed to make the push to legend. I'm older now, the player base is more mature, metagaming is solved quicker, easier and more definitively thanks to sites like vicious syndicate. The end-result? This isn't what I was playing when I was booting up the game everyday to complete my dailies when I was 14. This isn't the game that me and my friends would play when we would mirror match up Legendary Priest. This isn't even naxxramas.