I played Hearthstone for 8 days and it drove me away. – September 15, 2022 at 08:17PM

Alrighty. So, I’ve played this game for 8 days now. I bought the welcome pack that gives 30 packs, and figured that would be enough to start making some progress. The tutorial is pretty good, teaches the basics of the game and awards some cards. I find out that I’m in the “apprentice league” which I assumed meant a separate protected league for people who have recently started playing the game, and that was really encouraging.

I jumped into the apprentice league play using pretty much the same deck that was assigned to me for the tutorial, Mage, with a few changes added in from the cards I opened in my packs. At first things sort of seemed alright. I lost several games, but nothing jumped out at me as being crazy. I then won some games over the next few days and progressed into Apprentice 20-ish.

From there, things got absolutely ridiculous. I was running into (What I now know) aggro druid and beast hunter, and big mage decks galore. I got stomped out by mech mage and murloc shaman and had no idea how to fight back against these decks. I was losing regularly on turn 5 and 6 and kept seeing the same decks and cards over and over. By rank 17 or so of Apprentice, I hit a total wall. I never won a game other than people disconnecting.

After asking around in some streams, I discovered the HSReplay website and found out that I’d been playing against really high tier decks for the past 2-3 days and if I wanted to craft them myself, it’d be 4,000 or even 6,000 dust. I had like maybe 85 dust. The streamer advised me to just copy/paste the aggro druid deck and dust some of my legendary cards to build it.

I took their advice, ran the druid deck and won enough games finally, to break through apprentice into bronze league. I thought that would change the situation, but it didn’t. I’m not exaggerating at all when I say my first 4 games were against golden decks, with golden heroes. My 5th game was against a non-golden deck that was still running tier 1, and my next two games were against two more golden heroes, one of which had a golden deck. In the end, I managed to claw my way to rank 4 bronze before I finally gave up on the game.

My thoughts about the experience, as a newcomer to Hearthstone are this.

Positives: The mechanics are fun, the client is a little clunky, but not too bad, I like the dust system, I like the strategy of minions keeping damage they took. (Unlike MTG, where they heal at the end of a turn.) I liked the bonus packs every 5 levels.

Negatives: It feels like Blizzard did everything they could to make the experience as miserable as possible as far as progressing. 40 ranks of apprentice is fine, except when you’re not actually playing against newcomers, you’re playing against people from the bronze pool or wherever they’re coming from. The game tells you, “You need to win to progress and get rewards, but you’ll also be fighting an uphill struggle the entire time.” I’ve never encountered a system before that takes 8 days of daily play just to break out of the so-called newbie levels. The card balance seems a bit wonky as well, it’s a sure sign that design has failed when you see tons of different decks all running the same key cards because they’re so powerful on their own.

TLDR: I tried Hearthstone, took me 8 days to get out of Apprentice, and the last 4 days of it was fighting against high tier net decks. There doesn’t seem to be protected play for newcomers, it’s a very, very poor experience.