Hearthstone for Beginners

I reinstalled HS on my iPad and am working on refamiliarizing myself with the game. I don't intend or want to be a major player in the HS universe, whatever that might look like, but I want to have some fun with it and see if I can get excited about deck construction again.

You Hearthstone gurus, can you offer tips on how to get started?

Right now I'm working on unlocking all of the basic cards for each class. I think I just have three or four classes left to do that on. I have almost no gold, so I can't do Arena, which I remembered was pretty fun. I only have the base game and the Nazzafrazz thing, which I don't remember anything about.

I tried playing against randos with a basic deck and got my ass handed to me, but since the goals often don't involve actually winning, that's not too much of a problem. I'd prefer to get slaughtered using cards I know and have, just so I can learn better from it.

Gimme the tips and tricks yo.

Download Magic Duels for free and play that, yo.

I love you

Play through and get all of the basic stuff, then do all three adventures AND the class challenges they come with. That's a ton of gameplay without getting into the more MP oriented aspects. You also get a lot of new, fixed cards. It costs money, but it will give you plenty to enjoy and some pretty tough challenges- some fixed deck, some constructed.

Black Barney wrote: Download Magic Duels for free and play that, yo.

I love you

I did my time with Magic. I enjoyed it, but I don't need to go back.

I addition to what Mike said do your daily quests to build up your gold and do the weekly tavern brawl at least till you get your card pack.

Yeah, always Tavern Brawl...you get a pack a week from that, sometimes they are fixed decks, sometimes you make one. They are usually pretty fun.

COMBINE quests wisely. If you have a timmy-ish Druid deck, try to have the quests that award you for playing high cost minions, winning as a Druid, etc.

I would also suggest going back and reading the other Hearthstone thread, at least the
beginning of it. There was lots of excellent information that helped me to be a better player.
Best of luck and add me as friend if you would like.
Mantidman#1912
the year the Titanic became non-buoyant.

And I will USUALLY reroll a 40 reward quest, unless it does match up with another one I'm doing.

Add everyone you can so you have someone to watch when you get the quest to watch a win.

Try not to pull your hair out when you beat someone down to 2 HP and they play some cheesy assed thing that resets their health to 30.

After you get all the basic cards for each class, make sure to beat each class in practice on hard mode. You get a nice gold bonus for that.

Do your dailies for gold. If you skip a few days, play hard to try to clear those dailies when you come back, then the game will refill them for you (the quests queue to a small degree). Abandoning quests resets any queue you have, though. Only do that if you really hate your quests.

Some folks re-roll the 40 gold quests. I treat them as easy days. I hate sitting to play twenty games, even playing enough for a five-win quest can annoy me. Do what you want there.

edit:

Doh, I can't believe nobody mentioned this yet. Play Ranked, not Casual. Especially if you don't have a big set of cards. You can't do anything but make progress until you get to Rank 20, and in general after the first week of a month everyone with good decks is gone from that range. It's the fairest playing field you'll find, but can be rough for a few days when it turns over.

In Casual, you get a bunch of fat-collection guys testing out new decks they're afraid to use in Ranked, and they'll just tool a new player. It seems counter-intuitive, but play Ranked to start, and stay out of Casual.

Legomancer wrote: I reinstalled HS on my iPad and am working on refamiliarizing myself with the game. I don't intend or want to be a major player in the HS universe, whatever that might look like, but I want to have some fun with it and see if I can get excited about deck construction again.

You Hearthstone gurus, can you offer tips on how to get started?

Right now I'm working on unlocking all of the basic cards for each class. I think I just have three or four classes left to do that on. I have almost no gold, so I can't do Arena, which I remembered was pretty fun. I only have the base game and the Nazzafrazz thing, which I don't remember anything about.

I tried playing against randos with a basic deck and got my ass handed to me, but since the goals often don't involve actually winning, that's not too much of a problem. I'd prefer to get slaughtered using cards I know and have, just so I can learn better from it.

Gimme the tips and tricks yo.

There's some good advice over there, but I can crystallize some of it here--that thread is long now.

1. Unlock all those basic cards. So... yeah. Just keep doing what your doing. I would play Ranked, too. As noted, Casual can be a bloodbath. At least in Ranked you'll be with folks around the same stage for the most part. And if you make it to Rank 20 you'll get the new cardback (which is savage this month) and some dust and a card in prizes on the first.
2. I made some cheap decks over at Hearthpwn that can get you to 20 with under 1000 dust and no Adventures. Having Naxx means things would be even easier. This is a link to the Druid one , and there are links there for the other three I made. There is also some very brief intro/theory stuff on those. Druid introduces the idea of "tempo" for example. The Paladin one can be built once your Paladin is at level 4, actually, but you need some dust.
3. Once you can get to Rank 20 with confidence, I would start thinking about Arena. If you can go 3-3, it "pays" off in terms of gold investment in packs. Normally a pack is 100 gold, and playing Arena is 150 and guarantees a pack as a prize. If you can 3-3, you will average 50+ gold in prizes in addition to the pack.
4. Play Tavern Brawl at least enough to get your free weekly pack from it. I love TB and play it tons if it's a good one. Arena and TB also count as wins for your quests.
5. The best quest is 100 gold for 7 wins (Total Dominance). Only for this quest you count wins in Solo Mode. So you can just smash the Innkeeper or Naxx bosses and earn gold.
6. Add me too, jeblucas#1574!

Hex Sinister wrote: Try not to pull your hair out when you beat someone down to 2 HP and they play some cheesy assed thing that resets their health to 30.

For some reason I find Reno Jackson in a Warlock deck to be much more annoying than coming across him in a Control Warrior deck; it must be how the Warlock players are able to abuse their hero power - and undoubtedly draw Reno in the process - and just heal back up when they're almost dead. Speaking of Reno, I had a memorable mirror match against a Control Warrior about a week ago where I was playing my "Jank-A-Reno" Warrior deck that not only doesn't have Grommash, but is missing Frothing Beserker as well. Anyway, at one point my opponent had 38 Armor and 30 Health before I got the advantage and beat him down to 2 Health...and then he played Reno. No matter, I beat him down again for a total of 96 damage dealt and the win.

As for daily quests, read this link if you're curious about how to maximize your gold earned from daily quests. After completing a daily quest I'll sometimes have a 50 or 60 Gold quest that I have queued up for the next day, but then I'll get hosed by a "Win 3 games with any Class" 40 Gold quest (or another non-class specific quest like "Play 40 Spells", etc.) coming up on a reroll (I always try to keep my quest log full so I have better odds for higher-paying quests on the rerolls). A trick I use to avoid that is that once I complete my daily for the day, I get any high priority quests (usually 60 Gold but sometimes 50) within one win of completion so a reroll can't screw me the next day.

Still unlocking all the basics (I had more left than I thought). Do you guys just stick with one or two classes and focus on them? When I met other Magic players who asked me what colors I play I was confused; my friends and I played all of them, building new and different decks all the time. But that was only six colors as opposed to ten or so different classes.

Thanks so much for the tips, especially the Ranked vs Casual. Few times I went Casual I did in fact get my ass kicked.

You end up having to play almost everything, just to get some quests done. It's pretty normal to gravitate towards things you like, but the daily quest system means you have to have some understanding of how different class builds work.

If you're really trying hard in Ranked, you're going to focus on one or two classes unless you have hot decks (and can play them) for everything.

I started off completely unattached to anything WoW and earned all the basic cards for all the classes.
Now I find myself with over 140 ranked victories with both Priest and Warlock, less than 50 with all the other
classes and zero with Shaman.
I enjoy playing all the classes in Casual, have a "Waaagh" Warrior deck with all greenskins, a "Mechanical Crime"
Rogue deck with all Mechs, and a "Magic of the North" Mage deck that uses all cards with snow/ice themes.