How to get a hearthstone legend mindset – Step by Step Learning Guide

 

It is not always about the deck you play. It is also about how you play it. This mage deck might not be the best, but this guide is awesome ;)

As I have this guide written some time ago and haven’t published cause I was a time off from hearthstone. I just wanna share it with you. Hope you enjoy.

This guide has over 4000 words. So take your time to read it.

You will learn:

• ·        How to set goals that stick
• ·        How you make consistent improvement in hearthstone
• ·        How to create a better mindset
• ·        How to set up a system and identify your leaks
• ·        How habits will help you reaching your goals
• ·        How you create success in longterm

First of all this guide is written for people who want to improve. If you just read it and don’t want to change, it’s a waste of time. You will get some action-steps in this guide. Knowledge is only important if you use it and keep track of your progress.

About me:

Well, my name is Nico. I am an author and high-performance coach from Germany. Since I am a small kid I am really into gaming. I’ve played really a lot of games starting with board games, a lot of card games and also was making a living while playing online poker.

Every game I am playing I want to know all about and finding the best strategy and learn how to improve.

As I an author and coach I already published some books and helping people to focus on their resources. I believe every one of us has got a great potential and lives far away from what he can achieve. So my goal is to help you out to switch your mindset and improve – in hearthstone and in real life.

My main language is german, so I am sorry for the mistakes in this article. But overall it’s enough if you get the main key points. When you just make one a small change, after reading this guide, it is already a successful.

Me and hearthstone:

This guide will not only be about strategy. I don’t think I am one of the best hearthstone players. As I know I need to improve in so many cases and missing a lot of experience with different deck types.  Even though I got some Top #100 legend finishes. But as I am not having too much time for playing hearthstone I don’t play competitive.

 Instead I focus on what I am already teaching. Helping you to create a system to improve. This guide will focus on your mindset.

Preparation:

Before you start reading this guide, make sure, you have the environment to read. No gaming, smartphone or videos. Playing hearthstone while watching a video is not efficient. It’s the same for reading. As we are human, it is not possible to do two things at a time.

There is a very important rulein hearthstone and i life:

Practice and figure out what works best for YOU, then forget about the rest.

Every time I see people searching for the quick fix. “There need to be a wonder, which will help me fix all my solutions and pains.” In reality it is hard work and it is always a step by step process. I want you to be conscious about this fact. You will learn to improve, but you can’t improve 100% within one day. But if you go one step at a time you will reach your longterm goals.

“PATIENCE YOU MUST HAVE my young padawan”-Yoda

Everything you read in this guide is just a view out of my experience. There will be things which will help you and others which won’t. But in the end you only know when you try things out. Just do it and give it a try.

Nobody knows the right things. Only you know. I am a believer that all the power and resources are already within yourself. Why do I believe this?

We are all at this point in our live, cause of all the daily decision we took. We are the product of our habits, the action we take everyday. Albert Einstein once said: “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”

So let’s start.

It’s all about you – you got the power

As I played a lot of games I’ve seen over and over the same issues. For me hearthstone has some similarities to chess, poker and sports. In those areas you are not the best player, if you only focus on the strategic part of the game. You also need to have a good mindset, playing your best game you can do. In poker it is called playing the A-Game.

You only play your A-Game when you are relaxed and calm. As soon as you are thinking of some day to day problems your mind gets restless and starts to think about things to do or whatever. You loose focus and start playing on autopilot. This is your B-Game. You playing from your experience, but loosing the view for making a change in your playing style, missing some opportunities.

Then there is the C-Game. The C-Game is the worst play you can do. For beginner it will come after loosing three games in a row, getting fucked. You are salty and just make stupid plays because you letting your emotions control you.

You need to focus more on playing your A-Game. Playing the best hearthstone and reaching your personal goal. It doesn’t matter if you want to climb to rank 5 or reaching  rank legend. It is your goal, not the goal of any other person in the world. You take responsibly for yourself. We are all at different states and have different goals. The only thing which is important:

Do you want to improve? And are you ready to invest some time and energy for it?

I write this guide to help you to improve and to switch your mindset. Cause I love it to see people getting better and believe in themselves expanding their abilities. So if you take action, it makes me happy. ;)

Sometimes it just needs a small impulse to expand a getting a power-boost living the dream.

As Stephen Covey once said: “Between stimulus and response, one has the freedom to choose.”

There will be a lot of knowledge in this guide. I tried to start with the basics. Yes we all want to know expert knowledge. But before we don’t use the basics it doesn’t work out. Learn the basics and when this is done, you can continue.

 I hope I’ve explained everything so you get to know. But since I haven’t written a whole book, please remind this is a free guide. I invested some time to write it. So it can’t contain all the information which are out there. Maybe I can take more time in the future to go more into detail and give you even more information to start improving.

 You can see it as a beginning of a journey. A journey to master your mindset.

The beginning

In life you have two choices: You can be proactive or you can be reactive.

1. ·        Proactive means, you take the control over your life.
2. ·        Reactive means, you give the control to other people and just react to the circumstances.

I think the only way to happiness is living a proactive life. This might not be the easy way, but in the end we are always happy when we grow and achieve things we never thought we can do.

The truth

In fact you know what is working not good for you. You know that you shouldn’t play so fast, because you are making some mistakes you wouldn’t do.

You know you should think more about your decisions and you know, that you play bad when you are salty.

But let me ask you a question. Why don’t you change anything, when you already know what is working bad for you?

Take your time. You can reflect a minute. This is a very powerful question. Why don’t you make a change when you already know?

Well in fact our mind takes control to often of ourself. When we are true to ourself we procrastinate things we don’t enjoy. “Oh yes tomorrow is a better day to start. Maybe I start someday.”

But when is this day? When is the day when you say to yourself: “Now is the right time.” Probably it will never. If you don’t take the decision in this moment to make a change you won’t do it for a long time.

To give you some help and to support you, I made this guide practical. I created some action-steps which will help you to make a start. This is all you need – starting the journey.

Every good player was starting as a newbie, learning the game and the rules. It doesn’t matter if you want to grow in hearthstone or in life. You need to practice over and over again.

1.      Action-Steps Goalsetting:

Yes you already know how important goal setting is in life and hearthstone. But sometimes we forget. So your first task is to set a goal. I’ve created some action-steps for you to print out, or you can use pen and paper.

#1 Write down all your goal you want to achieve in hearthstone. (If you want to get legend, write this down. If you want to stop tilting write this down. If you want to be the best player in the world, write this down.)

#2 Focus on one goal. What is the most important goal you want to achieve? Make a big circle around it. This is your goals where you put all your energy in the future. Don’t make it in your mind. You need to write it down to achieve it.

Our mind is like the RAM of the computer. If it’s full you slow down. You need to take space to get a boost.

So here is the first task. Stop reading now. Before you continue with this guide, do this task. If you don’t, it’s a waste of time. If you read the whole guide without taking action, you failed. When you just read a part of this guide and done an action task, you are a winner. Cause you took action! This is what it’s all about. Really! I wouldn’t write so many sentences. I know how tricky our mind can be. Stop now and just do the action steps.

How to achieve your goal?

Well done! If you read this line and already done the first action step you can be proud of you. Most of the readers won’t do it. They just have their regular reading habit, which is reading without doing something. Some are already on the next video or text message. They haven’t controlled their environment before reading.

So congratulations to you.

To achieve a goal you need to break it down. Try to make as small steps as possible. In the following I try to help you out with some components of hearthstone.

When you were starting to play hearthstone, your skill level was at zero in this game. You didn’t know the rules, which deck to play, which strategy to use…Even a rank 25 game could have been a struggle without a good deck. ;)

There were a lot of things you needed to learn.

In the beginning it was very easy to growth. You just needed to make small changes to improve. You learned a lot new things every day, getting better and better. After a while it was getting harder and harder until you reached a point, where you’re getting stuck.

The green line is the learning curve of hearthstone. So when you already a good hearthstone player it is much harder to improve, because you already know the basics.

When you already reached a pretty high level you will need to put a lot of work into the game.

It is much easier to raise your winrate from 50% to 55% then from 62% to 63%.

That’s why it is important to have set your goal. You need to be sure if you just want to play only for fun or to reach a more competitive level.

As you are still reading this guide, I think you want to get better. So let’s take a deeper look.

Let’s say your goal is to reach rank legend. So before you can reach your goal you need to take a lot of small steps to get to this point.

Those steps might be:

·        Practice playing a tier 1 deck which will win against the meta

·        Being aware of playing mistakes

·        Knowing the decks your opponent are playing

·        know when to take mulligan

·        Knowing the basic strategy of your deck

·        Reduce the misplays

·        Having a good mindset

·        Ask every turn: What does play my opponent next turn

·        Taking time to watch twitch

·        Reading articles in forum how to play decks

·        …

There is a long list of things you need to master to achieve your goal. You can’t do all at once. So it is good to make a break down and to write down all your leaks.

Action-Steps: Finding your leaks:

A good strategy to improve very fast is to reduce your biggest leaks. Before you can do this you need to be aware of your leaks.

#1 Write down on a piece of paper all those things where you can improve. Write down at least 10 things.

#2 Figure out the Top 3 leaks you got. Mark them with a circle.

#3 Set your top 3 priorities. What is your biggest leak? Second biggest leak? Third biggest leak.

Well done! Again be proud of yourself for taking action. It is not easy to face ourself with our weakness. Our ego doesn’t like it. So you’ve done a great job again.

Now that you know your leaks, we can go to the next step.

How to improve in Hearthstone

As you have seen in the graphic before you need time and practice to get better.

When you want to do too many things at the same time, it ends up in a mess. See yourself as a learning bubble. When you have a lot of different directions, the bubble won’t expand. You go one step in a new direction and then two steps in another one.

Like when you are watching a twitch stream while playing hearthstone you can’t improve. You won’t learn the game play from the video because you got only some attention and you won’t improve in your gaming, cause your focus is half on the stream.

It is much better to focus on exactly one thing at a time.

Let’s say your biggest leak is the mulligan. Then it will be the best thing to just take a day to fully concentrate on mulligan. That might be your session goal.

When you start a new game take all the time you need thinking about every card you see. Ask yourself: What do I play on my first turn? What does my opponent play? What will I play then and what cards do I want to have on my hand.

VS. Class	Best starting hand	Basic strategy
Warrior, Control	Flame Imp, Dark Peddler…	Aggro plan, care of AOE
Warlock
Priest
…

 

Let’s say your biggest leak is – you don’t know your best starting hand vs. all deck types. So a good start is to break it down. Take some time and write down all the cards you want to have. Like what is your best starting hand vs. which deck type. You can go step by step throw the process. Just start with the first deck, where you feel confident.

Then your whole focus goes onto one task. You will improve much fast and reach your goals much faster. Your learning bubble got only one direction and after you learned this skill you can make a checkmark and go to your next leak. You level up. It’s like earning some XP points.

This is how you will improve superfast!

Action-Steps: Step-by-Step Breakdown

You already know your leaks. So pick the first leak and write down the things how you can improve.

#1 Read out your biggest leak

#2 Write down as many action-steps as you can do. It will be much easier for you to do those steps, once you make a plan and written them down

#3 Enter a reminder, for example a post it to remind yourself of your session goal.

As a poker player, I wrote down every session a goal for myself. In this session this was where my full attention goes. As soon as I improved I made a new one. It doesn’t need to be big. Just a small piece every game and you will get better and better.

Now you’ve learned the strategy how you can improve your game to reach your goal.

Focus on the progress not on the goal

In life and in hearthstone we all want to reach a goal as fast as possible. We always think that as soon as we reached our goal we are happy. But we are not. It’s an illusion. As soon as we reach a goal, we want to reach a new one and another one.

You need to be happy in the moment. It’s about the journey not about the goal. So to bring consistency into your play style you need to make a mindset shift.

It’s all about the progress. Set a goal, but then focus just on the progress (the new habits). When you start doing this, you will reach your goal from time to time. It doesn’t matter if it takes 2 weeks or 2 month. You improve day by day getting better and better.

When you want to get better in anything in life you can’t stop. Everything in life is growing. When you stop you are not improving. Even worse, you will loose your skills from time to time, if you don’t use them.

Your mind already learned automatism how you play. From time to time this behavior isn’t useful any more. I don’t want to dig too deep into the material.

Just want to mention you’ve got two possibilities. You can improve or you decrease. You won’t play at the same level if you stop playing for a while.

“Where focus goes, energy flows.” – Tony Robbins

This leads us to the next question. How can we bring consistency in our play?

Habit formation

As my priority of coaching is helping people to implement new habits, this might be one of the key parts of this guide.

I am a big believer in habits. Cause this is the concept which really helped me out in nearly all areas of my life.

Create habits to achieve your goals. It’s that easy!

When we start a new behavior it is hard at the beginning. Our brain needs to learn it. As soon as we doing it over and over again, it’s getting easier to do. We need less energy to do it. After a while we don’t need to think about it anymore. A habit is formed. It’s like taking a shower or brushing the teeth.

It’s the same for hearthstone. In most situations you do what you always did. For example the mulligan. Your get your cards and need to decide what are your keeps. Most of the players are just using there automatism. They choose the cards what they have always been chosen. Don’t thinking anymore about the decision.

If you want to get better you need to ask yourself every single time. What is my best starting hand? What card will I play in turn 1? What does my opponent will play in turn 1? …

You need to break old habits and implement new ones, which help you reaching your goal.

You can form a new habit for this process. But before you can create a new habit you need to be aware of your behavior. When we are in a rush, we don’t take enough time. We want to play fast and we are already at our next game, just playing on pure autopilot.

How to form a new habit?

I’m a huge fan of the concept from BJ Fogg of the Stanford university. He created a concept which is very easy to use in real life and not only in theory. So here is how it works.

First of all you need to understand what is a habit. A habit is a automatic behavior where you don’t need any energy to do.

A habit got three different parts: The trigger, the action, the reward.

The trigger: The trigger is an action/behavior that initiates the new behavior.

Example: We starting a new hearthstone game and getting our first 3 cards dealt

The action: The action is our new habit we want to create.

Example: We ask ourselves. What cards do I want to keep and why?

The reward: To make it easy to understand we just say in this example you get a better hearthstone player. (You taking now better decisions)

It is important to build one habit at a time. Yes I know you are confident and you are the one special person for whom rules doesn’t count. It is not true. You will fail, if you start with 5 new habits at a time.

Now it seems easy to add those extra 30 seconds. But your ego doesn’t want to be in the present moment, taking enough time, while it already knew what is the best decision.

Think about a juggler. Juggling with one ball is easy, you don’t need to concentrate very much. Once you starting with more balls it’s getting harder and harder. One simple mistake and you fail. All the balls (habits) are falling on the ground.

Start small! It’s key in the habit formation process.

Action-Steps:

1.      Ask yourself what is the habit I want to create? Which habit will help me to get a better hearthstone player? It is very easy to start with a simple question, like “what will my opponent play next turn. You can use the trigger. “You draw a card or its your turn”

Advanced concept - New Habits trigger new habits:

As I mentioned before, you can built a loops if you want to. Then you can create multiple routines which help you out. Let’s go back to the last example. We are starting a new hearthstone game.

#1 So the first action is to ask ourself, what cards we want to keep?

Now let’s go a bit deeper into it. We also can ask ourself some of the following questions:

• What will be my optimal hand?
• What deck will my opponent play?
• What will be my optimal hand vs. agro or control class?
• What cards does he want to keep?
• What will I play in my first turn?
• What will I play in my second turn?
• What will I play if he got those special cards?
• What is my probability of getting a better card?
• …

There are a lot of questions you can ask yourself to take the best decision. But as you only got a special amount of time you need to practice this behavior.

You can make every question a habit. Once you asking yourself the #1 question, you can use the new habit as a trigger to form the new habit asking question #2.

Once it is a habit you can ask yourself another question. This is how you can stack habits.

 

Getting better in hearthstone or in life, is a step by step process. You can improve if you take small steps. One habit at a time. You don’t need to feel bad if you are not the rank you want to reach. If you will practice your skills will get better and in some weeks or some month you will finally climb the letter.

So if you have read this guide and you didn’t take action, go back to the beginning and do the action-steps. You can’t expect to make a change when you didn’t do anything for it.

If you already done some action-steps. Well done! You can be proud of yourself. You are going out of your comfort-zone and this is where the magic happens.

I hope that you learned some new things, which you can implement to improve your game. If you got any questions you can sent me a message. If you just changed one small thing after reading this guide, I am happy.

Maybe I will write some bigger guides in the future about how to avoid tilting and get more into the whole concept of our mindset. If there will be some interests I might create some streaming or videos.

If you like the article, feel free to share it and write a comment.

Thank you very much for your time and happy hearthstone!

-IKY