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In Dust We Trust
Today, Zeriyah brings us a blog post that talks about crafting in Hearthstone, one of the methods of obtaining new cards!Originally posted by Zeriyah (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)Whether you’re enjoying the ambiance of an interactive board, immersing yourself in the charmingly composed music, or jumping right into the thick of deck-building, there’s a little something for everyone in the world of Hearthstone. A few of our goals include making your Hearthstone experience fun, streamlined, engaging, and immersive, whether you’re a new player or a card game veteran. One of the ways in which we’re streamlining your gameplay experience is through our easy-to-use Crafting system.
What is Crafting in Hearthstone?
Our crafting system will allow you to take the cards you don’t want and turn them into cards you do want—quickly and easily.
Why can’t I just trade my cards with my friends to get the cards I want?
Many card games out there are considered “Trading Card Games,” or TCGs. While there are perks to being able to trade your cards, there are negatives to card games that support trading, even in a digital world. What do you as a player want out of trading cards? Generally, the answer is “To get the cards I want and trade away the cards I don’t!”
What happens when the cards you have are the “wrong” cards—cards other players simply don’t want? What about when everyone wants the same cards?
When a player opens a pack of cards in a typical TCG, they’ll generally find a fixed number of cards of various rarities. Cards of the most numerous rarity in any given pack, or “common” cards, end up having little to no value. Everyone has them and no one wants them.
What about the rare cards? These “more valuable” cards can vary wildly from “MUST HAVE!” to “meh” and anywhere in between. In a trading system, the unimpressive rares end up being only slightly more valuable than common cards, even if they aren’t nearly as common. It’s very common for a dozen or so rare cards from any given set to contain most of the value and the rest are worth very little. People demand those high-end cards, and their value skyrockets. Can’t afford to buy all of the good rares? You better hope you’re lucky when you open your next pack.
So in a trading-based card game, you may finally manage to get a card that is “worth” something . . . but then you want to keep that card and not trade it away. So your only option is to purchase more packs until you get something worth trading, even if you may not actually want to part with it. That’s not particularly fun. On top of that, you may even feel like you can’t play the game competitively without that specific card! It’s very frustrating, and new players are reluctant to become invested in a card game if they can’t manage to get those cards—in trade or for cash.
Crafting allows you to get the cards you’re actually looking for without having to wait for random luck to shine your way, with no need to look for people that have a particular card you want to round out your deck.
Hearthstone allows you to disenchant your Expert cards into Arcane Dust, and you then use the Arcane Dust to create the cards you want, instantly! It’s fast, it’s easy, and you don’t have to reference how valuable your card is on a secondary market each time to want to make a choice to trade it off or not.
The Nitty Gritty
“Expert” cards are cards you acquire through packs, whether you purchase them with Gold or real money. You’ll find a card’s rarity right in the middle, as shown by the little oval gem. A white gem denotes Common cards, blue are Rare, purple are Epic, and orange cards are Legendary.
Cards will disenchant into a quantity of Arcane Dust based on their rarity. Common cards will be worth less Arcane Dust than Epic or Legendary cards. If you want to craft a card for your favorite deck, simply take your accumulated Dust, find the card that you want in your collection, and spend enough to unlock that card! It’ll take a lot more dust to unlock a Legendary card than it does to unlock a Common card, so keep that in mind when you’re on a crafting spree.
Here’s the breakdown of how much Arcane Dust you get from each card rarity:
- Common (White) Cards – Disenchant for 5 Arcane Dust / Craft a Common card for 40 Arcane Dust
- Rare (Blue) Cards – Disenchant for 20 Arcane Dust / Craft a Rare card for 100 Arcane Dust
- Epic (Purple) Cards – Disenchant for 100 Arcane Dust / Craft an Epic card for 400 Arcane Dust
- Legendary (Orange) Cards – Disenchant for 400 Arcane Dust / Craft a Legendary card for 1600 Arcane Dust
Gold Cards
You can also use Arcane Dust to craft Golden versions of every card in your collection! Golden cards have beautiful alternate frames surrounding them, proudly displaying your accomplishment of acquiring them to you and your opponent. Golden cards also have the added bonus of having animated art to make your epic Hearthstone duels even more epic. Golden cards can also be found in packs, but they are very rare.
Let’s take a look at how much Arcane Dust you’ll need to craft Golden cards!
- Common Golden Cards – Disenchant for 50 Arcane Dust / Craft a Golden Common card for 400 Arcane Dust
- Rare Golden Cards – Disenchant for 100 Arcane Dust / Craft a Golden Rare card for 800 Arcane Dust
- Epic Golden Cards – Disenchant for 400 Arcane Dust / Craft a Golden Epic card for 1600 Arcane Dust
- Legendary Golden Cards – Disenchant for 1600 Arcane Dust / Craft a Legendary Golden card for 3200 Arcane Dust
Keep in mind that these Arcane Dust numbers aren’t final and they may change during the beta.
That’s Hearthstone’s Crafting system in a nutshell: grind your extra cards into precious Arcane Dust and immediately use that Dust to make the cards you want—it’s that easy! We hope you have a ton of fun crafting cards in Hearthstone to make some pretty awesome decks!
Really, it depends on how much cards cost.
If a pack of cards works like packs in Magic or WoW TCG, and it costs $3-4 for a pack of 10-15 cards, the dust isn't that big of a deal. Chances are you'll get 5-10 commons, 2-4 uncommons, and one rare or legendary card (with most packs having only a rare). Those commons and uncommons can all be disenchanted (there's a good chance you'll have a full playset of commons very quickly, and not take very long to get a bunch of uncommons), and give a decent amount of dust. 320 commons for one legendary sounds like a lot at first, but for anyone who's bought a box of Magic cards, note that you get 360 in that box - imagine if you could turn all of them in for a mythic rare of your choice (and then turn in all the uncommons for a second), on top of all the rares and mythic rares you got out of it normally. Not a bad system, and while I think I'd like the option to trade as well (especially if you could trade dust), a system like this isn't too shabby.
Of course, if a pack of cards costs $5 and only has five cards and doesn't even guarantee a rare, then that would change quite a lot.
Last we heard packs would be 5 cards with at least 1 rare or higher quality cards, with an aimed price of $1 per pack.
Ah, missed that. Still, $1/5 cards is about the same as MtG (a little better in this case, since one pack of Magic is only one rare; here you get three for $3). So, it'll take a while to get a full playset of everything, but I think I like the idea of having a "set" grind to get a card you want, instead of needing to be lucky.
So 320 common cards just to make one legendary...Or 640 common cards for one golden legendary...
Orrr you get your wallet out and start buying booster packs with gold...
Yeah, easy to see what direction THIS game is taking.
I somewhat agree with you yet mathematicly this seems possible. Let's see how much time we need if we're being optimistic. Let's say your first pack will gave you only common card, your second one has only one rare while your third one has only 1 epic and you are unlucky to get legendaries for some reason. I don't remember how many packs you get per win/lose but being optimistics lets assume you get a single back for losing one game. Lets say you lose 3 times; you would get 25 dust from first pack, 40 from second and 120 from third totaling 185 dust from losing 3 times in a row. A game is usually around 10 minutes so it just took you half an hour to get 185 which is roughly 1/9th of what you need for a legendary. It will take around 4 hours and 20 minutes of non-stop losing to get a single legendary. There are 35 total legendaries. It will take roughly 151 hours and 40 minutes to get them all. Twice that for golden cards so 303 hours 20 minutes of time to get the entire legendary cards in the game in gold. Thats 9 hours less than 13 days.
If we want all the cards in the game golden and we're also being optimistic we can assume we got all other gold cards twice. So the first one we didn't disenchant but the second one we did to get the loss we had from the first one back, and the difference is the cards we didn't disenchant because we didn't have them in the first place and wanted 2 copies. If we're being optimistic 303 hours of total game time is what we need to get all the cards in the game in gold. Ofc losing might not give a single pack but being optimistic lets say winning gives more than 1 pack which is balanced out to make the same numbers as if we got a single pack for every match.
So optimisticly it's 13 days of play time for the entire card collection. Lets double it to 26 days to be less optimistic. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkXf1aR2LXA Thats about the play time I have on my level 90 alt in wow. Let's be even less optimistic and say you have like 10 cards that you just can't seem to get in gold. I would say even that is awsome. In conclusion I'm not that worried. In theory I'm sure people will be owning all golden cards like in 6 months at the very least. New cards and possible expansion would be like a year away at best (though it's a card game so might be faster) so people would be done with the current cards by then. I think this doable.
I doubt many people will be disenchanting anything they don't have at least 3 copies of already. It would be a giant waste of dust if you suddenly needed a card you could use.
Too easy = no fun, but if it's too hard, a lot games will be won by just putting a legendary card on the board...
Still prefer the crafting system to "Well i dont have legendary/epic cards which means i cannot trade AT ALL"
I'm kinda hoping they will add a way to convert dust into gold or card packs. It'll take quite a while, but what happens once somebody collects the full set? They have no more use for additional cards or dust at all (except maybe saving it to craft all the new cards in an expansion set the moment it's released). Or what about people that really only want to play Forge? It would be nice to be able to turn those cards they gain back into gold/packs to help defer the cost of entry if they don't plan to play many constructed matches with them anyway. I don't even care if the conversion rate is terrible, it would at least be nice to have the option.
That doesn't look like the animation I was expecting. I was more thinking along the lines of Harry Potter paintings. Thx for sharing CherryPL.
I have 2 words for the conversion of cards into dust, and then dust into cards again: HOLY SHIT.
I don't like these conversion rates AT ALL. I know the intent is to keep us playing, but with these conversion rates I'm not going to be crafting much. I'd rather keep my cards, and d/e the cards I have more then I'm allowed to have, then I would d/e everything I don't need for my main deck and craft at these rates.
I'm going to be playing the same way, only disenchanting excess cards. I need to have a complete collection of cards so that I can try out everything. During the beta though, I may end up disenchanting quite a few cards and just focus on a couple of heroes since the progress will get reset anyways when the game launches. Gotta catch em all, Hearthemon!
Gotta catch em all, Hearthemon! lol Fluxflashor :D I will also only de excess cards. If you get a lot of packs after a while I'm sure we will have almost all nessasery cards for us by then we will have tons of unwanted cards in which I'm sure enchanting won't be a problem.