I was discussing the idea with a TCG enthusiast friend of mine earlier today regarding how awesome it would be if HearthStone had it's own variant of the traditional TCG draft, also known as limited construction.
The Basic Idea
So, to provide a little background - about 8 or so of my friends played a lot of the WoW TCG card game and loved it. We had practice duels and entered local tourneys with our constructed decks, but the most FUN format was always when we had our own draft. One of the lads (usually me because I was closest to the card shop in the city) would pick up n x 3 booster packs usually of the same set, we would all meet up at the host's house and get into the draft!
How Does the Draft Work?
Sorry if you have played drafts before, I am just trying to provide an explanation for those who may be unfamiliar with them. For the WoW TCG - Each booster pack contained 15 cards. Let's say we have 8 players for the draft. This would give a total of 360 cards (8 x 45 cards). The way the cards are distributed areas follows:
Each player opens the first of his/her 3 booster packs. Each player will select the card they deem best from that pack, and pass along the rest of the booster pack to the right.
Each player will then receive a booster pack from their left from another player, with the 14 remaining cards (less the card the player on the left has deemed the best in the pack for their own deck idea).
This process is repeated until all the cards from the pack have been exhausted, usually a player ends up with a few scrappy cards that either don't fit his chosen deck theme or are crappy in general :P
The same is done for booster packs 2 and 3, with the only difference being the direction of the cards shifting to the left, and then back to the right for the third booster pack.
At the end of the drafting phase, each player will have 45 cards to build their 30 card limited deck (in constructed play the deck size was 60). Throughout the draft, players should gradually get an idea of what type of deck they want to be building. Some powerful cards are worth building a deck around itself, but sometimes the draft just won’t provide you with the meat of the deck to help out your big card. For example, in the WoW TCG you could pull a really nice Alliance monster in your first pack, but you might have really bad luck in finding alliance/neutral monsters to aid your cause and may end up having to change to Horde. It’s usually a good idea to leave your options open until the 2nd pack and then begin to focus after that.
Once the player has decided on his/her 30 card deck, they are then allowed to select a hero from the current set/block of 3 sets (not every set had a Hero for each class). Usually for fun, my friends and I would keep our deck a secret until the duelling begun, as well as any of the sweet cards we may have pulled in our boosters.
We would then create random first round brackets, and have three rounds of duels, usually in swiss format, i.e. the winners keep playing the winners. In this format, our winner would come out 3-0 in the limited format with the top deck.
Who Gets to Keep the Cards?
Once the duels have finished, each player deconstructs their decks and puts the rares and epics into the middle of the table. From 1st to 8th place, each player selects one card from the whole draft pool to claim for their own until there are no rares/epics left remaining.
Note: Usually the first pick cards as you can imagine were the cards that would fetch the most money or have the most value in that players constructed deck. Uncommons and commons were usually anybodies for the taking, remember we were all good mates and usually pretty generous with helping each other out.
What Makes Drafts So Fun?
I think drafting/limited construction is the best format available in TCGs. Some reasons include:
Everyone is on equal footing. Sure, somebody might luck a really strong card and have a slight advantage, but card games are usually not so black and white and for the most part everybody has a great chance to win provided they are confident with their deck building skills and know the pack well.
Strategy on the fly. We aren’t all entering the draft with our blinged up tournament deck, where we know the competitive meta to a tee. The thought process of carefully narrowing down your current selection from a bunch of other cards isn’t always straight forward, and sometimes you have to pick cards and hope that certain other cards may come your way later in the draft.
It was always a great social thing for my mates and I, we were even drafting as frequently as once a week just because everybody had so much fun. ~18 bucks each for hours of fun and card progression/acquisition was pretty cool with us.
Pretty much every card gets a chance, even the 6 drops with no creature power whatsoever could be strong in a limited format. You didn’t always get the cards you wanted, either because they didn’t drop in the boosters or another player has snagged them first. This opens up filler slots to other cards which normally wouldn’t see any play otherwise. You may have a certain soft spot for a crappy card if it helped you finish off your opponent!
Could Drafts Translate Into HearthStone?
I will wrap this up shortly, seeing as it is almost 3:00am in Australia right now. My friend and I were playing around on the forge today, and like the idea of making a draft deck and competing against others, but felt like it was an incomplete version of the limited format. Sure, the forge is awesome in it’s own right, but I felt as though it wasn’t the full draft experience.
One reason being is that you are simply given a choice of 3 cards per row which is independent of what your opponent has to choose from. This in of itself can create imbalances in a 2 player environment and could greatly skew the results of the duelling process. If the players alternated turns through a booster pack, this would result in a much fairer distribution of the card power in that given pack. I feel the forge should remain how it is because it is a nice touch, however I would love, love LOVE to see a FULL draft system implemented. Here are some ideas/thoughts as to the challenges and obstacles to get this into the game in no particular order:
Payment. I know my friends and I would happily contribute our real life cash or in game currency to buy the boosters required for the draft.
Amount of cards in booster packs. This would also affect the feasibility of the draft. From what I have seen so far, the boosters look to contain 5 cards? If this is the case, draft specific boosters may need to be created to support the format. Perhaps 12 cards per pack giving each player 36 cards? You would need more than 10 per pack for sure, as sometimes you receive cards specific to multiple classes and are thus naturally restricted from whatever deck you choose to play. 36 cards would give some leeway in building the deck.
Guaranteed rarity in boosters. From what I have seen, the rarity is completely random in HS booster packs. For drafts to be worth it, the draft boosters would need to have a consistent format. I.E. in a 12 card pack, 8 commons, 3 uncommons and a Rare OR Epic OR Legendary. This provides balance in the draft.
Potential MMR option. Would you want to draft with randoms? Or queue with a friend or two to play a draft with 5-6 other random people? Drafts can take upwards of 2 hours in the WoW TCG, and you wouldn’t want that experience to be ruined by a stranger who leaves the game. Would you make it ‘inhouse’ or ‘invite’ only, where 1 person is deemed the admin of the duel and creates their own draft party, and then HearthStone functionality would do the rest (UI, prize distribution etc). I personally think it would be awesome to queue solo or with friends against others and even have an MMR rating. I would primarily be using this for inhouses with my RL/online friends though. Opening up to randoms could create issues with abandons and what not.
As I hinted towards in my previous point, would time be an issue for some? HearthStone is a LOT faster than WoW TCG, so I don’t see this really being an issue. As long as the draft was automated and time restrictions were put on card selection during the draft (i.e. 20-30 seconds per card) and deck bulding (i.e. 5 minutes) I could really see this working smoothly through the client. I would be happy to dedicate up to 2 hours for a draft personally, but everybody is different.
Some Closing Thoughts
Okay, so my formatting is rubbish and I probably blabbed on a bit, but it’s now after 3:00am so forgive me. I would really, really love to hear the opinions of beginners and veterans alike on their thoughts on the draft format itself and whether or not people would be interested in working with Blizzard to garner enough support to incorporate it into the game. Feel free to discuss any points I have raised, or raise some more that I might have missed – or simply share your own experiences.
I'm guessing though that it would be a stretch for Blizz to implement something like this. If anything like this ever materializes it's probably based on Forge play evolving, and possibly e-sport interest. Given the casual nature of this game though, it might be a niche that stays too small for Blizz to ever adress.
Still, best you can do is get people interested in the concept, and try to promote it. Once HS goes live there's going to be a whole new generation of people learning about and getting into card games, so who knows what their interest might be.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
If you see a bad post on the forum use the report function under it, so I or someone else of the moderation team can take care of it!
Nice post VIPowL. I would love to see the FULL draft implemented as well. I would absolutely love it. I think you hit on an important point in that they would have to have some sort of custom booster packs for such a system. Also, I think the card packs in their current state do include a guaranteed Rare+, though I am not positive about this, so that's at least a start. But fr0d0b0ls0n brings up a good point as well. With 9 classes and a very rigid class-specific system, the full draft system in Hearthstone could be a LOT more luck based than traditional drafts. I do have a simple solution to remedy this though:
- When the game is created - whether local, private, team, whatever - 3 Heroes are selected at random to be the base of the match. The booster packs will be custom-tailored so that any class-specific cards within are strictly of the 3 designated Heroes. The system of just randomly selected Heroes could perhaps even be expanded upon to have some sort of weighted vote, where the top 3 most desired by the group as a whole are selected. This could either be done in a real-time "cast your votes" implementation, or perhaps even much more smoothly implemented by way of a "Preferred Heroes" list stored within everyone's Hearthstone profile. If you have no list saved, then by default it would assume you prefer a 100% random Hero selection, which will get taken into account. Maybe the end result is Warlock and Hunter get selected, and the last Hero is completely randomly generated, based solely on the fact that 1/3 of the players preferred a completely random Hero. Something like this wouldn't be too tough to implement. EDIT: Upon further review, I think the Heroes would certainly have to be 100% random, otherwise people would buy in and designate a Hero simply because they need cards of that specific class, and it could become some sort of cheap way to abuse the booster pack system.
I think the greatest challenge to this system is the time constraint. I think that since some players might buy in with real $, it would be too much of a risk for them to run long games. If something on their end crashes, or someone loses internet connection, the PR would be a nightmare, and I think they had enough of that with Diablo 3. I think if we want this implemented, we need to come up with some way to minimize the amount of time it would take to resolve such a mini-tournament. Is there any way to run a tournament like this with 3-4 players? If so, how long do you think it might take? I would like to see us work together to really polish up some type of plan for this that makes sense to Blizzard in a business sense, so as to increase the possibility of this actually being considered. I really hope we can come up with something, because I would love to play a full draft.
I think this idea is fantastic and has the potential to take this game to another level. I've played a lot of TCG's in my time and I can say by far drafting is my favorite element of them. I would definitely be behind this idea and don't think it would be as difficult as some suggest. As has been said specialized booster packs would need to be created to accommodate for a draft mode but i don't think you would need to limit it too only 3-4 classes. From what I there are more than enough neutral minions to be able make a deck then like most drafts a splash of class cards, thats how drafts felt in WoW TCG to me for the most part and I found them very enjoyable. I think not having horde and alliance minions would actually help a draft format of the game and would make it easier to create a deck.
Anyways I think it would be a great addition to what already looks to be a great game if it can be implemented properly.
I think this idea is fantastic and has the potential to take this game to another level. I've played a lot of TCG's in my time and I can say by far drafting is my favorite element of them. I would definitely be behind this idea and don't think it would be as difficult as some suggest. As has been said specialized booster packs would need to be created to accommodate for a draft mode but i don't think you would need to limit it too only 3-4 classes. From what I there are more than enough neutral minions to be able make a deck then like most drafts a splash of class cards, thats how drafts felt in WoW TCG to me for the most part and I found them very enjoyable. I think not having horde and alliance minions would actually help a draft format of the game and would make it easier to create a deck.
Anyways I think it would be a great addition to what already looks to be a great game if it can be implemented properly.
So you're suggesting the 'special' Draft booster packs just contain all neutral cards and no class-specific cards? That could definitely work.
I'm guessing though that it would be a stretch for Blizz to implement something like this. If anything like this ever materializes it's probably based on Forge play evolving, and possibly e-sport interest. Given the casual nature of this game though, it might be a niche that stays too small for Blizz to ever adress.
Still, best you can do is get people interested in the concept, and try to promote it. Once HS goes live there's going to be a whole new generation of people learning about and getting into card games, so who knows what their interest might be.
Thanks Xskarma, I'm basically thinking the same thing. It seems to me that Blizzard are caught between two minds here. They have their <20 small team dev set-up, yet they are basing the game evolution and progression on community input. This is fine if the community remains small, but if they want to address prospects such as e-Sport and the like then I am thinking they are looking for this game to catch on and garner a larger player base. Blizzard would be stuck between a rock and a hard place if they kept their small team whilst the community boomed, no matter how talented the Hearthstone dev team is. That being said, it is Blizzard and I'm sure they will dedicate more resources to the project when they find out Hearthstone is going to be a real winner.
With 9 classes (and more in the future) is almost impossible to do a good draft passing cards, at least remotely similar to a good experience playing Hearthstone. You'll have decks with no flavor, just 2-3 class specific cards and pretty similar free/common neutral cards every single time.
I agree to a certain extent frodo, however I still think variety is entirely possible. If you take a look at the WoW TCG, there are still 9 classes which a player has to align to at the end of the day. The only difference being Alliance/Horde/Monster vs Neutral/Class Specific monsters in Hearthstone. The fact that a player doesn't have to choose a faction and can create the creature component of his/her deck from the variety of neutral monsters still gives the draft some flair. Perhaps the custom draft booster size may need to be bolstered to 15 however, just to give the chance of getting 6-7 class specific minions/spells as opposed to 2-3.
So you're suggesting the 'special' Draft booster packs just contain all neutral cards and no class-specific cards? That could definitely work.
Doesn't have to not contain the class cards at all but they could be designed to have only a specific amount of class cards to ensure that there will be enough neutral cards to support decks for all players. It will be no fun if everyone was playing just neutral cards but you don't need heaps of class specific stuff to give it the feel of being a mage or a priest or whatever deck it may be. I found playing WoW TCG drafts that you would have your minion line up being about 70% of your deck and then you would have say 5-6 spells from what ever class you decided to draft for and it always seemed to work out fine. With there being no Quests and less equipment in Hearthstone then i'd say the minions might make up for 80% of the deck but i still feel its a concept that can work well in this game.
- When the game is created - whether local, private, team, whatever - 3 Heroes are selected at random to be the base of the match. The booster packs will be custom-tailored so that any class-specific cards within are strictly of the 3 designated Heroes.
The system of just randomly selected Heroes could perhaps even be expanded upon to have some sort of weighted vote, where the top 3 most desired by the group as a whole are selected. This could either be done in a real-time "cast your votes" implementation, or perhaps even much more smoothly implemented by way of a "Preferred Heroes" list stored within everyone's Hearthstone profile. If you have no list saved, then by default it would assume you prefer a 100% random Hero selection, which will get taken into account. Maybe the end result is Warlock and Hunter get selected, and the last Hero is completely randomly generated, based solely on the fact that 1/3 of the players preferred a completely random Hero. Something like this wouldn't be too tough to implement. EDIT: Upon further review, I think the Heroes would certainly have to be 100% random, otherwise people would buy in and designate a Hero simply because they need cards of that specific class, and it could become some sort of cheap way to abuse the booster pack system.
Great post Shnack! So many creative ideas, props to you buddy. I would love to playtest the idea of narrowing the Hero/Class field down to 3. The idea of having a vote or featuring preferred/favourite classes in the players profile is a fantastic idea, with the thought in mind that players are probably trying to acquire cards for a given class as well and therefore might be trying to win there way through the draft to that last warlock epic they need to complete their deck etc. As you mention though, this could be a cheaper way to card acquisition - which is not the sole purpose of the draft at all, it's more of a nice added benefit.
I think the greatest challenge to this system is the time constraint. I think that since some players might buy in with real $, it would be too much of a risk for them to run long games. If something on their end crashes, or someone loses internet connection, the PR would be a nightmare, and I think they had enough of that with Diablo 3. I think if we want this implemented, we need to come up with some way to minimize the amount of time it would take to resolve such a mini-tournament. Is there any way to run a tournament like this with 3-4 players? If so, how long do you think it might take? I would like to see us work together to really polish up some type of plan for this that makes sense to Blizzard in a business sense, so as to increase the possibility of this actually being considered. I really hope we can come up with something, because I would love to play a full draft.
Time is certainly an issue, and perhaps draft wouldn't be for everyone. However, i see the limited format as a rewarding construct, and thus something people would be inclined to dedicate a bit of time to. I'm sure most gamers would have the time for a 1-1.5hr draft, if say they can handle a solid 3+hour session on their favourite single player or multiplayer game! The disconnect issue would be a problem, looking back to WC3 their was no way a player could reconnect on the main client. If you look at Valve's approach to DOTA 2, players can reconnect to a game they have dc'd from, and common courtesy would usually see the other players pause whilst waiting. This may be a bit different in Hearthstone, and stricter rules may need to be set. If a player's net messes up for 5 minutes, perhaps a game pause can occur. On the other hand, this could delay the rest of the draft if the other players have already finished. So if it is known (i.e. an inhouse game with friends) that the player cannot come back due to power out/emergency etc, then perhaps an AI could sub in for the remainder of the draft. I dunno, these are just my thoughts and certainly not within the realms of my expertise haha.
3-4 players would be an awesome format! Probably 4 minimum would work, as i think draft can range anywhere from 4-8 players and work perfectly, with less players naturally finishing quicker. There is so much potential in this space, and I would be happy to work with the community in trying to get some vision from Blizzard.
I think this idea is fantastic and has the potential to take this game to another level. I've played a lot of TCG's in my time and I can say by far drafting is my favorite element of them. I would definitely be behind this idea and don't think it would be as difficult as some suggest. As has been said specialized booster packs would need to be created to accommodate for a draft mode but i don't think you would need to limit it too only 3-4 classes. From what I there are more than enough neutral minions to be able make a deck then like most drafts a splash of class cards, thats how drafts felt in WoW TCG to me for the most part and I found them very enjoyable. I think not having horde and alliance minions would actually help a draft format of the game and would make it easier to create a deck.
Anyways I think it would be a great addition to what already looks to be a great game if it can be implemented properly.
Another great post, and good reasoning to why no class limitation would need to occur in the draft format. I don't have an exact minion count, but from fiddling around in the forge and looking at lists there seems to be quite a large pool of neutral minions. Good point with the Alliance/Horde limitation as well, whereby when it comes to deck building the cards of the opposite faction would be unplayable and not even up for consideration if a player commits to one faction. Whereas in Hearthstone, there are more options and more deck styles due to the fact that the cards are not split into blue or red. It's all theory at this stage, would love to hear some more opinions!
This thread is fairly old, but this is relevant, so here goes...
My play in Hearthstone has picked up again since the release of the Android client, and I've been kicking around the idea of implementing an online draft outside of the game, the idea being that the actual matches would be played inside the app. The draft would be "Slow Draft" style, where the drafting happens asynchronously and there is no time limit, and then people play their assigned matches as they are able and report the results back to the host.
Would anyone here be interested in that? Or at least helping me test out my implementation of the draft portion so we can see how the class limitations go, etc.?
The main difference here is that each player needs to have the cards for the draft already, so I was thinking that for a first run, at least, I would do a pool built only from the Basic card pool...requires no monetary investment, but people will need to have unlocked the common basics for all of the classes to ensure they have the entire pool.
The point, I think, is to actually have a booster draft where a pod of players are drafting "against" each other and choosing from the same pool of cards. The arena just has individual players selecting from their own random pools...read the original posts above for an explanation of the differences.
Anyway, I've gone over the basic card pool and I'm pretty sure a 5-player draft with 4 rounds of 12-card boosters would be completely possible (and maybe even fun!) to draft. I think I'll try to set this up to do with some friends at work, but if anyone here is interested in giving it a go, let me know.
G'day my fellow HearthStone awaiters!
I was discussing the idea with a TCG enthusiast friend of mine earlier today regarding how awesome it would be if HearthStone had it's own variant of the traditional TCG draft, also known as limited construction.
The Basic Idea
So, to provide a little background - about 8 or so of my friends played a lot of the WoW TCG card game and loved it. We had practice duels and entered local tourneys with our constructed decks, but the most FUN format was always when we had our own draft. One of the lads (usually me because I was closest to the card shop in the city) would pick up n x 3 booster packs usually of the same set, we would all meet up at the host's house and get into the draft!
How Does the Draft Work?
Sorry if you have played drafts before, I am just trying to provide an explanation for those who may be unfamiliar with them. For the WoW TCG - Each booster pack contained 15 cards. Let's say we have 8 players for the draft. This would give a total of 360 cards (8 x 45 cards). The way the cards are distributed areas follows:
At the end of the drafting phase, each player will have 45 cards to build their 30 card limited deck (in constructed play the deck size was 60). Throughout the draft, players should gradually get an idea of what type of deck they want to be building. Some powerful cards are worth building a deck around itself, but sometimes the draft just won’t provide you with the meat of the deck to help out your big card. For example, in the WoW TCG you could pull a really nice Alliance monster in your first pack, but you might have really bad luck in finding alliance/neutral monsters to aid your cause and may end up having to change to Horde. It’s usually a good idea to leave your options open until the 2nd pack and then begin to focus after that.
Once the player has decided on his/her 30 card deck, they are then allowed to select a hero from the current set/block of 3 sets (not every set had a Hero for each class). Usually for fun, my friends and I would keep our deck a secret until the duelling begun, as well as any of the sweet cards we may have pulled in our boosters.
We would then create random first round brackets, and have three rounds of duels, usually in swiss format, i.e. the winners keep playing the winners. In this format, our winner would come out 3-0 in the limited format with the top deck.
Who Gets to Keep the Cards?
Once the duels have finished, each player deconstructs their decks and puts the rares and epics into the middle of the table. From 1st to 8th place, each player selects one card from the whole draft pool to claim for their own until there are no rares/epics left remaining.
Note: Usually the first pick cards as you can imagine were the cards that would fetch the most money or have the most value in that players constructed deck. Uncommons and commons were usually anybodies for the taking, remember we were all good mates and usually pretty generous with helping each other out.
What Makes Drafts So Fun?
I think drafting/limited construction is the best format available in TCGs. Some reasons include:
Could Drafts Translate Into HearthStone?
I will wrap this up shortly, seeing as it is almost 3:00am in Australia right now. My friend and I were playing around on the forge today, and like the idea of making a draft deck and competing against others, but felt like it was an incomplete version of the limited format. Sure, the forge is awesome in it’s own right, but I felt as though it wasn’t the full draft experience.
One reason being is that you are simply given a choice of 3 cards per row which is independent of what your opponent has to choose from. This in of itself can create imbalances in a 2 player environment and could greatly skew the results of the duelling process. If the players alternated turns through a booster pack, this would result in a much fairer distribution of the card power in that given pack. I feel the forge should remain how it is because it is a nice touch, however I would love, love LOVE to see a FULL draft system implemented. Here are some ideas/thoughts as to the challenges and obstacles to get this into the game in no particular order:
Some Closing Thoughts
Okay, so my formatting is rubbish and I probably blabbed on a bit, but it’s now after 3:00am so forgive me. I would really, really love to hear the opinions of beginners and veterans alike on their thoughts on the draft format itself and whether or not people would be interested in working with Blizzard to garner enough support to incorporate it into the game. Feel free to discuss any points I have raised, or raise some more that I might have missed – or simply share your own experiences.
Cheers,
VIPowL.
Nice read, you make it sound fun. :)
I'm guessing though that it would be a stretch for Blizz to implement something like this. If anything like this ever materializes it's probably based on Forge play evolving, and possibly e-sport interest. Given the casual nature of this game though, it might be a niche that stays too small for Blizz to ever adress.
Still, best you can do is get people interested in the concept, and try to promote it. Once HS goes live there's going to be a whole new generation of people learning about and getting into card games, so who knows what their interest might be.
If you see a bad post on the forum use the report function under it, so I or someone else of the moderation team can take care of it!
Nice post VIPowL. I would love to see the FULL draft implemented as well. I would absolutely love it. I think you hit on an important point in that they would have to have some sort of custom booster packs for such a system. Also, I think the card packs in their current state do include a guaranteed Rare+, though I am not positive about this, so that's at least a start. But fr0d0b0ls0n brings up a good point as well. With 9 classes and a very rigid class-specific system, the full draft system in Hearthstone could be a LOT more luck based than traditional drafts. I do have a simple solution to remedy this though:
- When the game is created - whether local, private, team, whatever - 3 Heroes are selected at random to be the base of the match. The booster packs will be custom-tailored so that any class-specific cards within are strictly of the 3 designated Heroes.
The system of just randomly selected Heroes could perhaps even be expanded upon to have some sort of weighted vote, where the top 3 most desired by the group as a whole are selected. This could either be done in a real-time "cast your votes" implementation, or perhaps even much more smoothly implemented by way of a "Preferred Heroes" list stored within everyone's Hearthstone profile. If you have no list saved, then by default it would assume you prefer a 100% random Hero selection, which will get taken into account. Maybe the end result is Warlock and Hunter get selected, and the last Hero is completely randomly generated, based solely on the fact that 1/3 of the players preferred a completely random Hero. Something like this wouldn't be too tough to implement.
EDIT: Upon further review, I think the Heroes would certainly have to be 100% random, otherwise people would buy in and designate a Hero simply because they need cards of that specific class, and it could become some sort of cheap way to abuse the booster pack system.
I think the greatest challenge to this system is the time constraint. I think that since some players might buy in with real $, it would be too much of a risk for them to run long games. If something on their end crashes, or someone loses internet connection, the PR would be a nightmare, and I think they had enough of that with Diablo 3. I think if we want this implemented, we need to come up with some way to minimize the amount of time it would take to resolve such a mini-tournament. Is there any way to run a tournament like this with 3-4 players? If so, how long do you think it might take? I would like to see us work together to really polish up some type of plan for this that makes sense to Blizzard in a business sense, so as to increase the possibility of this actually being considered. I really hope we can come up with something, because I would love to play a full draft.
I think this idea is fantastic and has the potential to take this game to another level. I've played a lot of TCG's in my time and I can say by far drafting is my favorite element of them. I would definitely be behind this idea and don't think it would be as difficult as some suggest. As has been said specialized booster packs would need to be created to accommodate for a draft mode but i don't think you would need to limit it too only 3-4 classes. From what I there are more than enough neutral minions to be able make a deck then like most drafts a splash of class cards, thats how drafts felt in WoW TCG to me for the most part and I found them very enjoyable. I think not having horde and alliance minions would actually help a draft format of the game and would make it easier to create a deck.
Anyways I think it would be a great addition to what already looks to be a great game if it can be implemented properly.
So you're suggesting the 'special' Draft booster packs just contain all neutral cards and no class-specific cards? That could definitely work.
Wow thanks for the positive responses guys! Let's try to fuel some more discussion.
Thanks Xskarma, I'm basically thinking the same thing. It seems to me that Blizzard are caught between two minds here. They have their <20 small team dev set-up, yet they are basing the game evolution and progression on community input. This is fine if the community remains small, but if they want to address prospects such as e-Sport and the like then I am thinking they are looking for this game to catch on and garner a larger player base. Blizzard would be stuck between a rock and a hard place if they kept their small team whilst the community boomed, no matter how talented the Hearthstone dev team is. That being said, it is Blizzard and I'm sure they will dedicate more resources to the project when they find out Hearthstone is going to be a real winner.
I agree to a certain extent frodo, however I still think variety is entirely possible. If you take a look at the WoW TCG, there are still 9 classes which a player has to align to at the end of the day. The only difference being Alliance/Horde/Monster vs Neutral/Class Specific monsters in Hearthstone. The fact that a player doesn't have to choose a faction and can create the creature component of his/her deck from the variety of neutral monsters still gives the draft some flair. Perhaps the custom draft booster size may need to be bolstered to 15 however, just to give the chance of getting 6-7 class specific minions/spells as opposed to 2-3.
Doesn't have to not contain the class cards at all but they could be designed to have only a specific amount of class cards to ensure that there will be enough neutral cards to support decks for all players. It will be no fun if everyone was playing just neutral cards but you don't need heaps of class specific stuff to give it the feel of being a mage or a priest or whatever deck it may be. I found playing WoW TCG drafts that you would have your minion line up being about 70% of your deck and then you would have say 5-6 spells from what ever class you decided to draft for and it always seemed to work out fine. With there being no Quests and less equipment in Hearthstone then i'd say the minions might make up for 80% of the deck but i still feel its a concept that can work well in this game.
Great post Shnack! So many creative ideas, props to you buddy. I would love to playtest the idea of narrowing the Hero/Class field down to 3. The idea of having a vote or featuring preferred/favourite classes in the players profile is a fantastic idea, with the thought in mind that players are probably trying to acquire cards for a given class as well and therefore might be trying to win there way through the draft to that last warlock epic they need to complete their deck etc. As you mention though, this could be a cheaper way to card acquisition - which is not the sole purpose of the draft at all, it's more of a nice added benefit.
Time is certainly an issue, and perhaps draft wouldn't be for everyone. However, i see the limited format as a rewarding construct, and thus something people would be inclined to dedicate a bit of time to. I'm sure most gamers would have the time for a 1-1.5hr draft, if say they can handle a solid 3+hour session on their favourite single player or multiplayer game! The disconnect issue would be a problem, looking back to WC3 their was no way a player could reconnect on the main client. If you look at Valve's approach to DOTA 2, players can reconnect to a game they have dc'd from, and common courtesy would usually see the other players pause whilst waiting. This may be a bit different in Hearthstone, and stricter rules may need to be set. If a player's net messes up for 5 minutes, perhaps a game pause can occur. On the other hand, this could delay the rest of the draft if the other players have already finished. So if it is known (i.e. an inhouse game with friends) that the player cannot come back due to power out/emergency etc, then perhaps an AI could sub in for the remainder of the draft. I dunno, these are just my thoughts and certainly not within the realms of my expertise haha.
3-4 players would be an awesome format! Probably 4 minimum would work, as i think draft can range anywhere from 4-8 players and work perfectly, with less players naturally finishing quicker. There is so much potential in this space, and I would be happy to work with the community in trying to get some vision from Blizzard.
Another great post, and good reasoning to why no class limitation would need to occur in the draft format. I don't have an exact minion count, but from fiddling around in the forge and looking at lists there seems to be quite a large pool of neutral minions. Good point with the Alliance/Horde limitation as well, whereby when it comes to deck building the cards of the opposite faction would be unplayable and not even up for consideration if a player commits to one faction. Whereas in Hearthstone, there are more options and more deck styles due to the fact that the cards are not split into blue or red. It's all theory at this stage, would love to hear some more opinions!
This thread is fairly old, but this is relevant, so here goes...
My play in Hearthstone has picked up again since the release of the Android client, and I've been kicking around the idea of implementing an online draft outside of the game, the idea being that the actual matches would be played inside the app. The draft would be "Slow Draft" style, where the drafting happens asynchronously and there is no time limit, and then people play their assigned matches as they are able and report the results back to the host.
Would anyone here be interested in that? Or at least helping me test out my implementation of the draft portion so we can see how the class limitations go, etc.?
The main difference here is that each player needs to have the cards for the draft already, so I was thinking that for a first run, at least, I would do a pool built only from the Basic card pool...requires no monetary investment, but people will need to have unlocked the common basics for all of the classes to ensure they have the entire pool.
Let me know if you're interested.
Don't we already have arena?
"Put your face in the light!" - Tirion Fordring
The point, I think, is to actually have a booster draft where a pod of players are drafting "against" each other and choosing from the same pool of cards. The arena just has individual players selecting from their own random pools...read the original posts above for an explanation of the differences.
Anyway, I've gone over the basic card pool and I'm pretty sure a 5-player draft with 4 rounds of 12-card boosters would be completely possible (and maybe even fun!) to draft. I think I'll try to set this up to do with some friends at work, but if anyone here is interested in giving it a go, let me know.
Interesting idea but it might be to difficult to impliment. I think blizzard might just stick with the arena for now.
Time is precious. Waste it wisely. Legend Seasons: 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 17
Current deck: Not playing much anymore
Highest rank: legend rank 9 Highest finish: legend rank 103 Infinite Arena Player