Certain analogies can be drawn between chess and Hearthstone. In chess, each player starts with an identical set of pieces. In Hearthstone, most cards are relatively balanced in terms of strength. That means that, while players may be able to synergize their cards in a more effective way than their opponent, the individual “pieces” (i.e. the cards) are going to be roughly equally strong for each player.
For this reason, in both chess and Hearthstone, victories are often initiated by gaining the smallest of advantages over an opponent. In a chess game between two equal opponents, the capturing of a single free pawn in chess can result in a win, even though this is only a tiny portion of the starting board. This occurs for two potential reasons. First, if one players forces equal trades amongst the pieces, eventually the board will reach a state where that single pawn is a massive advantage (for example, if the remaining boards are 2 pawns for one player and 1 pawn for the other). Second, the extra piece acts as an extra tool on the board, improving that player’s board position and potentially allowing him to force uneven trading of the pieces. The first reason closely resembles the concept of card advantage in Hearthstone, and the second reason closely resembles the concept of tempo, which will be focuses of this article.
The analogy between chess and Hearthstone can only be taken so far, however. While the “pieces” in a deck are of roughly similar strength, they aren’t identical, meaning that even extremely similar cards can be used differently. Second, while you control the cards in your deck, you can’t completely control which cards you draw and when you draw them, meaning that the options available to you at any given time will likely be different almost every game. Of course, the same will be happening with your opponent. As such, learning strategy in Hearthstone is much different than in chess. In chess, a perfect player could theoretically predict every move that the opponent might do, prevent it, and never lose; there is nothing “hidden” to the player in chess.
In Hearthstone, you do not know what plays your opponent has available, only the moves that they MIGHT have available. As such, good plays in Hearthstone become more of a statistical matter. You cannot make plays that are guaranteed to be the right moves; you can only make plays that are statistically likely to be the right moves. You won’t come out ahead of every such play; whenever statistics are involved, sometimes you will win, and sometimes you will lose. However, if you play the odds correctly on every move, more often than not, in totality, you will come out ahead. As such, playing Hearthstone well is somewhat different than many genres of game, where you can see an action and be told to respond with a specific action.
The Three Competing Resources
In the long run, the goal of these articles will be to teach Hearthstone strategies. But due to the wide variety of options, we need to first start with the basics of tempo, card advantage, and the heroes’ life points. These are the three primary resources within the game, and often, advancing one tends to occur at the expense of at least one other. Understanding these trade-offs is necessary for understanding more complicated strategy elements. As a summary, these three resources are:
Tempo: References the rate at which you can spend mana in order to put minions on the board or remove enemy minions.
Card advantage: References the number of cards each player has on the board and in hand.
Hero life: The remaining life the hero has; when it hits zero, you lose.
Tempo
Tempo is a reference to how quickly you can spend your mana in order to gain position on the board. Note that many card game players will also include the health of the enemy hero when it comes to tempo, defining it as the pace at which the game can be brought to an end. While this is a reasonable definition, for the purposes of this article, tempo will reference the rate at which you utilize your mana to have lasting effects on your board; this is largely done so that the hero’s life can be thought of as a separate resource.
Position on the board accounts for the number of minions you have on the board, the strength of those minions, and if applicable, any special effects the minions might have which will affect who can control the board. For example, a large minion and multiple small minions can have roughly equal amounts of tempo. At its most simplistic point of view, if player 1 is able to use what they currently have on the board to kill everything player 2 has on the board, and player 1 still maintains some minions after this is done, then player 1 has a tempo advantage.
Some cards may have weak stats in exchange for abilities which affect the board. For example, compare Demolisher to Kirin Tor Mage, which have the same mana cost. The Demolisher has weaker stats but its effect has the ability to damage enemy minions on the board without taking any damage itself. This ability will do damage every turn as long as the Demolisher stays alive. So Demolisher trades tempo in the form of stats in exchange for tempo in the form of its special ability. Which card is more effective depends on the situation.
Finally, the first player to generate tempo tends to have an advantage. It is often said that the best defense is a good offense; this true moreso in Hearthstone than other games, largely due to the ability of the attacker to choose which targets they wish to attack in an advantageous way. For example, look at the board below. Each player starts with an identical board. But because Player 1 chooses which minions attack which, the net result is a board position which greatly favors Player 1; since the boards started equal, if Player 2 had been the one attacking, the result would have been in Player 2’s favor. As such, it must always be remembered that tempo will tend to favor the player who plays minions first (or more specifically, the player who gets to choose the attacks).
In this article, tempo will reference the rate at which a player manages to spend their full mana bar in order to gain minions which are purely focused on gaining control of the board. Some minions may have effects which don’t affect the board position; such minions will generally have lower stats relative to their cost to compensate for this, which causes them to be a tempo loss compared to other minions of similar cost. As a simple example of this, consider the 6-cost minion, Priestess of Elune. By comparison to Chillwind Yeti, we can see that Priestess of Elune has comparable tempo to a 4-cost minion; and we can see her stats are several points below a basic 6-cost minion such as Boulderfist Ogre. Unlike the other two minions, Priestess of Elune heals the hero for 4 health when she enters play. As such, Priestess of Elune is a card which trades tempo in exchange for healing the hero.
So, why does tempo matter? Well, tempo in general results in damage to the hero. If you constantly have minions on the board, and are playing them faster than your opponent, you will be able to start attacking the enemy hero with those minions every turn. For example, imagine you saw the following cards being played by each player each turn. It’s hard to imagine that Player 2 would be able to survive much past turn 5, even if Player 2 were to constantly keep healing themselves. So in essence, consistently having much higher tempo than your opponent will tend to result in a win.
Card Advantage
At its most simplistic level, card advantage is simply the number of cards you have on the table plus your hand. At the more complex level, partially used cards on the table may not count as full cards anymore. For example, a large minions which has been substantially damaged may no longer have the value of a full card anymore. Consider a Boulderfist Ogre damaged to 1 health; it is now nowhere near as valuable as a Boulderfist Ogre at full health due to the fact that it might be easily killed. Another aspect of this is cards who generate much of their value from their Battlecry. Consider, for example, the card Ironbeak Owl. The card, while a 2-cost card, has substantially weaker stats than most 2-drop cards because it has a battecry which silences a minion. As a result, once it’s on the board, some of its value has been “used up”, and to a degree, it can be thought of a card which only now has a fraction of its value remaining.
Card advantage matters for two reasons. The first reason is that card advantage is a source of tempo. For example, when you have 10 mana, if you only have a single card in your hand, you are unlikely to be able to spend that full mana in a turn. This leads to a loss of tempo, and as mentioned previously, a consistent loss of tempo to your opponent will usually result in a loss. The second reason card advantage matters is options. If you only have one card in your hand, even if it’s an extremely expensive card, such that you can play it without tempo loss, that card is your only option; you either play it or you don’t. On the other hand, if you have an extremely large hand, you have options, and can play the cards that are most beneficial to the situation.
By default, a player draws one card per turn. If the game lasts long enough, players will eventually have 10 mana to spend per turn. Most cards in your deck will cost well less than 10 mana, so if the player only uses the default drawing mechanism, cards are likely to be consumed faster than they are drawn by default. Thus, in a long game, if a player relies solely on the single card draw per turn, they can expect to eventually run out of cards and reach what is known as the “top-decking” phase, where you essentially draw a card and then have to play it that turn in order to keep up with your opponent, regardless of what the card is.
Hero Life
Hero life is probably the simplest of the three resources to understand; you start with 30, and if you hit zero, you lose the game. So in some ways, hero life could be considered to be the most important resource, much in the way that the King is the most important piece in chess. However, in practice, a player should learn to think of their life as another resource. Until your hero’s health hits zero, you haven’t lost; it doesn’t matter how much damage your hero takes as long as the enemy hero’s health hits zero first.
As was mentioned before, tempo tends to lead to consistent damage to the enemy hero every turn, and in a long game, card advantage tends to lead to tempo. Thus, particularly in the early game, it can often be beneficial to trade a small amount of hero life in order to gain tempo and card advantage, with the goal being for this to result in a large advantage in hero life later in the game.
The Three Resources: How Much Do They Matter?
All three resources have at least some effect on the game. Basically, in a nut shell, the goal is to reduce the hero’s life to zero. However, until it hits zero, it does not matter how low it is; bringing the enemy hero’s health to zero while yours is at one is still a win. In general, the enemy hero’s health can repetitively be brought lower each turn by generating greater tempo than the opponent. Consistently generating tempo requires having both enough cards to play and the right cards to play, which requires card advantage over your opponent. You will often have the opportunity to sacrifice your hero’s health to generate additional tempo and/or card advantage, or sacrificing these things to add to hero health. This is the interaction of these three resources amongst each other.
Differences in hero life and card advantage tend to be less important when they are high. For example, if Player 1 has 8 cards in hand and Player 2 has 7, while it is true that Player 1 has a card advantage, the difference at the moment is negligible. Both players are likely to have plenty of options available to them to spend their full mana bar. On the other hand, if Player 1 has 2 cards and Player 2 has 1 card, then the same different in card advantage has now become extremely relevant. Of course, that doesn’t mean card advantage should be completely neglected with a large hand; if the players are forced into trading cards 1:1 with each other, which can often happen, then the 8-7 card advantage will likely eventually become a 2-1 card advantage over time if nothing is done to reverse the situation. Similarly, hero life becomes far more important as it falls low. You don’t lose until your health hits zero, and that needs to be remembered. Thus, taking a few points of damage when a hero has full health is almost irrelevant, especially in comparison to tempo and card advantage. On the other hand, by the time the hero’s health is down to only a few life, that few points of damage becomes much more relevant.
Unlike card advantage and hero life, small differences in tempo can be very significant, even if the individual tempo of each player is large. Tempo is far more easily traded between the players, meaning that a player can often easily force a large board with only a small difference in tempo into being a small board with the same difference in tempo. Beyond that, however, a small advantage in tempo tends to give a player far greater options for clearing the enemy’s board. Once this starts happening, that player can gain solid control of the board, and begin forcing trades that are in their benefit. In this way, the tempo tends to snowball out of control, where a small advantage in tempo becomes and increasingly larger and larger increase in tempo every turn due to the winning player losing small amounts of their tempo to remove large amounts of the enemy’s tempo. As such, gaining early board presence can be extremely important in Hearthstone, even if the minions are weak.
Basic Two-Phase Game
A player can expect a standard game to go through two main phases. The first phase involves the players jockeying for board position, often trading tempo and getting in free hits on the enemy hero when it does not result in a loss of tempo. At some point, one player may begin to ignore tempo and begin attempting to simply kill the enemy hero, particularly if they can follow up on later turns with spells or weapons (which tend to do large and immediate damage). Any advantages in terms of the hero’s lives will give them an advantage once the race to burn the enemy hero begins. Different decks will tend to use different combinations of these two phases.
For example, a rush deck has the goal of trying to kill the enemy hero as quickly as possible. Such decks will often completely neglect enemy minions unless then are a uniquely large tempo advantage, and will focus almost entirely on doing as much damage to the enemy hero as possible. Such decks recognize that over a long amount of time they are likely to fall behind on tempo, in part because they are usually allowing the enemy to choose how the minions will attack each other; however, the goal of such a deck is to do so much damage to the enemy hero before this happens that they cannot recover.
On the other hand, a control deck may do completely the opposite of a rush deck. Such decks will almost never focus on attacking the enemy hero directly unless there are no enemy minions to neutralize. So for example, such a decks would often attack an enemy’s 1/1 minion using their own 7/7 minion, despite the fact this is a large loss of hero damage, and will only ignore enemy minion’s if they can kill the enemy hero no that turn.
A good example of a deck that has a noticeable blend to these two phases is a version of the Mage deck. In the early game, such a Mage deck will attempt to quickly drop a limited number of low-drop minions. They then proceed to kill off any minions with direct-damage spells, hide their minions behind minions with taunt, or freeze enemy minions to prevent them from attacking (or some combination of these tactics). The goal is not to simply pick at the enemy hero’s life for several turns, trying to reduce them to roughly half health. Around turn 7 or so, the Mage will often lose their board control, but the goal up to this point was simply to damage the enemy hero to roughly half health. At this point, the Mage will take advantage of the fact that they have several spells that can do large damage to the enemy hero to kill the hero, even though they have lost tempo by this point. Recognize that the point of this description is not to say that all Mage decks will play like this; rather, this was presented to demonstrate how a deck will start by utilizing tempo to attack the enemy hero’s life then use the advantage gained from this to finish the game.
...Watch for Part 2 Next Wednesday where Sar dives into more common situations with the three resources and how you can make the best choices given the circumstances!
5
Is it just me or is Captain's Parrot the most common beast you get from Webspinner? I would rather get an Angry Chicken!
4
Oh man. This is going to be a tough choice between Ice Crown, which I love right now.
2
I would like to see more Dragon cards, and Dragon cards that interact like the Beasts and Demons currently do. Some Dragon cards that might be fun:
Anyhoo, just some thoughts.
1
Deadly Shot will take this out at any +/+ even with stealth if you can get it alone on the board.
3
I love the artwork on this card. I hope the artist does more in the future.
4
Are there any good replacements for this card? I don't have it yet. :( I've been playing Stranglethorn Tiger and Spectral Knight as substitutes. However, I was thinking maybe Sludge Belcher be a better substitute than Stranglethorn since it has Deathrattle?