Hearthpwn

10 years. A decade. Three hundred fifteen and a half million seconds, give or take. A long time. If you had a time machine, or perhaps some arcane magic, and could go back that far in time, you would find a completely different world.

A world where Iron Man 3 is the movie everyone is talking about. Where the hottest dance song is "Get Lucky", a Daft Punk collaboration with Pharrell Williams. Where Nelson Mandela, Shirley Temple and Fast and Furious' Paul Walker are all still alive. Where we were playing games on Playstation 3's and Xbox 360's. Different times.

And if you go back precisely 10 years, then on that day, the 23rd of May 2013, the database and news site called HearthPwn, for the recently announced Blizzard game Hearthstone, was officially launched. First by word of mouth, and shortly after that with an official announcement on sister site MMO-Champion.

When visiting the site on that first day you were greeted with this post, announcing that HearthPwn was the only site around with a datamined and complete collection of the cards in the game so far.

The game was at that point not even playable outside Blizzard offices. People made due with physical cards, made with cropped art, and simulation programs like Cockatrice, where people had to maintain and apply the rules of the game manually, like you would in physical card games.

Many parts of the game were not invented yet, or were in a totally different state. There's no Battlegrounds, Standard mode or even Tavern Brawl yet. The Arena was at that point still called "The Forge" and was initially announced as being a game mode where you would have multiple people pay several unopened card packs to start the game and then work like a physical card game Draft mode, where all the packs get opened and people pick 1 card from the total before the next person picks a card, round and round till the cards are gone. You were supposed to craft a deck this way and then play the other players with it. And at the end of this you would keep your cards you picked for your collection.

Different times.

But there's a thread of familiarity running through the decade since then. A string of posts and guides and forum discussions centered around the greatest online collectible cardgame there ever was.

There were news posts and guide posts, big posts and small posts. Arena posts and Brawl posts and esports posts. Serious posts and silly posts and all kinds of posts.

And there were decks. Literally more than a million decks. Upvoted decks and downvoted decks and decks that went really hard. Decks with stories.

And there is 1 other connecting factor between the then and the now. People. People who made the site and used it. Moderated it and wrote for it. This site would not have become what it is and what it was without people. Tons of people. So we want to thank all of them, from the developers to those word of mouth visitors in the early evening of May the 23rd 2013, to the people who only today signed up, the freelancers and the volunteers, even the people that got banned occasionally.

You are all part of what made this decade on HearthPwn what it was, so from the bottom of our hearts, THANK YOU!

DiabloFans: The Diablo 4 Interactive Map - Mobile Friendly!