Opening Moves Week Day 4 - Ahead or Behind
Blizzard is holding "Opening Moves Week" across all their Esports titles to celebrate the start of the new competitive year. Each day, a small blog post is going to be made which will talk about a different part of a competitive match. Today's topic is Ahead or Behind and tomorrow they'll be talking about your first five turns.
Quote from Kevin HovdestadOver the past three days, we’ve found a win condition, built a deck to support it, and successfully chosen an opening hand during the mulligan—now, it’s time to put all of that planning into practice as the game begins.
As the game begins, how your individual turns will play out is dictated by whether you are playing from ahead or behind—or, simply put, whether you are winning or losing given the current game state. When the game starts, the player who goes first is theoretically ahead, since they get to “ask the question” first with their initial play. If they get on the board, the player going second now must “answer” that play, and who is doing the asking or answering will shift and change over the course of the game from there.
Evaluating your opening hand, you’ll have some judgements to make about how to proceed. What are you anticipating from your opponent? Is your best play to go aggressive, or do you need to hold on to cards to maximize their value later? Before your first card ever hits the board, you need to know where you intend to take the game, and tweak your game plan as your opponent responds in kind.
Staying AliveWhen you're ahead, you need to convert your lead into a win before your opponent reaches their win condition. Push to deal damage before they can clear the board. If your opponent needs minions to buff, keep their board clear so they can't catch up effectively.
Thinking critically, even in this early stage before you’ve started to introduce new variables from your opponent, is a great way to improve your odds of winning. Suppose you’re going second against a Warlock who has played a Flame Imp on his first turn. Do you have a way in your hand to remove it from the board? Is doing so the right use of that card, given what else you are now expecting from the Warlock having seen it?
There are also gambles and risks to consider. Maybe you use The Coin to play a Novice Engineer, since that’s the only play you have available. Would you have been better served to risk taking some chip damage from the Flame Imp to keep The Coin? If your Warlock opponent ignores your Novice Engineer to do extra damage, maybe your gamble will pay off, and you can utilize another minion or spell in tandem with it to kill the Flame Imp next turn. Or, maybe you gave them an easy way to cycle with Mortal Coil…
This is all just in preparation for the very first turn—so don’t miss Day 5, when we’re going to look at how you can navigate a couple of critical scenarios over the first five turns! We round out the early game and the end of Opening Moves week tomorrow.
not bad not bad
Good guide, it should be in game
They should allow new players some "class packs" I think once they figure out a direction they would like to head or even try. Only Neutrals/that class, guaranteed 3 class?? idk
They baited me here with Murloc Tinyfin, I can't resist him & his cuteness :3
I don't mind Blizzard being a little basic and general on their guide layouts, but bad advice for new players just isn't helpful. I'm not sure how many situations in the current meta warrant using The Coin for a Novice Engineer, even if it's your only play. You really want to burn the tempo advantage from the coin to put a crappy 1/1 on the board and cycle? The Coin is inherently more valuable than cycling, unless you are effing desperate.
It gives me a sour feeling that they so casually talk about "being behind" and that the player going first "is theoretically ahead", when this is one of the most frustrating balance issues in Hearthstone and the reason why Aggro oftentimes is and has been the dominating playstyle.
When you play as Hunter or against Hunter, though the same is true for most aggressive decks, the Coin can very well determine the outcome of the game. If the aggressive player goes first, you either have one, better two early board clears and a heal and another way of stabilizing, or you just lost. It's not all that much fun, really. And even worse when it happens in Arena.
I know it's not the point of this topic, but when I read this, I had to think of the many soulcrushing experiences of losing because of a coinflip, or because the answers to early game aggression just didn't want to show up. One can only hope it gets at least a little better again once Patches disappears.
In a Meta with ~70% control decks completely dominating everything, I doubt Aggro is a problem
Aside from grossly exaggerating, I suppose you haven't played Hearthstone for that long yet, have you?
https://www.vicioussyndicate.com/vs-data-reaper-report-78/
just read on the data. Seems more like you have not played the game in a long time
This should be introduced as tips and advanced tutorial that also rewards packs for new players to start playing the game and not outsourced, to most players those guides are kinda obvious at this point but I wish I knew those points as a new player..
Make a PVE advanced tutorial about advanced mechanics currently in game you don't know how to mulligan..
They could make sort of "Puzzle mode" with levels like "win this turn" there are tonnes of those in like yugioh and they are ton of fun and teach a lot about right ordering of things and interactions.
Maybe Blizz could include new player guides like this into the game, instead of making new players go through an incredibly boring grind to unlock all basic cards for each class? The new player experience in HS is incredibly bad, these guides on some website that new players might not even read are not helping a lot imo. It's a nice idea to educate the new players, but I think they chose a wrong method with these little guides outside of the game.
You should play your account on a new region, I just started playing in NA and was surprised about how annoying the grind was to unlock the basic cards. Also I just got a friend to start playing and he experienced the same. You have to play around 50-100 games against the AI until you finally unlock all classes basic cards. It's repetitive and NOT fun. If they would guide the players through a couple of these matches and explain the importance of mulligan, curve, board control and game plan, then I'm sure more players would stick to the game and not quit frustrated.
btw: when you are done grinding the basic cards, the fun begins in the ladder at rank 20, facing razakus priests and tempo rogues.
Yeah, my friend that started playing bought some packs very early. If he didn't, I'm sure he would have stopped playing already. F2P just isn't fun at all nowadays. I started playing in the beta, so I had a different start, but if you want to move higher in the ladder then rank 20-16 you have to grind for a long time of invest money.