To understand my “Hearthstone problem” involves delving back into my past to the days of my youth. As a child born in the year of Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh! (1996) I was surrounded by the cross media hybrid of cartoons and card games. Yu-Gi-Oh! was my preference but in short collectible card games require two things to prosper as a hobby, firstly is expendable income to purchase booster packs / booster boxes and secondly is friends and colleagues to play the game with. I as a child had neither. Yet what little cards I did have didn’t stop my imagination flourishing as I dreamt of a world where (like Yu-Gi-Oh!) professional card games were a thing and the rockstars of the world. I imagined living the dream of rockstar, expert duelist and from all of this it should be clear I was a pretty cool kid right?
So what’s this all got to do with Hearthstone you ask? Well Hearthstone essentially goes most of the way to making that dream a reality. Gone are the days when I can no longer afford the cards I need for my decks, Hearthstone allows me to earn and craft the cards I need. Gone are the days when I yearn to duel but cannot find an opponent, Hearthstone has thousands at the ready. Aside from the standard mode of ranked and unranked duelling the game also allows play in The Arena game mode which for all you Yu-Gi-Oh! buffs out there is like that time the gang gets sucked into the virtual world by Noah and must select their deck of cards on the fly before they battle. Its also a pretty rad and fair competition mode as well.
Finally the game also toys around with the idea of the Tavern Brawl game mode which again for you Yu-Gi-Oh! aficionados is like the Dungeon Dice Monsters equivalent in that it takes the general idea of the card game and twists and transforms it into its own unique thing. It changes weekly as well so there’s always the allure to come back each week and see the latest random event on offer.
Granted I’m not going into the slight problems of the game such as the limited amount of decks you can keep constructed at once, the fact that most players just copy a professional players deck or that Tavern Brawls forces you to construct a new deck every week (if required) and doesn’t allow for storing of more than one at a time. The truth is though in my eyes none of these problems actually matter because I never thought I’d see the day where I’d live out this impossible, childhood fantasy. Yet here I stand a duelist trying to make his way in the world and become the king of games. It’s time to duel!