Hearthstone

[yuris125]

In my experience (admittedly not much, under 2 years of playing Magic + about 1 month of Hearthstone before I got bored), it all depends on definition of pay to win. Obviously, you need powerful cards to build the best decks, and powerful cards are usually most expensive as well. But it is equally true that at a high level, both you and your opponents will likely be players who are not limited by card availability - and that's where skill matters. Hearthstone is better than Magic in this regard, because budget decks are still good enough to challenge optimal decks - they may have a 40% winrate, but it's still enough to win and have fun. In Magic, lands alone can cost over $100 (even in cheaper formats), and while you may have budget substitues for creatures and spells, you won't be able to play your deck to maximum potential without a perfect manabase

Where Magic trumps Hearthstone is in communities it creates - and that not only helps you make friends, but also makes borrowing cards much easier. Hearthstone is a collectible card game without trading, and being unable to trade for cards or borrow them is a big limitation

Also to follow up on the discussion whether it's more difficult to play an aggro or a control deck from a few pages ago - as someone who favours aggressive red decks in Magic, I often find myself on the receiving end of "aggro requires no skill" discussions. These statements are mostly made by players who never played those aggro decks. It is true that playing aggro may involve fewer choices; the thing is, each choice ends up mattering much more. Aggro decks in general are muck less forgiving than control. If a control player stabilises, he/she will almost never lose, regardless of mistakes he/she makes. If an aggro player makes a mistake, it may well give the opponent an extra turn, and that extra turn may be all they need to stabilise. Knowing the order in which spells should be played for maximum damage output, when to play them on your turn, when to keep up mana for them on opponent's turn, when to go for the kill, when and how to play around counter spells - taking all this into account requires a huge amount of skill. In Magic at least, any good deck requires a lot of skill to play to its full potential - and from the time I played Hearthstone, I believe the same is true there

[Ichabod]

My opinion is that Hearthstone doesn't require money for you to have fun. I never spent anything on the game (the dollars to reais conversion is pretty harsh), but I had loads of fun, mostly with Arena. I think crafting decks with what you have is also pretty fun - you may not reach top positions (it is possible, though it may take quite long), but it's fun beating people that drop 3, 4 legendaries in a row (not that I ever experienced the sensation, since I'm a noob ).

[Kuro]

Hearthstone is P2W only in the sense that you can put money into it. All you get for money is your cards faster, so the free player can always catch up, it is just that they will do more slowly. Compared to most trading card games, Hearthstone is one of the least P2W out there.

[WilliamLP]

Hearthstone is the extreme opposite of pay to win. Given that the game was created for profit, it's amazingly kind to even those who don't want to pay a cent for it. It gives you daily quests to get gold to get packs or arena runs over time. It's possible to get good enough at arena to play forever. Yeah you need some cards to compete with the best decks on the server, but you also need a lot of hours invested into the game to get the experience and knowledge of the game, metagame, and card set. And if you spend those hours, they hand you the gold necessary to buy packs, on their own or through arena runs, and it doesn't take an absurd amount of time to build up to any deck you want.

I've only payed for one arena run, and I'm not very interested in constructed, but if I was, I think I have enough to disenchant everything I will never use and make any top tier deck.

(I've gotten pretty unlucky with opening legendaries. I have 578 arena wins, and I think I average about 6-7 wins per run, so with the number of packs I've opened I should have 4-5 legendaries I think - it's one in every 20 packs. But I only have three: The Beast (ugh), Ysera, and Alexstrasa. I do have 5200 unused dust from disenchanting only duplicates and golden cards.)

[Gaspar]

I think Hearthstone is a bit more pay to win than some of the other comments here put - the time commitment to be able to build all of the top tier decks solely through Arena runs is pretty high. The idea that you will eventually catch up to the paying players is really just not true unless they never release new cards - if you did 2 arena runs a day, that's probably pretty close to the average players ability to time commit. At that rate, it would take a really, really, really long time to be able to craft most of the legendaries, let alone the rares that are pretty critical to most decks.

That said, I think really its more pay for variety than pay to win. Some of the prominent streamers have done series where they run a Free to Play account. In those situations, they generally pick which hero you want play and basically disenchant everything else. If you combine that with skill, you absolutely can get Legend rank without spending a dime. The other issue of course is that you're restricted to certain playstyles - the most controlly decks all run decks that require insane amounts of dust to craft - those are just not on the menu if you're not spending any money.

Anyway, I guess the idea is while I would disagree that the game is pay to win, there's no doubt that not paying severely restricts your options in gameplay.

[Kuro]

Something to consider is that you can enjoy Hearthstone without getting Legend rank or anything, if you're happy with trying to claw to Rank 10 or whatever the skill ceiling is a lot lower. Perhaps more importantly, Hearthstone is very little P2W compared to other card games: You can easily play without paying a single cent and crafting means that, say, 40 packs for 49.99 is very likely to get you a lot of good stuff or discenchantable stuff. By comparison, there are times in card games like Yugioh where a single card that's needed to compete in the meta is in the range of 300 dollars (The DAD Return format) and decks for Yugioh/Magic that are competitive usually go into the triple digits in price. By comparison, Hearthstone can be played totally free (theoritically) and it has a lower price floor to get into "P2W" mode to begin with.

While Trump just disenchanted everything, that's really only something you need to do if you're trying to get to Legend, as someone who was free for a good while and has only spent like 20 dollars on the game you can make effective and fun Decks for multiple classes with fairly good speed. Not Legend, but once I had gotten decently good at playing it wasn't too hard to get around Rank 12 to 10 and I think most people would be happy with that. And the price ceiling to get to Legend is much lower than it is to, say, win a Yugioh or Magic big tournament. The only other card game I know that is as little P2W is Scrolls.

Also, since WilliamLP brought up The Beast: I've actually been teching The Beast in my version of Sunshine Hunter! It's working pretty well, the downside has only ever really been a downside once, and it allows a sneaky trick of putting another guy on the board vs. Decks that don't put out a lot of monsters like Control Warrior to get bigger Hounds. It also ends the game very quickly and forces the opponent to deal with it ASAP, which often hurts their ability to deal with Highmanes.

[WilliamLP]

Well, clearly I need to complain about my bad luck opening legendaries more often! After my only arena run of the day, a middling 6-win hunter draft:

[Kuro]

Leeroy, nice!

[Gaspar]

Something to consider is that you can enjoy Hearthstone without getting Legend rank or anything, if you're happy with trying to claw to Rank 10 or whatever the skill ceiling is a lot lower. Perhaps more importantly, Hearthstone is very little P2W compared to other card games: You can easily play without paying a single cent and crafting means that, say, 40 packs for 49.99 is very likely to get you a lot of good stuff or discenchantable stuff. By comparison, there are times in card games like Yugioh where a single card that's needed to compete in the meta is in the range of 300 dollars (The DAD Return format) and decks for Yugioh/Magic that are competitive usually go into the triple digits in price. By comparison, Hearthstone can be played totally free (theoritically) and it has a lower price floor to get into "P2W" mode to begin with.

While Trump just disenchanted everything, that's really only something you need to do if you're trying to get to Legend, as someone who was free for a good while and has only spent like 20 dollars on the game you can make effective and fun Decks for multiple classes with fairly good speed. Not Legend, but once I had gotten decently good at playing it wasn't too hard to get around Rank 12 to 10 and I think most people would be happy with that. And the price ceiling to get to Legend is much lower than it is to, say, win a Yugioh or Magic big tournament. The only other card game I know that is as little P2W is Scrolls.

Also, since WilliamLP brought up The Beast: I've actually been teching The Beast in my version of Sunshine Hunter! It's working pretty well, the downside has only ever really been a downside once, and it allows a sneaky trick of putting another guy on the board vs. Decks that don't put out a lot of monsters like Control Warrior to get bigger Hounds. It also ends the game very quickly and forces the opponent to deal with it ASAP, which often hurts their ability to deal with Highmanes.

Yeah, I don't think its pay to have fun at all. But I don't think too many people would consider 'winning' sitting around rank 10.

Anyway, I don't mean to bash the game, I enjoy it thoroughly. I went on a 7 game winning streak earlier today which is by far my longest so I'm especially feeling good about it.

[Jowy]

Hearthstone is the extreme opposite of pay to win.

Wow. I don't really even know how to answer to that.