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We asked some of the world's best Hearthstone players for their advice on getting into deckbuilding and they offered up these top tips to improve your theorycrafting game.
When it comes to choosing a deck to play in Hearthstone, your best bet is often to look at what's finding the most success and copy that list into your collection. It's a perfectly legitimate way to play, but, over time and as your knowledge of the game grows and you feel more confident about your skill, the idea of 'net-decking' becomes far less enticing.
Leaving that wealth of information behind is not an easy or entirely sensible decision, though, especially if you want to establish your own deckbuilding credentials. Instead, it's another resource to be used, along with many others, to help build your own masterful deck lists.
Who better to ask about devising Hearthstone decks than some of the games top pro players? Many of these familiar faces have even more insight to offer, as they took part in the recent world championships where, because of the expansion release date and set rotation, they had just one week to prepare and refine their line-ups. That requires some serious deckbuilding magic, which they generously pass on below.
Identify the strength of cards based on their power level
According to pros, one of the most straightforward ways to evaluate whether a card is good or not is to compare the mana cost of the card to the stats it offers. Say Blizzard reveals a new four mana minion. From there, we can all take a Chillwind Yeti, with its four attack and five health for four mana, as a solid baseline to compare it too.
Does the card have nine value worth of stats to work with? Is some of that power reduced in favour of a strong ability, or faction synergy? If there's more, what's the downside to the card? These are the sorts of questions asked by Thijs 'Thijs' Molendijk when he sees new cards for the first time.
"Some classes, if they get one specific spell for a cheap cost, it can be super powerful. In some other classes maybe a very greedy card could be the greatest," he says. "You can already get a lot out of the stat line of the cards. Also, a card has to not be situational all the time – it has to be consistent, otherwise it's not going to be in your competitive deck."
However, this should never be the beginning and end of how you value a card for two important reasons. The first, according to Muzahidul 'Muzzy' Islam, is to not get too caught up in any hype surrounding a card. A card may look "broken, or insane" on face value, but when it comes to live play it falters.
Similarly, don't completely write off anything that appears too weak. "Take Grim Rally," suggests David 'Justsaiyan' Shan. "If you didn't see Scarab Egg, the card might not look so good. So, synergies come along a lot later, but I think if you play enough card games for a while, you get an instinct on how to evaluate cards individually as well."
Wait to see the full set or future card reveals
That brings us perfectly onto our second tip: there could always be more cards released that empower seemingly insignificant ones at a later date. This could be in future expansions, or, in some cases, it can be as early as a later reveal for the same expansion, as Muzzy suggests.
"I don't usually focus much on building decks before the whole expansion is announced, because in the final days they end up dumping a lot of neutral cards and a lot of other different cards," he explains. "I tend to wait until the whole expansion is announced before I think about what decks and theorycrafting what I want to do."
Even though he and many other pro players enjoy doing card reviews as more are revealed, Jon 'Orange' Westberg is of the same mindset to Muzzy and waits until everything has been put out there before seriously theorycrafting decks.
"It's very hard to make an informed decision before you see everything, because all the cards affect each other in a way," Orange explains. "I'll do it on stream and I'll talk about them, or what I think about them, but I don't think about it too much until I've seen all of the cards. I don't think it's until then that you can start making all of the combinations."
With all of that information to hand, you have a much better idea of how all the cards might work together. From there, you can properly start to think about how you want to construct a deck and it's best to start right here.
Adapt decks from the existing meta
Going in completely clueless, without any insight into the current state of the game, is not recommended for deck building. You don't only want to know what decks are currently seeing play, but also how well (or how poorly) they're currently performing. A glance at the Tempo Storm Meta Snapshot is always a safe place to start. You can then use that information as a basis to develop your own decks, further advancing an existing list with new ideas.
"I think it's best to start on a refined list, a list that someone has tweeted in the past and has stats backing it up," agrees Muzzy. "So, you take that list as a starting point and if you feel that certain cards aren't strong in the deck and other cards might perform better, just put them in."
It may not sound like it could lead to the invention of a new deck archetype, but just look at some of the results from this expansion. Taking a classic Control Warrior base, we've seen Bomb Warrior, Dragon Warrior and Mecha'thun Warrior all emerge as viable, distinct alternatives. The real takeaway, then, is to not dismiss drawing from existing decks, as there's usually room for new discoveries.
"The likelihood of theorycrafting the next best deck is pretty unlikely," suggests Casper 'Hunterace' Notto. "But, what we do, in general, is just to look at existing archetypes that got additional stuff. We try to build on what we already have, or what we already know has potential."
Explore the obvious synergies
As we saw most recently with Bomb Warrior and Heal Druid, Blizzard does enjoy pushing certain deck archetypes with each new expansion launch. While they may seem too transparent to assemble and not always find great success, they do work as a great sparking off point for new deck ideas.
"I think that it's definitely smart to shove an archetype at players," enthuses Mark 'Ike' Eichner. "The archetype only takes up 10 or 15 slots of your deck, so you have to come up with all the ways to work around with it. Having the baseline to start with is super valuable. I don't know what I'd do if there was just a bunch of stuff that had nothing to do with each other – it doesn't really make a lot of sense."
Many other players also don't see much of an issue, for example, that it may seem painfully obvious when building a Murloc deck that you want to throw all the Murloc cards into it. That's because those last remaining slots are where you can find your edge, using your expertise with Hearthstone to build something better than other lists out there. Orange agrees.
"People seem to dislike that, but I don't think there's anything wrong with it," he says. "I'm more of a guy who likes the little decisions. Bomb Warrior, maybe you have 25 out of 30 cards that build itself, but choosing those five last cards, that's the stuff I'm really into, so I don't mind it as much."
Be prepared to test and refine your ideas
Once those decks are built, it's time to try them out properly. The easiest and most obvious way to do this is hammer games on the ladder and monitor your results. This is an especially good approach in the early days of an expansion, as you get an idea of what everyone else is trialling at the same time. This is what Ike recommends.
"Ladder right after the expansion is super valuable information, because a lot of people have really great ideas," he says. "Their core ideas are super strong, but they don't have the skill to make it into an optimised deck, so during the new expansion what I like to do is add a lot of people I play against on ladder with cool ideas and talk to them. I wind up trying to be deck doctor myself to make it a little bit more optimised for what I need it to do."
That communication is extremely important, too. If you have a pool of fellow players you can bounce ideas off, you might find it easier to uncover new approaches. In some cases, that doesn't even have to be a handful of players you chat to, though. You can tap into other resources to see how decks are developing.
"I'm keeping an eye on Twitter. I'm keeping an eye on Twitch. Seeing the popular streams, seeing what people are playing. What's winning, what's not winning and develop from there. There are a lot of different avenues to go from to figure out what decks you want to play."
From there the cycle can repeat. You might see something in a game that gives you a moment of inspiration, or realise how a new card package might fit perfectly within an existing archetype, or which decks might find more success against the popular picks on ladder. Who knows, soon enough you could be piloting a new deck to the top of the tier list.
