As someone who’s played Hearthstone from about a month after initial launch thought I’d throw in my two cents to the debate. At one point I really loved the game and played pretty obsessively for a few months but since then have tailed off to maybe 20-ish games a week ( primarily street car commute ). Those games are ladder and arena whenever I get the gold built up. Ladder-wise I usually end between 6 - 9th at the end of season (I can’t imagine bothering to grind past 5th). Anyway, that’s a long-winded way of saying I have lots of games under my belt and am fairly good (but far from great). My take on Hearthstone is that it takes some skill but has a skill curve that is, largely, very flat and very frustrating when compared to the RNG component. I would contend you can learn 80+% of the skill by reading a few articles about value trading, when to go face, etc. and playing a bunch of games. After that climbing the skill curve takes a big investment of time in learning all the decks in the meta and what drops are expected to be played when. It’s frankly completely not worth it because each incremental hour changes your win % a tiny bit due to the large factor that RNG plays in the game. Even looking past how RNG-happy that blizzard has become in card design ( okay, it’s a bit better now that standard in place ), fundamentally, if an opponent who has an experience and a tier 1 deck, gets drops on curve and you don’t, you are unlikely to win a balanced match. By balanced I mean a match that isn’t tilted heavily towards you by deck composition. The extremes of deck match-ups is also another source of unwelcome (to me) randomness, you hit a string of bad matchups in ladder by chance and you’re cooked. Don’t even get me started on Arena, that’s now a total luck fest. A month or so back, I made notes on 30 games specifically looking at whether I thought I or my opponent could have possibly done anything different at all not to lose the game ( I had to guess at opponents hand but you can usually guess most of it by card plays ) , I can’t remember how many exactly but in only a handful did I think that given the cards drawn, the losing player could have done anything prevent it – either the winner made a rookie mistake or it was a forgone conclusion based on card order.
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