Recently, Mojang's Scrolls went free to play. Sort of. Actually it died, got abandoned, and Mojang sort of released its rotting corpse to the players to play among themselves if they want.

This made me look at a couple of titles I was previously familiar with - Infinity Wars and Runescape Legends, both very good, unique and clever card games. Of course, they are both practically also dead. They still exist, but they are basically ghost towns.

And its hard not to see Hearthstone as the culprit. I mean, a large player base tends to snowball for games like those. Everyone is playing Hearthstone because everyone is playing Hearthstone. It's a vicious cycle where the most popular game only gets more popular simply because of how popular it is. On the other hand, if it wasn't for Hearthstone making tons of cash maybe those games qould not have been made in the first place, the genre not being popular enough. I guess I just can't decide, if I should be cursing Blizzard's "MtG for dummies" or not :P

Nice topic to ponder on a Friday night. I think Hearthstone had a positive impact on card games. It was easy to play and it created interest in this type of game. The bad news is that Hearthstone is a money pit and if you don't spend three digit amount of money on a regular basis, you can't be really competitive and you just play for fun/casual mode. The good news is that the people who tried Hearthstone and didn't like it/didn't want to spend so much money, looked into the other card games. Personally I quit Hearthstone for the Elder Scrolls Legends because I can play it on mobile phone, it has quite a bit of strategy involved, and is f2p friendly. I am sure the rest of the card games apart from Hearthstone gained a lot of players who either quit Hearthstone or became interested in card games after seeing Hearthstone and just picked another game.

I played for a while some years back and really enjoyed it, but I should add a disclaimer: I've heard some, what appeared to me at least, worrying rants about how new card design was screwing up the balance. So I just want to get out of the way that I cannot comment on that at all since I never got far enough to notice such problems.

Perhaps if I list what made me like Hearthstone back then, then you can contrast/compare that with other card games.

- Obviously you could buy hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of cards and build a killer deck early on. A serious concern for me then was being steamrolled by such overzealous VISA/MASTERCARD players, as well other more senior players who have spent many months building decks. But I was relieved to find that, even though this did occasionally happen, it was a rare. The majority of my losses against other players I attributed to weak tactics or card selections on my part. So my take-away was that Hearthstone's match making system worked very well, at least at the time.

- I thought the monetary system was very fair given that I didn't want to spend any money on cards packs. I only felt compelled to buy the single player 'mini-campaigns' in which you can earn lots of 'campaign'-specific cards (more on those later). But a completely free and sensible way I thought to obtain cards was through arena games. An arena game costs 150 gold and by doing 5 out of 7 daily quests weekly (you can let them accumulate and do 3 daily quests in one sitting if you want) you can easily earn enough gold for two arena entries every week.
What arena is is a series of games against other players until you've lost 3 times total, with rewards given based on your number of wins. The worst you can do (3 losses 0 wins) is a pack of cards and perhaps also a little gold. The bonus with arena games is that you have to create a deck from a pool of cards the arena gives you, so no-one can use their own personal decks. That is, it is a level playing field. And if you do better than 3 losses with 0 wins then you can win additional card packs and gold for extra arena entries.

- Apart from the 2 or so game modes against other players and their decks (ranked matches and such) there are 3 other completely different game modes that I really enjoyed. Arena was one of them as explained above, and the other two are tavern and the bought 'mini-campaigns'-dlcs. The former is a weird mode which changes once a week I think, containing interesting game modes such as cooperative battles with other players against a very strong 'boss-deck'.
But it's the dlc 'mini-campaign' dlcs that I enjoyed the most. These are completely single player and consists of something like 10 boss-decks that you have to defeat at a normal and hard difficulty, by the end of which you will have unlocked something like 20+ cards from the campaign. And these 'bosses' are fiendishly designed with weird abilities that you won't encounter elsewhere, and which requires you to try and design a deck from your available cards specifically to deal with the particular boss and his/her special abilities.
I think I bought about 2 or 3 of these dlcs and found progressing through each to be great fun but also very formidable.

- Unsurprisingly since it's Blizzard, the game is also polished to a shine, has great music and just generally runs very well. The effects feel great and it has a definite warcraft vibe if you like that sort of thing (which I do)

- Lastly, I'm not a veteran card player or anything, but I did notice that the mechanics were on the simpler side of things. Still, I found that the number of things I had to keep track of in a typical match was about as much as I felt I could stomach at the time, especially given the time allowed to make a move. I suppose I would be up to try a more complex card game some day, but at no point did I feel underwhelmed at the simplicity of Hearthstone's mechanics.
Well, except perhaps in the tutorial.

By the way, one other card game I messed around with out of curiousity was Animation Throwdown:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1y38Yw_Rbo
which kind of makes me angry thinking about it. It is an absolutely excellent idea for a card game : combining for example a Fry card (character) and Planet Express ship card (vehicle) yields a much stronger Fry Delivery Boy card (where he is on his bicycle - see? character + vehicle = scene from show with character controlling a vehicle)
But the whole idea is wasted on an absolutely trivial card game where you don't even actually play against other players! Instead you play against the AI using another players deck... Such a waste of an excellent idea :\

I played Hearthstone obsessively over a year ago until I hit gold warlock. I spent hundreds of dollars on cards. When I recently went back to play I found that all my cards are so out dated that I would have to spend a ton to play again and not just get wrecked. So instead I played MTGO which I have not played in like 3 years and to my surprise found all my cards and even bot credits were still there. I was able to play immediately and have tons of fun without spending any money. When I did decide to buy some cards I was also surprised to find I only had to spend a few bucks to get most of what I wanted. That being said, I really did enjoy hearthstone when I was pumping money into it to keep my cards updated. I like both games. If both games were free totally to play (if the cards were free) and I could only choose one I would pick MTGO because it has much more depth. The biggest downside to MTGO is the interface looks like it was made in the 90s lol. But, it gets the job done. Other than that the only card game I have found that I actually liked a lot was Hand of Fate which is a totally different style of single player game. I recommend checking it out if you have not.

Edit*

I would also like to point out that when I tried Hearthstone again I saw so many new things I wanted to buy and new cards people were using I did not really give it a chance because I did not want to dump more money into the game like last time. It is possible I could have still played and had a chance. I'd be curious to hear others input on that.

I'm afraid CCG's are way too simple for tastes, though I dig the lore and card artwork of MTG.

I don't play the on-line card games (I tried Gwent, but it didn't do much for me), but I'm actually currently playing Hand of Fate and really liking it. It's kicked my ass a few times and I tend to have miserable luck with the success/failure draws, but it's still a damned fun game. I second the recommendation.

Reinvigorated. Eternal is quite popular and digitizing table card games is quite popular too.

I didn't like Hearthstone at all. To me it's just a dumbed down, casual version of Magic the Gathering. And I'm no great Magic player. I only ever played it with a few friends, nothing competative. Anyone with a half decent deck would steamroll me, and they same would likely be true of Hearthstone have I spent enough time with it to try being competative. But it still bothered me to no end how simplistic and unoriginal hearthstone felt. Even down to the artwork. What impressed me with Infinity Wars and Runecape Legends is how innovative they were, how much untapped (no pun intended) potential those devs found in an online CCG.

But really I'm not trying to debate Hearthstone's mertis or lack thereof. Obviously there's a legion of people who love it. Hell, even some of my friends play it a lot and spend money on it. No, I'm more curious how the genre as a whole is doing, and if anything other than Hearthstone (and maybe Gwent) has a chance to exist on the market for a longer while, or is the giant going to devour any upstart. It's a genre where every game need a fairly large player base to exist at all, so it seems that being too original and taking design risks might be a death sentence, and that's just sad. It would mean stagnation with just two or three big titles as the only game(s) in town. I played it, and I absolutely love it. Even though I only managed to beat the final boss by the skin of my teeth, and only on my luckiest run ever. But it really is a superb game, original, fun, with a great mood an unique gameplay.

I don't think so to the first two, but I'd half agree with the final part. I think you have to try and put yourself into the shoes of a noob player interested in the genre, like I was before I tried out Hearthstone. I only knew of two card games : Hearthstone and Magic the Gathering. The latter always interested me a great deal due to its artwork and flavor text, but I had no intention of actually building a physical deck and seeking out other players. An online version was exactly what I wanted.
I looked at a MtG online game at some point, before Hearthstone I believe, but two things put me off: a seemingly much smaller player base and a complaints about the match making system with players getting steam rolled by far superior decks.
When I looked at Hearthstone I saw a gigantic game with gameplay that looked interesting and exciting, with a classic Warcraft vibe that I'm a huge fan of. So I tried it out and ended up having a lot of fun with it for the reasons listed in the above post.

So Hearthstone confirmed for me that a card game can be a ton of fun. So the question for an established Hearthstone fan then becomes : how about trying out other games in the genre?
For me, as a case study of your typical card game noob :), there was a couple of immediate concerns :

- I'm not really keen on a card game where I don't particularly like the atmosphere and cards themselves. I like the hearthstone cards and artwork very much, and magic the gathering even more so. But something like Elder Scrolls or Gwent or Runescape doesn't really interest me at all in this respect. If I were a bigger fan of the genre then I'd expect this not to be an issue.

- Player bases. I considered Duelyst for a bit, but was turned off by the prospect of a steady decline of players once the hype had passed. And it appears that this has happened : https://steamcharts.com/app/291410
It's still being played but I don't think by enough people. At those player numbers for a collectible card game I'd expect to be steamrolled almost consistently as a semi-casual player. That's a huge turn-off for me, even though the game itself looks very interesting.

- Free to Play model + match making. I think this is incredibly difficult to pull off well, and was actually quite surprised to find that I really liked how Hearthstone's did it (granted this was like 3 years ago). I have no intention of getting a strong deck by buying card packs, nor to be steamrolled by people who do, so the game has to provide a fun alternative.

- Fun single player content. I wouldn't ever have guessed that I would want this in a card game, but after Hearthstone I don't see myself trying out a card game if I can't play through challenging campaigns which require you to build specific decks that you would never use against another player. Simply because I had a total blast with this part of Hearthstone. Neither Gwent, Duelyst nor Magic the Gathering online appear to have such game modes.

So with these 4 concerns, each of which individually is enough to be a dealbreaker, it doesn't look like there is an alternative to Hearthstone for me at the moment (unless I'm mistaken?) These 4 concerns would matter less for someone who is a huge fan of the genre, but unfortunately I think that's too small a number of people to keep the genre alive outside of something with the wider appeal that a game such as Hearthstone has.

There's a new online version of MtG currently in beta, we'll see how this turns out. That's the problem I mentioned at the start, this vicious circle. I don't blame you, I'm not saying you're doing something wrong, but this really becomes an impossible situation for smaller games. The player base is not big enough, so I won't play it, so the player base will never be larger, and will most likely shrink until the game dies. It just feels like a game not connected to a major IP and a publisher with enough money for marketing is never going to get around that.

Even worse, as time goes by, people interested in the genre sort of become commited to the one or two games they already play. They learned all the ins and outs and bought/won a ton of cards, and they are not going to jump ship for something new.

By the way, I played a little Duelyst. It's an interesting game, but I hate the pixel graphics, and since it's not really a "pure" card game but a card/turn based board strategy hybrid it just wasn't what I was looking for. Still, it had great reviews and a lot of people recommended it to me. So if even that is losing players, then things really don't look great for diversity in the genre. It really looks like Hearthstone, Gwent and Elder Scrolls are destined to starve out the competition.

" There's a new online version of MtG currently in beta, we'll see how this turns out."


Aw man, I got excited thinking they were finally updating MTGO with new graphics. Turns out they are just making a different version with better graphics. So, i'll still be stuck in my 90's looking interface lol.

From the FAQ:

Q. Is MTG Arena going to replace Magic Online?

A. No, development on Magic Online will continue with new card sets, new updates, and ongoing tournaments. The focus of MTG Arena will be on the newest cards and game modes. Because of this, Magic Online—which has a library of nearly every card ever printed from the game's entire history—will continue to offer unique experiences to players.

Q. Why did you choose to build MTG Arena instead of a new Magic Online client?

A. There were a lot of advantages to starting fresh with MTG Arena. The team is building the game in Unity, which gives us more flexibility for future growth. We created a new Game Rules Engine that can better understand even the most obscure card interactions. We wanted to integrate modern online services that will create a dynamic overall experience and also someday integrate with other aspects of your Magic life.

(PTW = Pay to win in my terminology)
I joined Hearthstone about a year or two after it got popular. It was around the Goblins and Gnomes expansion time. Back then it was fun, you could legitimately build up a deck and play without paying out for PTW cards. You coudn't get high up, there was still a ceiling, but it was fun. I really enjoyed playing the odds, seeing what other decks did, generally just having fun. Even recommended it to my brother, who got really into it. It was an excellent introduction to card games, and really helped the genre.

I came back a while ago and found it a mess. You played a card and some PTW dump immediately threw you out. They have poisoned their own well.

Hearthstone helped and grew the card game genre, however PTW as a business model will always kill it off. Sure in Hearthstone nothing is unobtainable, but at the rate they started releasing packs, and with the powerup each pack got, you were all but required to pay in to keep up to date. So I left.

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I've never liked Hearthstone because I don't like that kind of graphics at all.

I prefer LCGs over CCGs. I prefer to buy one expansion pack and get all the cards I need as opposed to buying a couple hundred. Too bad there aren't very many competitive ones that have been computerized. The most popular online ones are cooperative ones like Sentinels of the Multiverse. Still fun though. I would love to see an online version of Warhammer 40k Conquest though - will never happen though.