Can You Bluff in Hearthstone?

Author: Andrew ‘The Water Boiler’ Klawitter

Bluffing in hearthstone falls into a few different categories, from the obvious bluffs, such as secrets, to more intricate bluffs involving AOE (area of effect) spells, and even some subtle bluffs in the form of minion attacks. As with any form of bluffing, there are risks involved, ways to mitigate those risks, and a means to evaluate when bluffing will provide you a greater chance at winning in a specific matchup.

Types of Bluffs

1. Bluffing with Secrets
2. Bluffing AOE Removal
3. Bluffing not having AOE Removal
4. Bluffing a mutually beneficial minion trade for a little extra damage

It’s No Secret

Secrets are the most straightforward version of bluffing in hearthstone. You are going to play a card that will trigger on your opponent’s turn, and that will have an effect on their play choices, hopefully to your benefit.

Let us look at bluffing with secrets, and how it differs from just playing out the secret and putting it all on your opponent to play around it. The key to bluffing with secrets is to influence your opponents thinking as to direct them into concluding it is a specific secret.

 

Example: Playing as a Hunter, if we can put all the opponents minions to 2 health or less during our turn, and then bluff a Explosive Trap secret, when instead you play a Misdirection, or a Snake Trap. This will usually convince your opponent not to attack your hero, and instead to attack any minions on the board, which would cause that Snake Trap to trigger. (and hopefully also include some extra bonus, like card drawing off a Starving Buzzard.)

 

Example: Playing as a Mage, by removing the opponents small minions, leaving a single large minion, to bluff the Vaporize secret. The goal here is to convince your opponent not to attack your hero with his large minion, and instead to attack one of your minions on the board, so that you can finish it off with a spell. Even if you have no minions on board, you can do this bluff in an attempt to convince your opponent not to attack your hero, and in effect stall for a turn, hopefully allowing you to draw into polymorph, or a similar solution, before taking too much damage.

The main caveat of Secret Bluffing is that it requires your opponent to have been in similar scenarios, where he was burned by that specific secret in the past. Thus causing negative feedback reinforcement, where he remembers losing a game to a hearthstone secret, so that you will be able to convince him that he should not make certain plays or minion attacks.

AOE Bluffs

One of my favorite Hearthstone bluffs is that of an AOE (area of effect) spell. You can bluff a Flamestrike, Consecration, Swipe, etc. by putting multiples of your opponents minions to a specific health total en mass (1 health, 2 health, 3 health, or 4 health depending on your classes AOE damage spell), instead of killing one or two of the minions. The goal here is to influence your opponents attack targets, and hopefully this will cause an opponent to hold additional minions in hand, rather than play them all out, to avoid getting his entire board destroyed by an AOE spell.

While it might seem counter-productive to put all of your opponent’s minions to a low amount of health, rather than killing off one or two of them; If the bluff works, it has the potential to save you some health points on your hero in the long-run, which gives you a chance to draw into a few more cards, and hopefully an answer, before your hero runs out of his entire health resource.

 

Example: Playing as a Mage, against a Paladin opponent. He has a Silver Hand Recruit and Stampeding Kodo in play on your Turn 6. By shooting the Kodo with the Mage’s Hero Ability Fireblast, you put his minions stats at 3 / 4 and 1 / 1. This means that you will take 1 extra damage, but it will, perhaps, convince your opponent not to play additional minions on his next turn. (or at least not play as many, since you are bluffing a Flamestrike)

Just like with the secrets, In order for an AOE bluff to be successful, your opponent has to have had a negative impact of a specific play sequence, where they got completely blown out of a game by a large AOE spell, such as Flamestrike. If your opponent has never had this experience, they will, of course, not understand your bluff, and just think you are playing strangely.

He Doesn’t Have it!

Conversely, it can be equally beneficial to bluff not having a massive damage inducing spell. You end up trading in some of your hero’s health, in exchange for card advantage generated by killing a few extra minions (and thus additional cards) from a greedy opponent. (Well, maybe we are the greedy player in this scenario, trying to bait a few extra minion kills from our AOE spell.) In essence, trying to convince your opponent to commit more minions to the board, at the cost of a few extra of your heroes health points.

 

Example: In the same scenario as above (mage vs paladin), turn 7 rolls around, your opponent now has Stampeding Kodo as a 3 / 4, Silver Hand Recruit as a 1 / 1, and [from his turn 6] decided on a Sword of Justice, followed by an additional Silver Hand Recruit, buffed to a 2 / 2. [and thusly he failed the efficiency test.] We can bluff not having a Flamestrike by playing a minion in this situation, such as a Water Elemental, instead of clearing the board with a Flamestrike, we are either sacrificing the Water Elemental to all 3 of his minions, or taking an extra 6 damage to our hero, in the hopes of our opponent thinking we do not possess a Flamestrike as one of our card choices.

One of the downsides to bluffing with your AOE spells in hand, is if your opponent does not take the bait, and decides to just wait it out, deal a little bit of damage, and always maintain a medium of just two minions on the board. Which ends up with us facing the conundrum of when to cast the AOE spell, at mediocre effect, versus at what point the damage to your hero becomes more than you can safely risk.

Basic Minion Attacks

The last category of bluff situation occurs every turn. Should you attack your opponent’s hero, or attack his minion; According to many beginner strategy proponents, you should always clear the minions first, right? That certainly is the least risky method. But it unfortunately only works based on certain circumstances, and under strict deck construction.

The Minion Quality Fallacy

Because of the risk of an opponent to ‘one up’ your minions, many times your thinking reverts to ‘how do I clear my opponents minions most effectively’. This is a bad line of thought in many games, because this will only work if your minions are, by and large, stronger than your opponents. if you have a higher damage per crystal potential as a sum of all of your cards. And perhaps you do. But is this possible for every deck? Do you really have the stronger minions 100% of the time?

So maybe, just maybe, you need to be asking yourself: ‘is that minion a threat?’ ‘do i need to clear it?’ - sometimes the answer is ‘no’; other good questions: ‘why am i clearing this minon? am i doing this to protect another minion from attack?’ ‘will i lose a damage race if both of us ignore the others minions?’ ‘should i attack into his minions to thin my ranks as protection against AOE effects?’ etc.

There needs to be a tangible benefit of trading the minion off, and even then, you might not want to do so. Especially if you can logically predict your opponents best minion attacks, and then calculate out the benefit of allowing you to choose how the minions trade, vs. the extra damage to his hero.

A B(l)uffing Game

As the most simple example, lets say you have a 3 / 2 and they have a 2 / 3, do you attack their minion? or their hero? what if it was the other way around? now you have the 2 / 3 and they have the 3 / 2. The answer is not as straightforward as you might think.

What changes these decisions is somewhat of a buffing game. Because cards that buff your current minions (such as Shattered Sun Cleric, Dark iron Dwarf, and others) can make a smaller minion from insignificant into a threat. It can be difficult to determine if your opponent has these cards in their hands, or even in their deck, and this can provide a chance to bluff for a little extra damage with early minions, instead of just snap trading them off.

 

How a Shattered Sun Cleric bluff works: By attacking your opponent with your 3 / 2, past his 2 / 3, (or vice versa) on turn 2, with 2 crystals, you can represent a Shattered Sun Cleric, but just not enough crystals to pay for it. The opponent would then consider why you would not want to trade minions. In this screenshot situation, concluding that you do not have a Fiery War Axe, at 2 cost, but yet you do not wish to trade minions, so they decide you might have the sun cleric, and attack your minion to trade them off. (so you get some extra damage in to his hero.) This type of bluff can be subtle, and works on a few different player types, especially those that always try to clear your minions off the board.

(The screenshot above clearly shows clerics, but, as with any bluff, you need not have them in your hand, or even in your deck, in order to attempt this bluff. Though if you think your opponent might have them in his deck…)

Arena vs. Constructed

During the past two weeks of playtesting, twitch stream watching, and article information gathering, I found that It is much easier to bluff in arena, as opposed to constructed. This is because your opponent has no idea what cards, or how many of them, you might be playing. Since there is always the possibility of you having 3+ flamestrikes or 0 flamestrikes. As you would expect, including a flamestrike in your deck is not even necessary for you to bluff having it, in order to keep the amount of minions your opponent plays in check. For this reason, you can actually do very well in arena without having any AOE effects, as long as you manage to bluff them successfully.

Have you had success with bluffing in hearthstone? Tell us of your bluffing successes (or failures) in the comments section!