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I am middle age gamer. I have children and a more than full time job. I have a beautiful wife and many friends.. I also possess a competitive streak about a mile wide. This means I play soccer in an adult league, practice Brazilian Jujitsu, am a semi serious poker player, and recently, I began to play Hearthstone. It would have been much simpler had I developed a meth habit.

Savjz recently hit legendary on the new ranking system, and we wanted to embed the emotion filled clip of the game in which that happened. After all, it's a big achievement - and a lot has happened for Mr. Savjz in the past several weeks. He went from a casual regular Hearthstone player, to becoming one of the world's best - competing at the highest level, and dominating in the IHEARTHU.com King of the Hill - 4 weeks running, and had 2000 viewers watch him get that Legend status. You can see that VOD below.

Hearthstone has a pretty forgiving learning curve compared to DOTA or League of Legends (Thanks to unranked mode + easy/hard AI), but once you hit Arena or Ranked Constructed, reality will undoubtedly set in: You suck. Although you can spend countless hours in unranked play mode, your innermost desire is to crush the ranks, pwn n00bs in Arena to 12 wins every time you try, and build a deck of 30 gold legendaries to finally show the world that you are that awesome.

Hearthstone is made to be a simple game to pick up. However, because of the wide variety of effects in the game, many of which have unwritten rules, the game is in practice very complex, to the point of having some truly bizarre interactions. The following is by no means a complete list, but should serve to whet your appetite for how crazy this game can get. As a note, some of these are most likely bugs, and may be fixed before the game is officially released.

As a newer player to Hearthstone (probably 3-4 months now), I decided I would learn the game from watching people on Twitch.tv. With no real CCG or TCG experience to speak of outside of Pokemon cards when I was around 10 years old, watching people who were considered the “top” players seemed like a way to learn the game. I started off with Hafu since I knew her well from League of Legends, another game that I play way too much and talk about even more. From there I progressed to other streamers such as ekop, Trump, GoodIdeaGaming, and Kripp, whichever seemed to be around at the time I needed a stream to watch while I was working.

Knowing the right amount of low-cost cards needed to consistently secure a viable starting hand is crucial; without the little guys, a control deck falls apart and an aggressive deck never gets going. Luckily, the following tables can help you build your decks accordingly:

So, I have a buddy that I talk with a few times a week that works at Blizzard, and he says the same thing you might hear from a blue post responding to a passionate fan expressing frustration on any of Blizzard’s forums.

If you are looking for a streamer to watch, one of the more obvious choices would be Trump. Trump streams every day from 11am-6pm Pacific Time. He has an immense knowledge of the game and is excellent at communicating why he makes certain decisions while providing entertaining commentary on his games.