The Mid-Age Aggro Blog #2 - 5 Easy Steps

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Weekly Play Update: It’s been a brutal week on the Ladder for me. I started the week Rank 11 playing a few decks that I thought had some potential to help me crack the top ten. Mid week I was as high as Rank 9 but I stumbled and then straight tumbled down the Ladder to Rank 15. I managed to get back to Rank 12 before holiday house guests have interrupted my playtime. I played 117 ranked matches this week, with a winning percentage of 48 percent. My best hero was a Hunter while the worst was a Paladin. I am trying to maintain a 55 to 60 percent win rate and I will play a single deck type this week in order to further isolate if I had just a bad week of RNG matchups or if the results are indicating serious holes in my game. I am guessing it’s more the latter than the former.

5 easy steps to better Your Hearthstone play

My jujitsu instructor has a simple mantra: keep it simple. He regularly dominates much younger and more athletic men looking to strangle him or break a limb by utilizing the most basic techniques of the martial art. Yet this is oversimplifying, like saying a samurai merely swings a sword. What he does is use the basic techniques perfectly, honed by thousand of hours of practice. What this can teach us is that there is no need to practice complex strategies in Hearthstone to become better. It’s applying the basics and using simple techniques to improve your game. I feel there are five steps (at least!) a player can take to improve and reach their goals in Hearthstone.

Study the Game

The first step to any improvement begins by understanding what you are doing. Studying the heroes and the card mechanics will give a player a deeper understanding of what is actually happening within the game. If you don’t understand why you lost, then you cannot fix your errors Ideally, recording your games for review is the most helpful, but given the resources required, it might not be feasible. Instead, take notes of games and you will see patterns start to emerge: maybe you have a tough time with warlocks, or that your games always end around turn 7. These patterns will help you create decks or strategies that will help you overcome obstacles and progress you further up the ladder. Another helpful studying tool is to watch streams of high-level players. Seeing how they navigate the game and how they play cards in hundreds of situations is invaluable for growth. Sometimes you will see a different way around a problem or how the high level player is countering the current Meta. Also, reading forums can help you learn lessons from other player’s experiences without having to recreate their mistakes. There is a saying I find useful: that a smart man makes a mistake, learns from it, and never makes that mistake again but a wise man finds a smart man and learns from him how to avoid the mistake altogether.

Setting Goals

Having goals is an important measuring stick to improving your play. Setting short term and long-term goals can help direct your energies and improve your time efficiency within the game. If you are like me, I have more desire than I have time to play Hearthstone. By using a short-term goal like win 60 percent of my games during the week I can see where some of my game flaws exist. These short term objectives will help build into your long-term goals such as becoming Legendary. Failing these goals, especially short term ones isn’t a bad thing. What you should do is look at where you failed, determine what you need to do to accomplish the goal, and improve that area. It’s important for efficient and steady improvement to concentrate on your weaknesses by measuring the distance of where you failed at the goal and the desired outcome. That distance between the goal and reality is where you should be concentrating your energies on.

Play Cards with a Purpose

Just because you can play a card, doesn’t mean you should. Having an overall strategy and then adapting that to the cards you draw is very important to long term Hearthstone success. Combos that require a certain play order or a crucial game mechanic can be completely useless and even worse, harmful, if cards are just thrown out onto the board just because you have the mana. Keeping a firm idea in your head of what cards you draw, what’s left in your deck, and how the opponent is playing will help you decide what cards to play and sometimes, what not to play. Simply throwing a card out to die is a good way to lose a match. Using a strong card to bait a removal card in order to play an even stronger card later on is a good example of playing with purpose. Throwing down an Elven Archer during round two when the Mage across from you has coined a Faerie Dragon out round one is not.

Know Thy Enemy

Part of a very famous quote from the Art of War by Sun Tzu applies to Hearthstone: “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.” In all types of card games, having knowledge of your enemy is an important resource to use against them. When I play poker, if someone I know and have played against sits down, I already have a fairly extensive database as to how they play in a variety of situations. In Hearthstone, this is even easier as once you see your opponent’s hero; you gain a wealth of knowledge. As you play more and study the game, you will further recognize the tactics most commonly played by that hero type. With this information, you can more effectively deploy counter attacks and know within a certain degree of accuracy what they will respond with. The easiest way to become well rounded about hero types is to play each hero in practice mode up to level 10. Not only do you earn gold and cards, you get to see the card types they use and basic strategies, such as a Burn Mage or Mid-ramp Druid. Knowing your enemy’s basic deck and then tailoring that based on their gameplay will allow you to better respond with more effective and winning plays.

RNG Happens

This is not so much a practice habit as a declaration: sometimes, even for long stretches of time, RNG will happen. Your opponent could be 57 warlock or mages in a row while you are playing a Sustain Druid or Paladin type. You can mulligan all 5+ mana cards only to have them replaced by all 6+ mana cards. Your opponent can have the perfect card to answer your excellent previous play. My personal favorite is the card I needed two rounds ago to avert disaster shows up in my hand the round my opponent has lethal on the board. All this is part of the nature of a random draw game. In poker, I have lost thousands of dollars because my opponent drew the one card in the deck that could beat me. Having elite skills and the perfect deck build means nothing if the cards are “falling” your opponents way. What should you do? Complain on forums how a class is overpowered? Switch decks to the flavor of the month? Uninstall Hearthstone? Smash your face through your monitor? I will be honest: I have contemplated them all and tried some. This is when I realize two things: most importantly, this is just a game and its equally likely that the cards will or have fallen just as favorable for me as they are for my opponent now. So, in a word: relax. Use the previous improvement techniques and try to eliminate bad gameplay as the culprit instead of blaming it solely on RNG. Once you have done that, then you can just laugh off the Lay on Hands or Mind Control top deck and move on to the next game. Minimizing your gameplay errors will make RNG losses much easier to deal with.