It was difficult to gauge the quality of Shirvallah, the Tiger before the Hearthstone card released as part of the game’s most recent set, Rastakhan’s Rumble. With its impossibly high Mana cost of 25, it was one of those cards whose strict requirement meant that its true value could only be tested after release.

Yesterday, Blizzard dropped a Hearthstone balance update that could easily qualify as the most significant set of nerfs the game has ever seen. The Druid class, which from Hearthstone’s launch has been defined by the ability to “ramp” up its Mana pool and play more expensive cards at a faster rate than the opponent,…

Blizzard has now announced all of the cards from Hearthstone’s upcoming Rastakhan’s Rumble expansion, and once again, it looks like the Hearthstone metagame is in for a huge shake-up once it drops next week.

Hearthstone games rarely go according to plan. Sometimes you draw the wrong cards and have to make the most of the situation. Sometimes your opponent discards your most important combo piece and you have to find a new way to win the game. Once you play the game enough, you start to get familiar with the decks you’re…

Hearthstone’s Boomsday Project expansion has been live for two months now, and as tends to happen at the end of the expansion cycle, the game is beginning to feel like a waiting room for the December 4 launch of the next set, Rastakhan’s Rumble. Iterations of Hearthstone’s most powerful decks have reigned for months,…

If you’ve played any Hearthstone since the Boomsday expansion launched in August, you’ve probably gotten destroyed by a couple cards time and time again. Earlier this week, Blizzard announced that three of those cards will be getting nerfed, and today those nerfs are live.

Hearthstone decks come and go, but certain strategies are so prevalent that they never really disappear. Minion-heavy “Zoo Warlock” decks have always been around in some way or another, but throughout the game’s current Boomsday Project expansion, it’s been one of the strongest decks in the game.

New Hearthstone expansions come out all the time, but it’s fairly rare for the base experience of the game to change outside of that. Earlier this week, Blizzard announced a few changes—including some new cards and tweaks to the ranked ladder system—that set the tone for how the game will evolve in the future. These…

One of the most persistently annoying mechanics in Hearthstone is Taunt. When a minion has Taunt, you have to attack it—you can’t attack other minions or the enemy Hero. Usually, Taunt minions are not that difficult to deal with, as they typically have weaker stats than their Taunt-less counterparts.

Hearthstone has shifted and bent its shape a handful of times over the years. When its first Naxxramas-themed “Adventure” expansion released in 2014, it took the shape of a single-player strategy game. Most recently, with Kobolds and Catacombs and The Witchwood, it took the form of a dungeon-crawling roguelike. And…

Hearthstone’s science-themed expansion The Boomsday Project drops tomorrow, and players are out in numbers doing what they do best: speculating about which cards and classes are going to be overpowered once the expansion is live. A few common themes have already made themselves clear, namely: that Boomsday looks like…

On December 22, 2017, when SpaceX launched its Falcon 9 test rocket and lit up the skies of Los Angeles with a glowing orb of smoke, a not-insignificant number of Southern Californians began to believe the aliens had finally come to murder us all. I was there for that, and I can say with confidence that my vexation in…

Hearthstone is a game about careful preparation, where you amass a grand collection of cards so that you can build powerful new decks. But yesterday, in the continuing rollout of its new science-themed expansion The Boomsday Project, Blizzard announced a card that ignores all that, allowing players to build a deck…

No Hearthstone card is bad on its own. Sure, some underperform in certain decks, in certain metagames, in certain pools of available cards. But time has proven that sometimes, cards that we thought were bad are actually pretty good when things align the right way.

When PSY’s “Gangnam Style” dropped in 2012, everything about it felt ephemeral. Funny enough to warrant attention yet unpredictable enough to sink its hooks, it lodged into the American psyche with the sensory magnetism of Beyoncé’s hand rotations in “Single Ladies.” With the globally accessible YouTube as its medium…

Update, June 8, 12:20 PM ET: Since the publication of this story, Blizzard has addressed the backlash over patch 11.2 by reverting the changes to Tess Greymane and allowing Quest Druid players whose decks rely on the newly-weakened Jungle Giants card to switch out their decks in this weekend’s Hearthstone Championship…

In Hearthstone, the art of deck building has always taken a relatively specific shape: You choose a win condition (e.g. kill your opponent with small minions as quickly as possible), then fill your deck with the most powerful card combos to help you accomplish that.

Since Blizzard’s Hearthstone launched in 2014, 1,594 cards have seen the light of day, some incredible, some terrible, and a majority just passing muster as “pretty good.” But which is best?

There is no objective way to measure whether something in a game is fun or not. But in the context of competitive online gaming, where empowerment for one player sometimes translates into abject misery for another, it’s much more common to encounter a mechanic so demoralizing, so soul-crushingly boring, that you…

When Hearthstone glitches out, you can see it. Cards fall into crevices of the board they should never go. Graphical effects linger perversely. Turn timers run on with no apparent end.