Ragar tries his hand at Blizzard's new digital CCG

Unlocking the Practice Decks

When you start in Hearthstone, you're given Jaina Proudmoore, the Mage hero, and a partial deck. With each tutorial match you complete, in addition to learning the various mechanics, you're leveling up Jaina and earning a pair cards every other level. With the tutorial out of the way, you might be tempted to jump straight into battle against other players - ignore that urge. With nothing but the tutorial behind you, you're still going to be short a few cards from having a full deck, leaving you fewer options to counter your opponent's moves as well as making you vulnerable to running out of cards in a protracted battle. Before charging off into battle with other players, you'll want (and the game will require you to do some of this first) to go into Practice Mode for a while.

In Practice mode, you'll see nine hero portraits for each of the nine starter decks. Jaina, being the only deck you'll have available at the start, is the only hero without an exclamation mark by it. To clear that mark and unlock these decks, you'll need to face off against that deck, played by the AI. It's a partial deck, similar to how your Jaina deck was before you leveled up, so you won't be seeing anything off the wall being played by the computer in these practice matches; these duels are primarily to get you accustomed to what players using that deck will throw at you as well as showing you what's possible in case you want to switch off to that hero after they're unlocked. Of course, switching over means you'll be back at level 1 and need to get to 10 before you'll have a full deck ready for normal matches, but with multiple other hero decks to unlock, you'll have plenty of time to do that.

Questing and Forging Ahead Into the Arena

While you're working through unlocking decks in Practice Mode and trying your hand against real players in Play Mode, you'll notice the occasional achievement and other pop-ups showing up after battles. Decks unlocked, levels gained, minions defeated - all sorts of numbers being tracked. These are Hearthstone's Quests, your primary (non-real money) source for gold, enchanting dust, card packs and more.  Finish one quest and one or two more will pop up, each with tasks you can accomplish through regular play and rewards to help you get more cards. They become more difficult to get and the rewards shift more toward gold/dust as you get past the tutorial, but that's to be expected; if they kept giving me card packs every three fights in Play Mode, there wouldn't be much incentive for me to buy them, would there?

All of the quests I've seen so far have been fairly simple and things I was going to do anyway: play X matches, deal Y damage to player heroes, defeat Z minions, etc. Really the minion one's the only quest type that not all players would do anyway if they were playing a deck with lots of Taunting minions to hold everything off while they burned the enemy hero with spells and weapons, but even then you'd still chip away at it with each battle. There lies the important part of questing: everything you do will help you progress toward more cards. Winning matches will certainly help you more with the damage-type quests, but you're always making progress. If you're winning a lot, you might want to set your sights a little higher than Play Mode, for there is loot aplenty in the Arena.

The Arena serves as a combination of competitive ladder and deck concept tester. The first time's free - after that it'll cost you some gold or some real money. You don't go in with one of your customized normal decks; instead you'll be building one with their Suggest A Card deck builder which will bring up a set of three cards from your collection chosen around a specific theme, such as "You need some 1-mana spells for starters" or "Time to pick some minions". By the time you've made your 30 choices, you should have a well-balanced, reasonably sound deck... in theory. You won't know until you take that newly made deck into battle against decks your opponents made using the same tool. The name of the game once you reach this point is "how many wins can I get with this deck before I lose three times and get kicked out of the Arena?" The more you win, the further you climb up the ladder, bringing you greater rewards as well as tougher opponents for each subsequent duel. When you're finally knocked out for the third time, you'll get five random reward cards to flip - some with gold, some with crafting dust and others with card packs. I've only run the Arena once so far with two or three wins before I was knocked out; while the 60 or so gold wasn't enough to pay my way into another Arena pass, the crafting dust and card pack I won made up for it. Now the question is: do I save up my gold for another shot at the Arena or do I just spend it on more card packs?