Therefore Hearthstone has been designed purely as a digital experience from the ground up, with the specific design challenges and opportunities that the digital space provides. Hearthstone doesn’t have a physical paper version, although its design mostly comes from a simplified version of the World of Warcraft TCG that predated it. Hearthstone is missing all of this, so it will be up to players to decide whether they feel Hearthstone’s turns are made all the better for cutting out most of the player interaction or if they’re just too non-interactive with no chance to respond to anything your opponent does in their turn.Ī Minion is choosing to target the opponent’s Hero with an attack, which will resolve instantly with no chance to respond. This immediately cuts away a large chunk of the gameplay in Magic where the attacking player declares attackers but it is up to the defending player to choose which creatures will block each attack, giving more of an advantage to the defender as the decider of the tactical result of combat.įurthermore, there are many steps to combat in Magic that allow for cards and abilities to be triggered along the way, adding extra layers of complexity but also strategic depth and increasing player interaction. When you attack, you choose which Minions are attacking which targets and the attack resolves immediately. In Hearthstone, your opponent can take no actions on your turn. The biggest, and by far the most important differences between the two are the player interaction aspects. Cards are all ‘colorless’ so you don’t have to worry about paying with different types of resources and since you reliably gain 1 per turn, you can more easily predict what you’re able to play in future turns based on what cards are in your hand.ĭrawing Lands is a necessary, but often frustratingly random part of playing Magic. In Hearthstone, decks are smaller and contain no resource cards (unlike Magic’s Land cards which take up a sizable chunk of each deck) so every card drawn is going to be a playable Minion, Spell or Weapon. It’s clear that Blizzard have decided Hearthstone is meant to be a faster, shorter, and somewhat easier game to play than Magic which has a higher barrier to entry due to its complexity and arcane rules. It’s a whole other debate whether these changes are improvements or not, so if we leave that aside for a minute, the question becomes more about why these changes have occurred. Power and Toughness – damage dealt is removed at the end of turnįrom this, we can see that Hearthstone has heavily borrowed many aspects of Magic’s gameplay while reducing the complexity and simplifying options, in most cases. Play 1 Land per turn, tap Lands for colored ManaĪttacker declares attacks, Defender chooses blockersĪttack and Health – damage dealt stays at end of turn (Please note: Every attempt was made to ensure the accuracy of this data, but some simplification / approximation may be applied.) Mechanics in eachĬreatures, Enchantments, Instants, Sorceries, Artifacts, Lands, Planeswalkers There are more similarities than differences, but its worth quickly going over the two to see how they compare. One way to compare the two games is to look at the mechanics of core gameplay in each one. However, it’s important to realize that there are some very fundamental differences between the two games that need to be kept in mind when attempting to answer a question such as “Which one is better?” As with most questions, context is everything – so we’ll need to come at the question from a few different angles. When one of the world’s leading Magic players does a complete 180 turn on the game, I think that really says something. Hearthstone is a serious contender to the throne long held by Magic, and this is something we haven’t seen for quite a while in the world of TCGs, especially digital versions of TCG games. Even the diversity of top competitive decks between Classes shows that the Hero powers are not as unbalanced as he first suggested. He was proven dead wrong about its future even just one year later, and is now a Hearthstone fanatic himself.
#Magic duels quests pro#
Brian Kibler, a world pro Magic player and game designer himself stated at the initial release that he felt Hearthstone lacked a competitive future and was inherently imbalanced due to the Class Hero powers. Hearthstone’s reception was overwhelmingly positive with a Metacritic rating of 88. Screenshots of Hearthstone (left) and a digital version of Magic: the Gathering (right).