Hearthstone

Given the current state of the game my only advise is avoid the game altogether if you have never played it. Card games are known for relying on random chance but Hearthstone has taken this to an extreme new level and it gets worse with each new update.

This while also constantly adding tons of new adventures and legendary cards, making it insufferable for new players to get a decent deck since they would need to literally grind for several months before they get certain cards that are necessary for basic competitive decks.

Of course that can be avoided by paying, so right now Hearthstone is basically a Pay 2 Win game unless you only play Arena and are really, really good at it, which is simply not going to happen if you are new to the game. So my only advise is to not even bother.

My very first CCG, and not a great one in retrospect. Its foundations, the presentation etc. were all rock solid, but the balancing, man, the balancing was just not there, and a chronic slowness to fix or tone down broken cards defeated a lot of the point/advantage of being an online CCG.

It was definitely enjoyable while it lasted, and I'm glad I picked this game up, beginning my love for card games, but I'm also happy for getting off the Hearthstone ride when I did.

(For reference, I started around mid-2015 and quit around mid-2017, its been a while and perhaps the game radically changed, I haven't seen much evidence to prove otherwise - honestly if I returned to an online card game, it would be Legends of Runeterra)

As a former CCG enthusiast and Dominion nut, I was pretty excited to play me some card games. Hearthstone is a neat variant on the Magic: The Gathering formula, taking advantage of the computer medium to make some cards that make use of RNGs and other effects you can't replicate well with real cards. The presentation of the game is top-notch; it looks great, it plays fast, and there's little ambiguity about what's going on, which is something that a lot of computer board game implementations struggle with. I stopped playing Hearthstone because I wasn't interested in pursuing it competitively and I also didn't want to spend money getting good cards. One thing I dislike about games like this is that it taunts you by being free then requires you to pay bank if you want to compete. The nice thing about games like Dominion is that the same cards are available to everyone anyway. In short, if you enjoy CCGs, Hearthstone is a neat game to try. There's a reason it's been so successful.