It is testament to the brilliance of the digital card game Hearthstone that its players have come up with dozens and dozens of crazy, effective strategies over the past year. One tactic that’s becoming particularly popular these days? Forcing players to run out of cards.
Let me explain. Every Hearthstone deck consists of 30 cards, and on each player’s turn, he or she has to draw one. Some abilities and spells will force one or both players to draw even more cards, which can be either beneficial or detrimental, depending on the circumstances. See, once your deck is empty, trying to draw a card will instead result in damage — called “Fatigue” — that increases incrementally over time. The first time you hit Fatigue, you’ll take one damage, then two, then three, and so on.
So with some clever deck-building, you can create a Hearthstone deck that is solely designed to force your opponent to run out of cards before he or she can beat you. That’s how two players created this scenario, where a player died after drawing 784 cards.
Although there have always been decks designed around forcing opponents to die from Fatigue, I’ve noticed the strategy go particularly widespread in recent weeks. One of the most popular recent decks is Fatigue Druid, which uses cards like Naturalize (“Destroy a minion. Your opponent draws two cards.”) and Coldlight Oracle (“Each player draws two cards.”) in hopes of quickly whittling down an opponent’s deck.
Running Fatigue decks can be ridiculously entertaining, although they will always lead to some very long matches. There are few things more frustrating than trying to face one unprepared.
If you’re a big Hearthstone player, here’s one deck you might want to experiment with. A couple of days ago on Reddit, Hearthstone player itsotter posted some ideas for a Fatigue Mage that uses board-clearing and minions like Coldlight Oracle and Deathlord to grind out an opponent’s cards. Sometimes it’s fun to be annoying.
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14 responses to “Hearthstone’s Latest Trend: Making Your Opponent Run Out Of Cards”
This makes my soul cry.
But yeah, I had this happen to me for the first time the other day, except it was the double-ass reaming of a murloc deck and fatigue deck. I’m not even going to bother looking up what the name of the card was, but my opponent hit me with what felt like 20 2/3 blue murloc thingies with a battlecry that makes both players draw 2 cards. He just happened to do this after I did a bit of a card haul, so I walked right into it. Ass balls.
This happened to me months ago. A rogue waited for my board to be full then returned all minions to their owners hand, filling my hand with my minions, most of them died cause there was no room. Then they kept making me draw cards which were discarded because my hand was full.
I’ve seen it around for a while. It’s become easy to counter. But it’s creative.
It’s called milling, it’s been a thing in Magic for a looooong time (since Revised, I believe). It’s not exactly the most ‘crazy’ thing for a CG.
Damn Millstone! I love that card to bits! Here’s the link to the card. http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=370737
Love me some Jace milling ;D
http://gatherer.wizards.com/Handlers/Image.ashx?multiverseid=254107&type=card
Milling! Crazy!
MtG – doing for 20+ years what other CCGs are doing now.
The original – and still the best.
That said – I’d play the crap out of hearthstone or any CCG that made it to my phone or console.
But after kicking my ultra expensive MtG Online habit it the late 2000s – I’m not going to be engaging in tournament level competitive online CCGing on PC for a while.
There’s no need to so condescending about it. Not everyone plays MtG.
Also, this is titled ‘Hearthstone’s Latest Trend’. Nothing about how this is a new thing in a CCG.
It wasn’t meant to come off condescendingly, just more reducing the superlative nature of the first paragraph – “It is testament to the brilliance of the digital card game Hearthstone that its players have come up with dozens and dozens of crazy, effective strategies over the past year.”
Yeah been on the receiving end of this, as well as other gimmicky stuff. One of notable mention was some mage that managed to clone those little gnome apprentices that reduce mana cost of spells despite me trying to take them out. He managed to get 4 up, dumped an archmage, and could cast unlimited 0mana fireballs(which also generated a fireball card) until I was dead. wp!
I remember people doing this back in the good ol’ Yu-Gi-Oh and Magic: The Gathering days.
Digital card game exploited by physical card game exploits, film at 11.
It’s not really an exploit, it’s a standard deck strategy.
Gotta love the ever annoying stall deck.
Oh man, stall decks. In the week I develop a serious Hearthstone addiction too!